Creche (Book II of Paranormal Fallen Angels/Vampires Series) (23 page)

“‘Your brother stole your blood, just as he now thieves the blood of others,’ the Maker told Abel, whose wings shone white and whose beauty was enhanced by the glow of his resurrection.

“‘In return, you shall take his blood as vengeance and in the name of justice. I task you with pursuing him and with destroying him. For as I vowed that I would not kill Cain, so shall you vow that you will. As Cain is immortal, so shall you be immortal. And in the same way that he drinks from your fellow man will you drink from him and destroy him. I will call you Cruxim, for the Crux I have given you to bear, and I shall reward you with the gift of giving life. However, so that never again might brother be pitted against brother so cruelly, your kind shall not know siblings. When you bear a son, your term of service shall end, your immortality shall cease, and you shall be afforded eternal respect in my house and in the house of your angelic forebears. When a female among you bears a daughter, she shall sacrifice her life for the life of her daughter. When I call you, Cruxim, you shall hear me and obey me.’

“Abel wept then, for he knew he had been granted a divine honor but also that justice was a harsh master.

“‘Where, Maker, shall I find the courage to kill my brother Cain, for I loved him and love him still because we shared the same womb?’ Abel cried.

“‘I shall give you the courage and the strength and the will,’ the Maker told him. ‘Vengeance, duty, and desire shall be your weapons.’

“‘And how shall I make these sons and daughters?’ Abel cried. ‘For I am alone and the only creature of my kind.’

“‘No, Abel,’ the Maker answered. ‘You are never alone. Just as I made your mother, Eve, for Adam, I shall make for you a partner. Like you, she shall bear wings and like you, she shall be faithful, and she will ease your troubles and bear your children as well as your burden. And as Cain has had bats to assist him, so shall I create loyal allies to fight beside you.’” She stopped reading and looked at me again. “And so it was that the first Cruxim were made.”

I was silent. From far below came the sullen drip of water, somewhere deep in the stone, and the slow breath of the ocean.

“Cruxim are nothing but his blade of hatred. Made only to avenge Lucifer and Cain,” I said. In that moment, I hated what I was more than ever. Was it any wonder I was so torn, my body doing battle with my mind? Cruxim and Vampire. Mother and Father tearing each other to shreds inside me.

My mouth was dry with the thought I might never be free of this thirst for death. This confusion. This loneliness. Or perhaps I would—when I had a son, who would also be filled with the wrath of the Maker and an insatiable lust for revenge.

“And to protect humans,” Skylar added. “Do not forget that we are also His first object of redemption.”

“I would rather the dust,” I answered her. “There is nothing for me. Now even vengeance will be bitter.” I sat gazing out at the horizon. “There is no redemption. There is nothing!” I felt the tendons in my wings tug tightly. “What else can there be?”

I dropped off the ledge and scooped up Sabine’s stone in my arms.

“There is love,” Skylar cried after me as I let the weight of the stone plunge me down and away.

“Not like this,” I replied. “Not built on lies and secrets, riddles and deceit.”

“Amedeo,” Skylar called plaintively, as if an arrow had struck her side. She swooped after me, pushing the
Cruximus
into the crook formed where my arms clutched the anchorstone to my chest.

“Take it. I took it for you. If you must leave me, and if you cannot save Sabine, at least save yourself. Solve the Sphinx’s riddle. Lift the Crux. Free yourself from this curse of vengeance.”

The
Cruximus
, the repository of so much pain over so long. I felt an urge to let the book plummet down, down, down, into the sea, until I remembered what else was down there: Sabine, encased in her heavy shell of gold. Perhaps if the riddle could free her, it would be enough. Perhaps that alone might absolve me. Even if she hated me, I would have freed her from the loneliness I was destined to suffer.

My eyes met Skylar’s one last time. Had I not been hugging the stone and the book so firmly to my chest, I might have taken her in my arms and kissed away her tears and cried for the secrets that had come between us. Instead, I stared at her beautiful face and my lips moved to speak but no words would come.

Was it possible to outfly my own demons?
I wondered as I winged away to the west.

