Moonless

by Crystal Collier

  She landed flat.

  Sight returned briefly—black floors. She clutched at her thundering heart. Something warm trickled down her face, warm and wet. The thump of feet echoed closer. She couldn’t move.

  24

  Purgatory

  Vague shapes in the darkness. Hands gently pressing. Alexia couldn’t connect the moments. One instant a person perched on her right, the next someone stood on her left. The same person? A strange musty smell touched her nose and she struggled not to choke on the sweet vapor. Frightening sleep overcame all else.

  ***

  Alexia’s right temple burned. A pang flared in her shoulder. Her ribs throbbed. Her knee. So many other dull aches. She bit down and wished for the oblivion she’d just left behind.

  Her eyes fluttered open. Darkness.

  Where was she? Why hadn’t Father come? Where did Sarah go?

  Padding cushioned her back, yielding and flat. She slid a hand across the coarse material, halting when her chest seized with pain.

  She fought to focus—not to panic. Steadying her breathing, she took shallow gasps, muscles loosening slowly. She recalled a legend, an old house, running with Sarah, a boy on a horse, bringers of death, falling.

  She tried to sit. Light flashed behind her eyes, blinding her to all but the pain. She lay back down, struggling to calm, settling several moments later into tortured stillness.

  Rustling from across the room drew her attention.

  “Are you awake?”

  She tensed. “Bellezza.” The effort to speak shot a spate of torment down her side.

  Fractures of thought flitted through her brain: the girl’s primal malignance, mention of a “banshee child,” a scream that could literally stop her heart.

  No. These things were not possible!

  But neither were red-eyed wraiths, dreaming the future, or a man so magnificent she would do anything simply to gaze upon him.

  “Is that you, Alexia?” Bellezza hawed. “I thought I knew that smell.”

  Smell?

  “Why have they brought you here?” the child asked darkly.

  Alexia blinked into the pitch, using as little air as possible, fighting the tears. “Brought me where? Where are we?”

  “Purgatory.”

  “Purgatory?”

  The girl laughed humorlessly. “Not quite Hell, but it’s close.”

  “Who brought me here? What happened to me?”

  “Don’t ask me, inmate.” Bellezza’s head must have turned. “Ask him.”

  Dim light spilled over them—an opening door somewhere behind her.

  They rested in separate cells, complete with thick iron bars, straw on the floor, cold blue-stone walls, and not a single window. Alexia lay on an elevated cot. Bellezza glared cross-armed from her corner on the opposite wall. She hadn’t aged—honeydew tresses several inches longer than Alexia remembered, large cruel eyes a supple brown shadowed by thin brows, pale cheeks, and vibrant red lips.

  The newcomer halted between their cells: a gruff fellow with heavy white whiskers, scraggly grey hair, and aged skin which contrasted with youthful dark eyes. Alexia had a difficult time looking away once she connected with them.

  Bellezza hissed.

  He kicked her bars, and she fell back. Alexia beat at the horror as he slid a key into her cell door, too incapacitated to fight whatever he might do to her.

  “Please,” she begged, “I am a nobleman’s daughter!”

  He pulled up a stool and sat with a chuckle, focus turning from her eyes to forehead. His finger snaked forward and pressed lightly at the . . . bandage on her brow?

  She sucked a quick breath.

  “Hurts, don’t it?”

  Lester.

  “That’d be a lesson to you. Be only where yer supposed to, and not where you ain’t.” He tugged at her other wounds: a dislodged shoulder, mangled elbow, wrapped ribs and tender knee, wincing all the while at what he saw.

  “What happened to me?” she requested.

  He glanced at Bellezza. “Well, you done near had heart failure.” His head shook. “Wrong place, wrong time.” A smile surfaced, but worry lines strained behind it. What could he possibly have to fret about? She couldn’t move and Bellezza was locked up.

  She swallowed. “You brought me here?”

  His smile broadened.

  “If you want me alive, why have you not taken me into town? Are you a . . .”The old doctor.“A surgeon?”

