Cruxim (Paranormal Fallen Angel/Vampire Series)

by Karin Cox

  “Oh, you didn’t hear?” Seamus’s voice was slippery with satisfaction. “Theron made off with her too. Yes, your two little playmates let you get all tricked up like the Messiah on the cross and off they’ve gone to fornicate together. Seems angel prick’s not all that potent after all, eh, Feathers? Or maybe she just prefers fur to feathers.”

  I didn’t even bother to snarl this time. Let the imbeciles think what they would. There is nothing more stupid than arguing with stupidity.

  “I heard she savaged one of Gandler’s carnival men and that Theron put a trident through the other.” Trudie sounded hopeful and a little breathy with the excitement of it all.

  “But neither of them thought to come for you, Feathers, now did they?”

  Impossible. Sabine would never betray me like that. My heart told me they were planning something, some way to free us all from Gandler’s clutches. Patience, urged my mind. She will get a message through.

  Gandler took no risks with my liberty. We remained in Provins, but no longer was I dragged from my cage to participate in Gandler’s nightly amusements. Instead, a parade of pilgrims, disbelievers, and sightseers was pushed past my wagon all day and into the night, each clutching a Provins penny for the privilege of seeing me.

  “They are stuck on,” a small boy insisted, poking a hand in between the bars to try to snatch a feather.

  “Our Lord God’s heavenly host are mighty, glorious beings. This wretched monster cannot be one. How else would our Father allow him to remain in this cage?” a cowled monk declared.

  “My, but ’e is ’ansome ain’t ’e?” One of the women from the nearby market, a flower seller, came most days, tossing blooms in through the bars and blowing me kisses. “Imagine what ’e must’ve looked like in heaven. Ooo, I reckon ’e might take me there if I can figure out how to get ’im outta ’ere.”

  “Why don’t you give him something useful then, you stupid bint,” a fat farmer told her. “Stop throwing him roses and give the poor bastard a crowbar tomorrow.”

  “Everyone back, back away from the bars.” Karl brandished a club. “If I see anyone throwing anything other than rotten produce in at this freak, I’ll lock them up with him. Don’t you idiots know he eats people?” He pulled a face at the crowd. They all took a step back.

  “I thought he was an angel. Which is it? Is he mutant, myth, or man?”

  “I’ll go in wif ’im, mister,” the flower seller shouted. “’E can eat me any day.”

  “Get back you stinking trollop.” Karl walloped her broad backside with the back of the club. “And you”—he pointed at the farmer—“go take a bath. You stink the lot of you.”

  “What happened to the others: the wolfman and the she-lion?” A small boy stared at Karl accusingly. “I paid coin to see an entire menagerie and the best you got is a man who’s been tarred and feathered, a pig-fat whore. No offense, Mademoiselle,” he said in the direction of Trudie, “and a man with two heads, and both of ’em ugly as three-day-old shit.”

  “Well, he ate the others, didn’t he?” Karl insisted.

  “Then I suggest you feed him more,” said the farmer. “The poor thing’s little more’n skin and bones.”

  “Don’t worry, me love, on the morrow I’ll bring you some sweet apples too.” The flower seller blew me kisses as Karl herded them on. Behind her ample frame, I thought I caught a glimpse of silver hair.

  “Wait,” I cried and put a hand out through the bars, inwardly cursing myself for my brashness.

  “Oh, sweet’eart,” said the flower seller, thinking I meant her. She tried to clutch my hand, but Karl pushed her back again. “I’ll be back, Sweet Angel. One day we shall fly away together.”

  The flower seller was true to her word; she came again the next day, but I turned my back and ignored her. “Moody today, me love.” She threw in a bunch of flowering rosemary. That night, I buried my head in her bouquet and wept.

  It had been ten days since Sabine and Theron had vanished, and still I had no sign of them.

  “Man died from Theron’s trident,” Trudie told me. “And another from your lion’s bite.” I had given up paying any attention to Seamus and Sinbad, their company vexed me so, but Trudie’s nightly appearances in the silken tent gave her access to the gossip. “Gandler brought out a new act last night: a woman who bleeds stigmata from her eyes, mouth and hands. Very beautiful, she is. More beautiful even than your Sabine.”

