Cruxim (Paranormal Fallen Angel/Vampire Series)

by Karin Cox

  “Why don’t you ask Gandler? He seems to be the authority on how freaks are made.”

  “Go!” Karl shoved me out into the ring, leaving me no choice but to struggle forward, the cross on my back.

  Karl followed. Every few seconds, he jabbed me with the javelin until I stumbled into the center of the arena.

  The cross obscured my wings at first, and the whistles and catcalls of the crowd rang in my ears. Over them, I heard Sabine’s growl of rage, and I swung my head a little under the heavy wood to search her out.

  Donothing, my eyes implored her. Soon this will all be over.

  When we reached the center of the arena, Karl yelled, “Stop!” and stabbed me with the javelin again until I collapsed to my knees. Taking up a wooden mallet and two wooden pegs strategically placed next to Gandler’s podium, he gestured for me to place the cross down.

  The crowd screamed out its awe and terror of Sabine and Theron and its approval of me—the Christ who would suffer to absolve the beasts—but I was under no illusion that Gandler would spare me the worst of his deprivations.

  My eyes flew to Sabine again. Then I placed the cross on the floor. Karl scooped me up, as if I weighed no more than a child, and lay me down on top of the crucifix, one giant hairy hand holding my wrist as he took up the mallet and spikes.

  You are used to this, I reminded myself as I felt the bite of the spike in the tender flesh of my palm. I remembered the cuts that marred my muscled chest, the earlier vivisection that had opened my chest and scarred a crucifix upon it. Torture is nothing to you. Nothing. This will soon be over.

  Even so, it pained me more than I remembered. When the gigantor had driven his nails through both of my hands and hammered my feet to the vertical pole, he grunted and swung the cross upright, sliding it into a pre-prepared hole beneath the arena floor. The full weight of my body, sliding down the rough-hewn sycamore, tugged agonizingly at my impaled limbs, and I screamed out in pain. Through my tears of pain and the rivulets of blood from my forehead, I could make out Sabine. Her face was a mask of anguish as Karl jabbed her away with the tip of his javelin and then turned his attention back to me.

  “Yes,” Gandler’s voice echoed around the ring, “the sins of others were absolved in the suffering of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ.”

  “Blasphemy!” I heard a woman yell. Her voice came strong and clear as a stream over the bleating of the crowd. “What blasphemy is this? The Lord our God will punish you for this atrocity.”

  Although my eyes were rolling in my head from the agony, the dragging, burning sensation of my own weight threatening to pull me into oblivion, I raised my head. The audience seemed unsure whether to applaud and cheer or scream in disgust. Most had their mouths open, their eyes fixed on me in religious fascination.

  And then I saw her. I knew immediately that she was the woman who had spoken out. She was standing several rows back, her slender body half shadowed in the last row of seats that could be seen from the ring, but her face, skin, and hair were so radiant she would have glowed in pitch darkness. She was pale and fragile, but the silvery gleam of her hair coupled with eyes gray as an autumn moon gave her an ethereal appearance. Her lips trembled as she watched. For a moment, I thought I glimpsed the flutter of wings beneath the red cape that covered her shoulders. I shook my head on the cross and closed my eyes a moment. I must be seeing things. When I opened them, she was gone.

  “Nooooooo,” I cried out and struggled. The crowd screamed out its anguish with me.

  “Although tortured and terrified,” Gandler continued. “Christ prevailed on the cross.”

  To make the point, Karl stabbed the javelin in through my ribs, and I writhed with discomfort.

  “Oh yes, he prevailed. He took on the sins of the world. The lusty, the lazy, the envious, the unbelievers, the thieves, the rapists, the murderers, all of the sins that result in freaks like these you have seen tonight, and he absolved them, and when he died on the cross...”

  Karl gave me another sticking with the spear.

  “...after three days, he rose again.” Gandler nodded to Karl who stepped forward and held his hands up to me. Grabbing my wrists, he ignored my yelps of protest to wrench my body free of the wooden spikes that impaled it to the cross. A great rift of pain opened on my palms and blood spattered the canvas floor. My scream was a pure thing, a prayer. And the crowd silenced in terror.

