Grey angel cutting through a starless sky and a girl with weary hair swept up in the inertia of her endless fall.
Index fingers connected.
A chipped black finger nail kissed a pointed gray claw. Creation.
To this day, she didn’t understand why she’d reached out for him—all she could see was a tidal wave of hair and ash skin. She didn’t have a clue who or what he was. Didn’t have an idea why he might care. But as he’d hauled her into the safety of his embrace and unfolded massive arched wings, swooping up into the twilight she couldn’t help but wonder if maybe an angel had been cast out of the heavens just for her. At last.
“Do you remember what you said, witch?” Nova’s voice filtered through her memories.
That night. After they’d landed, somewhere far away from the harsh city lights. Somewhere where there was moonlight and vibrant blue grass, flowers and candy-striped butterflies.
Deep in the wiles of New Gotham’s cursed forest, they’d exchanged very few words but as they’d knelt next to Acheron Creek, desire red lilies were carried away in a procession of oriental funeral lanterns, and she’d taken his hand and said, “I’m glad I didn’t miss this.”
The words were simple. There was certainly nothing graceful or awe-inspiring about them. They shouldn’t have the weight they still did, but they rolled off her tongue like lead and she recoiled from an internal wince.
Memories faded, dust to dust, and she jerked back. Free. “The old woman is probably waiting…”
“No.” He pushed off her ridiculous nurse hat and it clattered to the floor. “The Hag sent Sybille here,” he reminded.
“Why?” Her eyebrows squished and venom tainted the tip of her tongue. “Why did she send me here? What was the pact?”
“You will spend the night here. And the Hag will validate her promise in return. Honestly, I’m surprised by her cooperation,” he answered. His eyebrow furrowed, faint crow’s feet crinkling the corners of his slanted eyes. Pensive. “She does not favor our arrangement, I thought.”
Sybille rubbed the impending migraine throbbing against her temple. “She doesn’t but according to her, you’re better than a tumble with Rumpel.”
“Sybille! Don’t rhyme!” came Socrates’ disembodied voice. “It embarrasses me!”
“Goddamn it, Socrates!” She swatted at nothing, like he’d be stupid enough to harass her and stay within arm’s reach. “I’ll rhyme about Rumpel however the f—”
“Sybille.” Nova flashed fangs cut from raw black diamonds and hauled her against the hard wall of his chest. He gathered her up in his arms, hands fisting in her hair, and fingers cradling the back of her skull. Her breath caught and her eyes widened. Her feet weren’t even touching the floor anymore, the wood planks no longer allowed to kiss the bottom of her feet. He wasn’t willing to share. “Never,” he whispered against her mouth, “again.”
Oh, what the fuck was he smoking now?
Everyone knew Sybille the Spindle Witch was quick, easy, and never painless. Rumpel was for fun. Any and everything she ever took to bed was for fun and as she stared up at Nova she was reminded all over again why that was.
She didn’t want hope.
Why?
Because to gaze back at the creation painting, that timeless and honored masterpiece, and really look at it was to notice that Eve had not been foreshadowed or drawn with as much care. From beneath the chapel’s ceilings, her image, humbled with hands begging, was hard to see. Irrelevant.
She was irrelevant. To hope otherwise was brutal pain. Hope was the very reason her mother had been so easily seduced. A curse and a coma. And the fantasy world they lived in made use of a defenseless sleeping woman in pretty much the same way the real one did.
By raping her every chance they got.
Nay? Didn’t every girl want to grow up to be a princess? Weren’t those the words staining storybooks and fueling bedtime dreams? Wasn’t that the tale that was told and heard by many?
If not, then someone lied…
Chapter Three
Far away, long ago…
Sleeping Beauty was a woman that was so beautiful even flowers wept sweet dew at the sight of her. She’d been born and a great feast was held in celebration. There, she was blessed by three fairies. One invitation had been forgotten by the carrier pigeons and naturally, things had gone to general hell from there. Or so, that was how the true Grimms had penned the tale. Older versions had cast the beauty who slept in the ring of fire as a Visigoth corpse bride. A Valkyrie who’d angered her All-Father, was made mortal, and put into an enchanted sleep. Cursed and claimed by any man who happened upon her.
That was probably closer to the truth, but nothing tasted quite like the ugly truth.
Honestly, the details didn’t really matter.
In every story ever told, she slept.
In New Gotham, the creature known as Sleeping Beauty was locked high in one of Striker Asylum’s towers, and she’d been reduced to a piece of leisure-activity equipment. A lifeless princess fleshlight crooked doctors clad in screaming white trenches used to supplement their income. And she was used. Such was her fame. Such was her beauty. Such was her curse. To be entombed in slumber and defenseless. Forever.
Sometimes, when the orderlies were drunk, they propped her naked legs open and took turns trying to shove one another’s faces against her cunt. She was cleaned after every use and sometimes, a nurse would change her backless gown like a table mantle. Men came and went over and over again, until the room was swarmed with cradles in Punnett squares. Each bastard child different, carrying a piece of its mother and a blemish from their father.
