Bird Song (Grace Series)

by S. L. Naeole

  The way he said creations showed an extreme distaste for the term, as though it were too clinical and removed. He smiled grimly at my thoughts and nodded. He placed his hands behind him as he finished with his story.

  “When Varmila died, the Seraphim didn’t know what it was that she had given birth to. It looked like a normal child. Beautiful and sweet, very affectionate and without flaw, the angels could find no reason not to let her live. She was allowed to live with a family of Electus Patronus in a busy village until she reached an age where the Seraphim felt more able to deal with whatever it was that she would become.

  “While she appeared normal on the outside, inside she was a different being. The time spent inside of her mother’s womb, feeding on the innocence that her mother consumed changed her, altered her physically. Her heart beat slower than it should have; her skin, though beautiful and flawless was thick and tough. She couldn’t eat what her human caretakers ate, but she never starved.

  “And then it happened. The Seraphim and their entourage came to see for themselves what had become of their little charity case. What they found changed everything.

  “When Varmila’s angel turned her, it wasn’t complete. The turn, the actual physical change continued as Varmila changed, as Varmila became a monster. When her daughter was born, the turn transferred onto her child. It was when the Seraphim arrived that the turn had finally become complete. Varmila wasn’t the monster anymore. Her daughter was.”

  Robert walked closer, his voice growing lower as he revealed to me something that I had not expected.

  “She called herself Miki.”

  “Sam’s wing-bringer,” I breathed.

  He nodded. “He became instantly attracted to her, their connection so strong that his change occurred right then and there, like lightning striking the ground. Sam, not knowing what Miki was and believing her to be human, immediately asked for permission to turn her, but the Seraphim denied him. There was something about her that they did not like, something about her that they couldn’t quite figure out.”

  I felt my forehead crease as I thought back to that night less than three months ago when Sam had told me about Miki. “He said that he turned her and that she became a monster that he had to kill.”

  Robert sighed as he saw the memory replay in my head. “He lied to you, Grace. He didn’t kill her.”

  “What happened to her then?” I asked. “If he didn’t kill her then she must be alive, right?”

  He shook his head and began to tell the final chapter to this confusing and dark story. “When the Seraphim left Miki with her caretakers, they left her in a large town of nearly eight hundred people. For that time period, that was a metropolis. When they arrived back just twenty years later, a blink in our time, Miki was the only living person left.

  “The Seraphim couldn’t stand for that, they couldn’t allow such enormous loss of life from one person who had been so closely tied to them. So they tried to kill her. But it was far more difficult than they had imagined because after twenty years, her thick skin had turned rock hard, she was fast and, like us, she could read minds. She knew exactly what was going to happen; she was prepared while the Seraphim were not.

  “It was a battle, an epic battle of good versus evil. It was so large and destructive in scale that history couldn’t keep it.”

  “How exactly could it have been difficult for them to kill her if she was the only one left in the village?” I asked, confused by the dynamics of this rapidly changing story.

  “I said that she was the only living person left, not that she was the only person left.”

  My mouth popped open so loudly, the sound broke through the CD that was on its second rotation in the stereo. “The only living person?”

  “Miki had killed everyone else in the village, but remember that I said that the turn was completed in her. She had become a monster.”

  My head started to hurt with all of the ups and downs of Robert’s story and I laid down, my arm resting over my eyes to block out the light. “And what kind of monster is that?”

  “Cruor Messor.”

  “What?”

  “Cruor Messor; a blood reaper. Her mother’s appetite for blood had transferred onto her while still in utero. Her strength, beauty, speed…even her immortality came from the angel who had tried to turn her mother. But ultimately, what made her the monster was the human side of her that manifested a virus that preyed on the weakness of the human body.

  “She became an incubator for this virus, but because of her thick skin, it couldn’t be transferred through from one person to the other the same way other blood-borne illnesses are, so her immortal body adapted the virus so that it could be transferred via a more readily available and easily distributable substance.”

  I bolted upright at his answer. I thought about every single vampire movie I had ever watched, every book I had read and I knew the answer before he had a chance to say it. “Her saliva.”

  “She wasn’t a vampire, Grace. She was…she was their mother. She’s the mother of all the monsters in this world that need blood to survive; vampires are simply the most well known.”

  “Oh God.”

  Robert nodded grimly. “Miki had created her own little army of immortal creatures who were strong and fast like her, whose bloodlust was just as ravenous. And because of the residual power that existed in her saliva, some of them possessed the same abilities that the Seraphim did, although in a much weaker state.

  “The Seraphim and Miki’s army fought non-stop with no losses on either side for weeks-”

  “Why didn’t the Seraphim just snap their fingers or something? I mean, isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?” I asked.

  “No. You can’t kill the dead the same way you do the living. The Seraphim had never faced this kind of enemy before; they didn’t know what to do. The fighting seemed endless; the divine versus the dead. And then Miki’s undead soldiers became weak with hunger. That was one of the advantages that the angels had on them: we don’t need to eat.”

