The Branded Rose Prophecy

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  “This business with the dog...” he began.

  “Yes. Asher told me what happened,” Ylva said. “Is Charlee alright? We haven’t seen her since Chocolate was killed.”

  “I’ll get to Charlee in a minute,” Darwin told her and sipped his tea. It was remarkably good. But he’d never had tea before that didn’t come out of a little bag. This stuff was rich and flavorful. He hadn’t known tea could be like that. He sipped again, delighted. “Ah, hell, let’s talk about her now,” he decided. “I’m not happy about how she’s pulling up after the death of the mutt. She’s pining.”

  Ylva’s lips thinned. “Oh, dear.”

  Asher shook his head. “Chocolate was everything to her. She traveled all the way downtown every weekday without fail just to get food for her. I think she scraped dinner plates at home to give her breakfast on the way to school and on weekends, too. From what Charlee told us about herself and all the things she didn’t say, I know how lonely she is. It doesn’t surprise me that she’s not bouncing back.” He put his cup down. “But I’ve had an idea.” He lifted his chin in a way that made Darwin look out the window behind him. He stared at the buildings opposite, trying to figure out what Asher was talking about. Then he saw the sign and it all came together.

  He looked back at Asher. “What are you thinking?”

  “I know the manager,” Asher said. “I think I can convince her she needs more help for the summer.”

  “A place like that couldn’t afford summer help. They live on donations.”

  “Voluntary help,” Asher qualified. “Charlee will like the idea that she’s providing a genuine service.”

  Darwin went back to sipping his tea, hiding his admiration. This Asher had Charlee’s character nailed down good and proper. She would like the idea of helping, especially there. “How soon can you arrange it?” he asked.

  Chapter Eight

  Charlee hung back, overwhelmed and just a little bit afraid. The big room was full of dogs. Everywhere. Tumbling over each other, rolling on the ground, bouncing up to catch balls. Big, short, fat, skinny, long sausage dogs, even mutts.

  “What is this?” she whispered. The sound the dogs were making was astounding. They were yipping, barking and panting happily. None of them were fighting, which was the most astonishing thing of all.

  “It’s a doggie playground,” Asher said. “I think,” he added.

  “That’s a pretty good description,” the white-haired lady standing next to him said with a smile. She had twinkling brown eyes and had asked Charlee to call her Carole. “It’s a very new idea in animal care that we’re trying and it does seem to be working. Did you know, Charlee, that the dogs can get sad and sick if they’re kept locked up in cages without human contact or contact with other dogs?”

  Charlee nodded. “I read about it,” she said. “Canine depression. They can die if they’re left alone.”

  “Charlee’s pretty smart,” Asher told Carole.

  “So I see,” Carole said with another smile. “Of course, you wouldn’t have to spend all your time supervising the playground. There’s a lot more to the rescue center. We have a medical section, staffed by volunteer vets. That can be a busy place. People bring in animals all the time, and they very nearly always need some sort of medical care. But we wouldn’t ask you to work in there until you had basic training in medical assistance. That’s something you could work up to, if you’re interested.”

  Charlee nodded. She would study for a year, if that’s what it took.

  “There’s a very large cat home on the other side of the building, too,” Carole added.

  “Cats?” Charlee breathed.

  “Then there’s the avian area,” Carole finished.

  “Birds, too?” Charlee pressed her hands together. “Can I see it?”

  “Of course you can,” Carole said. “This way.”

  * * * * *

  They were back in the office once more, with Charlee’s head reeling with facts, figures and pure delight, when she realized for the first time that Asher was no longer with them.

  “I believe Mr. Strand went back to the restaurant, just after we left the playground,” Carole said, picking up the reading glasses that hung around her neck on a chain and sliding them onto her nose. “He said you should stop by when you were done here and tell him how it went.” She pulled a sheet of paper out of a drawer in her desk and placed it in front of Charlee. “This is a volunteer profile. Mainly, it is contact information so we know where we can reach you if we need to. What hours can you give us, Charlee?”

  “Right now, all the hours in the day,” Charlee said. “School’s out for the summer.”

  “Yes, it is, isn’t it? Which school do you go to?”

  “I start junior high in September.”

  “I think you might be one of our youngest volunteers. But we take anyone who wants to help us, so don’t worry.” Carole smiled at her. “It’s important that you work the hours you say you’ll be here. We schedule paid staff around volunteer work schedules. We’ll be counting on you, Charlee. Volunteers are what keeps us out of the red—well, mostly.”

  “When can I start?” Charlee asked.

  Carole considered her. “How about now?”

  Happiness burst through her. “Yes.”

  * * * * *

  Ylva looked up from the cash register as another customer came through the door, and smiled when she saw Charlee standing uncertainly just inside the door. The restaurant was busy, for the lunch rush was in full swing. She waved Charlee over.

  The girl hurried over.

  “They took you, then?” Ylva asked, and counted back change to the diner whose bill she was settling.

