Rose

by Ripley Proserpina

  From the corner of her eye, she could see Seti moving from person to person. He lifted them when they couldn’t stand, and spoke in low, calming tones.

  “My purse!” the woman cried. “All of my things!”

  “I’ll get it,” she said.

  As she scooped the contents of her purse back into the bag, the doors across from her opened. Rose glanced up, expecting to see an MTA worker.

  She was wrong.

  From out of the darkness, a tall form leapt smoothly into the car. Rose stared, her mind refusing to accept what she saw.

  “Hello, strange girl.”

  A low growl filled the car and suddenly, Seti stood in front of her. Next to her, the older woman gasped then slid as fast as she could down the seats, away from Rose.

  Crouched in front of her with his knees bent and fingers hooked like claws, Seti faced the vampire. Somehow, the man—vampire—had found her.

  Followed her.

  And stopped the train? How?

  “Strange girl with a strange friend.” He took an audible breath. “Not one of us. But fast like one.”

  Her heart pounded. It slammed against her ribs, and she imagined the sound of it filled the entire car. The rest of the world fell away. There was only her, Seti, and the vampire.

  “I know you,” Seti said. He didn’t sound like himself. His voice was raspier, animalistic. He blocked her view so she had to rely on what she heard. Even if she could see, the red light lent a shadowed cast to everything. “You attacked her.”

  “You can hardly blame me,” the man replied. “She is a curious specimen. Not a human. Not a vampire. Not like you—whatever you are.”

  “Leave.” Seti ignored everything else the man said.

  He tsked. “No no. Boston is for vampires. We don’t live in the shadows anymore. We walk in daylight. We should have ruled this city, made it a waking nightmare. I wondered…” The man came into view before Seti countered and blocked him again. He feinted to one side, but Seti was just as fast. Laughter echoed off the metal walls of the car and someone whimpered. “Humans pretend nothing has changed when everything has. Like your pet here. Smells like something more… fresh air and flowers… but one bite is torture, cold racing through my veins.”

  The whimpering turned to full-blown sobs.

  “Shut up!” the man yelled, and someone choked, as if they’d put their hand over their mouth to smother the sound.

  Seti’s form blurred, then blurred again. He was staying between her and the man who was trying to get to her. It was like sitting at the edge of a hurricane. Her hair whipped around her face, obscuring her vision, and her eyes watered. She blinked to clear it, only to catch Seti lunging forward. The two men slammed together like football players except with a thousand times more force.

  Twisting, Seti threw the man away from her—and right through the emergency exit. The back of the train blew out and the man flew from their car into the next.

  She barely had time to process what had happened when Seti grabbed her arm. “We have to go,” but he was hurled backward.

  The man grasped her arm so tightly the bones in her lower arm broke. Still, she tried to wrench herself away from him.

  One tug was all she managed before he was ripped away. In the dark, the person who held the vampire in the air looked like Seti. Longer hair. Black eyes.

  But it wasn’t.

  “Ra…” she whispered his name, and his gaze cut to her before he focused on the vampire. The muscles in his jaw twitched as if he was grinding his back teeth.

  He didn’t speak. The vampire gripped Ra’s fingers, trying to pry them from around his neck, but all Ra did in response was to squeeze them tighter.

  And tighter.

  Then, in one quick yank and tug, he pulled the vampire’s head from his body and tossed the pieces on the floor.

  The head rolled down the aisle, coming to a stop near the older woman’s feet. For just a second, Rose and the woman held each other’s gaze before she looked down at the head. Then, right before her eyes, it disintegrated like the crawler had. One second it was there and the next it paled and shrunk to collapse into a pile of ash.

  Ra knelt in front of her and she caught her breath. “We need to go.” He glanced at her arm and the way she held it cradled against her chest. Without another word, he lifted her into her arms and leapt out of the car.

  Seti and Horus were there, standing on the opposite track. Horus’s gaze went from her head to her feet before returning to her arm. “You’re hurt?”

  “He broke her arm.”

