Creche (Book II of Paranormal Fallen Angels/Vampires Series) (21 page)

I scowled at her, not wanting to believe it, my wings held rigid, the feathers shaking with disbelief. “You speak of ‘them’ as if I am not one. If they fear them, then they fear me.” I growled.

“But why should I believe you anyway? What have you done to earn my trust? What has Silvenhall done for it but cage me and coddle me and lie to me? Even you have lied to me before. Perhaps everything is a lie. The Swan. This story about my father.” I shook my head. “I know my mother. She would not have done such a thing. My mother would have never have loved a Vampire.”

Skylar’s voice was barely a whisper, but she looked up at me, defiant. “Your mother did, Ame, just as did you, if only you would admit it to yourself. You loved Joslyn, even more than Sabine. You love her still.”

It was true. Every word of it. Every word pierced my heart like a fang.

With trembling hands, I reached up to clasp the silver cross that hung around my neck, tugging it to snap the leather that held it. It looked so delicate, too delicate to kill. I let it dangle before my eyes until my tears obscured it, remembering how Joslyn had leaped in front of me, how she had taken the cross Beltran had designed for me. 

“She knew,” I whispered, clutching the cross in one fist. “Joslyn knew.”

Skylar just nodded.

“She knew,” I repeated hoarsely, “and, like you, she did not tell me.”

T
he night’s darkness was like the fast embrace of death after the brightness of Cascadia, and my soul felt as heavy as Sabine’s anchorstone, weighing me down toward the inky ocean. I had said nothing to Skylar, just taken up the anchorstone in my arms and fled Cascadia, stumbling through the winding white passages, ignoring Skylar’s pleas and her tears until I found an entrance that would lead me out, back into the dark.

I was one of
them.

The thought writhed in my head. It explained so much. The euphoria I had felt when Beltran had injected the boy’s blood into me, and that it had enlivened me and not killed me. Beltran had known it too. Why else the silver cross? Why else follow me and goad me and take Joslyn from me except that he knew what kind of freak I was—and hated me for it?

My breath, as I drew it in, stung my throat. All along I had felt I did not belong at Silvenhall but had not known why.  Now, the truth tortured me.

No wonder the Cruxim hated me. I was an enemy among them, a wolf amid lambs. They must have felt the urge to crush me, to drain me of the accursed Vampire blood that filled my veins, just as I desired to destroy Beltran. Yet they had not.

Only so they might use you!
my angry thoughts cried. The Cruor—the fulfillment of a prophecy told by the
Cruximus
, a book that may have been itself a lie, for the Council was corrupt, the Sibylim liars.

I did not care.

I was not one of them. I had never been one of them.

I was alone.

I gave a great swoop of my wings, eager to put Silvenhall far behind me. I was flying blind. Anywhere here there could be a crag or a monolith to block my path, to send me hurtling to the ground, but I cared not. It could hurtle me to Hell, where I belonged.

The ocean churned like a great black bedsheet below me, and I thought that all along I had been wrong and that perhaps Beltran had been right.

His words rang in my ears.
You eat us. Just as the lion eats the gazelle, or the fox eats the hare. Yet still you think yourself so much better than us.

I had been arrogant. A predator hunting prey, no different to him. How many had I had killed? Thousands. My tongue felt thick in my throat. A kind of sick hunger filled my stomach just thinking of them, and a howl of horror escaped my lips.

I was a monster—even more monstrous than they. An unwitting cannibal, I had spent centuries feeding upon the blood of my own.

My own!
I chastised myself. As if they could be my own any more than the Cruxim of Silvenhall, or Milandor, or Argentil would ever be. As if their suspicion, their hatred would be any less if they knew what I was: a creature born out of a love as perverse as any Dr. Gandler had derided.

I realized, with horror, that even Joslyn and Skylar had let me do it.

Joslyn had let me gorge upon them to free Sabine, had even fed me her own blood.

