Autumn Rose: A Dark Heroine Novel (31 page)

There was a warm tint in his eyes that I hadn’t seen before, and without ever tearing his gaze away from my lowered body, he took a long drink from the glass in his hand, which contained what looked like brandy.

Abruptly, he spun and headed for a sideboard to my right. I heard him set the glass down and risked watching him. His hands gripped the furniture’s edge and his head was bowed in submission to the rushing waterfall beyond the glass.

“I didn’t invite your friends for the sake of their social standing.” His tone was irritated. I stayed dumb. The knee flush to the floor was beginning to numb. He glanced back at me after several seconds of silence. I could hear him raking a breath in.

“Lower your knee.”

I didn’t move.

“Lower your knee, Autumn!”

I did as I was told. Kneeling tall, fighting for balance as my legs quaked, I felt like a fool. I didn’t feel like I was bowing before my prince.

“Fallon?” I whispered to the chorus of the crackling fire. “You’re scaring me.”

One by one, his fingers loosened their grip on the wood and he swallowed, hard, rising and turning back to me. In a breath, he was in front of me, his hand cupping the back of my head, his fingers intertwining in my hair, and my forehead resting against his thigh, almost level with his crotch. My eyes flicked right. My throat tightened.

“You can’t answer me, can you?” he asked. His voice was chillingly calm.

“I—”

Nothing came.

His hand clenched in my hair. He took a few deep breaths and then spoke. “Come sit with me.”

He helped me up with a hand in mine, while my other tugged my hem as far down as it would go.
Oh, Lisbeth, why this dress?

He sat down and nestled into the corner of the sofa in front of the fire, and I sank into its folds, knees clamped together. We settled at right angles to one another. He watched me, one leg crossed over the other, hands on the back of the sofa, free foot hanging; casual, like the earlier tension in his arms had flowed through his hand into me as I had knelt before him.

I was rigid. The fire was the only place I could look.

“I tried,” he said. “I tried to be selfless. I know that you need to heal before you can offer me what I want, and I’ll help you. But I’m still a man, and seeing you tonight . . . seeing you so beautiful, so confident . . . I just had to know. I had to know if there’s any hope.”

I didn’t look at him.
How can I? He’s right.
But the tone of quiet acceptance . . . it broke me. I found his gaze. His jaw tightened and he leaned forward, taking the decanter in his hands.

“Christ, you’re not even legal,” he breathed, dry, humorless, hand and voice shaking as he poured out two glasses of red wine.

I stopped fiddling with my hands. “I will be in a week,” I said slowly, eyes darting right.

“Don’t suggest something I know you can’t give me. Heart first.”

He handed me a glass, touching his own against mine and taking a sip. As he did, he leaned back and the light from the fire chased the shadows from his face. For the first time, I realized just what was scaring me, and why his eyes were so warm: each iris was as red as the crimson liquid in his glass.

Why does that scare me?
We had just been talking about it, about those kinds of feelings, I could see the sweat running down his neck, and I wasn’t an innocent: I knew why he had crossed one leg over the other.

“Do you know the effect you have on men? Do you have any idea how people see you, revere you?”

I shook my head.

A hand returned to the back of the sofa and he took my gaze for his own. “You are beautiful; you know this. But you are too innocent to know the power you wield. I doubt I’m the first, and I will definitely not be the last who wants your heart and more. And I wish I was strong enough to be content with just your companionship, but I need more than an untouchable glass ornament on my arm. My family; your family; the court . . . they need more than that.”

I shifted and set my glass down, staring at its delicacy. “I’m not an ornament, am I?”

He also set his glass down, empty now. His eyes had faded to their usual blue. “You are. You are a deity. You should be kept safe in a cabinet, pure and protected from the pain.”

It was in a sudden surge of courage that my hand settled on his top leg and pulled it from across the other until both his feet rested flat against the tiled floor. And it was with a rush of something new, something injected into my chest and back, abdomen and neck, something that felt like magic but wasn’t, that I rose onto my knees on the sofa and straddled him, hands coming to a rest on his shoulders.

