When Rose Wakes (25 page)

Rose staggered back and stumbled off the curb. A car horn blared but she could not tear her gaze from the sight, as more crows dove from the trees above and glided down from the storm-swollen sky, pecking and clawing at Maurelle’s arms and face and tearing at her clothes and hair. The pale woman screamed in fury, trying to tear them off.

The birds drove her up against the wrought-iron gate, and the moment Maurelle struck it, she screamed and thrashed, pulling away from the metal even as she fell to her knees, momentarily weakened and disoriented.

What the hell—
Rose thought.

“Run,”
a voice rasped, and a breathless Rose stared, sure it had come from one of the birds.

“She won’t!” Maurelle cried. “She’ll die!”

Rose began to turn, watching for a break in traffic, but out of the corner of her eyes she saw Maurelle stand and raise her left hand and snap her wrist, flicking her fingers open as though releasing something she’d held captive. A wave of gloom darker than the storm seemed to blossom from her hand, enveloping Rose, who found herself suddenly bathed in night-black darkness, the ground beneath her strangely unsteady. Frantic, she tore at the air around her face, thinking that she could rip away whatever cloud
Maurelle had draped her in. She touched her eyes, rubbed at them, tried to get her vision to clear, but all the while her balance kept shifting and she listed from side to side as though she were trying to cross the deck of a ship in high seas, not an ordinary city street.

“I need to see!” she shouted, pressing her hands over her eyes.

When she lowered them, the darkness had lifted from her sight just in time for her to see the taxi hurtling toward her. Rose locked eyes with the driver, saw his own fear as he jerked back against his seat, slamming on the brakes. His tires squealed on the rain-slicked pavement and the cab slewed sideways, the driver’s door slamming into Rose and knocking her off her feet. Her skull hit the road and a different darkness descended.

It lasted only seconds.

“Jesus, honey, are you okay? What are you doin’? You drunk or somethin’?” the taxi driver babbled. “Come on, sweetheart, open your eyes.”

Rose did.

“Oh, thank God,” the cabbie said. He knelt beside her, an old man who smelled of stale beer, cigarettes, and yesterday’s cologne. “You okay, kid?”

Rose sat up fast and looked around, but saw no sign of Maurelle or of the crows. No sign at all that she had been attacked and driven into the street instead of just running out into traffic like a fool.

“Careful, hon. Way you hit your head, maybe you got a
concussion. Take it easy, okay? Damn, how’d you cut your neck like that?”

The taxi driver shifted his head slightly. Behind him, a single large crow perched on the roof of the cab. The bird cawed once, startling the driver, who got up and tried to shoo it away, but the crow did not budge.

“What the hell?” the cabbie muttered.

Rose climbed shakily to her feet. “I’m grateful,” she said. “It’s not that I’m not grateful. But you’ve got to tell me what’s really happening. Who
are
you? Who the hell am
I
?”

She cried this last with such anguish that the taxi driver stared at her for several seconds, at a total loss, before he ventured a reply.

“I’m Eddie. Eddie Czajak. But I’m sorry, kid, I got no idea who—”

Rose pushed past him, rushing at the cab, and at the crow who sat atop it. “Talk to me!” she screamed.

Eddie Czajak muttered something under his breath that sounded quite a bit like a prayer. Then he took her arm.

“Listen, why don’t you get in the cab and I’ll take you over to Mass General? Or maybe it’s better if I call an ambulance,” he said, almost to himself. Then he changed his mind. “Nah, you better get in.”

A cry filled the air as the crow took flight and at first Rose thought it had come from the bird. Then she looked across the street and saw Aunt Suzette and Aunt Fay running toward her, ignoring a man who’d pulled his car over
to see what was wrong. Aunt Suzette moved faster than any woman her size ought to be able to.

“Rose!” Aunt Suzette called, tears rolling down her face. “Oh, Rose.”

She grabbed Rose in her arms and crushed her in a panicked embrace. Rose couldn’t breathe.

“Lady, I’m sorry,” Eddie Czajak started to say.

