Cruxim Read online

  “Joslyn,” I said again, less firmly.

  Her eyes were glassy with tears. “How foolish of me, to want so badly a love that cannot hope to last even one of your lifetimes. And so I thought that perhaps, just for an instant, you might indulge me.” She ran the feather from my cheek to my collarbone, her other hand flying to the buttons on the front of my torn shirt. “That, just for once, I might know what it is to be a woman before I must learn what it is to be a nun.”

  “Joslyn, this is foolishness.” I clasped her by the wrists, holding them firm against my chest. I could feel her pulse in them, the blood-beat as intoxicating as her nearness.

  “Just a kiss then.” She was sobbing now. “One kiss to remember you by.” Involuntarily, my grip softened. Her hands flew to my chest and one crept around my back to stroke my right wing. She raised her face to me again, and I bent my head to her, knowing that her closeness was too much, her power over me too great. I could not do this. Should not do this!

  I leaped backward, tearing angrily at my shirt and exposing my wings. “Joslyn, go home!” I commanded in a tortured voice. “This is not for you!”

  “What is for me? A life of misery and seclusion with tired old women, that is what you want for me?”

  In the corner, I spotted her abandoned habit. With a great flap of my wings, I flew to it, clutched it up, and threw it on the floor at her feet. “A life of purity!” I said. “Not this ... this seduction like a common harlot. Go home!”

  I could bear it no more. The temptation of her was too great.

  With another almighty flap, I soared up in the air before her. Although tormented by the thought of leaving her naked and alone, I knew I was not strong enough to stay.

  “GO BACK!” I commanded, swooping out through the ruined roof and into the cool dark arms of the night.

  Below me, Joslyn crumpled to the floor. Her body gleamed pale against the black cloth of her habit. “It is as it ever was,” she cried. “When I need you, you fly away. I hate you.”

  I knew then, and only then, that her love for me was true.

  Angry at myself and at her, I soared over the fields, flying rapidly with little thought of who or what might be abroad to see me so early in the evening. Only when I reached a lonely elbow of the brook did I stop. Landing, I then threw off my clothes and waded in up to my waist. A naked angel bathing in the moonlight. Even the cold water did little to still the waves of desire and anguish that flooded through me. How had I missed it? Her unhappiness. The change in her. And was she right? Had I been so callous as to deny Joslyn her liberty for my own purpose? Had I wanted no one else to have her?

  Yes, I quickly realized: that much was true. But nor could I reconcile our relationship. This child-woman who for the past fifteen years had needed my protection needed it still. My heart knew I must save her from myself as much as from others.

  I ducked under the water. Small fish darted before me as I splashed my wings in frustration, sending droplets of quicksilver into the air. My hands to my wet hair, I wept, knowing then what I must do. I must set her free and leave her. She was a woman now, and my protection had become her prison. Gradually, an uneasy calm returned to me, and then, more than an hour later, I returned to the castle.

  I arrived to find the ruins illuminated by some light I could not recognize and swooped down, landing outside the walls. Joslyn must have somehow concealed a lantern, I thought. As I approached, the fickleness of the light wavered on the gilt cover of the incunabulum I had given her and alerted me that she had lit a fire.

  “Joslyn?” I flapped down through the ceiling into the room adjoining the Great Hall. There was little smoke, but a noise caught my attention, a muted scrabbling. Perhaps a rat or a bat, I thought as I hurried closer to the flickering glow, keeping to the shadows a little, lest she still be upset with me.

  I saw her foot first, stretched out taut on the cold cobbles of the castle floor. Her robes and wimple were beneath her. I remember still the pointed elegance of her toes, the curve where her other leg, drawn up in the air, became buttock.

  The rest of her nakedness was hidden to me. The broad back of the man above her obscured her nudity. Dark hair swung on his shoulders as he gyrated above her. Muscles tensed, he leaned down to kiss her neck, his hands upon her wrists.

  I watched for just seconds—rage and jealousy blinding me—before I rushed forward. “Joslyn!”

  Her whimper of desire was drowned by a scream of laughter as the Vampire turned toward me. Blood dripped from his fangs and speckles of it shot forward in the firelight as he hissed. Then he jumped away from her.

