Creche (Book II of Paranormal Fallen Angels/Vampires Series) (15 page)

I thought of the enormous pile of feathers in Skylar’s Eyrie and realized what it was: so much more than just a place to sleep. “Are they all yours? All of those feathers?”

Her wings were full and flapping, gently circulating the evening air, wafting the scent of wildflowers.

“All but one.” She smoothed the feather necklace at her throat.

D
espite my status as a curiosity, the feast was merry. The brooding stares that had earlier followed me around Silvenhall were replaced with inquisitive semi-tolerance. Skylar was popular here—beloved, even—and her serene demeanor, rarely touched by easy emotion, was tonight all smiles and the dimples they brought with them. Several times, I found myself concealing the turmoil of my thoughts or realized my gaze had paused too long on her face as she chatted to Illysia, who sat beside her. It was only when the subject of Jania was raised that her mood fell again.

After the haunches of venison, wheels of flaky, thyme-rich goat’s cheese, and rustic bread of oat and seeds had been washed down with flagons of Haemil, a female Cruxim rose to a stage at the front of the tent.

“Crèche of Silvenhall,” she began in a resonant voice so earthy that for a moment I thought it had come from the mountain itself. “This night, we celebrate the Swan.”

Cheers of approval drowned her words until she put both hands up in protest. Her palms were a whorl of patterns tattooed in silvery gray.

“Twelve cygnets today make their vows.” The woman’s violet eyes searched the room for the betrothed. She nodded knowingly when she saw them. “Rise as they come to stand before us.”

One by one, the Cruxim of Silvenhall rose from the tables and made their way to a center aisle. On the left, the males formed a line, with the females on the right. Only those Samea had motioned to remained seated. When she nodded, the coupled “cygnets” rose. Taking each other’s hands, they walked together to the far end of the tent.

I found myself in line, facing Skylar, focusing on the feather at her throat. She raised her hands above her head, palms out, just as the other Cruxim had formed an arch of their arms. Warmth radiated from her palms as I pressed my own against them, resisting a sudden, unbidden urge to coil my fingers through hers. Instead, I turned my eyes toward my feet as the first of the betrothed pairs glided through the arch towards us.

Their bare feet whispered against the floor as they whirled together down the aisle. Each female, I noted, wore a bobbing feather, like Skylar’s, at her throat.

I envied them their happiness. Was this what the Swan knew that I did not: a love eternal?

“No. Not eternal, Cruor,”
came Skylar’s thoughts.
“Not yet. There is still the Crux.”

When the dancers reached the stage where Samea stood watching, they aligned themselves in pairs. We lowered our hands to our sides and turned to watch them. Skylar’s wings brushed mine; we stood so close.

“Cruxim of Silvenhall. This night we celebrate our commitment to Crèche and to Crux, for this eve of the Cygnus Amoratus, we join forever those who will bear the full burden of love—its joys, its pains, its losses.”

The crowd was watchful, drinking in each couple’s smiles.

Samea spoke their names aloud, nodding to each pair in turn, and then raised her hands again.

“Step forward.” She nodded to the first two, a dark-eyed, dark-haired boy and a girl whose pale beauty was eclipsed only by Skylar’s.

“Galeo,” Samea addressed the boy. “On love’s wings shall you fly henceforth. Your oath shall be her oath; your blood, her blood; and her Crux, your own. What is it that you offer Nemelia?”

The boy bowed to one knee and took his betrothed’s hands in his. Gazing up at her, he said, “My oath shall be her oath. My blood shall be her blood. Her Crux shall be my own. My love for Nemelia shall shine on countless dawns and shall outlast moons. My arms and my lips and my love shall be hers alone, to hold her and to kiss her and to safeguard her, for now and forever more. Her nest shall be my hearth until my spirit seeks its home in her heart and in the living love of our child. In this truth I trust.”

The slight movement of Skylar’s wings tickled my own. I was surprised to find even her expression taut with emotion.

