Cruxim (Paranormal Fallen Angel/Vampire Series)

by Karin Cox

  “Ame!” Sabine’s snarl came again.

  Still gripping a writhing Beltran, I turned to find her crouched over a female Vampire, clutching the bitch’s neck in her teeth. Her eyes were fixed on the open space beyond the wall, where three more Vampires had appeared. A further three scurried like rats from the shadows as Sabine clamped down on her victim’s throat and a fountain of blood sprayed over her.

  Even with my hand on his throat, Beltran coughed, “You’re outnumbered, Cruxim.”

  “It has ever been the case.” I could smell his blood, taste it. It was sweet vengeance with a hatred chaser. But as I kicked out to take one of the advancing monsters off the wall, I was distracted by a shout from the street below.

  “NOW!” a voice bellowed, its insistence interrupted by a terrible roar that could only be Sabine.

  Balanced on the wall as I was, I spun and lost my footing, pulling Beltran to the ground with me and taking his punch to my brow as I fell. Blood stung my eye. I scratched at his face with my nails, fighting against his strength to pin him down long enough. It would take just minutes for me to drain the blood, the mirth, the sheer cockiness right out of him out through his jugular.

  Yet all around me the wailing continued. I stopped in my task and raised my head. Through the red haze, I saw Sabine inching backward. The hair on her back was raised in hackles and her high-pitched caterwaul was one of terror. No Vampire could bring on that fear in her, I knew. Then a great net, gleaming silver in the moonlight, descended upon her. One of her forepaws was quickly caught in it, and the more she tore at it, the more entangled she became.

  “Sabine!” After delivering another a punch to Beltran’s head, I climbed off him and swooped to her aid.

  Beltran, ever a coward, climbed groggily to his feet and spun his black cloak around him like a pair of dark wings. A bat, he wheeled off into the night, screeching his mockery. There was nothing I could do but curse and turn to freeing Sabine.

  Tearing at the net with my teeth and hands had no effect. It was of woven silver fiber, a rope of some supple metal, and even with some of my strength recovered, I could not break it. Blinded with blood, I swung violently, seeking the net’s owner, and then heard the swoosh of another net cast about my own shoulders.

  “Excellent work,” a voice boomed from the shadows. “We shall have our friend from the tower too.”

  A man stepped forward and shot a dart from a blowgun into Sabine’s haunches. As she collapsed in a bundle of fur and claws in the dirt, I recognized our assailant.

  Dr. Claus Gandler.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I came to sometime later, to a jogging sensation.

  “Hurry! It’s wearing off.”

  Despite wanting to strike out, I found myself too groggy and weak. Obviously, whatever they had dosed Sabine with had also poisoned me. The faint scent of sweat and carbolic soap filled my nostrils. I had been flung over someone’s shoulder. A sound behind drew my attention to another man—a colossus who jogged along behind us with Sabine’s inert body draped over his shoulders like a fur stole. Her head lolled with every bounce, and even her tail was motionless. I was gripped with a sudden panic that she was dead. Ahead, I saw a waiting coach, the driver cloaked in black. Then everything went dark again, a blackness interrupted only by incessant screams.

  Sometime later, when my eyes opened upon moonlight, I knew I must have slept for an entire day. My body seemed intact and unharmed, although my shirt and coat were gone, leaving my wings exposed. The ground beneath me was cold, and I momentarily feared I had been returned to the cell in my tower. Then I felt the tug of motion beneath me as my weight shifted and realized I was on a wagon, in a sturdy cage on a wagon. To my left was another cage in which Sabine lay stretched out, her tongue lolling from her mouth.

  I rushed to the bars close to her cage and stretched my hand toward her. “Sabine,” I whispered. But I could not reach her.

  Her chest rose and fell, and after some minutes, I saw the twitch of a paw. She groaned and swatted the air again. Then she rolled over and groggily lifted her head.

  “You’re alive!” The screams of the night before must have been nothing more than a bad dream. “Sabine, you should never have tried to help me. There were too many.”

  She yawned and tried to stretch her legs but, still unsteady from the sedative, stumbled and lay down again, giving her paw a lick to still it.