  He laughed. “You hear that, witch?” he addressed her inmate. “She wants to know if I’m a surgeon.”

  Bellezza gave him a dark glare.

  “We don’t need no surgeon ‘round here.” He turned back to Alexia. “What we got’s a lot better.” And he gave her a partial toothed grin. “Pain.”

  She backed into her cot. “Father will shoot you dead when he finds me!” The proclamation sent stabs of agony throughout her core.

  “Aye, Sparrow, if he finds you.”

  She closed her eyes. He was right. She didn’t know where she was. Sarah would have absolutely no idea where she disappeared to, and Father . . .

  “I could have left you there.” He scratched his chin. “Let you rot in the stairwell, crying for help in an estate what no one lives. I even could have left you to bleed to death, but I didn’t, did I? No, I bandaged you up and brought you here, and this be the thanks I get? You threaten me?”

  She blinked at him. “Thank you?”

  “That’s more like it. I knew you had becomin’ manners.” And he glared Bellezza’s direction.

  “Will you let me go?” Alexia questioned hopefully.

  “Where are you going to go, Sparrow, and how would you get there?”

  She struggled to grasp his meaning.

  “You’ll be lucky to walk—not to mention keep upright with that.” He pointed to her head wound. “And then you’d miss the best part.”

  Her heart swelled with dread.

  “Wouldn’t she now?” he turned to her prison mate. Bellezza hissed and faced away.

  “Well, now.” He clambered up. “Hope you’re hungry. Wouldn’t do to have you meet him with an empty gaw, would it?”

  The cell door clicked into the catch as he shuffled back out of the chamber. He returned with two platters. Her stomach roared. He set Bellezza’s food outside her cage where she couldn’t reach. He brought the second one in and sat next to her.

  “Are you hungry, Sparrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “And would you like this here food?”

  “Yes, please.”

  He fed her buttered bread and greens. The agonizing process ended earlier than she would have liked, her stomach still relatively empty, but she couldn’t complain. Left to her own devices, she’d go hungry.

  “Now that don’t seem so difficult, do it?” he called over his shoulder. “You ready to ask like a lady?”

  Bellezza growled.

  “That’s what I thought. Well, I know how you like eatin’ off the floor.”

  The girl’s ferocious eyes bored into him. Alexia counted her blessings not to be the recipient of so black a glare.

  He took Alexia’s plate and stepped toward the exit.

  “Lester,” Bellezza snarled.

  He turned back. “What’s that?”

  She sneered incredulously. “I can’t reach.”

  “Dear me!” And he laughed as he retreated from the room, sealing them back into pitch. Bellezza let out a moan followed by what sounded like several things launching into her bars.

  “I’m going to kill you when I get out of here!” she hollered. She barked. She growled.

  Alexia shrank further from her prison mate, attempting to alleviate the ache in her shoulder by rolling. Movement sent flashes of misery all through her, and she settled—defeated—back to her original place. Bellezza had spoken true. This was purgatory.

  “Bellezza?”

  “What?” she snapped.

  Worried that the wrong word would result in near heart
-failure again, Alexia chose her words carefully. “How long have you been here?”

  “I have no idea. Months?” she spat.

  She cringed, daring to risk her health. “Why?”

  “You really know nothing, do you?”

  How could she ignore the contemptuous superiority in the child’s tone? “Beg your pardon?”

  “Don’t,” the girl corrected sinisterly. “Society does not sit well with me.”

  Even in the absence of light she felt the child’s odious eyes. They exuded concentrated animosity that made her skin crawl.

  “I think I understand you, Alexia.” The child’s stunning charm had returned. “You are what you are, because you don’t know better. It is really quite . . . quaint.”

  Alexia scowled. It felt odd, being spoken to so condescendingly by such a young creature.

  Bellezza growled. “He must enjoy having a pet so oblivious.”

  “Then educate me. Why did they take you from the baron’s that night?”

