Cathedral (Cradle of Darkness 1)

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.