Waif looked down upon her, an icy façade shuttering his features. His voice quieted to the pitch of one inviting her to unveil her secrets and urgent wishes. “What do you crave?”
It felt like disrobing her most intimate desires before him, like unraveling the last bit of lace on her skin as she bared it: “Companionship.”
He smiled.
Like Spice and Heat
Wickedness felt like spice and heat: a hot apple pie sliding down her throat, with spicy cinnamon stinging on her lips.
Although Cherub knew the charade they played must eventually end and she would have to discover why he’d come and changed her father’s tears to blood, for now, she longed to extract as much companionship from Waif as she could.
They made a game of it. First, they would do something she wanted and then, she insisted, they must do something Waif wanted.
Thus went the whole day:
First, she requested he teach her the game of queens, during which their heads bent over figurines of ivory and jet on a checkered board, his shining brows drawn in concentration, her lip caught between her teeth, his tresses of stars lighting up her copper curls.
After that, Waif wanted to explore the library and Cherub demanded they exchange excerpts from their favorite books. Unsmiling, he recited dark poetic tragedies of broken spirits abandoning hope and of despairing kings relinquishing dreams. With a tremulous smile, she read aloud some tales of love blooming from reprisal and of hope blossoming for the desolate. When she dared a glance at his impenetrable eyes, she wondered if the merest spark of hope might ever ignite in them.
When they exited the library, he longed to climb onto the highest tower. There, together, they balanced upon the toothed crenellations while her lacy gown and his cloak whipped around their legs like the pennants snapping over their heads.
He gazed not at the lush carpet of hills, though, nor upon the quaint village sprouting in the dale like a picturesque patch of mushrooms and teacups, but he hooked his attention upon the grounds below – the orchard trees the size of her fingertips! – as if he might step off the ledge and let the gardens catch and crush his falling body.
She grasped his arm and pointed to the far horizon, at the tinge of pink bringing a blush to the sky, much as the wind and elation flushed her own cheeks a painted rose. As she gazed upon the gorgeous firmament and envisaged what fantasies might prowl beyond, he looked instead at her.
She begged a dance after that and skipped before him through the castle, hopping nimbly over the streams of her father’s blood while only the most petulant of queries entered her mind. Was she truly expected to go belly up in loyalty to a father who had never given her a single glance? Her father had never, not once, shown her an inkling of concern, devotion, or kindness, and yet – she leapt over another crimson stream in the corridor – she must bow to protecting him like an obedient child!
And she would, she swore, when the evening tucked the sun to sleep. Then, only then, would she fight for her father.
But now…now she was wicked.
Before the grand entrance to the ballroom, Waif lifted her over the churning stream of her father’s blood and set her on her feet inside the grand scarlet-red-and-snow-white hall.
He swept in behind her and caught her waist, her wrist, and drew her up on her tiptoes and close, so close her nose brushed his and their breathing touched scents, her sugared plum to his liquored mint, and she went motionless, closer to a human than she’d been in years.
Then a magical melody soared into the wings of the ballroom and she laughed. The faintest quirk of his lips made her lean forward, breathlessly expecting a smile, but then he swung her into an exhilarating whirl and whisked away all thought but this whimsical, wondrous motion. Her feet barely skimmed the polished floor. The lacy scraps on her gown’s hem flared out like ribbons over her capering legs.
It felt like sailing the skies on a cloud. Was this what a lover’s arms felt like?
Cherub’s mouth ached from smiling, and her heart ached from something else.
Waif danced her out of the ballroom and leapt with her over the gurgling blood. He wanted to make cakes.
Moments later, the kitchen wafted in an aromatic cloud of powdered sugar, crushed raspberries, and shavings of vanilla. Cherub’s giggles mingled with Waif’s somber voice. Their noses turned white with flour, their fingers sticky with dough, and the stove steamed hot with delicacies. The air between them turned delicious, lush and tasty.
Humming, Cherub spun on her tiptoes and barreled right into Waif’s arms. Into a hot, living human being who breathed against her while his heart beat real blood right against hers, their pulses frantic and fleet-footed as darting rabbits. His fingers linked around wicked Cherub’s waist and her naughty eyes peeped up at him beneath lashes touched by sunset from the kitchen window. He leaned down and she rose up.
Then dusk sang its last lullaby, night tucked away the sun, and her father’s tears abruptly changed course.
They flowed into the kitchen and boiled across the stones, straight toward her. Scarlet spatters splashed across her ankles, hot and fizzling on her skin.
Her lips parted right beneath Waif’s, in an O of shock. He froze, too, his eyes darkening and his hold tightening.
Twisting away, she pattered from the broiling brook. Her wet feet smacked the flagstones.
