“Death is better than endless suffering.”
“Is that not their choice to make?”
What were they saying? Cherub’s mind stumbled over itself trying to chase their words for meaning, significance, her thoughts putting together a puzzle.
Take the king’s soul as Waif had taken the queen’s?
This creature spoke of her father, her mother—she knew it.
What had Waif done to them?
The cowled figure’s stance shifted, and again she knew his attention affixed on her. “Take her father’s soul and you can still save your people.”
“No.” Were they her words or Waif’s?
Her heartbeat throbbed in her throat, her heart itself a bird trying to beat from her chest. She only knew that Waif’s master was looking at her and forming words as he smacked his lips as if around a delicious bonbon, his mouth puckered on the disgusting luridness of rot.
“Why do you not take her soul?” He licked the words like a slimy treat. “Her innocence would be the finest dessert. A liquored cherry when only crumbs remain of the cake. A bone to suck marrow-dry. Let me have a taste—a taste of her fingers…” He reached past Waif, who spun in a swoop of wings.
Feathers caught in her hair and his hands slid around her waist at the same time that claws gripped her hand. A rough tongue licked across her fingers.
She screamed an instant before her feet lifted from the wormy earth.
Wake Up, Wicked Cherub
"Wake up, wicked cherub,” Waif murmured in her ear.
Her lashes disentangled and her eyelids lifted, as heavily intoxicated as if she’d drunk an entire flagon of rum and left her body as unwieldy as the rum barrel. Waif sat beside her bed, resplendent in his light-swallowing cape and secretive eyes.
“Who was that—what was that?” she rasped, her throat truly parched as if on the heels of a night of screams.
His hair sparkling in the morning sun, he poured glittering water from a carafe into a glass and handed it to her. The liquid slid down to her stomach like the sweetest ambrosia.
But her belly knotted as all she’d heard and learned slipped and slid in her mind, trying to gain purchase and meaning. “What is your master?”
“A goblin.”
A goblin? A creature that lived in a world under the hills and feasted on unwary humans? She could not comprehend how—why—“How did you come to know him?” Without the goblin cooking him on a spit and eating him morsel by morsel?
Waif bowed his head, his starry hair falling over his eyes. “In a time of weakness. But—” his head lifted, his gaze alighting briefly on hers before defecting to the window that framed a leaden autumn sky “—this is not a story for the light of day. It’s to be told under cover of darkness, behind closed doors and in the softest of whispers—if at all.”
Cherub nodded, the motion jerky, her belief held by a thread. “And why is your land dying? The worms, the flora…”
She hadn’t meant to ask that—or perhaps she had because she could not ask the rest, although suspicion settled like ash and salt at the back of her throat, powdery and desiccated, and she must ask sometime.
Again, he could not meet her eyes. “The price of stealing souls is you slay the land, hence the worms infesting it and devouring anything edible. I stopped taking souls when I realized its cost, but then your father’s tears saturated even the worms, and my people fed off their bodies, the larvae marinated in his despair. His tears watered our animals, and we consumed his sorrow with no choice. It weakened our fight against the ever-present rot until I had to stop the flow of tears.”
“But my father’s tears healed the sorrows of our village whenever anyone drank!”
“Because the tears flowed swiftly through your land and never soaked into the ground. Your people could drink his sorrow like hot cider on a chilly day and warm their insides and then return to their bracing ale, but by the time the tears reached my kingdom, their current grew sluggish and heavy, and it steeped the very ground in his despair. The earthworms fattened with it, and his sorrow permeated everything we ate. For us, it became not a simple drink to counterbalance the rest of our diet, but our diet entire. Sorrow relentless, sorrow unbroken.”
“So you made blood flow instead.” The words came bitter, acrid like unwashed celery. “What will my father’s blood do to them?”
“Blood will give us the impulse to slay what needs to be slain.”
No inflection colored his tone, but the words of his goblin master resurfaced. You would rather massacre your people than let them waste away in sorrow?
“You mean each will slay himself,” she said flatly.
“It is better than an existence filled with sorrow.”
“Like the fate you subjected my father to when you stole my mother’s soul.” The phrase lodged in her skull like a jarring tune. She had to ask – no, accuse him – unable to put off what she’d displaced to the very edges of her mind. “You stole my mother’s soul.” It wasn’t a question, but blame.
He met her gaze, steady and perhaps even slightly apologetic. “I did, when I was but a child. Master taught me such things to protect my kingdom.”
“Why?” Her voice broke. “Why would he teach you something so terrible as to take a soul from a living body?”
“Some secrets are so dark they should not be spoken, for they cannot be understood with words. Perhaps, in the dark of night, the story will tell itself in your sleeping ear.”
“In a dream?”
“In a nightmare.”