  “They were not the problem.” Her eyes fixed on the bars that contained her.

  I lowered my voice even further, beyond a whisper. “Does he have it? The anchorstone?”

  She growled gently in her throat. “If he did, I would already be dead.” Padding to the bars, she eyed them cautiously, as if looking for weaknesses. Gaily painted wagons, many covered with canvas, surrounded us in a circle.

  “Sabine, I thought of you the whole time: whether you would look for me, what you must have thought.”

  “Right now, I think we need to get out of here.” She began to pace, her anger rippling in the small space like the muscles contained beneath her shimmering coat.

  “It’s no use. I’ve already tried. They’re sound. Reinforced iron and as impenetrable as the bars of my tower.”

  “Your tower?”

  I nodded. “Where I was imprisoned … in Sezanne. Did you think I had simply left?”

  “I have searched for you for so long.” Her voice was low. “I forgot what to think.”

  “How did you find me? I have hoped for so long that you might, that you cared enough to look.”

  “I have never given up looking. But it was not you I was watching last night. It was Gandler. If eternity has taught me anything, it is that it pays to keep a watchful eye on your enemies. As it turns out, he led me to my love.”

  “I am sorry, Sabine. So sorry about our last parting. For four decades, I have longed to make it right.”

  “What is four decades to ones such as us?” She rubbed against the bars, and her words were resonant with purrs. “You shall have eternity to make it up to me, but I am sorry too.” I saw desire and playfulness sparkle in her eyes as she looked over at me. Then her features darkened with concern. “Your wings.” She nodded at the tatty, battered white feathers.

  “They’ll grow strong again with use.” I shrugged, wishing I had some way to hide them.

  “You told me once why you feared him: life in a cage. He came to the tower. Told me he was a collector.”

  “He would say that.”

  “He had Joslyn’s book. A gift I gave her. An illuminated incunabulum of mythological beasts.”

  Sabine raised her eyebrows at that and continued to prowl. “How many of them were myths?”

  “Possibly none.”

  “Then you have your answer. He is a collector, Ame. Claus Gandler runs a freakshow.”

  “You might consider mindin’ your manners,” hissed a high-pitched, Irish-accented voice. The flap of a covered wagon next to me was rolled up a little to reveal a creature hulking in the corner of the cage. “Might be pertinent to mind who you go callin’ a freak.”

  “Hush, Seamus. Take a look at the lad. He ’as some kind of wings sproutin’ from his back.” A hand set about rolling the canvas up a little more, until I could make out that the creature slouched in the corner was a man … or rather two men.

  Two heads, near identical in appearance, rose from one body, and an extra arm dangled uselessly on the left-hand side.

  “Better’n having a second head sproutin’ from his shoulders, I daresay, Sinbad.”

  “Or a lion sproutin’ from her tits.” Twin guffaws followed, and a hand shot out from between the bars to point at Sabine.

  The man who had spoken first, Seamus, seemed most possessed of the torso, which was emaciated and filthy. I was surprised I hadn’t smelled them first, although their wagon was downwind.

  Sabine rolled her eyes and sniffed. Open hostility glittered in her stare.

  “So what’re you? Some kind of archangel?” The secon
d twin, Sinbad his brother had called him, asked.

  “No. A freak,” I answered. “Just like you.”

  “Like us?” Seamus pointed to his brother.

  “Yes. Like the two of you.”

  “Oh, that’s where you’re wrong. You see, we’re not freaks. The only freak here is that fecking doctor, or so he calls himself. Pervert would be more appropriate. The rest of us, why we’re jest unique. Ain’t that right, Seamus?”

  Seamus nodded until the two heads set to bobbing in unison.

  I looked away, back to where Sabine stood, her lips curling in disgust, her tail charged with a potent energy.

  “Freaks or no freaks, why are we here? What does he want with us?”

  Seamus laughed again. “Welcome to the circus. He makes coin off us. Exhibits us. If we’re lucky.”

  “Roll up, roll up! Come see the unuuuusal, the unnnnnique, the peculiarities of nature. It’s iiiiiincredible, un-be-lieve-able,” Sinbad picked up immediately where his twin had left off. “The two-headed man! The woman so fat she eats three suckling pigs a day! The wolfman who tears men apart! The gigantor, able to lift a horse with a single hand. Roll up. Roll up!”

