by Karin Cox
Skylar just nodded.
“She knew,” I repeated hoarsely, “and, like you, she did not tell me.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The night’s darkness was like the fast embrace of death after the brightness of Cascadia, and my soul felt as heavy as Sabine’s anchorstone, weighing me down toward the inky ocean. I had said nothing to Skylar, just taken up the anchorstone in my arms and fled Cascadia, stumbling through the winding white passages, ignoring Skylar’s pleas and her tears until I found an entrance that would lead me out, back into the dark.
I was one of them.
The thought writhed in my head. It explained so much. The euphoria I had felt when Beltran had injected the boy’s blood into me, and that it had enlivened me and not killed me. Beltran had known it too. Why else the silver cross? Why else follow me and goad me and take Joslyn from me except that he knew what kind of freak I was—and hated me for it?
My breath, as I drew it in, stung my throat. All along I had felt I did not belong at Silvenhall but had not known why. Now, the truth tortured me.
No wonder the Cruxim hated me. I was an enemy among them, a wolf amid lambs. They must have felt the urge to crush me, to drain me of the accursed Vampire blood that filled my veins, just as I desired to destroy Beltran. Yet they had not.
Only so they might use you! my angry thoughts cried. The Cruor—the fulfillment of a prophecy told by the Cruximus, a book that may have been itself a lie, for the Council was corrupt, the Sibylim liars.
I did not care.
I was not one of them. I had never been one of them.
I was alone.
I gave a great swoop of my wings, eager to put Silvenhall far behind me. I was flying blind. Anywhere here there could be a crag or a monolith to block my path, to send me hurtling to the ground, but I cared not. It could hurtle me to Hell, where I belonged.
The ocean churned like a great black bedsheet below me, and I thought that all along I had been wrong and that perhaps Beltran had been right.
His words rang in my ears. You eat us. Just as the lion eats the gazelle, or the fox eats the hare. Yet still you think yourself so much better than us.
I had been arrogant. A predator hunting prey, no different to him. How many had I had killed? Thousands. My tongue felt thick in my throat. A kind of sick hunger filled my stomach just thinking of them, and a howl of horror escaped my lips.
I was a monster—even more monstrous than they. An unwitting cannibal, I had spent centuries feeding upon the blood of my own.
My own! I chastised myself. As if they could be my own any more than the Cruxim of Silvenhall, or Milandor, or Argentil would ever be. As if their suspicion, their hatred would be any less if they knew what I was: a creature born out of a love as perverse as any Dr. Gandler had derided.
I realized, with horror, that even Joslyn and Skylar had let me do it.
Joslyn had let me gorge upon them to free Sabine, had even fed me her own blood.
Skylar, having known me for what I was, had allowed me to hunt with her in the dark alleys of the Piraeus.
My horror was replaced with a welling, sick laughter. What a fool I had been. How weak and gutless and whining a creature. I thought of all the earthly pleasures I had denied myself. My love for Joslyn—a human, just as my father had been when he met my mother. I had denied it, and her. And denied it again when she was a Vampire, deep in the caverns beneath the Grand aux Dimes in Provins. We might have loved for an eternity, Joslyn and I, had she told me what I was. I ground my teeth. Why had she not told me?
“Because she knew. She knew what it was to be a monster.”
Once again, the thought was not mine, and as the sun’s rays rose behind me in the east, I knew it was Sabine. Her stone warmed in my arms.
Sabine, I thought, I have wronged you too. When I should have been searching the sea for you, I followed a lie to Silvenhall.
I had hoped to find acceptance and affection and kinship, all of the things my heart had longed for since childhood.
Instead, I had found myself.
And I hated him!
A venomous resentment of my Maker rose in me. How had he let this happen? How had he let my mother degrade herself by giving her body to such a desecrater of mortal joys, the one I should call Father but could not?
"Is our Maker at liberty to stop love where it is true?”
I thought it was Sabine again. But as I listened, I stopped and swerved to find Skylar flying behind me.
