The Branded Rose Prophecy

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  The door opened, washing them both with air that seemed frigid, as Asher drew back. Their eyes met as he straightened up. They met and locked.

  It was a moment of perfect understanding. Charlee often wondered what Asher was thinking, but not right now. She knew, and she knew that he knew what was in her mind. The kiss hung between them, a throbbing, unspoken and unfulfilled wish.

  She just had to lean forward. She knew that if she did, he would complete the action. He would take her head in his hands and his lips would meet hers. All she had to do was lean. Her lips were already parted; it was the only way she could breathe.

  “That’ll be ten and a quarter,” the cab driver said.

  But that didn’t shatter the moment the way it would have in a movie or a book. The tension between them wasn’t a delicate thing. It was alive and growing with each passing second.

  Asher’s hand, where it rested on the back of the front seat, curled into a fist, his knuckles whitening. “Go,” he breathed.

  Before it’s too late. She understood what he had not said as clearly as if he had spoken the words.

  “It’s already too late.” She slid out of the cab, but not before she saw his eyes widen.

  Deliberately, she turned and walked to the front door, pulling out her keys, her back to the cab, which didn’t move. She made herself step inside and shut the door without looking back, but once the door was safely closed, she let herself sink down onto the little stool Darwin used when he was putting on his shoes to go out.

  She was shaking, and it wasn’t a good feeling. It made her feel sick. All the moments she had shared with Asher were flickering across her mind like a movie, or one of those sentimental look-backs they did for the Oscars, all the long-gone but great moments playing out while soppy music ran.

  “Hey, you’re back!” Darwin said, coming down the stairs. He was already in his dressing gown and slippers, his skinny ankles showing below the hem of the tartan gown.

  Charlee looked up at him, her reaction fading and the one fact her quick jolt through the past had given her at the forefront of her mind. “He hasn’t aged,” she told Darwin.

  He came to a halt in front of her, puzzled. “Asher?”

  “No grey hair. No wrinkles. He still looks exactly the same as the day we met.”

  Darwin considered her with an expression that held no surprise. He nodded, like she was confirming something he had already known.

  They looked at each other. It was a night for clear communications, Charlee thought, for she knew exactly what Darwin was thinking, too.

  What hid behind the mask called Asher Strand?

  Chapter Nineteen

  Asher slipped into the darkened room and stood at the back, listening as the graduates’ names were called. “Rick Lemora,” was the next one called. So they were still to come to the Ms. He hadn’t missed her walking across the stage.

  He looked around the very full auditorium. There were parents standing at the back and along the sides, just like he was. He looked for Darwin, who would be easy to spot because of his height, working systematically from the front row to the back, and finally found him standing on the right side, a camera in his hands. He was watching Asher and as Asher spotted him, he nodded and turned his attention back to the stage.

  So did Asher. There was a sinuous line of kids in caps and gowns, from the far right of the stage, snaking back to the wings and on into the dark. Charlee’s graduating class had over four hundred kids in it. It would take a while for them to all cross the stage, take their diplomas and shake the principal’s hand. But Asher could already see Charlee in the lineup. She was taller than anyone next to her and stood like a slender sapling, watching the others walk the stage rather than talking to anyone. Her hair had been looped up into some sort of elegant knot at the back of her head, beneath the brim of the mortar board cap. Even capped and gowned in identical fashion to everyone else, she still stood out like neon.

  Finally, her name was called. She walked across the stage, her long legs swinging easily under the gown, and shook York’s hand with a small nod of her head. It was as if she were choosing to accept the diploma.

  Asher found he was clapping harder than anyone around him, the heat and tension in his chest catching him by surprise. I’m just proud of her, he told himself. And he was. But the degree and fierceness of his pride puzzled him.

  Once Charlee had climbed down the steps and was seated with the other graduates, Darwin worked his way past the other standing parents until he reached Asher’s side. “Step out for a minute,” he said shortly.

