The Relic Read online

  More laughter.

  But the unhinged sound was mine. I was laughing at them.

  They were afraid of a head on a stick! The irony being that... so was I. I was petrified of a skull with sorry flesh hanging from its twitching muscles. One that could not touch me in any way that mattered.

  One I was extremely tempted to simply… eat.

  He was already inside my mind, why not just digest what was left? I could imagine the crunch of bone in a powerful maw. Even though the sound of those screams had been more beautiful than any the sun might inflict on the most terrible demon of hell.

  Red eyes I remembered held mine as I said it. “I hate you.”

  I don’t think I had ever said that to another being in my life.

  But it was freeing! “I do, Darius. Not once did I love you. I might not remember, but I know I fought your desires.”

  And I had never fought Vladislov, not in that way. Not even on the planks when I’d let him have his show at my expense. No, I just ran, because I could not bear to look at him when he seemed so giddy.

  And I would deal with him later.

  What a thought. I would deal with the king of monsters, and I already knew he would kneel to me, perhaps even cry, but never learn.

  In a very strange, comforting way, I could even accept that.

  But first… Darius.

  Lip curled, I stood just as I had seen my haughty daughter stand, snarling, “You’ll be nothing but a display in a garden, scratching at the minds of those who wander too near in the same way mice scratch at the walls. You’re a pathetic infestation, Darius.”

  “Kiss me, my treasure.”

  Oh, I’d kiss him all right. I’d eat his face right down to the bone!

  Tongue already tracing the sharper edges of my teeth, I took a step closer, caught by a voice at my ear. “Pearl, this is no place for you.”

  What?

  Who on earth would dare come between me and the finest, most pure moment of rage.

  True hatred sang in me as if it had always been there, would always be there, and would give me all the comfort I lacked since my first breath.

  What was love when hate might empower? What was love but a figment of the imagination?

  Hate was far more real. It was palpable.

  I could be whole!

  A figure stepped into my periphery. “Look at me. One look and you’ll understand why hate will never devour love no matter how hard it tries. Compassion triumphs over cruelty. Self-respect feeds while self-indulgence diminishes. Pearl. I’m right here.”

  A man, brown-skinned and beautiful in a way tranquil seas were beautiful. Eyes as hypnotic as waving barley in a soft breeze. Voice… his voice was water to quench an endless thirst. He offered a kind smile, even as he said, “This particular demon knows you in ways you cannot imagine. Look at your hands. Already, you’re pulling Darius free of his prison. He’s luring you into his whims, feeding your hatred.”

  What?

  Oh God….

  My outstretched hands were sticky with rotting ooze, both palms flush to the torn ribbons of throat that needed to be worked free. I had already pulled the snapping head a good three inches higher, fighting the crusting matter that had glued him in place.

  I was touching the vilest of creatures, his crispy skin cracking against my touch, his teeth bared as if once I pulled him to my bosom, he’d feast.

  While I thought I was making a feast of him.

  Desperate, the monstrosity screamed vileness into my mind as I yanked my touch away, and a sickening sound followed the head sinking down the pole until the tip hit the inside of his skull.

  Its face was a frenzy of twitching, brains scrambling, healing, scrambling, healing. Just like me, there was a hole. A pike, taking parts away.

  And in that, I took pleasure.

  Even as I gagged.

  The effort it took to break my gaze from the boiling crimson of a half-rotted head was almost unbearable.

  As if it might make me clean, I scrubbed my hands on the silk of my skirt, the red growing grisly with the bits of unspeakable things. The stain on the outside matching the stain on the inside as that thing screamed for me to return.

  Darius had been so close to freedom, in the arms of a daywalker who could move through space on an accidental whim. Who had fallen into his dream by teasing me with the angelic face of a dirty, suffering boy.

  My boy.

  Just like my girl, Jade.

  “He has my son.”

