When Rose Wakes (29 page)

Her hands still prickled with the static of the glamour she had somehow summoned to destroy the thing Maurelle had created in imitation of Kylie. But if Rose hadn’t seen Aunt Suzette do it, she would never have known it was possible. She had no idea how to weave glamours or cast enchantments. A terrible sadness overcame Rose. She had finally begun to remember who she really was, finally had an opportunity to begin building a life in this modern world. And now it would be over. But if it came down to a choice between running and fighting, with death the outcome either way, she would do her mother and father proud. She would make her aunt Maurelle understand the abominable act she was about to commit.

Rose glanced back at where Jared lay sleeping on the floor, blood leaking from his nose, injured when he’d fallen. Then she faced Maurelle again, straightening her back.

“Come on, then,” she said, filled with more pity than hate, more disgust than fear. “You’ve waited long enough.”

Maurelle quickened her pace. “Indeed.”

She’d made it almost as far as the broad staircase that bisected the school when the corridor filled with the sound of breaking glass. Rose glanced around, trying to figure out what windows were shattering, and then she realized that it came not from one direction but from many. Maurelle turned almost in a circle, crouching like an animal awaiting attack, and then it came. Black
shapes streaked into the corridor from open classroom doors—a murder of screaming crows suddenly filling the hallway, the sound of their wings combining to a thunderous roar.

“No!” Maurelle shouted. “You’ll not keep me from her this time!”

The crows whipped at her, tore at her, beat her with their wings, but they did not stop her. Talons scraped bloody furrows in her arms and face but Maurelle kept coming, reaching out and killing several of them with her bare hands. Her golden eyes gleamed brighter and she barked a few words that Rose did not know but which her heart understood, and all of the crows in front of her froze in midair. They did not fall to the floor, but hung as though on wire, rigid, trapped in a moment of time like flies in amber.

As the rest of the birds attacked her from behind, Maurelle focused on Rose.

“Why aren’t you running?” she called along the corridor, face striped with bloody gashes.

“My mother was your sister,” Rose said, taking a step forward instead of back. “Did you ever love her?”

The Black Heart stalked the hall, squeezing a crow to death in her right hand, bones crackling, blood squirting out between her fingers.

“What about Etienne?”

Maurelle faltered, stopping perhaps forty feet from her. “Don’t you speak his name!”

Rose took another step toward her, voices inside her head screaming for her to run. But she would not.

“He came to see me, you know. Before he left. I was a little girl, but I remember now. He left because he couldn’t stand to be around the evil thing you’d become. He told me he was ugly and twisted on the outside, but you’d become even uglier inside. He left in
shame,
Maurelle. Is that what you want him to remember of you?”

The pale woman, now painted crimson in her own blood, sneered. “Every moment you still live you are a monument to your father’s betrayal. I only hope his spirit still lingers in this world so that his ghost can watch you die, so he will see it, and know the pain he gave to me.”

A scream came from amongst the crows. Rose thought it originated with the birds themselves, but Maurelle whipped around just as the black birds scattered and Aunt Suzette reached out from amongst them, shouting words of death. She clasped Maurelle by the wrist and the Black Heart’s entire arm began to wither and decay as though that part of her belonged to a corpse.

Maurelle blinked out of existence as though she’d stepped out of the world and then reappeared a moment later two feet to the left. She thrust her hands toward Aunt Suzette’s face and glittering silver things like insects clouded the air between her palms, then swarmed toward Aunt Suzette’s eyes. Rose saw Aunt Suzette’s lips move in a whisper powerful enough that the silver things blackened and fell like ashes to the floor.

Then the fight truly began. The sisters attacked each other with a savagery that made Rose shrink back. They struck and clawed, both of them flickering in and out of sight, dancing in and out of the world Rose knew. Maurelle caught Aunt Suzette in the same glamour she had used on the crows, trapping her in a frozen moment of time. Her dead, withered arm hung useless at her side but she did not need it if Aunt Suzette could not move. Rose screamed. Crows flew at Maurelle’s eyes, trying to tear them out, but she brushed them away and then reached for Aunt Suzette’s face, a black-light aura forming around her right hand.

“No!” Rose shouted, and ran toward them, panic shattering logic. Her hands clenched into useless fists, but she couldn’t just stand there.

Aunt Suzette tore free of her paralysis and batted away Maurelle’s deadly hand.

“Get back!” she snapped at Rose. Then she turned on her sister and shrieked in anguish and rage, and Rose saw that she had changed. Her features were narrower, beautiful but cruel, her golden eyes still gleaming but turned dark as tarnished brass, and when she screamed the sharpened points of her teeth glinted.

This is her face. This is the nature of the fey unmasked,
Rose thought.

The two surviving sisters spun and darted and struck like animals, winking in and out. Suzette had taken Maurelle by surprise and crippled her, taking away the use of
her left arm, but in seconds Rose realized it would not be enough of an advantage. Perhaps Maurelle had always been stronger or perhaps the hatred that had made her the Black Heart fueled her, but whatever the reason, she would win. Rose could see it, watching them. Aunt Fay lay dead in the cafeteria downstairs, and Aunt Suzette would die here, now, on the cold linoleum or up against the steel lockers.

Rose swore under her breath.
The lockers.

Maybe there was something she could do after all.

She turned and bolted back along the corridor, at first weaving around sleeping students but then hurdling over them, not daring to waste a second. Like the rest of them, Jared had not moved, but the pool of blood from his nose had widened and Rose had to force herself to ignore him. She couldn’t help him if she was dead. Darting left, she raced into the hallway annex and then into the chem lab, slapping at the light switch.