  “Gandler just got two more acts,” agreed his brother. “I wonder what he’ll call you two?”

  “The fallen angel? The whore of the pride?” Sinbad suggested.

  I flew at the cage, my intensity forcing the single torso to shuffle back from the bars. “You might consider minding your manners,” I snarled.

  “Might,” Sinbad said. “Except it looks like Gandler’s got himself some pussy.” The two of them broke into manic laughter.

  “Ignore them. Pair of stupid Irishmen. Two heads and they couldn’t rustle up half a goddamn brain between them,” another voice interrupted from a wagon opposite.

  “Catwoman meet wolfman,” Seamus heckled.

  “Shut your mouth, idiot,” came the man’s response. “We’re in company. You could have given them a pleasant welcome.” A hair-covered hand crept out and began to roll up the canvas from the inside.

  “Welcome, welcome,” Seamus said. “Welcome to hell. Come right in, the water’s warm, and the fecking werewolf’s awake.”

  “How many times do I have to tell you and your other imbecile head that I’m not a werewolf?”

  Thick dark hair covered the man from head to toe, sprouting even from the palms of his hands. His eyes, which peered out from behind a matted mop of hair, were a dark, intelligent brown. “I’m Theron, the wolfman. Pleased to make your acquaintance. What are those things anyway?” He gestured towards my back. “Wings?”

  I shrugged and tried to flatten them a little. I wasn’t used to being seen, not like this, and I knew that my time spent in the tower must have made me a pitiful sight.

  “You some kind of angel or something?”

  I shrugged again.

  “Not much of a talker.”

  I met that with another shrug.

  “What about her?” Theron pointed to Sabine.

  “I am a Sphinx,” she said, her voice haughty.

  “Hah.” Theron sounded skeptical, but there was no denying that Sabine was intriguing.

  “Looks like Gandler finally got himself a real one,” Theron said and pushed the hair out of his eyes. “Or two.” Then he pulled the canvas back down and went quiet.

  Afterward, once the others had retreated behind their covered cages, I mentally reprimanded myself for not being friendlier to him. I wanted to know more about what Gandler might have had in store for us, find the chink in his armor that might enable us to escape. He might have been able to help me in that. I swore under my breath.

  Sabine was silent, continuing her pacing.

  “Do not worry,” I soothed her. “It is as you say: he does not have the stone.”

  “Ame.” Her voice was soft and low, and she turned her eyes full on me for the first time and stopped pacing. “They tortured you, didn’t they?”

  I nodded. “Yes, but there was no torture like missing you.”

  A brief smile danced at the corner of her mouth. “I am afraid, Ame.”

  I reached out through the bars again, longing to touch her face, to draw her to me and comfort her like the old days. “It is okay. I will watch over you. Protect you.”

  “You cannot reach me. No one can reach me. And every day I will be gone. Stone.”

  Sudden terror tore at my heart. “Sabine, what will happen ... if ... if they destroy your body?”

  She laughed, but it was a terrible sound. “Nothing. Every day my body will vanish at sunrise, my spirit will fly to my anchorstone. At sunset, my body will reappear, whole and complete, in the exact spot from whence my spirit flew at sunrise. Oh, I will ache with it all, feel it all, but even if they should cut me into a thousand pieces by nightfall, I will reappear whole, intact, the next day, as if the anchorstone has created me anew.”

  I remembered then, how quickly she had always seemed to heal, and how long the days had seemed without her. “You can’t appear elsewhere?” It was a futile question. I already knew the answer.

  “No. By day, my spirit is bound in the anchorstone, but when it returns, it is to the place where my body vanished. We may choose a new anchorstone if we feel we are in danger, and many times have I done so since Gandler began to persecute me, but we must do that by night and in person. Only the destruction of my chosen anchorstone will kill me. The torture...” She trailed off.

  I bowed my head, knowing her terror, the curse of immortality, and we fell to silence.

  “How did you know?” I asked her eventually, jostling her out of her silent worry. “About the girl—that it wasn’t Joslyn? That she was human? Had I drank from her it might have meant my death.”