  “Probably just another fake,” Sinbad sneered.

  I ignored them.

  “Sabine will return,” I told Trudie. “Gandler has me watched day and night, but she will come for me.”

  “Don’t be so sure, Feathers,” Seamus said. “Gandler hung up half a lion’s corpse and the body of a wolf from a gibbet post. Told the crowd they were killed trying to escape.”

  In the cage opposite, Trudie wobbled to a sitting position and began to rifle through the mound of food the procession of people had thrown into her cage.

  “Theron was no werewolf. It was not him.” I rolled my eyes.

  “Aye. Nor was it her,” Trudie agreed. “That was a male lion, up close. But it wouldn’t do to tell people a lioness and a wolfman were prowling the city together.”

  I nodded. “This woman who weeps blood. What is her name?”

  “Joslyn, he calls her.” Trudie found half a moldy cake and stuffed it in her maw, then she continued, “But I call her bluff. She’s beautiful, sure, but she has the unnatural look of that poor dead girl about her. I never see her by day. There’s something not right about her. I hear tell she approached him too.” Trudie swallowed down the lump of cake and followed it with half an apple. “I never heard of a woman who weighed less than three hundred pounds or weren’t tattooed like a sailor wanting to join the circus.”

  “Joslyn,” I repeated quietly to myself.

  It cannot be her, I told myself. How would she know I was here? Then I reminded myself that half of France had probably heard of Gandler’s angel at the freakshow in Provins. It was a wonder Beltran had not turned up. But surely Joslyn would not come. I had told her I never wanted to look on her face again, that if I did I would kill her, surely she would stay away. Unless...! I had a fleeting vision of Danette’s face. No. No, it could not be. Had Beltran’s ruse with the mortal girl been based on truth? Had Joslyn, like Danette, sought me out to die?

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Two nights later, I saw her for the first time in nearly two hundred and fifty years. Death had not wearied her. Her skin was luminous, and her eyes—those eyes—still shone bluer than the ocean.

  It had surprised me, and the others, that Gandler had not set about torturing me following Sabine’s escape. Perhaps he knew that my part in Danette’s death was torture enough for me, or perhaps he was too busy hunting for Sabine to care. But there was no torture he could devise that would be as painful as seeing her face after so long. She came for me in the early evening. The bustle of the covered markets had died down, and the night was still and warm and so quiet that I could hear the crickets busy in the fields beyond Provins’ walls. Oh, what I would give to be out there, flying above the fields under the bone-white moon, away from Joslyn, away from all of this.

  It was two weeks since Sabine and Theron had vanished, and no word or sign had come from either of them. Kettle, too, had disappeared. Trudie said he was being punished for Sabine’s escape. Every day, I looked for something that might provide some clue as to Sabine’s whereabouts or her plans, but as each night segued into morning with no sign from her, I began to think perhaps the twins had been right, perhaps she had abandoned me. The only thing that prevented me from thinking Gandler had found her anchorstone and pounded it to gravel was that the man himself had not come to gloat over it.

  The night Joslyn came, I got my answer.

  The twins and Trudie were already in the tent, and Joslyn was dressed for the show. A white silk sheath with a cowl covered her lithe body. Cinched in by silver at the waist, it left her slender ar
ms bare and free. Had it not been for the ethereal glow of her skin and the vermilion of her lips, she might have been an angel floating towards me—or a vision. My veins tingled, sensing the closeness of Vampire blood, but the man in me sensed her too. Yearning tugged at me, yearning for years so long past that it seemed as if all but the memory of them was dust.

  “Joslyn?” I stood and grasped the bars of my cage.

  She smiled a little and moved closer. “We must be quick.” She pointed towards the big top.

  “Yes, the stigmata.”

  The edge of her laugh could cut steel. “A pretty trick,” she said. “But of course you know that. It is not a hard thing, to cry. To bleed.”

  “No,” I said, awkwardly, remembering that night in the river, when my tears had come close to matching the stream’s volume. “Joslyn, that night ... I ... It was a sin.”

