Creche (Book II of Paranormal Fallen Angels/Vampires Series) (11 page)

“If it is selfish to want to protect those you love, to keep them safe, then I am afraid of what you must think of me,” I said softly. “Both for wanting it and for failing at it.” As I settled beside her on the rough stone, my fingers brushed hers where she leaned on the bench.

“They are selfish,” she insisted, moving her hand away. “You are driven by the desire to destroy Vampires. For Jania—for all of Milandor it seems—there is no need.”

I shook my head. “It is hibernating. Sleeping. They have not vanquished it.” I was speaking of myself, but I hoped it to be true.

“I hope so.” She sighed. “Milandor is a mighty Crèche now, bigger than Silvenhall even. How can we hope for victory while they sit sipping each other’s blood and convince fledgling Cruxim to join them?”

Jania’s defection from the Council had hurt her more than I realized.

“Our enemy grows in number while we shrink.” She sounded defeated.

“Have hope,” I told her. “We do not shrink. Our population is constrained.” It was a strange word, but it had once been Sabine’s and the thought comforted me. What had she said? I searched my mind, but her exact words were gone, and only that one remained. “We live, we have a child, we die.”

Skylar’s face crumpled suddenly. The sight of tears glittering in her eyes shocked me. I had never seen her so animate.

“It is our Crux.”

I put my hand over hers, alarmed for her.

“Do you not feel it then?” she asked.

“Feel what?”

“The desire for a child?” Her voice was small and impossibly soft in the darkness.

Ah, and there is the kernel of her anger
.

Another memory tugged at me, not of Sabine or of revenge but something softer, something lighter—something altogether more urgent. Azure eyes. Tiny arms outstretched.

“No,” I said. “No.” I shook my head, gripped by a visceral fear. “What could I teach a son but how to die? What could I teach a daughter but how to grieve the loss of her mother?”

“You could teach them how to live.”

We were silent for a time. I leaned back against the stone, thinking of Joslyn’s words, all those centuries ago, about the convent, her anxieties about being cloistered.
They are not so different, these two women,
I thought, glancing at Skylar. Her head was back against the wall, her face framed by a halo of hair.

“You never did say it.” I broke the silence.

She cocked her head.

“The Swan they spoke of in the Council, you never told me what they meant by it.”

It coaxed a small smile, but her mood was still somber. “The Swan is a ... it is nothing.”

I squeezed her hand, preventing her from pulling it away. “Tell me. Please.”

“It predicts who will pair-bond with whom.”

“A bird?” It sounded ridiculous. I couldn’t help but laugh.

I saw the white flash of Skylar’s smile in the semi-darkness. “A bird? No.” She laughed. “It is known as the Swan because ... swans, too, mate for life. The Sibylim tell us who will be betrothed and make a record of it, sometimes even before the lovers are born.”

“Betrothed so they might love one another so fully, so faithfully, that they create orphans to weep for them. It seems callous.”

I had thought to be consoling, but Skylar glared at me, her face flushed. “Jania might say the same.”

“How can they tell who someone will love?” I scoffed. “It’s as if it is a transaction, like a carriage-man at the markets arranging to breed a mare.”

“It is an oracle.” I could hear her slow inhalation. I had exasperated her again. “But sometimes a Messenger may know it themselves. I am a Messenger,” her voice softened. “Sometimes I know.”

“You mean the Maker. He tells you who should love whom?”

“No.” She put her hand to her chest. “The heart tells me. The Sibylim visit a holy grove to make the oracle. Once, it was in Delphi, but since your mother—”

I sighed. “Again?”

“Hear me out. Now, they do not leave Cascadia. The oracles tell us which hands will meet. Which are destined.”

“From birth?” The
pffttt
of my escaping breath was loud in the silence.

“Sometimes before.” She jumped off the ledge. “But why waste time with histories you will not believe?”

S
he did not speak to me again until we reached the glade. We found it filled with mountain deer, dainty, curious, big-eyed things that rushed up to Skylar expectantly.