  Her cackle made Alexia jump. “He tried to stop me. Tried and failed. No one can stop me.”

  Stop her? Alexia swallowed back her misery. “From doing what?”

  “Serving justice. That son of a pig-sucking billows-rat deserved what he got. I only wish I could have made it hurt more. Maybe if I’d twisted the handle?”

  Alexia recoiled in horror, overrun with torment for the action.

  “Anyway, you have to admit it was stylishly done—unique at least.” The girl’s tone darkened. “They won’t stop talking about it for a long, long time.”

  “You killed him?” Alexia wheezed.

  “I have you to thank for the ladle. It really left a nice impression.”

  “But you said—”

  Bellezza scoffed. “I did not exactly wish to be condemned for murder if you proved more powerful than him.” She sniffed. “Besides, I may not have acted if he hadn’t come. It really was his fault.”

  A burst of dread besieged Alexia once more. Bellezza killed him? All along she assumed . . . but Bellezza did it?

  “How?” she voiced.

  “Don’t tell me.” The malicious grin on the girl’s face leaked through her tone. “Now this is refreshing. He hasn’t told you anything, has he? How old are you, Alexia?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Seventeen? Seventeen!” Bellezza shouted. “He broke the rules.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “When you came of age—you don’t even know what that means!” Her laughter burst forth shrilly, mockingly.

  Alexia blinked into the darkness. “When I turned sixteen?”

  “Oh no, this is far more complex.” Bellezza’s pitch positively buoyed. “You came of age on the moonless night proceeding or following your birthday. Your talents should be in full sway by now.”

  “Talents?” she managed in a very small voice. “What talents?”

  “Don’t ask me.” The high-pitched vibrato softened. “But he knows.”

  “He who?”

  “Him.”

  “Him?”

  “Well yes, him,” Bellezza stated conclusively.

  Alexia glimpsed those world-stopping eyes in her mind, unable to breathe for the way they held her.

  “But don’t even think about it,” Bellezza snarled. “He’s mine.”

  “All right,” Alexia surrendered willingly.

  In the silence that followed, she closed her eyes and must have fallen asleep because she dreamed of home, of the gardens . . .

  The door slammed open. She jumped.

  Ouch.

  “Alright pig-sty, you ready to show some manners?” Lester called.

  Bellezza’s jaw tightened. She sat cross-legged with her arms folded, glaring at him. In the brighter light—day, Alexia noticed the metal collar ringing the girl’s neck and gray cuffs about her wrists.

  “I said, are you ready to show some manners?”

  The girl continued to glare.

  “No? I can come back in a few hours. Course, by then the bugs will have finished off your meal.”

  Bellezza’s shoulders shook.

  “Don’t go gettin’ all riled up on me.” He crossed his arms, smirking at the demon child. “You can’t hurt me. Her, on the other hand?” He looked Alexia’s direction.

  Bellezza glanced at her companion, fury drizzling out of her tensed posture.

  Alexia blinked back. The girl didn’t wish her harm?

  Bellezza addressed their captor. “Can I have my dinner?” Her eyes slid away, followed by barely a whisper, “please.”

  “What?” Lester taunted. “What’s that?”

  Her face darkened. “Can I have my dinner,” through clenched teeth, “please?”

  “I’m sorry, didn’t quite hear that?”

  Her tone grated unevenly and rattled the corners of the room as she bellowed, “You will give me my dinner now!”

  “Lester.”

  He jumped as someone came up from behind.

  That voice . . . “Do not be rude. Feed the poor girl.” A vivacious tenor tugged at Alexia’s heartstrings.

  The gray elder hurried to his duty.

  Soft ginger waves, dreamy radiant luster, shocking blue eyes and a strong figure paced into the prison and between their cells. Alexia drank him in, her heart instantly in her throat. He moved past without acknowledging her presence.

  It was like standing in the sun, but not feeling it on your skin. Disappointment ate through her.

  “Hello, Bellezza. How are you today?”

  Her lashes batted. “I am always well when you are near.”

