Rose jerked her eyes open in time to see Graham’s roll back in his head, his hand locked on her arm and his body shaking. Her skin was alive, was afire, and she felt hard breaths rolling into her lungs. Graham sagged to his knees and she followed him down, didn’t want to let go, fear and fright mingling to work on her. There was a cold clutch of terror conjoined with this strange pleasure. It was almost akin to that she felt sometimes when she was alone, by herself, at night, and she reached down—
“Graham!” she cried, catching him as he started to slump. She lowered him to the ground, bearing his weight easily. She’d manifested, all right. Yesterday she couldn’t have lifted him, couldn’t have held him up like that.
But today…today she felt like she could have carried him for miles if she needed to.
And, she realized as he shook in her arms, she might just need to.
She touched his cheeks, placing both palms on them, and that feeling of tingling pleasure, that slow burn of fire across her skin in a way that she—well, she actually rather enjoyed it—had never quite felt before, ran through her like someone was ringing a pleasant bell that resonated through every fiber of her body. Rose shuddered too, her hands locked on Graham’s cheeks, holding him against the storm that was surging through him—
“ROSE!” Her granddad’s voice crackled like thunder out of the clouded sky, and she looked back to see him hurrying toward her, her mam in tow, and Tamhas and Hamilton following behind, along with Miriam Shell and a few others.
“Get your hands off him!” her mam screamed, and the command jolted through Rose so hard that she complied immediately, taking her hands off Graham’s cheeks and skittering away from him, leaving him to stop shuddering all by his lonesome, as the others came thundering up.
“Oh, my,” Miriam Shell said from a few feet away. She’d drawn up short, and observed the scene from a little distance like a detached spectator. She looked at Rose and seemed to gulp. “Oh, my.”
“You’ve no need to gawp like an idiot, Miriam,” Rose’s mam said, staring at the widow with undisguised fury. “Save for the fact you are an idiot, in which case you still have no need to gawp.”
“She nearly killed the boy,” Miriam said in reply, though a bit hollowly.
Rose’s granddad was on his knees next to Graham, as were Tamhas and Martial. “He’s not dead,” Granddad said. He looked up at Rose, and there was a spark of reassurance there, almost buried beneath something else—worry, she thought.
But worry of a kind she didn’t remember seeing from him before.
“Miriam,” Hamilton said softly, hovering over Graham and looking down at him, “be a dear and go roust Caitir, will you? I think we’re going to need her Persephone abilities for this. Ease the boy’s spirit a bit.” He turned to favor Rose with a weather eye, and she could see discomfort there, as well.
“What…what happened to him?” Rose asked, still sitting in the dirt where she’d moved away from Graham.
No one spoke for a long moment, and the only sound—other than Graham’s ragged breathing—was Miriam’s hard footfalls as she ran back to the village. They lessened in time, receding into the distance.
“You happened to him,” Rose’s mam finally said, and there was so much quiet judgment in her words. Even more in her eyes when she turned to look at Rose, hints of betrayal speckled in with the worry.
“Now, now,” her granddad started, “you dinnae—”
“I do,” her mam said, a whisper filled with fury. “I was afraid of this. That you’d take after…him.” She said the last word replete with such disgust that Rose wanted to scamper back farther to escape any possible venom that might have spewed from her mam’s mouth.
“You always knew that was a possibility,” her granddad said with his usual air of quiet patience.
“I never thought she would, though,” her mam said, and there was that streak of betrayal crawling through her words like snakes writhing in hay.
“No harm was done,” her granddad said. “Nothing done here that can’t be undone.”
“Your granddaughter is a succubus,” Tamhas said in a whisper so low that Rose barely heard it. Had the adults around her been talking like this all along? She knew in her heart they had, she’d seen it happen for years, heard the bare hiss, but never realized that they were having full conversations so low that she and Graham had never heard them. “I don’t think that can be undone.”
“Tamhas,” Hamilton said warningly, and he was looking straight at her. They all were.
Rose felt like she’d been cracked hard over the head with a thick bough.
A succubus?
A damned soul eater?
Her?
Her skin tingled with cold, crawling over the warm feeling that had favored her moments earlier, when she’d been touching Graham. The world had seemed so pleasant then, so pleasurable—
Now it seemed like winter was going to set in any second, and a blizzard would bury her right here.
Her mam was staring at her with fury, and Rose stared right back. When she found her words, Rose said, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Her mam said nothing. Just looked away.
She looked at her granddad. “Why didn’t ye tell me?”
He seemed to take a breath in, though just barely, movement so subtle he was almost a statue. “Your mam asked me not to.”
“And when you have ye ever listened to her before when she’s asked that?” Rose was on her feet now, steadier than she thought she could have been. Her skin was hot again, and she wanted to touch someone else.
They all seemed to recoil from her, and that made Rose hold back. She looked at Tamhas. “You didn’t say anything. Just now.” She stared at him, and he looked away. “You knew? You must have; you ran and got me mam and granddad right off when you realized I could hear you talking low, so…you must have known.” She looked from Tamhas to Hamilton. “Didn’t you?” The quiet accusation felt harsher to her than if she’d yelled.
Hamilton nodded, his face contorted with a strange regret. “Of course we knew. But…we all hoped you wouldn’t end up as…well…you know…”
“As a bloody soul eater,” her mam said, harsh anger bleeding out into the quiet air.
A thick drop peppered Rose’s cheek, followed by another that landed on her shoulder.
The quickening pace of the rain seemed to reawaken the others. “We should get him inside,” Tamhas said. “There’s nothing to be done just waiting here. Moving him won’t hurt him.”
“Aye,” her granddad said, and positioned himself at Graham’s legs. “Let’s be about it.”
The clouds had given way now, crashed on each other, no Scottish sunshine left to see. It was all grey gloom above as her granddad lifted Graham by the legs, Hamilton got him under the arms, and they started back toward the village, Tamhas supporting him with an arm under the lower back. They didn’t struggle at all under his weight.
They hurried, picking up the pace as the shower increased, fat drops raining down around them. They were out of sight in thirty seconds, disappearing up over the rise back to the village and leaving Rose alone with her mam.
That didn’t last long, though. Her mam wouldn’t look at her, and soon enough, she turned to leave as well, giving Rose the sight of her back.
Rose’s eyes burned, but she stayed where she stood. “Mam!” she called out, when she could bear the quiet of her mam under the fury of the coming storm no longer.
Her mam stopped, but only for a second. “You’re such a disappointment,” she said, and that was it.
And soon enough, she, too, disappeared over the hill.
Quietly, six strangers watched it all happen. Among them stood a man with sandy blond hair, and the stir of familiar feeling came through him at the sight of the exchange, a peculiar similarity that verged on deja vu.
*
“This all seems…familiar,” Zack David said, running a hand through his hair, ruffling it. His hair wasn’t actually here, but then, neither was he; the events they’d just watched play out must have happened years ago. They were most certainly not of the now, though he couldn’t put his finger on an exact year, at least. The village looked almost timeless in its way, and by that token seemed frozen in time. He stared at the red-haired succubus in the storm, rain pouring down around her. She stood there alone, the girl who’d just lost everything she’d ever had, and…
He almost felt sorry for her.