“You can come along if you like!” I shout as I shakily run down the hall, stopping every so often to re-balance myself on a table or a statue. Sir Charles follows me at a brisk trot, tail wagging like crazy. We pass the entryway, the blood trail all cleaned up. I try not to look at the fancy bag with the dress in it Dane got me, still sitting forlornly on the chair.
The house fae doesn’t come along, no footprints following me in the luscious grass lawn that leads from the house and into the garden, just Sir Charles’s paw prints and my own pair of converse.
Everything’s fresh and green, no sign of a struggle, no blood out here. Wherever Barnabus was attacked, it must’ve been farther out into the garden, at a different angle, and maybe even that’s cleaned up too. I stare out at the magnolia trees in the distance and wonder where Barnabus is right now - it should be easy to spot such a huge, distinct fae walking around, but maybe he’s got camouflage powers or something.
I’m alone in the garden. Well, not alone, but Sir Charles is too busy chasing his own tail to really be considered company. It’s a heart-stopping walk, in a good way, with all the flowers and fountains. A spate of maple trees in the distance have started to unfurl their huge green leaves, and the sunflower patch has grown so big and tall and vibrantly yellow it’s like staring into the actual sun.
I pick my way over to the eight glass domes, resting on a bench every so often to give my legs a break. The huge bruise on my ribs from falling in the tub last night makes it hard to breathe too deep, so I don’t. The tub, Dane wrapping me in a towel and pulling me out of it, the way his deep voice reverberated through my chest, the way he placed me down on the bed like I was made of glass instead of bone and flesh -
I shake my head and my cheeks are warm. Stupid beautiful afternoon sunshine.
Feeding - that’s what I’m here to do, not think about useless shit. I tell Sir Charles to wait outside the domes and approach them. White, black, blue, green - those are the four roses I don’t need to feed. I head over to the butter-yellow rose’s little glass house, and open the door by the delicate gold-plated handle. Inside it’s a lot warmer than outside, and moister. I fan myself with my shirt collar and walk towards the plant in the center of the circle of dirt.
It’s not as tall as the other rose plants, but it grows wide, spreading out over the dirt in all directions. I walk up to the yellow rose and marvel at how perfect it is - no brown spots, no withering, just a flawless sun-yellow rose as big as my head. It’s thorns are stubby and rounded, almost incapable of hurting me at all, but I still take care not to touch them. Who knows - the fae inside might hate his thorns being touched. So I reach up and tenderly stroke the first petal I see. Van Grier said to do the petals, which means the petals might be the torso equivalent of humanoid fae. One petal, two, my fingers shaking as I work, scared one sharp move might rip or tear the beautiful flower.
Doing every petal would be too much, but I don’t know how much or when to stop. It’s not like the rose can tell me it’s full with words.
Except it doesn’t need to.
When I reach the first petal of the inner ring of the rose, it starts to glow. All of the petals seem to unfurl a little wider, a little larger, and pulse with a warm white light.
“Wow,” I whisper. “You look like a bunch of giant, flattened firefly butts.”
The glow instantly stops, and I sputter.
“Wait! I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that - you’re very pretty!”
There’s a beat, and then the glowing starts up again. I laugh - is this fae vain or what? I guess he can hear me - if it is a he at all.
“Okay, well, that’s it for this week.” I pat one of the vines by my feet. “I’ll see you later.”
Just before I turn to leave I hear a slithering and a soft pressure against my ankle. I’m extremely ready to kick it and yell snake, but I look down to see one of the vine’s grown long, a smaller, but just as gorgeous yellow rose budding right before my eyes.
“Oh wow. Neat trick.”
I try to take another step, but the vine instantly grows long around my ankle. Half-tripping, I pull my foot out.
“Is this…for me?”
As if in confirmation the vine grows up, offering the rose insistently. I bend and pick it, the stem giving away easily, and I turn my smile back to the big rose.
“Thanks!”
I tuck the rose in my flannel pocket and start over to the next dome. The orange rose with pink streaks mirrors the most heart-stopping sunset, and its petals feel so soft it’s like stroking velvet. It has these super neat curlicue thorns, and it grows in a perfect diagonal line upwards to the top of the dome. It’s got a much sweeter perfume than any rose I’ve smelled before - like overripe nectarines and strong, sugary lemonade.
“You’re awfully alluring, aren’t you?” I mutter as I stroke the petals. “Just who are you trying so hard to attract? There aren’t any bees or butterflies around, you know.”
Just then, the orange rose starts to glow like the yellow one did, but unlike the yellow one, a bunch of its petals suddenly fly off. Not fall - fly. I start to think I’ve done something wrong but the petals join up in pairs and start to beat like wings - perfectly imitating butterflies. A pink-streaked orange cloud of mock-butterflies floats around the dome glowing brightly, and my breath feels frozen in my throat like the first time I ever went on a roller coaster, or the time I got my first goldfish as a kid or the first time I held my college acceptance letter in my hands - pure uncertainty mixed with delight.