“You feed them.” I gestured to the insistent way they followed her.

“No, many others before me, but I would not let this orphaned one die.” The young doe nudged her again, bleating. “It meant milking the others to feed her. But we are all shepherds, or were once. You will learn that soon enough.”

“Shepherds?”

A line of deer following her, she walked to a gnarled tree and removed a pail that hung from one of the higher branches.

I watched her calm a doe, gentling its ears with one hand until it let her place the pail underneath so that she might milk it. The orphan approached me and nuzzled my hand. Its lips were warm against my palm. How long had it been since I had touched an animal that wasn’t a bat? The black mare at St Martin de Re, I supposed. It felt good that the deer did not shy away from me but trusted me as it did her.

“I thought we were swans,” I said, still wondering what she meant by shepherds.

Skylar laughed. “Patience, Amedeo. It will all come in time.”

And I had time—a month at least. Would she make me wait for every scrap of information?

“Kisana told me you all learn the
Cruximus
by rote.” I kept my eyes on the deer. “You know the Sphinx’s riddle, but you won’t reveal it.” My eyes called her on her lie.

She looked up at me sharply and then took the half-full pail and helped the orphan drink from it, focused on the doe’s greedy sucking.

“Patience,” she cautioned. “You will not be permitted to read the
Cruximus
or to hear the oracle of the Sphinx until they are sure of you and until you have made a blood-troth. They do not trust you yet.”

“Yet you do?”

She let the deer lick a smear of milk from the back of her hand before stroking its back. It shook itself to fend her off and skittered away, kicking its dappled rump in the air. “I know you better,” she said finally.

“You
think
you know me better.”

Her head snapped up like a deer’s, nostrils flared. “And what do you know, Amedeo? In all the centuries you have lived, what has eternity taught you?”

Her voice remained calm despite her words, which maddened me.

“Not to trust those who lie to me.” I lashed out, although I could not tell why I felt the need. “And sorrow.”

She sighed and watched the deer graze. “You are a deep well,” she said eventually. “One must take care not to drown in such a well, or in one’s own sorrows. Perhaps I should not have brought you here, but if you will let me, I might teach you more than the Sphinx’s riddle. Might be I could teach you happiness. Silvenhall was a happy place ... once. It might be again.”

The sky was beginning to lighten at the horizon, tipping the steep pillars of rock with bronze and rose.

Tiredness overtook me. Why did I continue to challenge her? She was right: maybe she should not have brought me here. I glanced across at her, at the dawn light that struck her face. Her expression was serene, unreadable. I envied her that. Was it happiness, I wondered, or something else? Trust? Faith? She seemed to know her fate before it found her. I fought at my fate and the bleak fates of others. Maybe she was right. I had been too much alone, too unhappy. A pit of sorrows. Yet whose fault was that but Silvenhall’s? And had I made fewer mistakes than she?

I stole another glance in her direction. If she was listening to my thoughts, her face did not betray her eavesdropping. She had wronged me by bringing me here, and she was keeping more from me, but despite it I felt drawn to her. I saw little kindness for me in this place, but for her. Could she be happiness too?

I shook my head. I had known happiness once, hadn’t I? And it was not in a Crèche. It was in letters tucked under my pillow, in passionfruit, and in poetry. Sabine’s wings above me, her rumble of laughter. All of those things were happy.

“And complicated.”

Skylar had been in my thoughts again, and I heard hers as clearly as a bell.

“How irritating that is!” I snapped, setting off alone down a stone path that led to a copse of wild lemons.

“I am sorry. I do not mean to irritate you.”
Her thoughts penetrated my head.

“Then what?” I spun to look at her. “To lecture me?”

She moved to a round, flat stone set into the ground and slid it sideways, revealing a well. The chain squeaked as she lowered the bucket. When she drew it up again, the water was so cold that a tendril of white mist curled from it. Hoisting the bucket to her hip, she set off away from me, water sloshing down the sides, until she poured it into a stone trough nearby.

