Autumn Rose

  I feel privileged to die for the woman who will change it all. My only regret is that I shall not see you into womanhood and watch you enjoy the blessing of raising your own children; a blessing I will find in nurturing you, knowing you are the last of our line and were born to awaken the nine.

  Her fate is set in stone,

  Bound to sit upon the first throne.

  The last of her line and a symbol of the fine,

  She is the last of the fall; a deity among all.

  Her teacher, her love, her lie,

  Alone, the first innocent must die,

  For the girl, born to awaken the nine.

  You are the first Heroine of Contanal’s Prophecy, my child. You are the hope of our people, and you must prevent the war he and so many others saw coming.

  My child, Lady Heroine, find your allies with haste and seek out the fellow Heroines with similar speed. Time is your enemy.

  In life and in death,

  Prof. R. Al-Summers

  Duchess of England

  No.

  No!

  She died as an innocent. She died because of me! This is what the Athenea had kept from me for so long. This was why she died . . .

  The weight of the guilt forced me down onto the floor and I surrendered to it, crumpling into a dead faint.

  Somewhere, deep in my heart, I hoped I would never wake up.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  Autumn

  The Lady Heroine Autumn Rose, Duchess of England.

  I didn’t care about the fate of my kingdom. I cared about him. I hated him, too. I cared that I had caused my grandmother’s death. I hated she had told me what I was. I felt nothing beyond him and her, and that scared me more than anything, anything in the whole entire world, because when I felt nothing . . . that’s when my mind slipped away into darkness . . .

  “Autumn, are you okay?” whispered a voice in my ear. It was Tee, who took my hand and squeezed it. “You look sad. I can take you to the school counselor if you like? She’s really good. She helped me when I was being bullied by Valerie.”

  What a strong child. She looked death in the eye and came out completely intact.

  “I’m fine, thank you though.”

  Are you talking about me, Grandmother?

  As I turned to smile at Tee, something at the far end of the field caught my eye. There was a commotion, a small group gathering around a navy blue mound on the floor. My first instincts told me it was a body, and they were right. It was Valerie Danvers, flat on the ground, with one of her friends from the party madly shaking her shoulders. People were whipping phones out, some recording videos, others more sensibly pressing them to their ears. As I watched, a figure broke from the group and started running back toward the main school. I watched a heartbeat longer, a heartbeat during which Valerie remained motionless.

  I scrambled up and sprinted fast—faster than any human could—across the field.

  Fallon was hot on my heels, but I was first to arrive. The speed at which we ran parted the growing crowd around her, and I skidded to my knees, immediately turning to her friend.

  “What happened?!”

  There were tears pouring from the eyes of the friend, but she wisely took control of her sobs. “We were just talking and she suddenly collapsed. I tried calling her name and shaking her, but I don’t think she’s breathing!”

  Gently tilting her head back, in case she had hurt it or her neck, I checked her airways for anything that might be blocking them. There was nothing. Turning my cheek so it almost rested against her parted lips, I waited for breath on my cheek. And waited. And waited.

  “No, she isn’t,” I answered, as calmly as I possibly could, praying the Athan would be no more than a minute away. Fallon dropped to his knees on the other side of her. I flicked my eyes up briefly. There was nothing but determined concern in them. “Airways are clear, but no breathing. Know CPR? Do it,” I instructed, knowing full well that he, like any other Sage, could perform basic first aid. Magic had a nasty habit of going wrong, and using healing magic when you didn’t know the cause of the emergency could do more harm than good.

  “Has somebody called an ambulance?” I asked, and was relieved when I was answered with a firm “yes.” I beckoned Valerie’s friend closer. She looked up at me with pleading eyes, and for a split second it was like the past eighteen months had never happened. I shook my head to clear it. “Does she have any medical conditions you know of? Breathing difficulties?”

  Her friend heaved in a massive sob. “She smokes sometimes, and she said she had been feeling sick all weekend.”

  I nodded and immediately began searching her body for medical tags, pulling up her sleeves in case she wore a bracelet.