She forged a trail of bright red footprints in her father’s blood.
Flushed Cheeks and Brass Appendages
Light as gossamer and swift as birdwing, she arrowed through the corridor. Up and up she flitted, free!
But for how long?
Threads of lace fluttered behind her in a taunting dance for her hunter. Her breaths came shallow in her chest like the noiseless wheezes of a bird while his came as silent as his footfalls in pursuit.
Where could she run, and who would hide her? What walls could outfox a sorcerer who drew forth tears of blood?
Perhaps she should have tried. Perhaps she should have gone to ground like game in her own garden: a hunkering mole behind a mound, a nose-twitching hare beneath a bush, a sleek-eyed cat observing sedately from a moldering statue.
But her body curved upward, up spiral stairs, past twisted sconces bearing liquefying wax, where scintillating candlelight gilded her dread-flushed cheeks and brass appendages reflected the terrified glances over her shoulder.
She burst onto the roof with resolve a flow beneath her skin even as her heart beat wildly against it.
What life was this? Why extend its torment?
But never again to lick sugarplum from her lips? Never to stop, breathless, with a lover’s hand on her waist? Never to experience the hot blood of his pulse beneath her kiss?
A leap from the tower would strew her dreams behind her like pearls plummeting from the sky. She would never gather them again, not with her broken form crumpled on the courtyard cobblestones while a thousand pretty visions disintegrated around her, un-grasped.
Her nimble feet nevertheless sprang onto the crenellations, into the gnashing jaw of the tower, and a thousand fears and fantasies jumbled in her mind.
Her father looking at her—just once! Reaching out a hand to caress her trembling jaw.
Her mother’s eyes opening to Cherub bending over her. The sweetest smile curving the queen’s lips!
A handsome stranger – Waif – reciting solemn vows of wedlock, preceding a stormy kiss that matched the tempest behind his eyes, pressed to her lips and igniting her soul.
How would that have felt, the kiss that her father’s blood had interrupted in the kitchen far below?
A wicked child had just one end.
“Don’t!”
Waif’s cry touched only air as she leapt.
Dreams Strewn Behind Her
Her dreams strewed behind her; that was true.
But they did not glisten like pearls from a turbulent ocean, tumbling iridescent and thunderstorm-dark around her.
Her dreams floated.
&
nbsp; Like feathers.
Like her—for he leapt after her. His billowing cape snapped into massive black wings that spanned the tempestuous heavens above her.
Then she was floating, in his arms.
Velvet feathers grazing her skin.
The Icy Bite of Chains
She lay on satiny sheets, icy chains linked around her delicate wrists, her fingers clenched on the headboard of her bed.
The gold manacles clinked with every movement and shift of her body, her slipping gown of time-frayed lace revealing more of her slender limbs. But the cold bite of metal on her velvety flesh couldn’t match the cold bite of Waif’s gaze upon her body, when he bothered to look.
He had chained her to her bed.
“Why are you doing this?” she whispered.
His demeanor didn’t alter, his profile stony and fixed on the window into the night. “So you don’t leap to your demise again.”
“Why would you care?”
No reply came from the rigid figure staring into the night.
“How do you have wings?” she tried a different approach.
His fingers grazed the gauze of the curtains. “They’re part of the curse for choosing the wrong master.”
“Who did you choose?”
Again he forbore reply.
Why was he even still here? And why had he come in the first place?
“Why did you turn my father’s tears to blood?” she demanded next. “Surely you can tell me now, when you’ve chained me like a wild animal!”
The barest flexing of his jaw implied she’d struck a nerve, but his words emerged as wintry as all his previous ones. “I’ve chained you like someone precious and beloved who cannot be trusted to keep herself alive.”
“Alive in what circumstances? In these?”
He swiveled toward her, his tresses of stars like liquid light winking over his shoulders. “Shut your eyes and let slumber take you, and you’ll dream of why I bleed your father’s eyes.”
A Castle Overgrown with Wart-Leaf
She did not shut her eyes, nor did she let slumber take her.
She fought it like a petulant child. In ways, she still was a petulant child… but even such a child could recognize the masterful flair of his violin music that rose gradually to pierce the veil of night.
It flowed into the room like his magic: mellifluous and persuasive, so sweetly invasive. It stroked her limbs until she twisted with restless heat, perspiration dampening her throat, her gown—and then something passing odd occurred.
Music spun her chains into liquid gold. In the sparkling candlelight, the dissolving links wound down her wrists in fluid spirals. Golden dollops rolled over her shoulders and caressed her spine.
Then they punctured her skin like needles.
She stiffened with a muffled cry as they dug beneath her flesh and wound inside her muscle, tightening like screws and becoming one with her body.