“Autumn . . . what . . . what are you doing?” He had to take a breath between every other word, and his eyes had dropped right back down to red.

“Why? Why do I have to be kept pure?”

His hands settled gingerly on my hips, where they had rested so many times when he had hugged me, or just now, when we had danced. It was different this time.

“You don’t. But you’re too important to hurt; to lose your mind. It’s why I’m afraid of breaking you. We need you.”

I slid forward a few inches. “Because I’m a seer?” I insisted.

He nodded and swallowed so hard I could hear the gulp. “Autumn,” he choked. “Autumn, you need to move back.”

He might as well have jammed a needle right into my heart. I shuffled back, and my arms fell away from him; instead I wrapped them around my stomach and stared at the arm of the sofa.

“Hey,” he whispered, untucking a few strands of hair from behind my ears. “It’s a compliment. I just like you far too much to ignore the fact you’re sitting in my lap.”

“Sorry,” I murmured, embarrassed and ashamed at what I had done, because I hadn’t achieved . . . well, what? What had I been trying to achieve?
I don’t want to be with him like
that,
so why did I do it?
Flirting with feelings so strong that I was rejecting them with all my might . . . that was dangerous. That was stupid. That was exactly the gossip the press wanted. Goose bumps rose on my arms at the thought.

“You’re cold,” he muttered, and, with a wave of his middle finger, a patchwork throw tossed on an armchair floated over and settled around my shoulders. He pulled it right around me, reached down with his hands, and, one by one, took my heels off.

When he was satisfied that I was comfortable, almost sitting cross-legged in his lap by now, he allowed himself to lean forward a little, until our foreheads were nearly touching. “I can’t pretend I see you just as a friend, or as a noblewoman, not anymore. I just want to hear that you need me, need me as much as I need you, even if you don’t want a relationship.”

My hands wrapped around the back of his neck and chest, quivering, and closed the distance between us so our foreheads touched. “I need you. When you first came, it got worse, you damaged all my walls, but—”

“I’m so sorry—”

“But now you make it better, I’m so much happier now and yet I still hurt, I hurt too much and I can’t let go, I just can’t. Please understand, please.”

I couldn’t hold tears back any longer, and he pulled my head down onto his shoulder.

“I’ll wait,” he said. “And we’ll get you better. I’ll wait.”

I didn’t really hear him, as a sudden, sharp stab of pain darted from my right temple to the left, like an arrow had been shot right through my head.

I let out a sharp breath and rose from his shoulder a little. He went to hush me but another, even more painful stab penetrated my forehead, and with a muffled shriek, I recognized the pain.

“My head hurts. My head hurts so much. I think it’s a vision.” My nails dug into his arms through his jacket, and he pulled me tight. “It is, it’s a vision!” The sobs heightened and I tensed up, gripping him as the pain intensified and moved from my temples down to my eyes, blackness infringing on the outer rim of my vision. “Please stay, please stay, don’t go!”

A hand stroked my hair. “I’m right here,” he cooed. “I’m not moving.”

“The servants . . . the servants . . . they’ll gossip . . .”

“It doesn’t matter. None of it matters.”

“It hurts! It hurts so much!”

“I know, Duchess.”

“Don’t let go. Don’t let go of me.”

“I won’t. I’ve got you.”

“I need you. I need you, Fallon Athenea.”

Darkness.

So it’s true. Athenea has been right all along.

Violet Lee thrashed in her bedclothes that night. The sweat-stained circles on her shirt, and her feet, twisted up in sheets with just her toes poking out, dripped.

“
Have you heard the Prophecy of the Heroines?”

My view of her slipped left and right across my vision as hazy outlines of cloaked men in a clearing jostled for attention.

“
It’s a load of destiny crap made up by Athenea. Not worth your time or mine.”

I could feel her curiosity burning as a constant pull back to her room, but I was definitely in another’s mind, and yet even as I tried to work out just whose mind, the scene spun and I could see a figure among the treetops, looking down on a group of gathered slayers and rogues.