“You judge your mother, but she was a lot like you, Amedeo. She tried to resist your father at first, Eresia told me, just as you resisted Joslyn. When he became a Vampire, she tried even harder, but she could not deny him.”
“Leave me, Skylar. Please. Leave me.”
I felt the breath of her wings in my face as she flew in front of me, hovering before me like a hummingbird. “I cannot leave you. Your exile is my exile.” She put out a hand to clasp my arm. “You did not bring this upon yourself, Ame. Do not take it upon yourself either.”
“What is there to take on?” I shook her off violently. “That I am a monster? A hypocrite? I am a cannibal. A misfit. You know yourself I do not belong in Silvenhall. You knew what I was,” I spat. “And you let me feed on them, on my own kind.” I shuddered. “Perhaps I will fare better with them.” I flung one arm out in the blackness and plummeted downward, hoping to lose her.
“Now you speak foolishly.” She followed my descent. “You know as well as I what would happen were you to go to them. You may be half Vampire, but they are not your kind.”
“What would happen?” I scoffed. “They would kill me. How? How might they do that, Skylar? Tell me, so that I might end this miserable existence myself.” I straightened out, still clutching Sabine’s stone, letting my wings stop my fall. Below was a thin isthmus of dark land battling a riot of whitecaps. A lonely little promontory at one end called to me.
Skylar’s wing beats faded for a moment as she fell behind. “You do not mean that,” she said gently. She plummeted downward. “I will not ask you to return to Silvenhall, for we cannot. I would not even ask you to grant me an audience, as I see you do not wish it, but please, you are tired. Sit with me awhile, and I will answer whatever questions you may have.”
I was tired and angry, and I knew she spoke sense, but ignoring her, I hurtled back up into the air and flew on until the beat of her wings had died away and her voice in my head had stilled.
Then, feeling her absence like a wound, I turned back to her.
She was perched on a high rocky ledge on cliffs that faced the sea, her legs dangling over the side, wings brushing the rock at her back. There was no room for me to stand, and the anchorstone made it difficult for me to sit. My wings ached with tiredness as I hovered before her.
Skylar reached out to pat the rock by her side. “Sit,” she said.
Carefully, I settled down beside her, Sabine’s stone heavy at my chest. All of the fire had faded from me. The ledge was thin and the night cold, but Skylar’s body was warm beside me; her hand barely brushed my own as she clutched the ledge. “Ame,” she said gently, “do not torture me, or yourself.”
I leaned my head back. The cliff was cool behind me. I have seen and borne so much torture, I thought. Would that it were done with, all of it.
Her fingers crept closer to my own, brushing them. I did not pull away. The warmth of them shot through me like a draught of spirits. I felt tendrils of her serenity seeking the dark corners of my mind.
“You are alive for a purpose.” Her thoughts. “We all are.”
“My purpose. My mission,” I spoke aloud. “What is that to me now? To destroy my own kind. To feed on them as I have fed on hatred and vengeance.”
“Amedeo, they are not your kind.”
“Nor are you,” I said bitterly. “Why haven’t you fallen on me yet, like I would have on them? Do not tell me you don’t feel it. You must be able to smell the blood burning in my veins. Don’t tell me you don’t crave it
.”
“I do.” She put her head back too, and her face fell. “I crave you more than you know.”
I sighed. “You say you love me, yet you could not trust me with your secrets. They were my mother’s secrets, after all. And now they are my sister’s. They are of my blood.”
“We ourselves are secrets. Why didn’t your mother kill your Vampire father?”
“That is different.”
Her voice was small in the darkness. “Is it?”
We were silent for a while, both of us. Eventually, I said, “My entire life I have been driven by a need to kill them. A power beyond my ken. A hunger I could not control. It was the only message I received from Him, besides the one you heard Him give to me on the beach.” I shuffled over. It brought me closer to her but enabled me the space to set Sabine’s stone down on the bench next to me. The stone was inert. If Sabine had returned in the dawn temporarily, she had slunk away again now. “Why give me such a hatred for those who are a part of me?” I continued. “Perhaps all Cruxim wonder why they must crave them and hate them so.”
