When Rose Wakes (2 page)

“Your mind is playing tricks on you,” Aunt Fay said firmly. “Things like this can happen with a head injury and a long period of mental hibernation. Focus. Listen to them. French is our first language, Rose, but you learned English in school and you speak it just as well as you do French. Better. Listen.”

Rose watched Aunt Suzette with the doctors, concentrating on the shapes of the words. She made out “sleep” and “girl,” but nothing else until an entire phrase “different parts of the brain.” And then it felt like a curtain had
been torn away that had blocked out an entire corner of her mind and the language flooded in; she understood everything they were saying.

She wished she had not.

“… possible that there are parts of her memory that Rose will never be able to recover,” the hawk-nosed doctor was saying. “Some skills can be relearned, even after a coma of this duration. If the part of her brain that knew the English language has been damaged, new pathways can open up. It is likely that she can be taught to speak English again, unless all of her language centers are disrupted, which she has just demonstrated is unlikely. Even lost memories may resurface after a time, but she needs to be prepared for the possibility that they won’t.”

Rose tried to sit up, muscles screaming in protest at the simplest movement. Her red hair fell across her face and she managed to reach up and brush it away from her eyes.

“But I might remember?” she asked.

For she could recall nothing of her life before today except for her aunts and their love for her. The hollow feeling inside her mind made her want to scream. Without her aunts there, she would have felt entirely lost.

Aunt Suzette clapped her hands. “There, you see!” she said in accented English. “You were worried when she didn’t understand you. The girl’s been comatose for two years. Of course her brain’s gone a bit soft in that time. It will all come back to her.”

Rose stared at her, eyes widening. “Two years?” she
said, repeating the words in English. “But what happened to me?”

Aunt Fay shot Aunt Suzette a withering glare, then adopted a warm smile meant only for Rose.

“It’s awful, I know,” Aunt Fay said in French. “But you’re awake now. And Aunt Suzette and I are going to do everything we can to help you catch up with all that you’ve missed. There’s going to be some physical therapy…”

Aunt Fay glanced at the hawk-nosed doctor, who nodded encouragingly.

“… but it won’t be long until you’re home safe with us. You can redecorate your bedroom however you like, and when you return to school—”

“Mrs. DuBois,” the hawk-nosed doctor said, “Rose needs her rest.”

Aunt Suzette laughed out loud and cocked a hip at the doctor. “Her rest? You can’t be serious. She’s been sleeping for—”

“Suzette!” Aunt Fay snapped. “The doctor is correct. Rose needs time to recover her strength.”

Aunt Suzette looked miffed, even hurt. Her usually jovial nature gave way to a pout. “I don’t need telling. You are the one in such a rush to send her off to school to deal with bullying teachers and cruel children.”

“Stop that,” Aunt Fay said. “You’ll frighten her. Rose has lost enough of her life to this horrid sleep. She needs to live now. She—”

“Auntie,” Rose said softly, her voice silencing them both. “I’m all right. At least I think I am. I don’t… maybe to both of you I’ve been asleep for two years, but I remember so little that it feels like my whole lifetime. I don’t… I don’t even remember
home.
”

Rose didn’t want to cry, but as weak and exhausted as she was, she could not keep her eyes from filling with tears.

“You’ll be all right,” Aunt Fay said. “I promise you, Rose.”

Rose wiped at her eyes. “But I don’t remember anything.”

“Not true,” Aunt Suzette said, sitting beside her on the bed. She scooped Rose into her pudgy embrace. “You remember us. The rest will come, but for now, you have us. We’ll always look after you. Oh, we missed you so much!”

Aunt Fay sat on the other side of the bed and took her hand. Rose met her steady, reassuring gaze and took a deep breath.

“I’m afraid to go back to sleep,” she confessed in a whisper, hoping the doctors would not hear.

Aunt Fay leaned toward her, her eyes kind, her voice low. “Nothing to be afraid of now, darling girl. The doctors will help get all your parts in working order again, but for now, it’s all right to close your eyes.”

“Yes,” Aunt Suzette agreed, smiling as she kissed the top of Rose’s head. “We’ll be here when you wake up. We’ve waited this long. What’s another few hours when you’ve got your whole life to look forward to again?”

Rose sighed contentedly and settled down, no longer caring that the doctors were there observing them. She felt loved and protected with her aunts around her. A small part of her still feared she would fall asleep and never wake, but she had been drifting in and out all day, and she knew the worst was over. Her life could begin anew.

But as she began to drift off, eyelids drooping, she caught a look that passed between her aunts. She wanted to speak up but she did not have the strength to fight her exhaustion, and she surrendered to sleep wondering what had been in that silent communication between Aunt Fay and Aunt Suzette.

Rose thought it had looked like fear.

F
lames glow in the distance, the cook-fires of the enemy. She sits in the stone frame of the arched window and gazes out at the night, wondering when Father will return. In the courtyard below guards stand watch over the doors, while others march along the battlements. But if the enemy were to defeat her father’s army, this small force of protectors would fall like wheat before the scythe.

The night is dark save for the stars and those distant fires, but she fears the morning far more than the hours before dawn. Her father’s castle, his lands, and his people, are surrounded almost entirely by the Feywood, and those who lived there—the kindly women of the wood and their tiny, winged companions—were too fond of the king and his people to allow the enemy to pass through their lands with malicious hearts. But the wood did not completely encircle the castle and its village, and where the trees did not mark the boundaries there was only the Serpentine River, with her father’s army on this side, and the enemy on the other.

Come morning, there will be war again.

“It’s only what he deserves.”