As the lights flickered on she ran toward the back of the classroom, caught her hip on a desk, but did not slow down. The big wooden cabinets at the back of the room had probably been there for thirty years or more, but the combination locks were more recent. She looked around the room for something to pry the doors with, considered half a dozen things, and then her gaze fell upon the huge metal deck of the paper cutter. The thing was heavy and would have made a hell of a weapon if she could have
wielded it with any accuracy, but she would only get one chance and could not afford to mess it up.

Hefting the paper cutter off the shelf by the window she went back to the cabinet, raised the metal deck—careful not to let the cutting arm swing open and closed on her—and brought the thing down on the lock once, twice, a third time. Her arms sagged, tired from the weight, but on the fourth try, the lock did not break but the latch tore free of the wood and the doors swung open. She dropped the paper cutter with a heavy thunk.

Third shelf from the top, right in the middle, she found what she wanted. Snatching it up, she raced back into the hall and around the corner into the main corridor just in time to see Maurelle hurl Aunt Suzette to the floor. Aunt Suzette hissed in pain, breathing in gasps, and tried to rise. Her sister kicked her and she crumpled. That black death aura had coalesced around her right hand again and she muttered something in the language of her people—not a spell, Rose thought, but some cruel farewell—and dropped to her knees beside Aunt Suzette.

Rose feared her footfalls would be too loud but Maurelle remained so intent on murder that she did not even look up. Why should she? What harm could one girl do her?

As Maurelle reached for Aunt Suzette, Rose stretched out the coil of iron wire she had gotten from the lab. They’d used them in corrosion experiments, but these were new, without a trace of rust. She held the dozen or
so strands of wire taut between her fists. In the last moment, just before she reached Maurelle, the Black Heart seemed to sense her and hesitated, but she did not turn quickly enough.

Rose whipped the wire over Maurelle’s head, caught her around the throat and yanked her backward enough to keep her off balance. Where iron touched her neck, Maurelle’s skin began to sear and blacken, and Rose smelled burning flesh. Maurelle gave a choking cry and reached for the iron wire with her one good hand, but the second she touched it she drew back her hand. Instead, she batted behind her, trying to strike Rose, who stayed out of reach as she twisted the ends of the wire together behind Maurelle, creating a collar around her neck that she could still hold on to. The iron cut deeper into her skin, hissing like butter in a hot skillet, its poison working into Maurelle’s flesh. It would seep into her blood and her bones, weakening her.

She fell onto her side, hand poised over her own throat, wanting to try to pull the iron wire away but unable to do so. Her eyes pleaded in anguished silence.

A dozen emotions warred within Rose’s heart, but she shook her head and backed away a step.

“I hope it hurts.”

But Maurelle did not hear her. The Black Heart had surrendered to unconsciousness, breath coming in hitching gasps as the poison infected her further.

Cut and bruised, bleeding and weak but alive, Aunt
Suzette sat up. She buried her face in her hands for a moment and when she lowered them, her eyes were full of tears of grief. For a moment Rose thought they were only for Aunt Fay, but from the way Aunt Suzette looked at Maurelle, she realized those tears were for all three of her aunt’s sisters and perhaps even a little bit for herself. She was alone, now, except for Rose.

“Bind her wrists and ankles with it as well,” Aunt Suzette said.

“And then what?” Rose asked. “Will you let her live?”

Aunt Suzette gazed at her sadly. “As opposed to what? Would you have me kill her, or kill her yourself, and have a heart as black as hers?”

Rose thought for a moment, and then shook her head. When Aunt Suzette knelt beside her suffering, unconscious sister, Rose turned and walked back down the corridor toward the lab. There was more iron wire there and she would do as she’d been asked, since Aunt Suzette couldn’t touch the wire herself.

She made her way around several of the fallen students before it struck her. She paused and looked back down the corridor. They were all still asleep. Maurelle had cast this enchantment and she was unconscious. When would they all wake up?
Would
they all wake up?

“Jared,” she whispered, and then she ran to him.

The blood from his maybe-broken nose had not spread any farther. Rose slid him away from the small pool on the floor and then took her jacket off. She’d meant to
ball it up under his head, give him something soft to lie on, but instead she took the sleeve and cleaned the blood from his face. His nose was swollen and a huge bruise had started to form on his cheek.

“Hey,” she said. “Wake up.”

Nothing. She glanced over her shoulder, expecting all of the sleepers to begin to stir at any moment, but none of them moved.

“Jared,” she whispered. “Please?”

What would she do if none of them woke up? What if they were all like this until someone could break the spell, if it could be broken? A hundred Sleeping Beauties.

Rose cocked her head and looked down at Jared again. A small smile touched the corners of her mouth and she bent down and kissed him gently. His lips felt dry and he exhaled into her mouth at the moment she inhaled, breathing in his breath. The intimacy of the moment made her sit up in surprise.

Jared moaned, furrowing his brow in pain, and his eyes opened.

Rose stared at him. “Wow.”
I did it,
she thought.

“Hi,” Jared rasped.

“Hi yourself,” she said.

She turned to see that everyone else had begun to wake as well. So it hadn’t been her kiss at all, just Maurelle’s spell wearing off. The realization disappointed her, but she knew she shouldn’t have been surprised. Things
like that only happened in fairy tales. There was no magic in a simple kiss.

Jared reached over and took her hand, forcing himself to sit up.

No magic in a kiss,
she told herself.

But just in case, she kissed him again.

Rose woke early on her first day back at school. A week and a half had passed during which the police had confessed to their bafflement at the strange bird attack on St. Bridget’s High School. Such things, they said, had been known to be caused by atmospheric disturbances, but they doubted this would ever be fully explained. Nor had there been any real conclusion of the investigation into the strange death of Fay DuBois, whom they now believed had crashed through the window while being attacked by birds and had struck a table when she fell, breaking her neck.