Creche (Book II of Paranormal Fallen Angels/Vampires Series) (3 page)

“W-what is this?” he stammered, no doubt surprised by her beauty as much as by her teeth.

Even killing, she looks at peace,
I thought enviously, and then I plunged my fangs into his neck. Hot blood burst through me, tasting of lust and impending death. His approach was not a new thing, not a novel way for them to kill.

Sex and death,
I thought.
The two are brothers.
From the corner of my eye as I drank, I saw Skylar pull the weeping girl away and tug her petticoats down.

“Flee,” Skylar told her, shutting the woman’s O-shaped mouth to still the screams. “Flee now.” She pushed her in the direction of the alley’s entrance. From the shadows above, a bat wheeled and screeched.

“Flee,” Skylar yelled, “and be thankful. You have lost a lust but found a life.”

“Cruxim!”

Skylar spun back toward the sound.

Turning my eyes up from my meal, I noticed a second Vampire crouched beneath a windowsill. 

“Drink!” I shoved the near-dead Vampire into Skylar’s arms. “I will deal with this one.”

She laughed, the clear, confident sound of it bouncing down the alley, following the footsteps of the Vampire’s prey. “And let you have them both? No.” Her features sharpened with bloodlust and her mouth opened to reveal her fangs, but her eyes remained on my face. I felt the heat from them as I drained the last rushing drop from the first Vampire and dropped his body onto the cobbles, panting. Skylar rushed toward us, but then she spun so quickly and gracefully that I almost missed it, and moved toward his friend. The second Vampire scanned the rooftops for a perch or escape. A cry came from above, and I followed it to see a slender, pale-haired Vampire folded into one of the eaves. He looked young, too young, and the thought took me that I knew him, but I could not discern from where before he leaped out into the night. The dark caught him on bat’s wings, and the creature circled, shrieking down to its friend below before vanishing into the dark. That Vampire, too, made to turn to a bat, but he was heavier and not as fast, and Skylar moved toward him like a wind. With a single swift kick, she stunned him.

“Be gone,” she said as she fell upon him. It sounded more like absolution than a threat, and her lips moved to his neck as gently as a lover’s. She lay there with him for minutes, his Vampire blood thickened by fear or a deadly desire. Finally, when he had ceased his twitching and was still, Skylar sat up and smiled. Not a drop of blood smeared her mouth; it was as if she had kissed him to death.

“How did you do that?” I licked my lips, embarrassed by the blood smeared on my mouth and on my sleeve, where I had wiped it.

Skylar smiled again. Even her teeth were free from the taint of blood. “I was trained,” she said. “You will see.”

O
ur meal made, we settled on the rocky outcrop of the Areopagus. The old city stretched stark white before us, its nudity broken by the pale light of evening that seeped under blue doors. It was an unsettled time in Athens for Christians and Muslims alike. The Greeks, ever wary, were more so than usual. Dark eyes shifted uneasily in dark faces as we passed. Black-clad widows of the plague sat in doorways, their arthritic fingers clattering on worry beads of hazelnut shell or olive pit when they saw us. The plague had crept into the
agora
. Its rigor settled in the twisted, whitewashed alleys and cast a pall over the marketplace. Even with our wings hidden beneath capes and clothes, two Cruxim aglow must have seemed feverish and fearful to them. We kept our distance. We sought the shadows.

All over the city, artifacts lay in the streets like so many histories, and I knew not where to start but for the cemeteries that sat like crooked teeth at Kerameikos. The statue of Athena that graced the Parthenon had once been adorned with Sphinxes on her crown, I knew, but she was long gone now and crumbling. Everywhere we looked, the stones were brittle relics, the faces eaten away, the wings chipped. All of them bore sorrowful expressions that I could not reconcile with Sabine’s proud demeanor. All the while, as I found them and kissed them, Skylar watched me with eyes gray as rain.