  “He has nothing,” the man said. “He’s a head on a pike. One tormented knowing his heart beats in the chest of a good man.”

  Ignoring the ring of suddenly silent vampires—beautiful dead things that toed a line they could not cross—I faced the intruder.

  And knew him.

  Which was not comforting.

  Arms folded under my breasts, further concealing my modesty from roving eyes, I saw the face he refused to offer on display at the wedding. And I found little gratitude considering all the years I called out for help and had been ignored.

  “What do you think?” He was ignoring my narrowed eyes and heaving breath. “They fear their fallen king so much they cannot even step forward to snatch up two vulnerable daywalkers.”

  “You are not vulnerable.” And he should not pretend as such.

  Where brown eyes had dragged over the crowd, many vampires scampered back as though burned. They came back to rest on me. And gave me no pain.

  Outstretching a hand, he said, “I’m not afraid of him.”

  “I am.” That was not a hand I would take.

  “I know. That’s how darkness worms in. Evil feeds on fear yet is slain by love.” The answer was easy, even offered with a kind smile.

  “And God is real. And the world should vibrate with forgiveness. And my children were taken from my body. And the only lover I’ve ever accepted used me as a prop to stage a show. And I am alone. And you hide your face.” My lip shook, fresh tears falling as I struggled to say, “And your teachings were false.”

  “So much of what I tried to share was twisted, even by those who claimed to follow me. I said one thing, and they claimed another long after I walked away from the tomb. Believe me when I tell you that the truth is devoured. It has to claw its way out of the belly of the beast. It has to fight what it is being replaced with. And, in doing so, is altered.” He looked pained. Endlessly sad. “I had been warned.”

  I knew. I had dreamed of those forty days and forty nights in the desert. “So what do we do?”

  “I had been warned,” he clarified. “But that didn’t mean I was wrong to disagree. I still do. You have lived miracles. You have seen God work in such amazing ways.”

  Hysteric giggling preceded. “I have lived miracles?”

  My faith was a joke. Jesus was insane.

  Looking side to side as if taking in the artwork of the landscape, the man said, “I have not been in this garden before. I imagine it must be quite beautiful in the sun.”

  Not that it was relevant, but it would be. There were fountains and flowers and little streams about, a façade to hide the ugliness of what lingered all over the grounds. “I didn’t mean to come here.”

  “But here you came all the same. You cried out for home and slipped from one place to another. What does that say about you that home is at the feet of that thing?”

  Ugly truth. I’d had enough ugliness for one night. “It says that I am—”

  “Confused,” Jesus, still holding out a hand to me, interceded. “Young. That’s all you are. Please, I need you to take another step away from the demon.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you are cutting into your wrist and you don’t even feel the pain. All it would take is a few drops of you to worm his way deeper, and he possessed you long enough.” His eyes pointed down to where my hanging fingers suddenly felt warm and icy all at once. “Don’t you think?”

  I was bleeding all over the grass, and not just a few drops. My na
ils had rounded into sharp little moonlight-white talons, and I had dug one in enough that bits of my torn muscle fibers were hanging from the corner of a claw. “Jesus!”

  Tripping over my feet, that red dress, my panic, I put far more than a few steps between the head and my body—feeling a strain, almost to the point of a snap, between my mind and the mind of the monster who still played with me.

  “This isn’t funny!” No scream ever would be loud enough to trumpet that. Arm mending, my blood soaking into the dirt, and I was once again the laughing stock.

  Those soft eyes turned toward the head, a frown turning a compassionate countenance into one of sadness. “But still, he laughs.”

  A grotesque cackle I could suddenly hear clear as a bell in my head. I could feel it on my skin. The papery dryness of a mummy possessing my body, and it tore my mind to shreds.

  Hands to my ears, I screamed, “How can you stand it?”

  “God is with me.” It was then I noticed the threadbare cassock. A pauper’s clothing, similar to what he wore as the old man at the wedding.