“Suzette!” Aunt Fay snapped. “Leave the girl alone. You’re suffocating her.”

Aunt Suzette released her, pulled back and studied her face, then clucked in concern over the wound on her throat.

“Maurelle,” Rose said, as if that explained everything.

Perhaps it did. Aunt Suzette only nodded, lips pressed together in a tight white line. Aunt Fay scanned the area as if searching to make sure the Black Heart had truly been driven off.

“Enough, Suzette,” Aunt Fay said, separating the two of them. She looked at Rose. “Let’s get you home.”

Rose slapped her so hard that blood flew from Aunt Fay’s nose. Rose’s hand stung and began to throb immediately, but she ignored it.

“You lied to me!” she screamed. “You said they were just dreams!”

Pain and sadness brimmed in Aunt Fay’s eyes. She looked at Eddie Czajak and then at the man hovering nearby on his cell phone. Rose thought he was probably calling the police.

“Not here,” Aunt Fay said. “Come home. You’ll be safe there, at least for now.”

Rose clenched her fist, hating the sting of what she’d done but tempted to do it again.

Then Aunt Suzette touched her arm. “Please?”

Rose looked at Eddie Czajak. “You can’t just walk away from this,” she said.

Aunt Suzette nodded. “Yet we are.” She touched the cabdriver’s wrist and the man’s eyes clouded over. He looked around in confusion. “Are you all right, sir?” Aunt Suzette asked. “You’re blocking traffic.”

Eddie Czajak looked back to see the half-dozen cars trying to make their way around his sideways cab as though he had no idea how the situation had come about. He started to ask for an explanation, but Aunt Suzette led Rose hurriedly away across the street. Aunt Fay put on a false smile and approached the man with the cell phone, whose eyes glazed over the moment she touched him. He looked at his phone as though surprised to find it in his hand.

Rose’s aunts flanked her, glancing around warily as they escorted her up the hill toward Acorn Street. She almost hung back, almost refused to go with them, but it seemed clear that they would not speak openly until the three of them had reached the apartment, and so Rose went along in grim silence. If that was the price she had to pay for answers, it would be more than worth it.

Rose sat at the little table by the window in the kitchen, the lights somehow unable to brighten the room. The heavy gray skies beyond the glass leeched all color from the surroundings as though the bleakest of January days had snuck itself into the middle of October.

She stared at the cup of tea on the table in front of her.

“You’ve got to be joking.”

Aunt Fay slid the cup nearer to her. “Do you honestly think so?”

Rose looked at her aunts incredulously.

“How long has it been since you stopped drinking my tea?” Aunt Suzette asked.

“I haven’t—”

Aunt Fay tapped the table. “You put yourself in peril, Rose. Not drinking that tea was a terrible mistake.”

Rose pushed back the chair and it squealed on the floor as she stood up. “I put myself in peril?
I
did?” She wanted to slap the woman again. “You could have told me the truth! You’re
the ones who put me in danger by lying to me and pretending that I was imagining things! I thought something was really wrong with me! I’ve been so confused and so… Don’t you understand how much it hurts to feel that way all the time? But you just kept lying!”

Aunt Suzette looked out the window. When she turned to Rose, she had real fear in her eyes.

“You need to drink that tea, Rose. Drink it right now.”

“And then,” Aunt Fay added, “we’ll tell you the truth. All of it.”

Aunt Suzette sat down in the chair beside her, seemed to contemplate how she might comfort her niece, but then only sighed.

“We’re sorry, Rose,” she said. “We were only trying to protect you.”

Aunt Fay welled up with emotion, then tried to swallow it back. “It’s all we’ve ever done. Perhaps we went about it all wrong, but we only wanted you safe.”

Rose stared at Aunt Fay, shocked by the dampness of her eyes.

“Please,” Aunt Suzette said, sliding the cup closer still. “You start, and we’ll start. And then we’ll decide, the three of us, what’s to be done next.”

Rose stared at the teacup. She took a long breath and then reached out. Her hand shook as she lifted it to her mouth and took a sip.

