by David James
Against the fallen cross, she was broken. Both arms stiff, flayed out on the beams. Blood drenched her hands, dripping down and covering the words on the cross so they meant nothing.
She whispered, “I’m sorry.”
My hands grabbed her wrist. Her pulse was slow and nearly silent. Her eyes flickered open and then closed again.
She was barely alive.
“Don’t give up,” I breathed frantically. My heart jumped around beats, skipping some altogether, forgetting how to drum. “I need you for this. I can’t do it alone.”
A word bubbled from her mouth, red and sticky and silent.
I knew it then.
“Kate...”
There were so many different kinds of love in the world, but just one that lasted forever: This love, ours.
It had always been love.
Kate lay in front of me, bruised, beaten and bloody. Her once soft brown hair was now a dark rust color, damp with sticky blood. Her once golden face the color of a deep morning sky was black and blue and I could barely see the girl underneath.
Against it all, I felt lost.
In this I felt so cold: Love changing. Hearts beating. People dying. And in the dark of the evening, just before day passed to night, I felt the tug of regret against my heart.
“Stay,” I said as I closed my eyes. “There’s so much I want to tell you still.”
I imagined the stars above, the way they blinked in time to my heart as if they were keeping it alive, and wondered if they would beat for Kate’s as well. If there was anything I could do to save her.
I could not lose her.
I leaned forward and brushed my lips to hers and felt my heart cry. It was heat and fire when we kissed, as if our entire world was burning. The air around us seemed to spark and shine, with her and I breathing in the heat like oxygen.
It was only us.
And, I thought, Only this.
I opened my eyes and saw a bright light surrounding us like falling snow, whiting out the world.
Silence.
“Kate?” I breathed, my voice echoing in the blank time.
Nothing.
Already, I missed her eyes. The way they held the truth she could not say. The way the violet glinted and sparked with strength.
They reminded me of stars, her eyes, and in them I knew I had found my heart.
“Please, Kate.”
There was nothing.
Nothing but my breathing.
My heart, lost.
Nothing.
Until-
“Calum...?” she whispered, opening her eyes.
I smiled down at her. “You’re alive.”
“What’s going on, Calum? Your skin!” she gasped.
“My skin?”
Blackness. My skin was as black as the night sky and dotted with thousands of tiny, shining stars like diamonds. On my upper arm, in the place it had always been, was my birthmark. It shone the brightest of all, twenty-five glittering stars emblazed in a night sky.
I did it, I thought.
I stepped forward. I felt like flying. “This is it, Kate. I’ve done it. We’ve done it. We’ve unlocked my powers. I am the Caeles.”
A voice to my left broke like thunder. “Now and for always, Caeles.”
Kate and I both jumped as Orion emerged from nothing. Next to him stood a beautiful woman, the same midnight skin and starry-night freckles covering her body. What looked like a ‘W’ was marked on her neck in tiny, flickering dots. Unlike Orion, her hair fell down past her shoulders in waves of curled silver.
“Orion!” I said and moved to meet him. “How did I do it? What can I do now? What is this?”
He chuckled. “You found the key, Caeles. With that you unlocked the power inside you. You’ve become one of us again, the last constellation to rise from the ashes. We are free again, because of you. Heaven’s Guard can protect the innocent once more.”
Before I could speak, he turned to the woman and said, “This is Cassiopeia.”
She nodded, and I did the same. She looked at me as though she could see my soul. Her eyes were colder than Orions, two graves digging deep. I wondered what she had seen that made them look like that. And then I knew. Death. And life. She had killed.
Kate had the same eyes.
Cassiopeia’s voice was like ice. It burned me when she spoke, every word like frostbite. “Young Caeles, you have much to learn if you are to continue this journey. Listen. If not, we are doomed.”
Orion smiled at her. His eyes, when he looked at her, were filled with something I couldn’t have placed days ago.
Love, I realized. He loved her.
“What happens now, Orion?” I asked. I ran my fingers down my arms. “What is this?”
“You are a piece of hope torn from the sky, Caeles.” He spoke quickly. “Your powers will allow you to call upon the stars of your constellation for help, guidance. With the stars you can control fire. Burn as bright as the stars you come from. You can become the night if you wish, blending into the shadows like a ghost.”
He smiled at me. “You’ll discover much more, too. You only have to wait until you are ready. But for now you must act quickly. We don’t have much time before the Devil senses your curse has lifted, and we have one demon to destroy before that.”
Kate stood away from us.
Though I had many, I needed one question answered more than the rest. “What was the key?”
Orion looked from me to Kate and back again. His smile widened. I saw his chest move up and down. The stars against his black skin moved slowly, and then quickly. A shooting star.