  He paused to retrieve something from the trunk that sat at the foot of the bed, the one that held all of the important artifacts from his life. He placed a small red object in my hand and allowed me to inspect it as he continued.

  “It took very little time after that to whittle down their numbers until only Miki and a few of the strongest of her children were left. She stood on the corpses of those that had fallen and laughed at everyone, especially Samael. She told him that though he had tried to turn her, she was the one who had turned him instead. She laughed because she knew the Seraphim couldn’t destroy her; she was as divine as they were. She didn’t need to feed, didn’t need to rest. She felt nothing, she loved nothing. She was the epitome of death.

  “The Seraphim began to doubt. The Seraphim never doubt, Grace. They’re a combined intelligence; they are never wrong. But in Miki, they found they were wrong…a lot. She was smarter, she was devious, and she knew the weaknesses of the angelic mind. The Seraphim were losing to a monster of their own creation.

  “Imagine how desperate the must have felt, knowing that they were losing—actually losing! But like all storms, they end. There was an elder named Avi who finally figured out Miki’s greatest weakness. Over the weeks of battle with her children, Miki would only appear at night, disappearing just before dawn, only to reappear again at sunset.

  “Avi knew then that as divine as Miki was, she was still part human, and during that time, many children in that area were born with a condition that made them sensitive to light. As it had her strength and her intelligence, turning had intensified this condition, turning a sensitivity into a deadly allergy. Avi learned that Miki was allergic to the sun, an allergy that passed on to some of her children.

  “On the day Miki died, Avi blocked her escape towards shelter and, as dawn broke through and the morning sun began to shine on her, her body began to change. Her smooth, opaque skin turned angular and translucent. The sun’s rays could be seen s
hining through her, and when her entire body was as clear as glass, she shattered like it.”

  He pointed to the object in my hand and I held it up. It was a dull, red piece of glass that felt unnaturally warm against my palm. “That is one of the various pieces that were passed on to each elder, a reminder of what happens when we fail to obey the rules that are handed down to us.”

  “So how did you come across it?”

  “My mother.”

  I didn’t know much about Ameila, and so I was captivated and secretly thrilled to know that I was learning something new about her.

  “Ameila was a Seraphim?”

  He nodded and removed the shard of glass from my hand. “Still is.”

  “But I thought that when you were born, when she had killed all those people…the Seraphim were going to punish her. How can they punish one of their own?” I asked as I watched him pass the shard across his knuckles with minor movements of his fingers, it moving along as though it were on a conveyor belt.

  “The Seraphim aren’t immune from punishment just because of what they are, Grace. If we cannot hold the guilty accountable simply because of their place of authority then we’re no better than-”

  “Us,” I finished for him.

  He shook his head in disagreement. “No. Humans aren’t infallible, that’s for certain, but they tend to find methods of regulation that often leads to fair and just results. No, what I was going to say that we’re no better than animals.”

  My laughter was a foreign sound after such a dark story. “But animals can’t see you. Why would you compare yourselves to creatures that don’t even know you exist?”

  “Because animals are as close to what we all could be if we weren’t given the ability to understand and empathize. A bird cannot understand what laying an egg on a radiator will do to its embryo; a dog cannot empathize with a cat that lost a fight with another dog; a fish cannot forgive another fish who is trying to eat it. We can. It’s a gift to us, your kind as well as mine.” He grabbed my hand and pressed my fingers to his lips. “We are also given the ability to not just love, but to fall into it, stumble upon it, crash down until it surrounds us.”

  I felt the words he said against my fingers travel up my arm in alternating warm and cold waves, distracting me for a minute. Or two.

  “Distracting you from what?”

  I blinked as I drew a blank. “Um…”

  He laughed and pulled me off the bed and into his arms. “Would you like me to refresh your memory?”

  I laughed, although the sound was half-hearted at best. “I remember now. I wanted to know why, if the Seraphim destroyed the vampires and…the other things, why do we still hear of them? Why are there so many stories about them?”

  “Because Miki had been alive for twenty years, Grace. All she had to do was infect five people, who would then infect five people and so on. She traveled, she utilized her freedom for trips to spread her mayhem and chaos to regions elsewhere. Think about how trusting people would have been of a beautiful young girl wandering all alone from village to village.”

  “So the monsters that died with Miki weren’t the only ones.”

  “No, they weren’t. Angels are capable of doing a great deal when gathered together, but we weren’t about to risk killing off entire towns and villages just to destroy a few of Miki’s offspring. Especially after the evil that had infected the first several generations began to weaken and many of their human sensibilities and traits returned.”

  I scoffed at that idea. “Monsters with human sensibilities? You mean like not getting caught murdering innocent people?”

  Robert held me immobile as he stared down at me. “Grace, those creatures kill because it is necessary for them to survive. You think it is evil because their food source happens to be humans but you must remember that that evil was implanted by one of my kind. Which is more abhorrent, the monster or its creator?”

  Rolling my eyes I quickly got down to my main point. “Okay, so now that you’ve explained to me all about Miki and her monsters—I still cannot believe I’m having this conversation with you—do you think that one of them could have erased Erica’s memories?”