Rose gasps as she twists around in the open window to look back into her bed chamber. Her balance lost, she begins to slip but catches herself, fingers scraping on stone. Heart pounding, she peers into the candlelit gloom of her room and sees nothing save the windblown billow of night-gray silks draped from the canopy of her bed.

“Who’s there?” she asks.

No reply comes but she can feel now that she is not alone. Her pulse throbs in her temples and she wets her lips with her tongue, almost afraid to speak again. But she forces herself to do so.

“Show yourself.”

“So like her father,” the voice whispers again, and it races up her spine on icy spider legs. “Imperious, issuing commands with no thought as to consequence.”

A hitch in her breath, she steels herself, staring at the door across the chamber from her. The window is no use—any attempt to escape that way, to climb or jump, would end in a fall to her death—but if she can reach the door, she might cry for help and be heard.

“Who are you?” she asks, hoping to discern the source of the voice, the location of her intruder, so she can flee without running directly into the arms of this woman, for surely it is a woman’s voice. An enemy’s voice.

“I am the uninvited,” the voice replies, self-amused.

It comes from everywhere and nowhere, making it impossible
for her to know if she can reach the door without being caught, but she must try. Steadying herself, she shifts slightly in the arched window frame and prepares to bolt.

A skittery sound makes her skin crawl and she freezes, peering into the gloom. Candlelight dances on the walls of her bed chamber and she thinks she’d best cry out, that flight might be impossible but a scream may bring help running before her unseen enemy can do her harm.

The skittering comes again, and this time she sees it, a tiny motion down on the floor—a cockroach, scuttling from one shadow to another. Her shiver of revulsion is followed by a moment of relief. Disgusting it may be, it is only a cockroach. The intruder remains hidden; Rose still has a chance to make her escape.

She pushes off from her perch, drops to the floor, and begins to run. Two steps, three, and then a wave of sound washes over the room, echoing off the walls. Skittering, the noise like an avalanche of small stones. They come from every corner and shadow, from beneath table and bed and wardrobe. Cockroaches. She screams and backs up as they flow toward her, spreading across the floor, and she scrambles back to the window and climbs once again to the precarious safety of the stone sill.

But they do not attack. Instead, the flow ebbs, cockroaches retreating, or so she thinks until she sees them gathering together in the middle of the floor, climbing upon one another with such speed that in seconds she realizes that they are building something… building someone.

The roaches sculpt themselves into a singular form, the figure of a woman, black and brown, many thousands of bug carapaces gleaming in the candlelight. And the roach woman smiles.

“Hello, Rose,” she says, that voice, the whisper of the uninvited.

“What do you want?” Rose shouts.

“Only to relish your anguish on this, the night before your father dies.”

“No,” Rose says, shaking her head. “You know nothing. My father’s army will turn your people back—”

The roach woman laughs. “Your enemies are not my people. My hatred is older than this foolish war.”

Questions cascade through her mind but Rose pushes them away.

“Get out!” she cries. “Leave me be!”

But the woman glides forward on a million skittering feet, drawing closer, reaching for Rose with that smile and with arms that are churning nests of clicking bugs, and Rose screams, feeling the vast nothing yawning behind her, the drop to the courtyard below tugging at her, more inviting than the embrace of the witch.

“Darling Rose,” the roach woman whispers.

A raven’s cry startles Rose from behind and she hugs the window frame, presses herself against the stone even as the bird darts past her into the room. It plunges into the roach woman and the body collapses, cockroaches showering to the ground and beginning a skittering exodus, flowing back toward
the shadows from which they came. In their midst the raven drops its beak, snatching one up, crunching and swallowing before snatching up another.

No cry of warning accompanies the other birds, just the sudden flutter of wings as they stream through the window, knocking Rose onto her hands and knees on the stone floor. Dozens of ravens, dipping their beaks, killing and eating as many cockroaches as their speed will allow. The feast is swift and savage.

Where the roach woman had stood, one of the ravens goes still, cocks its head, and studies her sidelong with one black, gleaming eye.

“You must be careful, Rose,” it croaks.

She throws herself backward, scrabbling away from the birds, and strikes her head on the wall…

•

And she wakes.

Rose opened her eyes, heart thundering with a fear that chased her up out of her dreams. She took a deep breath, drawing comfort from the familiar surroundings of her room in the rehab wing of the hospital. Drab as it might have been, it was the only home she could remember and the ordinariness of it soothed her, even as the claustrophobia she had been developing of late returned. She might be safe here, but she wanted to get outside, to see people other than doctors, nurses, and physical therapists. Her aunts were wonderful, but Rose hadn’t seen
anyone her own age since she had woken from her coma, and since she could not remember anything, it was as if she had never met another teenager.

The television bolted high on the opposite wall showed a woman mixing some recipe in a bowl, the volume on low. Rose was alone in the room, but the TV had been tuned to the Food Network, which—since her awakening—she had learned could only mean Aunt Suzette had been watching over her. The two women were her guardians and took turns sitting with her. While Rose went through painful physical therapy, they would talk to her about the world, educating her about all the things she had forgotten. And after those sessions, one or both aunts would sit with her, sometimes massaging her leg muscles to relieve the tension there, and they would watch television.

Aunt Suzette loved the Food Network, while Aunt Fay preferred the History Channel. But when Rose managed to get some time to herself, or when her guardians fell asleep in their chairs, she used the remote control to skim through channels, watching a little bit of everything, trying to block out the terrible pain in her arms and legs. Physical therapy was agony. All through her coma, her aunts and the nurses had exercised her limbs to prevent the muscles from atrophying and the tendons and ligaments from shortening. The doctors seemed satisfied with the results and confident that she would be able to live an ordinary life—in fact, they were constantly amazed by the speed of her progress—but when the physical therapists
were putting her through her paces, Rose thought of them as her torturers.