“Holy crap, alright sweetheart,” I whisper, one of the butterflies landing on my hand with a featherlight touch. “You’ve impressed me for sure.”
The petals return to the rose, settling back into their proper places like they never moved to begin with. The glowing fades and I make a bow before I leave.
“I’ll see you next week for another show.”
Sir Charles trots over to me and sniffs my yellow rose, and I pat his head. “You bored yet?”
He barks, except it’s more like a ‘bork’, and he tears off into the distance, completely ignoring my yells for him to be careful. Oh well - it’s hard to be really worried about him when a fully-fed Barnabus is patrolling around out there. I’m pretty sure Barnabus could crush anybody with his right hand Mortar and his left hand Pestle. Which I just made up. Note to self; maybe don’t tell go around naming fae body parts after human tools just because you think you’re clever. Addendum; Dane’s dick is now called the Eggbeater.
I whip my head around, paranoid he’ll be behind me and hear that, but there’s nothing. Just me and the garden and the roses. Which I’m grateful for, considering I don’t know how I’d act if he waltzed up right now. It was easy when he was just an asshole, but now he’s done something mildly nice for me and now it’s harder.
Who am I kidding? He probably just did all that last night as part of his apology he’s struggling with. He probably thinks we’re even now, and he’ll go right back to being an ass to me and everyone else in the conceivable universe.
I sigh and head towards the light purple rose’s dome. This one’s an odd one - it’s not low to the ground like yellow, and it’s not tall like white or orange or red. It grows round, as if it’s mimicking the dome itself - a perfect sphere of vines beneath a perfect sphere of glass. It’s almost uncanny how perfectly roundly it’s grown - and if I didn’t know it was sentient I’d probably think it’d been put under a case while it grew to maintain that dome-like shape.
The second I reach out to touch the petals the vines shrink in on themselves, enclosing the rose inside an impenetrable fortress of short, triangular thorns. It has so many thorns - even more than the white rose does, all of them crowding the surface of the vines until there’s no blank space left.
“This thing might as well be under the protection of the FBI, at this point. Hah,” I chuckle nervously to myself. “Get it? Point?”
The purple rose isn’t as nearly
amused with my joke as I am. It has a faint scent to it, not totally invisible like the yellow roses’, but not as strong as orange. It smells softer, older.
“Hey,” I squat down to the dome’s level. “You okay? You’ve gotta be hungry, right?”
The dome tightens further, so tight I can barely see the purple petals anymore. The idea of putting my hand in that thicket of thorns makes me wanna hurl, but I don’t have much of a choice - if it won’t come out, I have to come to it.
“Okay,” I breathe in and hold it, sliding my hand into the only space big enough to reach the rose. The dome tightens on me, the thorns digging into my wrist like a bracelet of shark teeth, but I grit out; “Take my whole wrist off. That’s fine. But I gotta touch you, or I can’t feed you.”
I push forward, the thorns digging into my skin and I can feel them tearing away ribbons of it, thin lines of warm blood oozing up.
“It’s okay,” My voice is shaky, and I’m trying to comfort myself as much as the high fae. “I’m not going to hurt you. I can’t promise I’ll never hurt you, because sometimes I hurt people on accident -“
The thorns tighten, burning like salt in a paper cut. I grit my teeth hard.
“- b-but I can promise you, pretty thing, that I’ll never do it on purpose.”
More pain, the whole world is just burning teeth in my wrist but suddenly, it all gets faint. The dome relaxes its grip on me, thorn-teeth pulling out as it loosens just enough for me to touch its petals. I smile, relief and adrenaline coursing through me.
“Thanks, I appreciate it. I know trusting people is rough - shit, I still have problems with it too. You’d think at nineteen I’d be over it but nope; surprise! I’m still a Suspicious Sally. An Immature Isabel, if you will.”
It’s slow going as I work my hand through the bush’s tiny openings, and sometimes all I can do is stroke the petals with the very tips of my fingers. But finally, with my whole body aching from contorting myself to fit in the bush, I see the telltale faint glow in the pale purple petals. I stand up, brushing dirt off my front as I throw the rose a grin.
“Cool. I’ll be back next week, okay?”
It’s hard to resent a rose as pretty as this one, or any rose that’s actually a fae. They’ve been bound for three years now; I’d be ready to lash out at anyone too, especially when Van Grier was the one who fed me and he sent someone new in - someone who could be as equally cruel.
My mind flashes back to the night I met Dane and Altair - I did try to stab Dane with a broom handle, didn’t I? He insulted me first and choked me later, but still. I probably shouldn’t have done that to begin with. I should’ve been the bigger person and just walked away.
Too late now, I guess.
I step into the red rose’s dome last. Immediately I notice the difference between it and the others - instead of a bunch of vines growing all over the place, it has one single vine as thick as my whole torso spiraling up to the ceiling. Its thorns are huge and few and far between. There’s no way I can reach the blood-red rose all the way up there.