  What I found made my blood turn to ice.

  Fallon hesitated for a couple of beats as he glimpsed what I had uncovered. Along the underside of her wrist and sitting just below the first few translucent layers of her skin were several long, black, inky marks. They followed the path of her veins exactly, like somebody had stabbed a fountain pen into her arm and injected its contents.

  “Blood magic,” I breathed to the prince in Sagean, afraid of panicking the crowd if I used English—a crowd that had grown to include most of the small school and several dumbstruck teachers, who tried to shout for calm as the people at the front of the ring saw Valerie’s arm.

  Fallon sprang back and stopped with the chest compressions, because with every press of his hands into her ribs the poison—that’s what it looked like—seeped a few millimeters higher.

  “Just do rescue breathing,” I quietly instructed, checking her other wrist for signs of the dark magic. It was with a cold heart that I carried out the action, as, freezing, I realized I had forgotten the very first step of first aid: check the area for danger.

  Blood magic didn’t just appear from nowhere. It always had a source.

  “Move! I said move! Are you people deaf?!”

  I let out a sigh of relief as I heard Edmund’s booming shout over the heads of the crowd, and immediately started summarizing all her symptoms for him via our mental connection. He elbowed his way to the front and I swung my head up to meet his eyes, still holding Valerie’s wrist for all to see. I wished I hadn’t looked.

  His mouth parted into an O and his voice produced the same sound. He stopped stalking and slowly approached us, kneeling next to me. In his palm appeared a long, extremely thin, and sickeningly sharp metal instrument, and in the other a small glass Petri dish, which he cast a spell over. Whatever he was doing, it was far beyond me, and I just watched, frowning, feeling her skin go colder and colder.

  He took her wrist from me and, locating the largest blackened vein, pierced her skin with the enlarged needle. As he withdrew it, I saw it was in fact some kind of pipette, because in its tip was a globule of the liquid, which he dropped into the dish. He cast another spell over the dish and its contents, and waited.

  I was getting agitated by his slow diagnosis, because whatever had been done to her, she wasn’t breathing, and Valerie Danvers was no vampire.

  The contents of the dish slowly began to swirl of their own accord and change color. While they did, Edmund examined the puncture wound he had created. It was tiny, but even with my rudimentary medical knowledge I knew she should be bleeding. She wasn’t, and she didn’t until Edmund massaged her wrist and forced a dribble of blood out onto her skin.

  But it didn’t stay there. As soon as Edmund removed the pressure, it was sucked right back into the wound.

  “Charnt,” was Edmund’s muttered understatement. His next word was much, much cruder as he took the dish back up and examined its color.

  “Edmund, hurry,” I prompted.

  “She’s not dead,” he eventually announced. “Not yet. She’s in a sort of coma, dangling on the edge.”
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  “What can we do?”

  Edmund’s lips twitched and he cocked his head slightly, gently placing Valerie’s wrist onto the cold ground. My eyes flicked toward Fallon, who had stopped with the resuscitation. They can’t be serious? But we were guardians! It was our duty to protect the humans, to heal them when things went wrong. How could they blatantly ignore that?

  “This is very dark blood magic. The source caster of this curse has somehow been in contact with her, and used her blood as well as his own. He’s draining the energy from her. Unless we can find the source, there’s nothing we can do.”

  Mr. Sylaeia had descended from the crowd and was comforting Valerie’s hysterical friend, who had heard every word of Edmund’s English. “We can make sure she’s not in pain,” the kind teacher muttered. “There are things we can do . . .”

  “Extermino, it has to be,” I continued in Sagean. Who else would do this? They were making a point. Adding to the blood on my hands . . . it was guilt-tripping, turned murderous. I felt guilty. I felt awful. A thousand of her lethal taunts did not add up to this. It was with an odd, burning feeling in the back of my throat, like bile was bubbling up, that I remembered telling Nathan about Valerie, when he still worked at the café . . .

