A rose for the dead ones
Sometimes they want to die, sometimes they want to live
And when they live they come to me
And when they die they are silent
No tender mercies shall I give as they plead for us
Without remorse I shall take their lives
Silently, in chaotic passion, from their impending mindless presence
Weeping the emptiness within
My blackened eyes blast forward; they shall see
Damned am I? No. For there is no damnation my soul hath not taken
Shall I be swayed in my vengeance as time tears open my wounds?
I think not!
-- Autumn Tears
"A Shadow Painted White"
Holtz slept.
In a crypt, in a dark, dank hole in the ground that on his more cynical and bitter days he thought was quite appropriate to him, Holtz slept. It had been a reasonably productive day, Justine had at least entertained the idea of joining in his crusade, and while he was no closer to destroying Angelus, he was slowly building an army. And each day that passed took him that much farther from the uncomfortable musings of the day before.
Holtz dreamed.
His dream began as most of his dreams did these days -- his home, his family, before the change. His daughter playing in the garden. His wife, cleaning around him as he relaxed on one of his few days of holiday. The sun shone down lightly, warming him to the point of laziness. Invariably the dream would change. He knew this as surely as he knew that he was dreaming. The sky would darken, his child would burst into flames, he would enter the house and find his wife dead. But for now, at least, he could relax and attempt to enjoy it.
"Daniel."
He looked up, startled. That wasn't his wife's voice. This wasn't in the script.
"Daniel."
He looked out. There was a woman walking towards him, or at least someone he thought was a woman. She walked in the sunlight and it reflected off her dark, dark hair, though her face always seemed to be in shadow. She was wearing a simple outfit all of white, simple and undyed fabric, and her feet were bare and grass-stained. She wore a rose in her hair, and a sash stylized into a rose at her waist. In her hand she carried a basket, and over her shoulders she wore a shawl. She might have been just about any neighbor come to call, except that in this dream he had no neighbors and no callers except two. And those were never as polite or as quiet as her.
"Daniel." She said his name a third time, and he stepped off the porch, squinting and shading his eyes from the unusually bright sunlight.
"Who are you?" He asked, suspicious. Not that he really should have been, except that this was a dream, wherein vampires could damn well walk in daylight if his mind thought he should be tortured by it. "What do you want?"
"Just to talk." Her voice was inhumanly melodic. It sounded as though she was singing even when she was clearly speaking. "You are bleeding."
He was. He couldn't really think how he'd missed it before. There was a gaping wound in his stomach, and similar wounds on his face and hands. Dagger wounds, by the looks of them. Though they didn't hurt, even now that he knew they were there. He wiped the blood off his face absently. "It's not bad," he lied.
"It is," she replied, and she took off her sash and stepped towards him. "It is mortal, in fact. You will die of it."
He stared at her. "What caused the wounds?"
"Life."
That was a new one. He was shocked enough to let her bind the wound to his stomach, and then stepped away when she moved to his hands. "Life caused my wounds," he said, disbelieving. He was having the sneaking suspicion that he'd be wanting to wake up soon.
"Life causes all wounds. Life's ending cures them." He still couldn't see her face for the glare of the sun, and that was bothering him more than he would have thought it would. "Living is pain. Dying is the only release we know."
"You're wrong," he said, almost automatically. She seemed to look at something over his shoulder, and he turned around. Darla, he saw, and Angelus, and they were being invited into his home by his young girl. He knew the ending of this story. He began to run up to the porch.
"You can't save them," she called after him. The sky had darkened, as of course it would have. He ignored her and ran up the stairs anyway. And, as he knew they would, his wife was there, dead, and his child was there, turned. "Their pain is over," her voice sounded in his ear, and he jumped and turned to find her standing in the doorway. "Yours is only begun."
"What the hell do you know about my pain," he growled, and he would have turned and hit her except that he slipped in a pool of his own blood. His face and hands were still bleeding, and the blood was seeping through the sash she had tied in a rosette around him, turning the white fabric red. How ironic.
"I've lived long enough to have shared it," and she stepped forward into the light of the house. He couldn't keep from gasping or stepping back in surprise at her face, but he did manage to keep from asking how, or why. Her face, her breasts, every part of her body that was exposed was covered in hideous scars, deep ones that should have killed her ten times over. He stared in shock for several minutes before his sense of irony and realism reasserted itself.
"So now I'm being beaten with the allegory," he said dryly. "I think I get the point."