“Hey!” I call up to it. “If you could come down just a skoosh that’d make this a lot easier!”
The rose doesn’t move an inch. No, wait - it does, just one inch, down towards me, with a hundred more inches left between us.
“Great,” I flash an unenthused smile at it. “Thanks.”
I look around for some kind of ladder, but there’s nothing. The garden’s benches are stone - too heavy to drag in here. There’s not even a bucket of fertilizer I can turn over and stand on. Just as I’m considering calling Sir Charles in and standing on his back, the thorns catch my eyes. They’re really huge, so big I bet I could fit a foot on one of them. And if I was careful, I could probably pull myself up with the other thorns, if I avoided the very tips.
But it’d be a long fall down.
“I’ve gotta feed you,” I roll my sleeves up. “Because I’m getting sixty-thousand dollars and I’ve fed everybody else and if you think you - the last one - is gonna make me roll over, you better start thinking better with that flowery brain of yours.”
The rose is utterly unmoved by my threats, so I set my lip and start to climb. One foot, two foot. Red foot (that’ll be bloody and severed if you slip), blue foot (if you fall and break it). My arms are still weak but not so weak I can’t edge myself higher bit by bit.
“Why couldn’t you just be like orange?” I pant, so high up now I refuse to look down or to the side or anywhere but straight up at my red-petaled goal line. “Show me some cool butterflies instead of trying to make me take the plunge to my death? I’m not a fucking fae, you know - death’s sort of a big deal for me!”
No movement whatsoever, just that brilliant crimson rose swaying slightly with my momentum against the vines and mocking me.
“Fine.” I square my shaking shoulders. “Thanks for the workout. I needed it, anyway.”
I somehow get to the top, clinging with all my breakfast-strength to the vine for dear life. It’s thinner up here, and so are the thorns, but they’re still thick enough to balance on. My slightly bleeding wrist from the purple rose aches, but I reach my hand out and trace over the red petals and for a second I forget how hard I’m sweating and how tired I am - they’re like silk, sleek and ephemeral and the more my eyes drink in the red the more I’m hypnotized by it. It’s such a classic, strong color, the most red I’ve ever seen something be, like God himself painted this one with the pure idea of the word ‘red’, with the red of the very lifeblood of the planet itself.
“There, see?” I wheeze. “N-Not so bad, is it?”
It takes a second. But like a delayed, long-thought-out response the red rose finally lights up, and I’ve never been more relieved to see anything glow in my entire life.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
I flinch at the deep, serrated voice. Dane. Knowing I can’t look down, I hug the vine and clear my throat.
“Hi to you too. How’s the weather down there?”
“Weather? You’re dangling twenty-five feet in the air on nothing but vegetation and you want to play coy with me right now?”
“I-I’m fine!” I insist. “What’s your damage? It’s not like I can’t get myself out of this.”
“Can you?” He snarls. “Can you without falling straight down and snapping your legs in half?”
Suddenly the vine shudders beneath me, and I clutch it and squeeze my eyes shut. Is this how I die, bucked by the red rose like a skittish horse? But when nothing happens I open my eyes again, only to see the long straight vine squat and in a perfectly curlicue, like a pushed-down spring. The ground is a foot away, and I jump off, collapsing to my knees with gratitude for the feeling of solid earth beneath my feet.
“T-Thanks!” I call up to the red rose, anything to put off facing Dane standing right behind me.
“At least Axel had a single shred of sense in him. You, on the other hand,” Dane scoffs, and I feel his arm tugging at mine. “Get up.”
“Stop!” I yank my arm from his. “Stop being an asshole again.”
“You -“ Dane sputters, then rakes a hand through his hair. When he talks again, his voice is tempered. Not any less angry, but a lot less inflamed. “You can’t do things like that.”
“Why not? I had to feed him -“
“If you die, you can’t feed anyone.”
“I wasn’t going to die -“
“You could’ve asked for help,” He cuts me off.
“From who?” I snap.
“Anyone! The house fae, Barnabus, anyone. Anyone would’ve been preferable to you climbing that thing on your own and risking your li-“ He stops. “ - your Brightness.”
“Why do you care?”
“Why do I care? It’s not just yours, you slow little beast; it’s everyone’s.”
“I’m not like some…some drug you can just pass around,” I retort, my whole body flushing with anger. “My Brightness is d
efinitely mine, and I can do whatever I want with it, and if that means I wanna climb up a giant vine to feed a high fae then I’ll do it, and you can’t fucking stop me. You can stop me from knowing stuff about fae but you sure as shit can’t stop me from doing what I want!”
I’m so mad I’m breathing hard, and the smell of him floods me - strong gin, sharp and juniper and that distinct musk I’d catch on people coming in late during class and on my freshman roommate when she forgot to febreeze the room - sex. He probably just got back from whatever lady’s house he spent the night at.
“I would’ve helped,” Dane finally says through gritted teeth. “If you’d asked.”
“But I didn’t. Because you weren’t here. Because the idea of asking for help from you is impossible.”