Cruxim Read online

  I could take no more. Darting forward, I picked the man up and threw him backwards against the wall of a church behind. In my anger, I underestimated my own strength; his head hit the stone with a resounding crack and blood showered the stone before he had even slid to the ground.

  The girl, Joslyn, had looked at me quizzically for a minute, and then she held out her slim arms again. “El meu angel de la guarda,” she repeated, satisfied that it was indeed true.

  I took the child to Montgat, to the home of Maria del Santos, my seamstress and as kind a foster mother as Joslyn could hope for. The entire journey, the child stared at me with those eyes, stared and smiled. Senyora del Santos was in her mid fifties and had always wanted a child; as a result, she asked few questions. Those she did ask, I answered with the insistence that the child was mine, illegitimately begotten and now orphaned by her consumptive mother’s death. Money had a way of closing lips back then in Catalonia, and it is no different in most places today. I paid Maria a handsome allowance to keep the child, and in some show of guilt or obligation, I visited twice monthly at first.

  Soon, I came to look forward to my visits. I would arrive with trinkets: a kitten she named “Velvet,” a colorful East Indian parrot in a gilt cage, all manner of dolls, musical instruments, and clothes. The child was excitable and loving and, I learned, was indeed an orphan. Her mother had been a slave in the dead man’s laundry. When her mama had died of the pox, her master had taken the woman’s daughter, young as she was, into slavery in her place. When, daydreaming and tired of the hot work and the heavy iron, Joslyn had burned shirts, he had beaten her. When she complained of hunger, he had beaten her, and when she was so tired that her little eyes closed at the wringer, he had beaten her again. It had been a miserable life, but despite it, she was a happy little thing. And the sole keeper of my secret.

  Of course, I kept my wings concealed from her. For many years, I wondered if she had forgotten. As a small child, she asked several times about them and why I had come to watch over her. When she was young, it was easier to let her think that I was an angel—her guardian angel—and I suppose that, for a time, I was.

  Outside, it has grown dark, and lights begin to flicker in the village. It would be a nice village, were it not the place of my incarceration. It is a much smaller now than it was before they came. I cannot blame them for taunting me. It is the same with men who come to gaze in awe at the tiger once he is safely in a cage. To Vampires, I am a predator, a threat; I understand why they come to goad me. Nevertheless, the population of the village has dwindled because of them. They feed on the villagers to spite me, to remind me of my inability to perform the duties for which I am designed. I can no longer be called upon to send these fiends to a hell of their own making.

  All but a few Vampires have chosen the life they lead, and even fewer choose to leave it voluntarily. For those who do, there is always Monsieur LeRay. A clever business, I must admit: a Cruxim charging to play mortician to Vampires who have grown weary of immortality. He set himself up in a dingy alley in Montmartre, open by appointment only. Most of his clients are simply tired: tired of life, tired of daily death, tired of the ever-changing world and their unchanging soul. Some are indeed remorseful, but all of them go knowing that no absolution awaits them. For those who do not wish to die, there is always me—should I ever escape this tower.

  I return to my hideyhole and remove the blade again. I should get started, before they come. It is hard to hide my scraping from them once they arrive, flapping as they do around the tower. Often, they are disguised as bats, screeching, taunting me. I do not know how they found me here, but now they come often to mock me. Several times they have grown bold enough to attempt to fly in through the bars. But the bars are spaced too close to permit them entry, just as they deny me exit. If they could take the shape of any other creature, say the rat or the roach, they may be upon me while I slept, but they cannot. Even the wolf is beyond them. The bat is their only form of disguise. Many times I have wished that I too might take on the shape of an animal. If I could have, I might be with Sabine at this moment, instead of trapped in a tower.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Until the night I was captured, Sabine and I had spent every evening together since our first meeting on the streets of London some fifty years before. As she had finished eating, I stood watching until it began to rain: fat, black drops that washed the blood from the streets. Together, we had dragged the Vampire’s corpse to the banks of the Thames near Blackfriars and set it adrift, and then we retired to the shadows of a nearby alley.

