Текст книги "Six Scorched Roses"

Автор книги: Carissa Broadbent

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CONTENTS

I. The First Rose

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

II. The Second Rose

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

III. The Third Rose

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

IV. The Fourth Rose

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

V. The Fifth Rose

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

VI. The Sixth Rose

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Ready for more?

Author’s Note

Also by Carissa Broadbent

Glossary of Terms of the Nyaxia World

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Copyright © 2023 by Carissa Broadbent

Cover Art by KD Ritchie at Storywrappers Design.

Under-jacket hardcover design by Nathan Medeiros.

Interior Design by Carissa Broadbent.

Editing by Noah Sky: noahskyediting.wordpress.com.

Proofreading by Anthony Holabird: holabirdediting.com.

Proofreading by Rachel Theus-Cass.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Please note that this story contains subject matter that may be difficult for some, including discussion of terminal illness, death, violence, and explicit sexual situations.

CHAPTER ONE

The first time I met death, it was in my first breaths—or rather, the first breaths I didn’t take. I was born too small, too sickly, too quiet. My father used to say that he’d never heard such a silence as when I was born—several terrible minutes in which no one said a word—and that when I finally started to wail, he’d never been so grateful to hear a scream.

Death never left, though. That became clear quickly, even before anyone wanted to acknowledge it.

The truth came the second time I met death, eight years later, when my sister was born. She, unlike me, screamed from the moment she came into the world. My mother, on the other hand, went forever silent.

My father had been right. There was nothing worse than that kind of silence.

And it was in that horrible soundlessness, as I stifled my coughs and my tears with the back of my hand, that the healer gave me a strange look. Later, after my mother’s funeral, he would pull me aside.

“How long has your breathing been that way?” he would ask.

Death always followed me, you see.

It quickly became clear that I wouldn’t have long to live. In the beginning, they tried to hide this from me. But I’d always liked knowing things. I was bad at reading people, but I was good at understanding science. I knew death even before I could name it.

But the third time I met death, it hadn’t come for me.

It was given to the town of Adcova like a silk blanket, settling slowly over our lives, placed there by one of the gods themselves.

Here’s the thing about the God of Abundance. Abundance wears many faces. The god of plenty is also the god of decay. There can be no life without death, no feast without famine.

Like all the other gods, Vitarus is a fickle and emotional being. The difference between excess and absence a mere whim of his moods. Entire lives—entire towns—made or unmade by a thoughtless wave of his hand.

For a long time, Vitarus smiled upon Adcova. We were a flourishing farm town, nestled in a fertile patch of land. We worshipped all the gods of the White Pantheon, but Vitarus was the god of the farmer, and so he was our favored deity. For a long time, he treated us well.

That changed slowly, in the beginning. One spoiled crop, then two. Weeks and then months of nothing. Then, one day, it changed all at once.

You can feel it in the air when a god is nearby. I felt it that day. I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling and could have sworn I smelled the smoke of funeral pyres.

I went outside. It was cold, my breath coming in little puffs of white. I was fifteen, but looked younger. My body shook. I was very thin, no matter how much I ate. Death stole every mouthful, you see, and it had been especially hungry lately.

To this day, I’m not sure why I went to the door. I was confused at first by what I was looking at. I thought my father was working in the fields, his form hunched and crouched in the dirt. But instead of the sea of greenery around him, there was only withered brown, coated with the wet, deadly sheen of frost.

I had never been good at seeing the things that people didn’t say. But even then, as a child, I knew that my father was broken. He clutched fistfuls of dead crops in his hands, sagging over them like lost hope.

“Fa?” I called out.

He looked over his shoulder at me. I pulled my shawl tighter around myself and shivered, despite the beads of sweat on my forehead. I couldn’t stop the shaking.

He looked at me the same way that he looked at those dead crops. Like I was the corpse of a dream, buried in everything he couldn’t save.

“Go back inside,” he said.

I almost didn’t.

For years, I would wish that I hadn’t.

But how was I supposed to know that my father was about to curse a god that would curse us back?

That’s when the plague came. My father was the first to go. The rest, slower. Years passed, and Adcova withered like the crops in the field that morning my father had damned us all.

It’s strange to watch the world wither around you. I had always put such stock in knowing things. Even the things that can’t be known—the power of a god, the actions of a cruel unfair fate—have a defined edge to them, a pattern that I could pull apart.