  “And they’ll be long gone,” Edmund retorted. Fallon had started stroking her hair, brushing it out of her expressionless face. It was pale, and getting paler, her lips turning a noticeably bloody shade of purple.

  I had to do something. I couldn’t just kneel here and watch her die in front of all her friends and peers and enemies. I was a Dark Heroine; there had to be a reason fate had chosen me, something deep in my magic that could help her. I racked my brain for what I knew of blood magic. Unmaintained chests of knowledge shifted to the forefront of my mind, old lessons from St. Sapphire’s and my grandmother that I had made no effort to remember. Sage rarely used blood magic—why should they, when they could conjure incredible power with the wave of a hand or simply replenish their energy with that found in nature? Instead it remained the preserve of the Damned, who gambled the crimson liquid in pursuit of power . . . a power limited only by the strength and daring of the wielder. It was all dark, and all dangerous, and curses like this were outlawed.

  “The law of opposites, and the law of the conservation of energy,” I suddenly blurted, feeling a spark of hope. “Sagean elemental magic is the direct opposite of blood magic on the wheel, right? And energy used or taken by performing magic always has to be replaced from another source, because you can’t create or destroy energy. It has to remain constant.”

  “Autumn, that’s first-grader stuff. It can’t help us,” Edmund murmured, gently trying to tug me away from the body.

  I carried on, ignoring him. “Death curses work by taking away the magical energy in a person, right—the part that keeps us all going, even the humans—and leaving them as just a big heap of biomass. It’s breaking the laws of nature that apply to absolutely everything that doesn’t belong to the genus homo. Why can’t we just stick to the physics and replenish the energy that is lost? And bonus, Sagean magic is particularly potent against blood magic, and will drive the curse out!”

  Edmund looked genuinely worried now, staring at me through wide eyes like I had gone crazy. Maybe I have. Maybe learning about being a Heroine has just tipped me over the edge . . .

  “Second-grade ethics, Autumn! You can’t go around reviving the dead! It’s against the laws of nature!” He tugged me harder this time, but I yanked my arm away.

  “You can’t break something that is already broken. She’s not dead, there’s still time.”

  “And you think a little blast of magic will do the trick? She is this far from passing”—he squeezed his thumb and forefinger together so there was no gap at all—“and it would take an entire life-force to bring her back. And not just any magic, or collection of different people’s magic, but powerful magic. Magic so potent, and so pure, it is strong enough to give her life and counter the curse.” He yanked me up with a hand under my arm, all pity he might have felt for Valerie gone with the rousing call of duty.

  The Athan will become your shadow.

  “Some miracles aren’t meant to be performed. It’s unnatural. Sage that powerful don’t exist!”

  You are a deity.

  Why? Why do I have to be kept pure?

  We need you.

  I need you.

  “Don’t they?”

  Fallon realized what I was going to do too late; he made a dive for me, but I had already done the deed. I had poured every ounce of my energy into Valerie Danvers. It didn’t take any effort, no more than it took to twitch a finger, and within a second her eyes had flown open and she gasped down a mouthful of air.

  Fallon made contact with me and we scrambled backward, pushing the circle outward as the humans allowed us room to tussle. The prince didn’t stop manhandling me until I was on my back but raised on my elbows, staring up at him. His features were hard, creased up into grooves with shock and concern, but they softened as he looked down at me. Behind us, Edmund was torn between me and Valerie, unsure of which to attend to. I allowed him a small smile, to reassure him.

  “I know what I am,” I whispered. And what I shall not be for much longer. “My grandmother left me a letter.”

  “Y-you shouldn’t have done that.” He crawled a little closer, tentatively, like I was wild and untamed. Slowly he reached out and brushed a strand of hair off my forehead. “You could have died if you used all your energy.”

  In the background, Valerie spluttered and coughed, shrieking as she spotted her inky arm, which was gradually returning to normal. With the help of her friend, she was raised into the same position I was in and silenced.

