Withering Rose (Once Upon A Curse Book 2) (2 page)

But before I could say anything, before I
could apologize for taking any ounce of hope he had left, the
trickling heat exploded in my chest as the magic washed over
me.

My mother's magic.

And the fact that it was now becoming mine
could only mean one thing.

She was dead.

I tried to cry, to scream, to do anything to
express the despair breaking my tiny heart apart. But I was lost in
the burn of the magic as it funneled into me from some invisible
place, pushing and pulling against my body, burying itself deep
inside.

I distantly remember hearing a low voice
shout foreign words. Through eyes that felt not my own, I remember
seeing two blurry figures in blue pointing weapons at us, yelling
at the two royal guards behind us, forcing them to drop their
swords. They ordered my father the king around in a way no one
dared before, shouting, using hand gestures when he didn't
understand. My father listened, standing when they told him to,
holding my limp body in his arms, refusing to let go. He walked and
walked and walked, holding me silently. He only said three words
the entire time the foreign men led us deeper into their unknown
world.

"Don't use it."

And I knew what he meant.

Don't use the magic. Don't show them what we
are. But more than that. Something deeper. Something only the
members of my family knew, a secret we held close to our hearts.
Because that moment, still as death in my father's arms as my
mother's magic raged through me, that was the exact moment I
started to die.

I felt it as the torment of heat and
strength and power finished devouring my seven-year-old body. The
fire ebbed. Delightful coolness sprung to my toes, covering my body
in a blanket of much-needed ice as the magic settled into its new
home. The last place the warmth lingered was down in the center of
my chest.

One moment, I was a happy, healthy
child.

And the next, I was slowly beginning my
descent toward death.

Because my magic came with a price. A curse
my family had kept secret for generations. We had the power to give
nature life, but only at the cost of our own. And as the heat
finally disappeared, I felt the bloom blossom in the very core of
my soul, a rose just like my name—a ticking clock hidden behind a
façade of beauty.

From that moment on, my life would become a
countdown, and all I could do was wait and watch as the petals of
time slowly started to fall.

Ten years have passed since the day that changed
everything. Ten years of pretending to be something I'm not. Meek.
Powerless. Just like everyone else. I've grown so tired of
pretending.

But as I walk through the concrete halls of
the underground base, I keep my head down. I try to remain
invisible. I hug my books close to my chest, keep my eyes on the
floor, and try to be as small as I can be. As unnoticed as I can
be. But there are always eyes that watch me nervously, tinged with
a bright spark of accusation I've done nothing to deserve. In these
halls, being born in the magic world is all it takes to be
considered other, different, strange.

Ten years ago, on the day of the earthquake,
my father and I and our two guards were thrown into a foreign world
we've been unable to escape. Earth. A place with no magic. A place
where magic is considered the most evil thing of all. At first, the
people of this world weren't sure what to do with us. Our clothes
placed us as otherworldly. We didn't speak their language. So they
locked us away, giving us just enough food to get by, speaking to
us each day as though we understood. Eventually, their language
became more familiar to me than my own. And after a year in
captivity in a broken city I could only see through the bars on our
window, when my father could finally explain himself and offer a
truce, they moved us here.

They call it the Midwest Command Center, a
freedom fighter base where the people of Earth fight with all they
can to rid this new world of magic, to make it more like the world
they remember. My father became their biggest source of information
about our old world and the magic that lived there. He gave them
our secrets to keep me safe. He pretended to hate the magic of our
world, he devoted himself to helping them fight it, all so they
would never guess what I was. What I could do. And at first, I
thought it was our salvation. They allowed us to live in a house
together. I could see the sun each day, could feel the wind on my
cheeks. I had more freedom than I'd ever had before, even in the
old world. No maids. Only two guards. No responsibilities except to
be a child.

And then it all changed.

Magic isn't docile. It doesn't do well
waiting in the background.

Every day became more of an internal
struggle to keep my power contained. Every breeze carried the scent
of the flowers I could grow with the twitch of my finger. Every
weed breaking through stone whispered to me to turn it into
something beautiful. The sun on my cheeks was a warm reminder that
its light was not the only thing that could give plants life. I
could give life. I could make things grow.

The magic swelled, pressing painfully
against my chest, my fingertips, my toes, aching to be released,
aching to be used. The power was a foreign presence inside of me
with its own needs and desires, its own demands. And every time I
took a breath, the magic came alive, fighting against my futile
efforts to keep it contained.

My father commanded me to keep it
inside.

But I lost control.

One night while I slept, the magic seeped
out against my will. It had become too big for my little body to
contain any longer. And when I woke in the morning, gasping as I
felt the first petal in my soul fall away, the first reminder that
using my magic cost me some of my own life, I still couldn't help
but smile as the view of flowers filled my vision. A hundred
different kinds, a hundred different shades. My inheritance. My
birthright. The one little piece of my mother I could hold on to,
that no one could take away. I laughed as I danced in the meadow my
bedroom had become. My magic was beautiful. And having been used,
it was satiated and calm, no longer fighting against me. The magic
and I were both at peace for the first time since coming to this
foreign world.

Then my ears caught the distant drum of an
alarm ringing ugly against my wondrous morning. The pound of feet
tearing up the staircase yanked me from my reverie. My father
ripped open the door.