No Maggot Would Feast
That night, again he played, and again the links on her wrists spiraled down her arms in golden dollops. Like caterpillars of metal, they delved beneath her skin and fused with her bones—and then sprouted into wings with a core of hardness combined with softness and buoyancy.
The next flight whooshed her beneath stormy skies where rain speared her skin like darts and plastered her lace gown to her limbs. Rivulets dribbled down her neck and scattered from her swooping wings. Shivers burrowed into her bones, chilling her down to her toes.
Then, there before her, a tower—his castle tower—stabbing upward, insolent, into the heavens. No wart-leaf had yet infiltrated the stone, but something else plagued this château of the past.
At its base teemed an army.
It bristled with weaponry: colossal warriors in gleaming armor lifted torches aloft and crunched enemy craniums with massive axes, broadswords, and flails.
Waif’s people stood not a chance; Cherub recognized that even as she approached the highest tower with a roof like whipped cream.
With her lace gown soaked through, her bare feet frozen stiff, she wondered what nightmare he meant her to witness tonight.
Then—motion from below.
A little boy burst onto the curved tower roof from a swinging trapdoor—a younger Waif, perhaps seven years old, his hair glittering in its crown of light, his face torn and forlorn in its radiance.
“Help me protect my people!” young Waif cried into the storm as rain spattered the tiny stars of his hair. “Goblin king, help me drive these invaders from my land, and I swear I will help you wreak vengeance on your greatest foe!”
A rush of air lashed sodden ropes of her hair across her eyes, followed by a vast, feathered shape that nearly knocked her from the sky.
Cherub righted herself and espied a flying horse landing on the rain-drenched roof with such force that rainfall sprayed beneath its mighty hooves. Agitated, it pranced on the sloped roof and folded in half its iridescent wingspan of feathers.
A cloaked form astride its back reached down a hand—clawed, taloned, and gray. “Will yours be the hand that steals souls for my realm, boy?” The call emerged in the throaty rasp of Waif’s goblin master.
Young Waif jutted out his chin and thrust up his hand. “I will!”
No! Cherub flung herself forward but hands grappled her back.
The goblin hoisted the boy onto the stallion’s broad b
ack.
The trapdoor the boy had fled from slammed open again right after, brimming so thickly with warriors in wet black armor that the throng of them resembled boiling poison frothing from the roof’s whipped top.
The great black horse leapt into the sky, its wings outspread, just as the nearest warrior’s ax slashed the empty space it had vacated.
Cherub slumped and the arms restraining her loosened.
Waif, starry-haired and grim-faced, hovered in the downpour beside her. His wings were dark and slick and membranous today, leathery as a bat’s. They fanned out, sleek and hooked at the edges, with raindrops funneling down them alit by his starry hair.
“Come.” He clutched her hand and together they leapt into the storm behind the goblin king’s winged stallion.
Another slew of slanting rain pelted Cherub’s face. She half-shut her eyes, her skin cringing under her clammy lace gown and her feathers shuddering beneath the crying sky.
Waif bundled her close, nestling her wings between her body and his chest. His heat permeated her algid flesh while his wings’ powerful expanse shielded them from anything other than a misting spray of rain. With every swoop, their stunning strength juddered through his muscle and sinew and into hers like a heartbeat: tha-thump, tha-thump…
They followed young Waif and the goblin king to a hillside on the moors with a door in the sopping grass. The goblin king sprang from the stallion’s shoulders and landed with a splat that spattered mud all over his long cloak. He scarcely lifted boy Waif off the stallion than the mighty horse disintegrated entirely into charcoal wisps of smoke.
Little Waif gaped openmouthed at that, unwittingly swallowing raindrops, but the goblin king hustled him through the door.
Cherub and adult Waif slunk behind them through varied passages of crumbling dirt and gnarled roots until they emerged into a cavern.
In its center shimmered a castle spun of silver filaments, cobwebs woven by spiders whose dozens of eyes peered from the cavern’s dark corners.
Waif merely urged her faster across the pebbled rock and muttered, “Hurry. Time is about to change.”
Cherub didn’t understand—at first. But once they arrived at the castle, a window folded back in the silvery walls to frame a windowless chamber lit only by Waif’s shining hair.
Months must have passed since he’d arrived in this realm, for his baby fat had been honed down to merciless muscle. His weight ranged between lean and unfed, and his night-dark eyes had gone half feral beneath his uncombed hair. The lack of any illumination but those strands cast his gaunt features into the stark demarcations of a changeling child.
His lips thinned, his eyes focused—concentrating on some far image.
Beside the first window, another opened in the cobweb castle, this one showing a royal bedchamber and a woman similar to Cherub: a long flow of ginger hair stuck wetly to her sweaty temples as she gritted her teeth and strained—she was giving birth!
A chill rode down Cherub’s back. This was her mother giving birth to her, Cherub.
