In the Roses of Pieria by Anna Burke

Author:Anna Burke [Burke, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bywater Books
Published: 2023-07-20T00:00:00+00:00

Dead you will lie and never memory of you

Will there be nor desire into the aftertime—for you do not

Share in the roses

Of Pieria, but invisible too in Hades’ house

You will go your way among dim shapes. Having been breathed out.

A stinging indictment, but what the hell did that have to do with Nektaria? It was hardly romantic. Gata had written, I’ve tasted poetry. Or rather, poets. Complex, like good wine. I will send you one—poet, not poem—and we can compare notes. I dwell far from the roses of Pieria, here in the countryside, though the night birds provide a pleasant chorus of their own. Your collection keeps me company.

Far from the roses of Pieria . . . But Gata wasn’t a poet.

Pieria. Gardener. Roses.

“Fucking cryptic cryptids,” I muttered, and opened a new tab.

I think my boss is a vampire, I typed. The search results were supremely unhelpful. Proof vampires exist, I tried next, feeling like an idiot. This was not how scholars conducted research.

“Historically, vampires have long been scapegoats for disease,” read one result. Well, that made sense. The rest of the search results devolved into speculation, clickbait, and conspiracy theories. I switched to an academic search engine. Sociology. Anthropology. Folklore studies. Nothing suggesting there was any science behind my employer’s thirst for blood.

“My family has a rare blood type she needs. And . . . I think you might, too.”

My blood type was O negative. Rarer than others, but not unusually rare. Maybe I’d gather up my courage to ask Fiadh what she’d meant by that.

I wished she were here. If I called her, she’d come over, trekking across the moonlit lawn to lie in my bed, and then I’d be tortured by her nearness and my wavering resolve, and not the constant cycling of theories and questions that otherwise kept me up. That, and the constant fear I’d hear the creak of my door and the soft scrape of Agatha’s shoe on the carpet.

My pillow swallowed my groan of frustration. How had this become my life?

• • •

“Teach me,” I asked Fiadh over her lunch break.

“Teach you what?” She looked up from a slim illustrated volume of what looked to be botany, its pages filled with watercolor drawings. The open page showed a pale green lichen dotted with red stalk-like structures. I hadn’t seen the book before.

“How to break thrall.”

“It’s a process.” She turned the page. Another lichen, this one coral-shaped. “This isn’t the place to try it.”

“Can you at least explain it?”

“Clara—”

“What are you looking at?” I plucked the book gently from her hands. An Illustrated Guide to Schwendener’s Theory of Lichenization, by Ira Atken. My eyes automatically picked out the anagram in the last name: Natek. “Lichens?”

“Look at the first page.”

I carefully flipped open to the beginning. On the once-white paper, someone had written, in red-inked English, “For G, with hope.”

“Natek?” I asked.

“That was my assumption. Does the handwriting match?”

“It’s hard to tell in the English alphabet. I’d have to do a closer comparison. Please, Fi.”

She looked up at me with those viridian eyes, and I experienced a different kind of thrall.

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