"I didn't mean it, Papa," I whispered.

"We have to get rid of it," he said harshly.
Not angry with me, I knew, but still, the words hurt. "They have
machines, Omorose. Machines that track the magic, that know when
and where it comes from. They sensed the surge of your magic
overnight. They're on their way here right now."

Together we ripped the flowers off the
walls, tugged the roots from the floor, and stuffed the broken
petals in my closet. Tears started to fall. I didn't have the
strength to wipe them away.

When the freedom fighters came, the room was
clean. My father told them it was the beast from the mountains, the
one whose magic these freedom fighters were constantly tracking. He
said the beast had come to kidnap me in the night, that he knew we
were from his world, and he wanted to kill us for fighting against
him.

The general and his men believed my father.
They trusted him.

It saved my life.

And it destroyed it.

That day, my father moved us from our house.
He packed our belongings and brought me to the underground section
of the Midwest Command Center, a place no sunlight and no life
could touch. A concrete box hidden in the dark. And I've been here
ever since. Hiding. Pretending.

I can't remember the last time I truly saw
the sun.

But each day I learn more about my new
universe. The scientists who work here called our world a parallel
one to Earth, similar yet different. And they say that long before
the earthquake, something happened to throw one of our worlds off
course and send it crashing into the other. Ten years ago, our
worlds merged, becoming a patchwork planet. I've seen the map at
the center of the base, blinking lights outlining the land and sea,
outlining a new world that was unnaturally created from two
different ones. In some places, the difference is so stark—a
mountain range that suddenly cuts off to flat plains, a gently
curving beach that abruptly turns into a wide stretch of hilly
lands. Old rivers have dried up. New ones have formed, cutting
through towns that survived the earthquake only to be flooded and
destroyed. The weather is still adjusting to the new world,
unpredictable as the tides and winds change each year.

But there is one thing on the map that
consumes everyone's attention, one feature that silently demands to
be seen. Dozens of misty circles pulse haphazardly across the
globe, obscuring the shorelines and the terrains, spots that are
masked and void. It's the magic. Their machines work on
electricity, and I've come to learn that magic and electricity were
not made to mix. The electric currents cannot penetrate the magic,
so all that is left in these areas is a hazy abyss signaling the
unknown.

And that's why I must continue to hide, why
I must be very careful about when and where I release my power. The
magic cannot be contained forever. Once in a while, it demands to
be let out, to be released. It is an animal caged inside of me,
ripping me apart for freedom. Sometimes, fighting it is too hard.
So I wait for ferocious storms, and when the lights in my room
flicker, I know it's safe. In the dark of the night, I sneak to the
surface where rain and wind whip around me, and I use it. When my
magic forces the electricity in the base to shut off, silencing
their blinking machines and winking out the lights, the people of
Earth think it is no more than the storm. Those few moments are
precious and short, not long enough for anyone to raise questions.
And after the brief second where I no longer have to pretend, I
sneak back down into my prison to continue the pretense.

So it's been for years.

And I can't see the end.

Which is why I walk now with my head down,
clutching my books and ignoring the sideways stares that follow my
every movement. I've traversed these gray, lifeless hallways more
times than I care to count, and I don't need to watch where I'm
going. My feet remember the path to my classroom, just as easily as
my mind does. I don't stop until I reach the open door, pausing for
a moment to scan for an empty seat before rushing to fill it. Only
when I sit do I notice the vase of lilies on my teacher's desk.

I gasp.

Immediately, the magic surges, washing over
me and demanding to be used.

I close my eyes, trying to steady my
breathing.

Even from ten feet away, I sense every
slowly decaying cell of those gorgeous flowers. Cut at the end,
plucked from nature to sit in a glass container and look pretty for
a few days, all the while slowly dying inside. I understand them.
And the magic within me wants to fix them. All it would take is a
single thought, one second of wishing it were so, and roots would
sprout at the base of the stems, sinking to the floor, searching
for dirt. I could give those lilies life.

I could.

But I can't. It would cost me too much.

After a few minutes of steady breathing, I'm
able to pull my thoughts from controlling the magic. And a few more
minutes later, I finally register my name being called.

"Omorose?"

Snickers.

Laughter.

The sound grates against my ears, and I open
my eyes quickly, flicking my gaze around the room. The girls at the
front bite their lips, looking back and forth between one another,
giggling not so quietly.

I wish after so many years I could say I was
used to it, that it didn't hurt.

But it stings. It always has.

"Yes?" I ask, voice quiet. In the old world,
I was a princess, a ruler, a leader. Here, I'm a wallflower, always
shrinking away. It's hard to make friends when I'm always
pretending. It's hard to make friends when I know anyone in this
room would kill me if they found out what I truly was.

"Have you heard anything we've been
discussing or were you just asleep in your seat?" my teacher, Mrs.
Nelson, asks.

I sink lower. "No," I murmur. "I didn't
hear."

More teasing.

More laughter.

"We're discussing everyone's plans for after
graduation," Mrs. Nelson urges, bringing her tone to a gentler
place. "The year is half over, and this week's focus will be on
compiling applications for jobs. The world needs more teachers,
doctors, soldiers, engineers, and physicists, especially out here
at the bases. But in some of the cities, there are different
opportunities, like journalists, broadcasters, politicians."