A cloaked shadow shifted behind young Waif. “Take her,” it crooned, and Cherub knew it meant her mother’s soul. “It wants freedom from pain.”
No! Again Cherub lurched forward, trying to stop the inevitable—an event that had played out so long ago!—and again the adult Waif grappled her back.
Imprisoned in his hold, she watched as her mother’s body went slack, her jaw askew, her eyes glassy and blank.
The midwife slapped the queen’s face, frantic—and the window shut and time sped up again. Another window opened.
This time Waif had been pared down to skin and bone, his skull practically visible and stretching out his skin with no layer of fat or muscle beneath. Even his hair barely shone, its light feeble and waning. He swayed on his feet but then steadied himself, mortally resolved.
Cherub understood in the next moment. The second window showed a village where colossal men in armor marched. They were patrolling the streets, some brandishing their pikes or smacking the villagers with the butts of their axes.
The invaders who had seized Waif’s kingdom, Cherub guessed.
One after the other, they collapsed for seemingly no reason, their jaws as loose and their eyes as vacant as her mother’s.
Time sped up again and Cherub saw that the villagers left the bodies where they lay, spitting on them, kicking them, but not giving them the decency of a burial.
But no rot touched the invaders’ skin. Like her mother, they simply lay in a soulless stasis.
Plants grew over their bodies and growths of moss softened their cheeks, but they yet lived and breathed.
No vulture would circle this prey. No rat would rend their flesh. No maggot would feast.
They lay in enchantment—cursed.
Cherub turned back to the first window.
The skeletal boy who had stolen their souls smiled—and collapsed.
No Innocent Would Dare
"He returned me to the human realm.”
Waif’s solemn voice enticed her from the clutches of slumber, promising an end to the story—or perhaps an explanation.
Cherub’s eyelids struggled open. So heavy, as if her body longed to remain tucked into the dream world she’d visited.
But that was a place of nightmares. Why would her soul crave such a dismal empire?
Especially with Waif here, bowed over her bed in the austere dawn, no wings visible, only his fall of starlit hair, his ever-present black cape and the velvet, silver-buttoned gloves. “Master simply discarded me outside the door to the goblin realm and left me to perish.”
It wasn’t the story Cherub wanted, but the unadorned nakedness of his features betrayed it as the story he wanted to tell, so she prompted him onward. “Who discovered you?”
“Why do you think someone—”
“You collapsed from malnourishment. You couldn’t even walk!” She lifted up on her elbows, noting the absence of chains and the smattering of golden feathers on her pale blue sheets. “He didn’t feed you, did he?”
“He tried, but I wouldn’t eat.” Waif’s throat jumped as he swallowed. His eyes like a skittish cat glanced at her and away, just enough time for her to note how prominent the purple circles under his eyes had become in the blunt glow of daybreak. “He offered me dew for drink and cobweb sugar for food. It can taste like any fare a human desires, but I wanted to be punished, not coddled.”
“So who saved you?”
“No one. Maybe my own resolve. I licked the dew from the grass, ate worms and beetles and crawled back to my kingdom.” He lifted her hand with a soft slide of his velvet glove beneath her fingers. “Do you despise me, Cherub?”
Cherub tipped her head at him. “Where are the souls you’ve stolen? You know where they are, don’t you?”
His shoulders curved in and his hold on her fingers went limp, but he didn’t abandon the grasp entirely. He stared, as she did, down at the disparity between her golden skin and his black glove. “What does it matter?”
“Can you not free them and renew your land and ease your conscience simultaneously?”
“Do you believe my conscience bothers me?” Said tightly, the words pried from stingy—or perhaps angry—lips.
“Why else preserve such a strong memory that you could transport me into it as if it had real substance? What gives it that substance but a strong sense of guilt? An unwillingness to let yourself release what you’ve done? You’ve no joy in it, that’s certain. Given the chance, would you liberate their souls?”
A hesitation met her words, then an even more hesitating response. “The enemy army will revive if I set their souls free.”
Then just save my mother’s, Cherub was on the cusp of replying before it struck her that it would never do. Having saved one, Waif would have to save the others, otherwise their weight would crush him.
“I cannot.” He gripped her hand, hard this time. “I promised Master to wreak vengeance on his greatest foe.”
“And you did!”
“Which I would undo by releasing them.”
“No. You’ll make the punishment more acute.” Cherub sat up completely and took both his hands in her own. Her voice quivered with rising conviction. “They will wake with their whole lives gone! Their strength gobbled by age, their beauty gulped up by time, their most invigorating years disgorged from their grasp. They’ll be reduced to feeble old men, doddering laughingstocks if they dare try to wield axes now overgrown with grass! Do you not understand? Waking them now would be a worse vengeance than never letting them experience what they’ve lost. You would flaunt what you took from them for the goblin king.”
Dreams of Darkness Page 9