Rose: Briar's Thorn (2 page)

I tried to suppress the snakelike hiss of my voice that I hated so much, and said to those around my vines, “Now if I were any of you, I wouldn't touch my lovelies.  They are loaded with a neurotoxin I brewed especially for Special Agent Pike here.”  I laughed a laugh that sounded psychotic even to my own ears and tried to settle my mind.

Pike prompted me in a wavering voice, “Just do it you monster.  How did you get out?”

I tilted my head.  What did he mean, how did I get out?  I just left of course. Then I got it and smiled at the daft lad. “Oh.  You thought you held me captive?  I came to you to kill me, to end this cursed existence.  You couldn't do it so I let myself be subjected to your poking and prodding and torture at that base, since it was somewhere I couldn't hurt anyone.  But the Gathering is upon us, the Scales have called and the balance must be struck.”

I giggled and caused a single thorn to extended and stab Pike, who was screaming like a little girl by that time.  I pulled my vines back through the gates to me and rolled my eyes at the look of sheer terror on Pike's face.  The fool really thought I had just killed him.  As he held his hand over the puncture, I hissed in my serpentine voice, “Don't be a baby, Pike.  It's just nap time.  I need to discuss the approach of the Alphas with my kin.”

I looked at the law enforcement officers who were staring between Pike and me, and shrugged and grinned. “He'll sleep for a couple days.  I never kill willingly.”

Then I turned to see that the four women, with auras that dripped with power, had moved to the gate.  I looked at the beautiful woman in the red cloak, she was just as I had imagined her, and she held herself with such surety and confidence, power held in check by an iron will.  Power that could finally end me.

I tilted my head at the Red Hood and pleaded, “I have sought you three for so long.  Will you sister, after we stop the Marcus brothers?  Will you grant me death from this torturous existence?”

She reached a hand forward and I recoiled, hissing out, “My touch is poison!  It would kill you.”

The woman seemed nonplussed and smiled with confidence as she shook her head, there was something gentle yet pained in her voice as she said, “No, it won't.  Only a wolf can end the curse of the Red Hood, just to have another rise to take my place.”

She reached through the bars and cupped my cheek with an unnaturally warm hand.  I closed my eyes and basked in the feel of flesh on flesh that had been denied me for so long and reopened my eyes to look at the woman who was very much alive as she comforted me.  The impossibility of actual contact was overwhelming to me.

I looked at her in shock then fell to my knees sobbing uncontrollably as I held her hand to my cheek.  I whispered between sobs, “You can... you can touch me?  Human contact, after so long.”

Another moved closer to the bars, the one that had more raw power than the others, but with a slippery grip on it.  I jerked back as she started to lay a hand on mine but then I smiled through my tears as she didn't fall down dead either.  Her hand had a glassy sheen to it.

  
The third had a warm energy that made me just want to gaze upon it and confess my sins.  She changed her appearance and grew antlers and a feathered cloak in an instant.  She looked like a goddess to me and I knew this was Gretta Snow.  Then that actual goddess of nature reached through the bars to stroke my hair and said in a voice that was all sunlight and warm breeze, “It is alright now child.  Everything is going to be just fine.  We will all face the balance of the Scales together.”

I looked around at the women, my sisters, and nodded through my tears.  We all looked back across the waters to the west.  Something evil was coming, something that had the reek of death and power.  It was the Gathering.  I felt my upper lip twitching up into a sneer as I thought. We're right here Marcus brothers, your move.

But right now... I closed my eyes again and reveled in the contact as the fourth woman laid a crystal hand on my other cheek.  I thought back over the centuries before I had been cursed, to the last time I had physical human contact.

It is one of the few things I can barely remember about being... human.  It was so very long ago.  The touch of another.  Life in Romania back then was so much simpler than the hustle and bustle of today's overcrowded world.

I was a happy girl back then, being raised in a small village by my loving parents. They were the tapestry weavers for the rich barons in nearby Citadel of Bucuresti.  The word held nothing but adventure and wonder for me back then.  The mountains we lived in were majestic, beautiful, and imparted a sense of unlimited possibilities.