  They pushed passed waiting parents and went out into the foyer. There were more people out here, too. Darwin went over to the seat in the lounge area. The bar itself was closed, the metal grill rolled down and padlocked, the area behind it dark.

  Darwin threw himself into one of the chairs and waved to the other.

  “Something you couldn’t discuss over the phone?” Asher asked, sitting down.

  “I don’t trust those cellphone things,” Darwin said. “Who’s to stop people from listening in?”

  “It doesn’t work like a CB radio.”

  “I wanted to see your face when I told you, anyway,” Darwin said.

  “Tell me what?”

  “She’s not going to college.” Darwin scowled.

  “Why the hell not?” Asher demanded. “She’s been dreaming, working toward it for years! What happened?”

  “You tell me, hero.”

  Asher caught his breath. “What?”

  “What?” Darwin asked, puzzled.

  “What did you just call me?”

  “A polite form of asshole. This has something to do with you.”

  “Her not going to college? I haven’t spoken to her for weeks.” Not since the prom. Not since he had nearly kissed her. Even now, just thinking about it made his heart start thudding and not in a good way. He savagely shoved the memory away and looked at Darwin expectantly. He certainly had not talked her out of college. Of course she had to go.

  “She says she’s going to live with Ylva. Some sort of apprenticeship. I can’t even get my head around it.” Darwin’s distress was showing in his voice. For him to not understand something must be a rare thing.

  But Asher understood now. He looked right though Darwin, putting it together. Ylva and Charlee had kept in touch since she had left the restaurant. That was to be expected. They had been close. But what had Ylva told Charlee? What had the power to make Charlee want to give up on college and work at Ylva’s? The apprenticeships Ylva put the newly recruited Amica through were tough, both physically and mentally. The compensation Ylva would have had to have dangled to convince Charlee life in Ylva’s house was better than a degree and a career must have been powerful indeed.

  “I’ll kill her,” Asher muttered.

  “Charlee?” Darwin asked, concerned.

  “Ylva. She talked her out of college somehow.”

  “Then you didn’t?”

  Asher rolled his eyes. “Of course I didn’t. College is the best place for Charlee to be now.” Best and safest, for it was far away from him. He stood up. “I’ll talk to her.”

  “Charlee?” Darwin asked again.

  “Ylva.”

  “Isn’t it Charlee who is making the decision here?”

  “Have you ever had any success talking Charlee out of something once her mind was made up?” Asher asked.

  Darwin sucked at his teeth with his tongue. “Nope,” he admitted easily.

  “I want to find out what Ylva told her. I might be able to do something, once I know what Charlee thinks she’ll get out of living there.” He pulled out his cellphone and dialed Ylva’s number.

  Darwin’s face scrunched up. “I don’t know which one I’d least like to talk to about this,” he said. “Seems to me that Ylva might get just as stroppy as Charlee over it.”

  Asher looked at Darwin and saw they were both thinking the same thing.

  Women.

&nb
sp; * * * * *

  Ylva tucked her feet up next to her. “Charlee asked me, Asher. I thought she was heading for Harvard in September, too.”

  Asher sank down onto the arm of the lounge chair sitting next to her sofa, most of his anger evaporated by surprise. “She talked to you? Do you know why she won’t go to college, then? Is it a matter of money?” Money could be found. There was always a way around money.

  “She was offered a full scholarship to Harvard. All she would have had to find would be living expenses, and I would have paid those in a heartbeat,” Ylva said. “It’s not money. She wants to stay in New York.”

  “There are colleges here.”

  “I don’t think they’ll teach her what she wants to learn,” Ylva said placidly.

  Cold fingers walked their way up his spine. “You can’t teach her that! There’s laun, she’s not Amica. They’ll kill you both.”

  “I am not beholden to the Kine anymore, remember?”

  “You know that makes no difference when it comes to laun. She’s not Amica.” Fresh horror gripped him. “She’s not being recruited? Please say she isn’t.”