  “What now?” I had asked. “Now that your charge is dead, you are a free agent.”

  “For now.” She had effortlessly lain beside me on the doorstep and had absentmindedly begun to clean the blood from her body, licking at both white flesh and golden fur alike. “Although I would not call it free.”

  I watched, entranced. “Why not?” I asked, recognizing that this guardian was being most guarded and wondering what she had to hide; perhaps a great many things, given her life span.

  She sighed and resumed her licking, wetting one great paw with that delicate pink tongue and passing it fluidly over her chest and face. “I am being hunted.”

  “Hunted!” I laughed at the absurdity of it. “By whom?”

  “My employer.”

  It had been a golden age for myth seekers back then. Everywhere, men had begun writing about shadows, seeking werewolves and harpies, Vampires and will-o’-the-wisps. It was all witches and pitchforks, God or the devil.

  “I did not know any man knew Sphinxes were real.” I gazed out at the rain and gave my wings a gentle flap to shake off the watery droplets.

  “Nor did I,” she admitted. “Until he found me.”

  “He?”

  “Dr. Claus Gandler.” She sighed. “Let us hope he never finds me again. His child, Fritz, had a rare illness. Polycythemia vera: an excess of blood. All his young life he bled—from the gums, from the nose, from the orifice, from the eyes. His father, Claus, was terrified they would come for him, and so he employed me.”

  “But how did he find you?”

  “How do you think?” Her tail picked up the pace, as if she were frustrated by my stupidity. “He went to Egypt.”

  I smiled. “Of course.”

  I had never before seen a Sphinx, but nor had I ever expected to find one on the Continent. Perhaps that was naïve of me. Back in the day, I should have expected to find a Phix in Boetia. In Asia, it is possible I once walked straight past the inert, stone-cold gaze of a Nicolonia. But here? In London? Of course, everyone knew Egypt was the home of the Sphinx.

  “How did he find you?”

  “By mistake rather than by design. We are nocturnal. Being also a creature of the night, you would know that.” She turned her gaze from me and drew her tail forward, giving it a tender lick to clean the tip, the way a house cat might.

  “You are statues by day?” I inquired, knowing it to be true.

  “Correct. But our stillness is also our employ. Since time immemorial, we have been tasked with protecting the tombs of the newly dead from them, the undead. It began in Egypt in the far, far ages,” she told me, using a phrase familiar to the very long-lived. “Vampires were few at first. The quality of the light, the dehydrating heat of the Old Kingdom did not suit them. But after an age, there was a plague of rats, followed by a plague of Vampires. When it was realized what they were and that they could take the form of bats, the Egyptians began to cleanse the streets of winged creatures, eradicate them even.”

  “I did not know that was a defense,” I said, surprised.

  “It is not.” Sabine looked smug, then smiled. “But the Egyptians soon recognized that. Finding there was no way to curb such monsters’ bloodletting, nor to kill them with any ease, they resorted to imprisoning them instead.”

  I remember the look in her eyes as she told me this: patience and wisdom, and a kind of gentle trust.

  “The pyramids!”r />
  Sabine just purred and stretched her back legs, getting comfortable. “Yes. At first. To begin with, the pyramids were nothing more than enormous, impenetrable prisons for Vampires. Later, they became tombs. But not for the Vampires. The Vampires interred within them withered but lived on. Perhaps some live on to this day, clinging to the walls in bat form, or as shrunken, skeletal monsters. No, the pyramids became tombs to protect the newly dead. The pharaohs and their families. The wealthy. The virtuous. The priesthood.”

  “To protect the dead from Vampires?” My eyebrows arched skeptically.

  “Yes. But not from being eaten by them, from being turned by them.”

  “They can turn only the living,” I said, a little too abruptly because Sabine growled in response before continuing.

