The Parasite Rose

Chapter 17 — The Window

The abandoned wing smelled like dust and old paper and something else—something metallic, faint, the ghost of blood that had been cleaned up centuries ago but never fully erased.

I found it during the daytime, when the vampires were sleeping and the castle was mine. That was the deal: I could go anywhere inside the walls during the day, as long as I stayed inside. The irony of being trapped in a place designed to keep sunlight out was not lost on me.

The wing was in the east part of the castle, past the library, past the armory, past a series of corridors that got progressively narrower and more neglected. The carpet ended. The stone walls became rough, unfinished, the mortar crumbling in places. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling like curtains that nobody had bothered to take down.

I'd been exploring for weeks. Mapping the castle's layout in my head, marking exits and dead ends, counting the guards' patrol routes. Old habit. In theslums, you learned the shape of every building you entered—every window, every door, every crack in the wall that might become an escape route if things went wrong.

This wing was different. It wasn't just abandoned—it was forgotten. The servants didn't come here. The guards didn't patrol. It was a pocket of silence inside a castle that was otherwise full of the quiet, controlled movements of people who had been alive for centuries and had very strong opinions about privacy.

I pushed open a door. It swung on hinges that hadn't been oiled in decades, the sound loud in the stillness. The room beyond was small—maybe ten feet square—with stone walls and a ceiling that was lower than the rest of the castle. The floor was bare stone, no carpet, no furniture. Just dust.

And a lock.

The door on the far wall had a lock. Old iron, rusted, the kind that would have been impressive three hundred years ago and was now just a lump of corrosion. I tested it with my fingers—the metal was brittle, the mechanism frozen. One good twist and it would break.

I didn't twist it. Not yet. I stood in the doorway and looked at the lock, then at the room, then at the dust on the floor. Nobody had been here in a long time. The dust was undisturbed, a thin gray layer that covered everything like snow. My boots left prints in it—two clear tracks from the door to the center of the room.

I pulled a hairpin from my hair. Thin, metal, bent at the end from years of use. Not a lockpick—not really—but it had opened enough doors in theslums to qualify as one.

I knelt in front of the lock. Inserted the pin. Turned. The mechanism resisted, then gave way with a click that sounded like a bone snapping. The door opened inward.

The room beyond was larger than the first. Maybe twenty feet square, with the same stone walls and bare floor. But this room had something the other one didn't.

A window.

It was boarded up. Three planks of wood, nailed across the frame in a pattern that suggested someone had been in a hurry—not careful construction, just a desperate attempt to block something out. The nails were rusted. The wood was warped. Sunlight leaked through the gaps between the planks, thin golden lines that painted the floor in stripes.

I stared at it.

A window. In the castle. In the place that was built to keep sunlight away from creatures who burned in it. Someone had boarded it up—someone who wanted to make sure that light never got in—but they hadn't done a good enough job. The gaps were there. The light was there. It was leaking through, steady and warm, the way water leaks through a cracked dam.

I walked to the window. Kneeling, I found the edge of one plank where the nails had rusted through. I worked my fingers under it—my wrapped fingers, the left hand still bandaged—and pulled. The wood resisted, then cracked, a splinter breaking off in my hand. I pulled harder. The plank came free with a sound like tearing fabric.

Sunlight hit my face.

Not the filtered, gray light of the castle's windows—the real thing. Direct, warm, the kind of sunlight that meant the sun was high and the sky was clear. It flooded the room in a wave, pushing back the shadows, illuminating every speck of dust, every crack in the stone, every detail that the darkness had been hiding.

I shielded my eyes. The light was too bright after months in the castle's permanent twilight. My pupils contracted, my eyes watered, and for a moment I couldn't see anything except white and gold.

Then the light settled. My eyes adjusted. And I looked at my hand.

My left hand, still wrapped, the bandages loosened from the prying. I unwound them. Slowly. The cloth peeled away from the skin, revealing the fingers underneath—pale, thin, the nails bluish at the edges.

I held my hand in the sunlight.

The light went through my fingers. Not just at the edges—through the entire finger, from tip to base. The skin was translucent, the flesh thin, the bone visible as a dark line floating in a column of light. My index finger was transparent. My middle finger was halfway there. The ring finger was starting—the tips catching the light in a way that normal skin didn't.

I rotated my hand. The light shifted, passed through different angles, and each angle showed me the same thing: less of me. The bones, the tendons, the thin architecture of a hand that was slowly losing its substance.

But the sunlight was warm.

