27. Rose
Rose
T hat voice.
My name.
I feel as frozen as the people in the market around me and for a moment I feel like I might be in suspended animation as well.
But I’m able to move, to slowly turn around.
And find myself face-to-face with the man who was once like a father to me.
Bellamy.
He stops a few feet away and before I can even make a move to lunge at him, he holds out his palm and pins me in place with an invisible forefield.
“How have you been, my dear?” he goes on, studying me. “I must admit, when I heard you were dead, I was certain I would never see you again.”
“Funny how the world works,” I tell him, the rage flaring up inside me.
He gives me a lopsided grin. My god, he really is immortal, isn’t he?
He looks exactly the same as the last day I saw him, maybe even a little younger, like he’s in his late fifties now.
The only real change I can see is in his eyes.
Once upon a time they were wise, calm, and occasionally kind, despite all the awful shit he did to me.
They were also a brilliant blue. Now though, now they are black as sin and harboring a malevolence that wasn’t there before.
Obviously he was no saint, he was a murdering, lying bastard.
But now he’s brimming with something slick and evil. It’s practically oozing out of him.
“You seem confused,” he ruminates. “Wonder if I’ve discovered the fountain of youth?”
“I know you haven’t,” I deride him. “I know how you got to be this way. You stole my baby brother from my parents.”
His brow furrows. “Your parents?”
Oh, right. He has no idea. Which is a good thing, because it means the lengths that my mom and dad went to worked. They kept me and Dylan safe.
“Amethyst and Wolf,” I tell him, raising my chin. “Looks like you didn’t know about me.”
He looks bothered by this and I feel a tiny twinge of pride. I’ll take what I can get.
“How can they be your parents?”
“As I said. The universe works in mysterious ways.”
His eyes narrow and he breathes in deeply through his long nose, as if smelling me. “Then that means you have the same genes as Leif.”
“Same genes as Leif, same powers as Dahlia. I’m the whole package.”
“Power?” he says, sniveling. He reminds me of a pig on two legs, wearing a toupee. “The power you possessed as Dahlia was good for one thing and one thing only, and that was killing vampires. Too bad you haven’t gotten the urge to use that power on yourself.”
I have the need to keep him talking but I’m not really sure why. Solon and Valtu are frozen in time and can’t help me. I guess I figure I’ll come up with some way to get out of this eventually.
I nod at the market around us. “You picked an awfully public place to do this.”
“You’re worried I’m blowing your cover?” His grin widens. “They won’t remember a thing leading up to this or after, and I’ve sent an electromagnetic pulse to disable all electronics and technology. No, Dahlia, this is just between you and me now. The way it’s supposed to be.”
He moves his hand and I cry out in pain, my whole body lifting a few inches off the ground, invisible vices clamped over my arms and legs, pulling me in opposite directions.
“You deserve to rot in the ground,” I grind out, fighting through the pain.
“For what? For showing you your true potential?”
“You brainwashed me.”
“I was a mere schoolteacher,” he comments, his black eyes looking positively inhuman.
“You’re a murderer!”
“So are you.”
“You made me this way!”
“We all have to wear many hats, Dahlia. That happens to be one of mine. Do you consider it murder when people deserve it? If they’ve killed others? Do you consider it murder when you do it?”
“You killed my parents!” I scream. “I loved them, and you took them from me. You killed them and blamed it all on vampires, but all along it was you.”
“There has to be sacrifices for the greater good. That’s how the world works.”
“But you did it to my world! Then you inserted yourself in my life pretending to be someone who fucking cared. Someone who looked after me. You used me and manipulated me when I only needed someone to love me!”
I hate how pathetic I sound, Dahlia’s insecurities coming through.
“I did care,” he says, and I let out an acidic laugh.
He ignores that and continues, “I cared for you like I would my own daughter. Your own well-being was of the upmost importance to me, as was showing you your true potential. You mattered, Dahlia, whether you want to believe it or not.”
“Stop calling me that. It’s Rose .”
“If you’re so hell-bent on being called Rose, then why do you care what happened to Dahlia’s parents? You’ve got new parents now. Amethyst and Wolf are quite the pair.”
“New parents you’ve also managed to fuck around with,” I cry out.
“You tried to take my mother, you kidnapped my brother! And just because they’re my parents now as Rose, doesn’t mean my parents as Dahlia didn’t count.
