A Shadow of Wings (26 page)

He groaned as Liam shifted up and off. Dylan rolled onto his back, surprised to see Liam held out a hand to help him up. Ignoring it, Dylan climbed painfully to his feet. He started toward Cam, but Liam grabbed his arm. “No,” he said with a solemn shake of his head. 

Led by his dog, Arum was already by Cam’s side, kneeling in the sandy soil left there by years of sewer-fed flow. He drew Cam onto his back, and it just about killed Dylan to see Cam’s arm flop lifelessly onto the ground and his head loll. Liam’s fingers were like steel around his biceps. Much as he wanted to, it would be pointless to fight the guy. 

“What are you gonna do with him?” he asked Arum.

Arum had pushed Cam’s shirt up, baring his stomach, which he probed gently. “Free him,” he said. “Cameron is very special. Unlike most of us, he truly had a destiny, and now we will help him fulfill it.” He glanced up in Dylan’s general direction with the ghost of a smile on his lips. “Did he truly not tell you what he is?”

Dylan swallowed and said, “No.”

“Since he’s unconscious and his eyes won’t be open, then I suppose it’s safe for you to see.” He opened a briefcase Dylan just then noticed he’d set at Cam’s side. “Bring him closer, Liam.”

The firm grip dragged him to within a few feet of Cam. Cam’s face was slack and sweet, reminding Dylan of the few precious mornings they’d had together, when Cam would be sleeping by his side, dreaming, safe. He had to swallow hard to choke down a shout of rage, or tears, or whatever it was strangling him. “Tell me you’re not gonna hurt him.”

“Well, that’s the problem with having a destiny, isn’t it? Once it has been fulfilled, your purpose is over.” He reached up and smoothed the silky dark hair off Cam’s forehead, almost affectionately. “Cameron would understand. I think he’s always suspected he was fated.”

When Arum bent over his briefcase, Dylan saw what lay inside. Knives. Not surgical knives, but butcher knives. His knees nearly gave out. “What the fuck, man? Please—don’t do it.” He tugged against Liam’s hold, but the brother only shook his head and held on tighter.

“Perhaps when you see his true form, you’ll feel differently.” Arum settled back on his heels, his palms resting on his thighs, as if they had all the time in the world. “He’s not human. You must have figured out at least that by now.”

Hearing it confirmed was a little harder than Dylan thought it might be. He nodded, remembered Arum’s blindness, and said, “So what? I don’t care. I like him the way he is.”

A soft laugh from Arum set Dylan’s teeth on edge. “But this isn’t the way he is. Not really. This is only a guise, given him by God so that he may serve. And he has served well. Poor thing, he must have suffered, and with such courage. Never have we known a cockatrice so attracted to the human world. From the moment he hatched, we knew he was different.”

Hatched?
Da fuck?
“Okay, I have no idea what you’re talking about. What’s a cock…cocka…”

“Cockatrice,” Arum finished. “A creature as old as time itself. They’re mentioned several times in the Bible and were quite a fixture in medieval tales, until, of course, they were almost wiped out. All but one.” 

While he spoke, he arranged Cam’s arms at his sides and straightened his legs. Then he began pulling off Cam’s jacket and cutting off his gore-smeared shirt with a pair of shears from the briefcase. He tossed them over by Liam. Cam’s cell phone slid halfway out of one jacket pocket. A lot of good it would do him now. 

“A knight hunted the very last cockatrice, determined to wipe out the species entirely, as they’d done already with dragons. Yet when he had the creature cornered, his sword raised and ready to strike, the knight, Alistair”—Arum pulled off Cam’s sneakers, manipulated Cam’s jeans down his thighs—“remembered the biblical prophecy, that in the end times, small children should play with the cockatrice and not be harmed. In Jeremiah, God promised to send forth cockatrices with his armies against the enemies.” When Cam at last lay naked, Arum settled back again on his knees. 

Only half listening to the brother, Dylan trembled with anger. Cam looked so helpless lying there. He
was
helpless, and so was Dylan against this fucking kung fu monk. Realizing Arum had gone silent, he looked up at the brown-haired man. “What’s all that got to do with Cam?”

Arum lifted a hand. “Everything. Alistair spared the last trice. He had to, because he felt otherwise the biblical prophecy wouldn’t be fulfilled, and he’d be defying God’s law. Rather than slay the monster, he offered himself in submission, and promised the Lord he would tame the beast and press it into holy service. An angel appeared with a golden collar.” He touched the collar around Cam’s throat. “To this day, all trices wear one as evidence of their promise to God and the mother church.”