  Ylva tipped her head to one side. “Isn’t that exactly what you promised Stefan and the seniors, a few years ago? When Charlee came of age, you told them you would have her recruited into the Amica to preserve laun.”

  “Yes, but how did you know that?” he demanded.

  “You are not the only Kine who continues to speak to me,” Ylva replied.

  Asher stood up, unable to stay still. “You’re recruiting her?”

  Ylva considered him for a long, silent moment, while his heart tried to rip itself out of his chest.

  “No,” she said at last. “It isn’t my place to recruit the Amica for you. I merely train those who have already volunteered. If Charlee wants to become one, later on, I won’t stop her. It will be her decision, and I will ensure it is an informed one.” She lifted her hand. “Do not ask me again about whether I intend to break laun, Asher. You do not need to know that.”

  Fear was a runaway train in his chest, making his heart work like an overheated piston. “You’ll put her in danger. You know the penalties as well as I do. Better than I do.”

  “Charlee will be quite safe with me,” Ylva said serenely. “Safer than she would be with you.”

  “With me?”

  “Charlee is irrevocably a part of our world now, Asher. She knows that and she has convinced me of it. You may not have intended to do so, but your protection has brought her into our shadow. Secrecy will no longer serve her. Knowledge will protect her and give her choices. She might yet enjoy a semblance of a life that she would not otherwise have.” Ylva seemed sad. “She no longer can have a human life. That is impossible now.”

  Asher pushed his hands through his hair. “How can she know that? How can you? If I leave, if we step right out of her life, it isn’t too late.”

  “Could you really do that, Asher?” Ylva asked gently. “Could you leave, move somewhere she would never find you, and pretend you never met her? Let her wonder and worry about you for the rest of her life?”

  “I’d...I’d say goodbye first,” he said weakly. “Make it clean,” he added. But he was lying. He couldn’t do that to Charlee.

  “She wouldn’t let you,” Ylva said. “Charlee worries about you. She worries about the parts of you she doesn’t know, as much as the parts you’ve let her see.”

  Asher walked toward the window but found he was walking in a tight circle. He stopped and reached for calm. “What did Charlee tell you, to talk you into thinking this was a good idea?” he asked. That was the final piece of the puzzle. That was what he had come here to learn, although he had thought it was something that Ylva had told Charlee.

  Ylva simply studied him, a sad smile on her face.

  Asher closed his eyes. “No.” He shook his head, trying to deny the swirl of pain circling through him. “Not Charlee,” he said hoarsely. Helplessly.

  “Do you see, now, why she must learn it all? She must learn everything, so that she understands as well as you do,” Ylva replied.

  Her logic was irrefutable.

  * * * * *

  Charlee slipped off her high heels and rubbed her toes. They were beautiful shoes, but they killed her feet, and she had been on them for hours. “He didn’t want to stay and see me?” she asked.

  Darwin pushed her gown aside. She had dropped it onto the table, her cap on top, then sat down and immediately got rid of the shoes. He slid the cap and gown off the end of the table so they dropped onto the seat of the chair, put the big mug of hot chocolate in front of her and sat opposite, his own smaller mug between his hands.

  “I think he was too upset to want to speak to you.” He grinned.

  “Did it work? Did upsetting him make him slip up? Did he give away anything?”

  Darwin sipped. “You were right about the ‘hero’ thing. He would have spit up his dinner if he’d been eating.” Then his smile faded. “But digging up the facts about Asher Strand is kind of redundant, now, isn’t it? You’re off to Ylva’s to get the dirt wholesale.”

  Charlee squeezed his arm. “I’ll still come home to visit when I can. It’ll be exactly the same as if I had gone to Boston.”

  Darwin shook his head. “No, it won’t,” he said gently. “You said Asher had changed you. Well, if we’re even half right about what we think Asher is, and the secrets behind the mask, then this is going to change you even more. You might come back to visit once in a while, but this won’t be home for you.”