I learned everything about the illness. I learned how it stole breath from lungs and blood from veins, how it reduced skin to layers and layers of fine dust until there was nothing left but rotting muscle. Yet, there was always something more there, something I couldn’t ever really understand. Not truly.

So much lived in that gap—the gap between the things I knew and the things I didn’t. So much died there. No matter how many medicines I brewed or remedies I tested.

The gap had teeth like the vampires across the sea. Teeth sharp enough to eat us all alive.

Five years passed, ten, fifteen. More people grew sick.

The disease came for all of us in the end.

CHAPTER TWO

I always kept my workspace clean, but I took care to make it extra organized that evening. Beneath the waning light of sunset, which splashed bloody pink over my desk, I carefully sorted my notes and instruments. Everything was in its perfect place when I was done. Even a stranger could have sat down at my table and resumed my work. I figured this was practical, just in case I didn’t come back. I was expendable, but the work wasn’t.

I surveyed my handiwork with a critical eye, then went out to the greenhouse. It wasn’t a very pretty place—full not with colorful flowers but instead spiny leaves and vines stuffed into glass jars. Not much wanted to grow here these days. Only one little piece of beauty glinted in the back, beyond the door that led to the fields. Once, when I was very young, these fields were full of crops. Now, only one patch of dirt flourished—a cluster of rosebushes, black flowers perched upon emerald leaves, each petal outlined in a shock of red.

I carefully clipped a single flower, tucked it into my bag with special care, then went to the yard.

Mina was sitting in the sun. It was warm, but she kept a blanket over her lap anyway. She turned to me and squinted into the waning light, looking at my bag. “Where are you going?”

“Errands,” I said.

She frowned. She saw through the lie.

I paused beside her for a moment—observing the darkness under her delicate fingernails, the heaviness of her breathing. Observing most of all the fine coating of flesh-colored dust that settled over the chair and her blanket. Her very skin abandoning her, as death crept closer.

I put my hand on my sister’s shoulder, and for a moment I considered telling her that I loved her.

I didn’t say it, of course.

If I did that, she would know where I was going and try to stop me. Besides, a word was useless compared to what I was about to do. I could show my love in medicine and math and science. I couldn’t show it to her in an embrace—and what good would a thing like that do, anyway?

Besides, if I hugged her, maybe I wouldn’t be able to let her go.

“Lilith—” she started.

“I’ll be back soon,” I said.

By the time I reached the doors, I was panting and sweating. I paused at the doorstep, taking a moment to collect myself. I didn’t want whatever was about to greet me to see me looking like a mangy dog. I glanced over my shoulder, down the dozens of marble steps I had just scaled, and into the forest beyond. My town was not visible from here. It had been a long, long walk.

Next time, I’d take a horse.

I craned my neck up to the house before me. It was a strange collection of architectural elements—flying buttresses and arched windows and marble columns, all mashed together in a mansion that really should have looked ridiculous, but instead stood in stubborn and intimidating indifference.

I drew in a deep breath and let it out.

Then I knocked, and waited.

And waited.

Nothing.

After a few minutes, I knocked again, louder.

Waited.

Nothing.

I knocked a third time, a fourth. And then, finally, I thought to myself, Well, this is the stupidest thing I’ll ever do, and tried opening the door.

The door, to my luck—or misfortune—was unlocked. The hinges squealed like this door had not been opened for a very, very long time. I had to throw myself against the mahogany to get it to budge.

It was silent within. Dusty. The interior of the house was just as strangely inconsistent in style as the exterior, though it took a few minutes for my eyes to adjust enough to see that. It was dark inside, the only light the moonlight spilling from behind me. The silver outlined the silhouettes of countless objects—sculptures and paintings and artifacts and so much more I couldn’t even begin to take in. Gods, it was mesmerizing.

“Hello?” I called out.

But there was no sound. No movement, save for the faint rustling of moth-bitten gauze curtains.

Maybe he was dead. No one had seen him for a few decades. I’d be disappointed if I came all this way just to discover a rotting corpse. Did his kind rot? Or did they just—

“It appears,” a deep voice said, “a little mouse has made its way into my home.”

CHAPTER THREE

There’s nothing to be afraid of, I told myself, but that did nothing to stop the hairs from rising on the back of my neck.

I turned.

And though I was expecting it, the sight of him standing on the stairwell, enveloped in shadow, still made me jump—the way one jumps when a snake moves in the underbrush beneath your feet.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust to the deeper darkness of the stairwell. He stood at the top of the stairs, peering down at me with the vague curiosity of a hawk. He had long, dark brown hair, slightly wavy, and a neat beard. He wore a plain white shirt and black trousers, unremarkable if a little outdated. He was large, but not monstrously so. I saw no horns nor wings, no matter how hard I squinted into the dark.