When I became of age, Safin, the son of the local shepherds came courting.  He was two years my senior, a broad-shouldered man with a muscular physique and a chiseled jaw that was framed by his curly black locks.  I was the envy of all the girls of the village.

Safin was such a kind and gentle soul.  We would often sneak off into the forest and sit by a small pond to talk about all the future held for us.  We would have our own small herd of sheep in a neighboring village and have a little cottage to call our own that we would make a home of with the children we would have.

The thing I remember the most was the warmth of his touch.  He would often cup my cheeks so he could look into my eyes, his own so dark they were almost black, with joy and mischief twinkling around in them.  He would hold me in his warm embrace as we would watch the sun set between the peaks of the mountains before walking the trails back to my family's home in the moonlight.

I longed for the day we would be married, then I could lay in his bed and he could make a woman of me.

I had unfortunately caught the eye of a man, Alister Marcus, when we made a tapestry delivery to his grand mansion in Bucuresti.  His family was powerful, they basically ran the entire realm behind the scenes, like puppet masters.  He craved power and wanted anything of value, and claimed it as his just dues.

He had four brothers who were cut from the same cloth except the timid one, Cristian, who believed a man had to work for his due.  He was the youngest of the brothers Marcus, and I think the only good man of the lot.

Once Alister had laid eyes upon me, the lech had determined that I was to be his.  He attempted to court me, even purchase me from my parents who refused.  I informed him time and again when he would corner me in local markets, or when I was out gathering materials for my parents.  He would shower me with lavish gifts.

I informed him again and again that I was spoken for, that Safin and I were to be married that fall, on the equinox.  This did not sit well with Alister, who challenged Safin to a duel for my hand.  He did not expect when he made the challenge, that it would give Safin the choice of weapons, and Safin chose fisticuffs.

Safin beat Alister soundly but chose mercy over landing the killing blow.  Alister retreated with his tail between his legs.  Then the evil man used his family's influence to ban all of Safin's family's wares from the marketplaces in Bucuresti striking from the shadows like a scheming snake.

Then came that moonless night, when everything changed.  After Safin kissed me goodnight at the door, after a walk in the woods, I stood in the doorway and smiled and waved until the night swallowed him.  I did not know that that kiss was to be the last human contact I would ever have.

Before I went in, I heard a clanking noise by the outhouse, just past the briar patch.  I went out to make sure our little chicken coop was secure for the night.  We had a pesky stoat that had been raiding our chicken coop from time to time.  The little, short-tailed, weasel-like rodents were nocturnal.

I came up short when I saw Alister leaning against the little wooden outhouse.  He had been idly tapping a dagger on the wrought iron hinges of its door to make the clanking.  He had a smug grin on his face and said as I started to turn away, “This is your last chance, Rose.  Come be my bride and I will shower you with riches, and share my power.  I will be the talk of Romania with such a beauty on my arm.  Refuse me and I will make you regret it for all of time.”

I was backing up blindly as he started walking purposefully toward me, sliding his dagger into the jeweled sheath on his hip, holding a hand out to me like he expected me to take it.

The smug grin disappeared and he exhaled in frustration. “Fine, but if I cannot have you, then nobody can.”  He looked behind him and said, “Alina.”

My blood ran cold at the name as an old crone stepped out of the shadows with a malicious grin on her weathered old face.  She was a gypsy witch who roamed the mountains here, rumored to be almost one hundred years old.  She practiced magics so dark that just to speak of them was to put a curse upon your own kin.

I had heard that the Marcus brothers have started consorting with magic users, and worse, in their quest for power.  Now I knew it to be true.

I tripped when my foot hit a stone beside the briar patch as I was backing toward the house. I tumbled backward into the razor sharp thorns of the vines and brambles.  But my fear of Alina cut my cry of pain short in my throat.

The woman looked at my predicament, her eyes lingered on the thorny vines and then she turned the dead pools of black to me with a smile that would chill even those with the stoutest constitution.  She started chanting as Alister said to her, “Make her suffer for all of time, never knowing the touch of another.  Make her poison to all she holds dear.  If I cannot have her, then make damn sure that nobody else can.”  Then he turned and strolled off as my screaming began.