  Agony gripped me. My wings, which I had managed to keep folded in the center of my back, sprang forth as I leaped away from Karl and carried me up, up, up into the dome of the tent.

  “And he ascended to heaven as the Holy Spirit, to forgive the small-minded, the weak, the repugnant sins of humanity,” Gandler boomed.

  The crowd rose from their seats. Cheers and whistles filled the pavilion as I flapped away from Karl, spattering him with droplets of my blood as I flew. I had soon reached the roof, where a net was strung, obviously designed to trap me should I have thoughts of escaping.

  Looking down through the vibrant colors of the crowd, all on their feet clapping and cheering now, I fixed my eyes on the slow tic of Sabine’s tail, the mesmerizing movement dulling my pain. When the pain subsided a little, I hovered there and searched the crowd again, but the woman with the hair as pale as gossamer was gone.

  “Yes, God, Lord Jesus and his host of angels shall protect us all from the filth of these freaks. He shall cast them all down to hell.” Gandler was really working himself up now. “Good people of Provins, give me your coin, so that I may continue God’s work and detain these monsters of Satan until such time as the angels shall truly entreat our Lord Jesus Christ to come again and smite them all from this earth.”

  Kettle suddenly sprang from the curtains. He carried a pitchfork and net, the latter of which he threw over Sabine and Theron. Using the pitchfork, he prodded them both back toward the door. The crowd roared its approval and I flapped down to hover above Sabine, a subtle warning that I would brook no injury to her.

  “Come, Feathers.” Karl strode to a silken rope that dangled from the ceiling and the net above the ring dropped down onto me, tangling in my crown of thorns and my wings. Below me, Karl began gathering the edges to yank me towards him, but there was no need. I was long tired of this fiasco. I did not struggle. A night spent in the cage was preferable to Gandler’s brand of miserable voyeurism.

  CHAPTER TEN

  They returned me to my cage, carefully concealed beneath the canvas cover, as soon as the crowd had filtered out to the stalls to buy rose candy and caramel apples, spun sugar, and toffees. But the cage next to mine remained empty. Well after midnight, I heard the clump of feet and saw Karl’s hulking shape approaching through the mist. A white shape in his arms could only be the girl, Danette, and I shuddered. Despite our passivity in acting out Gandler’s sick entertainments to his satisfaction, it seemed Sabine had still taken Danette’s place on the operating table that night.

  Damn him! We should have defied him, I thought, rubbing at the wounds on my palms. I would not make the same mistake again.

  I had expected Karl to place the girl in Sabine’s empty cage, but to my surprise, he opened my cage door and shoved Danette’s weak body inside.

  “You did well tonight, Feathers.” Karl wiped his brow. “A present for you.”

  I scowled at him.

  “Now, now, don’t be ungrateful. I didn’t even stick you hard,” Karl sneered.

  “Tell me, Karl, why do you do it? You have ten times the old man’s strength, yet you do his bidding.” I lowered my voice. “Once you killed Gandler, you could set her free.”

  “Shhh.” Karl held one meaty finger up to his mouth and slammed the cage door shut, grinding the lock into place. “Don’t talk like that.” He paused then growled. “Don’t be talking like I can trust you, Feathers. Just ’cause you got wings don’t mean you’re any better’n the rest of this lot. You’d sell me out just as quickly, no doubt. Now shut up. Eat your dinner.”

  I gazed around my cell f
or the clay bowl Karl or Kettle usually filled with gruel; then I understood what he meant.

  In the opposite corner of the cage, Danette sat shivering. Her blonde hair was a mess of blood and her skin as pale as a wraith’s. Even for one undead, she looked near transparent.

  I shrank back from her in horror, but all the while, my stomach growled for a taste of that pale flesh and my eyes remained fixed on the snake of blood seeping from her forehead.

  “No,” Danette said weakly. “Do not pull away.” Her lips trembled and I could see the blood beat of her pulse at one corner of them. “Come to me. Come and hold me. Just once more, I would like to be held before I die. To be held, once more, by someone good.”

  Still, I pushed myself away from her, against the bars. This was another form of torture Gandler had prepared: for me to spend the night in this cage with her, longing for and pitying her.