“I do not think all Cruxim hate with your passion, Ame; nor, perhaps, do they love with such intensity. Perhaps that is only for Messengers. But the Cruximus tells us that we were created imperfectly. Knowing we were made that way helps.”
“You were made that way.” A pebble bit into my palm where it rested on the ledge. I picked it up and turned it over in my hands, searching its uniform surface for a crack or a rough patch that might reveal its faults.
“How was I made...?” I trailed off. Finding a small chip on one side, I tossed the pebble aside, watching it fall far below into the waves that might smooth its imperfections.
Skylar took my now idle hands in hers. “We all have a choice, Ame. We all have freewill. It just doesn’t always seem that way. Sometimes, fate or hate can influence us.”
“If it is my choice, then I wonder which part of me wants them all dead so badly: the Cruxim who hates them or the monster that wishes itself mortal?”
“The Cruxim in you. It makes sense that we hate them.”
Leaning over, she swung something heavy over toward me, and I saw that she wore a leather satchel slung over her shoulder. “I brought a gift for you, in apology.” She lifted the flap.
“It may mean death to me,” she said, her voice lowered, “if they find I have taken it.” She handed me a tome recognizable by its emerald latch, by the yellowed paper peeping from the interior, and by the flaming, winged cross that had been carefully burned into the leather cover.
My breath froze in my throat. “The Cruximus. Skylar, you should not have done this.”
“I am already dead to them, Amedeo Aeternus.” She put her hand on mine. “Your exile is my exile, remember.”
“For that, I am sorry.” My neck ached. I rubbed it, soothing the stiff muscles where my wings joined my shoulders.
“Here,” she said. Her fingers were warm and strong where they kneaded my nape.
I have destroyed her too?
She stopped and put a finger to her lips. “What I choose to do is not yours to lament. I chose you, even when they told me I should not. And I chose you in the Council of Paleon Chamber when they told me the repercussions if I failed. Those who believe the Swan would say I chose you before I was even born.”
She looked sidelong at me and her lashes were long on her cheek. “I am sorry you thought I brought you to Silvenhall like a lamb to the slaughter. It was not my intention. My intention was to bring you as a lion among wolves.”
She opened the book, angling it to read in the dawn light. “Do not believe those who will tell you that you are a monster to be feared. Let me tell you who you really are, Amedeo. Who we are. And who you might become.”
Her voice was soft, and although part of me doubted her still, the fanning of her wings lulled me as I leaned my head back against the stone and listened.
“I told you once that we were older than man, Amedeo, but it was a half-truth.” She stopped herself, aware of the fragile truce between us. “Not of design,” she added hastily, “just that our origins are beatific, heavenly, but we are earthbound creatures, born of earthly acts.” Her eyes left the page and studied my face. “Have you read The Holy Bible?”
I shook my head. “Not entirely.” I had tried once, when I was very young, and then again in Barcelona when I committed Joslyn to the nunnery, into the care of the Maker.
“What can words on a page tell me of my Maker?” I explained to her. “The scribblings of prophets do not concern me.” In truth, I did not think even men believed it. For all their angels and demons, few who saw me with their own eyes in the tower of Sezanne had thought me a thing of the Lord. “Life has taught me that men fear evil more than they aspire to do good.”
Skylar contemplated my words for a moment and then said, “There is a passage within that some believe to be the Maker’s word on justice. ‘An eye for an eye; a tooth for a tooth.’ We are that eye, Amedeo. And that tooth.” I saw the points of her canines pillowed against the crimson of her bottom lip. “We are divine retribution, Amedeo, in all of its folly. But the Cruximus is not like the Bible. It is not the word of the Maker; it is the memories of the Sibylim before us, a record of days past.”
She passed the book to me, her finger tapping on a passage. “Here. Take it. Read it yourself.”
When I did not, she smoothed it open again on her knee.
