The Farthest Gate (The White Rose Book 1) (43 page)

There remained but one card to play.  I sang my need inwardly to the black rose, calling it like a childhood friend to come out and play.  Within my spirit, black petals unfurled quickly without my willful opposition.  I felt my heart slow, becoming a void.  The black rose filled me with torrential darkness that was rife with violent currents and riptides.  Sighing welcome, my soul drank the explosion of power thirstily.

The flower in my spirit drained the light of my hopes and dreams, all I treasured from life, in exchange for the destruction it would deliver in any case.  Deep into shock, on the border of madness, I wept for the life I would never have with Azrael.

Grandfather saw the death of hope in my eyes.  My broken surrender stirred him to offer an awkward comfort, as he assumed victory was his.  “It won’t be that bad.  You will see…” 

My clutching hand reached by instinct for the compass necklace I wore, tearing it loose as the last of me slipped toward total eclipse.  I collapsed to the floor, jarring my bad knee, but the darkness fed upon the pain, freeing me of it—a small mercy.  The necklace fell from my nerveless hand.

My Darkness spoke to me:
Everything is lost, so let everything be lost.

Becoming a living thing, my shadow grew as Death
’s had, swallowing the ruined floor, the withered vines, speeding on to the far walls.

My grandfather stared
down at me, incredulously.  His voice emerged, a choked whisper, “How are you doing this?”

I turned
, the hub of an infinite wheel.  Sinking … my self dissolved in darkness.  A shudder went through me. 
I am dying … of love and surrender ... alone.

“Stop this!” Death screamed.

His sword thrust deeply into me.  I did not feel the weapon.  I had become the coldest of all shadows.  Death’s blade fractured, shattered by a cold greater than its own.  The dark jagged pieces were sucked into my flesh, devoured.

My Darkness filled the rafters, consuming the damaged ceiling and the higher chambers.  It would not be long before the palace, the Courts of Death, the surrounding cities, and finally the port city of the Necropolis were
all unmade.  Thought of so much annihilation failed to stir my concern.  The dead cannot be bothered with anything.

Death plunged a hand of shadow into my chest.  I think he sensed the dark rose and meant to tear it from my soul.

But the black rose found him tasty.

He screamed as if his arm were being gnawed to the bone, and finally tore himself away.  Half his arm
was
gone, leaving a tattered stub around the elbow.  But more shadow spilled from his shoulder.  The arm lengthened, reformed, and became actual flesh once more.

Despite his dramatic recovery, Death backed away from me, his eyes full of the terror
he
usually inspired in others.

I gathered myself off the floor and smiled in joy, free at last—no longer Celeste.  She was a small lost thing caught in the currents of my core, surviving as a trace element only because she did not fight the building pressure that demanded release.  Furious winds streamed my hair across my eyes.  The white strands had darkened to obsidian.

A midnight sun exploded in my chest.  Ebon sheets of fire rolled off me, a wall of force that shoved Death contemptuously away.  What
was
this small wyrm that I need concern myself with him any longer?  Let him watch me shatter his world as he had shattered the lives of so many others.

Azrael appeared, looming in front of me.

“My love!” his whisper was a shocked thing, thick with dismay.

I smiled welcome, opening my arms in invitation.  A vortex of black winds enclosed the throne room, working outward from there.  The gale gave voice to the surging violence within me.

In the distance, Death picked himself up.  He called to Azrael, “She is lost!  Join me in striking her down while we can.  The Veil has taken her!”

Azrael gripped my arms.  He pulled me against him. 
“Celeste!  Give me the Darkness and be spared!”
  His eyes blazed with painful intensity.  He pressed his lips against mine in a final gentle kiss.

I melted against him, my hands clutched his back.  Reduced to hunger, I crushed him against me and returned the kiss with savage intensity from a place where light was unwelcome.  I felt his wrapping cloak, a smothering cocoon, and then we fell into infinity, exchanging Death’s realm for the emptiness of the veil.

To Celeste, this had ever been unrelieved darkness.

My reborn eyes distinguished between thousands of shades of black.  The space was no longer uniform, for I saw form in the churning ether.  It enclosed me with petals, layer after ephemeral layer.  This was the true black rose; that part of me which wore Celeste’s flesh was only a small fraction of a greater entity.  Here
, resided my disembodied soul, trapped between realities since the birth of the cosmos.

The
Dar’kyn had drawn on me through their Tree to empower their magic—until I tired of them.  Celeste had become the more intriguing distraction.  As for Azrael...  I clung to his pleasant coldness, dragging my hands across his flesh in adoration.

A stiffness that I did not expect pressed into me.  Once more, Abaddon was attempting to deceive me!

The faint trace of Celeste within me flared, leaking hatred that I copied.

“You bastard…!”

I pushed him back, then used my hand to strike a vicious blow across his face as we hung in nothingness.

His face moved away, then sought me, as though the blow had been a lover’s caress.  “Celeste, it truly is me.  When we walked into the light of Heaven’s Gate, certain … changes … were made.  It seems God has a strange sense of humor.”

I stood on black ether, willing it to support me as I faced my lover.  Celeste’s longing was a spur.  Could it be true?  Dare I believe him?  I wanted to, badly, hungry to taste him, to devour his cold flesh, his passion … and his bright, celestial soul…

Azrael’s hand came out of his cloak, holding the rapier I had earlier lost.  He thrust the blade into my heart.  It sank silently into my flesh, piercing me.

“Forgive me,” he said, “and find peace if you can.”

I looked down at the hilt jutting from my breast, then met Azrael’s gaze.  “Oh, well done!  Such wondrous treachery!  But I forgive you.”  I extended my hand to him even as I weakened my stance, dipping toward the
floor
, as if my unnatural strength had failed.