Skylar, having known me for what I was, had allowed me to hunt with her in the dark alleys of the Piraeus.

My horror was replaced with a welling, sick laughter. What a fool I had been. How weak and gutless and whining a creature. I thought of all the earthly pleasures I had denied myself. My love for Joslyn—a human, just as my father had been when he met my mother. I had denied it, and her. And denied it again when she was a Vampire, deep in the caverns beneath the Grand aux Dimes in Provins. We might have loved for an eternity, Joslyn and I, had she told me what I was. I ground my teeth. Why had she not told me?

“Because she knew. She knew what it was to be a monster.”

Once again, the thought was not mine, and as the sun’s rays rose behind me in the east, I knew it was Sabine. Her stone warmed in my arms.

Sabine,
I thought,
I have wronged you too. When I should have been searching the sea for you, I followed a lie to Silvenhall.

I had hoped to find acceptance and affection and kinship, all of the things my heart had longed for since childhood.

Instead, I had found myself.

And I hated him!

A venomous resentment of my Maker rose in me. How had he let this happen? How had he let my mother degrade herself by giving her body to such a desecrater of mortal joys, the one I should call Father but could not?

"Is our Maker at liberty to stop love where it is true?”

I thought it was Sabine again. But as I listened, I stopped and swerved to find Skylar flying behind me.

“You judge your mother, but she was a lot like you, Amedeo. She tried to resist your father at first, Eresia told me, just as you resisted Joslyn. When he became a Vampire, she tried even harder, but she could not deny him.”

“Leave me, Skylar. Please. Leave me.”

I felt the breath of her wings in my face as she flew in front of me, hovering before me like a hummingbird. “I cannot leave you. Your exile is my exile.” She put out a hand to clasp my arm. “You did not bring this upon yourself, Ame. Do not take it upon yourself either.”

“What is there to take on?” I shook her off violently. “That I am a monster? A hypocrite? I am a cannibal. A misfit. You know yourself I do not belong in Silvenhall. You knew what I was,” I spat. “And you let me feed on them, on my own kind.” I shuddered. “Perhaps I will fare better with
them
.” I flung one arm out in the blackness and plummeted downward, hoping to lose her.

“Now you speak foolishly.” She followed my descent. “You know as well as I what would happen were you to go to them. You may be half Vampire, but they are not your kind.”

“What would happen?” I scoffed. “They would kill me. How? How might they do that, Skylar? Tell me, so that I might end this miserable existence myself.” I straightened out, still clutching Sabine’s stone, letting my wings stop my fall. Below was a thin isthmus of dark land battling a riot of whitecaps. A lonely little promontory at one end called to me.

Skylar’s wing beats faded for a moment as she fell behind. “You do not mean that,” she said gently. She plummeted downward. “I will not ask you to return to Silvenhall, for we cannot. I would not even ask you to grant me an audience, as I see you do not wish it, but please, you are tired. Sit with me awhile, and I will answer whatever questions you may have.”

I was tired and angry, and I knew she spoke sense, but ignoring her, I hurtled back up into the air and flew on until the beat of her wings had died away and her voice in my head had stilled.

Then, feeling her absence like a wound, I turned back to her.

S
he was perched on a high rocky ledge on cliffs that faced the sea, her legs dangling over the side, wings brushing the rock at her back. There was no room for me to stand, and the anchorstone made it difficult for me to sit. My wings ached with tiredness as I hovered before her.

Skylar reached out to pat the rock by her side. “Sit,” she said.

Carefully, I settled down beside her, Sabine’s stone heavy at my chest. All of the fire had faded from me. The ledge was thin and the night cold, but Skylar’s body was warm beside me; her hand barely brushed my own as she clutched the ledge. “Ame,” she said gently, “do not torture me, or yourself.”

I leaned my head back. The cliff was cool behind me.
I have seen and borne so much torture,
I thought.
Would that it were done with, all of it.