  “I’ll still love you,” she told him softly.

  “Get on with you,” he said, and rolled his eyes.

  She grinned and stuck her tongue out at him, then drank her hot chocolate.

  It was a moment she would remember clearly and sadly for the rest of her life, for they hadn’t been close to right, and what they had guessed had been only a tiny corner of a reality they couldn’t possibly have suspected was there.

  It was also one of the last moments of her youth.

  “Are you sure about this, Charlee?” Darwin asked. “There’s still time. You could still talk to Harvard.”

  She gave Darwin the same answer she had given Asher in the cab, after her prom. “It’s too late.” Then she tried to explain, because Darwin deserved it and he was upset. “I think it became too late eight years ago, when I saw his sword and he swore me to secrecy. I think that locked it in. I was never going to be normal after that.”

  A week later, she took up residence in Ylva’s house.

  NEW WORLD

  Chapter Twenty

  The next six years didn’t just fly by for Charlee. They slipped away unnoticed, exiting stage left while the focus of her attention was on center stage.

  “You’ll work harder than you’ve ever worked in your life,” Ylva had warned Charlee the first few days she had moved in to the tiny room in the basement of the house, where there were at least a dozen other similar rooms, all occupied. “You’ll become a virtual slave to the older Amica, and—”

  “What are the Amica?”

  “That’s something you’ll learn eventually. You’re starting very much behind the other women. They come to the program with a solid understanding of our world, and they are already committed to becoming one of the Amica. You don’t even know what our world is. You will have to catch up by yourself. I will expect you to carry your full share of responsibilities and keep up with your studies to an acceptable level of accomplishment. The gaps in your knowledge you will have to fill in your spare time, and there will not be a lot of it.” She smiled a little more kindly. “If I do not hold you to the same standards as the others, Charlee, they will resent you.”

  But she had been resented, anyway, even though it felt like she was working twice as hard as any of them, just to keep up. She was not a full Amica recruit. She was merely a human to whom Ylva had offered the full benefits of her training.

  It took years for Charlee to even begin to understa
nd what Ylva’s full training encompassed and why being privy to such training would cause such resentment.

  Ylva had not exaggerated about the amount of work each day presented. Her house was a large three-story on Fifth Avenue, but the human world and its petty concerns stopped at the black oak door and the world of the Kine, the Herleifr, took over.

  The house was very nearly self-sufficient. It drew a little water, gas and electricity from the mains, enough to keep authorities satisfied that all was as it should be. But Ylva had installed banks of solar power panels on the other side of the roof garden when she had moved in, and most of the house’s power came from these panels, and all of its heating.

  It was the job of the newest recruit to clean the panels daily, regardless of the weather, and in winter when the snow fell it was a miserable and thankless task that Charlee struggled through, sweating under her parka, while her fingers turned red with the cold and she lost feeling in the tips.

  It was also the newest recruit’s responsibility to see to the kitchen fires. Charlee had been astonished to find that most of the first floor of the house was given over to a large kitchen workroom that featured a blazing fire in the middle of the floor. There were also two big, black iron ranges that the cook needed burning at all times. Charlee had to learn how to manage the ranges by the feeding of wood and the controlling of the vents, so that they were able to leap from fresh flames to the hot, glowing coals that produced the steadiest and hottest ovens for the cook.

  In between stoking the ovens, Charlee’s duties in the kitchen also involved scrubbing dishes, for Ylva’s kitchen did not feature anything like a dishwasher or an electric or even a gas oven. Charlee also scrubbed the floor and walls and kept the big wooden work tables cleaner and more sterile than an operating theater, all while listening to and watching the Amica trainees working at the other big tables on the other side of the kitchen, through the arch.

  When the cook, whose name was Skuld, deemed that Charlee had sufficiently grasped the fundamentals of keeping a kitchen clean and orderly, she had moved her to the beginner’s table on the other side of the kitchen.