Cathedral Manuscript-WIDE FINAL

by Addison Cain

  The being came to a decision. “If she’ll drink once more, I’ll leave her be. Comfort your wife and tell her to open her jaw.”

  It was there I saw how he’d already tried to tempt her, a wrist offered, the same wrist he’d fed her from the night she’d been left in pieces. And Jade shook her head.

  So I obeyed.

  I went to her side, knelt, pulled her head to my shoulder as I whispered whatever sweet things an old warrior might think of into her hair. I promised her the River Seine. A life of joy free of corruption. Pretty things.

  So many pretty things I had found and hoarded for her to smile at.

  Freedom. Even from me should she wish it.

  And with those words, she parted her lips and drank of death.

  For a third time. For yes, I had watched this woman’s every breath for the last agonizing days.

  Two painful gulps, and her eyes would never be blue again.

  Red as fire, mind deconstructed, she met my gaze, and she saw me for what I was.

  Her slave.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Jade

  I cannot even imagine what my father’s body must have gone through when he’d been changed from man to immortal. Once upon a time, a proud Persian king, then the creation of something powerful beyond measure. Did my father even recognize what gifts were given to him in his early state of ignorance? Did he think all vampires were like the man who’d offered him eternity? Had he any idea what Vladislov was?

  For I was certain, Grandfather was as powerful then as he was now.

  Yet in the two interactions I’d witnessed between the men, I had seen no familial conversation. Vladislov had received no more formal a greeting than other emissaries or visiting ancients. There was no closeness, no endearment.

  No sense of shared history.

  At least none that I understood. Maybe because they were so old. Maybe because my father had no heart. He certainly didn’t love his people, neglecting the throne for months at a time, hidden away and secretive.

  One day you’d turn around, and Satan would be in the room. Smiling, dressed in glittering robes. Beautiful, devious, and ready to rend. Like clockwork twice a year or so.

  Twice a year to mangle my mind, send his hive into a manic uproar, and then leave after ripping apart enough of our numbers to keep the flock in line. I expected little more from my grandfather.

  In fact, I expected less.

  Considering what he’d just unleashed within me.

  I knew what his blood was, and I knew how insignificant this flock was in comparison. Not even an afterthought. But he was drawn to this place, so for that reason alone, he was going to take it. And when he was bored—and he would grow bored—he’d wander on to walk the River Seine, philosophizing about concepts beyond my understanding with God only knew who.

  Because really, in comparison to the years I’d just swallowed with a few mouthfuls of his blood, I was still nothing but a fetus.

  One that felt extremely strange and very, very angry now that I felt power for the first time in my horrible life.

  So angry, in fact, that it ate up the rest of me, my insecurities and failures burned to ash with the flood of vengeful intention. As if I could shine with the blazing heat of the sun and burn all undead who dared stand so close to something so full of wrath.

  From the way Malcom shielded his eyes with a curse, and how the ground shook as he reeled back—how I steamed and rattled, and heard the conservatory’s unbreakable, bullet-proof glass crack and fall all around me, it must be so.

  Vladislov had once asked me what I would do to the Cathedral had I the power to act as I pleased. And that old wish was taking place without any effort on my part. In fact, I wasn’t sure I could stop myself from razing it to the ground.

  I lacked any kind of self-control to contain such unimaginable power.

  “Remember, young one.” Grandfather put his hand to my shoulder, careless of the bright light that had sent Malcom to vanish into the shadows or fry. “No flames. Give half of them a chance to survive, your Marie Antoinette included. Just exorcise the ghosts of this decrepit old place and leave the bones behind.”

  As if what he commanded were so easy. As if I could stop myself when I felt out the weaknesses of stone and exploited them. Overcharged, inexperienced, and burning from the inside out, I found my body moving from place to place. As if I’d willed it. One moment in the boudoir of one of the cruelest males I’d been forced to take within my body.

  All it took was my presence to see his flailing form turned to ash. He’d never even had the chance to scream.

  I was the sun. I was death, eating through my people in a very different way than I was infamous for. All the while, those who haunted the Cathedral screamed, scrambling into the night to find cover as stone cracked and entire sections of this ancient, cursed church collapsed into rubble.

  How many I killed? I cannot say. And not all were intentional, too many just got in the way as I popped in and out of existence. Ending my massacre in the throne room where my father waited, bloodied from I know not what, and burning with his own power—that was far more immense than mine.

  “You ungrateful, useless child!”

  There was just enough to his demeanor to see that my sire was rattled, all the more apparent for he’d missed the most important feature of the room.

  Immaculate, dressed in a black suit somehow untouched by the dust falling from a building that still shook, Vladislov sat my father’s throne. Witnessed by the many factions who’d fled to this very spot in search of rescue. There was the foreign contingent, stolid and unmoved by the carnage. There were my father’s sentinels, others transformed for their beauty or gifts in the arts, the rabble, even the fresh-changed. So many, all who would witness my end.

  Already I felt the hand of death, cold, comforting, offering me rest. So I faced it as the daughter of a royal, with my head held high and my words vicious. “You are an unworthy king and a disgrace as a father. I am ashamed to have known you, Darius. And before I die, I will bring this Cathedral down to crush you into dust!”