Something else, something foreign bloomed from inside them then and unfurled from her back: something airy and rustling. Downy and soft.
Wings.
Her chains had become golden feathers at the periphery of her vision.
She sat up and the wingspan lifted her almost to weightlessness; her fingertips barely brushed her sheets.
How would it feel to soar?
With a single beat, the wings arched her from the bed onto her feet. She padded toward the window, curious, with the wings buoying her up so that her toes barely skimmed the lush carpet.
Beyond the gossamer curtains and the glassy pane twinkled a tapestry of gems above, inviting her to ride the night on her golden plumage.
She climbed onto the windowsill and spread out her arms, then leapt into nothing.
Her feathers swooped out and captured her on the next air current, sweeping her far into the sky.
Laughing, she stretched out her arms and soared. Her wind-tossed curls swelled and rioted across her shoulders while her gown of loops and strings became a plaything for the night, which played like a capricious child. A matchless experience!
Wondrous were the velvet hills and dales undulating below where milky moonlight gathered in pools. The light shone so thick Cherub almost felt she could ladle it into a bowl and drink it like soup.
She crossed from one kingdom into the next and the next. Fields of crops alternated with forests, which altered to lakes resembling hand mirrors that reflected the vanity of the sky.
Eventually her wings dipped her lower—and lower, dropping her onto a plain of rippling wheat beneath a nocturnal breeze, where a melancholy air infused every breath.
Where the inhabitants did not sleep.
They wandered the meadows in their nightgowns, barefoot and listless, awake and gnawing their lips with worry.
No, not worry, but sadness, their mouths drawn down, their jaws gaunt from lack of nourishment. Not because no baskets of fruit graced the kitchen counters she glimpsed beyond farmhouse windows, but because no appetite seemed to trouble them in their burdensome gloom.
They shambled along like hollow husks, drained of joy and shades of their former selves—or shades of what a living human should be.
“They are becoming sorrow.”
The voice drew her around, not quickly as in the waking world, but drowsily, as all things must be in sleep. Her calves and hips scarcely felt the rustle of wheat past her gown.
Waif stood behind her, his own wings – if he had them – folded beneath his voluminous cape.
“They’re becoming sorrow?” she echoed, and his words before he’d departed last night floated to the surface of her mind: You’ll dream of why I bleed your father’s eyes.
Was she dreaming now?
She took in the shuffling figures plagued by mourning and insomnia. Had her father’s tears flowed so far that they had wrought this woe upon Waif’s land?
“Unfortunately, this is not the worst fate that afflicts us. Come.” He extended his gloved hand, the silver buttons hardly competing with the shimmer of his starry hair.
Cherub slipped her bare fingers into his velvet glove and he embarked into the firmament, boosting her with him.
For a few instants they soared side by side, their wingspan magnificent and the flight utterly breathless.
Then a castle loomed into view, one of fairytale towers with cupped tops like whipped cream—but there, any sugary resemblance ended, for the nearer they sailed, the more clearly the moonlit scene became one of decay.
The gardens at the château’s base stretched withered and sparse, a domain of sagging stems and wilted leaves. The castle itself was overgrown with wart-leaf, whose thick leaves clumped with pustules oozing green juice down the stone towers like black blood.
“What happened here?” Cherub whispered, whispering because she dared not speak out loud in this place, fearing it might pinch the voice from her throat and leave it to shrivel alongside these plants.
Waif released her hand and speared down the remaining distance to the garden. Landing crouched among the shrunken plants, he plunged his hands into the soil. Wasted leaves and dirt crumbled around his velvet gloves.
When he withdrew his hands, the earth beneath them writhed with worms.
Suck Marrow-Dry
"Shall we weep for your dying kingdom, dear Waif?”
It was a new voice that drew Cherub’s attention this time, a voice as sour as beets in acid.
Alighting on the wormy ground and inhaling its cloying scent of moldy molasses, she looked upon a figure in a faceless cowl standing beside Waif.
The hood tilted as if the cowled figure were cocking his head, and Cherub got the distinct impression he was studying her and that he was smiling… a smile tarnished like ancient silver. He hobbled forward. “What have you brought home, Waif? A toy?”
“A girl.” Waif’s tone betrayed nothing, as frosty as the icy chains he’d locked her in, but in one swift step, he inserted himself between Cherub and the cowled figure. “Not a toy.”
�
�A game, then?” The cowled figure’s hands came up—clawed and talon-like and charcoal-gray, not human hands at all—and he rubbed them together like an eager witch. “We like games.”
“No.” Waif’s tone went even more rigid. “I’ve not played with you for years. I’ve done with you.”
Dreams of Darkness: An Anthology of Dark Fairytales Page 8