It was an uneasy scene, where every creature wanted to rip out the other’s throat. They spat venom back and forth and the trees suffered as the rogue punished the bark with his nails, and the branches of the trees silently bore the weight of the mysterious onlooker.

Is she dreaming this?
I thought as what was presumably her bedroom flickered back into the center of my gaze. And if she was, did that make this scene real or not?

“
They’ve found the Sagean girl of the first verse. The Prophecy is true.”

Whose heart paused for a moment there? Mine or hers?

“
They have found the first Dark Heroine. But, after all, you don’t believe it, so don’t trouble yourself. We’ll let Lee know before Ad Infinitum is over.”

There it was. The Prophecy the vamperic council thought Lee might use as an excuse. Finding the first girl . . . that
was
his excuse.

Violet Lee finally came to a rest in her bed, but even in my unconscious state I could feel my weight bearing down on the prince, and feel the heaviness of my limbs slumped against his.

I was going to be alive to see the Prophecy of the Heroines finally, after so many millennia, be fulfilled . . . and, hopefully, the danger and fear we were in ended, and the war so many prophets had seen coming stopped.

Autumn

F
allon! This is
the
Prophecy! The one we have all longed for! This is what could put it all right! Why are you not happy?”
I demanded.

His mind was full of its usual blue skies, but every single box had been locked down, and I was greeted with the equivalent of a mental shrug.

“ ‘They’? That must mean your family, surely? They are going to find the first Heroine! Have you not heard anything?”

He was out of my line of sight as he fussed over his horse: a young, lean black mare he affectionately called Black Beauty. As she bucked her head and tossed her mane, I heard a scoff.

“I would never be trusted with that kind of knowledge, I’m too young, you know that, Autumn.”

“I hope it wasn’t just a dream of Violet Lee’s. I hope it was real.”

“You’ll find out soon enough. My aunt went straight to Father.”

I finished saddling the horse I always borrowed—a dappled gray mare called Infanta—and let her drink as I picked up my riding gloves and weaved through the stalls until I found the prince. Gloves on, I lightly and nervously gripped the stall edge.

“About last night . . .”

He pulled his own gloves on and met my eyes. He sighed.
“I told you. I’ll wait.”

“But is it enough?”

He came forward and placed a gloved hand against my cheek. I closed my eyes, briefly, and let the velvet warm my wind-battered face. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. With that, he took the reins of his horse and led her out of the privacy of the stables, to where our friends were waiting.

Between Jo, Alfie, and Lisbeth, all the humans who didn’t ride or didn’t have the confidence to take Alfie’s crash course in horses had found riders to chaperone them, and tiny, petite Tee was going to ride with me. Once I had settled in my saddle, Fallon hoisted her up, barely needing the strength of his second arm, she was so small. A few soft words in Sagean to reassure Infanta, and I quickly urged her into a trot toward the northern gate to the estate. The Athan, ever-present, ran on and disappeared ahead of us.

My grandmother had always told me to watch the way a man treated his animals. If he was kind to them, he was a good man, by her reckoning. And as I threw my hair over my shoulder to look back and watch the prince, I could see the tension of the stables melt away into the ground, and a small smile spread across his face as he rubbed his mare’s neck. He eased her into a canter and began to catch up with us.

The air buzzed, and the hairs on my arm, even below my thick riding coat, stood on end. We were approaching the perimeter shield. Tee shuddered below me.

“You can feel that?” I murmured in her ear, which was level with my shoulder. She nodded. I frowned. I’d had no idea humans could detect magic like that.

If the weather held up, we had planned to take our guests—my friends, Jo, and a couple of Fallon’s classmates from the sixth form—out riding on the high moor, where the views were stunning and we could escape the anguish my latest vision had brought up. And so it was with the intention of a peaceful afternoon that Fallon led the way out of the estate, through the shield and onto the bridle paths that weaved deep into the valleys between the tors. It was a scrubland; another planet, with a dull palette of gray granite and withered, muted greens and browns. The streams ran in troughs and leaked out between the toadstool-tufts of elephant grass, and the air smelled of rot. I stayed ahead of the others with Fallon, keen to reach the higher, fresher ground.