Rose grew up with a need to hunt.
Her memories began with hunting. It was the word her infant ears heard most, and the label slapped on to every aspect of her toddler life.
She was a part of the huntsclan. Her uncle was the huntsman, leader of them all, and she was his huntsgirl.
Rose had fight in her from a young age, and her uncle saw it. She was ferocious and precocious, and her uncle saw it and singled her out; not, she liked to think, simply because she was his niece.
On the contrary—it was perhaps because of this that she became his niece.
In any case, the hunting was as much a part of her as her dragon birthmark. It fueled her. She hunted beetles, spiders, rats, cobwebs.
She ached to hunt bigger things...especially on the day when the Huntsman told her why he was her uncle. Magic, he told her, was a vile and evil thing, and it was the reason that Rose had no mother or father. A dragon had killed her parents. Her uncle had taken her in before it could kill her, too.
So it was dragons that she really longed to hunt—dragons that she would hunt someday, to fulfill her role as Huntsgirl. To make her uncle proud and avenge her parents, she told herself.
She ignored the nagging thought in the back of her mind that maybe, she just enjoyed how powerful the part of a hunter made her.
Rose traced the birthmark on her wrist and waited for a dragon.
The first thing Ivy knew was that she was half of a broken whole. That she was incomplete. Everyone was always talking about it, so it was a fact she couldn't escape.
Her first word was "sister". Ivy didn't even have a sister—or, presumably, didn't have one anymore.
Of course, Ivy wondered what had happened to Rose—where she was, if she was still alive. But she had never known her and she cried sometimes because everyone was talking about Rose and no one was looking at her.
Her mother and father were always speculating, always weeping quietly, always hiring new detectives—and Ivy hated it. It wasn't as if they'd known Rose anymore than she had, but they talked as if they had—as if Rose had been with them for years and years and Ivy was just an afterthought in the wake of her disappearance.
The unfairness was that her parents had known Rose for a total of ten minutes before she was abducted as an infant. They had known Ivy for five years, and she was the odd one out. She felt like a machine put out of use and gathering dust because one of the parts was missing.
At school she was the girl with the missing sister, or the single twin. At home she was the live version of an age-progression photo showing how Rose would have looked now.
Ivy twisted two tiny hospital identification tags between her hands, crushing one in each fist, and waited to bloom.
When Rose was ten, she had her first kill. It was not a dragon; it was a small griffin. When it was over, after the Huntsman praised her and the victory was declared to her fellow trainees, she went back to her room and cried. She cried for the release of the unexpected fear that had gripped her, for the pride and joy of finally, really being a hunter, and, somewhere in the muddied waters of her thoughts, she cried for guilt.
She didn't really feel guilty for killing the griffin—she almost felt guilty for not feeling guilt about it.
But she let the pride and the satisfaction drown that out, and she let her mind and body slip into a mold of confidence. There was no doubt in Rose's mind. She was a hunter. She was the masked girl eradicating all vile traces of magic from the world in which she lived.
That was when Rose decided that it was not enough to wait for a dragon—she would have to go out and find it herself.
Ivy thought that ten was a turning point. She'd had no sister for ten years. Her whole life. Maybe the world would finally recognize her individualism.
And it did, sort of. She made friends who had no idea she was the girl with the missing sister. She brought home reports cards and her parents didn't wonder aloud what Rose's best subject would have been. They even failed to hang up four stockings on Christmas Eve.
Sometimes Ivy felt remorseful that the impending fade of her twin sister's memory brought her hope. For all she knew, Rose could have been (probably had been) murdered. She could have been tortured, or perhaps she was still being tortured.
But she couldn't help it. She resented Rose—resented the kidnappers who might as well have taken her and killed her as well, seeing how little good being alive and safely at home did her.
Ten was the turning point, though. Ten was the year that Ivy was Ivy, her parents one and only daughter, noticed and cherished.
Ten was not the turning point she expected—it was the sudden bend in the case of the missing Rose.
The year that she became a teenager, Rose moved to New York City with her uncle, to be his special apprentice. She was happy to be chosen, confident in her ability—and also excited about the prospect of attending junior high.
At school, Huntsgirl invested herself in the girl part of her title—she played with alter-egos, at first simply enjoying the irony of her pastel wardrobe palette and flower jewelry, but Rose found, to her surprise, that there was something in her other than hunting. She liked people, she liked school, she liked activity. She liked dances and boys and extra-curricular activities—and Rose found she could become nearly as passionate about acting as she was about hunting, in some moments.
But in the midst of all the schoolwork, all the making friends and auditioning for school plays, there was still one goal that consumed Rose's mind—Huntsgirl's mind.
It was the reason that she and her uncle had come to New York, and every night, Rose hunted, and anticipated—because New York City was the territory of the American Dragon. And Rose was going to slay him.