“He said not to take it off. Never to take it off.” Dylan’s words rattled out of him, and he knew Liam must feel him shaking. Something bad was going to happen. He felt it in his bones.

“It’s safe for me.” Arum’s eyebrows lowered contemplatively. “Normally it wouldn’t be for you. The cockatrice’s gaze is deadly. It’s why we in the order blind ourselves, so that we may interact with them without risk of death.” He reached for the collar.

Dylan thought fast. “What if he wakes up and I look at him?” 

Arum’s slight, cold smile chilled him. “In this case, it won’t matter.”

He leaned over Cam and spoke in a language Dylan thought might be Latin. The collar slipped off, and in less than the blink of an eye, Cam was gone.

And some sort of…monster lay there. The only evidence of the transformation was the dust settling in the glow of the lantern, displaced by the body…changing.

Liam held Dylan up in an iron grip. Otherwise he would have fallen. 

Cam wasn’t a pretty monster. He wasn’t a sleek wolf or a beautiful unicorn or anything like that. He wasn’t even particularly big, still man-sized, though no human feature remained. He looked like a chicken crossed with a snake crossed with a bat. He had the head of a rooster, complete with a serrated red comb. Above that glowed a golden light, like what Dylan had seen before, only now it was sharp and clear, though it was obviously insubstantial. Just a light. 

In place of his human face, he had a hooked orange beak that looked lethal even in sleep. His feathers—fuck, he had feathers—seemed to be dark gray and deep green, a bit scraggly in spots, covering a curved neck and a lean hawk-like body. Instead of feathered wings, though, his were black and leathery, folded loosely at his sides. Armored plates covered his throat and chest. His beautiful long legs had turned into scaly yellow stalks, bent awkwardly as he lay on his back, at the ends of which curled long-toed claws. Each leg sported a twelve-inch spike that pointed inward. Spurs, he remembered back from when his grandpa had roosters. Strangest of all was the scaly tail that stretched out several feet on the soil, with a tuft of feathers and a shiny black barb at the end. 

He was ugly and absurd and fascinating all at once, and when Dylan considered he’d fucked him, and been fucked by him, his knees buckled.

Spots danced before his eyes, and Liam shook him. “Breathe,” the monk commanded. 

Dylan did and shook his head. “I…can’t believe it.”

“Behold the cockatrice,” Arum murmured reverently. He laid the golden collar in the briefcase and lifted a knife instead.

“Hey!” Dylan pulled against Liam’s hands. “Please, just because he’s…that, what he is, you can’t hurt him.” 

Arum paused, parting the feathers on Cam’s…well, where Cam’s stomach would have been. “Why?” he asked curiously. “Now that you’ve seen his true form and know he’s a monster, why would you ask me to spare him?”

“Because I love him,” Dylan answered. Without hesitation, without caring. He nodded. “I do. I swear, I won’t say a word about this. Just…put his collar back on, and I’ll take him out of here, and you’ll never have to hear nothing from either of us ever again.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s not the way things are going to work here.” Arum plucked a handful of feathers from Cam’s belly and set them aside. “Although I must say, the Lord does work in mysterious ways.” He paused again. “Would it help if I told you part of Cameron will live on? Part of you as well.”

“What part?” The spots were swirling again, his pulse pounding in his ears, and he felt Liam easing him down to his knees before he passed out.

“You’re going to have a son.” The light winked off the knife as Arum leaned in to slice Cam open.

“I love him.”

Those words summoned Cam from the darkness surrounding him, an inky sea in which he drowned.

“I love him.”

Human words penetrating his cockatrice brain. A sharp tug at his abdomen as feathers were plucked. A murmuring voice—Arum.
Arum!

Everything rushed back—Arum’s betrayal, Liam pinning Dylan, the dart, the weasels. Cam screeched and whipped up his head. First the older brother startled, and then the younger one, Liam, yelled out.

Cam just caught the descending knife in one claw as Arum tried to stab him. They grappled only seconds, but it was long enough for Liam to pull protective goggles over his own eyes for protection. Dylan made a dash to escape, shuffling on hands and knees across the ground, but Liam snatched him up once more. Dylan threw a wild gaze at Cam, and Cam turned his head just before he might have killed him.

