Twilight of the Wolves Page 27

  He fills his mouth and drinks his wine and paws at my knee beneath the table, taking my hand in his machinefist and feels the coldness of my skin, asks me if I need a shawl which I shake away. The blood boils but he will have none of my heat, only my hate. The touch of his hand on mine fills me with pain and hope and regret. I should’ve died. Should’ve killed myself long ago rather than been his whore. It’s my weakness, my cowardice, my trivial love of life and the hopeless world that kept my heart still beating. But in his brutality there was at times a warmth that I feel now. A gratitude, even the loathing rises all the way to my teeth and it’s all I can do to keep from screaming and ramming the fork through his face and eating his human heart.

  Tomorrow you will be mine, in body and heart. You will reign over this household as my one and true love. I will take you away from your bondage and save you as I saved you all those years ago from the barbarous hands of the slavers. Would that make you happy?

  Yes, master, I bow keeping my eyes low. My face is a mask and I will play the sheep if I can die a wolf.

  He tsked, No, no longer will you call me master. Simply Lord Alex. Or, better yet, Alex, hm? Isn’t that better, the familiar? In that way you will be above the masses with me. You will stand high above your race as an example. Through much suffering have you become worthy of a place beside me where the light of the distant stars will wash away this imperfect and bestial darkness from your body and soul. When we rise again, we will be together, alone, far across the ocean in Roca. Your land is a fertile paradise but ours is a created one. From the dust and the rocks we have forged a world of precise perfections.

  Your world, this land here, it has its own magic. The brilliant hues, the color, the bounty! There is so much to have here and most of it has been untouched! The savages of this land never understood what it was that lies beneath their feet or in their trees. So it is not that we force you to be slaves, but it is the natural order. Just as a dragon stands, or rather, flies at one evolutionary pinnacle, so the Rocan stand above all of this. We are men who have created Man. The new gods. We have seen what the world is and we have taken it, transformed it, and it is what I give to you. I found you, a beaten slave, and now raise you to nobility. Lady. I will even let you keep your old name. Lady Aya, the first of her kind. We are too old in this life, but in the next, we will be gods! We will take the next step! Many are afraid now of becoming more, of being more, but we shall be the new gods forged of fire and steel and silver and gold. All beauty will be in our veins! Here, I have something for you.

  He clapped his hand and Alexi sauntered into the room and laid a tiny box in his father’s outstretched hand. Lord Alexander did not look at his son or acknowledge his presence and Alexi disappeared, laughter bubbling inside of him as he danced out of sight.

  Here, my lady, a present fitting for your new place in the world.

  The box, pushed before me, small and black and tied by a goldleaf ribbon. The heart betrays and I’m warm, butterflies beating against the walls of my chest and a swarm inside my skull. Within is a thin string of gold holding a large crystal with many faces carved into its exterior. My blood beats but it’s black and cold and everything flutters, my hands shaking but not from anger and he smiles and laughs and urges me to put it on and then helps me clasp it round my neck where the stone rests above my breasts and tears press against my eyes, a pressure in my head and my chest and I can’t speak.

  And then he kisses my cheek and his warmth is inside me and he promises we will be together again tonight and then I’m alone, sitting, motionless, and I hate him. Weeping, I hate him. I say it over and over to make it true, to keep it there inside, tying all my memories together. This final humiliation, this filling me with pleasure and gratitude where my body makes its final betrayal.

  He has killed me a thousand times and turned even my body against me. All that I have.

  So many nights I’ve cried to the moon and waited for the howl to answer me. So many nights I longed for you to appear in the nightsky along with the other seven, luminous and dark, a shadow on the expanse of spacetime. Only for me. For my eyes. For my heart. For all these years I held to the promises you told a girl who had the heart of a wolf and I hear your voice inside, not only the doublevoice of your godhood, but your human voice, when you were only cursed. Doubly cursed. Once by a wolf and once by a human child.

  It breaks my heart every day and in a new way to know that you no longer exist beside me, my star, my Moon, my life and my light. My center, my darkness, my breath and my fight.

  I long for your howl again, that distant song that was never wrong and then the lunar petals sing too, a polyphonic symphony to bring it all back to me, and I dance in your moonlight, basking in the reminiscences of your breathing twilight.

  The night collapses upon me and I am numb, moving through the house unsure of my place, no longer a servant but not yet served. Alexi tells me that this is better than he could’ve imagined and I know that I am only a pawn and the enemy has played into Alexi’s hand unwittingly through decrepit fantasy and hubris. He talks about Valencia and the promises of Arcanes, of dragons, and the spirit deepest to the Vulpen: revolution. He speaks as if tonight is already the past, a certainty, already his name being written in the stars along with the old gods.