As he spoke, Orion gently followed the patterns of stars on Cassiopeia’s arm. I felt like I should turn away, but his voice wouldn’t let me. “Life, or the idea of it, is funny sometimes. We walk our days as hollow men, never truly realizing this day might be our last. This day might change everything. Too often it is forgotten that the truth can set us free. Today you felt that, Caeles. Willing to give your life, your soul and heart, to save another is a truth many are afraid to find. But that, truly, is the only way to find the truth of love. Real love is boundless. It is brave. Sometimes being brave just means falling in love, and to find it, we must surrender every fear we have until we are left with the irrevocable desire to believe in forever.”
Orion stepped forward and put his hand on my shoulder. His body was disappearing. “Love,” he said as both he and Cassiopeia vanished like a memory. “The key was love, Caeles. True love.”
~
Fragments of the church still fell around us. Nothing more than ash and the lighter pieces of wood were still aloft, but the sounds of the smoldering building were enough to fill what silence was left.
“Are you okay?” Kate said. “What just happened?”
I turned to look at her. With her hair wild and filled with pieces of wood, her skin blotted with ash, burned, and blood dripping down her face from a cut on her forehead, she never looked more beautiful.
She was alive.
I reached to brush a stray hair from her face. It stuck, covered in blood, to her cheek. I brushed it behind her ear and moved my hand down her jaw, a line of red following, to her shoulder and finally her hand.
“You look like I feel,” she said.
I tried to smile. I could feel my lips crack and my cheeks moan in torment. Every part of me was bruised except one.
“Does that mean you love me, too?” I asked.
-Kate-
No.
My heart said one thing-
my mind another.
Did I love him?
Yes.
But it went against everything I believed in.
As I thought about it, I felt lines of red run through the Warrior Code and mark me free. Still, there were places where the blood could not reach, where the vow was unbreakable. Where a part of me would forever be a Warrior girl caught between.
Soldier by soldier, side by side,
Never shall I break these words, or Death wil
l reap the victor.
Would this be worth it?
-Calum-
I saw something change in her eyes. The violet in them flashed blue. I could feel her pulse from her hand as it raced ever faster.
After a moment she spoke. “We are already dead, aren’t we?”
“What do you mean?”
Her eyes never left mine. “I mean that there’s no going back to what we were before. This is it. You are the Caeles. You walked into your destiny and have no way of going back. I was a Warrior but now... ”
I pressed my thumb gently against her hand, felt the warmth of her skin flush in mine, and said, “There’s this side to you I never knew, Kate. That Warrior you were before, well, you’re still her, but now you’re something more. You’re dark and bright and savage. You’re everything to me.”
“I think I love you,” she said in a breath. “But I still need to find my sisters. They come first right now, Calum. They have to. I can’t run away from them. Even if the world ends tonight, even if we die, my heart needs to keep looking for them. I need to die trying.”
I squeezed her shoulders. “I know.”
When our lips met again I felt my heart explode even more than the church had, felt my skin burn. The world faded and became our own secret place. I couldn’t breathe, or think, but somehow I went on living even more so than before.
For now, it was enough.
-Kate-
I can’t, I thought.
His skin was still the color of night with stars blinking slowly and, as darkness fell, he nearly faded away. “Calum, I don’t know if I can be who you want me to be. I can’t be that girl who falls in love and forgets everything but you.”
He sighed and closed his eyes, but didn’t let me go. “I don’t want you to be anyone but you, Kate. And I know what that means. But you can’t be afraid of this. Of us.”
When Calum opened his eyes, I saw galaxies. Millions of tiny stars shone in the blue; a vast sky filled with hope. He said, “I don’t want you to change who you are, but you can’t be afraid to open your heart a little.”
“I’m not afraid,” I lied. “It’s just that there are things about me you don’t understand. Even if I do save my sisters, I’m cursed. This thing that I am? This witch? It’s not going away anytime soon. You saw Magda. One day I’m going to be exactly like that.”
“You won’t. We’re all a little cursed, I think, but we can still love as if we weren’t. When I was little,” Calum said, a smile curving into his lips, “I used to count the freckles in my birthmark and pretend they were wishing stars. I used to wish for so many things: More birthdays, better parents, a car, a dinosaur. And love.”
He looked down at his arms and, still holding my hand, twisted them around so he could see the way the stars shot from his fingers up to his elbow and around to his shoulder. “Now I’m covered in shooting stars and my only wish is the one I already have; you, Kate. I love you. And I promise I’ll love you until the end no matter what.”
“You can’t know that,” I said and closed my eyes. My heart felt like it would rise up and choke me at any second.
“Kate,” Calum whispered. “Look down.”
I opened my eyes and gasped.
We were flying.
Calum hugged me close. “So this is how love feels.” His voice sounded completely at ease, as if flying was the most natural thing in the world. White folds of tiny clouds floated around us, and stars lit up my face.
I closed my eyes again and felt the air run around me, felt it breathe against my skin as if it were telling a story.
I was free. Free.
When I opened my eyes, the night was not as dark.
From a distance I could see a soft glowing light near where the Order’s entrance should be.
“Calum,” I said. “Look.”
Below us, hidden in the shards of the church, were words written in the dust. The reason the unhallowed place was nothing more than splinters in the wind:
I’m coming for you.
