Bird Song (39 page)

“With each subsequent child she bore, she grew hungrier and hungrier for the taste of blood until finally she began killing her own children, even as she continued having them.
 
By the time she gave birth to her last child, the bloodlust had taken over her completely and that baby was born having been nurtured in her mother’s womb solely on the blood of its siblings.

“The Seraphim had had enough of this and destroyed
Varmila
immediately after her last child was born.
 
They then sentenced the angel who had turned her to a mortal life.
 
This was the beginning of the new laws, the laws that required angels who turned humans without permission to destroy their…creations.”

The way he said creations showed an extreme distaste for the term, as though it were too clinical and removed.
 
He smiled grimly at my thoughts and nodded.
 
He placed his hands behind him as he finished with his story.
 

“When
Varmila
died, the Seraphim didn’t know what it was that she had given birth to.
 
It looked like a normal child.
 
Beautiful and sweet, very affectionate and without flaw, the angels could find no reason not to let her live.
 
She was allowed to live with a family of
Electus
Patronus
in a busy village until she reached an age where the Seraphim felt more able to deal with whatever it was that she would become.

“While she appeared normal on the outside, inside she was a different being.
 
The time spent inside of her mother’s womb, feeding on the innocence that her mother consumed changed her, altered her physically.
 
Her heart beat slower than it should have; her skin, though beautiful and flawless was thick and tough.
 
She couldn’t eat what her human caretakers ate, but she never starved.

“And then it happened.
 
The Seraphim and their entourage came to see for themselves what had become of their little charity case.
 
What they found changed everything.
 

“When
Varmila’s
angel turned her, it wasn’t complete.
 
The turn, the actual physical change continued as
Varmila
changed, as
Varmila
became a monster.
 
When her daughter was born, the turn transferred onto her child.
 
It was when the Seraphim arrived that the turn had finally become complete.
 
Varmila
wasn’t the monster anymore.
 
Her daughter was.”

Robert walked closer, his voice growing lower as he revealed to me something that I had not expected.
 

“She called herself Miki.”

“Sam’s wing-bringer,” I breathed.

He nodded.
 
“He became instantly attracted to her, their connection so strong that his change occurred right then and there, like lightning striking the ground.
 
Sam, not knowing what Miki was and believing her to be human, immediately asked for permission to turn her, but the Seraphim denied him.
 
There was something about her that they did not like, something about her that they couldn’t quite figure out.”

I felt my forehead crease as I thought back to that night less than three months ago when Sam had told me about Miki.
 
“He said that he turned her and that she became a monster that he had to kill.”

Robert sighed as he saw the memory replay in my head.
 
“He lied to you, Grace.
 
He didn’t kill her.”

“What happened to her then?” I asked.
 
“If he didn’t kill her then she must be alive, right?”

He shook his head and began to tell the final chapter to this confusing and dark story.
 
“When the Seraphim left Miki with her caretakers, they left her in a large town of nearly eight hundred people.
 
For that time period, that was a metropolis.
 
When they arrived back just twenty years later, a blink in our time, Miki was the only living person left.

“The Seraphim couldn’t stand for that, they couldn’t allow such enormous loss of life from one person who had been so closely tied to them.
 
So they tried to kill her.
 
But it was far more difficult than they had imagined because after twenty years, her thick skin had turned rock hard, she was fast and, like us, she could read minds.
 
She knew exactly what was going to happen; she was prepared while the Seraphim were not.

“It was a battle, an epic battle of good versus evil.
 
It was so large and destructive in scale that history couldn’t keep it.”

“How exactly could it have been difficult for them to kill her if she was the only one left in the village?” I asked, confused by the dynamics of this rapidly changing story.

“I said that she was the only living person left, not that she was the only person left.”

My mouth popped open so loudly, the sound broke through the CD that was on its second rotation in the stereo.
 
“The only
living
person?”

“Miki had killed everyone else in the village, but remember that I said that the turn was completed in her.
 
She had become a monster.”

My head started to hurt with all of the ups and downs of Robert’s story and I laid down, my arm resting over my eyes to block out the light.
 
“And what kind of monster is that?”

“Cruor
Messor
.”

“What?”

“Cruor
Messor
; a blood reaper.
 
Her mother’s appetite for blood had transferred onto her while still in utero.
 
Her strength, beauty, speed…even her immortality came from the angel who had tried to turn her mother.
 
But ultimately, what made her the monster was the human side of her that manifested a virus that preyed on the weakness of the human body.

“She became an incubator for this virus, but because of her thick skin, it couldn’t be transferred through from one person to the other the same way other blood-borne illnesses are, so her immortal body adapted the virus so that it could be transferred via a more readily available and easily distributable substance.”

I bolted upright at his answer.
 
I thought about every single vampire movie I had ever watched, every book I had read and I knew the answer before he had a chance to say it.
 
“Her saliva.”

“She wasn’t a vampire, Grace.
 
She was…she was their mother.
 