I
soared on and on, not knowing where to go, dragging Sabine’s stone with me until I came to a place my heart knew. From above, it was little changed. A lonely brook, a ruined castle, and the Convent dels Àngels high on the hillside, brooding over orange orchards and rows of rosemary.

I descended and slumped down, panting, among the debris of the castle I had visited often with Joslyn. My thoughts were heavier than the stone I cradled in my arms, and my tears pooled in Sabine’s partly open marble mouth.

When I gazed at the stone now, I wondered if I had truly seen Sabine at all. She seemed so foreign to me, a noble animal unburdened by the Maker’s curses. What would she think of me, revealed for what I was? The sun turned the tears upon my face to salt. Much as I kissed the marble lips, Sabine did not awaken within her stone to hear my sorrows.

It was not until evening threatened to fall, and I kissed the lips once more before setting my dark head against the pale curls of marble, that Sabine awoke. A growl issued from the solid lips. For a moment, I thought the warmth on my face was the tip of her protruding tongue; then I saw that it was a tear, milky in color, slowly setting to stone as it rolled from one marble eye.

Around the lump in my throat, I whispered her name.

A blink of recognition answered.

Finally, she said, “Even sleeping, I hear, Ame.” Her words sounded hollow, as if they bounced around inside the rock, rather than being tethered there.

I jolted up, head to my hands. “You have heard what I am. What must I do, Sabine?”

“What you have always done.”

It was like her, to be so sensible. My response was to pace before her and answer with a disbelieving laugh. “What I have always done is kill them, but I did so believing it was good and holy and true.” I looked out over the field to the brook. “All along that has been a lie. I am as unholy, as damned, as the rest of them.”

“You are the same Amedeo you were yesterday. Nothing has changed but for knowing.”

A tremor in her voice told me it was lip service. I knew how much she hated them.

My pacing increased in urgency. “How can you say that? Everything has changed.
I
have changed.”

“We all change.” Stone eyes followed my predictable movements. “Look at me.” Her eyes swiveled to the place where her hindquarters should have been.

“And that, too, is my fault,” I raged. “You and Joslyn and Danette and Evedra, and now Skylar—how many other lives have I destroyed?” My eyes alighted on the crumbling wall before us, remembering it taller. Beltran had clung to it, laughing savagely as Joslyn, naked and bleeding and smelling of sex and rosemary and regrets, cried on the stone floor.

“What is this place?” Sabine snapped suddenly, and her stone eyelids crinkled with distrust. “You have been here before.”

I dropped to my knees, replaying over in my head the last night of Joslyn’s humanity. “Yes,” I admitted. “It is where I first met Beltran.”

Sabine’s emerald eyes shifted in their stony sockets to take in the wall and the floor and the chasm my last visit here had rent in my heart.

“It is where you lost her.” Her carved lips did not move over the words but her eyes flashed.

Yes. But she could have been mine all along,
I despaired.
I was a Vampire, just as she was. I need never have lost her.

In a whisper, Sabine said gruffly, “I wish you had left me at Silvenhall, or with your other love on that rocky shelf. Even with the sea I am now so used to would have hurt less. Anywhere but here. There are too many ghosts.”

She hates me
. I tortured myself.
She knows I loved Joslyn. She knows about Skylar and the betrothal. Everything. She knows what I am, and she hates me for it, just as I hate myself. I am a monster—just like them.

“Never like them,” Sabine growled.

I looked away, embarrassed. Each thought of Joslyn and of Skylar must have felt like a knife to her heart.

“I hear everything when I am one with the stone,” she elaborated. “But a woman hears a man’s words most clearly when he is saying goodbye.” Another milky tear spilled from her eye.

I bowed my head and stopped my pacing to go to her, stroking the marble back. “I am sorry ... for all the hurts I gave you.”

“It hurts more that Skylar hears your thoughts and forgives them, when I cannot.” A great sorrow seemed to seep from the stone out into the coming twilight. “You can fly from her, Ame, but still she understands you. And your heart hurries to hers as surely as it slinks away from mine.”

I swallowed. “No one understands me, least of all myself. And I have never slunk away from you. I am here for you. I am here to awaken you.”

