MacKenzie's Rose (excerpt)
She stood on the edge of the windswept cliff—the
stiff seaward breeze tearing at her hair and cloak—eyes straining to the
horizon in the first gray light of dawn...but again, he did not come.
She was tempting fate. Every
day the air was a little brighter, the angry red sun a little closer to bursting
over the rim of the world before she would abandon her vigil and seek shelter
from its flame. And still—he did
not come....
...The centuries melted like candle wax.
The bleak seacoast became a high-dollar tourist trap—but her headland
remained inviolate behind her boundless fortune.
She cut her waist-length hair; exchanged her cloak and billowing skirts
for a pants suit and duster; but still she pushed the sunrise, scanning the sea
for a ghostly sail. He did not
come.
Her manservant came to the edge of the widow’s
walk, standing respectfully beside it, a single perfect rose held delicately in
twisted fingers. “Madame—come
away. The dawn....”
A thin gray wraith, MacKenzie left the sentence
unfinished, as he had for decades, while he blossomed with his roses from
stripling boy to flowering manhood, then withered at last to this dying weed.
As his father had before him—and his father’s father before
that—stretching backward in a long, unbroken forest of MacKenzies whose roots
were antediluvian.
She seemed vaguely to recall a time when she herself
had been MacKenzian in origin—a distant cousin or some such branch of the
family tree—but it had long ago ceased to make any difference.
She was simply “Madame,” or “Ms. Stoker” to her few
acquaintances.
She had no friends.
Except MacKenzie.
MacKenzie lay one gnarled hand gently on her arm and
slowly drew her toward the safe harbor of her mansion fortress.
It rather amused her to consider the fact that her dawn vigil might well
be the death of her yet, as the sun caught her trying to shore up MacKenzie’s
stubborn pride and match her pace to his faltering steps.
Once, long ago, at the pinnacle of his manhood, when
the aching loneliness had become particularly wearisome, she had offered
MacKenzie her eternal favors. He
had refused sweetly—willing enough to provide a brief distraction, but not to
share eternity. That day, she
wept...and her satin pillow had been stained with blood.
Today, she curled her arm through that of her loyal
servant, sometime lover, and dearest friend and aided him more than he assisted
her. She would lose him soon, and
there would be no MacKenzie in the house for the first time in centuries.
He had been a MacKenzie. In fact, it had been his youngest brother who had brought her
the news of his sailing—and stayed to become the first MacKenzie.
But this one—admittedly her favorite, for he had
once looked oh-so-much like his wandering ancestor—was the last.
He had never married, despite her urging.
Although he would not become her immortal companion, he had been her
lifelong champion, and refused to share either his responsibilities or his bed
with another.