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

by Karin Cox

  I doubted that. If nothing else, she was an enigma, another riddle to be solved. So closed. So guarded. A leaf furled around the beginnings of a flower, or the hardness of chestnut shielding something sweeter and silkier than it showed.

  I shook my head. It was not for me to know her. What could I offer her that I hadn’t already promised others—and failed them? Let the flower blossom, the nut crack in its own time. I had more pressing riddles than Skylar, and older loves too.

  Snapped from my reverie by the approaching cliff, I glanced at Skylar, hoping she had not been listening to my private thoughts again. Her face, in profile, showed me nothing.

  Cliffs below and columns above were pockmarked with tiny caves, and at the cliff’s edge, Skylar shot upward into the mouth of the nearest cave.

  “First lesson,” she yelled down to me. “Rebellion was the start of this, as it may well be the end.”

  “What rebellion? Surely it is impossible for Cruxim to war with each other. We are incapable of killing each other in warfare.”

  “Amedeo, you have seen them. Seen us all.” She gave me a hand to help me after her into the cave. “Sometimes, it feels like all we do is war. You are right that we cannot kill each other, or at least we do not.” Skylar set off into the darkness. “But I have seen feathers torn from wing and hair from heads, and wounds that took years to heal, physical and emotional. And without Milandor as an ally, even Silvenhall might be compromised if we came under attack. The treaty decreed Milandor had a blood vow to protect Silvenhall and the other Crèches. But now ... they would not kill for us. In truth, they do not even kill for themselves.” She beckoned for me to keep following. “Since they began to drink Haemil, Milandor no longer hunts.”

  Our way was lit only by firebugs and by glow-worms that wriggled in the damp walls. When the cave opened out into a chamber, I sensed the iron-sweet aroma of blood. It made me thirsty, followed by an insatiable anger. The lust to kill rose in me.

  Why do you tarry here, Amedeo, even while Beltran’s blood-beat calls to you! I shook my head to clear the thought.

  All along the shelved walls, amphorae of clay or carved marble, and jugs of jade and bronze, were waiting, their contents maturing.

  It was all I could do not to topple them all.

  “We have not always drunk each other’s blood.” Skylar moved along the shelves, as if looking for a particular vintage. “Back in the far, far ages, it began. Most Cruxim drank it only for ritual and ceremony, but we made it for the Sibylim. The Sibylim do not bloodlet. Their blood is considered holy, but as priestesses nor do they hunt. Now they barely even leave Cascadia. When others saw that they, too, might live off Haemil...”

  She came over to where I leaned against a wall. Whether I was angered by the words Skylar spoke, by the closeness of the Haemil, or by the distance between myself and any Vampires that might slake my rage was anybody’s guess.

  She leaned against the wall beside me. “I have drunk my share,” she confessed. “There was a time I was being trained as a Sibyl. But then ... I ... it was a lucky thing that I had not yet made a vow. It was not my fate.”

  “Fate!” The anger in my veins subsided somewhat. “I cannot credit fate—or luck. We make decisions and we call them destiny when they are kind to us and regrets when they are not.”

  Skylar shrugged and put out one finger for a firefly to land upon. “You think you make decisions, Amedeo, but I know you have heard the Maker too. The Cruximus says we have ills to attend to, sins to absolve, regrets to right. Sometimes we stray from our path. Fate guides us back. It leads us to others who heal us or who will help us fulfill our birthright. I did not choose my fate any more than you did. It was luck that I did not let others choose it for me.” She blew the firebug away and it flitted off to land on a jar of Haemil.

  I wet my lips with my tongue, still longing for the wine. Did she mean that I, too, had let others steer me from my mission? Had my love for Joslyn or Sabine made me less a Cruxim? Had I wanted to be human? Wanted to be half animal? I did not know. I had not even known what it meant to be Cruxim, other than to kill. What fate was that?

  I scoffed. If my fate was to kill Vampires, then I was more Cruxim than these Haemil-swilling, hiding angels. I had taken more taut skin between my teeth than most of them, I guessed.

  Skylar did not explain herself further. Her words were a secret, her thoughts a light that shone inwards. I wanted to ask what she meant, but she quickly changed the subject.

