“Where does it say we are?”
Cat-witch Esmerelda searches some more. “Rosehaven.”
“Rose *Heaven*?” Mid-Hazel responds, perhaps in jest.
“Haven. Like a place of rest.”
“Rose Haven, then. Is that two words?”
“One. Rosehaven,” she says quicker.
“We’ll make it two to separate it from the locals. Won’t know where to look for it when we make our reports.”
Esmerelda the cat-witch stopped typing. “Shouldn’t we ask them first?” She looked around the face but not directly into those always scary, dead white eyes of hers. Never the eyes, or not for very long anyways. She could still feel them boring into her like steely beams of hate.
“I do not wish to confront the ruler of this land to ask that question. Unless you have other suggestions.” Mid-Hazel didn’t want suggestions. She wanted obedience. Esmerelda shook her head. “No ma’am. No suggestions. No *more*.”
Mid-Hazel then nodded, pleased in the moment. She looked out the window at the freshly fallen snow. She could hide here for a while; make this a hideaway until the hubbub about the Bellisaria murders calmed down. The bodies kept heaping up as she looked around and saw more enter the room where she just committed the first. Did Jenny Lind plan to have a *party* tonight? she asked as she stabbed some more. It was a rhetorical question. Obviously she did in some manner. 1-2-3-4, then the 5th to top it off. All Orange that one was. Mid-Hazel figured Aldebaran as a home planet. Aliens in Our Second Lyfe. She’d heard of such things, of course, but never this close up. And orange blood as well: hard to tell where the wound stopped and the person began; All Orange indeed. She carted them out to the garden for burial, not knowing the gardener was due the next day to reseed the roses. Soon enough, the top of an orange finger stuck out of the ground. Aldebaronians were extremely hard to kill, and had the ability to heal themselves to a remarkable degree. Mid-Hazel didn’t know that fact. The finger clawed and clawed and got another orange finger free, then the 2 worked in concert to free another, and then the 3 another, and then the 4 another, the 5th. All Orange had emerged. The hapless gardener took her place in the makeshift grave. All Orange was a killer as well. She had faked her own death to get revenge.
“Rose Heaven?” she asked her typing assistant later at a different but not dissimilar location, another witch hideout.
“Haven,” the assistant responded. Perfect.
Sunklands 