  He nodded slowly, hesitantly. “I would like to think not, since I know all of those in the area, but I’m afraid that if this was being done by a supernatural being, it would be one of them and not one of the others.”

  “Others?” I gasped. “What others?”

  Sighing, Robert began to answer. “Grace, you humans believe that you have incredible imaginations because of the creatures you read about in your books and see in your movies, but everything fictional to you is based on something real, something that exists among you that you simply refuse to see because that would mean having to admit to being wrong, that fiction is indeed fact.”

  “I accepted it. I accepted you. In fact, I listed quite a few of them before I even found out-” I argued but he held his hand against my mouth to quiet my words.

  “And I keep telling you that you’re different. Grace, I just told you that monsters truly do exist, and I’m about to tell you about creatures that you probably have never heard of, and you’ll accept this because you are different. You’re not like the rest of the people that live outside of those white walls and that iron gate.

  “Do you think that Graham would be willing to accept that there are Sceadugengan that roam your front yard? That there are Mazikeen who move his keys around so that he thinks he misplaces them? That there are Werewolves and Shape-shifters who watch movies while he’s working?” he asked even though he already knew the answer.

  When I shook my head, he asked the one question that he hadn’t yet. “And, do you think that he’d be willing to accept what I am?”

  This time I spoke up. “Yes—unequivocally. He knows how much you mean to me. He knows that you saved my life, Robert. He knows that you love me. He would accept you no matter what you were.”

  Robert smiled sadly and brushed away the tiny tear that had mysteriously formed at the corner of my eye. “And what about when he learns that I’m Death. Would Graham still accept me, Grace?”

  I had no answer for him that wouldn’t have been a lie. I didn’t know what Graham would have thought about that.

  “I’m a mythological creature twice over, Grace, and even those who are raised to believe in me have a difficult time accepting it when I appear to them. But that’s not important. What I want you to understand is that my world is one where you exist among those you cannot see because you don’t want to see them. Or, more importantly, you don’t want to know who truly is and isn’t one of you.”

  I opened my mouth to deny this, but how exactly could I do that? He had just described a whole other world that existed right beneath my nose, and I was oblivious to it. All I wanted was normalcy; it was what I kept telling everyone anyway. I was exactly the type of person Robert was describing.

  “I’m sorry,” he apologized, but I shook my head.

  “No, you’re right. You shouldn’t apologize for telling me the truth. You just didn’t know that you were describing me when you did it because you didn’t know how deeply my need to be just like everyone else really ran. So, now that we’ve got that out of the way, can we get back to who might be the one tampering with Erica’s memory?”

  I needed the change of subject. I needed it like a hangover cure because the truth of Robert’s words had started to spread like an ink stain in my head and I didn’t understand why it bothered me so much.

  Robert eyed me nervously, but obliged me. “I’m going to have to follow her in order to find that out, Grace. I cannot see a face or hear a name in her head that stands out other than your own, so I can only rely on real time revelations.”

  The thought of Robert following Erica, watching her as she went about her life in every way felt like I had swallowed a fishbone that had lodged itself in my throat and every time I tried to swallow down my annoyance, it irritated me more. “If there is no other way—I cannot belie
ve that we’re helping out Erica Hamilton!”

  “I could ask Lark to do it, if that would make you feel better.”

  The suggestion burned like a bright beacon of hope for about one tenth of a second before the image of Lark strangling Erica flashed in my head. Robert saw it and laughed, shaking his head. “I guess not.”

  “If this is what it’s going to take to stop her, I can handle you being around her for a day. One day. No more.”

  The air around us grew warmer as my concession pleased him. “You’re very generous with your boyfriends.”

  I laughed at that. “Boyfriends? There’s only ever been one.”

  “And who exactly would that be?”

  “You, of course!” I exclaimed laughing as he nuzzled my neck.

  “I’m afraid that you’re incorrect,” he whispered into my ear.

  Stiffly, I pulled away, just the hint of him not being a part of my life enough to turn my mood instantly black. “What do you mean by that?”

  Immediately he released his arms from around me and placed them on my face, cradling it like you would something precious, priceless. “I told you before, Grace. I’m your future. It gets no more permanent and intimate than that. Boyfriend is a temporary title.”

  I opened my mouth to argue but he lowered his face to mine quickly and pressed his mouth to my top lip. Instinctively, my bottom lip closed around his, and though I knew it shouldn’t have happened, I gently stroked it with the tip of my tongue.

  It had an immediate effect on me; my brain grew foggy and my ears filled with the humming of something I could only guess was my blood; blood that felt hot, heated to burning. It was all I could do not to force him to stay absolutely still so that I could savor him for as long as humanly possible. Instead, he pulled away and began apologizing profusely. “I shouldn’t have done that. I knew better. I knew…”

  “Why are you apologizing for kissing me?” I demanded. “It was a kiss. People do it all of the time. People who don’t even like each other do it, and they do it in ways we never have…and probably never will.”