Read Online Autumn Rose: A Dark Heroine Novel by Abigail Gibbs - Free Book Online

enough already . . .
    I didn’t even notice that the prince had stood up until I heard his voice over the hushing room.
    “Autumn is right. The Terra won’t last much longer. The world has changed, and we don’t see eye to eye anymore. It could lead to war. But it won’t. Fate won’t let it get that far. What do you think the Prophecy of the Heroines is for?”
    I pushed down so hard on the desk to stand up that the table moved with a groan and my chair nearly toppled over. I felt silly standing, but it was an old ritual from my Sagean school, and sitting made me feel small compared to the prince. “And how can a few dark beings rebuild the Terra and stop a war? What if they don’t appear in time? What if they fail?”
    “They won’t,” he insisted, and for the first time I actually met his gaze. His forehead was set in a single line of frustration and I could feel my magic beginning to warm up my veins with anger.
    “No Heroines have appeared yet. If the vampires killed Violet Lee tomorrow, there would be no stopping a war. What happens there affects us all!”
    I waited, holding my breath and almost hoping he would try and deny my logic. I knew I was right, I had seen the threat with my own eyes: the hate of the humans, the Extermino . . . and Violet Lee, the peculiar girl I couldn’t get out of my dreams.
    “You’re wrong—”
    It was still early enough in the term for the coming of the bell to be something of a shock: as the shrill, uneven wail cut through the quiet, everybody jumped.
    I packed up my things as quickly as I could and rounded the end of the horseshoe, wishing my feet would move a little faster so that I could get out before the prince finished what he had to say. All the courage that I had possessed when angry had fled, just like I was fleeing outside.
    “Autumn!”
    Turn, for Pete’s sake! I could feel him closing in on me, the rest of the class not far behind, never breaking from their packs.
    “Duchess!”
    Then came the call that stopped me, that turned me on the spot. It was a call that summoned from the unnatural earth roots that held me in place, prisoner, to hear what I knew was coming.
    “Why do you keep calling her ‘duchess’?” It was an innocent question. Tee, joining her cousin in the ranks of the class, could not have known how much I had dreaded that very question and prayed in the last twenty-four hours that nobody would notice how the prince addressed me.
    I pleaded with my lips, mouthing no, no, over and over, but when he turned to look at the younger girl and back at me, I could see in his bright cobalt eyes—they always said you could mark noble blood by the eyes—that he would not oblige.
    “Don’t you know? She is the duchess of England.”
    I did not wait for the gasps or the questions, because I could not bear to hear them. Instead, I turned and walked six measured paces, then took to the air.
    Remember who you will one day be, child!
    I do not want to think of that day, Grandmother. I do not want to think of it.
    Why do that? Why be so willfully cruel? Why deny me my choice like that? At least I could run. If it had not been the end of the day, I wouldn’t have been able to escape his revelation like this. Escape him.
    Though the sun created a patchwork of light and shadows below me on the town, the air was cold. The wind from the sea was caught in the jaws of the concave river mouth, funneled along the increasingly narrow valley, stirring the masts of a tall ship moored on the Dartmouth embankment. The rigging made a soft chime that the wind carried with it, an underlying melody to the beating of water that the old paddle ferry produced and the shrill whistle of the steam train weaving along the embankment toward Kingswear. It was a small village, standing in proud opposition to Dartmouth on the other side of the river, its multicolored cottages rising in uneven terraces much like the larger houses of the larger town did. Over bridges, past creeks,