  I find myself beside Lord Alexander who speaks on and on as he always does, but it’s different now, full of promises that make no sense. Promises after Death and in new life and our hearts beating as one. My thoughts drown him out and I am alone in the bed I’ve bled in for years and years, where my body’s been taken from me, and I feel nothing. I smell the sweat of all the others but no longer feel jealous as I sometimes did, betrayal after betrayal, for years and years, the body turning to its enslavement and finding comfort there, in the black abyss of his heartless chest. The foul decayed stench that he farts and burps away, that seeps through his pores and covers his skin in grime and oil, his coarse body hair that rubs me raw. But then his words twist and spin and he’s no longer trying to teach me but justify himself and his voice gets soft and quavers, I do it for him. I don’t want to hurt him. I never wanted to hurt any of them. They may be bastards but they’re mine. I know they won’t have me here for them. I began too late. I was too old when I started fathering children and Alexi hates me though he’s afraid to admit it. My dear—he takes my hand in his cold but human hand—you must think I’m a monster at times. They must be strong. I do this for them. To make them strong. All I can give them is all that I leave behind but I cannot protect them from the world. You’ve seen them. You know them. They will never be Rocan and they will never be natives. They’re caught between worlds and I shelter them from that. It’s my power that keeps them safe but I will not last, his kiss is dry and short on the back of my hand.

  But there he was, sitting with the Alexandras laughing and clapping with their first steps into the world. Rocking them to sleep. Tying Alexi’s shoes, cleaning the wounds he got from the other boys. The bleeding noses, the scraped knees, the raw fists. Dacia lying there with her feet up and Lord Alexander rubbing her legs, laughing with her. Not instructing but laughing, treating her as a woman and not a thing. And then all the touches he gave to me. His softness and his delicate hands, like a child’s, unused to work. Even with Alyc, the look on his face when he was born and the fear he felt when Krysta died because she couldn’t stop bleeding from birthing poor baby Alyc. He read to him and held him every day for half a year staring out into the night and the suns, his face crumbling not only from age but at the loss of that beautiful girl, too young for child bearing. The canyons of his face grew deeper and his voice thicker and his habits meaner. It was then that age came to him, mortality’s limits appeared clear before him and he spoke to us like children in need of instruction.

  The Twilight Days he sat with the children, his bastards and even our children, born into slavery. He sat with them cutting out masks for the festival and painting their faces. Gods and demons and he put flowers in
their hair and sang the songs he brought with him across the ocean. Patting heads and clapping, dancing, chasing happiness, pulling it from the air around and handing it to the children. They weren’t his but he was kind to them. He was kind to us when he wanted to be. In the daylight he was our friend and master. In the night he was our monster.

  My dear Aya, light of my life, I have wasted so much time. I do not lie when I say that I loved you upon first sight. You changed everything inside of me and I needed to have you, to possess you as you possess me. And so I took you. I needed you and still do. To leave you there with those soldiers was to leave myself, my heart and body. Before that moment there was nothing and no one. I came to this world and left mine behind. I had a family before. Rocan. I married too young and left her too soon. I can’t see her face or smell her breath. I never missed her the way I always miss you. Even when I watch you, the way you cooked or cleaned, the way you averted your eyes from me, I missed you. It broke my heart to not speak to you, to not ravage you again and again. You are all that I have ever wanted. All that I need. And now you are mine. Now more than ever. I can’t live without you and I won’t. You will always be by my side. Always. I found you and I saved you so you could save me.

  His face is creased and carved with deep lines of hope. The gleam of candlelight on the metal surrounding his iceblue eye makes him grotesque, even as he pours himself into the night. Away from the didactic tones and ponderous philosophies, he speaks as if he is a man and I am a woman, though he demands I be his.

  I’m too old for him to touch anymore. Too fat and too coarse. He has used me fully and I am left only with his delusions, the significance he’s pushed onto me.

  Jealous and full of rage, my body playing with me, begging for his touch even as the revulsion grows, filling me with bile and hate. I watch him in the mirror above us as he watches me and there is nothing. This constant betrayal, this love and hate, this begging, this kicking and screaming in my lungs, in my brain, in my heart.

  His breath evens and sleep takes him but I wait, staring at my grotesque reflection above in the candlelight. I came here a child and leave here an old shrivelled being, bent by age and rage and humiliation and shame.

  Rolling from my captor, I creep to the kitchen where they wait with bated breath until they see my face. Question after whispered question, they part for me and I take the knife and return, feeling a thousand days away, watching myself through the prism of my nightly dream, swimming in the ocean of his blood.

