by M. L. Desir
Seth laughed, but it wasn’t pleasant.
“Leave us,” Gabriel commanded.
Clara vanished in a twirl of red and gold leaves, and the other Chosen simply disappeared.
Seth kicked the headless corpse in the side. “Well, isn’t that rather disturbing? And as grotesque as this might sound, I expected poor Harold to stand up, clumsily search for his head, and place it upon his neck, but ha, ha, ha. This is certainly not what I expected. He’s obviously . . .”
“Dead,” Gabriel finished for him, an angry bite in his voice.
Seth nodded, his eyes wide. “Quite. Hmm. Interesting. Since he could be cut down so easily, Gabriel, like those maudlin vampires of legend, then he was obviously not immortal.”
He and Seth stared at each other, and Gabriel could see—he knew that they were sharing the same thoughts. The blood bond had nothing to do with this moment of mutual understanding.
Seth smiled. “You shouldn’t fight me. Really, you shouldn’t. We’re one in the same, you and me. We want the same things. Immortality. True immortality.”
“We? The same? No, we’re not. I only desire immortality because I want to be free to rule myself and only myself forever. You, however, want to rule everyone and everything. You want to be God. You’re the Prince this rotten world deserves, but not what it needs and that’s why,” he took a step toward him, “I have to destroy you.”
“Destroy me? You self-righteous bastard, remember the blood bond. And what kind of Prince are you to forget about that?” Seth asked in his condescending way.
Gabriel gave him an irresistible answer. He drew the chandelier down with his will. It descended in slow motion and fell onto Seth. Broken pieces of crystal and glass went spraying like jagged shards of ice. For a split second, he wondered why Seth hadn’t vanished, since he certainly could’ve, but when Gabriel heard a terrible scream, he didn’t have to wonder any longer.
The scream came from Seth, as pain tore into him. The pain of every shard of glass that must’ve cut into Seth’s skin seemed to ricochet into his. Gabriel looked at his hands and arms. No bruises, no blood, but his body ached as if he had been cut through with a thousand swords.
Colin appeared at his side. He wrapped an arm around his shoulder, but Gabriel had to shrug it off. Every inch of skin was sensitive to the touch. “Master Gabriel?” he cried, his eyes filled with unspoken tenderness. “What’s happened?”
“The bond,” Seth answered from the debris, “is strong. You know what happens to those who no longer want it.”
Gabriel staggered toward Seth, wishing that he could choke the life from him. He tried to slip through time and space to close the gap sooner, but couldn’t. It hurt too much. Every step felt like walking through an ocean of knives. When he finally reached Seth, the bastard had dragged himself next to one of the dead women and sucked what little blood remained. His wounds closed up quickly. His blood that had spilled had already gone and so did his hope of breaking the bond. Stranger still, as Seth drank, his own pain slowly subsided.
Seth rose to his feet and dusted himself off. “Don’t want the bond anymore? Gut and bleed yourself then, like a pig, into oblivion.” Seth baited him, wanting Gabriel to inflict him with more pain so that in turn, he would be hurting himself.
Gabriel flexed his fingers and stood a little straighter. It didn’t hurt so much anymore. The pain had dulled. Yes, the blood bond proved to be both strong and crippling.
“You forced the bond on me. And make no mistake, you’ll be the one to pay the price to break it.”
“You know Gabriel,” he said sweetly, “your memories are absolutely delicious. Your sister killing herself for love of you was beautifully tragic.” He threw back his head and laughed. “I do so enjoy browsing the pages of your mind.”
Gabriel flamed and took a step forward. The bastard had access to his deepest thoughts, his secret memories. Even the ones he didn’t care to visit or to remember. “Damn you! You had no right. I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you,” he screamed. He lifted Seth by the throat and squeezed, ignoring Colin’s cries, his tugging on his arm.
Seth stopped laughing, and Gabriel smiled, but the harder and longer he squeezed, the more he felt himself becoming weaker as the pain of bones breaking in his own neck intensified. His own bones weren’t breaking, but they might as well have been. He sank to his knees, unable to bear the pain, and his chokehold on Seth reluctantly loosened one finger at a time.
