Chapter 19 #2
For a moment, it seemed that his father might give in to his emotions and allow those decades of stiff-upper-lip composure to relax enough to let himself acknowledge whatever he felt, whether it be remorse or grief.
But then his brow smoothed over like hardening ice, his eyes becoming as cold and blank as bullets.
“Well then, if you want to be the new Master, you know the rules. What it takes to inherit. Lower thy honor and raise thy blood and thou wilt soar over heaven. Give yourself over to the pleasure that come only from being lord of life and death. Rule with fear and nothing else. Kill the girl, and revel in it—for the pleasures of the blood exceed the flesh by far.”
His father was raving mad, consumed fully by his bloodlust and the post-euphoria of the hunt.
Cal thought he might be able to snatch the rifle from his father’s hand and overpower him, but Nadine was faster, angrier.
More desperate. Something spherical and metallic arced in his periphery, close enough to feel the displaced air; it threw off orange sparks where it caught the light, winking like a ball of fire.
Before his father could dodge, it collided with his temple with a wet, heavy thud. Whatever it was, it carried some heft—the impact left a divot in his father’s brow where bone had been crushed—and when it fell, it thudded to the ground, kicking up clods of dirt.
A sparrow. One of the bronze statuettes from the garden pedestals.
His father raised a trembling hand to his skull, palpating the damage. His eye rolled helplessly in that direction, knocked partially loose in the damaged socket. “You—cunt—” he wheezed, shaking the gun as he staggered towards her, drunkenly and half-blind.
Cal shoved her aside again, forgetting about her wound in his haste to get her out of his father’s line of fire.
She collided with the empty pedestal and screamed.
The two both went tumbling to the ground, the plaster column missing her by mere inches.
On her hands and knees, she crawled, grasping at the damp earth.
His father turned towards the sound, trying with both hands to correct his aim.
Cal lunged.
Pain lanced through his knee, bright and hot, as he landed on a stone.
His father, trapped beneath him, hissed as the air left his lungs.
Mud sucked greedily at their writhing bodies, creating a vacuum that made moving feel like swimming through syrup.
He was taller but his father had more bulk and the rather dubious benefit of having nothing to lose.
“Damn you—” There was more pain, hot and fiery, as his father swiped at his face. Blood swept down his cheek in coursing rivulets, hot and steaming. “You’re no son of mine—the blood runs thin in you, too—you’re weak—weak like your mother—”
A shape moved in the dark. Nadine again, clutching another animal statue to her chest.
Cal grappled with his father’s wrist as he attempted to force the gun away from his chest. “You can’t even follow your own fucking rules. Fuck tradition.”
“Tradition.” His father laughed as he regained control, euphoric in his madness, shifting the pistol slowly in his direction.
“Yes. Tradition. Did you know, Caledon Cullraven used to drink the blood of his kills? He thought it would make him live forever. And so he has—he lives in this house—in this statue—in this very garden—undying . . . forever.”
(Wouldn’t that make for an amusing ghost story?)
“His sparrows watered these flowers. Yours will, too. In blood and cinders—”
The gun went off. Cal managed to shove his father’s hand away as the strength of his grip shifted to his fingers. “It still fires!” he crowed, as the bullet ricocheted off the bronze statue in Nadine’s trembling hands with a deafening clang. “How’s that for tradition?—tonight, a deer will roast—”
Cal’s hand closed over the sparrow statue that Nadine had thrown earlier.
He smashed it into his father’s jaw, knocking loose teeth and skin.
He paused, a heartbeat of shock before the pain set in—but Cal did not wait.
Again and again, he brought the statue down, until the bronze was black with blood and pulp, and his father had sunken back into a lake of his own blood.
He dropped the statue with a clang. Blooded, after all. But by necessity, not by choice.
Nadine stood there, wide-eyed and shaking, still clutching the statue.
“Now you see,” he told her, panting. “Now you see what we really are.”
If she were wise, she would beat him over the head with that bronze casting and run off into town, never to return. He didn’t think he would stop her. No matter how prettily she ran—he would not become his father. She would leave him with her life.
Nadine braced herself visibly before stepping forward, reaching around him to touch his spine. Cal stiffened, arching involuntarily as her palm slid down the small of his back.
“I wonder,” he murmured, “if this is how the late citizens of Rome felt, watching the empire fall at last. As if they had watched the demise of a once unstoppable god.”
“Your father wasn’t unstoppable. He was crazy.”
“If that’s the case, then it was a shared madness, Nadine. I still half-believe it myself.”
“In the sparrows?” she asked, taking her hand away. “Or the killing?”
“You heard my father. It was a fairytale. A dark one, perhaps, but a fairytale nonetheless. I had convinced myself that if I somehow found a willing sparrow of my own—one who chose me—the past would rewrite itself. But I suppose that’s the difference between fairytales and delusion, isn’t it? Delusion doesn’t have to follow logic.”
He took in her tangled hair and matted clothes.
“I suppose you’ll try to leave now. That’s the way of a sparrow, after all,” he said bitterly. “To refuse.”
Her eyes slid past him to his father. “What are you going to do with him?”
“Bury him, I suppose.”
“Beneath the hellebore?”
It was such a Cullraven sort of question that his laugh was torn from his throat like a thorny vine. Cal cupped her jaw, smoothing the flyaways back with his thumb. His fingers were still wet with his father’s blood and they left rusty streaks over her cheek with each pass.