  “We also drink Haemil for the Cygnus Amoratus.” She glanced at me from the corner of her eye. “You think we are hiding, but we never let Haemil quell the need to kill ... not until after your mother...”

  I sighed. “Yes, my mother—the cause of every ill in Silvenhall. Perhaps fate abandoned me when I inherited her talent for disaster,” I said sarcastically.

  “Milandor did not exist before Calira’s exile.” Skylar ignored me and continued, “They are the newest of the Crèches, but they began to drink the Haemil first. Silvenhall, Hiltenhall, Willendel and Kindamor refused it, drinking only ritually to bind themselves to the Crèche and to each other. We sent parties out to hunt while the Cruxim of Milandor grew strong on their own blood. Then we, too, began to have more feast days, more bloodletting. Humans bred, and Vampires with them. It was harder to remain unseen. It was a convenience not to have to leave the Crèche.”

  I walked over to the rows of bottles, touching the jars, wiping away the shining motes of dust. “Yet all the while, the Vampires kept killing and turning and growing in number.”

  She nodded.

  “I envy you,” I added. “I cannot turn off my hatred for them, my urge to kill. It is a rage, I—”

  “Most cannot,” she shushed me. “Do not think the need is lost.” She bared her fangs at me. “We are Cruxim, our need remains. All hungers have a purpose. For us, it is the only way the Crux will be lifted from our shoulders. When Vampires are no more, only then might we truly be.”

  I shook my head. “All I know is that I would kill a million times over to rid the Earth of their filth,” I growled.

  “You might have to.”

  “It sounds a sweet impossibility.” I shook my head. “To stop that terrible passion. What would drive me on without it? I crave their deaths. Without vengeance, there would be nothing but hollowness.” I sounded a monster even to myself, nothing but a killer. But memories of Sabine encased in gold, and of Beltran’s body hunched over Joslyn—dispassionate, controlling, raping—filled my mind. Even if he were dead, I knew I would hate him still. I would give my life to see him purged from this world.

  “Peace,” Skylar suggested softly. “Perhaps without vengeance there is peace.”

  She moved behind the row of shelves and vanished deeper into the cavern, down another corridor. “Milandor sought peace too,” she continued. “Yet you are right that, like us, without their mission they lack purpose.”

  “Not if their purpose is only to live in peace. Not if they have forsaken the mission altogether.”

  From ahead, I heard her tsk. Her voice, when it came, was brusque. “Theirs is not peace; it is cowardice. Jania says they want a love that exists free from the need to kill or to die. But fear, not peace, controls them.”

  “I saw soldiers with them. Jania said they have fought before and won even against Silvenhall. What have they to fear?”

  “Yes. Soldiers who train but do not fight. Do not mistake me.” She stopped and waited for me to catch up. “Their fear is not of Vampires, although they seem indifferent to the hunger. They fear not Silvenhall either. In Milandor, they fear only losing the ones they love.”

  I reached up, feeling for the cross that hung around my neck, seeking its light in the darkness. “I know what terror that loss is,” I whispered. “It is the greatest fear. I would call them pragmatic.”

  Silver eyes shone back at me. Pushing a strand of hair off her forehead, Skylar spun and continued on down the passage. “They are selfish,” I heard her mu
mble.

  At the back of the cave, she hoisted herself onto a stone ledge, patting the seat next to her for me to sit.

  “If it is selfish to want to protect those you love, to keep them safe, then I am afraid of what you must think of me,” I said softly. “Both for wanting it and for failing at it.” As I settled beside her on the rough stone, my fingers brushed hers where she leaned on the bench.

  “They are selfish,” she insisted, moving her hand away. “You are driven by the desire to destroy Vampires. For Jania—for all of Milandor it seems—there is no need.”

  I shook my head. “It is hibernating. Sleeping. They have not vanquished it.” I was speaking of myself, but I hoped it to be true.

  “I hope so.” She sighed. “Milandor is a mighty Crèche now, bigger than Silvenhall even. How can we hope for victory while they sit sipping each other’s blood and convince fledgling Cruxim to join them?”