  He laughed. The sound pulsed like bursts of light, the echo of angelic glory.

  “Have you mastered it yet?” His head tilted.

  The child looked down, shoulders drooping. “It troubles me.”

  “Hm.” His lips came to a close. “You will overcome, I am confident.”

  Bellezza threw herself at the bars. Alexia leapt in alarm. She cursed herself for the reaction, taking several seconds to overcome the agony.

  “I am tired of trying,” Bellezza pled. “Please let me go!”

  He touched the tip of her little nose. “You will go free—” Her face brightened. “—but not today.”

  The girl’s countenance fell.

  “I think you are making progress. In fact,” his unrelenting eyes finally turned on Alexia, “she is proof.” The kindness had gone. His glare hung heavily on her, like dark storm clouds after a glimpse of perfect sunbeams.

  He rounded to her cage, nodding for Lester to loose the bars. His grimace deepened as he neared her side—not so much a grimace as a darkening of the eyes. She wanted to melt into the floor and cease to be.

  “Some ointment, Lester.”

  The key-bearer exited.

  He hesitated only briefly, flashing an agonized scowl as he took a seat. Alexia wished she could escape. He was disappointed the fall hadn’t killed her. Now he’d have to do it himself.

  Their gazes met. She dove wholly into his, consumed by the need to be wrong.

  “Well done, Alexia. You found me.”

  25

  Healing

  His words ushered forth so quietly, Alexia wondered if they’d penetrate Bellezza’s corner. His glare clashed with the pain in his expression. She held still, searching his face for any hint that their reunion brought him the slightest joy.

  His head shook. “This may well be the least intelligent thing you have ever done.”

  She frowned. How could he possibly know that unless he’d been watching her all along?

  Depression swallowed her whole. He had been watching. He could have come to her at any time, and he hadn’t. He didn’t want her here.

  Her face burned with embarrassment. She wanted to dig a hole in the earth and climb in.

  “Foolish,” he muttered, focus turning to the bandage on her temple.

  The corners of her eyes stung, readying to produce tears. She blinked them back and bit into he
r lip. She would not cry.

  Lester returned with a screw-cap jar and handed it to her blue-eyed tormentor. Daubing a bit of the creamy white substance onto his fingers, he removed her bandage and touched the side of her head. Unholy flames burst into her temple and ate through the muscles—agony to match her emotional suffering.

  She jerked away. He grabbed her jaw, holding her in place. Her teeth grated. She had wanted so long to be this close to him, and now that she knew what it meant, she ached to burst through that prison door and be far, far away. Pain. True, blinding pain. Let her heart be laid to rest now. She didn’t have need of it anymore!

  She threw an arm at him, crying out as Hell’s fire coursed into her head.

  He caught her arm and laid it gently beside her. The inferno died, his fingers glazing softly down the side of her face. Tingles fired up from her toes.

  His hand retracted.

  She gasped, eyes opening. She wanted him to touch her again, to feel the pain, the flames, the ache of lightning through her bones!

  He stood.

  Why? Why did his contact do this to her?

  She tenuously lifted her gaze. He stared back, his handsome face granite, his scar a jagged marble blemish.

  “That is enough for today.” His eyes snapped soundly away as he handed the bottle back to Lester. “Redress the wound. Keep her down.”

  And he moved abruptly from the confines.

  26

  Almost

  Kiren stopped just outside the door, landing against the wall and pulling his hands through his hair. He covered his mouth and closed his eyes. A little worse—had her fall been only a little worse . . .

  He bit his knuckle, channeling into his own flesh the need to break something.

  Movement pulled his attention up, to the boy hovering in the shadows. The young man twisted a hat in his grasp, eyes wide.

  Kiren straightened, shoulders back. He swallowed, seeking the calm that had been his constant for so long, the calm she shattered by merely existing. He lifted a hand, patted the boy’s shoulder and escaped to the night.

  Escaped to sort the conflicting needs pulsing through him.

  27

  What You Are