“In the Beginning, before darkness entered the world, the Maker existed in Paradise attended by a choir of winged servants. Angels were beneficent creatures who were proud in their service to the Maker and were also the servants of the Maker’s greatest masterpiece and the most favored of all his creations—Man. So proud was the Maker of his creation Man that He bestowed upon him a great gift, one that he had not given his humble, loyal heavenly host. The gift of creation. Angels were filled with love and joy and harmony and good intention, but they were forbidden from enjoying each other’s bodies. Only men and women could join in love to conceive new life.
“The first man, Adam, and his wife, Eve, grew daily in the Maker’s favor, enjoying the delights of the Earth that the Maker had made for them. Soon, the heavenly host, who served them, began to resent the gift the Maker had given humankind. They became enchanted by Eve’s beauty and by Adam’s virility. With their envy, the first sin was born into the world. The sin of envy consumed them, an unquenchable fire, until it drove Lucifer and a handful of renegade angels to leave the tranquility and peace of heaven for the Eden of the Earth. It was there that a Fallen Angel known as Sammael fell in love with the first woman, Eve.”
I could tell, by the cadence of her voice as she read, the fairytale quality of the words, that she knew the story almost by heart. It crossed my mind to stop her and to ask only for that which had brought me to Silvenhall in the first place: the Sphinx’s riddle. Then Sabine’s words replayed themselves in my head: She did not tell you because she knew what it was to be a monster.
What good was the riddle to me? If I revived Sabine she would surely hate me: for what she was ... and for what I was.
“Sammael tempted Eve with his heavenly beauty,” Skylar continued. “And Eve was flattered by his words. She lay with him beneath the tree of knowledge, and thus was Eve’s nudity revealed to her husband, and thus was the curse of painful childbirth laid upon her and all of her daughters. Thus it was too that Eve, and wretched Adam with her, was cast from the Garden of Eden.” She stopped to draw breath, running her tongue over her lips.
“There was no apple?”
She shook her head. “The temptation was not knowledge but carnal knowledge. Eve’s desire for Sammael and his for her.” She smoothed the page again, tilted it into the light, and again began to read.
“The Maker loved his heavenly host, but Sammael’s treachery infuriated him. He smote Sammael for his sins and banished Lucifer and all other dissenters to the fiery realm of Hell, from which they might tempt mankind only in deed and never agai
n in flesh.
“In time, Eve grew heavy with child. When her pains of labor bore forth offspring, it was not one child but twin boys—one she named Cain and the other, Abel.
“Only one of her sons, Abel, possessed the wings on which his angelic father had flown down to the Earth.” She fluttered her wings, which made a shushing sound against the rock.
“Adam both loved and resented the twin boys, for he saw they had been born of lust, of temptation, and deception, and of envy. Sin lurked in their blood and in their hearts.
“Of the two, he loved Cain more, for Abel’s wings reminded him always of Eve’s transgression and of Sammael. The Maker, however, loved both sons equally. The Maker considered all on Earth his children, and he knew that Abel, who had done no wrong himself, deserved a father’s love as much as Cain.
“Cain grew to be a farmer, and Abel a shepherd. Adam and Eve were proud of them and put their troubles behind them.
“In those days, the Maker walked among men and visited with them, and every year, to honor him and to ensure the crops grew strong in the fields and the herds were plentiful, meat and produce from Man’s toil would be served to the Maker at a great feast.”
Again she stopped. I sat up straighter, turning my head from where it rested against the wall.
“In the Crèches, we still observe the Feast of Remembrance.” She bit her lip. “Or we did. Now that I am exiled...”
She bit at a fingernail and then returned her hands to the book and continued.
“Both mortals and angels attended the feast—for Adam and Eve had other children by then too—and all would sup and dance and make merry, and lay before the Maker the best of their table.
“One year, Cain laid out his sacrifice of crops: plump ears of corn, pumpkins round and bright with goodness; nuts and berries from the soil and the bushes; rich, fragrant wine squeezed from the grapes; freshly baked bread studded with barley and herbs, and with it olive oil, green and piquant; and then sweet, fresh fruit from the vines, and honey the bees had conjured from the nectar of flowers.