  Jania’s defection from the Council had hurt her more than I realized.

  “Our enemy grows in number while we shrink.” She sounded defeated.

  “Have hope,” I told her. “We do not shrink. Our population is constrained.” It was a strange word, but it had once been Sabine’s and the thought comforted me. What had she said? I searched my mind, but her exact words were gone, and only that one remained. “We live, we have a child, we die.”

  Skylar’s face crumpled suddenly. The sight of tears glittering in her eyes shocked me. I had never seen her so animate.

  “It is our Crux.”

  I put my hand over hers, alarmed for her.

  “Do you not feel it then?” she asked.

  “Feel what?”

  “The desire for a child?” Her voice was small and impossibly soft in the darkness.

  Ah, and there is the kernel of her anger.

  Another memory tugged at me, not of Sabine or of revenge but something softer, something lighter—something altogether more urgent. Azure eyes. Tiny arms outstretched.

  “No,” I said. “No.” I shook my head, gripped by a visceral fear. “What could I teach a son but how to die? What could I teach a daughter but how to grieve the loss of her mother?”

  “You could teach them how to live.”

  We were silent for a time. I leaned back against the stone, thinking of Joslyn’s words, all those centuries ago, about the convent, her anxieties about being cloistered. They are not so different, these two women, I thought, glancing at Skylar. Her head was back against the wall, her face framed by a halo of hair.

  “You never did say it.” I broke the silence.

  She cocked her head.

  “The Swan they spoke of in the Council, you never told me what they meant by it.”

  It coaxed a small smile, but her mood was still somber. “The Swan is a ... it is nothing.”

  I squeezed her hand, preventing her from pulling it away. “Tell me. Please.”

  “It predicts who will pair-bond with whom.”

  “A bird?” It sounded ridiculous. I couldn’t help but laugh.

  I saw the white flash of Skylar’s smile in the semi-darkness. “A bird? No.” She laughed. “It is known as the Swan because ... swans, too, mate for life. The Sibylim tell us who will be betrothed and make a record of it, sometimes even before the lovers are born.”

  “Betrothed so they might love one another so fully, so faithfully, that they create orphans to weep for them. It seems callous.”

  I had thought to be consoling, but Skylar glared at me, her face flushed. “Jania might say the same.”

  “How can they tell who someone will love?” I scoffed. “It’s as if it is a transaction, like a carriage-man at the markets arranging to breed a mare.”

  “It is an oracle.” I could hear her slow inhalation. I had exasperated her again. “But sometimes a Messenger may know it themselves. I am a Messenger,” her voice softened. “Sometimes I know.”

  “You mean the Maker. He tells you who should love whom?”

  “No.” She put her hand to her chest. “The heart tells me. The Sibylim visit a holy grove to make the oracle. Once, it was in Delphi, but since your mother—”

  I sighed. “Again?”

  “Hear me out. Now, they do not leave Cascadia. The oracles tell us which hands will meet. Which are destined.”

  “From birth?” The pffttt of my escaping breath was loud in the silence.

  “Sometimes before.” She jumped off the ledge. “But why waste time with histories you will not believe?”

  CHAPTER TEN

  She did not speak to me again until we reached the glade. We found it filled with mountain deer, dainty, curious, big-eyed things that rushed up to Skylar expectantly.

  “You feed them.” I gestured to the insistent way they followed her.

  “No, many others before me, but I would not let this orphaned one die.” The young doe nudged her again, bleating. “It meant milking the others to feed her. But we are all shepherds, or were once. You will learn that soon enough.”

  “Shepherds?”

  A line of deer following her, she walked to a gnarled tree and removed a pail that hung from one of the higher branches.

  I watched her calm a doe, gentling its ears with one hand until it let her place the pail underneath so that she might milk it. The orphan approached me and nuzzled my hand. Its lips were warm against my palm. How long had it been since I had touched an animal that wasn’t a bat? The black mare at St Martin de Re, I supposed. It felt good that the deer did not shy away from me but trusted me as it did her.

  “I thought we were swans,” I said, still wondering what she meant by shepherds.

