Creche (Book II of Paranormal Fallen Angels/Vampires Series) (18 page)

“Sorry—it is always enough.”

“Skylar!”
I started.

“I cannot leave you. The Council bound me to watch you, remember.” She came and settled beside me. Her wet eyelashes glittered in the moonlight, a crescent of stars.

“They all know, don’t they—the Council, the other Crèches.” I reached for her hand. “They all know what I am to you.”

“The Councilors know, yes. The congregation likely suspects. Your mother predicted many things. Her oracles told of the formation of Milandor too, and of things that are perhaps still to come.”

“Yet she never predicted my father.”

Skylar closed her eyes for a second and gripped my hand. “No one predicted that.”

“If the Swan is right, if the Maker is watching, how is any of this able to happen? How could it go so wrong?”

“The Maker is mysterious, or we are fallible. I do not know.” She laid her head on my shoulder. “I know only what I feel in my heart.”

I squeezed her hand. “And I in mine. Yet what can my heart offer you? You are light and peace where I am darkness and shame. My heart will be too heavy for you to carry until I have freed Sabine. Until I have killed Beltran.” 

Her lips quivered, as if she were biting back words, then she nodded almost imperceptibly. “That is what love is, Ame. A light through the darkness and a hand to lift a lover’s burden. I have seen you love. Perhaps there is more light in you than you know?”

I thought of my incandescence at her touch, but still I shook my head. “I cannot risk you.” I kissed her brow. “I must do this alone.”

“I understand your...” Her breath caught a little. “Your ... obligation to Sabine ... or is it love?”

“It is both,” I admitted. “What I felt with you...” I shook my head. “I have felt nothing like it before. But to ask you to help me, to wait for me—both would be unfair. I cannot ask you to revive Sabine, loving her as I do, growing to love you as I have.” As the words left my mouth, I knew that there was no growing. I loved her. I knew it as surely as the wind knew every inch of the glade we sat in. I loved her with a wild terror that warned me I had never truly loved before her, and I would never love again after her. It was undeniable. Only my mind would deny it to spare the dishonor admitting such a love would bring.

Her eyes looked too large for her face, twin sorrowful moons each with a private lunar sea to drown me in.

“I will wait for you, Amedeo. I must. It is fated.”

I could not reply; my voice would not come.

“Let me help you,” she pleaded again. “Our path is the same. I, too, wish to see Sabine saved. The
Cruximus
speaks of the Sphinx as an ally in ridding the Earth of Vampires forever. If that is true, we might live in peace, Amedeo. We might bear children and live to raise them together.” She took up my hand again, and I watched as she brought it, brown and trembling, up against the paleness of her cheek. She rubbed her lips against my palm and kissed each knuckle tenderly, but her sadness had not passed.

Her dream called to me: a place at peace, free from all pain.

“You have loved Sabine well,” she whispered. “Fate is your only crime. Even if you love her still, you were made for me and I for you. This is the Swan. This is what it is, Ame. It brings us to love so suddenly, so completely, as if on wings, that we may soar together for a lifetime.”

I bent my head, my hand firm as I returned her grasp. “I cannot soar with you, Skylar,” I murmured. “Not yet. I can only sink until I awaken Sabine.”

We sat there in silence for hours, she and I, our hands entwined, our bodies aglow with love, until the poplars and Cypresses and firs on the hillside were burnished by the approach of dawn. When the night finally set upon our love, we made our way back to the Eyrie.

“Y
ou should bathe,” Skylar suggested as we entered the cave. My new knowledge of the Swan had set a barrier between us, a gravitas that found us both grateful for activity—anything to keep our minds off the luminescence we had shared in the glade.

Upon entering the Eyrie, my gaze had lingered on the nest for an instant, as had hers, before we both turned away, embarrassed. I had never felt so awkward here, so out of place.

She left the room as I undressed, and once I had stepped into the pool, she returned with a bowl of dried fruit, flowers, and nuts.

Hungry as I was, it was not fruit I craved but blood. The urge to hunt was cresting like a wave inside me. While the light had emanated from me, I had thought I might never hunger again. Thought I would never want for anything but her. Now that the light had faded, I thirsted for blood with an ache that dried my throat and sapped my veins.