And by the way, a kiss didn’t hold enough weight to break any spell on the face of the fucking known universe. A kiss led to a suck. A suck led to a fuck. And a fuck led to a cradle. Simple mathematics—get some.
Most of Beauty’s bastard children were sold into the goblin market’s slave trade, or scientific research. Some were even sold to human couples looking to try their hand at rearing a monster. Or perhaps they were looking for a trophy. Those who weren’t sold or adopted were killed or imprisoned for “rehabilitation” purposes.
Very few escaped. Sybille did.
It happened when she turned fifteen. That morning, she’d sat up in that thin and blue, plastic wrapped mattress and everything had been different. It had been like slipping on a pair of Aviator shades. Dark lenses. Tunnel vision.
Eventually, a potbellied orderly with three chins and fat meaty hands had approached her lonely corner of the cafeteria table. There was a silver cross hanging between the puckered man-boobs poking at his scrubs. She’d felt the shock of his approach beneath the soles of her crumbled dusty bunny slippers. He might have asked her something, she didn’t remember. One minute she’d been eating her chocolate pudding with a shiny white plastic spoon, the world rolling before her in hills of black, and the next minute she was…laughing.
Crazed, shaking laughter that seemed to break upon impact and scatter to all four corners of the asylum. If one listened closely to Sybille’s laughter, you could almost hear her mother’s tears. For though she was asleep on a grave, the rose was not dead. And cruelty, no matter the circumstances, was always felt. Such was its tangible omnipotence.
The orderly leaned forward and she stabbed him in the eye. Without a second thought. Eyeball gouged and pierced, exploding out of his eye socket in wet, dripping nerve endings. Blood spilled down his cheeks. And she vaguely recalled him screaming but couldn’t hear right then. Behind faded Aviators, she watched with vacant glassy eyes as he grappled onto the hem of her dress and sank to the ground, staining the disgraceful white and blue-speckled assless paper frock with crimson handprints.
There was a fire. She couldn’t remember who started it. Maybe it’d been her. She remembered Drusilla, she remembered running, but Sybil 10234 was pronounced dead in the destruction. Naked and bloodied with soot and ash, the girls were found wandering Grendel Avenue by a raven. They’
d followed it to Enid’s humble leaning doorstep.
The soles of their feet bled, leaving scarlet letter footprints as they were lead inside by the blind old woman. No questions were asked. She’d cleaned them up, fed them, and tucked them into bed with her, safe beneath her stardusted cloak. They’d been nothing but trouble ever since. Or so, the haggard old fey said from time to time.
And Nova? If asked, what would he have to say about Sybille L’aurore-Prince?
In the present, he stood holding her in her darkest hour, fearless beneath the darkest side of the moon. He slid his palms against her cheeks, cradled them in his large clawed hands, lifted her delicate chin, pressed his mouth against hers.
The past—fractured.
It fell away piece by piece until nothing remained but the moon and her monster.
I can’t breathe. She ripped her mouth away, hiding her face in his chest. “I…can’t.”
“Stay, Sybille.” He wound his hand in her hair. “Will you stay if I told you what the Hag promised?” he whispered. “Stay here with me.”
Her bottom lip trembled. “I…”
He didn’t give her opportunity to finish. His mouth swooped down to capture hers and he kissed her senseless. As if it was the end of the world and this was his thousand times good-bye. His sensual mouth plied hers gently. So gently. Butter meeting caramel. So sweet.
I can’t. The puppy was still trapped between them. She tried to pull back, tried to tear her lips from his, but he narrowed his arms tighter and dragged her hips against his—request denied. Nova didn’t give her an inch. He probably hadn’t given her protest a passing thought. He was like that. When he was in this kind of mood, there was no room for disobedience. No room for begging. No room for anything but…him.
Yip!
The puppy’s happy bark shattered the heat, and Sybille broke the kiss with a violent jerk. Her breasts rose and fell. She could barely breathe. No air…
The fire—it stifled.
The gargouille was nearly unaffected, save for the deep lines of annoyance creasing his rigid brow. “Stay, Sybille.”
“No, Nova.” Her bottom lip smarted from abuse and she narrowed her eyes into slits. “I’ve already told you, last time was the last time.”
The grip he had on her biceps was punishing. He curled his other hand tighter into her hair. So tight she could feel the impressions of his knuckles against the back of her skull. “Am I not sufficient?”
That was beside the point. That would always be beside the point.
“Like I said before,” She ripped free and the puppy ducked her snout in the crook of the witch’s elbow, hiding, it seemed, from the angry lust electrifying the air between them. “If I had known it was you,” She took one step back. And then another. “I wouldn’t have come.”
“I know,” was his only answer.
This time he nearly hauled her off her feet. His mouth claimed hers and her eyes flew open. Only to drift shut. She…melted. Putty and clay in his slender, strong hands. She almost moaned, but swallowed the little telling sound instead. They were lost in one another, but Sybille didn’t make love. And she didn’t make promises.