I could feel the darkness, the sickness and wrongness of the witches magic seeping into my very heart.  The pain was blinding.  Her chanting rose over my screams, then she stopped and smiled at me.

I started to raise my head up out of the thorns, I had survived?  Then without warning nor preamble, the vines and brambles of the patch blackened and tore through my body, into the blackness she had poured into my heart.  The vines and thorns tearing through my flesh in its rush to disappear into that blackness.

I don't know how long I screamed.  I was peripherally aware of the cackling old crone fading back into the woods and sounds coming from my cottage.  My parent's voices.  Then I passed out as the last of the briar patch disappeared inside of me.

When the morning sun on my face woke me.  I lurched out of the nightmare I was having.  Just to find I was laying on the ground outside of my home.  I felt sick, and I could feel the darkness inside of me, letting me know it was not a dream.  I could feel all the black magics in the world, even in distant lands, and a sick part of me craved those magics, wanted to devour them and use them for my own.

I shook the dark thoughts from me and sat up, and the screaming began again.  My parents lifeless bodies were crumpled across me.  Their tongues swollen and their eyes and ears bleeding.  I skittered backward.  I screamed more when I realized I hadn't used my arms or legs.  Vines had tore out of my back, the pain was like last night, and the black thorny vines windmilled me back away from my parent's corpses.  I hung there with my feet just off the ground, supported by the vines like they were giant black spider legs.

I tried to get away from them, but that just caused them to take a step back with me.  I stopped my screaming and attempted to figure out what was happening.  Had I gone mad?  Was I hallucinating?  As I turned my hands up to look at my palms, I noted that some of the vines did too.  Mother of nature and Earth, I was a monster.  The black vines seemed to do my bidding.

I wished them away with all my sick and decayed heart and they pulled back within my body, thorns tearing at my flesh as they retreated.  I looked back, my clothing was not torn, and I pulled up my blouse and my back was undamaged where the vines had exploded out of.

Then I paused.  I was so pale, sickly looking, maybe even slightly green.  I looked at my hands, they were that sickly pale color too.  My nails were so dark they looked black though green highlights shone in the sun.  Was I dying?

I scrambled over to my parents and just cradled my mother's head in my lap as I cried.  The sun was high in the sky and I hadn't moved.  Then I heard a voice that could make everything all better.  Wake me up from this nightmare.  Safin called out to me, “Rose!”

I heard his footsteps thudding as he ran to my side.  I looked up at him and sobbed out, “I don't know what is happening to me, Safin.”  My voice sounded wrong, almost serpentine.

He looked at my parents, horror and compassion on his face.  Then he shushed me gently as he pulled mother from my lap and laid her gently beside father.  Then he turned to me.  I will always remember the look of love and concern as he gave me a soft smile and laid his hand on my cheek.

I will also always remember the look on his face as he died from the poison that I had become.  I could actually see the life drain from him as his eyes and ears started bleeding and he fell forward onto the ground.  Then there was screaming.  Always the screaming... a voice I should know... it was mine.

I had killed the three people I loved most in this world.  The screaming won't ever stop.

I don't know how many different ways I tried to end myself that day.  The vines and brambles would always prevent me from coming to harm.  I quickly learned that, while they seemed to obey my every whim, they also made sure I would live to suffer as Alister had wished.  I realized that they were both my protectors and my jailers, to ensure I suffered for all of time.

Any living thing I touched suffered the same fate as those I loved, almost instant death.  I had experimented with our chickens and a field mouse that was unfortunate enough to come close to one of my vines.  I tried squeezing some of the toxin out of a vine and swallowing it, but I was immune to my own poisons.

I dug three graves in mere minutes, my vines and brambles churning in corkscrewing windmills, chewing up the ground.  I left my family, and the man I loved in the unmarked graves then donned my mother's heavy black riding cloak and disappeared into the forest.  Away from people, sticking to the shadows like a monster like me should.