Thirteen was also the year that she met a boy.
Ivy decided to start junior high by chopping off her hair. It was an act that made her feel like her own.
If her parents had had any idea how Rose chose to or would have chosen to wear her hair, they surely would have banned Ivy from changing hers, but it didn't matter, because Rose didn't exist.
Ivy did, and so her blonde hair was short and feathery. She liked to wear dresses in deep shades and draw spirals on the back of her hand. She wrote moody, trashy poetry, and she tried desperately to be Ivy.
Since her tenth year, when a detective had discovered a new clue in the abduction case of her sister, she had gone back to being the leftover twin.
Perhaps that was better. After all, she was accustomed to it after ten years. It was an automatic reaction to wonder if Rose would have aced English when she nearly failed, or to guess at what Rose's favorite color was and consequently pick the opposite for her own.
It was instinct to be the shadow of a person who didn't exist. Ivy wasn't sure, sometimes, if she hated Rose or herself.
But junior high was when she met a girl.
Rose and the boy didn't so much meet as crash together. Literally, and in so many other ways. He was small with green-frosted hair spiked up by the application of too much hair gel. He rode a skateboard and thought he was cool and made awkward attempts to win her; attempts that sometimes made her pulse coil and skip in odd ways that she had never experienced before.
Her pulse raced, also, during her almost weekly encounters with the American Dragon. They had found him, but he kept eluding death, and in the moments when there was no school and no hunting, Rose found herself in a confused stew of emotion—frustration that she was failing as a hunter, elation at the thought of a cocky Chinese American boy in a red jacket.
She wondered how two such similar shades of red could elicit two emotions of such extreme difference. When Jake wore red, it was attractive, endearing, fresh.
The red of the dragon's scales burned into her mind like acid, taunting her with flickering flames of thoughts—her parents were unavenged, she was not worthy of her uncle's favor, the truest part of her identity was being crushed into a dust-heap of failure.
Day and night were both red, but the reds were as different as day and night. Joy and rage. War and peace.
Love and hate.
Met wasn't quite the right word. The first time, Ivy only glimpsed her from a distance. It was just a fleeting image on her walk home from school one day, but it settled deep into her mind. She stood staring at the spot for a long time before she convinced herself to move on.
Walking in New York, sometimes, she could forget who her life revolved around. She could forget, almost, that she had a life, and that she had parents who might be waiting to tell her something new about their daughter. Their real daughter. The one they didn't know. Not the one who had been trying to be their child for almost fourteen years.
Ivy looked at maps and wondered if all cities would make her feel like that. She doubted she would ever see another city while she was still under eighteen—her parents would never leave New York, because Rose might come walking through their door one day with a smile and a story. Rose might not have been dead. Might have wanted to see them, suddenly, after so many years of nothing but speculation and obsession.
Ivy despised the way her parents were obsessed—but the part she really hated was that she was obsessed with Rose, too.
On her way home that day, she stopped at the convenience store and bought a cheap bottle of hair dye.
Rose found out at a young age, and in a startlingly concrete way, that sometimes love and hate were the same thing.
It happened because Jake Long and the American Dragon were one and the same. It was the most horrible moment of her life.
Huntsgirl wanted to kill a dragon. Rose did not want to lay a finger on Jake. Somehow, in the moment, when she looked back, she found that a little piece of the hunter in her died. But at the same time, Rose did not want to look at his face for a very, very long time, so both she and Huntsgirl ran.
Her uncle punished her for it, the colossal screw-up of letting the American Dragon escape, but all she felt towards him was grateful. She would be sent back to the academy, faraway from both Jake and the dragon. Close to the Huntsman, the only person she should have ever loved.
In the academy, she went through the motions of training on automatic. She was still the best—the one and only Huntsgirl, the Hunter only second to her uncle, some said, but she felt mechanical, because love and hate were the same thing. She felt them both fiercely towards the same person, and Rose could not deny or dismiss either emotion.
She sometimes pondered how long Jake had known, how many times he had not killed Huntsgirl because by day she was Rose.
It was undeniable that he loved her, but that did not stop Rose from hating him.
And the hate didn't stop her from loving him back.
Ivy dyed her hair black. It was frightening, at first, against her pale skin, but it looked good with the dark colors of her wardrobe, she decided, and somehow, with the blueness of her eyes. Her parents didn't seem to care—or rather, didn't seem to notice. She almost got a bitter satisfaction out of that, at first, but later she cried on the bathroom floor, crushing the empty bottle of dye between her hands and wishing she could take it back.
Ivy wished she could take back her whole life. Away from Rose. Or with Rose. If Rose hadn't been kidnapped, she would have a life.
She wondered if she still would have resented her sister.
The thought occurred to Ivy every once in a while that it was her sister's kidnappers she was supposed to be angry with, to hate and resent and despise. Rose and her parents should not have been on the list.
