The Blood of Caged Birds (Mortalsong Book 1)

by J. M. Stredwick

  “Let us have this moment,” I say.

  Alphonse’s stiff regard is lowered, and he reaches out his hand. He is still afraid but squeezes me tightly when he makes contact. Both of his hands go to my breasts now, and he caresses me down my waist. He buries his face in my chest and breathes as if he will die of desire.

  “I want you,” he murmurs.

  I allow the shoulders of my shift to slip low, and he takes this as invitation to expose me. He sits back and gazes as one might gaze at artwork. Then he leans forward and pulls it down to my feet. With his hands at the ground on his way up he kisses my thigh, and the gentle touch brings desire to my own blood.

  He flurries to rid himself of his coat and breeches, to be as naked as I am.

  I am chilled. He stands, and I glance at his parts, noting that he is ready.

  “No.” I shake my head. “Sit.”

  He immediately obeys, and I seat myself as I had done before, with my buttocks resting against his lap. I part my legs, so they are on either side of his. He wraps his arms around me to feel every part of me. His hands are relentless now, kneading and pulling, tracing and feeling. I feel my breath coming now sharper, and his, in unison. I help him find his entrance and we finally make the intended connection. He groans loudly, panting against my back.

  He does not move.

  “Please, Claire,” he utters in my ear, drawing my hair back with his hand. “Please.”

  It is all he says. I begin slowly.

  ________________

  I awaken. We had fallen asleep in the bed, wound closely underneath the heavy coverlets. When I stir, I feel that the day has gotten away from us. We will have to return immediately. I fly out of the bed and begin to dress myself.

  “Alphonse?”

  He is not here. I feel odd, as if I had been drunk before. Now, I feel mildly ashamed. I do not regret it, as he feared, but I don’t understand myself. I know that I made him touch the sky with happiness, that I am proud to say.

  When I am fully clothed once more, I exit the room. There is a small clank at the end of the hall. I think he must be in his old room, searching for something. I try to remain quiet and make my steps silent.

  When I come to the last door, the one that is cracked a bit and begging for entry, I lay my hand flat against it and push it wide.

  There is nothing I can do but scream when I see it. Alphonse is covered in blood, a knife in his hand. There is a creature lying on the floor. Its body is gray and distorted, partially translucent so that you can see all of its innards and organs. Its face is marred and inhuman. The entire scene makes me ill.

  “Claire!” Alphonse shouts.

  I feel sickness drawing up my stomach to my throat.

  Alphonse rises and runs to me, tossing the knife to the ground.

  I am doubled over, breathing heavily. I cannot think of it. I look back to the humanoid creature on the ground as Alphonse grabs me by the arms.

  “You shouldn’t be here!” He shakes me.

  I jostle myself out of his grasp and hit him a few times in the chest as he attempts to take hold of me again. “What is this? What is happening?”

  He glances back at the creature on the floor. I now notice a stream of dark fluid pumping from a slit in its neck. It is not moving: simply dead. I bring a shaky hand across my mouth then fury interrupts my fear. How dare he?

  “You think you can bring me to some madhouse? Use me for your pleasure and then what, I do not even know what to call this!”

  “Listen to me,” he argues. “Listen. I will explain.”

  “I will not listen! Take me home!”

  He lets out a frustrated breath and goes back into the room. He drags the body to the corner where I notice that there are shackles fastened to the wall. He clicks the manacle shut around one of the creatures sagging wrists and then lays the knife next to the recumbent body.

  “What are you doing?” I round on him.

  My only thought as I stand there, a disoriented contusion in the room, is that my mind has crumbled. Perhaps, I am sleeping still, wrapped in his arms, pressed by the weight of his heavy arm. I’ve cut myself down, went against all things honorable that I’ve debauched myself into insanity. Everything seems so crystalline, so real, but slow, as if I have buried myself into a chasm in time and all else is dust, and what is right here is the only thing that could possibly exist. No. This could not be real.