“You are wrong,” Sabine answered coolly. “You are here to awaken yourself.” Her tone gentled. “Do not punish yourself. Skylar will forgive you ... when I cannot. She knows you loved Joslyn, and she loves you anyway ... when I cannot. She knows what you are, Amedeo, and she loves you anyway ... when I cannot. ”

“Sabine, do not say that.” I snatched up the
Cruximus
from where it had fallen on the stone floor. I shook it at her. “I have the Sphinx’s riddle. I will free you.”

Her growl was laced with pain. Beyond the ruins, the setting sun turned the Valencias to forbidden golden fruit. “It is better that you leave. Leave me here, in this place where you loved Joslyn more fully than you ever loved anyone until Skylar,” she growled.

Her stone eyelids closed, and when she opened them again her growl had dropped to a pained whisper. “Do not make it easy, Ame. Leave me my hurt so that I might remember you have always been something between an angel and a devil.”

“Sabine,” I cried, but her eyes were blank and her marble teeth were bared.

“I love you,” I insisted to the empty sky and the even emptier-seeming stone, stroking the tear that had already set to stone on her cheek.

You lie,
my heart told me.

The growl that issued from the icy stone suggested that I always had.

S
he had instructed me to go, yet I defied her and stayed. When I finally slept, my head resting upon her cool, marble shoulder, it was to escape the pain of living. I found little solace in it. I dreamed of blood staining the Earth, spreading out around me, withering everything and everyone, and when I awoke, once more the darkness claimed me as its own and the rage in me returned.

I was hungry. I had not eaten for days. Bloodlust rose in me and rankled me. What it asked disgusted me. How could I gorge myself on Vampires now? In a vain attempt to flee from my growing hunger, I flew out into the enveloping evening. 

The brook slithered dark as the snake of time, centuries worth, below me. As I had centuries before, I felt pitted and alone, as hollow as the half-shell of sky above. I had nowhere to go. The only places that had ever felt like home to me were poisoned with the memory of who I had been and whom I had lost.

With a scream, I rushed upward, as if to scratch at the pale eye of the moon with my wings. I hurled all the curses known to Earth and to Hell at my Maker. His only message to me was his absence.

In my rage, I plummeted back down to the crumbling castle.

When I had cried all the tears in me, I lit a small fire to warm myself by and took up the
Cruximus
from where it lay next to Sabine’s anchorstone.

Do not trouble yourself to read the riddle. Sabine is gone.

I considered destroying it, tearing the pages from the binding and burning them one by one.

Skylar put her life in peril so that you might read it,
my thoughts admonished me. I opened it tentatively, as if what I was might cause the book to burst into flames at a Vampire’s touch, but it did not.

If He would tell me nothing, if He would leave me ignorant, perhaps the
Cruximus
might tell me something—anything—about how to be this thing I had become.

I flipped forward to a section that resembled Psalms, skimming the text for anything of interest. It was written in calligraphy, both elegant and laborious to read. My eyes seized upon on the word I had heard Skylar utter many times: Haemacra. Returning to the first paragraph on the page, I began to read.

“The Sibyl’s Decree” read the title. The name beneath indicated it was written by one known as Eresia—Shintaro’s betrothed, I remembered.

How long had he been alone? How many centuries?

I moved a finger down the page as I read.

––––––––

“T
he day shall come when blood will wash the Earth as a red tide, devouring all before it. It shall follow a black wave, a time of dark tidings for mortals, and its teeth shall be sharp with the knowledge of our doings and of our death. Only one among the light-givers might stop the tide. One new to the world yet old to it. One born of sacrifice and of sorrow, whose blood cannot be spilled but who has spilled forbidden blood. This one will be known as the Cruor, and will suffer the Haemacra and live. Vengeance congeals in his veins but his honor will meet it with mercy. Over his coming, the bloodwine will be soured, and through his deeds it will gush from mouths dry with long regret and make them wet and willing to rush upon old enemies. You shall know the Cruor by the cross he bears and by the mark upon him. By the name that makes him live forever. By the love of the Mother and the faith of the Father. By the sins of the Sibling and the love of the Swan. And by the riddle of the Sphinx.”