  “So say you, Cruxim.” Her voice was gruff. “I thought you were sent to hunt them. To kill them.” She fixed me with a steely gaze. “How can you not know they can turn a freshly cast-off body? For twenty-four hours after death, twenty-four hours alone, a Vampire is perfectly capable of turning the dead into the undead. A Vampire bite will animate the body within that first day of death, enough to allow the dead to feed on Vampire blood and rise up as one of them. Any longer than twenty-four hours, even a second more, and the corpse’s cold blood congeals in the Vampire’s veins, killing them instantly. Why do you think so many more Vampires immediately followed the Black Death?”

  I had never been one to frequent cemeteries or morgues in search of the undead, although I suppose that might have seemed the obvious place to search for my quarry. On hearing that, all those years ago, I wondered why I knew so little about my enemy and myself. I knew that my ignorance compromised my mission.

  I’d hesitated for a moment before answering. “That is the problem with being Cruxim, I suppose.”

  “You do not know these things?” she asked, disbelievingly.

  I shrugged. “I work alone. My mother told me all Cruxim do. One of our many disadvantages. Whoever made us to combat them in many ways gave them the upper hand.”

  “You are as strong as they are,” she said, and I noticed her eyes fly to my muscular arms.

  “Yes. But they benefit from a culture. They are sociable creatures. For millennia, they have studied the lore that made them so. We Cruxim have no such library of knowledge about our mission, nor about our motive.”

  “How do you come to be then?” she asked, surprise pitching her voice higher than her standard purr. As she gazed at me expectantly, I realized she was attracted to me. It caught me off guard.

  I cleared my throat, embarrassed by her attraction and the feeling of my own blood hot in my veins. “We reproduce sexually.” I looked down at the cobbles, ignoring her eyes. “But we never know our parents of the same sex. They die within hours of our birth.”

  She quirked an eyebrow. “Your population is unchanged then, constrained.”

  “Yes. I suppose it is.” Even then, I had not known why I was telling her the secrets of my kind, or whether those whispers I remembered from my childhood were even true. Why open up to one I had just met, and one with the memory of a Sphinx, no less? “It is one of two ways a Cruxim is able to die—by giving life to another Cruxim.”

  “And the other way?”

  I glanced at her sideways, wondering if she could be trusted. “To drink from a mortal, it is said.”

  Surprise flashed over her face. “So you were raised by your mother alone.”

  “At first. Within years she gave birth to my sister, and she too was lost to me when I was but a boy.”

  “Your sister’s father would not take you in?”

  “It is not our way, he told me. Once strong enough to hunt for ourselves, we do so alone.”

  Sabine had drawn air in through her fangs, and her tongue protruded slightly, comically, from between them. “You are at a disadvantage then, Cruxim. Your population remains constant, the older more experienced of your kind being constantly replaced with younger, more vulnerable Cruxim with little sense of history and no sense of lore. How have any of you survived?”

  I nodded, disturbed by her assessment. “That is why Vampires turn humans. Not for company. The life of an immortal is lonely, but it is not for that. They do so to defeat us by number alone. To win.”

  Her gaze bored through me. “Where, then, did the Cruxim come from? Why are you here? Why are there not more of you?”

  “I do not know. I am no conduit for my Maker. I do not even know him,” I admitted. “I know only my purpose. I feel the need to hunt them, to feed off them. An insatiable thirst to kill.” I shifted on the doorstep, feeling the warmth radiated by her fur. “How are you here?”

  “I know neither.” Her voice was proud, hard. “Nor do I care to. I am here. Perhaps I always have been. One day, I awoke from slumber and my limbs were no longer stone and my breath was no longer stilled.”

  “You just awoke from stone?”

  She crossed her great paws one over the other. “That is all I know. Each day, when the sun rises above the horizon, I return to stone, not so much a location as an anchorpoint, tethering me to this world. My first guardian stone was limestone. Once, it rested outside the tomb of Pharaoh Ramesses IV, until it was moved to a museum, and now....” She trailed off, and her expression grew wistful. “Dr. Gandler must not find me when I am one with the stone.”

  It had stopped raining but had grown even darker, closer to the dawn. I stood to stretch my legs. “How did he find you the first time?”

