“And how do you suppose that’s going to work?!” she snapped. “You’re not an angel, you idiot!”
“I know,” I answered, opening a vein with my thumbnail as Celeste had done before. “But I felt the changes that took place when she gave me her blood. I’m the closest thing there is to her actual child now, so this should work.”
I let my blood drip onto the sword, unsure of what I should do with it. Spread it? Drip it on several places?
Regardless of my confusion, one thing was in my favour - my blood, as I suspected, had become the same thick, dark substance as hers, lending weight to my theory.
A few moments passed with nothing happening. Then, just as I was losing hope, my blood began to seep into the blade, and the engraved runes seemed to glow with an unpleasant light before fading again.
“I hope it’s meant to do that,” I muttered to myself, before offering the blade back to Lorelei.
“So...you tasted the blood of a fallen angel?” she asked, filled with a morbid curiosity. “How did it taste?”
I had a fleeting, too-vivid memory of that taste, and I almost retched again at the mere thought of it.
“Wrong.” I pressed the sword into her hands, trying to coax my broken mind into generating some kind of plan.
“You have to take the sword,” I told her hurriedly, “it’ll give the game away if she sees me holding it. Find the others, try and keep her occupied. She’ll be too fast for you, just make sure you’ve got a good aim when you throw the sword to me.”
“And where will you be?” she asked, not in doubt but concern - for me, as usual.
“Just trust me, sweetheart,” I told her, and kissed her. After spending so much time with Celeste, to kiss Lorelei again was...purifying.
“You better make it look like you had some ‘fun’ with me then,” Lori told me, and I looked at her in shock.
“What?! No, Lori, I can’t do it. I can’t hurt you on purpose, please-”
She slapped me, although it seemed to hurt her more than me.
“This is your idea, idiot,” she told me with her usual affection. “You have to make it convincing. There’s no room for half-measures here, Eyathehn, so just...just do it, alright? You got over it, I’m sure I will too.”
“It took me more than a week to recover, from some relatively simple wounds,” I told her, and she shrugged.
“Yeah, but I’m more awesome than you. Now stop being a pussy and fucking do it already.”
I should have known better than to argue with Lori. I never could persuade her.
“ Ish’ta vas tuan yl danem sahd tahvein,” I told her, forming the dagger in my hand again.
“Love you too, you idiot,” she replied with another weak smile, before I drove the shadow blade into her side.
CHAPTER 14
Matricide
I had told her to trust me. I had told her I had a plan.
I had lied.
As Lorelei staggered away from me, bleeding from wounds I had inflicted in the name of plausibility, I sat on the dead grass and stared at nothing. I had no idea what I was doing, how I was going to complete the task before me...and worse, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. So much time spent in Celeste’s company, talking with her and learning the nature of her personality, had deepened the bond I’d never wanted.
I loved her. It was that simple.
Not the romantic love that Lorelei and I shared, and not quite the love between parent and child, but some perverse mixture of the two. My mind was now filled with doubts - about my resolve to kill Celeste, and about whether or not I still had anything worthwhile to offer Lorelei when this was over.
I looked down at my hands and arms, noticing for the first time the strange, dark patterns and lines where my mother’s blood had stained my skin. It made me wonder - if I was now so much like her, how could I ever hope to be anything better again? How could I possibly hope to be the man Lorelei wanted, or needed?
It took time, but I eventually reached a conclusion. I stood up, still feeling the heat of the blood that ran through my veins, and ran off into the night.
I needed to find Celeste before she found anyone else.
I had been hoping for Celeste. Or Lorelei, or Kalin, Seraph, any of my soldiers.
Instead I ran into Tyr and Remus.
“Look at what you’ve become, boy,” my father snarled at me, levelling a pistol at me as if it was meant to scare me. “You should’ve let your brother kill you back in Canada, save you from this beast you’ve been turned into.”
“Remus is a pathetic try-hard, Tyr,” I told him matter-of-factly. “If you bothered to look past your blind pride, you’d see that.”
“You dare talk about your own brother like that?” he snapped, unaware how little I cared anymore. “Your own family?!”
A sinister, echoing laugh reverberated around the trees, a sound I knew all too well.
“Family?” Celeste hissed, her anger twisted the word into a curse as she approached the two men from behind. “I bet you don’t even remember what the word means, Tyr Black.”
Tyr spun around and opened fire, his shots hitting nothing but trees and air as my mother ghosted to my side.
Remus, as usual slow to pick up on things, fired at Celeste, even when every shot did nothing but whine off her armour or her hand. The weapon clicked empty, and as he began to reload I made my move.
I used my newest abilities to create a barbed lash, which I swung at Remus while he fumbled with his fresh magazine. So typical, that he wouldn’t even know how to stay calm under pressure. How he survived was beyond me.
My weapon coiled around his gun arm, the barbs biting deep and causing him to cry out as he dropped the weapon. A single, sharp pull was all it took to put him on the floor, and I vanished from my position to reappear with one foot on Remus’ back.