“Nemelia.” The Sibyl turned her violet eyes on the girl. “On love’s wings shall you fly henceforth. Your hand shall be his, and your nest his too. Your blood shall be his blood, and his Crux, your own. What do you offer Galeo?”

She dropped Gaelo’s hands, but her eyes were trapped in his black-eyed gaze. Slender arms shaking, she unfastened the feather at her throat. With a single solemn kiss upon his brow and another on his lips, she hung the feather around his neck, stroking it with a trembling hand.

“Galeo, my oath shall be your oath. My blood shall be your blood. And your Crux, my own. Before birth was it promised and beyond death shall it endure. My feathers shall warm you, and my arms and my lips and my heart shall cherish you beyond all the day’s hours and through the longest of all nights. This single feather called you to me and bade me love you, and its Swan’s song shall sing you and its purity protect you for now and forever more. My nest shall be our hearth, but my love shall make its home eternal in your heart and in the living love of our child. In this truth I trust.”

“It is true,” Samea said. “The Swan has sung it.”

The two lovers stepped back, away from each other. Necks arched, they circled each other gracefully, spiraling closer until they met and nestled together like necking swans.

“May happiness bless your nest,” Samea decreed. To the cheers of the crowd, Galeo and Nemelia walked hand-in-hand to the field of flowers, and began to dance.

We watched Samea preside over eleven more couples, the vows changing for each. Afterward, the “nested” danced in the fields, whirling beneath watchful stars amid the bobbing flowerheads. They moved with the grace of dancers, eloquent and natural, and when all of the rites were finished, other couples rose and began to join them.

“None have decided to clip the Swan’s wings and join Milandor.” Skylar smiled, watching them. “It is a good sign. Will you dance?” She offered me her hand.

It was so small, so slender, paler than the delicate, fluffy love-in-a-mist the dancers had set blowing in the breeze.

Skylar waited, one hand over the feather at her throat, the other extended to me.

I knew I could not take it.

I could not join the enraptured dancers, not for all that it meant.

Each day here, Silvenhall’s radiance had leaked into my darkness, illuminating it with dreams of peace, healing the hole inside me, obscuring the pain of Joslyn’s loss and of Sabine’s absence, eroding my need to hunt and kill or to do anything but to live. Each day, the sad freaks of Gandler’s Circus of Curiosities, the cramped cages, and the degrading sideshows slipped from my memory. The tortures and threats, gone. The scars and scattered feathers, healed. But the promise of peace itched at me, niggled. It was a dream within a war. Here alone was there safety, but it was the safety of a shell that could be cracked open easily enough. Chestnuts. Buds cut before they bloomed.

I wanted to let her light in, but the thought tormented me. I wanted to take her hand, to taste her lips, to see what lay beyond the feathered dress and the beating wings. But it shamed me how much I craved her serenity. How much I wanted to forget not only Sezanne and Gandler, and his horror, but Sabine and Joslyn both.

And I could not forget.

“I am sorry.” I put my hand on her arm instead, squeezed it consolingly.

She flushed more fully but still stood waiting.

“Skylar,” I murmured. “Too many loves have already been lost to me.” 

With a curt nod, she withdrew her arm completely, raising it above her head like a dancer and spinning off alone into the field. How beautiful she looked. How like a swan. Love-in-a-mist formed a halo around her.

“So many that you would choose to lose another.”

I sat against a tree trunk, watching. Long after midnight, I realized that the smooth, circular motions of Skylar’s hips, the curlicues of her arms, and the tender incline of her neck as she danced had mesmerized me, and that neither Joslyn’s ghost, nor Sabine’s stone, had interrupted my thoughts of her—and I wept for what Skylar’s peace had turned me into.

W
e left the field at sunup, turning west towards the Eyries along a corridor of Greek firs.

It was cold inside the antechamber, the chill of early morning creeping in over the balcony.

Skylar still had not spoken to me. She led me to the nest chamber, where she busied herself lighting a brazier of cones fragrant with the sticky scent of pine. The flames dimmed the light of the fireflies but made the nest glow rosy as the sunrise.

“Sleep.” She nodded to it. “You must be tired ... although you danced less than I.”