  From me. Those words had come from me. And they were sick with all the things he’d done, the mistakes I’d made, the world that was a worse place because we both existed in it.

  “You wouldn’t dare!”

  “Enough.” Vladislov broke through the creak of stone and the roar of my father’s anger. “Enough, child.”

  The valve of unrelenting power the ancient had opened in me closed, stolen away, just as easily as it had been given—simple words from his mouth more powerful than any vendetta I might possess. Just like that, I was the little girl in the blue dress, swinging from her father’s arm, recalling child-like joy and the sensation of completeness before my head had been split in half.

  That was the perfect way to feel when my father tore my heart out. Whole.

  I closed my eyes and braced for it.

  Whatever parts of me that had been left in my grandfather’s pocket were mine again. I didn’t even feel the pain when a red-eyed demon whose features I carried reached forward faster than even the undead could see. The sound of a ribcage cracking, the gagging noise of blood shooting up both windpipe and esophagus, yet it felt like nothing more than a scratch.

  This rebirth would be painless.

  Or so I thought… until a body slumped against me, taller, larger, and had me tripping over my feet to catch him as he fell. An angel's face contorted in pain, my angel, with a gaping hole in his chest and his beating heart in the harsh grip of my father.

  Malcom.

  “No!” Throwing my body over his, my banshee scream shook the crumbling rafters. Our eyes met, my heart refusing to beat if his wasn’t going to exist. And I realized, as his blood bubbled over my fingers, what love felt like.

  How I’d felt it for this man from the moment I’d looked up at him as a babe.

  How it was terrifying, and fresh, and the most
beautiful thing that might ever exist. And that there was no life worth living if he wasn’t in it, bossing me about and challenging me to be better.

  I truly was dying, even if my body was whole. “Malcom… no.”

  In my arms, his glowing eyes were losing their luster. Yet still he tried to smile through the blood, mouthing that he loved me and begging me cast a gate and run.

  That would never happen. I’d die here, with him, seeing him as he was: the glowing light of my life in a world that was nothing but dark. And I swore this to him as I kissed his mouth and tasted heaven.

  “Poorly done, son.” The lightness of the decree from the throne, made my loss seem insignificant.

  So it was to him, I begged for Malcom’s life. “Eternal fealty if you save him.”

  With a smile, the ancient turned me down. “No.”

  Standing, finding my father held the heart of the man meant to me mine, watching him prepare to crush it into jelly and laugh, I struck.

  Vladislov barked with the voice of a God, “I said enough!”

  Shaken to my soul, caught in midair and dropped to the ground by an unseen power. I gasped for breath and found that Vladislov didn’t require eternal fealty from one as puny as me. He only need speak and I was his thrall.

  And from where I struggled for breath, when I fought every muscle in my body that refused to move so I might reach the dying heart of my beloved, it seemed my father suffered the same.

  The devil himself was frozen solid, clearly fighting the enthrallment and unable to break free.

  As my people observed in absolute silence.

  With a heavy sigh, Vladislov stood from the throne. Buttoning his suit jacket, an expression of immense disappointment aging his face by eons, he walked down the dais to where his offspring and his grandchild thought to end one another. “Why make her weak when she could be such an asset to our race? Those, Darius, are the actions of an insubstantial man. There is a difference between wielding power and ruling by fear. I have told you this time and time again. The world has no room for creatures like you in these modern times. My child, you have refused to adapt, created a kingdom so flawed that a mere child tore it asunder in one night. I taught you better than that.”

  My father, vibrating with the power held by a stronger beast, hissed, “You wouldn’t dare steal what’s mine. Not after all I’ve given you!”

  “The illusion that any of this was ever really yours baffles me the most.” Hand to his chest, dignified in a way I’d never witnessed from this changeable man, I fought with every bit of power Vladislov had poured into me to break the compulsion so I might reach that black heart in my father’s blood-drenched grip before it ceased to beat.

  Inch by inch, my hand stretched forward. But God, the pain, what I had to sacrifice to raise my arm and brush my fingers over my only love’s stolen heart. And still I fought the will of an ancient, one who could see me ended with but a thought… prying that heart from my father’s fingers.

  Because it was mine, and always had been.

  Bones broke as I struggled to take a step toward the fallen Malcom. To piece him back together as he had once done for me. Tears streaming down my face, I made it those three agonizing paces, to fall over his body, and find that his eyes were already closed.

  “She’s very impressive,” Grandfather said as he edged nearer to watch.

  The heart I put back, pumping it with my hand as veins and arteries reached for their necessary muscle. Slicing my wrist with little claws, I bled for him straight into that gaping hole in his chest. Red blood that had gone several shades closer to black. And I begged Malcom to come back to me.

  But he didn’t wake up, and that fluttering heart in my hands skipped beats, failing before my eyes.

