Aviary
CHAPTER ONE
Saya Claymore
When I was young, my mum told me Mother was always watching. If I were ever to drop my glamour, Mother’s disappointment would stir the very core. The crust of Kepler would split and collapse in on itself.
It was no surprise that I clung to that fear until I grew up and saw the lies for what they were.
Because if Mother disapproved of me removing my glamour, would she not have scorned those who caged me?
Or those who pinned me to the ground and tore my dignity from me, rubbing it into the dirt?
Or did Mother not care because half of me was already dead?
A glamour once hid my fingernails, but now they are pointed. Sharper. Blending into the skin in a way that looks unnerving. My pointed ears move, twitching and alert to nearby sounds.
I sigh sharply, then open my eyes at a nearby whimper. Illuminated red eyes watch me, sending chills up my spine from the nightmares that once gripped me in the Darkovish Feeding Ground.
In those nightmares, I performed ballet in front of hundreds of thirst-driven nightwalkers. Except now I’m not dancing. I am a bird with my wings clipped. Caged in iron, all because I trusted a nightwalker who hid his venom inside honey-dipped words.
“This is my world, and until you accept that I am not your enemy, you will merely be living in it.”
Yeah, that definitely sounds like something a fucking enemy would say.
I raise my hands, and even in the darkness, there’s no hint of my now white-dotted pale skin. Coated in red blood and soil, I stare absentmindedly at the proof of the horror I’ve witnessed.
“Alti pres,” I murmur. A phrase my mum used whenever she did something her Blessed frowned upon.
I quickly learned she was apologising—not from the words themselves, but from the way she looked.
Her hands clasped together in prayer and her focus on the ground, among the sea of toys Cole played with.
Serun said the same words when I was barely conscious, as I woke in that coffin. He knows vegodian.
But how?
He must have known others like me.
Secrets and lies. I’m so fucking tired of them. And to think I fell for it all just as I did the promise that Jax would save my brother.
Muttering under my breath, I lean back and rest my head against the iron bars.
Chains clink, and the stench of decay fills my nostrils from the nightwalkers caged nearby.
After Serun trapped me in this cage, it moved up from the garden I had clawed my way to from my grave, and into some kind of dark storage space.
At least I assume that’s what it is. It’s not lit very well, but there’s the echo of the sound of other cages hanging from chains.
Nothing has happened since.
The nightwalker a few cages down from me grabs the bars and shakes the cage violently, making it sway back and forth. From his cracked lips, he whimpers, “I want to go home, Lucifer!”
Lucifer?
Home…
I grip my dirty, bloody, once-white gown, my fingernails digging into my kneecaps as I think of Cole. He’s out there injured—or worse—with a man who only cared about saving me.
An animalistic growl tears through my lungs, more creature than human. I should have killed Jax. Except, a part of me was too shocked to process that he never really cared. No one cared about Cole like I did, except for Manni.
Tightness constricts my throat, a noose of my own making, at the thought of her. Manni’s blood dripping from the vent, puddling on my mattress, staining it red.
“If we open the door, that creature will slaughter us,” Jax says.
Manni smashes her palm to the glass and screams, “Open the fucking door, Jax!”
I spin around and shove him, but he doesn’t budge. “You promised!” I shove him again. “You fucking promised it wouldn’t be like this! Jax!”
I recoil from the memory.
“And who are you?” A man crouches near the edge of his cage, tilting it towards me as he rests his arms against the bars.
“You aren’t human. At least not all of you.
Pointy ears, red eyes, yet you aren’t like us.
” The man cocks his head to the side, his eyes narrowing into half-slits.
“White hair and icy skin. A foreigner, perhaps? Alien from a different world?”
Avoiding his eyes, I focus on the scar cut across his right brow. Nightwalkers are known for trickery. Every word will be a lie. I should know. Serun, Lord of the fucking Undercity, claimed me as his consort without my consent.
It’s my Blessed all over again.
“A half-breed?” another says, her light voice flitting through the air like wind.
She sits with her legs hanging from the cage, swinging them back and forth, moving her prison like a pendulum.
Her dark hair is knotted atop her head, and there’s a clean scar that cuts along her lip, leaving a white line in her dark purple lipstick.
“Didn’t think we could reproduce, even with a human host. One of the perks of being a newborn is I do not know shit.
So, maybe there are others like you out there? ”
Serun doesn’t believe so. Yet, he could have just said that to make me accept his bite.
Tremors quake my cage, sending acid churning through my stomach. The nightwalker who had been begging Lucifer to free him bursts into a sobbing fit as we start to move. Our cages rotate clockwise, and chains clink as we are lifted towards a new circular light, throbbing red. My cage is last.
I mutter a curse and sit up to see what’s going on.
There’s nothing else to do but wait, trapped.
The cage of the male nightwalker who was trying to question me lifts higher than mine, but his gaze stays locked onto me with scorn.
I am a nightwalker with a heartbeat. I’m sure these true nightwalkers will try sinking their fangs into me when they have the chance.
A ring of warmth hits my cage when it passes through the opening in the wall.
In the growing light, the lock comes into focus.