  My dress was all the more garish beside it. “God has never been with me.”

  “Has he not? The tree branch that broke so you could be free of the noose? The snowfall after you’d been harmed by the lecher, a dust of pure white covering your tracks so you might find your way home to safety?”

  I’d had enough of men of God, of the complete lunacy around me. “Then why was I hung by a priest? Why was I raped for walking home from work?”

  It was as if I finally asked the right question. The man gave a breath of relief. “So that we could have this moment in a lovely garden, enjoying the view.”

  19

  Pearl

  Interlaced so tightly around in my grip that my fingers began to swell, the rosary grew red with my dripping blood. Cracked beads, a bent cross, the man depicted suffering upon it standing before me with his hand still outstretched.

  A stranger to me, nothing like the vision I had clung to. As if he understood, as if he had witnessed this revelation more times than he could count, he crooked his fingers.

  I filled them.

  I filled that open palm with the lie of religion, abandoning my rosary and my blood-soaked utter stupidity in those waiting fingers.

  Bead by bead, the string I used to say my prayers pooled in his palm. Red, damaged, but still beautiful. He let me look for as long as I could bear. And then, as if reading his mind, he closed his palm and tucked the last vestment of my flagging faith away.

  “How can you stand living with the lie?”

  He didn’t seem to mind that my blood smeared his hand and clothing. Offering an elbow as if to suggest we might take a stroll through nightmares, he said, “I tell everyone the truth. No one listens. So I speak as this man or that man. I speak as I always have. I call for compassion. But my father’s world is so unbalanced. It only reflects what he’s become. There are the good parts. There are the entertaining parts. There are the parts that love his son and his creations. And then there is the famished monster. Who eats, and eats, and kills. Who devours everything in his path all while searching for you.”

  The only thing I had anchoring me to this world, the one thing that had pulled me from the crypt, I knew was too good to be true and too ugly to be anything but beautiful in my eyes. “I’m not his wife or his soul. I can barely keep up with his chaos. I wasn’t his sister or his queen in a past life. I was a waitress desperate to stay in the sun, who was afraid he would realize I needed him, that he did not need me, and that he will never really love me, considering what I am.”

  Gesturing toward the path, he led me away from the head and past the scattering undead, saying, “Who are you to say what you are and what you are not?”

  Excuse me? I was myself talking to a pretend demigod. Acknowledging that should have split me in half, but Darius had already done the rending. “I am me!”

  That. That made Jesus smile. “A girl who dreamed of a window so she might sleep safely in the sun. A kind heart who wanted nothing more than to find a home.”

  “Your father can read my thoughts, you’re doing the same. That does not mean you know me.” Why were all these men so insufferable? Why was he leading me through a throng of hissing vampires who scurried away as if they might be burned by the very sunlight we discussed?

  “I can’t read your thoughts. What I know is because Vladislov has written to me of you. The detail in his letters… he is deeply in love. A phenomenon I never imagined I might witness, though he had told me stories of his lost wife.”

  My heart had been broken so many times. I had trusted adults. I had fought to please employers. I had wandered and begged God to lead me to someone, anyone who might take away what made me wrong. And where had God led me? To an alley where Malcom had ripped my fangs from my skull. But he had not been able to remove my cravings.

  Where had God been in that? Where had God been while Darius had done things I could not recall? Lip shaking in a way I hated, eyes prickling, I dared to ask, “And all my prayers?”

  Where my arm was tucked into his, he patted me gently. “God heard them.”

  No, he had not. And nor had this man. “But I prayed in your name. I prayed to your holy mother.”

  “And that was foolish. Where in the scant, centuries-old catalogued recordings of my teachings did I ever say that prayers should be made to me or to my mother? Would that not be idolatry?”