We wandered the winding laneways of the
Plaka
, following the chants of a priest, but nowhere did we see a Sphinx that moved at my touch. At Anafiotika, a donkey stumbled by, shying when it smelled us. Its burden of fresh rosemary and thyme and salty, curdled feta hung in the air. The aroma made me think this was a Joslyn place, and that Sabine would not be here. I felt the absence of them both so keenly that I stopped and leaned against a wall until the donkey and its cargo had passed.

Eventually, when my heart had flown with all its hopes at the statues of more than fifteen Sphinxes in Athens and not one had rewarded me with as much as the batting of an eye, Skylar put a hand on my shoulder.

“It is enough for today.” She squeezed gently.

Loneliness opened like a vault inside me. Her hand, warm above my wings, trembled there, as if a current ran through her to me, but I ached for Sabine, for a friendship forged from stone and sorrow. I shook her off and rose again into the night to search the Cyprus groves on the Hill of Muses.

At one statue, I thought I felt a slight ripple beneath the stone, but when my lips brushed the marble, they met only the dust of memory. Weariness was playing tricks on my mind.

Still I tried. We flew on through the night to Thebes, but despite the old myth, no Sphinx statues quickened at my hopeful kisses. If the lions that adorned the gates of Mycenae had faces, their eyes might have stared at me accusingly, but only their bodies saw us slip into that ancient place to search for any sign of Sabine there.

There was none, only grizzled gravel surrounding olive groves, and poppy-strewn plains that stretched before us like empty years. At Korinth, I pressed my lips tightly against the marble smile of a Sphinx that had guarded funeral stones there since the sixth century. Not a twitch of tail betrayed the creature within. Nor did the stones at Marathon, Khalkis, or Katerini arise from their slumber as we flew up the coast.

At daylight, I slumped into a cavern on Mount Olympus and rubbed my aching wings. Skylar was sympathetic, but I missed the weight and heat of Sabine—the length and strength and power of her supple body sprawled next to me.

“Do not give up hope.”

Skylar’s voice seemed to come from far away, as if she were not talking to me but to herself or to something that existed elsewhere.

Hope
: the word hung in the air. What a fragile concept it was. What a tangle of coincidences. “She could be anywhere,” I said.

“Then we will go anywhere.”

I jolted upward with anger. “No! I will go anywhere. Why will you not leave me? Why have you come?”

“To protect you,” she said, without a trace of anything but kindness.

“I don’t need your protection.” I felt for the cross at my throat. “Look at what happens to the women I try to protect or to those who protect me.”

“Sometimes, men need protection from themselves.” She shook her head a little. “And sometimes that is a woman’s job.”

I sniffed.

“They loved you, Amedeo.”

My hair felt thick with dust and sweat as I raked it with my fingers. “Why can you not leave me to my grief?”

“Because...” She peered at me curiously for a moment, as if she might answer differently, then she inclined her head a little, rose, and began to collect kindling at the cave’s entrance. “You need me.”

“I need no one but Sabine.”

I watched my thought enter her mind like an arrow. For a second, Skylar’s wide, arched brows drew closer, and I thought my words had left a wound, but I could not be sure. Her wings shimmied slightly, either with cold or insult. Insult, I thought. Was I coming to know her moods, etched as thinly on her as they were? Perhaps I knew her too, in some strange way. I felt my forehead crinkle at the thought, and put it away.

Then she turned away and piled the sticks and leaves she had gathered high into a tower.

When she turned to face me again, she kept her eyes lowered. “What made you come to Greece? Why do you think she might be here?”

“Nothing but hope,” I answered. “Fragile, broken hope. And a riddle.”

She glanced up at that. “Tell it me,” she requested.

Suspicion halted the words on my lips. “Why should I? Perhaps you have too much interest in a creature you did nothing to save when you could. Why seek her now? Why save her now?” 

Skylar was silent for a time until she said, “There is a riddle, too, that I have heard. It speaks of a way to wake a Sphinx from a long sleep. That is in part why I was following you, Amedeo. Why I was following you both. A time may come when we both need your friendship with Sabine, just to survive.”