I was almost a little disappointed by how… normal he looked.

Yet, the way he moved betrayed his inhumanity—or rather, the way he didn’t. He was still the way stone was still, no minuscule shift to his muscles or rise or fall of his shoulders, no blink or waver of his gaze as it drank me in. You don’t realize how much you notice those things in a person until they aren’t there, and suddenly every instinct inside of you is screaming, This is wrong!

He approached down the stairs, the moonlight illuminating bright amber eyes and a slow smile—a smile that revealed two sharp fangs.

My chills were short-lived, drowning beneath a wave of curiosity.

Fangs. Actual fangs, just like the stories said. I wondered how that worked? Did his saliva contain an anticoagulant or—

“Would you like to tell me what you’re doing in my house?”

He had an accent, a sharp lilt stabbing into the t’s and d’s, rising the long a’s and o’s with a melodic twang.

Interesting. I’d never heard an Obitraen accent before. Then again, most people in the human lands never met anyone from Obitraes, because vampires didn’t often leave their homeland and were usually better off avoided if they did.

“I was looking for you,” I said.

“So you come into my home uninvited?”

“It would have been easier if you had come to the door.”

He paused at the bottom of the stairs. Again, that vampire stillness, the only movement a single slow blink.

“Do you understand where you are?” he asked.

That was a stupid question.

Maybe he was used to being cowered at. I did not cower. Why should I? I’d already met death three times now. So far, the fourth was a bit of a disappointment.

“I brought a gift for you,” I said.

His brows lowered slightly. “A gift,” he repeated.

“A gift.”

He cocked his head, a slow curl brushing his lips. “Is the gift you?”

Another chill up my spine, and this time, I shifted a little to ease it—which I hoped he didn’t see.

“No,” I said.

“Not this time,” he corrected, which I had no idea how to respond to.

“The gift is very special. Unique. You’re obviously a man who appreciates unique things.” I gestured to the walls and the many artifacts that lined them. “In exchange, I ask you for a favor.”

“That isn’t a gift,” he pointed out. “That’s payment, and I offer no services for sale.”

“Semantics,” I said. “Hear my offer. That’s all I’m asking.”

He frowned at me, silent. I wondered if someone better at reading faces would be able to tell what he was thinking, but as it was, I certainly couldn’t.

After too long, I cleared my throat uncomfortably.

“Is there somewhere we can sit?” I asked.

“Sit?”

“Yes, sit. You must have lots of chairs in here. You must do nothing but sit, being in this mansion all by yourself all day and night.”

“Do I look like I do nothing but sit?”

He took another step closer, and I looked him up and down without really intending to.

No, he looked like he did a lot of moving. Probably sometimes lifting heavy things.

I sighed, aggravated. “Fine. We can talk here in the doorway if you want.”

He seemed like he was considering it, then acquiesced. “Come.”

He brought me to a sitting room, which was even more cluttered than the entryway. This one, thankfully, was lit, albeit dimly, with lantern sconces that held peculiar blue flames. Paintings and shields and swords and scrolls plastered the walls. Overflowing bookcases were shoved into every corner—even in front of the windows—and the center of the room was full of mismatched fine furniture. Statues loomed over us—a jade cat staring us down from one side of the room, and a fierce, very naked woman rendered in black marble eyeing us warily from the other. The curtains were cerulean silk, and matching sweeps of fabric hung across the opposite wall, pulled back to reveal another expanse of paintings.

It was a mess, and it was the most breathtakingly beautiful place I had ever seen.

In two seconds, I identified art from four different countries in separate far reaches of the world. The sheer amount of knowledge in this room—I couldn’t even imagine.

My eyes must’ve gone a little wide, because he made a low noise that almost resembled a chuckle.

“You dislike my decorating?”

Dislike?

I considered telling him, This is the most incredible place I’ve ever been, but thought maybe now was not yet the time to start stroking his ego.

“What House are you?” I asked, instead.

Another blink. “Excuse me?” he asked, like he thought he misheard me.

“Which House? From Obitraes.” I gestured to the wall. “This all seems too brightly colored to hail from the House of Shadow. And you seem far too sane to be from the House of Blood. So does that mean you’re from the House of Night?”

His brows lowered again, now pressed so low over his amber eyes that they looked like two little jewels peering from pits of shadow.