  “Ylva, it’s perfect! There’s all sorts of animals. I’ve been cleaning cages, and talking to them, and....” She shrugged, but Ylva could see the happiness in her eyes and the energy crackling from her every movement. “I’m on a lunch break. Is Asher here? I wanted to thank him.”

  “He had some things to take care of.” Ylva considered her. “Have you eaten?”

  “I...uh...no, I guess not. I didn’t know I would be working all day.” She smiled.

  Ylva turned her and pointed at one of the few empty tables. “Go and sit down. A customer just sent a chicken dinner back because it had gravy on it. I’ll get the sous chef to reheat it for you.”

  “Really? That would be wonderful. I didn’t know how hungry I was until just now.”

  Charlee sat at the small table. It was one of the two-people-only tables that were popular in the evening. Because office lunches usually needed seats for three or more, the two-people tables often sat empty.

  She was nearly through the small portion of the roast chicken dinner when Asher arrived. He spotted her in among the diners and came and sat down. “You’re still here?” he asked.

  “I am a volunteer at the SPCA,” she said proudly.

  “They have you working already?” He seemed amused.

  “I wanted to.”

  He nodded. “What time do you finish?”

  “Four.”

  “So you’ll be catching the 4:20 as usual.” He seemed to be saying it to himself.

  Charlee rolled her eyes at him. “You’re doing it again.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Thinking hard and only speaking a third of it aloud. It’s difficult to understand when you leapfrog like that.”

  His grin broadened. “You’re smart. Can’t you keep up?”

  “Mostly, I do. But you’re thinking about me. That makes it harder.”

  Asher sat back. “You should stop by for lunch each day.”

  It was a complete change of subjects. Charlee frowned. “Are you checking up on me?” Then she stared at him as his comments pulled into a cohesive pattern. He hadn’t been changing subjects at all. “You are checking up on me. What’s going to be at the other end of the 4:20, Asher?”

  He hesitated for a long moment, his big fingers playing with the neatly folded napkin on t
hat side of the table. “Either Darwin or Lucas will meet your train, each day. They’re going to walk you home.”

  Charlee put her fork down. “I’m nearly twelve years old. I can walk home by myself. I’ve been doing it for months.”

  “Things have changed. You know why.” He looked at her steadily, reminding her without words about what had happened to Chocolate.

  Charlee pressed her lips together. “Okay,” she said with a sigh. “But just for a while. Just until we know if he’s gonna come back at you.”

  “It’s not me he’ll come at,” Asher said quietly. “He dealt with Chocolate. There’s Lucas and Darwin, but he’ll look at them and figure they’re too much trouble. But you’re not. If my warning wasn’t enough to deter him, if he’s as crazy as Lucas says, then he’ll come after you next.”

  Charlee pushed her plate aside. Her appetite had fled. She felt a little sick, her heart lurching in her chest.

  Asher sat forward again. “I’m sorry to scare you. But you need to know this,” he said gently. “The problem is, I don’t know how long it will take him to decide that getting even with you will be worth the risk of having me come after him. He might be just sensible enough to decide you’re not worth the trouble, either. But he might not.” He frowned. “He didn’t give way at all when I was talking to him. He didn’t back down mentally even when I had him…when he was cornered.”

  Charlee swallowed. She had deliberately not wondered about what Asher had done the night they had buried Chocolate. But now she was getting a possible glimpse of it. She wasn’t sure she liked it.

  It also didn’t seem very real right now, with Asher sitting across the table from her, looking very normal in his business suit and tie. He’d already loosened it, but that didn’t take away from the urbane impression he gave. Even his hair was short, unlike a lot of men these days who grew their hair down past their collars. Even the Wall Street types sported mullets and long locks.

  In some ways, Asher was almost, well, square. Charlee didn’t like to admit that even just in her mind. But it was true. He had short hair, he wore suits. He didn’t seem to drink or go dancing at discos, or have dates, which Charlee figured most men did if they weren’t already married. He just seemed to work all the time.

  ….isn’t that what superheroes do? The question popped into her mind and she recalled almost with surprise that she used to think of Asher as a superhero, like Superman. When had that changed? Because it must have changed in her mind at some time if she was looking at him now and having trouble thinking of him doing heroic things.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “You’ve gone all quiet.”

  She shook her head. “It’s nothing. Just thinking about Chocolate,” she lied.

  Was she growing up and moving on from nonsense like superheroes? It worried her. She remembered every moment in that alley like it had happened yesterday. She would never forget it, nor would she forget what Asher had done for her and Chocolate. But she had known Asher in his daytime disguise a lot longer than she had seen him being heroic. The daytime mask overlaid everything.

  Besides, it was secret. Never to be spoken of, just as Asher had changed what he had been about to say a moment ago.

  Asher leaned forward again. “Hey,” he said quietly. “Chocolate was lucky. You loved her and took care of her for a long while. There are some animals out there that never get to be loved by anyone at all. They have the most terrible lives.”

  “I know,” Charlee agreed, thinking of some of the poor creatures she had been caring for that morning. “But now I can help as many as I can.” She tried to smile, to reassure Asher. “You…you’ll be careful, won’t you?” It blurted out of her, pushed out past the old secrecy injunction.