Her thin, treacherous fingers curled around the sharp silver spindle hanging like a threat against her heart. She pulled and the chain popped, clasp gaping free.
The puppy leapt from her arms, landing somewhere close by on soft paws and she lifted her spindle like a knife, poised to rip the gargouille’s jugular open with silver brandished from the pits of Mount Hindarfjall.
His arm shot out, hand circling her wrist like a leather cuff long before the spindle could even whisper against his throat. But that was beside the point. She never expected to land the blow. She never expected to actually defeat a gargoyle with such paltry tactics. That had never been the point. It was just a distraction.
Blood was already oozing from her fingertip, pale lashes sweeping closed.
She was already dreaming…
She was already…
Gone.
* * * *
The spindle pendant was for show. She didn’t need it to spin. Never had. It just made things quick, easy, and dirty. Some more practiced dreamspinners had the same ability. Instant immersion. It took skill and understanding of mediation and different levels of consciousness. She didn’t have time for all that noise. For her, there was no need to count sheep, to urge herself into the dream world slowly and then all at once. With a spindle pendant from Bits and Pieces, she could grant a wish with just one small prick.
Even so, black nothingness always greeted a dreamspinner upon slumber.
No sky. No stars. No constant, grinning whispers.
Just oblivion.
The Fade was like looking into the fractured jaws of eternity and realizing time and time again you will never matter. That one person was a fascinating speck of black in the abyss. One crimson tear didn’t even splash the wrinkled ocean.
It was an image of the world before stars had collided, banged and birthed the universe to a start. Nothing existed without being willed into creation. Thousands of realities existing at once. Baba Yaga had described the dream plane as a web of consciousness shared by every single living and undead thing in the world. Even mice slept, even gods dreamt…
To dream was to visit the heart of creation.
And the heart of creation was destruction.
It was cutting down a tree to saw its lengths into sturdy boards fit for a casket. It was grinding mountains into ash so black sprawling cities could rise from the earth like dogmatic steeples from hell. The strength of a dreamspinner was in their ability to fracture their mind and decorate a black void with their memories, their experiences, their inner angels and demons. It took an immense amount of will power. Creativity. A special set of focuses.
Indeed, there was nothing more dangerous than someone with the power to weld reality together from the pillars of boundless imagination—especially if their idea of fun was a little sick.
Under Sybille’s domain, the Fade was…
If the Fade was creation, than Sybille’s little slice of heaven was the roiling center of a wicked cauldron. It started with a dead sea of acid. The kind that ate through flesh and bone with finger-licking snaps and sizzles. Lime green froth and foam popped, bubbled. Erupting from the middle of the briny ocean was a tower spun from brick and the skulls of her enemies, set into place with oozing, insidious ruin. Inky, spoiled tears trickled from their empty eye-sockets. It was a home all her own. Cold and sharp black briar grew like the plague, crawling and creeping until the edifice was swallowed.
The sky above the thorn tower flashed green and purple with lightening. Each crack like a god strumming low notes on an organ. In Sybille’s world, each cloud painted something different. Ragged, ghostly faces of the criminally heinous and insane. Clown marks with jagged smiles and tears. Stars, cosmos marking the images of wyverns, wyrms, and dragons. A sinister lighthouse standing beneath a bedeviled sky with dead moths sticking to its shattered bulb.
Decorative grotesque spouts were sentinels jutting off the edifice with watchful black eyes, mouths gaping as they rained acid, barring windows from the uninvited. They rained and rained upon the world. It poured over every entry but one—the balcony at the very top. The marble beveled out into the world like an opera seat. To peer between the sheer plum balcony curtains drifting and wafting with the sweet magnolias in the breeze was to peer into madness.
The scent of peach blossoms, white jasmine flowers, and red, red roses floated from the rusted quarry stone. What wasn’t stone was heavy teak wood with Nursery rhyme pictographs carved in the rosette paneling and steepled accents. Porcelain dolls rowed on the bed, lining the shelves and baseboards. Life-like, roving eyes were moist. All of them souls killed and trapped in the Fade. Sybille recognized some of them. Most, she did not. They were smiling. They were all smiling. Blood glistening on their innocent and blushed cheeks, dribbling from their opaque mouths and sweet cherub lips.
And behold…
Seated on low versatile stool in the very center of this darkness was Sybille. She’d fashioned as a crown made of tin-foil and a dress made of black, weary waves of pleated black taffeta. Seated on a low versatile stool with her black sapphire gown pooled around her, she hummed a tune she’d never been able to place and guided rough wool through the ebony spinning wheel’s wicked, sharp spindle.
Twinkle, twinkle, twinkle. Tiny bells rang like snowfall, creeping and sweet.
Yes, because it wasn’t enough that she had to listen to him talk all day every day.
Now, she had to hear the magic coming too.
Black Briar Page 4