I crawl closer, tipping my cage as I reach the other side.
Muttering another curse as I right myself, I catch an intricate ripple of light shimmering across the metal above me.
What the fuck? I frantically grab at the lock, hoping there’s a way to open it.
Nothing. Not even a damn keyhole.
Seeped in warmth, my body twitches as the light hits me. My dirt-stained gown, caked with dried blood, is now illuminated, and my long, pointed fingernails catch on my sleeves.
Serun’s bite seems to have shattered everything I’ve tried to hide, exposing me for what I truly am: part nightwalker and part vegodian.
And I’m not familiar with either side of myself.
“Huh, would you look at that? So this is why some call this the reaping?” murmurs the man in the cage above me.
I look down to see hundreds of red eyes filling the stalls of a grand theatre. The nightwalkers watch in silence. Not a murmur. A dead crowd.
As I crawl away, giving up on the lock, I notice a man standing centre stage.
An orange glow radiates from him, outlining his body.
Unlike the other nightwalkers in the crowd who are drowning in bleak greys and blacks, this man stands out.
He’s dressed in a white shimmering suit, the sequined embroidery sparkling with diamonds, twisting with the design of a dragon head on either side of the buttoned jacket.
He is lanky, his blond hair slicked back and glistening with gel that keeps every strand trapped in place. Pale, beautiful—and like Serun, he has an aura of powerful magik coming from him.
And as if I conjured the man who festers in my thoughts, my attention snaps to the gallery.
There, Serun sits between the two nightwalkers who were with him when I crawled out of my grave.
The only difference is the woman standing behind the blond man’s chair.
Her hand is on his shoulder, his resting over hers.
Her short, black hair sits above her shoulders, and her lifeless crimson eyes gaze off into the distance.
Blue glitter dust shimmers over her long dress, and jewels sparkle across her neckline, wrists, and fingers.
And as much as I want to figure out who they are, my focus keeps snapping back to the nightwalker who caged me.
The nightwalker I kissed.
The nightwalker I enjoyed the company of.
He is slouched against the side of his chair, his elbow on the armrest, knuckles on his cheek, and cloaked in shadows.
Cinder-crimson eyes roll in my direction. My heart sputters for a second before the formidable wall of reasons I am in this situation blocks the feeling from going any further.
“I’m surprised our lord came,” the male nightwalker near me says with a dramatic roll of his eyes.
The room brightens, and he becomes more than a silhouette.
Sandy-blond, shoulder-length hair curls down his neck.
The scar across his brow is prominent, and he has a sculpted, angular face.
The nightwalker brushes at the dirt and debris matted into his rumpled clothes.
He must have crawled his way out of a coffin as well.
“Like what you see?” he says, arching his left brow with a smirk.
Quickly looking away, I direct my attention back to the nightwalker on stage.
He clears his throat into a microphone, and the sound vibrates through the silent room.
“Welcome!” His voice overlaps a thousand times in my ear until it stings.
“The annual bidding is now underway. This is your chance to claim a newborn spawn to join your household until they come of age.”
“What’s a newborn?” I murmur.
The man beside me cranes his head to hear my breathy voice. “We are. Humans turned by the blood of another, then killed. You must be very new if you didn’t know that, heartbeat.”
With my frown deepening, I take in the man on the stage once more.
“Hmm…I see you’re not the talkative type,” the man in the cage beside me chuckles darkly.
The man on the stage below raises his hand. “Above you are newborn nightwalkers without a House. Their masters cared little for them, and because a House can only have one newborn, they have sold them to me.”
“Heh…” The blond man leans his arms against the cage, eyes sweeping the room. “Seems my old master didn’t care to come to buy another.”
The woman with curly brown hair leans against her cage, tilting it further.
“I tied my master up outside before the sun rose. Seems the sunlight did its job and rid us of a master unworthy of the title of his House.” Through the corner of her eye, she looks at me and says, “How ’bout you? Where is your master?”
“I don’t have one,” I reply. “I am no slave.”
The man huffs a laugh. “We will see about that, heartbeat.”
“One nightwalker has already been claimed,” the presenter says, and we turn our attention back down to him. “Our dove with clipped wings. Serun, Lord of the Undercity, has made her his consort, and I doubt any of you will dare try to outbid my brother.”
His brother? So that likely means we are in the Sunken City Serun mentioned before he clouded my mind with shadows.
The sea of red eyes snap to the gallery, but it isn’t like they can see anything. Serun remains hidden in shadows as murmured conversations rise with a stir of excitement.
“Finally!”
“It’s about time!”
“Someone bonded to Lord Serun?”
“Love blossoms where shadows once rejected desire!”
High praise. Serun being alone seems to have been a hot topic among nightwalkers.
“Eh…I wonder who this lucky dove is?” my nightwalker neighbour says. My cage trembles, and his focus snaps to me as it starts to descend. I plunge into the darkness, away from the other cages still illuminated in radiant light. “Huh. Look. At. That. Not a midnight snack after all.”
My ears pull back, and I scowl at the man centre stage as he flashes a pearly smile in my direction before stepping to the edge of the stage. He raises his arm and says, “Let the bidding begin!”