I had seen her watching me; she knew I had not danced at all. It was in her nature not to bear a grudge.

“I will take the floor tonight,” she said. “Two nights on the floor is enough.”

I did not tell her that, in my forty years trapped in Sezanne Tower, I had become accustomed it. Besides, she was right, I realized: I was tired—centuries tired. I was tired of so much and of so many things.

So tired that I knew I would welcome the nest’s warmth. Must I live forever in the cold?

Others do,
my mind warned me.
Danette, Joslyn, Evedra and Sabine all sleep cold for you, Amedeo, and may forever.

For once, I did not heed the bitterness of my head. I chose warmth. Nodding my thanks, I climbed over the feathery wall, marveling at its softness, the careful arrangement of down that left only the softest quills to stroke the sleeper.

Skylar gestured to my clothing. “I won’t look. Undress if you wish. I will turn my back, but I must not leave you alone.” She averted her gaze.

I remembered her nakedness two nights before and how she had offered to join me in the pool. Hers was a false modesty. My laughter, so strange a sound in the confines of the Eyrie, matched the strangeness of the night as I slid from my clothing.

I had laughed more here in days than I must have in years, more than in all of the years since I was captured at Sezanne. Again, I had the feeling that Silvenhall was seeping into me, turning whatever brittle bone was in me to fluid silver.

“Why do you laugh?” she asked, and I heard a tinge of hurt in her tone.

I propped myself on one elbow to see over the nest, half-hoping that she, too, might be undressing. She was not. She stood, her face as tranquil as ever, brushing away the cinderberries and elfskiss tangled in the feathers of her gown. A mist of fine pale hair stood up on her arms, and she shivered, shifting closer to the brazier.

“You are cold.” On a whim, I put up a hand to beckon her. A dust of feathers curled into the air where I patted the nest beside me. My voice rasped in my own ears, “Come. You must not leave me alone, remember.”

Some unreadable emotion made the eyes she lifted to mine huge and silvery.
Hope,
I guessed as I watched her unpin the rosette and let her hair swing, bright as gossamer, to hide her face.
Or fear?

Her head snapped up, the expression suddenly defiant. Reaching behind her, she fumbled with the buttons of her dress to let it crumple at her feet, a pile of feathers hunched like a dying swan.

I could not look away. The slimness of her waist, the proudness of her breasts made me flush as if I’d drank too much wine.

She shivered again, but the pale buds of her nipples bloomed, wine-stained as her mouth, as she watched me admire her, and her eyes were bright with some challenge I had already accepted. 

When I opened my arms to her, she half flew to the nest edge. Then, collecting herself, she perched there hesitantly.

I slid my hand up her body, seeking the softness of her wings, and tugged her into the nest. She fell in with me easily, her body coiled before mine, her wings tickling my chest and obscuring the scars I carried there. The scent of flowers hung, with petals of love-in-a-mist, in her hair. Strands and petals moved with my breath as I spoke.

“Before Kisana was born, if it was cold, my mother would wrap me like this.” My voice was little more than a breath. “I had forgotten the warmth of another Cruxim’s embrace, until now.”

The contours of her body fit mine perfectly: the height of her, the curve of her spine and buttocks. She nestled into me, her neck angled into the crook of my own. My lips met the skin of her throat and hovered there, below her ear, as if I might say more, except that all words were lost to me. Only want remained.

Her softness contrasting my growing hardness, I wanted her more than I had desired anything or anyone: Joslyn and her intoxicating blood, Danette’s salvation, more even than I had ever wanted Sabine. More powerfully, even, than I craved honor or vengeance. I remembered the lust of the boy’s blood in my veins, like a little death, and how it too had expunged them and superseded them, and it angered me. Was I so fickle?

I had controlled my desire for Joslyn and for Sabine. Why could I not control it now? Why did it burn in the core of me like a brand? My lips were hot against the argent of her skin, my body hard with the need for her. She was silver to my iron.
She weakens you
, I thought,
but enriches you
. I wasn’t entirely sure the thought was mine.