  All the jarring and leaping made her arm hurt like a motherfucker, but it would heal.

  “How fast will it heal?” Horus asked as Ra took off. He moved as fast as the T, and she shut her eyes against the disorienting pace. Graffiti covered the walls and blurred as she flew by. God. The whole place smelled like mold and garbage, and now she wanted to puke.

  In the blink of an eye, she went from total darkness to overly bright fluorescence. Her arm throbbed in time with her heartbeat. Healing started slowly. First, it was just hot, and aching. But then molten hot lava moved down her bone. It destroyed everything before hardening into rock.

  It hurt so bad. She wanted to cry out, so she pressed her forehead against Ra’s chest and sucked in breath after breath.

  “It doesn’t hurt,” he said, confusing her. There was pressure inside her brain. Someone was tap-tapping at it, wanting inside, and she was in too much pain to fight it.

  It doesn’t hurt.

  She let Ra’s words wash over her. Water lapped at the lava, cooling it instantly, and she sighed in relief. It doesn’t hurt. This was what he’d done when he saved her. He pushed the idea into her head, and her body responded. It was quite a power.

  “If you told me to fly,” she whispered, “would I grow wings?” Her loopy question came out slurred. “Could you make my boobs grow bigger with just a suggestion?”

  Someone snorted, but she hadn’t meant to be funny. “S’not a joke.”

  She felt so good right now. And drowsy. For such a hard-muscled body, Ra was really comfortable. She’d just keep her eyes closed. Just for a minute. His pec was her pillow.

  Someone snorted again, but this time it came from beneath her ear. Ra had laughed. Look at that. “Pillow pec,” she said again, to see if he’d laugh. He did. And she smiled.

  21

  Ra

  Ra rested his forearms on his knees and stared at Rose while she slept. He and his brothers had brought her back to her apartment. Horus had argued about bringing her to Briar’s, but Ra hadn’t wanted to. For some reason, the idea of any other person besides his brothers around Rose made him want to stick the pieces of the dead vamp together again and rip it apart all over.

  It wasn’t that Sylvain, Valen, Hudson or Marcus were a threat to her safety. Objectively, they weren’t. But he couldn’t handle a vampire around her right now. He was too riled.

  Too… attached.

  Ra closed his eyes and shook his head. Don’t freak out. If only his power of suggestion worked on himself. The greatest irony in the world was that he could calm strangers, and not himself. The universe had a sick sense of humor.

  He took in a deep breath to scent the air. Rose was everywhere, but the horrible, burning scent of her pain was gone. That had nearly driven him mad. He’d pushed the command into her head, and she’d resisted him.

  Leaning back in the chair, he growled. He’d only wanted to help.

  “You’re going to wake her up,” Horus whispered. He stood nearby, shoulder propped against the doorframe of the kitchen. He’d raided her fridge and took a bite out of the sandwich he’d made… the fourth sandwich he’d made.

  Ra swallowed the growl and stood, making his way to his brother. Rose’s apartment was small and cramped, and his shoulders brushed against Horus’s as he went into the kitchen. Seti was inside, parked on top of a barstool that looked like it was moments from splintering. Sure enough, when he shifted t
oward them it creaked but held.

  He glanced around the kitchen. Everything in here was old, but clean. The laminate floor was swept, and the stove probably as old as Rose, but it gleamed in the yellow light.

  It was a home. Ra hadn’t had a home in a long time. Quebec wasn’t home. It was too cold and… blue.

  For Ra, home was the smell of eucalyptus and the sting of sand on his skin when the wind blew. It was shades of brown, and then when the Nile flooded, an explosion of green. Epochs passed, and while he’d never go back, that patch of earth was the first thing that came to mind when he thought of home.

  “How long are you staying?” Seti asked.

  The question went under his skin, rasping like sandpaper.

  “Why?” Apparently, it bothered Horus, too.

  “Because I want to know.” Seti’s voice lifted at the end of the sentence, but he quickly tempered himself. “I need to know.”