Seth dropped to the floor beside Gabriel and let out a rasping sound like a laugh or a cough. Most likely a mixture of the two. A line of blood trickled out the corner of his grinning mouth and down his chin. “Is that why you don’t want to rule? Is that why you don’t care for Enlightening others? Poor darling Gabriel thinks that he’s some cursed thing—”
Gabriel banged his fist on the hard floor, before staggering to his feet. “Shut up!”
“Don’t chide me so, Gabriel. Please. I’m merely unlocking the feelings you’re too afraid to feel. Perhaps,” he said matter-of-factly, “we need to revisit these feelings. Shall we?”
Gabriel raised his foot to crush Seth’s head, but his shoe met with thin air.
Seth reappeared several inches away. He spun around, and his robe began to tear away into little pieces in an unnatural wind. Each piece of black fabric sprouted wings, piercing eyes, a dagger-like beak, and an iridescent sheen. A murder of crows circled in Seth’s place before flying in all directions.
Colin drew in a sharp breath. “Another illusion.”
One of the crows turned gracefully to one side on a current of air. It gave Gabriel a sidelong glance and sped toward him with its arrow-sharp beak.
Colin drew up his hands, flames dancing on his fingertips. A single ball of fire shot out like a mini comet and engulfed the bird. Its body disappeared like mist hit by sunlight.
Gabriel turned around to thank Colin, but he was nowhere in sight. He found himself alone in the bedroom of his nightmares, partially clothed and crying. His twin sister was doing the same on the opposite side of the room.
“No, not again,” he whispered, voice raw with tears.
At the sound of his voice, Abigail stopped crying and wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “If you had done what our parents wanted, I would still be alive. Murderer.”
He shut his eyes tight and squeezed his hands into fists. He squeezed hard until his fingernails pierced the soft flesh of his palms. But she still lingered as vivid as any dream, any nightmare. A memory that wouldn’t let go.
“Because it was wrong, Abigail. It was wrong what mother and father wanted us to do. We won long ago because we didn’t give in. I won’t let you haunt me any longer.” He shut his eyes again, only this time, he gave a heavy sigh of relief.
“Gabriel? Gabriel. Gabriel,” a bright voice chanted again and again, making music of his name.
He opened his eyes to see a young woman with chocolate-colored eyes searching his face. Her mane of wavy black hair gave her away. There was something mischievous and charming about his dream girl. “You’re sleeping.” She cocked her head to the side, smiling. “Wake up.”
And he did. In his bed. He didn’t remember how he had returned home, but without a doubt, Nikolai had something to do with it. The child had somehow brought him here.
He stood beside him. “You must rest,” Nikolai said gently, as if Gabriel were the child. “I must rest. My master, don’t fret about Seth. I was able to seal his access to your mind for a time . . .”
The boy’s pale blue eyes glowed in the dim light. Glowing like jewels, but beneath his eyes were dark circles. The lids fluttered as if he were dozing off into sleep. “You’re very hard to take care of, my Prince.” When Nikolai leaned in and placed one hand on his forehead, Gabriel saw that the other pressed close to his heart was smeared with blood.
He licked his mouth and tasted what he fear
ed. Feared to desire. Nikolai offered his bleeding hand. “More?”
Gabriel didn’t answer. Instead, he closed his eyes and pretended to be asleep.
In the distance, a piano played a lovely sound. Nikolai hummed a little ahead of the melody.
CHAPTER 28
Colin
COLIN DRANK A DARK bitter porter by himself at the Ten Bells in Commercial Street. The public house was one of the places he used to frequent often in hopes of seducing some flash toff into following him to another less conspicuous place for a few minutes of torturous fondling, on his part. He could earn enough money to buy food for a week, but he usually ended up spending it on opium.
This evening, he had come to get away, but only for a couple of hours. To get stinking drunk. He had downed his seventh and felt no effect. Gabriel didn’t say anything about being unable to get drunk after being Enlightened.