“Oh Nadine,” he whispered. “You’ll be good to me, won’t you?”
???????
The scorpion had pulled the little frog down with him into the venomous deep, but somehow she had managed to endure his poison and drag the two of them to safer shores.
When she jolted awake with a harsh cry, he tightened his arms, sorrowful and possessive.
“Cal?” she spoke warily.
“Yes.” He ran his fingers down her arm. “I’m here.”
“I had a bad dream.”
“Did you dream of me?”
“It’s this house.” Raising her voice, she said, urgently, “I hate this house.”
“I know.”
She swallowed. “What happens now?”
“Well, I imagine the good sheriff will be working hard to smooth over the edges left by my father’s and brother’s absences. There probably won’t be any more hunting festivals. At least, not for a while.” Helena Peters, he thought sardonically, will be beside herself with joy.
“What about the money they bring in? Won’t that hurt the town?”
“Some things deserve to die.”
Cal slid out of bed, feeling the brush of air on his bare skin when she reached for him. I should go, he thought, leave this place, forever, but he remained where he was.
Some poisons were too strong to resist.
“What happens to me?” Nadine asked.
“You.” Cal breathed out harshly. “Well, I imagine you’ll leave, Nadine. Now that there’s nothing to hold you back, that would be the wise thing to do.”
“But I can’t go back!” she cried. “Not to how things were before! My aunt—she loves me, but she doesn’t need me. And my sister’s . . . gone. I don’t have anything else. I don’t have anyone else!”
His heart twisted at her impassioned words but he couldn’t bring himself to credit them. “And what do you want from me, sparrow? Would you prefer a cage to your loneliness? Would you like to be like my mother, quaking in fear of the man who haunts her nightmares—and her bed?”
His voice dropped. “When I came into your room that first time, I almost took you then. In your sleep. Defenseless. And I would have enjoyed it, Nadine. Just like I enjoyed hearing you scream when I bit your pretty neck. Tormenting you makes me hard—and so does the fear in your eyes when you run from me. Sometimes, I want you so much, I can’t fucking stand it. ”
He had said too much. The air between them grew heavy, pregnant, suspended between the now and the future point of no return. Cal chuckled humorlessly.
“Is that the kind of man you want?”
“I want someone who wants me,” she said. “Who needs me.”
Jealousy clawed at his insides, hot and animal. “Good. Find him and fuck him, then.”
“I want you,” she said.
I want you.
He leaned over her, intentionally menacing.
Planting his shaking hands on either side of her body, he prowled closer until he was suspended over her body like a predator over its prey, though no predator, he thought, had ever trembled so while meeting its quarry’s eyes.
“And if I drag you into the woods?” he asked. “And if I hurt you? If I hunt you?”
“You saved me,” she insisted. “You care about me, in your strange, twisted way.”
It was true that even when reason dictated that he should not, he had sacrificed everything to be with her in every way that he could.
And none of it had ever felt like enough.
Even knowing what the consequences would be for his attempts at insubordination, he could not let her go, even to save himself.
The fucking scorpion, prisoner to his own nature.
He tensed. She touched him, grazing the tight drum of his belly until her fingers found the towel still knotted around his waist. She tugged it free, letting it fall.
It snagged briefly on the hard length of his manhood and then he was bare.
Cal set his teeth as her careful fingers traveled down his hip, across his inner thigh. His cockhead began weeping.
“’These violent delights have violent ends,’” he gritted out.
“I know that one. ‘Which as they kiss consume,’ right?” Stretched beneath him like a cat, Nadine allowed her lips to brush his nose.
The move, which started out exploratory, innocent, quickly became purposeful as she sought his mouth.
His cock brushed her torso and she broke from him to rub against it.
His breath left him on a hiss. “Goddamn it. I will be the end of you, Nadine.”
“Then we’ll start from the beginning and try again, Daddy.”
What inhibitions he still possessed fled from him all at once, galloping like a herd of wild mustangs through his heated blood. Before she could recover, he pushed her back against the bed so roughly that she bounced—a move he regretted when he heard her make a sound, as if in pain.
More careful now, but still deliberate in his intent, Cal shoved up her dress and slid into her on a single stroke. Her hips rode the recoil and she moaned into his mouth.
“You really are mine, aren’t you, Nadine?
” he said in wonder. “Ever since you came to Ravensgate, you were practically begging to be corrupted. Didn’t I tell you that you could only be mine in ruin?
” He let his hand splay possessively on her thigh, opening her wide to his enthusiastic thrusts.
“What dark magic did you work on me to make me feel like this?”
“Love,” she said.
Love? She . . . loved him—even now? Though he hardly dared believe it, he turned her face towards his. “Kiss me, then. Love me, then. Let me be your cage and I’ll give you an open door.”
His sparrow arched and he reached between them, smearing his seed over her thighs and belly, and growling, “Mine,” as he tasted her thundering pulse.
Then he kissed her, and in that velvet darkness the house itself seemed to sigh and contract, as if all of its ghosts had been expunged from the very walls like a citrus pulped of its juices.
“Yours,” she agreed, as her head fell back in a final sweep of surrender.
And then they slept: the last Master of Ravensgate and his sparrow.