  Sabine fixed me with a sad look and her eyes turned darker for a second. Then she looked away. “I didn’t.”

  “Then why did you stop me?”

  It was dark, but I could see the green shine of her irises as she whispered, “Jealousy.”

  Our silence was soon interrupted by a metallic rattle of the bars.

  “Look lively,” came a voice out of the darkness. A light bobbed close to the ground, and a metal pannikin clattered against the bars of the cage next to mine. “Dinnertime.”

  “Sinbad, wake up. The fecking dwarf’s here,” I heard Seamus say.

  The small, stunted figure stopped at the twins’ cage and shoved through a mash of barley and ground meat. Then he approached my wagon and stopped, staring up at me in fascination.

  “An angel, is it? Well, what on earth do you eat?”

  A scar ran across the dwarf’s lower lip, turning it down at the corner and slurring his speech a little. If not for that, he might have been handsome once, even despite his short stature and his scowl.

  “Little people.”

  He gazed at me a minute and then smirked. “Oh, we have a jester, do we? Think it’s amusing to make fun of my condition?” He tore a dagger from the belt that held up his too-big britches and jabbed it through the bars, trying to slice at my legs.

  I stepped back. “I’ll have whatever that gruel is you’re serving up. Unless you happen to have a Vampire on hand.”

  “Vampire!” the dwarf hissed. “I’d have sooner seen the last of their kind.”

  “Then we have something in common, my friend.”

  “Call me that again and I’ll stick you with this while you’re asleep.”

  “Oh aye, he ain’t no man’s friend, this smug little devil,” called out Seamus.

  “Quiet!” The dwarf’s reprimand was booming. “Or I’ll have both ugly heads off your shoulders, you inbred pair. And you.” He gestured toward me with the knife. “I’d suggest you keep a civil tongue in your head or I’ll cut it out. I’d like to see you talk to your little pussycat here without it ... or maybe it’s her tongue I’ll cut out.”

  “Try it.” Sabine strolled to the bars and issued a growl that seemed obscene coming from her feminine lips. “Meat for me, thank you.” She gl
anced in my direction. “He was joking. But a few pounds of fat little midget ought to fill the hole in my belly.”

  “You’ll have another hole there if you’re not careful.”

  Sabine just yawned.

  “Kettle, you’re being tiresome again, it seems.” The wolfman rolled up the canvas and beckoned the dwarf over. “Apologize to our new guests, Kettle, and explain to them how it is that you came to have your head so far up Gandler’s arse that you’re allowed to waddle around acting like you’re ten foot tall and as normal as Tuesday.”

  “The good doctor sat down on him one day, I think,” Seamus chimed in again. “His head’s been up his arse ever since.”

  “That’s enough!” Another voice from the far side of the circle interrupted. “I’ve been awaiting my supper all day and you’re keeping it from me. Come to Trudie, Kettle. Come, little Kettle. Come feed Mama,” the voice wheedled. “I’ll not make fun of your size.” The voice was a rich baritone and the words were followed by a wheeze, the cause of which became apparent when the dwarf threw off the covering of a huge wagon to the right. A mountain of woman lay sprawled on her back, her enormous legs spread by the rivulets of human flesh that puddled at her every joint.

  “I’ll have to come back for you, Trudie. The pigs haven’t finished with the slop buckets yet.”

  Trudie, the fat lady, hauled her wobbling torso up on arms as thick as pillars and glared at him. “One day, Dwarf, I just might sit on you, too.”

  “Silence!” Kettle screamed. “Or I’ll have the lot of you sent to Gandler’s tent to scream along with that girl.”

  Everyone quieted, digesting the dwarf’s threat.

  “What girl?” I dared ask.

  “New girl,” Theron the wolfman answered. “Gandler found her wandering in a village, half dead, terrified, bite marks to her neck. She’s one of them all right.”

  A memory of piercing blue eyes and a neck pale as a swan’s tugged at my mind. “What does she look like?”

  “Haunted,” Sinbad said. “Probably quite beautiful once. Fair, with blue eyes. Just how Gandler likes them. Good thing she’s already dead.”