  “Shhh,” she said, one finger to her lips. “Not one so dark as this.” She gestured to herself, her hand fluttering the white silk of her hood. Then she slid her fingers in through the cage.

  The jolt of electricity when she touched me caused me to leap back, as if she had burned me, and her smile turned to a scowl that made her blue eyes gleam suddenly black as Gandler’s. “This is how you would treat me—your rescuer?”

  “My rescuer? Joslyn, you must not do this.”

  “I must.” Her voice grew soft again, seductively so. “Ame, I must. For more than two hundred years, I have searched for you. And yet, ever, as soon as I grew close, they pulled me away. Beltran locked me in a coffin for half a century. Said you would kill me, kill us all, that I must stop this ceaseless, endless longing for things that were past. Mortal dreams that never were. But I knew.” She put her other hand through the bars, both of them seeking mine, which trembled like a child’s in hers. Slowly, Joslyn brought my scarred palms to her lips. My skin prickled at her touch, repulsed and stirred by the coolness of her kiss and the beat of her blood.

  “He never told you?” I made to withdraw my hands, but she kept one clasped in her own.

  “Told me what, Meu angel de la guarda?”

  The words were sweet, but still each felt like a wound.

  “Beltran never told you,” I said again, wondrously. “The tower at Sezanne? You never knew?”

  “You were at Sezanne?”

  “For forty years. Held prisoner by the citizens of the village.” I hung my head, but she caught my eye and her expression told me she had read something in it.

  “Your wings...” She dropped my hand and made to stroke a wing feather, but could not reach it through the bars. “Gandler did not do this then?” she whispered. “He did not torture you? She lied to me.”

  “She?” I was confused. “Beltran knew I was in the tower. He came most nights to mock me. He never told you.”

  “And all the while I searched,” she said slowly, sadly. “All the while...” She broke off and her face flushed with anger. “The jealousy. Oh, the cursed jealousy. He always hated you, would have done anything to keep me from you. But why would she lie to me?”

  “She? She who?” The old expression leaped into my mind. She’s the cat’s mother. “Sabine...?” I breathed.

  “She told me Gandler was a torturer. She came to me to save you. Said I was the only other being she could be sure would help to free you.”

  “She did not lie about that; here you are.”

  Joslyn pushed the hood from her head, and the wind took a strand of her long dark hair and blew it across her face. “Here I am,” she said. “But he did not do this to you.” She nodded to the scars that patchworked my chest.

  “No, but he is a torturer all the same. He…” Danette’s name stalled in my throat. “He tortured Sabine. He removed her teeth, her claws. Tormented her.”

  Sabine’s softly spoken word that night in Paris, when I asked her why she had stopped me, sprang into my mind: Jealousy.

  Had she brought Joslyn here to help free me, or in the hope that it might destroy her greatest rival? I shivered, and my wings flapped involuntarily in the darkness. “How did she find you?”

  “She did not. She found Beltran.”

  I must have looked puzzled at that, because Joslyn cocked her head back at me slightly. “The coven houses in Paris. Sabine told me you were captured there. She came there looking for me, knowing Beltran must be there somewhere. She guessed he would know my whereabouts.”

  Anger thickened my blood. “Why do you stay with him?”

  “Where else is there to go? I did not stay. Not at first. After the first deadened months, I crept away inside myself. I flew to Dubrovnik, hid myself like a monster. A bat, I crawled inside the walls of Lovrijenac Fortress and withered there. All the while, Beltran searched for me.”

  And all the while, I thought, I did my best not to. What had I done myself, those first hundred years without her, but wander in a daze, lost in a nightmare of killing and blood and need and duty? Each neck, every set of fangs, a reminder of what she had become. How many nights had I wished to put an end to it all until I had met Sabine?

  “What did she tell you about Gandler?” I quickly changed the subject.

  “He’s a torturer. He caught you in Paris, when Beltran attacked you, and forced you both into his freakshow.”

  “Joslyn.” My voice had a chill to it. “You must leave this place. Leave at once! She has not told you what he is. He knows what you are, knows this little act is not stigmata.”

  Her eyebrows shot up and she shook her head. “Ame, he does not know.”

