Six Scorched Roses (Crowns of Nyaxia)

A deal?

My mind grabbed onto those words and didn’t let go.

A deal.

Not a punishment. An exchange.

It seemed like such a small distinction, and yet it reframed everything I knew of what had happened between my father and Vitarus that day. The story I had told myself for fifteen years—that my father had cursed his god, and by terrible chance, that god had decided to curse him right back—was false.

My father had made a choice.

Betrayal skewered me.

“A deal.” The word was scratchy in my throat. “He made a deal with you.”

Vitarus’s eyes glinted with interest, peeking through his boredom like sun through the clouds. “You did not know?”

I said nothing, but I didn’t need to speak for a god to know my answer.

He laughed, the sound rain on the fields. “You came here hating me for my cruelty. But how your heart changes when you realize it was your own father who damned your people.”

He couldn’t have. He wouldn’t have. He…

But my fingers closed around the branches of the rose bushes, thorns coaxing blood to my fingertips.

My strange roses, that grew right here in the spot where Vitarus had stood, all those years ago. I had thought that they grew here because a god had once stood upon this soil.

But…

My father had been so upset by the crops he couldn’t save. The fields he couldn’t fill.

Vitarus saw the realization in me. In this moment, the only creature I hated more than my father was him—for the utter delight on his face.

“All the things he was willing to give up for some fertile soil,” he crooned. “I told him that life requires death. He did not care.”

Vitarus twirled the rose between his fingertips. The vine now wove all the way down his arm, the blossom and leaves so swollen they filled his palm.

“Beautiful, aren’t they? Shame they aren’t edible. Tell me, little girl, was he disappointed by that?”

My eyes burned. My stupid, selfish father. The truth was, he never even lived to see the roses. He was the first to die of the illness, and the first sprouts of these bushes poked from the earth after his death. I remembered vividly staring down at them as I walked home from his funeral, staring down at those little beads of green like they were an equation that didn’t make sense.

Well, they didn’t. They never had.

I crushed the rose in my clenched palm. It left smears of black and red against my skin.

All of it for nothing.

I had fought. I had studied. I had sacrificed whatever life I had left—and I had succeeded, I had succeeded in creating a cure, and it would be for nothing.

Vitarus tilted my chin up, his rose-covered hand sweeping the tear from my cheek, a thorn leaving a salt-stung scratch of red.

“Why are you so surprised?” he murmured—a genuine question. “Do you not know the nature of humans by now?”

He cradled my face like a lover, one hand on each cheek—one touch of death, one of life. I could feel both roiling inside me, surging at his touch—illness and vitality, decay and growth. My reflection stared back at me from his curious eyes, shrouded in the gold glint of his desire.

He wanted to consume me the same way he consumed withering crops. And I wanted to give up and let him.

But then, something moved over his shoulder, something barely visible within the thick cloud cover. A little glint of silver-white.

Wings.

Vale.

My stomach dropped.

Vale couldn’t be here. Vitarus wouldn’t tolerate a vampire in his presence. There was nothing the gods of the White Pantheon hated more than reminders of Nyaxia’s betrayal.

Maybe Vale knew that.

Vitarus’s brow furrowed, noticing my distraction. He started to turn, but in a fit of desperation, I turned his face back to me. His skin was violently hot, and I drew in a sharp breath to resist the urge to pull my hand away.

“I told you I want a deal,” I said. “I want to terminate my father’s bargain.”

I couldn’t offer Vitarus goods or riches. But in an immortal life, one thing becomes more valuable than all else. I heard the answer as Vale had said it to me, months ago:

Curiosity, mouse. Curiosity.

“It will be a game,” I said. “If I can give you back everything that you gave my father, you will take back the plague. You’ll treat our town just as you did before.”

For a moment, I thought I’d miscalculated, and Vitarus’s petty anger would still win. But…

There. There it was. A glint of curiosity in his eyes. Cruel amusement. His knuckles stroked my cheek—decay blossoming over my skin.

“You do not know what you are offering me, child.”

“Do we have a deal?” I said.

In the distance, Vale flew faster. I could make out his shape now, hurtling through the air at impossible speed.

Vitarus could not resist it. He smiled and leaned close to my ear. “Deal,” he whispered, then straightened. The full height of him, now that he stood again, nearly paralyzed me with fear. But he outstretched his hands, waiting, expectant.

My father made a deal out of desperation.

I dug a handful of the earth from the ground, then pressed it into Vitarus’s waiting hands. “Soil,” I said.

Vitarus’s palm remained open, expectant.

My father made a deal because he was surrounded by a withering world—soil that would not give life, crops that would not grow.

I yanked a flower from the rosebushes, placing it atop the dirt in Vitarus’s palms. “Flowers.”

A slow, terrible smile spread over his mouth.

Vale was nearly here. I could see his face, now, desperate—his hand, outstretched, reaching for me even though he was still far away. Within it was a single flower, just a tiny dot of red and black in the distance.

“What else?” Vitarus prodded.

My father made a deal because he was surrounded by a withering world.

Soil that would not produce.

Crops that would not grow.

And a daughter that would die.

My father hated the gods for taking his livelihood. And he loved his family too much to let them go. That day, he had kneeled in the fields and looked back at me like hope destroyed, the same way he’d looked at those dead plants.

It now seemed so, so obvious.

I thought I wouldn’t live to see seventeen, twenty, twenty-five. But here I was, thirty years old with a heart still beating, death matching my pace without overtaking it. Still living, just like the cursed, blessed flowers my father had left behind.

I felt like a fool for not realizing it sooner. That my longer-than-expected life was so much more than luck. When the town withered, and I lived. Why hadn’t it even occurred to me to question it?

I placed my hand in Vitarus’s, laid on top of the flower and the dirt.

Vale hurtled to the ground, a rough, stumbling land, just behind Vitarus.

But I had the god’s attention now.

“And?” Vitarus breathed.

“Me,” I said. “I give you me.”

Vitarus leaned close, his lips so close they brushed mine.

“Humans,” he purred. “For all your faults, maybe you aren’t so boring, after all.”

His kiss was fierce and thorough, his tongue parting my lips, claiming, searching. I couldn’t breathe. The world dissolved. Life and death collided. He breathed into me, and his breath was growth and sun and water and light—and then he drew in a deep inhale, peeling all those things away, and coaxing forth like a fire the illness that had followed me since the day I was born. My strength withered. My lungs shriveled. My skin grew hot with fever and cold with shivers. My heart beat, beat, beat, pulsing only thin, impotent blood.

Fifteen years of illness that my father’s deal had staved off now crashed back into my ailing body, all at once. Fifteen years of weakness rushing through my veins, stealing my unfairly prolonged life with it.

In the distance, I heard a familiar voice call my name.

But that shout of desperation fell far into the background as Vitarus, a lifetime later, broke our kiss.

“You have your deal, little ailing lamb,” he whispered, licking my health from his lips.

And then he was gone, and I fell backwards into the newly barren soil, right back into death’s embrace.