  His brow lifted and she could tell he knew she was talking about his superhero stuff. “I’m always careful,” he said. But there was a flicker in the back of his eyes that seemed to refute him.

  It made her say firmly, “I’m going to stop by here every day during my lunch break. I want to make sure you’re…being careful.”

  Asher started to smile and she could tell that he was going to laugh, too.

  “I mean it,” she added.

  His smile faded.

  “If you’re going to insist that someone walk me home, I’m going to insist on this,” she said. “Deal?”

  Asher considered her for another long moment. “Deal,” he said.

  * * * * *

  Asher kept up his end of the deal. Every day when she arrived at the station from her job (and she felt very grown up about having “a job”, although she would never tell anyone that), Lucas or Darwin would be waiting at the bottom of the stairs to the platform. It was Darwin more often than Lucas, for the train he usually caught home at the end of the day arrived at the station at nearly the same time she did. But when he was late, or couldn’t make it for other reasons, Lucas was always there.

  One day, it had been Asher himself. He had straightened up from his lean against the bottom of the stairs and dropped his arms down to his sides. “Lucas is at the training camp and Darwin is working late.” He said it in a way that made Charlee think he was apologizing.

  She grinned at him. “So you walk me home instead. That’s great.”

  He seemed troubled by her answer. As they headed across the road and out into the strong early July sunshine, he glanced at her. “Charlee…”

  “What?”

  “You know that some people, including your folks...they wouldn’t like the idea of you and I being alone together.”

  Charlee bit back her protest, as vague hints and conversations at school rose to mind. While standing at her locker, Charlee had heard Amy Green, who had transferred in only two months before the end of the year, talking to the big circle of girls who had instantly gravitated in her direction because of how pretty she was. Amy had been talking in a loud whisper about a girl at her old school and the rumors about her and a male teacher. The teacher had quit mysteriously, but not before the girl had transferred out. Amy had been pulled out of the school by her parents, suddenly and without explanation. Her mother had been upset for three days and hadn’t relaxed until Amy was settled at PS 157. Even then, someone picked her up from school every single day.

  “What did he do to her?” one of the other girls had asked, her eyes big. That had been Noreen Tartt, who liked to tell everyone she was going to live up to her name. Charlee guessed it was a way for Noreen to jump ahead of the teasing she would have got otherwise.

  “Who cares?” Amy had replied shortly. “He got me kicked out of the best school ever.”

  Charlee had nearly finished at her locker. She slowed down her movements, wanting to hear more.

  “Do y’think he did things to her?” one of the others asked in a hushed voice.

  “Prob’ly,” Amy replied, with a disinterested tone, fiddling with her hair and tossing it over her shoulder. She was watching Chuck Benson walk by with his football teammates.

  Charlee had given up on the conversation then and hurried to the subway station to go downtown. Amy had only been interested in why she had been forced to come to PS 157, which was a perfectly good school in Charlee’s estimation. Charlee didn’t think any of the male teachers “did” things, for a start. That was the point she kept returning to. What did ‘doing things’ involve?

  Was it…was it sex?

  Charlee had known about sex for a few years. Books were freely available that had given her an intellectual understanding of reproduction and human biology, but the knowledge had only lodged in her memory at a superficial level, a set of facts that seemed slightly disgusting (a man really does that to a woman?) but explained a great deal of odd adult behavior she had observed that had once been inexplicable.

  She had sat on the train, not reading but instead thinking through what Amy had implied about her old school. Had the teacher done something to the student, something sexual? Could a grown man do that? She supposed they could. But why would they want to?
She had a hard enough time imagining a man actually liking sex with an adult woman, who supposedly wanted sex just like he did. A girl the same age as Charlee wouldn’t want sex. So how could a man want to do sexual things to a girl? It defied understanding, but she had to suppose that anyone could be sexually drawn to anyone. There were gays and transsexuals, and she guessed there were probably even stranger combinations and pairings, stuff that adults kept well hidden from kids.

  Charlee had left off her ruminating at that point. It just didn’t interest her enough to keep her wondering.

  But now she looked at Asher, startled. She hadn’t considered that people might look at Asher and her in the same way as the teacher and the student at Amy Green’s last school. “But you’re not like that!” she said.

  Asher smiled. She liked his smile, when he smiled like he was doing now. It made his eyes twinkle and made her feel nice, just by looking at it. “Thank you for that, Charlee. I’m not like that at all. You and I know that, but it doesn’t look good on the surface, which is the only place most people look. Do you remember the deal we made back in…” His eyes widened. “Hell’s bells, that was nearly a year ago. When you found Chocolate?”

  “When you saved her,” Charlee amended. “But I remember the deal. I don’t tell anyone about you. I don’t even get to tell them how you saved Chocolate.”

  “Especially about how I saved Chocolate,” he amended. “This—us being alone together—if someone didn’t like it, they might start looking for more information about me and my life. The reason for our deal, for keeping things secret…that’s not something I can afford to have come out as public knowledge. Do you understand?”