“All right,” she said, taking another sip of the bitter brew. “Tell me.”

Aunt Suzette began to cry.

“We meant well, Suzette,” Aunt Fay said, touching her sister’s arm. Then she turned to Rose. “I’m not certain how much of your dreams you recall, and without going over every detail I can’t be sure if they were purely memories or some dreaming variation on reality. But at the very least the parts of your dreams that you have shared with us… all of that happened.”

Rose felt her mouth go dry. Her skin prickled with strange heat. It had been one thing to suspect, but to have such blunt confirmation of the impossible shocked her so much she could not even move to set down the teacup. She began to argue that it could not be true, that they could not be witches or fairies or whatever, but more mundane questions surged forward in her mind.

“That can’t be,” she said. “The place in my dreams was some medieval French kingdom. People haven’t lived like that in—”

“A thousand years,” Aunt Fay said, her gaze grim and unwavering. “And Suzette and I have watched over you all that time. Our sister gave up all of her enchantment in order to give her husband a child who could live in a human world, though she knew the risks. We argued with her, but who has ever spoken logic to love and triumphed?”

“I don’t understand,” Rose said.

Aunt Suzette took a shuddery breath, her tears now under control. “She knew she might die, Rose. And she
asked for our promise that if she did not survive childbirth, that we would watch over her daughter always. And we have.”

Rose uttered a tiny laugh. “A thousand years? You’re saying my coma—”

“Was not a coma,” Aunt Fay interrupted.

“Drink your tea, darling,” Aunt Suzette said grimly. “It makes it more difficult for her to see you.”

Her. Rose shivered. Maurelle. She wanted to deny all of her aunts’ claims as sheer insanity, but she had always known the dreams were more than dreams. And Maurelle had tried to kill her, just an hour ago, before the crows had attacked.

“The crows…” she said.

“One thing at a time,” Aunt Fay chided her. “Your ‘coma’ was the only protection Suzette and I could devise—”

Rose remembered her dreams. “You couldn’t remove Maurelle’s curse, but you could change it.”

“Yes. And so you slept. We kept you hidden as best we could, until earlier this year when we knew the time was approaching for you to wake. We planned carefully. You would wake in an American hospital in the best facility we could find, with no memory of your old life. When we encountered young women and girls your age we…”

Aunt Fay glanced at her sister, perhaps a bit guiltily.

“We borrowed from them,” Aunt Suzette continued for her. She smiled gently. “You needed to know how
to speak English and, without your own memories, you needed at least a basic understanding of the life of a teenage girl in the modern world. We distilled that for you, so that this life would not be so shocking. So you could function.”

“But how?” Rose asked, brows knitted in confusion.

“I hope we’ll have the time to teach you,” Aunt Suzette said. “There are far too few of us left in this world and it’s high time we learned if you’ve inherited any of your mother’s glamour.”

“But you said she gave up her—”

“Yes,” Aunt Fay said, giving her sister a hard look. “She gave up her glamour but that did not change what she was. You have your father’s blood, Rose, but your mother’s as well. Or do you think that just any ordinary girl can sleep a thousand years? Cursed or not, anyone else would be dust by now. And, of course, you have all the charms of our kind. There’s a light in you that most people will be enchanted by, but which will make others—those with a darkness in them—uneasy.”

Aunt Suzette smiled. “Your voice is one of those charms. It was a gift from Aunt Fay and me.”

Rose felt cheated somehow. What did this mean? Her singing voice wasn’t her own? Were her friends only her friends because of her
charms
?

“So you’re saying I have, what,
magic
?” Rose asked, the word feeling so strange on her lips.

“Certain glamours, absolutely,” Aunt Suzette said. “But there isn’t
time now to explore what you may be capable of.”

Aunt Fay sighed. “Please, just listen.”

“Can you at least tell me
why
?” Rose pleaded. “Why did Maurelle hate me? Why is she called the Black Heart?”

Her aunts both glanced at the window as though afraid merely speaking their sister’s name would summon her. Then Aunt Fay gestured to Aunt Suzette, an unusual show of deference.