Page 98 of Roses & Ruin

“It’s not so bad,” I whisper, my vision beginning to tunnel, every breath filled with splinters. I feel Delia’s body shiver violently against me.

“Rose,” she whispers, but it’s so faint, so soft, I wonder if it’s just a memory. I feel a gentle whoosh tousle my bloody hair. The weight of Delia’s body disappears, and I’m suddenly surrounded by a swirling cloud of sparkling dust. The gale-force winds have died, but a gentle breeze lifts the brilliant cloud up and up toward the shattered windows.

When the last glittery grain of Delia’s body is gone, I collapse to the ground.

Hayden catches me in his arms, his eyes streaming. The howling winds must have dried all the holy water from his body. His shackles are broken.

“Turn me,” I gasp, writhing in pain. “I don’t have much longer.”

“Rose,” Hayden sobs, brushing back my hair, pressing kisses to my forehead. “If it doesn’t work, if you die—”

“I’ll die anyway. With Delia dead, I’m not coming back. Not anymore.” Hayden’s face is fading to black. Everything’s fading to black. “It’s not true what she said,” I wheeze, just in case this really is it. “She didn’t make me love you. I made me love you. Now change…” But he’s taking too long. I can’t even finish my sentence. My arm falls uselessly to my side.

Distantly, I feel Hayden’s fangs sink into my neck, feel him drain me within an inch of my already dwindling life.

“Drink,” I hear in a gorgeous voice. Something warm and delicious is pressed against my lips, and so I open my mouth and I do. I drink.

Hardly anyone survives it, says the echo of a memory from a past life.

“Wake up, Rose. You better wake up,” says that gorgeous voice again.

It’s the very last thing I hear before finally sinking into nothingness.

Chapter 33

This is what it feels like to die.

It’s the only thing I remember from my two hundred years of reincarnation. This interminable, cold black. The taffy-like stretch of time. How an instant feels like a century, how the years fold like a blanket, different points touching each other.

Oh, then there’s this.

The pain.

Each cell dying slowly. The terrifying scrambling that happens when there’s a slow ratchet up of suffering, when you’re sure you can’t weather it getting worse and then it crescendoes in a burst of agony.

I can’t escape it. Right now, I’m writhing, fighting, fleeing, but I know from experience there’s no saving me from this.

Isn’t that messed up? That this is the only knowledge I carried with me from my past lives? That in the end, now that I’ve breathed my last, there was no sweet memory with Hayden I could take with me? That it was only blood and death?

But now something else is breaking through. Not death. Him. Memories I’ve never had before, never been allowed to keep, rise up all at once.

The secret handshake we came up with together in the early nineties. The double clap, the snap, the wiggly fingers at the end.

I remember how I teased him for accidentally ripping the armrest off his chair during the “devil face flash” moment when we watched The Exorcist.

During our first life together, he’d had to ask me three times to marry him. The first time, he was so nervous, he fumbled and dropped the ring into the ocean. The second time, he hadn’t bothered to ask my father because “he was just a human.” Boy, had he regretted that one. The third time, he set up a picnic with my favorite foods. Had Winston deliver the invitation. When I turned back from the sunset to find him on his knee, I thought, I never knew vampires could sweat. I tucked my smile into my hand. Let him sweat a minute longer.

Sometimes, apex predators need to be taken down a peg. Especially apex predators like Hayden Caldwell.

I can picture the wedding, that beautiful disaster. And the wedding night. The wedding night!

I remember how in the early 1900s he hated the song “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and I found it so annoying that he couldn’t tolerate a simple song that I’d whistle it constantly, just to get under his skin.

I remember the tearful fight in the rain when I begged him not to fight in the First World War, and he told me he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t fight to protect me. Our lingering goodbye kiss on the train platform, the last time I saw him in that life.

And I remember all the boring in-between moments. The quiet mortar that joins bricks, the load-bearing pillars of love. Hayden bringing me a glass of water when I was coughing in the next room. Hemming pants on one end of the sofa while Hayden read the newspaper on the other. A whole day spent in companionable silence together doing errands, Hayden a patient sentinel at my shoulder as I appraised the bruises on apples, Hayden handing me clothespins as we hung the wash to dry outside, the gentle clink of plates as we washed and dried after dinner.

This is what I hope to take with me to wherever I’m going, whatever comes after. The memory of Hayden’s face, soft and content, as he dries a metal fork with a dishrag. After all, he’s a vampire. He could conquer the world, move mountains, dive to the greatest depths of our unexplored ocean.