I didn’t even need to question whether that was confusion. Good. Maybe he was surprised that any human cared to know about the three vampire kingdoms of Obitraes. But I liked making it my business to know things. It was the only thing I was any good at, and besides, when you don’t have much time in this world, you want to fill it with as much knowledge as possible.

He said, “Are you really not concerned that I’m going to eat you?”

A little, a voice whispered in the back of my head.

“No,” I said. “If you were going to do that, you would have done it by now.”

“Maybe there were other things I wanted to do first,” he said in a tone that implied this often got much more of a reaction.

I sighed wearily.

“Can we talk?” I said. “We don’t have much time.”

He seemed a little disappointed, but then gestured to the sitting room. I took a seat in a dusty red velvet chair, perching lightly upon it with my back rod-straight, while he settled into the opposite leather couch in a lazy lounge.

“Are you familiar with Adcova?” I asked.

“Familiar enough.”

“An illness is plaguing the city.”

His mouth quirked. “I had heard that one of your fickle gods had taken a bit of offense to that place. Shame.”

As if Nyaxia, the vampires’ exiled goddess, was any kinder of a god than ours. Yes, the twelve gods of the White Pantheon could be cold and fickle, but Nyaxia—the heretic goddess who had split from the Pantheon two thousand years ago to create her civilization of vampires—was just as ruthlessly cruel.

“The illness is getting worse,” I said. “It is starting to expand to nearby districts. The death toll is in the thousands and will only rise.”

I blinked and saw dust—rancid dust, swept from sickhouse floors and streets and bedrooms. Swept five, six times a day from the church floors, funeral after funeral.

I saw dust that I swept off of Mina’s bedroom floor, a little thicker each day. The dust we both pretended did not exist.

I cleared my throat. “All of Adcova’s and Baszia’s top scientists and doctors are working on finding a cure.”

And priests, and magicians, and sorcerers, of course. But I’d given up on thinking that they might save us. It was their god that damned us, after all.

“I think that you, Lord—” I stuttered, realizing for the first time that I had never actually asked for his name.

“Vale,” he said smoothly.

“Lord Vale.” I clasped my hands before me. “I think that you might have the key to a solution.”

He smirked at me. “Are you one of the country’s ‘top scientists and doctors?’”

My jaw tightened. I had always been bad at reading people, but even I could recognize that he was mocking me. “Yes. I am.”

Again, that wrinkle between his brows.

“What?” I snapped. “Do you want me to be more demure about it? Are you, about your accomplishments?”

Vale didn’t look like he was especially demure about anything.

“What is your name?” he said. “In case I need to verify your credentials.”

“Lilith.”

“Lilith…?”

“Just Lilith. You gave me one name, so that’s what I’ll give you, too.”

He shrugged a little, as if he couldn’t argue with that.

“So, Lilith. How do you intend to save the world?”

There it was again—that cloying coating of saccharine mockery, so thick that not even I could miss it.

I said, “I need your blood.”

A long silence.

And then he laughed.

The sound was low and restrained, and yet, so thick with unmistakable danger. I wondered how many people had been given that laugh as their final goodbye to this world.

“You came here to ask for my blood,” he said.

Alright, fine. I could see the irony.

“Yes,” I said. “I won’t need too much. Just a little.”

He stared at me incredulously.

“It won’t hurt,” I said. “I promise.”

“I wouldn’t think it would.” He straightened, crossing one leg over the other.

“I would only need four vials of blood each time. Maybe a little more, if I need extra for additional tests. I would need to come once per month.”

He said, without hesitation, “No.”

I cursed silently to myself.

“Why not?”

“Because about two centuries ago, I decided that I would never again do anything I didn’t want to do. And I don’t want to. So no, mouse. That is your answer.”

I honestly didn’t know how to respond to this. He’d seemed to be having such a fantastic time toying with me that it hadn’t occurred to me that he’d flat out refuse—at least, not so unceremoniously.

His face was a mask now. No wrinkled brow, no smirks. He spoke like he’d just turned down an invitation to dinner from someone he disliked. Pure indifference.

My fingers curled, and I pressed my hands against my skirts to hide the whitening of my knuckles.

Of course none of it mattered to him. What else could I expect from a creature like him—a creature that did not understand life, death, or suffering—but indifference?

I forced myself to do what Mina would do. She would smile sweetly and charm. I was never good at being charming and didn’t see much point in it most of the time, but it was worth a try. So I smiled, though it felt more like a baring of teeth.