  Horus dropped his sandwich onto a plate. He swallowed what was left in his mouth like it pained him. “I don’t know if I can leave.” He drummed his fingers on the table and then glanced at Seti. “I saw her first, you know.”

  “So?” Seti lifted his eyebrows.

  “So…” Horus said. “If anyone should leave, it’s you two.”

  His words shocked Ra. He’d watched his brothers banter back and forth, volleying in the familiar way they always did. But—

  Now it was his turn to ask. “Why should we leave, Horus?”

  “I saw her first. I did the right thing. I followed the rules. No attachments. But then Seti came back…”

  Ra shook his head. That rule was in place for a good reason. By now, his brothers should know exactly what happened when they got wrapped up in human affairs. “The reason we’re in Boston at all is because you two got attached to a human.”

  “There it is!” Seti crowed. “I knew it! I knew you’d bring that up!”

  “What?” It was true.

  “We watched the boy grow up!” Horus argued. “He followed us around. We were practically big brothers to him.”

  It was Henri LeGuin’s impending death that brought them all back to Boston ten years after Ra thought they were done with the place. They could have spent a few more decades south of the border, but the call from LeGuin’s family meant they had to drop everything. “I told you not to get involved eighty years ago! I told you to say goodbye and good luck to the kid, but you didn’t. You joined the army. Dragged Seti into it. Dragged me into it. We spent four years in the snow and the mud, watching kids who’d never been farther than the farm next door die all around us just because you made a friend and wanted to protect him.”

  “That’s an oversimplification,” Seti said. “And you were as fond of him as we were. Who taught him to fish? It wasn’t me. Wasn’t Horus.”

  Ra ignored him and the sharp slice of pain that came from a long-buried memory of a baby-cheeked boy casting his line into the St. Lawrence. The discomfort made him doubly harsh. “Now, remind me, Horus. Where did you end up? I can’t recall the name of the place, but I certainly remember the fifteen years you spent depressed after it ended.”

  His brother’s voice was barely above a whisper. “Ardennes.”

  “Right. That’s where LeGuin was blown up.”

  “Ra. Back off.” Seti stood and got between him and his brother. “LeGuin survived the war because of Horus. He had a chance at a life.”

  “You can’t save everyone.” Despite his best efforts, he glanced toward the other room where Rose was still sleeping. “Not getting attached is the only thing that makes this life bearable.”

  “Well, maybe I want more than bearable,” Seti said, sitting down hard on the stool.

  “I followed the rules,” Horus said again. “Even though I saw her first and felt something right away.” He touched his chest and looked toward the other room. “If I stayed then I’d be the one getting us into trouble again. But I wanted to. I didn’t want to go.”

  “Then why didn’t you come back with me?” Seti’s voice was accusing.

  “You made your choice. What was I supposed to do? Fight over her? You liked her enough to leave us.”

  “I—” At a loss for words, Seti snapped his mouth shut.

  A horrifying thought occurred to Ra. Was this it? They’d been together their entire lives, long enough to watch the desert cover the pyramids. Would it be a girl who split them apart?

  From the bedroom, there was a sigh. Rose was waking up. Urgency filled him. If he was going to leave, he should do it now. It would be easy. All of them could just slip out.

  But his feet were glued to the floor. He wasn’t going anywhere. Not yet.

  22

  Rose

  When Rose awoke, she wasn’t certain if she’d dreamed the whole thing. Seti. The vampire. The train.

  Her apartment was quiet, the only sound her breathing and the traffic outside. Her curtains had been drawn, and she knew she hadn’t done that. She hadn’t even put herself to bed.

  Which meant—it hadn’t been a dream. “Hello?” Her throat was dry, and she sounded like an old woman.

  The door to the kitchen opened, and the brothers walked out. They moved like predators. Rose’s apartment was old, and there wasn’t a spot on the floor that didn’t groan or creak under her weight. But not for them. Despite weighing more than Rose by… she cocked her head to the side, trying to figure out their weight. She was about one thirty-five… Horus was—

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Horus asked.