  Joslyn’s eyes sprang open, and her hand reached out for him. “Beltran,” she said breathlessly, and I noticed that her teeth too were stained with blood.

  It was then that I knew it. Aside from the flushed cheeks, the low-lidded eyes, the hair a nest from writhing, against the paleness of her neck was a dark smear of blood.

  “NO!” I spun around, propelling myself towards the Vampire with all the speed my still-drying wings could manage. “You have NOT done this!”

  “Au contraire, Cruxim.” Beltran leaped up, clinging to the walls of the castle with his long nails. “She begged me to.”

  His laugh brought bile to my throat.

  “How could I resist a virgin, let alone a nun?”

  Joslyn sprang to her feet. “Ame!” she commanded, and then, with just a hint of shame, said, “Leave him. What he says is true. I ... I ... I wanted to know what it was like.”

  Striding to her, I seized her head in my hand, turning it roughly to the side. The smear became a trickle, a rivulet of blood from two puncture wounds in her throat. “And this?” I asked hoarsely. “You would be a whore and a monster?”

  Joslyn wrenched her head from my hands, and her stare was haughty. I knew, in that moment, that she was no longer human.

  “I would be an immortal. Like you,” she said.

  “No,” I managed through gritted teeth. I pointed to where Beltran, naked and still sniggering, clung to the castle wall. “Like him!”

  Her voice became gentle then, and her eyes softened. “Please,” she said, clutching at my arm. “I did it for us, that we may always be together. That you might love me now for eternity.”

  “You have no idea what you have done!” I flung her away, my desire to kill her stronger than any other, except perhaps my desire to weep for her. “I brought you here, to God”—I swung an arm in the direction of the convent—“and you have plunged yourself straight to hell. Don’t you understand what I am? What you are now? We can never be together. Never.”

  Her face crumpled. She pointed to Beltran. “But he said...”

  “He said. He said!” I raged. “He is the devil’s apprentice, the evil I have sought to protect you from. And failed.” Spinning on my heel, I launched myself up the wall, my arms seeking the jugular of my enemy. Beltran, his feet bunched against the wall, leaped away to cling on the opposite side, and bared his fangs.

  “If you catch me, you can have me, Cruxim,” he goaded. “Just like I had her.”

  I flew at him again, in my rage slamming hard into the bare wall he had vacated, winding myself slightly.

  “Ame!” Below us, Joslyn crumpled on her robes and hugged her knees to her chest. Tears of blood sprang from her eyes.

  “You will kill me,” Beltran said, “and leave her a newborn. No longer a virgin nun but assuredly a virgin Vampire alone in a world of infinite pain with no one to instruct her in how to survive. Oh, Cruxim, you are harder than I thought. Or will you kill her now? I know you can feel her. I know you want her. I can assure you she tastes good.” Beltran licked his lips theatrically.

  “Stop it!” Joslyn sprang to her feet again. “Stop it both of you.”

  My laugh was a thing of despair as it echoed around the chamber. “Stop what? This?” I gestured wildly to Beltran, to myself. “This can never be stopped. This is my purpose: to kill Vampires in the name of God. His”—I pointed to Beltran—�
��is to make them in the name of the devil. You wanted a lover, well you have one now. Lust as hot as hellfire for eternity. Are you happy?”

  “No,” she whispered, and I saw that it was true: already she was miserable. She would have eternity to get used to it. Abandoning my hunt for Beltran, I fluttered down beside her.

  “Ame.” Joslyn rushed to embrace me.

  That one last time, fighting my deepest urges, I had let her. I had drawn her into my arms, feeling her head on my shoulder, smelling the fragrant, musty warmth of her, the rosemary and passionfruit and sex that clung to her hair and hands. I had considered plunging my fangs into her neck then and there, saving her from a lifetime of horror. Yet nor could I condemn her to the hereafter.