Azrael leaped in to catch me with an arm behind my back.  His hood fell back.  His pale face was unveiled.  Tears wet his cheeks.

I lifted myself, and thrust out a hand with long black nails.  My claws dug furrows over his heart.  His rent flesh welled with thick golden blood.

He gasped.  His eyes were wide with pain and shock as he retreated.

But I stayed with him, licking angel blood from my talons, smiling with pleasure at the intoxicating taste.  I wanted more!  Pain and pleasure were a marvelous mix.

I summoned black fire and my clothes burned away.  I grasped the rapier hilt and pulled the sword from my body, casting it away with disdain.  My wounded flesh closed, healed like my knee by what the ignorant call dark magic.

“Come fill me,” I demanded.  “Sheath yourself in my flesh.  Let me drink your lust with your life!”

Mesmerized by my inviting stare, he stopped retreating.  Azrael’s eyes pulsed with blinding force.  “It is not lust I feel…”

My arms drew him into an embrace.

He continued, “But the love you have taught me.  You are welcome to take it all.”

“In time, I will,” I assured him.  I licked blood from his chest and clawed his back, opening new, luscious wounds.  “Oh, I will!”

21. THE SWORD OF THE ROSE

Darkness used my eyes, my body. The Spirit of the Veil had taken my inner places, and I lived only until she got around to plucking me forth, and crushing out the last of my awareness.  My spirit occupied the eye of the storm, a tiny spot of peace in a maelstrom.  This was my returning nightmare; the mask-shaped portal had opened to allow Darkness to sweep across a white infinity … except this was all too real and no dream at all.

I would not be awakening.

At least I had won my war—my son could return to Earth and obscurity, while Death picked up the many pieces of his existence.  It might be decades before he sought Phillippe again.  This was not the best victory I could have achieved, but I accepted it none-the-less. 

My sharpest regret was the loss of Azrael.  I would have given anything for a final kiss, a last caress…  Huddled and hiding, I tortured myself with memories of his chiseled features, perfect smile, and tight gold curls.  I imagined his voice calling to me even now…

“…the love you have taught me.  You are welcome to take it all.”

It was not imagination.  It
was
his voice!  What could this mean? 

I traced the voice to a massive black mask—my own face—the open gate through which Darkness had conquered.  Beyond was a passage to another space. 
This was what the black rose had obscured at its heart until blooming.  Here was the point where Emptiness and Hunger gained access to my soul, drawn by the dragon-blood I had inherited from Grandfather.

A piercing cry rent my heart.  Azrael suffered.

I passed the open gate and found myself in the Veil, confronting my stolen body.

Azrael pressed against my spectral back.  His touch comforted me though it lacked force, as though I were feeling him in some entirely new way.  He slid down to my feet, breathing laboriously.  I could not tend him—hovering as I was in the black-eyed stare of my possessed flesh.  Seeing my body from the outside, I was shocked to see star-fire tinted hair turned black as the devil’s heart.  Other changes included black nails that gave my hands a lethal, predatory look.

My face, twisted by violent passions I did not want to understand, hissed in rage and surprise seeing my spirit.

“Leave him alone!” I demanded.  “I will not let you hurt him.”

In answer, a claw-like hand slashed through me as if I were only a straying wind.  I felt no pain, only a kind of unpleasant wavering.  I looked down at myself and noticed that the light of Azrael’s eyes, filtering through, rendered me translucent in places.  Where my heart should have been, was a light given off by a rose carved from moonlight.  Apparently, my calling as The White Rose was stamped upon my very soul.  Possibly, I had been born with this token that had proved both blessing and curse.

On one point, I had no confusion; I knew what I was, a shade formed before my time—not yet properly dead.

The Darkness that wore my flesh abruptly grinned, then laughed and slashed me repeatedly—not to wound, but to impress on me the futility of interference.

“How are you going to stop me, She-Who-Was-Celeste?”

I did not know, so I fell back on bravado while grasping for inspiration.  “You do not want to find out!  And I am still Celeste.  You have no right to my name, or my lover!”

Her voice spiked in a laugh.  My defiance amused her.

“But if you are Celeste, then who shall I be?” she asked.

Azrael spoke, distracting me from answering far too boldly.  “Celeste!  I knew … my love … would call you to me!”

He spoke haltingly, as though words were agony:  I wanted to drag him from danger, but I had no true substance, and dared not break my attention from so potent a threat as this Dark Rose.  Determination strengthened my spirit, making my raised arms appear increasingly solid.  Still, I doubted I could strike her the lightest blow.

My lover’s changing voice told me he was rising behind me, either recovering his strength, or expending it dangerously.

“You can’t fight her,” he said.  “We should go and leave her here.”

“She is not going to allow that.”  I knew the awful depths of her hunger. 

“Oh, I might,” the Dark Rose said.  “Anticipation has been known to sweeten many a dish.”

She wanted us to go?  I did not believe her.  Her eyes betrayed her—black stars, radiating a palpable force that sent ripples through my spectral form.  I drifted back to keep her attention from roiling my essence, thinning me like mist in morning sun.

She followed slowly, pressuring me with the threat of her nearness.

She did not want us to escape, but she
did
want us to try.  Why?  For the thrill of the chase?

No!  I saw it suddenly.  She needed Azrael to open his cloak of shadows, to provide her new body with a gate to the rest of the universe.  The force that kept the Veil from spreading out to swallow countless worlds was holding the Dark Rose here as well.  She needed a reaver as a key to unlock this prison, having been careless in the joy of incarnation, letting Azrael bring her back.  As soon as he snapped open his cloak to take us away, she intended to lunge in and break through to elsewhere.