Enlightenment started to feel more and more like a punishment.
He had come out also to be absent from the mansion. Now that his Master was (for the most part), safe and sound, Colin thought that he deserved a break.
And there was another reason. After sunset, his piano lessons had begun, the one Faron and Lilith called Nikolai.
Colin hadn’t left because the chavy couldn’t play; he left because the child played well.
Eerily well.
The first time he walked into the parlor to watch, the music that reverberated through the house flowed as beautiful and free as any Mozart concerto, but when he stepped into the room, the insides of his stomach became cold. It took several minutes of staring at Nikolai to register that he was playing. His hands lighted upon the black and white keys like pale doves. He looked like a miniature dark prince of fairy tales as he stared up at him with his large, light blue eyes.
Nikolai wasn’t like the children he was used to, but the unfamiliarity didn’t cause Colin to dislike him. Rather, he feared and pitied him all at once. His fears regarding Nikolai had more to do with his being Enlightened. He sensed something not quite right with him. He knew that Gabriel could sense it also, but saying something about it didn’t align with his modus operandi. He wondered if Nikolai had something to do with Gabriel’s sudden weakness and subsequent blood lust and quickly scolded himself because the blood bond with Seth was the reason. But, not the only reason, right?
After all, Nikolai had found Gabriel raging. He could’ve somehow been responsible for what happened. Colin had tried to get answers from him, but when Nikolai only returned his stare with an empty smile, his suspicions became sharper.
And the way Gabriel looked at Nikolai with those hard, hungry (for answers, for blood?) emerald eyes in itself revealed as to what Colin hadn’t seen during his struggle with Seth.
He asked the bartender, Ben, for another drink.
“Sure you can handle it?”
“As long as I’ve got the money,” Colin replied, “what does it matter to you?”
Ben paid his scathing outburst no mind. “Well, that toff o’er in that corner wants to buy you a drink. For yer company I figure, George.”
George. That’s the name they knew him by. In their eyes, he was still an unfortunate, a male prostitute, who catered to sodomites. This human couldn’t see what he had become.
Colin widened his eyes in a questioning expression.
“That innocent look don’t fool the likes of me,” Ben said. “Money won’t save your scrawny neck from the gallows. If you don’t have a title, your money is as good as the shit on the bottom of my shoe.”
Colin shrugged. Just as long as the Miltronians didn’t catch him exchanging his services with men, he’d remain free from the hangman’s rope. He had never been caught, and a part of him knew that he probably never would. The worst that would happen was spending the night in prison for “indecent and lewd behavior.” Aristocrats deemed unsavory (not unfortunates like himself) were needed to play the cautious game of hide and seek with the law, ducking in and out of the garish light of society because, God forbid, everyone would know that their blood wasn’t blue, and their shit didn’t smell like roses. But even then, Ben was right. Aristocrats weren’t likely to die for it. Excuses would be made, and cover-ups were to be expected.
He remembered when times were hard. Often, he hadn’t been sure when he’d get his next meal. He experienced times when he couldn’t open his eyes. And most of the time, the only thing that motivated him to live was opium.
Before Gabriel.
Colin looked to the left corner of the packed barroom. Sitting at a table, a well-dressed man raised his wine glass in a toast. Perhaps an invitation.
The man licked his lips, staring at Colin from the corner of his eyes, the way birds looked from underneath the paw of their captors. Helpless, mesmerized. And when Colin made eye contact with him, he felt that all-too-familiar wrenching of his insides. He wanted to run away from this grotesque yearning, wanted to vomit in one of Whitechapel’s dark, dirty streets. You have plenty of money, he told himself. You don’t need to do that anymore.
Yet he remained seated, hands trembling with eagerness.
As a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly. Clearly, his mother’s voice.