  “He realized what the pyramids truly were. The shape, like an inverted fang. The impenetrable nature of them. That they were places of imprisonment. He shares your passion for abolishing Vampires; such is his terror of them. Bringing Fritz to Egypt, he set out to search the African continent for any sign of them, to learn how he might exploit any weakness he discovered. The Sasabonsam and the Adze, the Impundulu and the Ramanga, Dr. Gandler found them all, studied them all—even managed to kill some of them. And then he found me.”

  She stopped to lick an affronting patch of fur on her foreleg before continuing. “I had been entrusted to Ramesses tomb, as I told you, but he was long dead. The old days were gone. Where once the pyramids were living coffins in which to entrap Vampires, over time they became their refuges. The treasure hidden within kept them wealthy over centuries, and the labyrinthine passages and tombs became the perfect coven houses. My task became to deter them from coming, to guard the contents of the tombs. Dr. Gandler was granted special permission to visit the antechamber. But he did not leave with the rest of his research party.”

  “A brave man to stay in a pyramid by night.”

  “Or a foolish one.” She yawned. The day was fast approaching. “But the fault is mine. I did not sense him somehow. If I had done nothing, they would have killed him. He would never have known me, never have been witness to my failure. Instead, I sprang out of the shadows to repel them, and in doing so, revealed myself to him. That was how he caught me the first time.”

  “Caught you?”

  “Saw me. Threatened to expose me, to grind my anchorstone to dust, or to have it hurled into the sea. In return for his silence and my freedom, I had to honor his request that I guard his son.”

  “Fritz?”

  “Yes. And so I did. I guarded the child for more than seven years, until he was in his early teens.” She looked sad suddenly. “I even became quite fond of him. But in the end, it was no use.”

  “Vampires?” I avoided her gaze.

  “Of course! Dr. Gandler was—is—furious. I abandoned my post momentarily to feed. A moment too long. Now, he is hunting me, and for a fate much worse.”

  I had scoffed a little at that, not to make light of her situation but in wondering whether she was being melodramatic. How, after all, did he intend to kill a Sphinx?

  “Do not laugh, Cruxim.”

  “Amedeo,” I corrected her. “Call me Ame. And I laugh wondering how he intends to kill an immortal.”

  A low rumble is
sued from her throat. “Very well, Ame. Don’t laugh. The esteemed Dr. Claus Gandler would no doubt love to entrap you too, as surely as he seeks to capture me. It is not death I fear: it is life in a cage.”

  Shutting off my memories again, I turn back to my task, freeing myself from the cage that has become my place of entrapment and of refuge from the monsters that have made the village their own. Only when I hear the swoosh of wings and the scratching of tiny claws scrabbling in the moss outside the window will I put the blade to rest. They have arrived. It will not be tomorrow, not now. Perhaps the day after.

  “Oh, Angel,” the voice comes from below, slippery with loathing. “Come to the window.”

  Beltran. I know his voice; how could I forget it? Many nights his words have come to roost in my head. His laughter, wild with condescension, a cuckoo in the nest of dreams I envisaged for Joslyn. I have promised myself that when I escape this tower, he will be my first scalp. I will toast my victory with his blood.

  For the moment, of course, the victory is his, as it has been for more than two hundred years. I shake my head. Could it be true? Was it really that long ago? It still feels like yesterday.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  When Maria Del Santos died at the age of sixty-four, Joslyn was an orphan once more. The child was thirteen, as pretty a girl as you could hope to see, and as good and as clever as she was beautiful. I took her to the Convent de la Mare de Déu dels Àngels, outside the city, where I hoped she might spend her life in devotion to her Maker, as I did. At the very least, I thought she might be safe there, under the tutelage of Dominican nuns. And, for a time, she was.

  As she grew older, my visits became more sporadic. I had a task to accomplish, which year upon year became harder. When I did visit, I was always stung by the sour looks of the nuns, as if they could sense a whiff of the preternatural on me. Many times, I considered their reaction had I allowed my wings to show: whether they would swoon in fervor or in fear of some bedevilment they could not comprehend.