“Remus!” my father cried, but as he tried to help his favoured son Celeste appeared behind him, her hand clamped around my father’s throat.
“Do you want to know what I think?” she hissed into his ear. “I think you have forgotten what family should even be. I think I love Deimos far more than you ever have, or ever could, and I think for your sins you should know the price of your neglect.” She looked up at me, her blazing eyes narrowed in spite.
“Deimos, my sweet child...end your foolish brother.”
I looked down at the squirming, worthless human being beneath my boot, and he twisted his head around as much as possible to try and look at me.
“Deimos! Deimos, please,” he begged, trying to connect with me after too many years of being obsessed with snubbing me. “I’m your brother! Don’t do this, Deimos, please!”
“I told you once before, Remus,” I told him slowly, “you are not my brother any more.”
I slammed my palm against his back, and a dozen tendrils of focussed darkness pierced his body, puncturing major organs and impaling him where he lay. His body convulsed repeatedly under the shock of the assault, until it finally went limp, his blood seeping into the ground.
The only other sound was the strangled cries of my father, struggling against Celeste’s grip to try and fight his way to my former brother’s body.
Celeste turned him around, her hand still locked around his throat, forcing him to look at her.
“This is the price of forgetting your family,” she told him. “Inevitably, the forgotten party will return, and exact a bloody price for being slighted. A shame you won’t live much longer to learn your lesson.”
A blade formed in her hand, and she made to drive it into his gut until I placed my hand on hers.
“No, mother.”
She looked at me, her eyes narrowing in suspicion.
“What do you mean, ‘no’?” she growled, and I smiled coldly at her. Tyr and Remus were nothing to me any more, and just as Celeste had said, I had felt slighted by them for a very long time.
“Think about it, mother. He’s just seen Remus die, his beloved eldest son and his heir t
o the family name. You kill him, he gets a peaceful death. But let him live...” I offered, letting my words linger. “He is not a young man, but he still has a few years left in him. Years which he will spend lamenting the loss of his entire family. Kill him now and he dies at once. Leave him alone, and he dies for years, by degrees.”
A slow, callous smile traced across Celeste’s lips, and I was briefly concerned that such a sinister expression no longer disturbed me.
“Oh, my darling, you are delightfully wicked!”
She looked back at Tyr, as if just realising he was even there, and opened her hand. The moment he dropped he staggered over to the lifeless body of Remus, turning it over and cradling the man who had once spent years running me down.
“Like I said,” I told Celeste, gesturing at the scene. “By degrees.”
She seemed to think for a moment, and began to walk away, motioning for me to follow her. I obeyed instantly, my need for her still warring with my desire to be the person I used to be.
“I wanted to talk to you, my love,” she told me, “because I felt there were things I should tell you.”
I looked at her in confusion, and she reached out to stroke my face as she continued.
“Your time with me has been hard on you, I know this. You have endured much that you were not prepared for. However, I feel you have handled it exceptionally well, darling. I wanted you to know...I am proud of you, Deimos.”
I almost choked at those words. Words I had fought to hear most of my youth, words that had eluded me for as long as I could remember...and the first person to utter them was a fallen angel who had unmade me.
“I meant it when I told you I was your mother in any respect that matters,” she added. “True, I was less convinced of it when I first found you, but over time...my dear child, I’m sorry, but I don’t think I ever told you that I love you.”
I was stunned, quite frankly. Celeste was a thousand kinds of wrong, on so many different levels, and yet she still claimed to love me.
Worse, I genuinely believed that she did.
“I love you too, mother,” I said weakly, it being about all I could manage.
She moved closer to me and kissed me slowly, a deep, lingering kiss that spoke of a restrained hunger for more.
She sighed as she parted from me, and she seemed to be...sad.
“I will miss that, when I leave,” she said, closing her eyes and resting her forehead against mine.
“Then don’t,” I whispered to her, and she pulled back for a moment.
“What?”
“Don’t leave,” I told her, my voice louder but no less trembling. “Just...go somewhere, where the others wont find you. You could visit me, or I could visit you, or...”
My voice trailed off as I realised how childish and pathetic I sounded, and Celeste gave me another weak smile.
“My dear child, I wish that I could,” she said, stroking my cheek again, “but I have my own mission to attend to. My father must be called to account for his crimes. He betrayed my kin, and we deserve answers.”
Almost unconsciously, I wrapped my arms around her waist and pulled her close, allowing myself to kiss her again.
And somehow, an idea sprang into my mind. It was a long shot, but I felt it could work.
If it didn’t, I highly doubted anyone would be left alive to condemn me.
“Mother,” I said, breaking away from the kiss, “I have to ask a favour.”
It took some doing, bringing the hunting party back together at the rise where we started. They were naturally distrustful, and several of the Omega Company soldiers outright hated me now because of what I was.
Not that many of them were left. Several had clearly been killed, and judging by the state of the survivors, it had not been a clean or quick death. Kalin and Seraph also eyed me accusingly, nursing their own wounds. Only Lorelei seemed to look at me with indifference, and that was somehow worse.