  “I’m making it look like death by suicide!” he storms, breaking my disorientation.

  He then goes to a trunk at the other end of the room where there are pieces of parchment, scrolls, and letters strewn about. He returns everything to where it was before with cold, steady hands.

  There is nothing I can do but wait for him, utterly wasted in my confusion. When he is finished, he shoulders past me and shuts the door behind us. His hand finds mine and I jerk it away.

  “Do not touch me!” I hiss.

  He grabs me by the arm nonetheless and I follow him down the stairs. He stops in the salon, his entire body quaking with anxiety.

  “I should never have brought you here,” he says, and lets me go.

  Alphonse draws his hands through his loose hair and he holds his skull, pacing the room.

  “Explain yourself!” I follow him closely. “It is done now! Whatever that was, whatever this is, I have to know.”

  He stops himself and attempts to regroup. I cannot believe that this has just happened. What am I to think? How do I piece the image of that…being…into a coherent reality?

  “I am working with a man who is trying to create an immortal human.” He shakes his head. “Obviously, he cannot get it right. As you saw. There can be unfortunate effects.”

  I cannot speak. My throat is so dry I feel like I have swallowed needles. His body is rigid, his face dotted with moisture, looking like weeping candle-wax. His words are enlongated and misplaced in my mind. There is no way for me to even assemble them in something recognizable. But still, it is what I saw. This abrupt change in him is shocking, as if I’m being thrust into knowledge of something I should not know.

  “I have never seen one like that.” He wipes his brow angrily. “I have only ever finished off the ones who are incompatible. That…that was something different.”

  “What do you mean finished off the other ones?” My voice is tight in my chest.

  “I didn’t think that it would get free. I was trying to figure out who your sister was. Who she is to them!”

  “My sister?” I shake, breath difficult to find. “What does my sister have to do with any of this?”

  My chest beats hard, panic flowing freely under my skin.

  “Monsieur Vauquelin, my father…” He swallows. “They said that she was invaluable to them. I know now why they want her. I know what she is.”

  “What in the earth, Alphonse! What are you even speaking about? Is my sister in danger?”

  I don’t know what else to ask and let out a swollen sigh. Everything that he is saying, all of it, seems incompatible with words allowed to be spoken on this earth. They should not be there, on his breath, stinking up the air like pestilential fumes. But the panic in his tone stalls in me as real and vibrates deep into my bones.

  He grows quiet and still, his back rigid.

  “Is she?” I demand, fury coursing.

  “They want to sacrifice her,” he says, his voice haunting to my soul. “They want to give her to a previous experiment that went wrong. This creature, they call her The Bone Woman. Apparently, my father studied her for years. Instead of making a human who is immortal, they created a creature that can give and take life. There are accounts of her needing to feed upon the souls of humans to stay in her youthful image, to feed when she is to give life. My father said that when she held his hands in hers she stopped his aging, that she can do it for anyone.”

  “Why would they want my sister?” I plead with him in extreme confusion, reaching out for him once more, as if holding on to him will calm the dissolvin
g of my mind.

  “Throughout my father’s journals it sounded like he was going mad. He was becoming infatuated with this creature. He wrote about how he longed to be with her. Your sister’s blood…many centuries ago, your sister’s blood was used to create the Bone Woman. Your sister was magic, Claire. I don’t know what or how, but Monsieur Vauquelin would know. He remembers all of his past lives.”

  Alphonse seats himself on one of the chairs, lowering himself as if it pains his body to do so. He hangs his head in his hands as if it weights too much for him to support.

