Rose: Briar's Thorn Read Free Page B

me and sat up, and the screaming began again.  My parents lifeless bodies were crumpled across me.  Their tongues swollen and their eyes and ears bleeding.  I skittered backward.  I screamed more when I realized I hadn't used my arms or legs.  Vines had tore out of my back, the pain was like last night, and the black thorny vines windmilled me back away from my parent's corpses.  I hung there with my feet just off the ground, supported by the vines like they were giant black spider legs.
    I tried to get away from them, but that just caused them to take a step back with me.  I stopped my screaming and attempted to figure out what was happening.  Had I gone mad?  Was I hallucinating?  As I turned my hands up to look at my palms, I noted that some of the vines did too.  Mother of nature and Earth, I was a monster.  The black vines seemed to do my bidding.
    I wished them away with all my sick and decayed heart and they pulled back within my body, thorns tearing at my flesh as they retreated.  I looked back, my clothing was not torn, and I pulled up my blouse and my back was undamaged where the vines had exploded out of.
    Then I paused.  I was so pale, sickly looking, maybe even slightly green.  I looked at my hands, they were that sickly pale color too.  My nails were so dark they looked black though green highlights shone in the sun.  Was I dying?
    I scrambled over to my parents and just cradled my mother's head in my lap as I cried.  The sun was high in the sky and I hadn't moved.  Then I heard a voice that could make everything all better.  Wake me up from this nightmare.  Safin called out to me, “Rose!”
    I heard his footsteps thudding as he ran to my side.  I looked up at him and sobbed out, “I don't know what is happening to me, Safin.”  My voice sounded wrong, almost serpentine.
    He looked at my parents, horror and compassion on his face.  Then he shushed me gently as he pulled mother from my lap and laid her gently beside father.  Then he turned to me.  I will always remember the look of love and concern as he gave me a soft smile and laid his hand on my cheek.
    I will also always remember the look on his face as he died from the poison that I had become.  I could actually see the life drain from him as his eyes and ears started bleeding and he fell forward onto the ground.  Then there was screaming.  Always the screaming... a voice I should know... it was mine.
    I had killed the three people I loved most in this world.  The screaming won't ever stop.
    I don't know how many different ways I tried to end myself that day.  The vines and brambles would always prevent me from coming to harm.  I quickly learned that, while they seemed to obey my every whim, they also made sure I would live to suffer as Alister had wished.  I realized that they were both my protectors and my jailers, to ensure I suffered for all of time.
    Any living thing I touched suffered the same fate as those I loved, almost instant death.  I had experimented with our chickens and a field mouse that was unfortunate enough to come close to one of my vines.  I tried squeezing some of the toxin out of a vine and swallowing it, but I was immune to my own poisons.
    I dug three graves in mere minutes, my vines and brambles churning in corkscrewing windmills, chewing up the ground.  I left my family, and the man I loved in the unmarked graves then donned my mother's heavy black riding cloak and disappeared into the forest.  Away from people, sticking to the shadows like a monster like me should.
    I learned of the lupus curse the following year.  The brothers Marcus had finally succeeded in gaining the power they craved but at a terrible cost.  As the years went by, more and more werewolves prowled the mountains on the full moons.  The first one that I had seen was terrifying in it's single-minded attack on me, it meant to eat me.
    I reacted in fear, forgetting that I was more of a monster than it was.  My vines