“Haemil?” I enquired hoarsely, but she shook her head.

“Only for Crèche rites. It will be many weeks before the Feast of Remembrance.” She stared at me intently for a minute, as if thinking.

“Here,” she said. Turning her back, she slipped out of her clothes.

I looked away from her nudity, but almost immediately the water displaced as she slid into the pool beside me, so close that the water seemed to tingle around me. I wondered if we might both shine again and the pool glow translucently with us.

She moved closer, close enough for the terror of my passion to return. If I could have, I might have leaped back, but the wall was already at my back. I felt the softness of her breasts where they met my chest, but she did not touch me otherwise except to lay her head on my shoulder, her neck close to my lips.

“I am yours, Ame,” she murmured, not seductively but truthfully—as she always spoke. “I have always been yours. Drink from me.”

“Skylar!” This time, it was not her nearness that scared me, nor even her words, but the thought of the act itself. “Haemil is forbidden. Surely such a thing is a crime.”

She looked surprised, a half-smile on her lips. “This is not forbidden. It is a gift Cruxim may offer only to their betrothed.” She raised herself on her tiptoes and pressed her neck to my lips. “Drink.”

Never had it occurred to me that I might do so, not in all the long hours with my body curled around hers and her skin on my lips. Something in it felt like sin.

"It is offered freely.”
She seemed wounded. Memories of Joslyn—the intensity of her blood coursing through my veins, the force needed to make myself stop, to resist—made me pause.

I will bless the Lord at all times; his praise shall continually be in my mouth ... The angel of the Lord encampeth about them that fear him, and deliver them.
Danette’s prayer whispered in my brain, followed by the sweet memory of her blood, turned sour. I had been unable to stop. Even if Danette had suddenly begged me to, I knew I would not have. The lure of her blood had been too strong.

“What if...? I felt my body tensing, hardening, at the sensation of her nipples firm against my chest, of her flesh so near. My lips brushed up her neck. Discovering a pearl earlobe, I kissed it tenderly, despite myself. “Skylar ... what if I cannot stop?”

She pulled back, her earlobe sliding from between my lips, and I knew she had read my thoughts and that they angered her.

“I am not a Vampire, Ame ... nor a Sphinx. I am as strong as you. If you cannot control yourself, I will control you.”

But I saw the doubt in her eyes.
You already do,
came my thoughts.
I am here. I cannot resist you.

I reached for her again, and she offered me her neck, but when my lips met her skin, it was not to bite. Fangs bared, I hesitated, and my kisses sought the hollow of her throat, where her breath fluttered.

I craved more than her blood—her bones, her core, her breath.

At her throat, the leather thong of the silver-tipped feather she wore stopped me. I wanted to kiss the empty space where its plume tickled the cleft between her breasts, to feel the prod of her nipples against my hungry tongue, but when I brought my hands up to remove it, she stopped me. Instead, she guided my lips to the point below her jaw, where her pulse beckoned.

“I cannot live with your guilt, Ame, and nor can you,” she cautioned. “I will make love to you only when you are mine alone.” Her tone was wistful.

“Skylar,” I groaned. Around us, the water turned to molten gold as I gleamed. “I cannot control myself.” I slid my hands up the curves of her body, over hips and waist and breasts.

Her voice, though thick in her throat, was soft as the coo of doves as she pushed my hands away. “You must, Ame,” she murmured. “We must. Now drink.”

She barely flinched as I broke the skin, but when my teeth and tongue met her vein, she shuddered and then relaxed, softening into my steady sucking until only her nipples remained firm against my chest. Blood gushed into my mouth, wild and natural, unfiltered and free, and so fast that it seemed like liquid light. Its beat was erratic, drums and cymbals and a strange humming crescendo that made me realize I was glowing again while she had turned as pale and cold as a corpse. My fangs released too quickly, and with a gulp that burned all the way down my throat, I pushed her away in horror. Silver hair swirled around us in the water as she sank.

“Skylar. Skylar!” I clutched her limp body up and shook her.

What have I done?

Hers eyes flickered half-open, her smile weak but radiant. Slowly, a pale light returned to her face and some of the weight returned to her body. “You enjoyed me,” she murmured.