But she hardly ever thought about the kidnappers. When she was younger, she had sometimes pictured horrible people and the horrible things they might do to a small blonde child—she tried to pretend it was Rose, but in the back of her mind she knew it was herself.
She was selfish, and angry, and tired of being Rose's sister.
But there was nothing she could do about it, so she rubbed the last remnants of dye on her finger and traced a spiral around her hand.
Rose had thought being betrayed was the worst feeling. She found out that being the betrayer was possible worse. She struggled for weeks at the academy, the decision rolling around inside her like a pinball. She was a hunter. She loved to hunt. She loved her uncle. She hated magic.
But she was afraid, because she loved Jake, too, and she trusted him enough to consider the fact that maybe, he was right. Maybe his perspective, that magic was good and the Huntsclan was evil, had some truth in it.
The first time she entertained that thought, she bolted out of bed in the middle of the night and went into the lavatory to throw up. If that were true, nothing Rose had ever done was justified. Her whole life was a shrine to a cult of glorified murder. Her uncle was the tyrannical cult leader.
Her mind refused to accept it. What about the dragon that had killed her parents?
But it also refused to accept that Jake was truly evil.
She began to watch her uncle, then. She paid attention to the things that he taught and the things that he did. For the first time, she listened with her mind and her instinct instead of just her intense need to hunt.
Rose found gaps. Horrible, earth-shattering, burning gaps and flaws. She tried to dismiss them. The rage of the hunt in her blood tried to drown out the realization, but it was no use.
She still loved her uncle, so being a betrayer hurt, but when Jake arrived, she had decided.
The second time that Ivy met her, she was working at a concession stand near central park.
It was winter, and Ivy had been counting quarters endlessly until the girl arrived. She came trudging through the snow, laughing, with a small Asian kid beside her.
Ivy stared at the thick blond hair tucked into a toboggan hat, at the girl's large blue eyes and flushed cheeks.
She looked away again quickly before the girl could catch her staring and served them their hot chocolate.
As they left, Ivy watched them with a heart thudding frantic knocks at her chest cavity.
She watched the girl's bright hair blur into the snow-covered park, and rested her head on the cool counter.
For the first time in her whole life, Ivy loved her sister. She couldn't get those intelligent blue eyes out of her head, or the smile that sparkled on her sister's lips.
Rose was happy. She was alive, and she was well, and she was happy. Ivy hadn't cared to know any of those things until she knew them, but the knowledge was precious now. She didn't feel anymore guilt, or hatred, and she didn't feel like a shadow. In spite of the cold, she was warm and real.
The knowledge that her parents were alive and that the Huntsman had stolen her and lied about it made betrayal easier.
She still loved her uncle—just as loving Jake hadn't quelled her hate for the American Dragon, the twinges of hate she now felt for her uncle couldn't quite douse the love she had held for him for so many years—but it was enough to make her believe that she had made the right choice.
In some moments, Jake made her happy enough to smile—to believe that they would win and somehow, someday, all the damage her heart had taken would heal.
But some moments, that felt like a lie.
She had parents and a twin, but she had no time to look for them. She had Jake, but being near him endangered not only both of them but countless others.
The Huntsman's plan would soon be fulfilled, and Rose knew her betrayal could not go unnoticed forever.
Rose knew what she had to do—the Huntsclan couldn't exist any longer, now that she knew what it was they were really trying to do, and what they had always been doing.
She would destroy them herself, if she had to, to keep Jake safe, to unravel all the evil they had done.
All the evil she had done—the killings that clawed up her throat in the middle of the night, like the creatures were alive again.
It didn't matter now. Rose had lost the will to hunt.
Ivy didn't tell her parents that Rose was alive. Perhaps it was selfish, but she thought it was kinder to all of them. The idea of Rose didn't hurt her anymore, but she wondered if the reality of Rose would be a disappointment to her parents. It was the idea of Rose that they knew best, after all.
And Rose had been happy. Ivy would not tear apart whatever life she was living to hand her instead an un-lived one with unknown people.
Instead, she gave away her self pity and saved up hope, measured in pennies and dollars, in jars. She worked through the winter, quiet as always, more patient than usual. She worked through the spring, and gathered her plans as summer arrived. When August drew near again, she took what she had gathered and found a bus heading out of the city.
Her parents sat in the living room as she walked out the door, wondering aloud what kind of homecoming dress Rose would have worn. Ivy thought she could have told them, but she didn't. She climbed on the bus without a word and looked west, towards thousands of imagine sunsets and other cities. She didn't look back at all until they reached the fadeaway of the skyscrapers, and then she allowed herself one tiny glance, and a whisper.
"Goodbye, Rose."
The sky ahead was red and orange like dragon fire. The heart in her chest felt like a flower in full bloom.
She felt whole. Ivy was complete.