Cathedral (Cradle of Darkness 1)

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.