  “Go with him,” I said gruffly, releasing myself from her embrace. I pushed her back, in the direction of Beltran. “Go from this place. From me. I must never see you again.” Using every ounce of my strength, I laid a kiss upon her brow. She was as cold as stone, yet that kiss burned like a brand on my lips. “I must never see you again,” I repeated. “If I do, I will kill you both.”

  I flew directly upward, not looking back, ignoring Beltran’s laughter and Joslyn’s wracking sobs. I flew for many, many miles that night, stopping only when my eyes were devoid of tears.

  I told Sabine little about her. I do not know why. I suppose she might not understand, might be jealous even. Maybe not of my love for Joslyn, tightroping between the love of a child and of a woman, but of Joslyn herself: the legs and arms and body parts that compose a mortal woman. Or she might think me weak, that I did not kill them both that night. Many times since, I have had the same thought. Instead, I left my charge in the care of a killer, and one of the worst kind. Ah, regrets, I have so many. The one thing longevity bestows.

  Sabine, in her infinite wisdom, never asked. Not about any others. For more than a century, that was enough. I was able to make her believe there was no one else in my heart. Mostly, there was not—nothing but a dull ache where Joslyn’s love used to nestle. But my heart was never the problem, nor hers. Nor was it any other lover that came between us.

  I had slept with a mortal only once, when I was but a boy. I kept my coat on and lay on the bed, letting her writhe above me. I know the effect I have on mortal women, and she was satisfied. As for Vampires, never. My dealings with them are only in death.

  Ironically, it was the very thing I loved about Sabine that prevented me from loving her entirely.

  “You love me like an artifact,” she had growled at me. “I may as well be eternal stone.” Her tail flicked erratically, and she prowled back and forth, growling. “Then we can be stone together.”

  They were the last words she had said to me before she vanished inside the stone that acted as her anchor, daily drawing her from the physical realm. She would not tell me where her anchorstone—as I learned the guardians called it—was located, so fearful was she of Dr. Gandler. I had a hint that it was in a small collection somewhere, in a dusty, private museum where it received little attention, but I could not be sure. I still cannot. She told me once that if I kissed the stone, her eyes might open, but I was unsure whether she was telling the truth. Even if I were out of this tower, I might not be able to find her unless she wanted to be found.

  She was right: I was unfeeling. Was it out of some remnant loyalty to Joslyn that I could not give Sabine what she desired? I do not think so. I loved Sabine. I love her still.

  “You love the idea of me,” she had angrily suggested one earlier time, when we had the same argument.

  I had stopped, considering her words. “No.” I responded. “I love you, Sabine.”

  “Then prove it.” She had lifted her head to meet my gaze, and her eyes burned to a lustrous topaz as she padded towards me. It was early evening. We had both just fed together on a Vampire I’d caught loitering outside a bar. I had removed my blood-soaked shirt and Sabine had spent the better part of an hour cleaning her fur, stopping occasionally to nuzzle and kiss me playfully or to bat me away with her great paws.

  “Show me,” she said, and her voice was velvet, contrasting with the roughness of her tongue on my bare stomach.

  She had pounced, knocking me playfully to my feet. Her eyes flashed as she stood over me, and then she bent her head to my neck. The gentleness of her kiss belied her strength. I placed my arms around her, propping myself on my wings, feeling the softness of her own wings above me, larger and more heavily feathered than my own. With a sigh of happiness, she flapped them playfully, and I lifted my body up again to kiss her, my hands falling to her breasts.

  I must pause for a moment in my retelling to remember them, for they were perfect. There was no wonder in my mind that the creator has chosen to make them forever bare. Each was perfectly turned, its roundness culminating in a pyramid of rosy nipple.

  I had brought my lips to each, feeling Sabine’s resonant purr through them. All around me, her mane of blonde hair, the sleekness of her fur. She dropped on top of me, kissing my face, allowing my hands to move along her back, to stroke her flanks. The cushioned softness of her paws pinned me down. Sabine had groaned again and bitten me, an involuntary nip of pleasure as I continued my adoration of her body. Then her haunches bunched, her back claws extended to grip the rooftop below us, and she growled again. The full moon cast snakelike shadows of her erect tail as it lashed from side to side. Had I not known better, I might have thought she were angry with me. The low growl came again, fragmented by her purr, and she kissed me even more deeply—so deeply I felt the points of her canines glance my lip.

