Number Three

Chapter 2: Rosewater

Rosewater is a beautiful town, but hardly anyone lives there.  I guess when your neighbor is Transylvania people don’t care about some small town a little over fifty miles away from it.  Rosewater is so small and insignificant that you would never find it on any map.  I tried to find it many times to no avail.  Like I said, Count Dracula is much more interesting than a town of 250 people.  It may be small, but Rosewater is very beautiful.  There are many rolling, green hills, and too many different species of wildflowers to count.  Mountains stand tall and majestic off in the distance, but they are close enough to see the snow on each peak and watch the mountain goats romp around.  Everything is full of color, and there is always a smile on everyone’s faces.  Everyone knows everyone else, but are not all related, as the case can be for many small towns.  The vampires tend to stay away from us because they have absolutely no idea we even exist.  They’re too busy terrorizing the Transylvanians and the rest of the world’s population.  It also helps that Rosewater is under an old enchantment that makes it completely hidden to everyone unless they happen to walk right through it.  No one has come through the barrier for almost three hundred years.

            The last person to go through and discover Rosewater was the Count Dracula himself.  He had thought he destroyed or turned everyone in the town, so he never attempted to return again or send one of his minions.  But Dracula was wrong.  One family made it out alive, and one friend of theirs survived because they were out of town at the time.  Before they returned, they had heard about what happened to Rosewater, so when they decided it was safe to go back, they took others with them to start the town over.  They succeeded.  Before the attack, Rosewater had a population of close to 2,500.  They were only able to build it back up to around ten times less than that, but the town survived and prospered, nonetheless.

            My favorite part of the town was a small hill just outside the barrier that protects it.  There were so many flowers and little creatures that lived there, and the view from the top was spectacular.  The first time my parents saw me sitting out there, they were ready to kill me.  They told me how they didn’t think I could be so irresponsible and stupid as to threaten not only my life, but also the lives of the entire town.  After that, the only way to go out to my hill was in secret.  And to protect myself I built a shelter underneath it with a secret door on the side.  I even built a tunnel that lead to the part of town no one ever went to so I wouldn’t be caught when I came up.  Whenever I saw a vampire flying by overhead, I would run to the door and take the tunnel back underneath the barrier so I wouldn’t be seen  I was never caught coming up from my tunnel, and I was confident that I would never be caught outside the barrier.

I was wrong.