It was all I could do not to shake her, she had alarmed me so. “You said you would control me!” I panted.

“I did.” Gray eyes gleamed triumphantly. She leaned up to find my lips, her tongue gentling out mine and becoming more insistent as her strength returned and as she tasted her own blood there. “There is so much more to come, my Swan,” she whispered when she pulled away. She kissed away a trickle of blood at the corner of my lips and added with a laugh, “You are still so very messy.”

I remembered the Vampire in the alley in Athens, and how precise and clean Skylar’s kill had been.

“Yes. Someone was supposed to be teaching me how to draw blood cleanly.”

She threw her head back, and her laughter rippled the surface of the pool; all of the careful guards she employed to keep her face impassive were off duty.  She glowed.

“That Cruxim has been busy.”

“Busy, yes,” I muttered, despite my honor, trying to pull her closer, desperate to feel the heat of her again through the cooling water. “But what activity could make a proper Cruxim too busy to teach me how to kill like she does?”

“A proper Cruxim has been too busy teaching you how to live,” she said gravely. She leaped out gracefully, onto the pool’s edge. “Enough play. Hop out and sleep! When we are rested, I will teach you how to kill.”

“I have killed all my life. Have pity, Skylar, come back and teach me how to love,” I wheedled, catching her around the waist and trying to pull her back in. She pushed at my chest, beat her wings, and wriggled free to flap back out of my reach.

“Only your soul can teach you that, Amedeo,” she said, more seriously than my play had warranted.

Confused by her sudden change in tone, I said nothing. I simply followed her from the pool and into the warmth of the nest and the sanctity of sleep.

When I awoke many hours later, night was falling and I was alone in the nest. I sat up, seeking out Skylar. She had turned her back to me to dress in doeskin trousers with silver stitching and a white corset that left her shoulders bare. It cinched in her waist and breasts. As she spun to face me, she looked petite and elfin, all wings and hair and hips, with the bruise of my fangs at her throat like a gaudy rose. Something about the way she dressed so quickly made me think she was angry. Had I drunk too much? Was there something else I should have done? Should I have returned the favor? Had she wanted more from me than the deep sleep we had both fallen into, bodies entwined, as soon as we entered the nest.

“Thank you,” I whispered, my eyes on her bruised throat.

“Do not thank me for that, Amedeo,” she said. Her eyes blazed as she reached up and snapped the thong that tied the feather at her throat. Tossing the pendant into the open mouth of a conch shell on the shelf, she said, “Never thank me for that.”

I knew not what to say to calm her as I climbed out of the pool and began to dress. The buttons on my cotton shirt were small and carved from deer antler, and as I fumbled with them I noticed the scars on my chest had faded to the worn silver of a stretch mark. I traced them with a fingertip, wondering, wanting to share this change with Skylar and to ask her how it might have happened, but her strangeness cautioned me not to speak. I gave up on the buttons, hoping she might comment on it, but she did not, and a quick, unexpected rage welled inside me. She had turned from fire to ice so quickly. How could she dismiss me while I still felt as full and heavy as a tick with the gift of her blood?

"It is not my blood that weighs on you. There is no weight I would lay upon you, Ame, except that of my own body. I offer you only lightness. It is the stone in your heart returned to sink you with it.”

I wanted to snarl back at her that there was no such thing. Honor alone bound to me Sabine. Perhaps it always had.

I wanted to scream at Skylar that my heart was hers, all hers. She could cut it out and hang it like a feather at her breast, if she so desired, but I was interrupted by the sound of wings on the balcony.

“Enter, Daneo,” Skylar called. Her words were punctuated with the snap of the silver cuffs she fastened on her wrists. 

Daneo’s cold eyes took in my part-open shirt and the constellation of silver scars on my chest. He frowned. One eyebrow, escaping the scowl, quirked at Skylar in question as his eyes loitered on the blood-red mark at her throat.

Ignoring him, she pulled knee-high boots of soft white leather on over her trousers.

“Skylar, Rosario has brought the stone.”

“Thank you, Daneo.” Straightening, she smoothed her hair back into a high, gleaming knot on the top of her head. “Bring it to him.”

But her mind spoke words only for me:
“So you see, it is true. Your stone has returned.”