  My sobbing witnessed by so many, the sound of my own heart breaking louder than the crush of tumbling stone, I somehow found the power to stand. Crumpled, as if held together by overstretched tendon and misaligned bones, I crept back to my father, to my grandfather, and I shoved my hand straight into the chest of my lifelong devil, ripping out what lay inside. Because I was owed—so much more than my father’s heart—but this was all I’d ever be able to claim from him.

  Falling to my knees, I tore out Malcom’s ruined organ and put the black heart of pure evil in its place.

  It pumped steadily, weaving with tissues and fascia, bring life back to the dead. The man I loved began to mend, lashes parting as if he’d woken from a deep slumber. To hear me say the truest words that had ever passed my lips, “I love you.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “Do you hear that, son?” It was gentle, approving, and unnaturally creepy. “She loves him.”

  Shielding Malcom’s rapidly healing body with mine, I watched a dance between a wounded cobra and a slinking mongoose. The cobra capable only of waving his head back and forth, the mongoose circling for the kill.

  Darius, heartless as he was, wasn’t dead.

  As our fallen king stood before his kingdom, his maker rent him limb from limb. Only to gently place those severed bits in multiple satin lined, disturbingly-sized caskets, carried forward by Vladislov’s contingent.

  And I’m sure I was not the only soul in that wreckage of a room who worried that one such as Darius might never be able to know a true death. Still, I witnessed what would pass for his end. Shivering to see the level of preparation Vladislov had aspired to.

  All of this would have taken place no matter my part in it.

  They gathered an arm or a leg, quarters of torso, spilled guts. Each container the proper size to hold the piece of the immortal whose heart would beat on forever in the body of another.

  In a man who was worthy.

  My grandfather's dissection of his son wasn’t messy work, considering. Concise, organized, pre-planned and ultimately... sad. Darius was dismembered, brought down from greatness as if nothing more than a dandelion puff blown apart by a passing breeze.

  And then the boxes holding what had once made up my father were silently carted off by strangers from strange lands with their own unknown agendas. All the while I imagined those bits would be hidden in various parts of the world, burned, buried, maybe left to rot.

  Sold to voodoo queens.

  But our fallen king’s head remained, cupped in the arms of his creator. A head still blinking, a mouth still moving. Alive.

  A long span passed, an hour, maybe more, as my grandfather considered his child. And though his expression failed to alter, I wondered if he felt remorse. But I feared he felt nothing, and that the nothing inside him had somewhat left the ancient surprised.

  Imagine growing to such an age where one questioned feeling anything at all. Such an existence would be worse than even the life I had lived.

  “You don’t need to cry for him, Jade.” My Malcom, already sitting up as if his ruined heart didn’t lie on the floor at his side, stroked my cheek, offering me comfort.

  That shriveled heart dead on the ground called to me, that piece of my angel. So I took it. I held it, finding the flesh had gone white as all the blood had drained out.

  A shriveled white heart that I would not give up for anything.

  Arms came around me, an entirely new sensation. This was a feeling I would grow addicted to. Melting against the greater strength of a man who had given his worthy life for my disgraceful one. Warm tears on a bloodstained face, holding the dead heart of my lover, I found that I did feel enough sorrow for both myself and my grandfather.

  There were so many lost moments to mourn.

  Had I the true strength, I would have killed Darius. He deserved to be broken apart, locked in caskets, scattered and forgotten. He deserved hell.

  But God didn’t work that way. Not for my kind. And watching it happen felt far too real.

  “What now?” I wasn’t even sure who I’d asked.

  Vladislov eyes dragged from the face of his son, finding mine. A moment later he held out his prize. “I
believe it’s been an age since Darius has seen the sunrise. Be a dear, and take your father for one last look.”

  Startling us all, he dropped the head, just like that, to crack and bounce on the floor. Fate leaving it to roll my way. And then as if all were forgotten, Vladislov climbed the dais, unbuttoned his jacket, smiling at the chaos of the room as he sat the throne.

  Whatever speech he gave my people, whatever was worked, designed, and arranged, I missed. With shaking fingers, I collected Darius by hair as dark as mine. With shaking legs, I did as I was bade.

  Malcom did not follow.

  After all, he’d pledged eternal fealty and a simple shake of the head from his new king was enough to trap my angel with the rest of the flock.

  So off I went. Dazed, drained, wounded, and victorious. I went through the wreckage I’d made with little more than a whim.

  At the edge of the fallen debris, I found a crack in an exterior wall wide enough so I might drag my body from darkness into budding life.

  The gardens.

  The same gardens I had played in as a child. The gardens I’d looked through from my glass cage. And came to stand before what had once been my conservatory. Now, nothing more than bent metal and razor-sharp shards of glass

  Taking this all in, holding dear Daddy’s living head by the hair, I had no clue what to do with myself… what to do with him.

  I know what he deserved, I grasped what was intended here, but enacting it was…

  How?

  Perhaps grandfather had felt grief dismantling his child. Perhaps this last step he found he could not do himself. Maybe that’s why he stared so long into the pain-filled, fluttering eyes of his creation.

  Standing in the field of everything I’d broken, I glanced down at what hung from my arm. What couldn't even look up to see the expression on my face. “I think he did love you, however creatures like him know how to love.”