To his surprise she smiled and, instead of saying something else particularly cryptic and meaningless, made a come-forward gesture with her hands, and the sash left his waist and reappeared about hers. The shadows fell from her face, as did the scars, to reveal a rather pretty young woman perhaps ten years his junior. "Oh good," she said cheerfully, "I was afraid I'd have to keep up that drivel for another few hours."
He stared. "You..."
She sighed, and moved over to his wife's chair, now empty and un-stained. "It's a long... may I?" she asked, and out of reflexive politeness he nodded for her to sit. "Thank you. Who I am is a long story. And there really is no way to shorten it, so I'll set it aside for now. I'm much more concerned, in any case, with who you are. Who you will become."
He stared some more. "Who I will become? Why should you care?"
She shrugged slightly. "I shouldn't. I do. Your pain and rage screamed out for leagues in any direction. It drew me out of my way. My father always said that people who put their noses where they don't belong sometimes lose them, a lesson I appear not to have learned as I still have my nose and continue to put it where it doesn't belong. But..." she leaned forward, the rose in her hair nearly falling off her head. "Everyone should have someone to care for them. No one should die unmourned. And, though I hate to say it, if you persist this way that is in fact how you will die. Alone. In a gutter. Unmourned and unremarked by any but the demon who put you up to this insanity in the first place."
Holtz wasn't sure if she was innocent, persistent, naive, or just plain stupid. Or any combination of the four and some others he could think of. "Are you insane?" That might have been it.
She sighed. She sounded irritated. "No, Daniel, I'm just a very old, very tired woman who genuinely likes you and doesn't want to see you lose your humanity and your soul because of something terrible that happened to you 200 years ago."
He laughed, and it sounded hollow even to him. "And just what were you planning on doing about it?"
In retrospect, and looking back on it, he shouldn't have asked. He really, truly should not have asked. The dream was surreal enough that he knew by now it wasn't truly a dream, and he should not have asked whoever it was that was intruding on his thoughts what they intended to do about something. He hadn't been an impetuous youth so long ago that he'd forgotten just what 'what are you going to do about it' meant. She hugged him, and he supposed it might have been so much worse, but he was caught entirely unprepared for this simple act. No one had hugged him since even before he had been entombed.
"There is nothing I can do, Daniel. This is all on you. You have to decide whether or not you want to pursue this quest for revenge, and at what cost. Things have changed, and you have to decide whether or not they will sway your vengeance or not. I can't help you, much though I wish I could. Not substantially."
"Then what the hell are you doing here?" he growled, suddenly irritated at this strange woman who appeared out of nowhere, intruded on his dreams, and proceeded to give him a lecture in moral behavior. "What are you doing here if not trying..."
"Caring." That stopped him in mid word. "I am caring. About you. Because if I don't, then no one will. Whether you know it or not, and accept it or not." She stood up, and he stared at her... she was tiny, he realized abruptly. "A wise man once said, 'vengeance is a water vessel with a hole. It carries nothing but the promise of emptiness.' Have you thought, yet, Daniel, about what you will fill that emptiness with when your vengeance is concluded? Or do you plan on following your quarry to the grave? Because I think that that will be a hollow victory for you, and a shining victory for the Darla and Angelus you knew."
Holtz's face didn't contort with fury, and she seemed all the sadder for it. "Get out," he said very softly, very calmly. "Get out of my mind."
She sighed, and stood up, plucking the rose from her hair and placing it bodily in his hand. "Remember me, Daniel, if you ever find the path you have chosen too dark, or too cold. I and mine will be waiting."
His hand clenched around the rose, driving the thorns into his palm and crushing the flower. Black petals cascaded to the ground. "Get out." The last thing he saw before the world faded away were her sad, sad eyes, blue darkened almost to black. Then he had the sensation of falling, and jolted awake the way sleepers sometimes do, as though he had suddenly hit the bottom of a very long drop.
Holtz awoke to a bloody palm stuck full of thorns, a crumpled flower in his hand, and a sense of overwhelming bewilderment and confusion and the feeling that something important had just happened. But he couldn't for the life of him remember what the dream had been. Shrugging, he dusted the petals from his hands and stood slowly, stretching a bit. Today he would talk to Justine again, perhaps convince her for once and all this time. If only he could remember what he had been dreaming of... he had the suspicion it was significant in some way...
When the man had left, the demon reappeared from the shadows where he had been watching. He picked up a few petals and turned them over in his hands, frowning.
----
Hrrm. This has more potential than I thought. May be the first in a series of Black Rose chronicles, tell me what you think of her.