I’ll destroy the world until I have you.
You can’t hide.
-Calum-
From a distance, the light looked like hope, a hollowed sphere of light rising from the mountains. But my mind kept floating back to what was really there, what I remembered. The words written in blood. Bodies covered in blood.
Always blood.
The light wasn’t hope. But then, what was it? True night would fall in minutes; the sky was tinged with eerie silver, and faint, thin beams of dark were poking through what light was left.
The darkest hour, I thought, is just before light takes over, but what of the moment before the light goes out? What then?
And then, I’m coming for you, too, Dad.
“Hurry,” Kate shouted, her voice muffled by the sky. I felt her entire body tense, growing more compact as we flew. Her voice grew delirious as I moved through the air toward the field, away from the blood in Ashfall.
I could not see her eyes, but I knew they were open.
Violet, always.
We flew against the stars, the wind.
“Faster,” she shouted. “Let’s go!”
Chapter Eighteen
Those That Kill
-Calum-
Mist covered the field; a sea of fog rising in waves of gray and white. Shadows danced in the dust that rose from the mountains; with night came the fog of darkness; cold mixed with colder. Rancid smells hit my nose when we landed.
Cold and a lingering heat that didn’t belong.
And then-
one.
My heartbeat, pounding.
Two.
My pulse, racing.
Three.
My fear, rising.
Out of the shadows came everything I wanted to stay hidden. Morphis, the heartbeat of it all, was in the middle. A smile set firmly on his face, his pointed teeth touching his bottom lip making blood drip down. A boy stood to his right, skin puckered with wounds, pale blue eyes fixed forward in something like hopeless, sorrowful conviction.
And my blood-covered parents stood at the edge of it all. Mom was walking blindly forward and Dad was smiling. His eyes found mine and locked and held. In his eyes fire raged, burning madly as if the flames were eating his soul.
In their arms were two small girls with dark brown hair, gagged and bound with black swirls of shadow.
-KATE-
I was wrong before.
It’s not loving that makes people weak. It’s when you love someone too much that you get hurt. Sometimes love burns with a fire so fierce it kills you like this:
Adam.
His smile.
Karen and Kelly.
Kelly’s head fell back as the Bloodletter moved, smiled. A noise escaped her. A sigh? A breath?
But she was alive.
They were alive.
“Kate,” Adam said stepping forward. His eyes were darker than I remembered. “You’ve grown since that night I took you and your sisters. I can smell the blood all over you, see it in those pretty violet eyes of yours. Didn’t I tell you this would happen? We all become savages after a while. Give it time and we all destroy the people we love the most. Now it’s your turn.” His lips twisted into a sad smile. He tilted his head. “So, tell me, little witch, are you ready to die? Or would you like your sisters to go first?”
My mind reeled in this: Adam.
Adam.
Adam.
Why are you doing this?
Adam.
Adam.
Adam.
I thought you were gone.
I don’t know you anymore.
Anger rippled across a scream that started deep in my stomach, ran across my leviti and ended in my Warrior’s heart. The urge to kill was blinding, ripping through my veins like poison destroying everything but this: Adam was a boy that I once loved. Now, he was someone entirely different. He had taken my sisters, ruined everything I’d ever loved.
He had broken my heart.
-Calum-
“You have something I want,” Morphis said, sucking on two fingers covered in twining vine tattoos.
Kate's voice sliced through the mist like knives. “What do you want? Tell me!”
“Silence, little Warrior,” Morphis said and waved his hand through her words. “This doesn’t concern you at the moment.”
Kate’s entire body shuddered. Her fists were tight at her sides, shaking. Anger seemed to be rippling under her skin, moving through her veins until it reached her mouth. Teeth gritted, she said, “Those are my sisters. Tell me what you want or I will rip your throat out and send you back to Hell where you belong.”
Morphis’ lips tugged slowly up. “Marcus liked you, Warrior. Did you know that? I can still hear his thoughts sometimes if I listen closely enough. He loved you once a long time ago. Wanted to protect you just like that pitiful, earthy woman I killed. But you were no match for the power I could give him. Really, you’re no match for anything are you, little Destroyer?”
Mutilated and dripping red, his body was bone and muscle poking out of ripped flesh, as though the possession was too much for a human to survive, even Marcus. He flicked his hands down his robes. I could see the red of his tattoos gleaming from underneath his shredded garments. When Marcus had been in control his eyes had been black, his gem had glittered menacingly on his forehead. Now, as Morphis, his eyes were a red so filled with blood they were on fire. His tongue lashed out at his lips, raking rapidly on his pointed teeth. I could see that he kept cutting his tongue on the sharpness of them, but that didn’t stop him. He seemed to like it, the taste of blood.
“Look, Destroyer.” A trickle of red ran halfway down his chin. “Look at what your pitiful leader Marcus has become.” He ran his eyes down his body. “But still, you both have something I want. And so we will make a trade. If you do not agree with my terms, death will come for everyone you see before you, and everyone you don’t.”