  “Dr. Claus Gandler hunts Vampires,” I told her. “He has devoted his life to it. He knows! You must fly. Now, Joslyn. Do not delay. You are in danger.” I could have cursed Sabine for not telling her.

  “No, Ame. It is you who is in danger, but I have come for you. We will be together.”

  Her voice had a singsong quality that made her delusion even more apparent.

  “Joslyn”—I put a hand up to the silver cross—“the girl who once wore this, he found in the village. She was my jailer … until Beltran. Please…” I felt my throat constrict with anxiety for her, even after all these years apart. “Please. Leave this place. Leave me.”

  She shook her head, and her curls bounced wildly. “Never, Ame. I love you.”

  I had forgotten how stubborn she could be, and how frustrating. I made my gaze as cold as Gandler’s eyes. “And yet I would kill you—in a breath. I would feast on you and send you to a fiery tomb!”

  How I wished she would leave.

  “This thing you want, my love you crave,” I hissed. “It is impossible! My entire being screams for your blood. If these bars were not here”—I shook the reinforced steel with all my force until my teeth rattled—“I would destroy you. I would consume you.”

  “Then so be it.”

  The roar from the pavilion rang in my ears.

  “I must go. I will return later.” Joslyn pressed her lips up to the bars. “El meu angel de la guarda, vengeance is coming for you, and her teeth are bared.” Putting her fangs briefly to her own wrist, she made the tiny weeping wounds that would double as stigmata. Then she pulled back and her fangs gleamed with blood. “I will need no fake tears tonight.” Her last look at me was one of undiluted sorrow; it stung my very soul. “The sight of you in a cage is enough.”

  I watched her float away, a wisp of white silk in the darkness.

  “A beauty, is she not?” The voice was low and came from my left. Trudie and the twins were already in the tent, and Gandler was making more good coin tonight, if the applause from the audience was anything to go by.

  I sprang back from the bars, into the corner.

  “The stigmata woman. I never saw such purity.” The last word came out sardonically. Then a whisper, “Some say she is the Vampire Queen.”

  “She is not.” I stepped forward again, recognizing the voice and relieved it was only Kettle. Yet still, he could not be seen. “Kettle?”

  “Aye. Down here, Feathers.”

>   I looked again. “Blast, Kettle. Where are you hiding?”

  “Do not yell, Feathers, or you’ll be the death of me.”

  “The death of you…?”

  “Psssssssst!”

  The hiss came somewhere beneath me. I squashed my face up against the bars and squinted down toward the ground. Something crawled there, squirming like a puppy on its belly, something small and toothless and disfigured.

  “Kettle?” I asked again.

  “Yes, it’s me. Are you blind, man? Be thankful you’ve still got two eyes to see a man who lacks two legs. Now, I suppose instead of Kettle the midget, men’ll call me Kettle the cripple and be done with it.”

  It was then that I saw what had happened to him.

  “Just when you think a man can’t get any shorter, Feathers.” He grunted. Blisters of sweat beaded his lip. “I suppose I should be lucky that he took only my legs for letting your feline friend escape, and not my head.”

  “Kettle…” I stared at the blood-soaked bandages, the stumps that terminated above the knee. “I’m … I’m sorry.”

  “What do you have to be sorry about?”

  “Your legs. For your loss.”

  “Shhh.” Kettle put a finger to his lips and rolled onto his back. A grunt of pain came from the ground near the wagon wheel as the exertion sent a further dark stain seeping through the bandage on his thigh.

  “Listen up. Before Karl gets back,” he whispered, propping himself awkwardly against the wagon. “There’s a lad here, Lee, who’s watching you night and day, aye and listening too.”

  “She is not a vamp—”

  “Shhh! God’s whiskers, Feathers! Don’t interrupt me. Lee’s my boy. A bastard. Gandler doesn’t know it. The other was mine too. The scarred lad. Kellane his name is. Used to be a handsome lad, did Kel. Gandler’d never risk letting him watch you alone now. He’s taken him somewhere. Won’t tell me where. He’s insurance. But Lee—”

  “I know Gandler keeps Kellane so you’ll do his bidding,” I said. “I know he scarred him.”

  “Aye.”