  “I am not the person you seek. Please, do not ask this of me. You are too close.”

  “I already asked it.” She smiled weakly. “Did you think it was Gandler, doing this to torture us both? No, this was my idea. I put it in his head by pretending to be terrified of you.”

  “You should be terrified of me,” I cautioned her and gripped the bars, needing their strength to stop me from burying my face in her elegant neck. My hunger was debilitating. I closed my eyes, pressed my face up to the bars.

  “Maybe once I was,” Danette said. “But what could be more terrifying now than my own self? Look at me, Amedeo.”

  I lifted my eyes to her. She was indeed a pitiful creature. The only color in her face was her garish blood and the lurid swelling of the bruises that ringed her remaining eye. Slashes and pockmarks lined her arms, swelling to small red hillocks where the point of a scalpel blade or syringe had bled her. Her left arm had been amputated at the elbow, a new torture.

  She laughed thinly. “Yes, you see what I have become. You must stop him, Amedeo. Don’t you see what he is attempting to do? Nightly, he draws my blood and injects it into his own arm. So much blood. He tried to force me to bite him, to turn him, but I had not the strength. When I could not, he did this in rage.” She waved the stump of her arm at me and groaned. “Imagine what he could be if he were immortal. The monstrosities he might commit.”

  “I would kill him!”

  “Yes.” Danette nodded. “But not if you are in here. And not if he has Sabine. You would not risk it. You love her.”

  She was right: I would not. And yet rage filled me brimful at the thought of one more of them, and one so evil as Dr. Gandler.

  The night was broken by a scream. High-pitched and ringing, it echoed off the iron bars of the wagon and fled into the night.

  Her huge sapphire eyes read the terror in mine. “Why do you think I wanted to come to you, Amedeo?”

  “To warn me.”

  “Yes, there was that, but more than that. I came to you to die. I wanted you to feed on me. This earth is hell to me now. I can bear it no longer, and you are tired, tired and thin. Karl is strong, as strong as ten men. You could use the strength if you are to escape him. My blood will give you strength. If only I had set you free, so many months ago.”

  “Danette.” My body cried out for even a single drop of Vampire blood.

  “Go on. I see the look in your eye. The bloodlust. I know how you must want me. Nightly have I craved Kettle and Karl, Seamus and Sinbad, Trudie and Theron, and most of all Gandler himself. The thirst, this need for blood, it is unable to be slaked, insatiable. What a thing it is to feel so empty.” Her bloodstained hand tugged at the gown at her throat, exposing her décolletage. I noticed her silver cross still dangled there, its brightness contrasting with the sizzling, blistered char of the skin beneath. She remained too pious to remove it, even though it caused her pain. “In the name of the Lord, I give you leave,” she said, exposing more of her neck and chest.

  “No!” I turned away from her so suddenly that I felt the swoosh of my wings as I spun. “I cannot. Danette, you have suffered so much. Too much. I cannot send you to hell. In Paris, in Montmartre, there is a physician named Monsieur LeRay. For a fee—”

  Tears filled her eyes, and such a great sob burst forth from her that it stopped me. “And pray, tell me, how I will find this place? How will I first escape Gandler, and then, having done so, find the money to pay this physician the fee you speak of to send me to treat with Satan? You are right, Ame, I have suffered much. Too much. End my suffering.” Her hands tugged at the gown again, and her eyes beseeched me. “Please,” she whispered. “Please, hold me.”

  My breath escaped in a sigh of pain and relief and anguish, and my knuckles released themselves from the bars. I did not tell her that her suffering would never end, that Satan had new tortures for her. She had been a good child who had been turned without consent. I still hoped I might be wrong. Turning, I flew to her and swept her into my arms, hugging her frail body to my chest.

  “You are so warm.” She snuggled against me like a kitten. “So very warm.”

  It will be eternally warm soon, my poor little one, I thought, but said nothing. Already I could feel the rhythm of her blood pulsing through her body, the sound of it calling to me to take her neck, that graceful swan neck, to my lips and to drain the life from her, to end the reign of the undead on earth one at a time, starting with this one nearest to me. To do my job.