“I am so glad you saw reason, children,” Celeste told them. “I have a proposal for you all.”
“As if we would listen to anything from you,” Kalin hissed, favouring his right side and standing awkwardly.
“You will if you want to live,” Celeste announced, and she continued when there were no further interruptions. “Now then. Deimos has made a request of me, and since he has asked me for so little - and because he is so dear to me - I decided to agree to it.
“I am going to spare you, all of you, if you leave now. Drop your weapons, leave Deimos and I in peace, and when I give him this world, you shall not be harmed further. I make this offer only once, so make sure you decide very carefully.”
There was an exchange of looks between the others, but Lorelei kept her eyes fixed on me. I gave her the slightest nod, and she closed her eyes to hide the pain.
You had better know what you’re doing, she told me, before turning to the others.
“Let’s go, people,” she told them, and they whipped around to face her, swearing indignantly.
“Faethy’ed!” she snapped. “We’ve lost this! We can’t even stop Deimos, let alone a fucking angel!” The others fell silent again, and Lorelei turned to Celeste.
“Fine. He’s yours. I hope you are both deliriously happy together.” Her scorn was palpable, and I felt her disgust down the link we shared. As she turned around and led the others away, I prayed there would be some way to rebuild all I’d lost.
“Well,” Celeste began, staring at my retreating allies, “that went better than expected.”
“That it did,” I told her, and she spun around to grip my head, pulling me to her and pressing her lips into mine again. It was a hurried, rough kiss, and I could sense her need in it.
“Take me again, darling,” she growled hungrily. “Let us celebrate before moving on.”
She dismissed my ‘clothes’ with an idle gesture, kissing me again and pulling me against her once more.
I no longer knew if I let it happen because I couldn’t resist or because I reciprocated her hunger. Either way, she took me again.
It would be the last time.
“It won’t be long now, my child,” she told me later, as we looked at the weak dawn slowly creeping over the horizon. “Another town, maybe two, and I shall have to leave.”
I remained silent. I had lost the capacity to feel at all.
And yet, despite that, despite all that was wrong about her...I still craved Celeste. My resolve was all but gone. I had to act, and act soon before I gave up completely.
“I still wish you didn’t have to,” I managed, my voice sounding like it belonged to someone else. She turned away from me momentarily, not seeing the small gesture I made, and she took a few steps away.
“Deimos...don’t make this harder than it must be. I love you dearly, you know that, but I must see my father. He cannot go unpunished.”
“I understand, mother,” I told her weakly, and she turned to me again.
“I’m glad, my child. Now please, let’s speak no more of this. Let’s enjoy our last few days together.”
I walked over to her and kissed her softly, and she smiled against my lips. Her hands came up to my face again, caressing my skin, and my left hand rested on her waist.
I brought up my right, and drove the sword into her heart.
Her blazing wings went rigid in shock, the flames flaring brighter for a moment before stuttering as they fell slack. Even the fire of her eyes began to slow and darken, and she looked down at the blade lodged in her chest. Her dark, viscous blood welled up from the wound, and a sickly red light began to spread through her skin.
She looked back to me, her expression one of pain - emotional, not physical - and her mouth worked as her legs finally gave out, dropping her to her knees in front of me.
I still held onto the sword, my own pain denying me the chance to run and leave it at that.
Her jaw worked soundlessly, as black oily tears coursed down her face. Finally, she managed to form a single word.
&nb
sp; “W...why?” Her voice was feeble, and I had never before heard her sound as weak, as childish and vulnerable as I had in that moment.
“Because our kind deserve to live and evolve, free of manipulation or interference,” I told her, ignoring my own tears. “They grew this way without you, and it’s only you that thinks they need to be something else.”
She reached out for me, and against my better judgement I kneeled in front of her.
“D...Deimos,” she said weakly, clutching my shoulder, “I only...I only wanted...what was best for you.” She was openly crying now, each word coming between sobs.
I couldn’t help but cry myself, for reasons I couldn’t put into words.
“I would...I would have...given you the world,” she wept, and I rested my head against hers.
“But I never wanted it, mother,” I told her quietly.
“It...it is...your...b-birthright,” she managed, her words taking more effort to form. The flames in her eyes were virtually dark now, her wings little more than smoke forming the impression of bones.
My growing grief wouldn’t let me speak, and Celeste smiled as much as she could manage.
“V-very well...better...finish the job...my love.”
And yet, I couldn’t. I’d managed that much, and yet couldn’t bring myself to end her.
She seemed to sense that, as she tightened her grip on my shoulder, placing her right hand on the back of my neck. With the last of her waning strength, she pulled herself up and forwards, driving the blade deeper into her chest as her lips met mine for the last time.
The connection lasted for a handful of seconds, before she breathed her last and slumped to the ground, her body turning a ghastly white before slowly dissipating in a cloud of black mist.
Eventually I was left alone, naked and weeping into the ground.
Of Angel's Blood (Chronicles of The Order Book 2) Page 20