Her fingers crept closer to my own, brushing them. I did not pull away. The warmth of them shot through me like a draught of spirits. I felt tendrils of her serenity seeking the dark corners of my mind.

“You are alive for a purpose.”
Her thoughts.
“We all are.”

“My purpose. My mission,” I spoke aloud. “What is that to me now? To destroy my own kind. To feed on them as I have fed on hatred and vengeance.”

“Amedeo, they are not your kind.”

“Nor are you,” I said bitterly. “Why haven’t you fallen on me yet, like I would have on them? Do not tell me you don’t feel it. You must be able to smell the blood burning in my veins. Don’t tell me you don’t crave it.”

“I do.” She put her head back too, and her face fell. “I crave you more than you know.”

I sighed. “You say you love me, yet you could not trust me with your secrets. They were my mother’s secrets, after all. And now they are my sister’s. They are of my blood.”

“We ourselves are secrets. Why didn’t your mother kill your Vampire father?”

“That is different.”

Her voice was small in the darkness. “Is it?”

We were silent for a while, both of us. Eventually, I said, “My entire life I have been driven by a need to kill them. A power beyond my ken. A hunger I could not control. It was the only message I received from Him, besides the one you heard Him give to me on the beach.” I shuffled over. It brought me closer to her but enabled me the space to set Sabine’s stone down on the bench next to me. The stone was inert. If Sabine had returned in the dawn temporarily, she had slunk away again now. “Why give me such a hatred for those who are a part of me?” I continued. “Perhaps all Cruxim wonder why they must crave them and hate them so.”

“I do not think all Cruxim hate with your passion, Ame; nor, perhaps, do they love with such intensity. Perhaps that is only for Messengers. But the
Cruximus
tells us that we were created imperfectly. Knowing we were made that way helps.”

“
You
were made that way.” A pebble bit into my palm where it rested on the ledge. I picked it up and turned it over in my hands, searching its uniform surface for a crack or a rough patch that might reveal its faults.

“How was I made...?” I trailed off. Finding a small chip on one side, I tossed the pebble aside, watching it fall far below into the waves that might smooth its imperfections.

Skylar took my now idle hands in hers. “We all have a choice, Ame. We all have freewill. It just doesn’t always seem that way. Sometimes, fate or hate can influence us.”

“If it is my choice, then I wonder which part of me wants them all dead so badly: the Cruxim who hates them or the monster that wishes itself mortal?”

“The Cruxim in you. It makes sense that we hate them.”

Leaning over, she swung something heavy over toward me, and I saw that she wore a leather satchel slung over her shoulder. “I brought a gift for you, in apology.” She lifted the flap.

“It may mean death to me,” she said, her voice lowered, “if they find I have taken it.” She handed me a tome recognizable by its emerald latch, by the yellowed paper peeping from the interior, and by the flaming, winged cross that had been carefully burned into the leather cover.

My breath froze in my throat. “The
Cruximus
. Skylar, you should not have done this.”

“I am already dead to them, Amedeo Aeternus.” She put her hand on mine. “Your exile is my exile, remember.”

“For that, I am sorry.” My neck ached. I rubbed it, soothing the stiff muscles where my wings joined my shoulders.

“Here,” she said. Her fingers were warm and strong where they kneaded my nape.

I have destroyed her too?

She stopped and put a finger to her lips. “What I choose to do is not yours to lament. I chose
you
, even when they told me I should not. And I chose
you
in the Council of Paleon Chamber when they told me the repercussions if I failed. Those who believe the Swan would say I chose you before I was even born.”

She looked sidelong at me and her lashes were long on her cheek. “I am sorry you thought I brought you to Silvenhall like a lamb to the slaughter. It was not my intention. My intention was to bring you as a lion among wolves.”

She opened the book, angling it to read in the dawn light. “Do not believe those who will tell you that you are a monster to be feared. Let me tell you who you really are, Amedeo. Who we are. And who you might become.”