“You didn’t let me complete my offer, Lord Vale. In exchange for your blood, I’ll give you a gift each visit.”

I reached into my bag and withdrew the rose that I had so carefully packed. I had to stare at it for a moment before I handed it to Vale. Did I imagine that it seemed even more beautiful in here, as if it was meant to exist in this room?

He stared at it, face stone.

“A flower. Very pretty.”

He did not even try to hide how unimpressed he was.

“I promise you,” I said, “its beauty is by far the least interesting thing about it.”

“Oh? And why is that?”

“You won’t know unless you accept my deal.”

His eyes narrowed at me.

“How many?” he asked.

“Visits?”

“Roses.”

“I’ll visit you six times, and I’ll bring you a rose each time.”

This time, I was expecting another unceremonious refusal. But instead, Vale examined the rose, twirling it slightly between his fingertips. He had a very cold, hard stare. It looked a bit familiar, and I couldn’t place why until I realized that it was the stare of a scientist, someone used to analyzing things and taking them apart.

A little spark of relief came with this realization. Because that, at least, was something I understood. Maybe Vale and I were worlds apart in every way—human and vampire, lord and peasant, near-immortal and pitifully ephemeral—but if we had that, it was already more than I had in common with most of the people I’d grown up with.

“Fine,” he said, at last. “I accept your deal. Did you bring your equipment? Let’s get this over with.”

Of course I had brought my equipment. I had my needles and vials ready. Vale pulled up his shirt sleeve and extended his arm to me, and I drew his blood.

Up close, he smelled like jasmine—both old and young at once, foreign and familiar. His skin was smooth and tan. When I touched his wrist to adjust the position of his arm, I jumped at the lack of warmth, but it also wasn’t as cold as I’d imagined it would be. People spoke of vampires like they were walking corpses, but I’d seen many, many corpses, and Vale didn’t look like any of them.

Still, I wasn’t quite sure what I was expecting when I pierced the smooth skin of his inner arm with my needle. I had to push much harder than I did with a human, and when the needle went through, it did so with a faint pop and abrupt force. The blood that flowed into my vial appeared to be the same consistency as human blood, but much, much darker—nearly black.

I watched it, fascinated. Then, by the second vial, my eyes had drifted up to the rest of the room, taking in the tapestries on the walls, the books on the shelves. Gods, some of those tomes looked to be many centuries old, carelessly shoved into dusty corners.

How old was Vale, I wondered? Legend said he had been here, beyond the outskirts of Adcova, for nearly two hundred years. How many decades—centuries—of life had he lived before then?

How much had he experienced?

“Are you enjoying looking?”

Vale’s voice startled me. My eyes flicked back to him. He was now looking at me as he had looked at that rose—pulling me apart, petal by petal.

Are you? I wanted to say.

Instead I said, “What will become of all of this when you die?”

“I’m immortal.”

I scoffed. “You’re not immortal. You’re just very long-lived. That’s an important distinction.”

“By the time it matters, I’m sure I won’t care.”

It already looked a bit like Vale didn’t care, judging by the condition of his living space, but I didn’t say that, either.

A knot of jealousy formed in my stomach. He spoke with such blasé carelessness about all of this. About his life. The gluttony of it revolted me. He’d hoard all of this knowledge here, and he’d think nothing of it. Selfish.

“I imagine it must become the only valuable thing, after all that time,” I said. The last vial was almost full. I watched the blood bubble up in the glass, ready to pinch off the needle. “Knowledge.”

“Knowledge is cheap and dull,” Vale said, too casually, and I almost gasped at him in horror.

“I can’t imagine that ever being true. There’s so much to learn about the world.”

He laughed a little, condescendingly, the way one laughs at a stumbling kitten. I corked the last vial and withdrew the needle from his arm. I found, with some surprise, that his skin had already healed around the needle tip. I had to rip it from his vein, which he didn’t react to.

“After so long, you realize that knowing things doesn’t especially matter very much. Knowledge with no context is meaningless. That’s not the real treasure.”

“Oh?” I tucked away my tools and stood. “What is, then?”

Vale stood, too. He was quite tall, and he looked down at me with a wolfish kind of delight. He smiled, revealing those deadly fangs. The moonlight from the window glinted in his amber eyes.

I felt, all at once, like an idiot for thinking before that he didn’t look monstrous. Because in this moment, with that smirk on his lips, I glimpsed the man of the legends. The monster of the whispers.

“Curiosity,” he said.