  I had been raised on scripture. The words had been beaten into my back. “The New Testament—”

  “Is a blend of megalomaniacs seeking worship and false prophets using my teachings to gain notoriety. Have you witnessed the vagaries of Twitter? It’s the same phenomenon yet more pathetic. Weak souls driven to share their every vapid thought. Their sick fragility seeking validation. Cults flourish. So much filth is spread with the intent to do harm and gain a high in the process. No different than the men and women shouting as I bore my cross. You’ve seen it in your own life, felt the hurled stones hit your body. Everyone has their cross to bear. You have a tomb and a hole in your memories.”

  “And a daughter who despised the sight of me. And a son you are trying to distract me from. Men think we don’t know what you’re doing. Women know. So stop wasting my time and tell me what Vlad had written of this boy in his letters.” How much angrier should I be?

  We turned at a cherry tree, following a path made misty from the damp lingering in the air. No undead approached. Instead, they still scattered as if there were a clear circle about us they were unable to traverse.

  “Why aren’t they hurting us?” A valid question, considering I could smell their intent on the breeze. Another valid question was why Vladislov had not come. Making me doubt him all the more. If he loved me, he would have come for me.

  “Because I am not afraid of them,” Jesus said, as if that explained everything.

  The small pebbles lining the path under my feet squished when I dug in my heels. “I didn’t mean to come here. Considering that all my life what I dreamed of most was to be in your presence, I’m finding now that I don’t like you very much.” Whatever he really was. “I want my boy, and I will leave.”

  My escort’s footfalls ceased. “And when I tell you there is no son?”

  “Then I’ll call you a liar.” My mind had been played with enough that I was beginning to see where the fingerprints led. In Darius’ effective seduction, the boy he showed me was real. Alive now. AND HE WAS MINE.

  Vladislov’s son, a figure a huge portion of the world’s population believed was their savior, said, “What you saw is feral, unnamed, and dangerous. It isn’t a son, it’s a burden.”

  Why mince words? “Because Darius made him that way!”

  Jesus agreed, eyes full of pity, “Because Darius made him that way.”

  “You will give me my boy, or by God I will end you. You who I prayed to all my life and who could hear nothing because you are only a man.” And men were fools who lied and tricked t
o get their way. “Your cassock doesn’t change that.”

  “I’m glad you are beginning to recognize what you see. The cassock is only fabric with the intention to denote station. It’s not real. I hung on a cross as long as you hung from a tree. My father, wings and all, rolled back the stone to set me free once he figured I’d learned a lesson. Stories came and grew wildly out of proportion, just as they will about you to Vampirekind, soul of Vladislov. You won’t be able to stop it, though you will decry the tales time and again. You will be powerless over your own retelling. The wife of a God. The mother of a queen. The keeper of an untamed demon child.”

  His complaints or comparisons, I didn’t care. I cared about his roundabout point. “You are not as different from your father as you might imagine. You’re younger, prettier, but just as crazy.”

  His smile—I could see what was in that smile now. The smile of my fallen lord was full of secrets. “Your son will need a name.”

  “Jasper. That will be his name.” Drawing my arm from the elbow of my companion, I faced him head-on. “Tell me what you want for him.”

  He took up the arm I yanked away, leading me toward a better-lighted path bursting with night blooming flowers and the scent of life. “Acknowledge that you are my father’s wife, nothing more.”

  Torn red silk splattered with crusted guck, rotting matter, grass stains, and the acrid stink of fear-induced sweat. One tit hanging free. I was anything but a bride. “You want me to lie.”

  He shook his head, long hair waving in a way that was far too familiar. “I want you to admit what all of us who have seen you already know. My father isn’t here, so grasp this moment in which I keep him away. The acknowledgment can be between us. Torment him for all eternity as he seeks out your favor. He deserves nothing less. But right here, in this garden, you and I will come to an understanding. Take him as your husband, and you’ll save more than just the boy.”

  Fine. I’d trade the only currency I had if that boy would be laid in my arms. Vladislov could have my body and a troth. He would have taken both anyway. “He’s my husband.”