“Only to help you,” she said as the deer flocked around her to drink. “As I help others.”

“And this helps? You patronize me. You treat me like a fledgling. You teach me like a schoolmarm.”

Her face crumpled for a moment, and she bowed her head. “I am sorry. I have never had to teach Cruxim lore to one who knows it not. Here, it is instilled from birth. It is in everything we do. How else should I teach you but by abiding by the lore? How should I please you without bringing about my own exile? Tell me, Amedeo, that I might teach you more kindly. Must I let you go, and Silvenhall with you?”

Shame washed through me. “I am sorry.” I hung my head. I wanted to tell her yes, to leave. “I am grateful, but Sabine’s anchorstone sits in Delphi while the riddle I sought is here. You know it. You hear my thoughts.” I coughed. “And yet you keep yours hidden from me. You keep the riddle from me, and much more. Why must I wait?”

“You heard Shintaro. You must wait.”

“A month.” I raised my voice. “Do you know how many corpses they might turn in a month?”

“Still it is so. What good would the riddle be to you here while that month passes? No good at all, even if you knew how to interpret it.”

“I deciphered the other.” I sat on a boulder and frowned.

“With my help.”

“Fine. With your help.” I folded my arms across my chest.

After dropping the empty bucket back down into the well, Skylar put her hand out to me. “If you would flee me and Silvenhall, I cannot stop you. But you are tired, as am I. Let us rest.”

“Who will watch me while you sleep?”

“None but me and my trust in you.”

I climbed to my feet. “Brave—to trust one such as I when no one else will.”

“Yes, or foolish,” she answered. The words were another echo of my past.

You are brave,
came my thoughts. I was the foolish one: for following her here and for already caring for her too much to flee.

“W
here shall we sleep?” I asked. Nowhere had I seen huts or shelters, villas or houses. I glanced at the treetops, but there was nothing there either but sunlight filtering through leaves.

“Let me show you the Eyries.”

Skylar turned away from the glade toward the cliff and then flew upward to where spurs of rock shot skyward to lonely heights. Caves formed faces in the stone. Carved into the cliff face were staircases and slides, all intricately functional. Stone deer, their antlers mossy with age, leaped from the staircases. Fauns and centaurs cavorted on the bannisters and lintels. I searched for the lithe, winged beauty of a Sphinx, but there were none.

“Here.” Skylar alighted on a cedar balcony garlanded with vines and clinging honeysuckle. A film of silk covered the entrance to the cave beyond.

Only more stone pillars, jutting heavenward, broke the blank blue of the sky.

“It is magical.”

“The Eyries,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Where we make our nests.”

I laughed. “You sleep in nests?” As soon as I said it, I wondered why it seemed so odd to me. I had curled up with owls as a lonely boy. I had plucked out my own feathers to shield me from the cold stone floor of Sezanne’s tower.

Skylar’s laugh could almost have been the call of a songbird, the way it rang through the Eyries. “Of course,” she said when it stopped. “How do you sleep? How do you dream if not in a nest?”

“In a bed.”

“You have been too much around mortals, Amedeo.” She tugged at my hand. “Try a nest. You might find it to your liking.”

Inside, the room was not so dark that I could not tell it was an antechamber. Its stony walls were carved too. Gryphons and fairies and crosses, embracing angels, and necking swans. It must have taken eons.

“Time is something we Cruxim have on our side.” She gestured to the sculpture.

“Stop that!”

“Sorry. You think me rude, but in Silvenhall, if your thoughts are not masked, we think nothing of hearing them.”

“I do not know how to mask them.”

Again her laughter.
“Yes. It is an unceasing wonder.”
She raised an eyebrow.

“For you, perhaps.”

“For me, yes.”
She moved away from me to a recess in the wall at the far side of the room, where she slipped off her kidskin boots.