  Her face heated. Resisting the urge to slap her hands over her cheeks despite the fact that she didn’t blush, she shook her head. “No reason.”

  “How’s your arm?” Ra asked.

  She’d been resting her weight on it, but now she held it out, rotating it. “Good. Healed. Thank you.”

  “I wasn’t sure it would work.” His narrowed stare went from her arm to her face. “You resisted me.”

  She pushed back the covers and swung her legs over the side of the bed. “Yeah.”

  “Why?” Horus asked. “He was trying to help you.”

  “Why would I resist someone pushing their way into my head and controlling my body?” she asked.

  “It wasn’t like he was telling you to bark like a dog,” Seti added.

  She held her hands palms out. “Whoa, okay? Three against one. Let a girl get out of bed before you start with the inquisition.” Standing, she put her hands on her hips. She felt a little better now. Something about being yelled at while sitting put her at a disadvantage. Now at least she was toe-to-toe. “I’m ready now. Feel free to shower me in your disappointment.”

  The glower on Seti’s face disappeared. “You make it very hard to stay angry.”

  “Good.” But then again, they had no reason to be angry. She hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “You’re better?” Horus asked. He took her arm and a shiver ran along her skin where he touched her. Lifting it, he studied it as if he could see right to the bones. “You heal so fast for a human. It’s a relief.”

  “Human two-point-oh,” she said. “I’m not entirely human according to Briar and her husbands. I’m something more. It’s in my DNA.”

  “More than human.” Ra rephrased what she’d said. “Not so very breakable.”

  “No,” she said. “I’ve never been delicate.”

  Ra lifted one eyebrow in a move reminiscent of Seti.

  “I’m not,” she persisted. “In the time you’ve known me, I’ve survived a vampire and a crawler.”

  “Two crawlers,” he amended. “I’ve known you longer than Seti and Horus.”

  She liked this joking side of Ra. “Right.”

  The brothers backed away from her, studying the apartment. Such moody boys and so hard to make sense of. She stepped toward them before checking herself. “Are you leaving?”

  They exchanged glances. “We don’t know,” Ra finally answered. “We should.”

  “Why?” she asked. “Do y
ou have jobs to get back to?” Another thought occurred to her. “Wives?”

  Before he could answer, someone’s phone chimed. Apparently, Ra was a modern sort of vampire because he pulled it out of his pocket and stared at the screen. He didn’t blink, but as Rose watched him, his eyes hardened and jaw clenched. Horus, who was closest to him, looked over his shoulder at the screen and immediately adopted a similar posture.

  “What is it?”

  “The vampire,” Ra said.

  “He texted you?” How—

  He stared at her unblinking until the side of his lips twitched. “No.” Next to him, Seti cleared his throat. Horus looked between them and opened his mouth but Seti shook his head. “No,” Ra said again, and there it was. A full-fledged smile.

  “Okay. I’m confused.”

  “It’s not from the vampire,” he replied. “The vampire is dead. I took off his head, so he can’t use his fingers to text anymore, even if he wanted to.” His smile disappeared. “Video caught our fight. And all of us running through the tunnel.” In the distance, sirens blared, and Rose had to pay closer attention to what he was saying because she could barely hear him. “This was from Marcus. Unfortunately, the police have identified you.”

  She didn’t think she heard him correctly. “The police identified me with the vampire?” The sirens were so loud now it was difficult to think. “That’s bad.”

  “Yeah,” Horus replied. Tires screeched outside and red and blue lights projected onto her walls. “We should go.”

  “I don’t think that’s an option,” she said. “There’s one set of stairs. Unless you want to jump from the third floor.”

  Horus nodded. “Okay. We’ll do that.”

  “I’m not trying to outrun the cops,” she scoffed. “What did I do? Appear on camera with someone who broke my arm. Where’s the body? Ra took his head off and he disappeared into ash. They don’t believe in vampires, Horus. They won’t do anything.”

  He seemed supremely skeptical of her statement.