I hadn't felt warm in weeks. The castle was cold—stone walls, no fires, the kind of ambient chill that seeped into your bones and stayed there. My fingers had been** for so long that I'd forgotten what warm felt like. But this—this was different. The sunlight hit my skin and I felt it, not just on the surface but deep, the warmth spreading through the transparent flesh, heating the blood that was still flowing through the thin vessels.

I stood there. In the window's light. My hand raised, my fingers spread, the sunlight passing through them and casting a shadow on the far wall—a shadow that was incomplete, missing the tips of my fingers, the outline of a hand with pieces cut away.

I should have been terrified. I was. But the warmth was there, too, and the warmth was winning. For a few seconds, the fear took a backseat to something simpler—the animal pleasure of heat on cold skin, of light in darkness, of a body remembering what it felt like to be alive.

I stayed until the sunlight moved. The sun tracked across the sky, and the beam shifted, creeping up the wall, moving away from my outstretched hand. I followed it—stepped to the side, adjusted my angle, kept my hand in the light as long as I could. But the beam was narrow, the window small, and eventually the light was too high to reach.

I lowered my hand. Looked at the shadow on the wall one more time—the incomplete outline, the missing pieces, the ghost of a hand that was half-there and half-gone.

Then I nailed the plank back up.

It took longer to close it than to open it. The wood was splintered now, the nails bent, but I managed to wedge it back into place. The gaps were smaller than before, but the light still leaked through. A thin line, golden, running along the floor from the window to the opposite wall.

I left the room. Closed the door behind me. Locked it with the hairpin—the lock clicked back into place, the rusted mechanism holding just enough to look secure.

My secret. My window. My light.

That night, I sat on the bed in the dark.

No candle. No lamp. Just the moon, thin and silver, coming through the window of my room—the castle window, the one that was glass and iron and designed to let in moonlight but not sunlight. Moonlight was safe for vampires. Sunlight was not. The architecture of the castle was a map of their fears, every window placed with precision, every angle calculated to keep the dangerous light out.

I held up my left hand. The moonlight caught it—pale, thin, the light passing through the fingers the same way sunlight had. But the moonlight was weaker, colder, and the transparency showed differently. In sunlight, my fingers had glowed—the light passing through them like colored glass. In moonlight, they didn't glow. They just disappeared. The light went through and came out the other side, and where my fingers should have been, there was only moonlight.

I moved my hand. The moonlight moved with it—or through it—flowing around the transparent flesh, finding no resistance, no obstacle, nothing to bounce off or refract through. My hand was a window. Light passed through me the way it passed through the boarded-up glass in the abandoned wing.

I sat like that for a long time. Hand raised, moonlight passing through, the bones of my fingers invisible against the silver glow. The room was silent. The castle was silent. The vampires were sleeping in their coffins and the guards were at their posts and the world was going on without me, a nineteen-year-old girl sitting in the dark, watching her own body disappear.

The question came without warning. The kind of question that sits in the back of your mind for weeks, waiting for the right moment to surface—when you're tired enough, scared enough, honest enough to let it out.

If my fingers were transparent now... what about the rest of me?

I looked at my hand. The index finger was gone—fully transparent, the bone invisible, the whole thing a ghost in the moonlight. The middle finger was next, the transparency spreading up from the tip, the joints disappearing one by one. The ring finger was halfway. The pinky was starting.

What happened when it reached my hand? My wrist? My arm? My shoulder? My chest?

What happened when the last piece of me was transparent enough for the light to pass through?

Would I become light? Would the sun go through me and come out the other side, and would I just be a column of light where a girl used to be? Or would I disappear entirely—not into light, but into nothing, the way a candle goes out when the wax runs out, the flame flickering once and then gone, leaving only smoke and the smell of burnt wick?

I lowered my hand. Pressed it against my chest. Felt my heartbeat—steady, strong, the pulse of a body that was still here, still counting, still holding on.

But for how long?

The moon moved. The light shifted. The shadow of my hand on the wall changed shape—fewer fingers, fewer bones, the outline getting thinner and thinner, like a sketch being erased by an invisible hand.

I lay back. Stared at the ceiling. The moonlight crept across the stone, slow and patient, the way it always moved—like it had all the time in the world.

I didn't.

The silence in the room was thick, the kind that presses against your eardrums and makes you aware of every sound your body makes—the heartbeat, the breathing, the blood moving through veins that were getting thinner by the day. I listened to all of it. Catalogued it. Filed it away in the journal that sat under my mattress, next to the tally marks and the numbers and the slow, steady countdown that I couldn't stop.

My hand rested on my chest. Transparent. Warm. Still mine.

For now.