  “Do you know any scripture?” she asked, and I confessed that I knew only a smatter. After Gandler’s little crucifixion, I did not care to be reminded of the Bible.

  “Very well,” Danette said. “I will recite.”

  “Danette.” I embraced her closely, so close that I could almost taste her. My lips brushed her cheek just beneath her ruined eye, and my eagerness for her death shamed me—until I remembered that she had died weeks before. “There is no return from this.”

  “I will bless the Lord at all times: his praise shall continually be in my mouth.” She started the Psalm, drawing her body even more tightly in, as if she might fold herself into me. “My soul shall make her boast in the Lord: the humble shall hear thereof, and be glad. O magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together.” Her voice trembled only a little.

  I put my lips to her marble-cold neck, pressed them against her jugular.

  “I sought the Lord, and he heard me, and delivered me from all my fears,” Danette’s prayer rang out defiantly as my teeth grazed her neck. She stiffened when the point of them penetrated deep into the vein. I crushed her to me then, jerking her neck back by the silver chain, which came away in my hand, and pushing her down so I could drill my fangs in to their extremity. My movements become savage, innate, my mouth filled with the sweet, metallic warmth of her.

  Danette gasped. “They looked unto him, and were lightened: and their faces were not ashamed.” Her hand gripped me, beseeching me not to stop until I had finished what she had begged me to do. Her voice grew softer, but still she spoke, “This poor man cried, and the Lord heard him, and saved him out of all his troubles.”

  I could have wept for her, or for myself, but then I heard the poem of her, the gushing, rushing rhythm of her life flooding into me. Her heartbeat was like a heavenly choir alive in my blood as I sucked. She began to shudder, and as she reached weakly up to stroke my face, I saw that the sun was rising. It was as scarlet as the blood that coursed over my lips.

  “The angel of the Lord encampeth round about them that fear him, and delivereth them.” With a final quiver, she flung her hand out and pointed. In my peripheral vision, I caught a glimpse of a red cape and hair gleaming like quicksilver. I wrenched my mouth away just as the red sun rose above the horizon. And then, with a final shudder, Danette was nothing but ash. I clutched only her glistening cross, warm in my hand.

  Thank God, I thought, for the sun. Sabine’s screams will have ended for the night. What was left of the girl departed on a fresh breeze. I hunkered in the corner of my cell, on my knees, and sobbed my shame to the new day.

  All
day, my dreams were scattered, clouded with thoughts of Sabine, Danette, and the screams we had heard the night before. What fresh hell had Gandler prepared for her, and where was he keeping her? The night’s rigors had exhausted me, but the day’s dreams drained me almost as much. I jolted awake in the mid-afternoon, drenched and listless, the silver cross fastened around my neck.

  “Heard you played your part well, Feathers,” Sinbad called to me. “Best takings ever last night. But t’is morning, quite the kerfuffle, I hear. Seems that cat of yours escaped. Treacherous she-bitch. I’m surprised Gandler hasn’t come to torture you over it yet.”

  “Heard Feathers was otherwise occupied last night, Sinbad,” Seamus joined in. “What’d you do with that pretty little Vampire in the darkness? You might act like a gentleman in public, Feathers, but from what I heard you weren’t no angel last night.”

  Sinbad laughed uproariously. “Wonder what old man Gandler would think of that atrocity. Or is that how you came about, Feathers? Mammy was an angel, Pappy was a devil? I bet that’s it.”

  “Well, she’s had her last now, hasn’t she. A shame. Sinbad and me would have been happy to spend a night alone with her, wouldn’t we? Afore you got to her, Feathers. They always say that two heads are better’n one, but I’m not sure how we could compete with Angel prick over ’ere. What is it, Feathers, made of solid gold and diamonds?”

  “Bet it tasted like ambrosia and felt like a horde of heavenly cherubims humming in her cunny.” They cackled like a pair of old fishwives.

  I slammed myself into the bars of my cage so hard it nearly concussed me, but my hiss, and the fire in my eyes, was enough to frighten them into silence.

  “Is it true?” I called out in the direction of Theron’s covered wagon. But I was met with nothing but silence.