  Skylar laughed. “Patience, Amedeo. It will all come in time.”

  And I had time—a month at least. Would she make me wait for every scrap of information?

  “Kisana told me you all learn the Cruximus by rote.” I kept my eyes on the deer. “You know the Sphinx’s riddle, but you won’t reveal it.” My eyes called her on her lie.

  She looked up at me sharply and then took the half-full pail and helped the orphan drink from it, focused on the doe’s greedy sucking.

  “Patience,” she cautioned. “You will not be permitted to read the Cruximus or to hear the oracle of the Sphinx until they are sure of you and until you have made a blood-troth. They do not trust you yet.”

  “Yet you do?”

  She let the deer lick a smear of milk from the back of her hand before stroking its back. It shook itself to fend her off and skittered away, kicking its dappled rump in the air. “I know you better,” she said finally.

  “You think you know me better.”

  Her head snapped up like a deer’s, nostrils flared. “And what do you know, Amedeo? In all the centuries you have lived, what has eternity taught you?”

  Her voice remained calm despite her words, which maddened me.

  “Not to trust those who lie to me.” I lashed out, although I could not tell why I felt the need. “And sorrow.”

  She sighed and watched the deer graze. “You are a deep well,” she said eventually. “One must take care not to drown in such a well, or in one’s own sorrows. Perhaps I should not have brought you here, but if you will let me, I might teach you more than the Sphinx’s riddle. Might be I could teach you happiness. Silvenhall was a happy place ... once. It might be again.”

  The sky was beginning to lighten at the horizon, tipping the steep pillars of rock with bronze and rose.

  Tiredness overtook me. Why did I continue to challenge her? She was right: maybe she should not have brought me here. I glanced across at her, at the dawn light that struck her face. Her expression was serene, unreadable. I envied her that. Was it happiness, I wondered, or something else? Trust? Faith? She seemed to know her fate before it found her. I fought at my fate and the bleak fates of others. Maybe she was right. I had been too much alone, too unhappy. A pit of sorrows. Yet whose fault was that but Silvenhall’s? And had I made fewer mistakes than she?

  I stole another glance in her dir
ection. If she was listening to my thoughts, her face did not betray her eavesdropping. She had wronged me by bringing me here, and she was keeping more from me, but despite it I felt drawn to her. I saw little kindness for me in this place, but for her. Could she be happiness too?

  I shook my head. I had known happiness once, hadn’t I? And it was not in a Crèche. It was in letters tucked under my pillow, in passionfruit, and in poetry. Sabine’s wings above me, her rumble of laughter. All of those things were happy.

  “And complicated.”

  Skylar had been in my thoughts again, and I heard hers as clearly as a bell.

  “How irritating that is!” I snapped, setting off alone down a stone path that led to a copse of wild lemons.

  “I am sorry. I do not mean to irritate you.” Her thoughts penetrated my head.

  “Then what?” I spun to look at her. “To lecture me?”

  She moved to a round, flat stone set into the ground and slid it sideways, revealing a well. The chain squeaked as she lowered the bucket. When she drew it up again, the water was so cold that a tendril of white mist curled from it. Hoisting the bucket to her hip, she set off away from me, water sloshing down the sides, until she poured it into a stone trough nearby.

  “Only to help you,” she said as the deer flocked around her to drink. “As I help others.”

  “And this helps? You patronize me. You treat me like a fledgling. You teach me like a schoolmarm.”

  Her face crumpled for a moment, and she bowed her head. “I am sorry. I have never had to teach Cruxim lore to one who knows it not. Here, it is instilled from birth. It is in everything we do. How else should I teach you but by abiding by the lore? How should I please you without bringing about my own exile? Tell me, Amedeo, that I might teach you more kindly. Must I let you go, and Silvenhall with you?”

  Shame washed through me. “I am sorry.” I hung my head. I wanted to tell her yes, to leave. “I am grateful, but Sabine’s anchorstone sits in Delphi while the riddle I sought is here. You know it. You hear my thoughts.” I coughed. “And yet you keep yours hidden from me. You keep the riddle from me, and much more. Why must I wait?”