Please Note: This is a repost of March's short story preview, in order to port it to my new website.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to my latest short story, The Irish Rose! The final word count is 5,467 words. You can read the first 1,000 words for free, but the whole story is only available to paid subscribers on Patreon, Ko-Fi, Substack, and my website.

Other stories in this series:
A Priest’s Lament (Newsletter exclusive)
Sleeping With Devils
Wilting With Neglect

This is one from the Tales From The Night Garden universe. You don't need to have read Lemon Balm in order to enjoy it. If you like the shorts, consider buying the book!

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Acanthus

Each time I found myself sitting on my hands with nothing to do, I was restless and buzzing with an anxious energy that refused to die. Refugees were flocking to The Yellow Rose now, and quite a few of them were vampires. We'd only been settled for a few weeks, but the waves of displaced people within our wake was staggering.

I'd been lost in my thoughts for most of the evening, drifting through memories that often hurt more than helped my fragile mindset. It was a bad night, full of internal negativity and dark memories. The smells of lavender, cinnamon, and sage clung to the walls in the cheery communal kitchen, the bright colors and warmth doing nothing to improve my mood.

There were so few vampires in the United States. So many of them lived in Nekane's jurisdictions, but my treaty had ensured they were left alone. Now that it was broken, many had been slaughtered. I tried to be happy that some of us survived. One of the survivors was Abyss Kennedy; a Nosferatu that had traveled the Garden paths once before. She showed up with a human she had introduced as her fiancée — Ebony Bone. A clatter from the kitchen island stole my attention, and my eyes darted towards the source of the sound.

Cypress was washing dishes in the sink, cleaning up after sharing a meal with Azalea and the Pack. "Acanthus, how is a wedding between a vampire and a human going to work? That kind of seems like a really bad idea."

He must have been careening through thoughts of Abyss and Ebony as well. I hadn't been projecting mine; the out of the blue nature of his comments and questions often left me completely upended. He brought it up so nonchalantly, as if we had been carrying on a conversation about marriage or weddings, or anything related to the topic. The only source of this question I could think of was Abyss' promise to Ebony.

"W-well," I said, trying to pull my thoughts together. "It's certainly possible. I held a successful marriage for eight years, I'm certain Ebony and Abyss will do fine."

The utter clattering in the sink suggested Cypress had dropped whatever dish he'd been scrubbing. They whipped their head up to gape at me over the kitchen island, sleeves still pushed up to their elbows and hands full of suds. It was always charming whenever he wore that shocked expression. "Wait. You were married?"

It wasn't so much the shock that hurt me. Was it so improbable that I had never held a companion close in my eight hundred years of existence? He may be my companion now, but I'd lived several lifetimes before the Pup had ever stepped foot on my doorstep. Huffing softly, I arched my eyebrow. "What, Cypress, pray tell, is shocking about that? Yes. I was married."

I held a hand out, summoning a blood bag from the fridge. The door opened and it zoomed into my hand. The soft click of the door echoed through the room as I grabbed it from the air, pulling it to me. "To Moira Byrne."

"Moira Byrne," he repeated the name as if testing it on his tongue. "You say that name as if I should know it," they scoffed.

His jealous nature was breaking through his otherwise accepting and open mindset, his pout clouding his boyish face. It was an odd paradox. The dishes were left ignored in the sink as Cypress crossed their damp arms. Why he got this way over my past relationships, I never understood. Many of them happened before he was ever a thought, and many of them ended tragically. "Put that pout away, Cypress, it's not becoming of you," I sighed. He scowled, but then his face relaxed into something more neutral. As he settled his expression, I took a breath. "Moira has made a name for herself in Europe, though I don't know what all she's been up to, only that she's safe. She was my wife for eight years before I was forced to turn her."

The werewolf squirmed where they stood. The scowl was back, but this time I suspected that the expression was for a different reason. "Forced?"

"Forced." My mind wandered back to the storm cloud memories, and a flash of red hair lit up my inner eye. The silence that stretched after felt endless, but it was only a few moments. I licked my lips, then with a soft inhale I opened my eyes to look at them again while I leaned back in my chair. "As you can imagine, François is in the mix. Should I tell you the tale?"

Cypress's eyebrows furrowed angrily. Their boyish charm dissolved and he looked years older than he was. "That dick again. Of course."

My heart twisted painfully and I winced, my eyes falling to look at the whorls in the large slab of oak that made up the dining table. "I'm sorry. I know. I don't need to tell you..."

He growled, but it tapered out into a huffed sigh, his shoulders sagging. He pushed off of the island, rounding it to return to the abandoned dishes. "I want to learn everything about you, Acanthus. But if you don't want to tell me, you don't have to. You know that."

"I wouldn't have offered to tell you if I wasn't willing to tell you," I gritted my teeth, my own frustration rising. But, I beat it back and forced myself to relax. It wasn't exactly Cypress' fault, and their frustration over François was warranted. The more I spoke of my past, the less the wolf liked the man. I pushed back the chair I was in, walking over to him and kissing his shoulder. I wrapped my arms around his waist, nuzzling his back. "Want me to tell you, or no?"

I could feel his shoulders relax with the attention. "I'm all ears, Acanthus."

Resting my cheek against his broad shoulder, I closed my eyes, and allowed myself to be drawn into the whirlpool of the past. "We're going far back tonight, then, if I'm speaking of Moira. She was twenty years old in 1329 when I met her…"

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