Cathedral (Cradle of Darkness 1)

His blue-blooded prick was balls deep in a sixty-year-old pussy who liked flowered hats.

Ignoring the beautiful blonde, satisfied that she hadn’t seen the state of my dirtied dress, I shuffled down my hall and locked my bedroom door behind me.

Head throbbing, I’d bunched up my discarded clothing and tossed them out of sight.

Out of mind.

Like the kitten.

Had I been wearing a blue dress that day?

It was so many years ago, and that horror had been the ugliest moment of my life. Small details I couldn’t recall, but I did remember the sound my skull had made splitting against stone when my father had flung me across the room.

I remembered seeing chunks of my brain spilled out on the floor.

Everything had gone orange, and I could taste grape.

Six years old.

A baby when I’d cuddled my pretty white cat to death.

She’d had a pink bow around her neck. She’d been sweet. And I’d been so hungry. The next thing I knew, the ball of fur wasn’t moving.

So I’d carried her from my glass conservatory where I was made to bear the pain of sunlight while I slept, and entered the hall where my daddy kept court. I’d interrupted to show him, so he could fix her.

Standing from his throne, he’d been furious.

It was the first time I’d recognized his anger directed at myself. Young as I was, I hadn’t understood that there were esteemed guests greeting our king. On no level did I grasp his embarrassment when the king’s daughter walked in with the animal she’d accidentally eaten.

Feline blood must have been all over my face, I probably licked my little pouted lips as I’d pulled on my daddy’s hand and asked for help.

“Daddy, I broke my kitty.”

When he’d ignored me, I’d settled for putting my fingers in his, hanging on to look over the reason I wasn’t being addressed.

A man with shining, long brown hair and a high forehead. He looked like an old oil painting. Distinguished, old-world aristocratic, and dead-eyed.

Too young to grasp his station, I’d offered the stranger a smile.

Completely failing to notice that the retinue behind him and the entire room were staring at me, I’d said, “Hi.”

Belly longing for food, I pressed against my father’s leg and clung. I probably had even tried to climb him.

“This is your daywalker?” That man, that golden-eyed stranger, smirked. “She’s precious.”

I’d shimmied my shoulders at the attention and swung harder on Daddy’s arm.

The unsmiling guest measured me with unblinking attention. “Does she favor her mother?”

Large hand settling over my hair, Darius, my beloved father, stroked my head. “Vladislov…”

That one word was the only warning offered. That, and the squeak of pain I’d made when my father gripped my fingers too tight in his fist.

“Come now, old friend.” Vladislov picked at his sleeve, outwardly serene. “The little one means no harm—”

And that’s when I had done it. Staring at waved brunette hair far longer and prettier than mine, still hungry, I’d instinctively sunk my little fangs into my father’s tempting wrist.

Airborne before I might flail at weightlessness, my skull met the wall. Shattering. Large parts of what made me me spilled all over the floor.

I don’t recall if I’d cried before his overflowing court. After all, half my brain was gone. All I remember is orange. A world of orange and the need to move my body away from danger.

No undead dared assist me, though I could hear my human nursemaid screaming.

To this day, I don’t know if she screamed for me, or because that was the last day of her life.

Smearing old stone, over many long minutes, I dragged my broken body out of the throne room with my only functioning limb. Across worn, icy stone, down the galleries to my sunroom where day after day I slept in a glass coffin and burned in the light. I have no clue how I managed to get my body up inside that bed, but that’s where I went to die.

Like a wounded animal working on the last dregs of instinct.

And I should have died. A long way from full-grown, the damage was that severe.

But with my head pillowed on bloodstained ivory satin, liquid life itself slipped over my tongue.

Careful fingers put parts of my skull back together. Unable to scream, I wriggled as he’d popped my eye back into the socket. Clinging to the stranger’s wrist with the scant energy I had left, an orange version of that foreign, brunette man leaned over my bed and stuffed handfuls of pocketed brain matter into my skull.

While I’d fed from him.

Over horrific hours, I’d mended, and I’d cried. And from that night onward I was terrified of my father.

It was never spoken of, not once. The next interlude where my stupid, childish steps had crossed my father’s path it was clear he’d been surprised I still lived.