“Evenin’ to you, George.” Carrie Witterly sat down beside him. She had been nicknamed Shakespeare for quoting the great poet’s sonnets with ease and at the perfect moments. He didn’t know if this skill made up for the fact that she wasn’t very pretty. One of her pale brown eyes had a lazy lid so that it looked smaller than the other, and sometimes when she smiled a certain way, it looked crooked. Her light brown hair flowing loose and long, far past her bottom, reminded him of a mermaid.
“Hmm. No Shakespeare tonight?” Colin asked. “No golden strains to lift my spirits?”
She giggled and slapped her knee. “Lift yer spirits? I nearly didn’t recognize you! So, when I saw yer young, strong back leaning over this here bar, I says to meself, ‘Carrie you need to talk to him.’ Told meself to start a conversation with you. Maybe you’d want more than words with a member of the fairer sex. Thought you was one of them toffs. Where’ve you been, or should I say,” she said, her voice low and intimate, “what’ve you been doing to be looking so flashy?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he replied, smiling. I don’t even believe it myself. Colin’s free hand rose to his throat. The delicious throbbing from Gabriel’s bite was gone. He only possessed a memory, but memories became stale, faded. Or worse, they changed.
“Did someone die?”
Colin frowned. “You could say that.”
She traced her coral lips with the tips of her slender fingers, looking thoughtful. “Well, if you don’t wanna share yer good fortune, at least buy me a drink.”
Colin gave her one of his sly side smiles. “The toff over in the left corner of the bar is being very, very generous.”
Carrie rested a warm hand on his shoulder, warmer than he expected. Her hand felt wonderful. “You going to be generous back?” Her breath felt hot on his ear.
He laughed. “There’s the rub, sweet Carrie.” Colin sighed and raised the beer mug to his lips and drained it of all the acrid contents. Vomit. No doubt.
“I know how you feel,” Carrie said. “I sometimes think that if and when I’m able to stop working these streets I won’t need to lay on me back to eat and ‘ave a place to rest me head. But…” Her brown eyes grew wide and wet. “But, I fear that even then I won’t be able to help meself. What honest man would ‘ave me?” Her warm light eyes held his for what seemed like an eternity. She gave him a kind, friendly look. He wished she would go away and yet . . .
“You hungry?” Colin asked her.
Carrie smiled, crookedly. “Always famished.”
He pulled out a couple of bills from his pocket and pressed them into the palm of her hand. “This should be enough for a couple of
weeks.” He kissed her forehead. “Stay clear from trouble. I don’t want to hear about you in the papers.” He changed his tone, mimicking the clipped, proper voice of a West Londoner. “Carrie Witterly, an unfortunate, was tragically the latest victim of the Whitechapel murderer.”
Carrie sucked her teeth. “That’s like the pot calling the kettle black, George. Death ain’t a gentleman, especially the one named Jack. Be careful.”
“Death. Oh, no fear of that,” he replied.
She rolled the money up and stuffed it into the cleavage of her slight bosom. “Thank ye for yer patronage. Ye sure ye don’t need me to repay you?”
Colin hesitated with what he wanted to say. He swallowed hard. “May I have another kiss?”
She cocked an eyebrow probably thinking he was full of shit. “Just a kiss?”
He placed his fingers beneath her chin and tilted her head back, looking into her face. Carrie blushed, but she didn’t turn away. He didn’t care if anyone watched. Touching another body, especially one filled with the warmth of red life replaced his life-and-death love affair with opium. The touch of flesh, the scent of blood had become stronger than his desire for opium. This new desire had eclipsed the old.
“Just a kiss,” she repeated. “I think that can be arranged, George.” She laughed then. “Was wonderin’ why yer name was George. ‘Georgie Porgie puddin’ and pie kissed the girls and made them cry. And when the boys came out to play, Georgie Porgie ran away.’ I wonder why ye run, George?”
He cupped a hand around her ear. “Because the girls are much prettier, so he runs,” he paused and blew on her neck. She giggled. “He runs after the girls so that they can cry from pleasure.”
Colin slipped off the stool. Carrie offered him her hand, which he took and stumbled to the door, drunk with her great delicious warmth and what it promised. He snaked his way through the crowd of elbows and shoulders blocking their path.