They did count! I loved them and they loved me and we were happy.
And you came and you ruined it all. You destroyed my family! ”
My words screech across the silent market, my heart growing tighter and tighter as the anger and injustice floods through my body, clouding my thoughts.
“As I said, it’s all about sacrifices,” he says simply with a splay of his palms.
“Sacrifices don’t count if they aren’t your own!”
His gaze sharpens on me and I get the same feeling from his eyes that I got from the ghosts and demons in Valtu’s place.
“Why are you really here, Dahlia?” He blinks slowly.
“Sorry. I mean Rose . Hmm? It can’t be those parents of yours that are just faint memories of a bygone life.
And it can’t really be Leif. You never met him before.
Why would you care about someone you’ve never met, that is obviously in no distress.
You do realize that what you’re trying to do is ruin his life?
Leif has only known me as his father, Atlas as his brother, Celina as his sister.
He doesn’t know the sacrifices he made, and he’s better off for it.
He’s a strong, smart young vampire, the only one I can stand to tolerate.
You want to take that away from him? He won’t let you. ”
“No,” I tell him. “He will know the truth. He will see. We will make him remember what you’ve done to him.”
“We merely borrowed from him to enhance ourselves. We’re his family. Without the testing and his contributions, we wouldn’t have been able to raise him. It’s lonely being a vampire, isn’t it? We couldn’t very well die and leave him. We had to ensure that we would live forever as well.”
What a crock of shit.
“You’re just telling yourself whatever you need to hear,” I snarl at him. “But I know the truth. You’re fucking evil.”
He tuts. “Oh come now, Rose. Evil is such a contentious word, don’t you think? So…close-minded. I choose to think you mean decisive. It’s much more apt.”
“If you don’t like evil, I have other words. Cowardly, cruel, despicable,” I spit them out at him. “Most of all pathetic . You’re a desperate old white man clinging to his youth, no different than your average sack of shit in a mid-life crisis.”
His lip curls into a toothsome snarl and he jerks his hands, making my body feel like it’s being torn apart.
I scream. I scream and let the pain and the anger churn through me like waves, creating chaos in my veins. I look up at the ceiling and I pray, wish, ask for the lightning to strike him.
With a deafening buzz, the electric energy inside me bunches up and releases right out of the top of my head, shooting up through the market’s arched ceiling and then blasting back down through one of the windows.
Shattered glass rains down on us as the lightning strikes Bellamy dead-on and everything turns white for a moment, my eyes reeling from the light. There’s a singed smell and smoke and I’m expecting his power to release me at any moment.
But it doesn’t.
I’m still stuck, being pulled in different directions.
And then I hear the laugh.
Low, rich, evil.
And then the smoke clears and Bellamy is standing there, not a hair harmed on his head.
“Foolish girl,” Bellamy says, his old mouth curving into a malevolent grin.
Then he flies through the air until he’s knocking me to the ground.
He presses his hands at my chest and my throat and green electricity crackles as it stabs at my skin, burning me from the inside out.
It’s his magic and it’s draining my life force, draining my own magic, until I’m turning into just a husk of what I used to be.
Are my organs going to go up in flames before the rest of me does?
The pain is blistering and I can’t even think anymore.
This can’t be it.
I’m not done.
All of Dahlia’s knowledge is in you , Lenore had said to me.
She was right. I am still Dahlia and there was one thing that Dahlia knew how to do best. I’m losing consciousness, succumbing to the power of his spell while I feel the heat starting inside me, but I have just enough strength to try one last thing.
Bellamy is immortal. Lightning can’t hurt him, nor can any of my powers.
But he is only immortal because of the blood of a vampire, and that should make him immortal in the same way that we are.
Meaning there’s a fatal flaw or two.
The lightning didn’t seem to set him on fire, and I’m not sure I have enough strength or magic left to try and slice off his head. But I do have one thing.
And he had taught me to use it well.
With my last bit of strength I bring my knees half-way to my chest, just enough to reach into my boot, the handle of the blade seeming to leap into my palm.
I curl my fingers around it and yank it out with a cry of effort, my muscles straining as every movement feels harder and harder, like I’m moving through tar.
Bellamy looks down in time to see me bring the blade up toward him. It’s glowing blue, lighting up his whole face, not from his presence but from mine.