The Dark Rose
Page 1
+ The Dark Rose +
By Valentine Ramsey
COPYRIGHT
THE DARK ROSE. Copyrighted © 2012 Valentine Ramsey and all her affiliated names and pseudonyms. All rights reserved. No part of this work maybe be used or reproduced in any manner of any kind.
This work is fiction. All characters, names, places, and incidents were created solely within the realm of the authors imagination and any resemblances to actual names of the living or dead, events, business establishments, and locals are entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
+ The Dark Rose +
COPYRIGHT
+ Dedications +
The magic of a first love
+ Forward +
+ Chapter 1 +
+ Chapter 2 +
+ Chapter 3+
+ Chapter 4 +
+ Chapter 5 +
+ Chapter 6 +
+ Chapter 7 +
+ Chapter 8 +
+ Chapter 9 +
+ Chapter 10 +
+ Chapter 11+
+ Chapter 12 +
+ Chapter 13 +
+ Chapter 14 +
+ Chapter 15 +
+ Chapter 16 +
+ Chapter 17 +
+ Chapter 18 +
+ Chapter 19 +
+ Chapter 20 +
+ Chapter 21+
+ Chapter 22 +
+ Chapter 23 +
+ Chapter 24 +
+ Chapter 25 +
+ Chapter 26 +
+ Chapter 27 +
+ Chapter 28 +
+ Chapter 29 +
+ Chapter 30 +
+ Chapter 31 +
+ Chapter 32 +
+ Chapter 33 +
+ Chapter 34 +
+ Chapter 35 +
+ Chapter 36 +
+ Chapter 37 +
+ Chapter 38 +
+ Chapter 39 +
+ Chapter 40 +
+ Chapter 41 +
+ Chapter 42 +
+ Chapter 43 +
+ Chapter 44 +
+ Chapter 45 +
+ Chapter 46 +
+ Afterward +
This is not the end.
+ Scene Songs (Spoiler Alert!!!) +
+ Random Info +
+ Author Bio +
+ Dedications +
I can do nothing more than dedicate these words and all future endeavors to my mother, Penny. Thank you for your enduring belief, support, strength, and above all else instilling in me resilience. The defiance, however, I claim all by myself. To the freezer always being full, I love you.
My thanks must also extend to the other second most important person in my life, my Uncle Joe. Thanks for being my listening ear, shoulder, confidant and stand-in father, and for giving me those months to get my mind together. Those days are due all the credit for The Dark Rose even though it’s taken me this long to finally publish it. All my love.
The magic of a first love
is the ignorance it can never end
+ Benjamin Disraeli
+ Forward +
On fair Verona Boulevard is where we lay our scene. From recent of ancient battles, stemming from a grudge between two vampire covens, both alike in dignity and royalty, break to new mutiny, as revenge is sought from infringing newborns crossing the agreed border where, civility ends, and civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
In the fatal loins of the mistress night, the foes have clashed, furthering the war and the misadventures of piteous overthrows. It is with this new taste of trespassing Rose blood, the Gray’s seek to find and savor more bloodshed of the imperial rosetum, hunting for that clash where blood from sides of both runs sweet and virginal in the gutters of strife.
In furthering each end, no loss is too great, whether it be a pair of star-crossed lovers to take their own lives. A final coup de grace, for suicide is mercy when their beloved is not in it.
But this story has come and passed, descendent of ancestry consequence, mother to her child the Gray-Rose war. The continuation of which your eager and patient eyes seek to attend and we words seek to fulfill.
Zero hours traffic to our stage, this page, so it shall begin, or what here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend. Enjoy.
+ Chapter 1 +
Pound For Pound This Love Goes Around
The Latin scripture Canus Domain could be read from the rear window of the 1979 Buick Regal Limited cruising Verona Blvd. Neutral ground as Rose territory lay to the right, Gray to the left. Lights of the upscale shops, their brightness near rivaling that of the Las Vegas strip, shone off the black car, setting it agleam like oil. To those strolling the walks of either side, whose eyes shined with a supernatural silver gleam, knew who traveled in this carriage of the new millennium as the mural of a praying Virgin Mary wearing a haloed crown was airbrushed on the hood, announcing its carrier as prestige.
Tinted windows blocked the Gray Prince from the hateful and honoring’s view, though dice could be seen dangling from the mirror. Residing in the driver’s seat was Deacon, owner of this ostentatious gold spinning rimmed chariot. To his right, relaxed and unflappable in the blood red velvet seats was Urijah, the Prince’s dearest and most trusted confident as he was cool and unprovokeable in all matters of calm or chaos.
The Prince himself, Dominic del Romeo Gray, lay in the backseat, arm behind his head, long legs stretched, booted feet crossed out the window. It would seem he’d be cramped in such little a space for such tall a figure, but the lithe grace of the vampire knew no bounds.