He should have remembered Arum had two hands, because he felt a ripping sensation as the brother sliced into Cam’s right wing with a second blade.

Cam screeched again, his voice like that of a thousand eagles battering the walls of the chamber. He leapt to his feet, snapping at Arum, his beak clacking. Of course the damned monk was agile and well trained and sprang out of the way. His dog attacked and got a mouthful of feathers before Cam kicked it with a powerful blow and sent it sprawling out of the circle of light.

“Cameron!”

He turned toward Liam, then away again quickly, nearly forgetting Dylan was vulnerable. Curse his hated eyes! He had no way to tell Dylan to cover his. But he’d seen enough—Liam had Dylan in a chokehold that would snap Dylan’s neck. 

“I’ll kill him,” Liam barked out. “Surrender now.”

“We want the egg, Cameron,” Arum said, hands up in a defensive fighting pose. “The church needs it. It is your duty—“

Cam stretched out his neck and hissed. He snapped his tail, waving the poison barb, bristling the feathers in a stiff ring around his neck.
Kill, rip, gut!
It took every ounce of willpower not to leap upon the monk. 

“Liam, release him.” Arum opened his hands, then lowered them slightly. “There might be another way, Cameron. I might have…misjudged.” To Dylan, he said, “Shield your eyes, Dylan. His gaze is lethal. It doesn’t matter if you’ve grown immune to his guise.”

He could hear Dylan’s frightened, rapid breathing behind him, wanted to go to him but didn’t trust what might happen. Then Liam dragged Dylan over in front of him anyhow, and he saw that Dylan had put his hands over his eyes. 

The smell of his lover’s blood had Cam tearing up clods of dirt and leaves in his fury. But his human mind, what was left of it, forced himself to calm. 

“That’s better,” Arum murmured. He reached out an open palm. “Come here, Cameron. You’ve always trusted me, haven’t you? Come here. You’ve no choice, really. It’s all right. You’ve been confused.”

Cam’s mind swam in a fog. How had everything gone so horribly wrong? Guilt wreaked havoc inside his heart, where his trice and human sides battered against each other. In this form, he was a beast, a well-conditioned beast, and it was so hard to fight the brother’s command. Plus cooperating might ensure another moment of safety for Dylan. Lowering his head because he was too overwhelmed to do otherwise, Cam allowed the monk to stroke his beak.

Arum smiled. “Yes, that’s it. You haven’t been well, have you?”

A lifetime of behavioral training and imprinting could not be overcome in minutes, not even in the heat of battle. Cam felt his will crumbling beneath the familiar touch, the fatherly voice. Arum held his head between his hands. “You didn’t know you were gravid, did you, my boy?”

Cam shook his head, his terrible head that must be horrifying for Dylan to see. Shame overrode guilt, and then they ran together through his ugly form. He settled heavily onto the floor, defeated. Dylan would never want him now. Surely he’d misheard those three little words. 

“You and Dylan have produced something very special,” Arum continued. “We always knew you would make your mark in the world, Cameron. And you have. You’ve been plagued by the sense that you’re different. Now I can tell you that difference is that you’re God’s chosen. In ten centuries, there has not been another like you. We’ve waited that long for you. And for your offspring.”

He shuddered at the words. What did this all mean? He was so tired, the tranquilizer still pulsing through his system. And his belly felt odd. Gravid. That meant he had an egg inside him. He bent his neck and pushed his beak beneath his feathers on his side. 

“It’s fertile,” Arum said, apparently interpreting his action correctly. “It must be. Three of us had visions of it, independently, right around the time of your hatching. When we discovered we’d all had the same vision, we knew we had to watch and wait. We never knew who your mate would be.” He tipped his head toward Dylan. “Somehow, I’d expected someone different. A scholar or scientist, perhaps…”

Beneath his hands over his eyes, Dylan’s mouth scowled. “Maybe he’s got better taste than that.”

Arum tsked. “God put you in his path. A little humility would serve you well, Dylan.” 

“Don’t believe anything he’s saying, Cam. They’re not on your side. Those weasels were working with them, and I know they’re your enemies.”

“There were those in the
reformatore
who also had the vision,” Liam said, speaking up at last. “There’s a great energy about Cameron they detected. In return for an alliance, the
reformatore
offered a number of their weasels to help us capture him. We only had to wait for the right moment to strike.”