  “I did use all my energy, Fallon,” I murmured, meeting his eyes again. They were milky. After I drew in a long breath that didn’t feel like it tickled, let alone quenched my lungs, I raised one of my hands. My hand was fine. The grass below it wasn’t. A small patch had turned black below my palm; when the gentle breeze made contact, the few remaining black stalks turned to ash and blew away with the wind. Involuntarily, my body was drawing the energy from the ground beneath it to try and stay alive. It was the only thing keeping it alive.

  Suddenly, my elbows buckled and my head struck the hard ground, sending stars dancing across my eyes. I blinked them back and stared up at the sky, feeling strangely elated. The weight on my shoulders had drifted away, both weights, and I felt free. Free to bask in the feel of Fallon’s cradling arms around me; free to enjoy the tingling warmth lingering in the miniscule gap between our skins . . .

  “Fallon, it won’t work,” I rasped. “You heard what Edmund said, nothing can save me now.”

  “You’re not as near to death as Valerie was. And you’re not cursed.”

  Holding me, he transferred his own magic to me, letting it seep through my skin. His limbs were gently trembling, he was sparing too much, and I wasn’t going to drag him into my darkness.

  “I want to die, Fallon. I don’t want to be a Heroine,” I whispered, and even that felt like there were needles being thrust into my throat. And there lay the crux of what I had done. It probably looked so selfless, risking my life for Valerie’s, but it wasn’t. It was the most selfish act I had ever committed, and I was a rotten child at times; I was escaping my pain, and my fate, and leaving my kingdom and its people to suffer. And yet the boy—almost man—above me still looked down on me like I was the dying sun itself.

  “I hate you,” I croaked. “For lying about why you were here. For never telling me. I hate you.”

  Even as I said it, my heart sighed, liar.

  “I’m sorry,” he breathed. “I’m so sorry. Please don’t hate me. I wanted to tell you your grandmother was an innocent. I wanted to tell you it was chri’dom who did it. I did, but I knew it would kill you. It is killing you!”

  His gaze left mine and flicked up as the sun was blocked out by a hulking figure. My vision was blurring but I could te
ll it was Edmund by his voice.

  “No, you’re not comatose yet. Don’t you dare pass beyond, little duchess, or I’m coming right after you to yell at you for being so stupid!”

  His words were fierce, but the voice behind them was cracking. I soon felt his magic flowing into me, too. I floated on it, warm and comfortable, lighter and happier than I had been in years. There was nothing to worry about. I wouldn’t have to go on grappling in the darkness without my grandmother. No future-altering fate would rest on my shoulders. No court, no politics . . . no guilt over feeling this way for Fallon . . .

  Fallon . . .

  It was dark, but I didn’t remember closing my eyes. More hands were resting on my exposed skin and more magic was entering my body, but it wasn’t bringing me back.

  “Autumn, please open your eyes. We’re going to save you. Just hold on.”

  I was being rocked gently, and my head wasn’t on the ground anymore. By the way my new rest dipped in the middle, I thought it might be someone’s knees. They were really quite comfortable.

  “C’mon little one, suicide isn’t an option.”

  Do they think I’m slipping away? Maybe I am.

  “Autumn, it’s Valerie. I’m so sorry for everything I did and said. Please hold on.”

  A little late for apologies now.

  I realized how supremely quiet it was. Other than the voices close to my ear, I couldn’t hear anything. Not the breeze through the trees, or the shouting of the crowd, or the siren on the ambulance that had been approaching when I saved Valerie. There wasn’t much to feel, either: the hands on my skin didn’t feel warm anymore, and the ground felt soft, like I really was floating. Cut loose and floating, and for once, not drowning.

  One thing I could feel were lips and breathing on my ears.

  “I love you, Autumn Rose Al-Summers, I always have. That’s why I came here. That’s why I kept everything I did secret. Not because of orders, or fate. Because I wanted to protect you. And so I promise to look after you always, in life and in death. If you live, I will never leave your side. And if you die, then we will face whatever is beyond fate together. You will never be alone again.”