“What exactly are we scouting for again?” he asked, the boredness in his tone transcending time and space as it would last eternity if it continued on at this rate.
“Prey,” Deacon answered absentmindedly, scanning the right hand of enemy territory.
Dom sighed. He had had his fill of prey for the night. His belly bloated with his glutton of their blood, his ears still ringing with their screams. Unlike Deacon, his hot tempered solider, he did not find satisfaction in their cries and pleas. Oh please! Oh please! Sigh their weary bones, the battle has sent them home, they have died, but it is a lie as their hearts still beat, the women’s legs simply weak from a body trembling peek.
“Food, I’m afraid,” Urijah said in his slow and unrushed drawl as he rarely spoke, “is not on Deacon’s agenda.”
Knowing him so well, Urijah did always have a way of reading Dom’s line of thought and it usually wasn’t in sync with Deacon’s. Dom rolled his eyes. How could he be so stupid? Prey, of course, could not mean the prey of food. Deacon was hunting Rose’s.
“I’m not in the mood to slaughter,” Dom said, irritated by Deacon’s one track mind.
Deacon patrolled the borders more often than any other Gray, looking for a stray hapless Rose to wander into their territory. If he found them they never knew about it.
“You never are,” Deacon said. “That’s what I’m here for.”
Dom draped his arm over his eyes. “Call me to battle when there’s an actual one to fight. Until then, do not seek to make a preemptive strike when no threat is near. Urijah, rein him in or he’ll have us at full blown war by the end of the night and I for one do not look to be fried in the morning light.”
“Why do you take misery to your bosom tonight?” Deacon asked. “Why not indulge in a little fun?”
Dom groaned.
“Ah,” Deacon said in realization. “Selene, your temptress, has been at her games again.” He laughed.
Dom snarled. “Is it funny? She taunts, she teases, she does everything but pleases. I am not blind in the eyes or ways of love, but I see no pathways to her will. She regards me as a toy. Infuriating! I wish nothing more than to rip her throat out! But then I find myself seeking to place kisses upon it instead. I
ask myself, why this brawling love, oh loving hate, when she has done nothing to first create. She is of serious vanity, her heart of well-seeming forms until she unleashes her claws that happen to lie between her legs that so quickly close before I satisfy my thirst. This is not love I feel, for there is no love in hate, only lust.”
“Admit you did love her once,” Urijah said. “You enjoyed the game.”
“Until years of it has worn me insane and the bud was bit with an envious worm. I am sick of valuing from afar where her bright eyes, scarlet lips, quivering thigh with the magical V inside, both so fine plastic surgery could not buy, remain constantly unavailable. A collection of body parts such as that are meant to be sampled in the flesh.”
Urijah chuckled. “She raises you up then puts you down to lie obese with love nectar.”
“Pound for pound! Her desire has still yet to be found. And there is that god-awful word again,” Dom sneered. “Love. So help me if my heart felt anything for Selene other than an unhealthy desire, then I require a silver bullet—aim it here and no higher.” Dom made a gun with his hand and pointed it at his heart.
Urijah glanced at him in the mirror. “That would fail to cure your misery,” he said. “You’re not allergic to silver.”
“But Selene is,” Dom pointed out. “And if she resides in my heart then burn it out and cauterize the wound. I will live dead. The love of cold fire leaves a lot to desire. Laugh at that.”
“Wouldn’t dare coz,” Urijah said dully. “I’d rather weep.”
Deacon laughed. “I will. Hilarious. You’re her bitch.”
Snarling, Dom shot up wrapping Deacon in a headlock. The tires screeched as Deacon swerved, nearly smashing head on into a car that honked and jerked to the side.
“Bark at this bitch,” Dom growled.
Deacon scrambled to right the wheel, pulling them back where they were contained in their own lane. Releasing him, Dom laid back.
“Meow,” Deacon said, looking at him in the mirror with shocked eyes. “How could I be so wrong? No bitch indeed, but a cat of malicious tendencies. This is good, surface this anger and let’s find some Rose’s to savage.”
It would seem his course could not be detoured. Remaining on Gray territory, Deacon pulled into a Fat Jack’s fast food restaurant. A fat man with a drooping gut spun around on a pole above as the droning theme song played relentlessly.
Dom wrinkled his nose in disgust at the greasy acrid smell created by one hundred percent all beef patties. Or as dogs and vampires with super sensitive sniffing barometers knew, every other part of the cow that wasn’t actual meat.
Where the Rose side was more sophisticated and classy, full of rich and prestigious shops, the Gray side was more down to earth and practical to the needs of the “real” world.
Dom pulled his arm from his eyes as the rumble of the ripped engine turned off.
“So quick and so easy,” Deacon whispered, his eyes dilating with excitement as he gazed intently out the window.