  “Ame,” she rumbled and wriggled herself forward again, the weight of her, and the sensual turn of her lips nearly robbing me of breath.

  With all the strength I could muster, I pushed her away.

  She playfully resisted, catching my face in her paws and kissing it again before recognizing my hesitance. With a quick movement, she hauled herself up and off me and crouched as if to spring. “What is wrong?”

  I avoided her gaze, focusing instead on her twitching tail.

  Noticing the movement of my eyes, she sat down and curled her tail forward around her haunches. The lust in her eyes turned to shame, and her purr died in her throat. “So that is it,” she said, her eyes downcast. “That is how you see me?”

  “You cannot know how I see you,” I answered.

  A frown crossed her brow, and her beautiful full lips drew into a tight, pink line. “I know that you see a beast in place of a beauty. I know that you will never let me love you as I desire.”

  I sighed. “Sabine…” I took a step closer. She was always difficult to approach when wounded, and I was tentative. “You are beautiful to me.”

  “Am I?” she spat. “Oh, parts of me are beautiful to you. But this,” she lashed her tail. “This!” She stretched, that way cats do with both of their hind legs extended rigidly behind them. “This is animal. This is beast. Beast! That is how you see me. Like all of the rest. A freakshow. Or nothing but a pet.”

  “Sabine.” I tried to reassure her.

  “You do not know,” she spat. “You cannot know what it is like to forever be half beast.” She sprang away into the night, denying me the chance to tell her that I did; that perhaps all men know that.

  It was not the first time the argument had arisen, but the night before my imprisonment, it would be the last.

  I have thought, many times, about why I could not take that final step with Sabine. It was not out of revulsion but a sense of moral wrongness: the same gut feeling that cast a wall between Joslyn and me. Once she left, that final night of our togetherness, I wondered what was wrong with me. Was it my destiny to deny myself the things I most wanted? Or was it not me denying them, but something greater than myself.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “You should see her now,” came his voice again from below the tower. “More beautiful than even you could ever have guessed. But I heard that you go for beasts now.” His laugh was strident. “Shall I send a littl
e beastie up there for you?”

  The squeal of bats was followed by another laugh. “Be a good, Cruxim, and let the little bat in. It won’t eat much.”

  “Do you forget, Beltran, my last words to you?”

  “I am a Vampire, Monsieur. We never forget.”

  “Then you will not forget this: one day, I will be released from this tower, and when I am, I will put your head on a pike, along with every other hell-bound member of your coven. I will burn you all, a baptism for your final resting place.”

  “Every member, Cruxim?” He laughed uproariously. “I will tell her that when I get home. Oh, Cruxim, it will break her heart.”

  “Do not speak to me of hearts,” I thundered. My voice bounced off the walls of the chamber and flew out to greet him. “Let not the heartless talk of hearts.”

  “Or the loveless of love.” A peal of laughter followed his words up the walls. “I like you like this, Cruxim. Such a pussycat. A caged lion. Just like your lover.”

  Had he found Sabine? Surely not or Beltran would have paraded her before me. It was a taunt, nothing more.

  “Be careful, Devil,” I yelled. “It is the lioness who hunts. She may kill you before I do.”

  A snort floated up from below. With a screech, a rain of bats descended on the window, battering their wings against the bars, their cries piercing the night.

  It was not the next day, nor the next. The chip of stone lay sullen and untouched in its hideyhole. The girl did not come again.

  She was replaced by an ancient, stooped man in a black hood. He sat at the top of the stairwell for the entire first day of his watch, his wrinkled face shadowed by the hood, impassive. My attempts to engage him in conversation were met with silence. I could do nothing while he was there but watch. All the while, I longed for the solitude to continue my plan.

  The second day, he took an object from a leather satchel he carried. The flip of the pages drew my attention. It had been four decades since I had read a book, and the thought came sorely to me. I remembered the embossed incunabulum I had given Joslyn and wondered what had become of it. Walking to the bars, I asked, “You are a reader?”