Skylar had coaxed a thin flame from the nest of twigs and dried leaves, and its smoke funneled up to hang in the cave’s roof. Coughing, I stood and moved beside her at the fire. “Tell me this riddle.” I took her arm and turned her to face me. “Tell me now.”

Firelight made her eyes dark as thunderheads. “You first.”

I recited it quickly, and she nodded at my words, but when I was finished, she said, “It is not the same. This place your riddle speaks of, the place you thought was Thebes. Perhaps it is where Oedipus received his prophecy and from whence the riddle I mentioned to you came. I have been there only once before. It is nothing but a small village now, a place they call Kastri, built among the ruins. Sphinxes once lined the walks to the great temple. Their eyes were said to watch men for their intentions.” 

“Ruins.” I felt great stones shifting heavily in my heart, like so many crumbling monuments. “If we must look at ruins then Skiathos, Skyros, Delos, and all the Cyclades might hide her, too, or Crete and Rhodos.” I watched the flames set a pinecone aglow. “Perhaps she is not even in Greece. What a task this is.”

“A task worth doing is always difficult.” Skylar fixed her gleaming irises on mine, but her eyes were sad. “Let me help you. The Greeks once knew Kastri as Delphi, from the ancient word for womb, although some called it
omphalos
—the navel of the world. It is a place of oracles, of mysteries. Perhaps it has something to tell us of your Sphinx.” She took my hand and squeezed it. Then, with a flap of her downy wings, she led me on toward the slopes of Mount Parnassus.

It was only once flight had stilled all conversation that I realized her sleight of hand. She knew my riddle, but I had yet to unravel hers.

W
e found the mountain in the stark light of late afternoon, the green of Parnassus broken only by a cleft of blue between the twin hills of the Phaedriades and by the river sitting like a jewel between the mountain’s cleavage. Everywhere, wildflowers pushed yellows and pinks and tiny snowy heads of white up amid the rubble, and bees droned in a vacuum of time. I stared at the marble columns that propped up a small village and felt my eyes prickle at the impossibility of finding her stone here. Beyond the village, nothing was standing. If this were the womb Sabine’s riddle spoke of, it was more desolate even than poor, sweet Danette’s. I turned away.

“Amedeo.” Skylar turned me back toward the mountain, and we climbed it together. Murmurs and mutters accompanied our passage through the dirty streets. When we reached ruins halfway up the mountain, even Skylar drew her breath.

I heard her thoughts ring out, “
Here it was that your mother’s vow was made.”

“
My mother?
”

Her mind cleaved shut; the door of a boudoir following an argument. I let it be.

We had flown half the night and half the day, and a great weariness soon overtook me. I longed for nothing more than to creep into a grove and dream, forgetting the tiring, fruitless journey to this place of Oedipus’s ancient doom, of ruins and of navels, of hopeless oracles. Perhaps, as I had once done, I might at least hear Sabine in a dream, or I might sleep more deeply in the mountain air.

But my legs continued to move involuntarily until I had overtaken Skylar and my half-closed eyes caught a movement in the trees ahead: a tawny blur, the true movements like the pouncing of a lion. I broke into a run, stumbling over marble in my path. As I righted myself, rubbing at my knees, I saw what it was that had tripped me. My heart lurched into my throat.

It was a head only, attached to the breast of a lion and to one great paw that was trapped beneath a fallen log. But it was unmistakably a Sphinx.

Gathering all my strength, I hefted the marble statue out from under the tree. The hindquarters and one front paw were still missing. The heaviness that gripped me was partly the weight of my disappointment, partly the added strength of life returning to the stone. It brought with it pink at the cheeks and lips and emerald green to heat the eyes, and then Sabine’s voice—that sweet, rich rumble—spoke my name.

I pulled back to look and Sabine’s eyes swiveled to fix me with a stare; theirs was the only movement in the otherwise stony face. 

“You came then?” she said, in almost a purr.

“Yes.” I put the stone down and lowered myself to kiss the marble again, the cheeks and eyes and breasts, and the rounded domes that topped the sharp claws of her one paw, hoping to breathe more life into her. It did nothing. Only her eyes flashed; all else was cold.