Dom sat up to see who and what had caught his attention. Two female Rose’s, tall and taller, skinny and skinner, blonde and blonder were strolling arm in arm across the street, chatting away in Italian, oblivious to the fact that they were being hunted. Chanel and Gucci bags hung from their arms as they were doing a little late night shopping.
Inhaling past the pungent stench of humanities quest to die young with cholesterol clogged arteries, Dom sought their scents, but couldn’t distinguish them in the wind tainted with motor oil and pollutant.
By their grace and model walk stomp it was obvious they were full blown vampires. By their appearing ages of early thirties they would have become vampire through the bitten virus rather than born vampire like Urijah and himself.
Vampires born from vampires, made in the womb of the human with the venom of the inhuman. Half breed children who at their height or end of puberty, teens to middle twenties, changed into a full vampire. Until that transition they remained mostly human, killable and fragile, but stronger with sensitive hearing, acute vision, and killer reflexes.
Human, but more than a human.
These children of the damned can only be made by those who have strength in their centuries of age and bear the nobility of royal blood. Dom was one of those children, though three years changed at the age of nineteen, soon to be four years at week’s time on Lammas Eve.
In this war a half breed was the glory kill to each side, bringing the most honor to their covens. But they were protected and guarded like Fort Knox; heard of, but unseen because they were so hard to conceive.
Urijah groaned, unable to help being enticed as he tilted his head up to the open sunroof, eyes closed. “They do smell lusciously sweet.” His fangs descended.
“We’ll strike fast and sure like the vipers we are,” Deacon said eagerly, gold eyes glowing, intent like a hawks.
Dom laughed. “We’ll strike fast? Surely you mean Urijah? For you are as slow as his temper. This is Ellis’s and Victor’s war,” he said darkly. “And not one I like to indulge.”
“You have no choice in the matter, being the Gray Prince,” Urijah said. “Ellis’s war is your war.”
“A fact I am all too aware of. But until I am King, I do not wish to give it anymore creed than it needs to succeed.”
And in his expertise, there was a reason the thorn of a rose always pricked your finger. They were scrappy S.O.B’s and weren’t worth the effort of fight unless it was to kill.
“The quarrel is between our masters and us their men,” Urijah said.
“And what are you set to do when it does become your war?” Deacon asked, turning his amber eyes on Dom. His fangs had descended as well.
Dom could see this for the test it was. One of loyalty and he did not like it. He grumbled low in the back of his throat at the challenge Deacon was placing before him. Deacon looked away in form of submission to his Prince.
“I plan to do what Ellis has not,” he said, his eyes boring into the back of Deacon’s head. As Deacon shifted, Dom knew he felt it. “Slaughter Victor and his kin and take over the House of Rose. However, until it is my time I seek to lay back and enjoy my worriless life.”
“Ellis is still young and in favor with the court,” Deacon said in thought. “It will be decades before he turns the throne over to you.”
“And what of it?” Dom demanded.
“And I want to have fun now,” Deacon said petulantly.
Dom signed. “By all means, the quarrel is yours. Prove yourself a tyrant and see if I care. Go after them, but take heed, the female vampire is a fearsome creature to behold.”
Deacon snorted. “While they may smell sweet,” he said to Urijah. “I shall be ever sweeter and seduce one or both into the shadows of the night. Women always enjoy the thrill of danger when it is with a man they are forbidden to be with.”
“Do you forget that they bite?” Dom asked, laughing. “No little playful nip of the teeth, they’ll turn you into a eunuch!”
Urijah winced. “You’re on your own with this one.”
“You cannot show fear,” Deacon hissed.
Urijah gave a rare laugh as it was comical, like he was giving advice on how to befriend a rabid dog.
“Laugh all you want,” Deacon said. “But it will be off with their heads. I’ll stick them on the House of Rose gates and all will gape in horror at my valiant deed, pay heed.”
“Or it will be off with your little head,” Urijah said.
Dom burst into hearty laughter.
“More like off with their maidenheads,” Deacon retorted. “The sweeter the blood, the sweeter the victory.”
“If those women are virgins then you’re the Dracula you claim to be,” Dom said. “I guarantee those woman haven’t worn panties since the eighteenth century. And sticking heads on pikes, do you hear this?” he said to Urijah.
“As it is I don’t think your lure of seduction would work,” Urijah said. A brunette human woman passed the two Rose vampires and both the
ir heads turned to regard her with hungry eyed interest. “They appear to be interested in something a little more ah…close to home.”
Deacon grumbled. “Lesbians. They’re only useful in threesomes and porno’s, otherwise they ruin everything.”
Urijah chuckled.
“Start the car and drive,” Dom said, shoving Deacon’s head forward.
Deacon turned the ignition, the rumbling growl of the engine vibrated through them.