She’s the mother of all the monsters in this world that need blood to survive; vampires are simply the most
well known
.”

“Oh God.”

Robert nodded grimly.
 
“Miki had created her own little army of immortal creatures who were strong and fast like her, whose bloodlust was just as ravenous.
 
And because of the residual power that existed in her saliva, some of them possessed the same abilities that the Seraphim did, although in a much weaker state.

“The Seraphim and Miki’s army fought non-stop with no losses on either side for weeks-”

“Why didn’t the Seraphim just snap their fingers or something?
 
I mean, isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?” I asked.

“No.
 
You can’t kill the dead the same way you do the living.
 
The Seraphim had never faced this kind of enemy before; they didn’t know what to do.
 
The fighting seemed endless; the divine versus the dead.
 
And then Miki’s undead soldiers became weak with hunger.
 
That was one of the advantages that the angels had on them:
 
we don’t need to eat.”
 

He paused to retrieve something from the trunk that sat at the foot of the bed, the one that held all of the important artifacts from his life.
 
He placed a small red object in my hand and allowed me to inspect it as he continued.

“It took very little time after that to whittle down their numbers until only Miki and a few of the strongest of her children were left.
 
She stood on the corpses of those that had fallen and laughed at everyone, especially
Samael
.
 
She told him that though he had tried to turn her, she was the one who had turned him instead.
 
She laughed because she knew the Seraphim couldn’t destroy her; she was as divine as they were.
 
She didn’t need to feed, didn’t need to rest.
 
She felt nothing, she loved nothing.
 
She was the epitome of death.

“The Seraphim began to doubt.
 
The Seraphim never doubt, Grace.
 
They’re a combined intelligence; they are never wrong.
 
But in Miki, they found they were wrong…a lot.
 
She was smarter, she was devious, and she knew the weaknesses of the angelic mind.
 
The Seraphim were losing to a monster of their own creation.

“Imagine how desperate the must have felt, knowing that they were losing—actually losing!
 
But like all storms, they end.
 
There was an elder named
Avi
who finally figured out Miki’s greatest weakness.
 
Over the weeks of battle with her children, Miki would only appear at night, disappearing just before dawn, only to reappear again at sunset.

“
Avi
knew then that as divine as Miki was, she was still part human, and during that time, many children in that area were born with a condition that made them sensitive to light.
 
As it had her strength and her intelligence, turning had intensified this condition, turning a sensitivity into a deadly allergy.
 
Avi
learned that Miki was allergic to the sun, an allergy that passed on to some of her children.

“On the day Miki died,
Avi
blocked her escape towards shelter and, as dawn broke through and the morning sun began to shine on her, her body began to change.
 
Her smooth, opaque skin turned angular and translucent.
 
The sun’s rays could be seen shining
through
her, and when her entire body was as clear as glass, she shattered like it.”

He pointed to the object in my hand and I held it up.
 
It was a dull, red piece of glass that felt unnaturally warm against my palm.
 
“That is one of the various pieces that were passed on to each elder, a reminder of what happens when we fail to obey the rules that are handed down to us.”

“So how did you come across it?”

“My mother.”

I didn’t know much about
Ameila
, and so I was captivated and secretly thrilled to know that I was learning something new about her.

“
Ameila
was a Seraphim?”

He nodded and removed the shard of glass from my hand.
 
“Still is.”

“But I thought that when you were born, when she had killed all those people…the Seraphim were going to punish her.
 
How can they punish one of their own?” I asked as I watched him pass the shard across his knuckles with minor movements of his fingers, it moving along as though it were on a conveyor belt.

“The Seraphim aren’t immune from punishment just because of what they are, Grace.
 
If we cannot hold the guilty accountable simply because of their place of authority then we’re no better than-”

“Us,” I finished for him.

He shook his head in disagreement.
 
“No.
 
Humans aren’t infallible, that’s for certain, but they tend to find methods of regulation that often leads to fair and just results.
 
No, what I was going to say that we’re no better than animals.”

My laughter was a foreign sound after such a dark story.
 
“But animals can’t see you.
 
Why would you compare yourselves to creatures that don’t even know you exist?”

“Because animals are as close to what we all could be if we weren’t given the ability to understand and empathize.
 
A bird cannot understand what laying an egg on a radiator will do to its embryo; a dog cannot empathize with a cat that lost a fight with another dog; a fish cannot forgive another fish who is trying to eat it.
 
We can.
 
It’s a gift to us, your kind as well as mine.”
 
He grabbed my hand and pressed my fingers to his lips.
 
“We are also given the ability to not just love, but to fall into it, stumble upon it, crash down until it surrounds us.”

 
I felt the words he said against my fingers travel up my arm in alternating warm and cold waves, distracting me for a minute.
 
Or two.

“Distracting you from what?”

I blinked as I drew a blank.
 
“Um…”

He laughed and pulled me off the bed and into his arms.
 
“Would you like me to refresh your memory?”