When Rose Wakes Read Free

from one shadow to another. Her shiver of revulsion is followed by a moment of relief. Disgusting it may be, it is only a cockroach. The intruder remains hidden; Rose still has a chance to make her escape.
    She pushes off from her perch, drops to the floor, and begins to run. Two steps, three, and then a wave of sound washes over the room, echoing off the walls. Skittering, the noise like an avalanche of small stones. They come from every corner and shadow, from beneath table and bed and wardrobe. Cockroaches. She screams and backs up as they flow toward her, spreading across the floor, and she scrambles back to the window and climbs once again to the precarious safety of the stone sill.
    But they do not attack. Instead, the flow ebbs, cockroaches retreating, or so she thinks until she sees them gathering together in the middle of the floor, climbing upon one another with such speed that in seconds she realizes that they are building something… building someone.
    The roaches sculpt themselves into a singular form, the figure of a woman, black and brown, many thousands of bug carapaces gleaming in the candlelight. And the roach woman smiles.
    “Hello, Rose,” she says, that voice, the whisper of the uninvited.
    “What do you want?” Rose shouts.
    “Only to relish your anguish on this, the night before your father dies.”
    “No,” Rose says, shaking her head. “You know nothing. My father’s army will turn your people back—”
    The roach woman laughs. “Your enemies are not my people. My hatred is older than this foolish war.”
    Questions cascade through her mind but Rose pushes them away.
    “Get out!” she cries. “Leave me be!”
    But the woman glides forward on a million skittering feet, drawing closer, reaching for Rose with that smile and with arms that are churning nests of clicking bugs, and Rose screams, feeling the vast nothing yawning behind her, the drop to the courtyard below tugging at her, more inviting than the embrace of the witch.
    “Darling Rose,” the roach woman whispers.
    A raven’s cry startles Rose from behind and she hugs the window frame, presses herself against the stone even as the bird darts past her into the room. It plunges into the roach woman and the body collapses, cockroaches showering to the ground and beginning a skittering exodus, flowing back towardthe shadows from which they came. In their midst the raven drops its beak, snatching one up, crunching and swallowing before snatching up another.
    No cry of warning accompanies the other birds, just the sudden flutter of wings as they stream through the window, knocking Rose onto her hands and knees on the stone floor. Dozens of ravens, dipping their beaks, killing and eating as many cockroaches as their speed will allow. The feast is swift and savage.
    Where the roach woman had stood, one of the ravens goes still, cocks its head, and studies her sidelong with one black, gleaming eye.
    “You must be careful, Rose,” it croaks.
    She throws herself backward, scrabbling away from the birds, and strikes her head on the wall…
    •
    And she wakes.
    Rose opened her eyes, heart thundering with a fear that chased her up out of her dreams. She took a deep breath, drawing comfort from the familiar surroundings of her room in the rehab wing of the hospital. Drab as it might have been, it was the only home she could remember and the ordinariness of it soothed her, even as the claustrophobia she had been developing of late returned. She might be safe here, but she wanted to get outside, to see people other than doctors, nurses, and physical therapists. Her aunts were wonderful, but Rose hadn’t seenanyone her own age since she had woken from her coma, and since she could not remember anything, it was as if she had never met another teenager.
    The television bolted high on the opposite wall showed a woman mixing some recipe in a bowl, the volume on low. Rose was alone in the room, but the TV had been tuned to the Food Network,