Adele Moore. Emily Paw. Her aunt, Elsie, could, too, but the poor woman lost her wits, what, two decades ago?”
“I heard she has tea parties.” Rose drank her tea.
Grandma nodded. “I’ve seen her do it. She brings teddy bears to the picnic table and pours them invisible tea out of a plastic tea set. Sometimes the bears even drink it. There was some real power there, but it’s all gone to waste now.”
Rose opened her mouth to tell her about a man who liked to jump on moving trucks and stopped. It was just an isolated incident. Nothing would come of it. Why worry her?
“Whoever has done it, I’ll find out. And I’m sure Jeremiah and Adele will want to give them a piece of their mind.” Grandma rose. “Well, I’d better be going. I’ll make the trip to Adele’s tomorrow and see what she knows. The hooligans finished their homework. Also, Georgie has a note from his teacher, something about stone books.”
“Stone books?” Rose frowned.
“Yes. I think he needs one made of marble.”
“Marble composition book,” Rose guessed.
“Yes, that’s the one.”
Grandma headed for the door and stopped, framed in the doorway. “Maybe you should give this boy a chance. Life doesn’t have to end after the Graduation Fair, you know. It goes on.”
She left. Rose sighed and poured herself more tea.
Give the boy a chance.
Rose mulled it over. Maybe she should have given William a chance. Most people in her position might have. She hadn’t dated in years.
And that was exactly the problem. She hadn’t dated in years, and her judgment wasn’t sound. A part of her wanted to be pretty and carefree. In her rare moments of desperation, she wanted a man to look at her like she meant the world to him, and failing that, she would settle for someone who thought she was beautiful and told her so. William would probably fit that bill. Part of her pointed out that something was better than nothing. But if she ended up with the wrong something, she’d regret it for the rest of her life. Once bitten, twice shy. Living in your dreams meant bitter disappointment when you woke up. She’d learned that lesson well.
The incident with William unsettled her. He’d unwittingly pulled all of her old wants and hopes out of the recesses of herself where she’d carefully stuffed them, and dragged the entire mess into bright light. Now she had to deal with it, and she resented him for it. Come to think of it, any handsome man who asked her out would’ve set off the same chain reaction. She didn’t want to go out with William just because he was in the right place at the right time. And she hated feeling desperate.
Rose got up, gathered the cups and the kettle onto a platter, and carried them off to the kitchen. It wasn’t always this way, she reflected. No, she was never the most popular girl in school, but she had her share of guys knocking on her door. Back then she dated the kind of boys even a Drayton girl didn’t feel right bringing home. Like Brad Dillon. Brad had black hair, hot brown eyes, and carved biceps. And the best ass in the county. But that was before the Graduation Fair.
East Laporte was too small to have its own high school, and most kids went to school in the Broken. There was a tiny church school for people who didn’t have the papers or the money to bribe the principal of the Broken high school, but aside from that, you were out of luck. For those who did attend the school in the Broken, high school meant four years of pretending to be a normal Broken person. Four years of having your nose rubbed in how poor you were and in all the things you could never do: college, traveling, having a nice house . . .
That’s why the Graduation Fair was a huge deal. It happened on the thirtieth of May, once the Broken schools let the kids out for the summer. It was the time for graduating seniors to celebrate their freedom. Everyone attended. Even the bluebloods from the lands neighboring the Edge came once in a while, cloaked in the powerful magics of the Weird. Food stalls sprang up along the field’s edge, caravans from the Weird arrived to exchange their goods for the trinkets from the Broken, and bouncy gyms and inflatable water slides were set up for the little kids. Once everyone ate and traded, people gathered at Crow’s field to watch the seniors show off their flash. There was nothing simpler and more complicated than a flash: a burst of magic, pure and direct. Like lightning. It showed a person’s power. The brighter and more defined was the flash, the stronger was the magic user.
The Edger kids kept to themselves even in the schools of the Broken, and once you hit high school, that’s all anyone would talk about between classes and during lunch: who flashed what color the previous year. The best Edgers flashed pastel blue or green. You just hoped you didn’t come out there and puffed out dark red, the weakest color, to the jeers of the audience. Only the bluebloods, the aristocrats of the Weird, flashed white, and even among them, not everyone could deliver a controlled whip of power.
Rose rinsed out the cups and put them back into the cabinet. Middle school had been hell for her. Leanne and Sarah, the two queen bitches, picked on her the entire time, because her mom had slept with Sarah’s dad, lured him away from Sarah’s mother, and then dumped him. Sarah’s parents split, and Rose paid the price. She was the daughter of a whore, and a beggar whore at that, a girl who was ugly, poor, and good at nothing.
She began practicing her flash in sixth grade. She worked at it with a fanatical devotion. She practiced for hours, in private, determined to show them all. When her mom died her junior year of high school, it only spurred Rose on. Flashing became an obsession. She practiced, and practiced, and practiced, until magic flowed from her, pliant and obedient.
When Rose walked onto that field at the Graduation Fair, her head held high, she knew she was ready. She had years of practice behind her. She would finally shove it in their faces. She opened her hands wide and flashed an arch of purest white, as defined as any of the best bluebloods could hope to offer.
In her childish triumphant dreams, Rose had imagined people cheering, pictured herself being hired by a blueblood house, receiving training, going off to adventure in the depths of the Weird. She had done something truly remarkable. Not even a burst of energy, but an arch, crisp and sharp like a blade of a scimitar that played in her hands like a willing pet.
Morbid silence greeted her. Fear stabbed her chest, and she realized suddenly that she might have made a mistake. And then Dad was there at her side, and he pointed his gun at the audience, and he and Grandfather took her off the field quicker than she could think, packed her into Dad’s Jeep, and drove to the house like wolves were snapping at their heels. That night Grandma didn’t sleep—she walked the grounds, reinforcing the ward stones with her blood.
In the morning, four messengers waited by those ward stones. Three had come from the Edger families, and one from a blueblood noble house. Only the blueblood man was allowed to enter. He sat in their kitchen, an older grizzled warrior with a sword on his waist, and laid it all out. Only bluebloods flashed white. That was an unshakable fact. In two hundred years, no Edger had delivered such a focused and bright flash. Coupled with her mother’s reputation, that could mean only one thing: Rose wasn’t her father’s daughter.
At that conclusion, Grandpa had to be taken out of the kitchen to keep from skewering their “guest” with his rapier.
Rose denied it. It simply wasn’t true: not only did she look like a Drayton, but she was born exactly nine months following her parents’ honeymoon. Her mother had lost her virginity on her wedding night. The sleeping around didn’t start until Rose was in her teens—it was the death of her mother’s parents that had triggered it.
The man shook his head. It didn’t matter, he explained. Even if she was legitimate, no one would believe her. Those of blue blood possessed the potential for great powers. Nobody in their right mind could ignore the possibility that Rose could be a descendant of a noble family, a descendant who could in turn pass that precious blood to her children.
Finally she understood. She had hoped to wow everyone. Instead she had marked herself to be used as a broodmare.
The blueblood outlined his terms: a large stipend to her family, a comfortable life for her. They weren’t offering marriage, like the other three messengers from the Edge. After all, they were an aristocratic house, and having a mongrel in their bloodline would be beneath them. They simply expected her to produce a horde of bastards to be used as retainers for their house.
Her father told him to get out.
It’s amazing how stupid you can be when you’re young, Rose reflected. Two days later, she had snuck away to see Brad Dillon. He told her, “Don’t worry, babe. It’s us against them. We can take them all on.” They made out,