  “They have postulated through different experiments that if Giselle’s soul is given to the Bone Woman, the powers she was given will leave her and she will be truly immortal. They wrote that it will cure her. Then they can use her blood to make themselves the same. They plan to create an empire of immortals. And all my fucking father wants out of it is to be able to be with the creature, the woman…”

  I feel grotesque in my own skin. I want to be home now, to swallow myself up in the comfort of my chambers. I need to find Giselle. I need to tell her of this madness. This lunacy. Even if it isn’t true, the madness and the threat are real. Giselle wanted to leave tonight. I thought we would be together by now. What if she leaves without me? She will not know what danger is out there.

  “They will come for her,” my tone is weak.

  “Somehow,” Alphonse affirms. “They will find a way to get her to the island where the Bone Woman waits.”

  “You knew about this and still you brought me here?”

  “I didn’t know everything. I did not think,” he speaks stiffly. “I thought I could gain more information. My father wouldn’t explain it all. I had to know that the immortality—the magic, the blood—I had to know that what he’d told me was true and not a damned ghost story.”

  “We have to go back! I have to warn her.” I scramble towards the door, but his strides are longer than mine and are not working against the impediment of a dress.

  “We have to be smart about this,” he warns me, hand on the door. “You cannot go barging into your mother’s home screaming about what you’ve seen.”

  “I will if I want to,” I seethe, trying to push him out of the way. “Let me go!”

  He stands in my way and pushes me back. “No, Claire.”

  “You don’t understand!” I feel tears coming to my eyes. “We were supposed to escape tonight. We were to leave so that she and Benjamin could marry, and we would not be forced into the marriages my mother designed.”

  Alphonse balks. Perhaps he is equating his time with me, his hatred of his brother, or piecing together his new understanding of my urgency. He remains in his stance, butted against the door.

  “I will not be able to find them,” I warn him. “We were supposed to go somewhere that our father and mother would be unable to find us. Do you think she’ll come out of hiding to find me? Do you really think she’ll risk it? After she waits for me and I do not show up? She will think I have betrayed her in some way. She will be gone from me and I won’t be able to protect her!”

  Alphonse is stoic now, reverted to his previous form.

  “If my father finds out you know, if he finds out we know, I have no doubt that he or Monsieur Vauquelin will kill us both. If you want to protect your sister,” he sighs, and I know that I will hate what he says next, “let them hide.”

  “Don’t keep me here,” my voice is low, a threat.

  He stares at me, willing me to behave, to listen.

  “I can’t let you do what you want to do.”

  He remains immovable.

  Giselle

  I walk beneath the shade of giant trees in the chilling spring air, fostering the determination I will need to make it to the brook that flows along the southern side of the Bonteque land. Outside of the walls of our constricting home, I feel freer. It seems that there is a darkness that has settled there.

  My legs pump on, my leather walking shoes digging slightly into the muddy earth. My skirts drag over heavy grasses, wet by an early morning rainfall.

  There is no other place to meet or speak with Benjamin, as each conversation is mediated and censored by my mother. I had been forced into slipping Benjamin a note, suggesting that we meet before they left as their dealings had come to a head. I will have to be brave, have to speak what it is that distresses me. If he loves me as much as I think he does, he will have no qualms against what I will suggest.

  I find him leaning against an oak tree, his hair loose at his shoulders and swaying out in front of his profile. He wears an unbuttoned high collared French coat with a linen shirt beneath, and a tan pair of breeches clads his lower half. He looks as if he is pondering the world. His eyes, half lidded, are lax, staring further than just the concreteness of the earth and bubbling creek before him.

  As I step over wet leaves, I capture his attention.

  “Giselle.” He strides forth. He looks unkempt with his loose hair, as was fitting for him. It is as if he is a rogue at heart, someone that does not fit the criteria of traits that nobility might approve of.

  He sweeps me into his arms, and I am taken by the spiced scent of him. His chin brushes against my forehead, not having been shaven in a few days’ time and it prickles me, making me laugh despite the murky circumstances.

  “You are here.” I breathe out a breath of relief, and I slide my hands beneath his coat and over the starchiness of his shirt, mindlessly running my fingers over his back.

  “Of course, I am here.” He tilts his head and kisses my forehead. “I have missed you. Is it too soon for me to say it?”

  “I’ve missed you as well.” I smirk at his faux worried tone, and he quits his act, leaning over me to force a passionate kiss onto my mouth. The forcefulness of his desire shocks me.

  “Benjamin.” I break his kiss reluctantly. “We must speak.”

  “After a few more of these?” He chuckles against my lips, his breath hot compared to the cool country air around us.

  He kisses me in presses of lip on lip before I am dazedly pushing him away again.

  “My love,” I whisper distractedly, and then unwind myself from him, stepping back a few good feet. Distance will aide me in collecting my thoughts.

  He eyes me promiscuously, but then sobers as I step back and affirm the urgency of what I am here to discuss. I will explain to him everything.

  I speak the words I have planned, scattering my thoughts all over the forest’s pleasant atmosphere in random tangles. I mention my mother, Claire and her misfortunes, and our betrothals.

  “But,” I say, turning away from him as I cannot bear to see his face when I speak of such a precarious topic. “There is one other way that we can survive this without succumbing to the jurisdiction of my mother, as well as save Claire from her own betrothal.”

  His expression is now pained by his understanding of what darkness has touched our family.

  I am shaking, terrified as I allow the words to fall out of my mouth. They are precious, having been thought up like jewels, mined from the crevasses of my subconscious. And they spill just like that, crystalline and gleaming in the open air. They matter so much to me, and I can only hope that Benjamin will feel the same.

  “We must marry now, tonight. Whenever possible.”

  Benjamin’s face tilts, a nimble smile curling the edges of his mouth. He looks to the forest floor then up again, swallowing tightly against some nameless emotion. I want to hide my face, blooming with all shades of rosiness, so that he will not see me as altogether too forward. I will have to explain.

  “We will never be able to marry with any sort of blessing from my father or mother. We can be sure of that. If we,” I begin meandering towards the river, fiddling with my nails. “That is to say, if you agree to it, we can go to the Parish nearby and have the Chapel Priest marry us. Claire will come with us. That way, we will be able to take her in and protect her. Ensuring we will not have to marry the men Mother has betrothed us to.”

 
; “Are you, Mademoiselle, asking me to marry you?” His satisfaction is striking.

  Laughter bubbles freely, like a happy hot spring steaming, saturating the space between us with coveted warmth. Our chuckling reminds me of two giddy children having just done something naughty. In fact, I feel as if I have done something so off base, so far from natural, that I feel tears rushing to my lashes. I blink them away with a fierceness that rivals my bliss.

  “Well, it might be better if you did the actual asking.” I snicker, adrenaline surging.

  “I have nothing to offer you now,” Benjamin speaks in his smooth way, kneeling into the wet grass before me, fixing me in a gaze so powerful I am unable to look away. He holds me captive. Locked there, bound by magnetism. “But, I vow to give you the best someday. That being said,” he smiles broadly, “I could never live without you now. Not now that I know that you exist. I need you, Giselle. I want to give you everything, and I will, if you give me the time,” he pauses and gives me a painfully mischievous look, “do me the honor?”

  I tumble down atop him, wrapping him in my arms as we hit the forest floor and allow the moisture to soak into us. All laughter and smiles are diminished, snuffed out by the light of severity. We embrace each other fractiously.

  “I cannot bear to think of what might occur if my father or mother discover us,” I whisper in his ear. “Do not leave me to suffer this earth without you.”

  “I would never,” his words are hushed and sacred. “Anything in the world could not keep me from you. Least of all your mother or father.”

  I listen to the trilling of flute-like birds overhead, my face buried in the firmness of his chest. How he adeptly draws me into a haze of comfort, it is intoxicating. An antique union of souls.

  “No one must know of our plans, Benjamin,” I tell him, voice muffled in his chest.

  “I must tell my father,” he admits plainly. “I will not deny him the courtesy.”