  His snorting contorted face, proud even in sleep, unbent by age, confident in his immortality. My hands shake and the tears claw out my eyes as he stirs, his eyelids flutter but he does not wake and my heart is stone. It is a stone dropped into still water.

  But he’s there with his children, with our children. At the festivals where he allows us to have our rituals and dances and songs and games. He touches me softly with the back of his hand, grazing it against my cheek, whispering of my beauty. Alexi riding on his shoulders, smiling, pretending to fly.

  I slap his face and he wheezes awake and sees me above him, the confusion and candlelight and the metal plate turn his features monstrous. His mouth agape and I’m kicking and screaming within the hollows of his eyes, staying alive, calling out your name to bring you back, and then I feel the vibrations within him. He is about to speak and I put the point of the blade to his throat and he stops, the vibrations run up my arm and I murder the words before they can reach his lips. Aghast, his eyes soft, pleading, telling me he loves me, and I plunge the blade in as far as it will go. When I pull it back, the blood gurgles and he drowns and I stab his stomach again and again, his hands clutching everywhere, trying to contain his deadblood within him. New strength filling me and I climb on top and take the knife high above my head and run it deep into his chest, the shock of metal on bone and the reverberations of the steel grinding against it and the blood slicking my hands and the handle causes the knife to leave my hands, slicing the palm. Taking it again and again, jamming it down into his chest, hearing the bones chip away, feeling the vibrations, my breath heavy and ragged, his eyes, twin bluesuns in the darkness watching as I lick the blood from my hands, stick my fingers inside him and wrap my hands around his heart to drink him one drop at a time until I am purified.

  Spacetime broke. It stuttered and stopped. Hacked to pieces and a life turns in on itself and back around. All these lives inside of me that I lived. From wolf to human, I have walked alone but I remember so much and all the past rushes into the night, written on the sky, projected by the stars. Sao, my Moon, fragmented and morose. Faoi and Hreao dazzling in the sky, pulsing against the blackness of spacetime. The past is alive and the present thins and stretches like a sheet pressed to the blade of humanity. The future. The blank page scarred by all that came before it, dictating how and what may go there. It is mine and ours to write but all the words are old, chosen by a lifetime of broken promises. The weight of my regrets and the pain inflicted by forces I still don’t understand grabs me by the throat and twists the knife deeper and all I taste is blood and his face shines before me. Those golden eyes and those sicklemoons. It never ends. A cycle revolving over and over until we leave this world.

  Beyond the walls and through the city of Luca built on the ashes of its own namesake where no one once ruled comes the voice of a multitude, all the youth gathered and their voice growing in cacophony but together, trying to be one, all words united and the drumbeat kicks through stronger and stronger but the voices rise above.

  Humanity rises together against itself, a circle looping over and over. They don’t remember and I wasn’t there but I heard the stories and felt the thousands of deadlives within his cold, cold chest beating only for me. My shadow. All those boys dying with their bodies broken and brutalised, their screams filling the night. What I remember are the trees and the wolves who gave their life for me.

  And him.

  I loved him.

  And he loved me.

  I love you.

  I still see your face, so sad, and feel the heat of your skin coursing through me and making me stronger, making me whole, filling the hole humanity left within. The humanity I was and am cursed with, the bane that makes this body and life, but I hold onto the wolf inside me. The one who truly is me and the ones who made me. The only family that ever mattered to me.

  The revolution begins tonight. It begins now.

  Thousands of boys, another generation led to die. And they will and I’m afraid. His blood tacky on my skin and thick in my throat as I watch our boys and girls march through the night. The suns will rise in an hour or two and even as I dread I’m filled with hope. Tonight, I’m still alive. We’re still alive. Screaming through the silence, through twenty years of violence. Their voices rise and I hear mine with them.

  Perhaps this will be our last night. The last night in my body and I spend it with you. Your reflection in the glass, in the blood I see upon myself. You’re still alive and you’re with me. The moons glow and maybe one is you, my brilliant Moon, my eternal twilight.

  We are the moon tonight and we shall drink the daylight.

  This could all last. We march as one and there are no soldiers yet. Maybe Alexi was right and all worked as he planned.

  They storm the room and stop before me, covered in his blood. Akira and Akio, Ioan, Remus and Rodica, Dacia, even little Alexandra all staring at me and I drop the knife. The twins take the fat dead Lord Alexander along with Ioan and Remus and throw him through the window, screaming and cursing, laughing and snorting, the glass shattering and I can hear Alexi laughing across the city, echoing through the night, the chaos he started, his hands raising us higher and filling us with hope even as they choke out forgiveness and blot everything in shades of vengeance.

  The Yi stood and watched the wolfgirl, her shadow, and her Moon. Waiting, restless, insatiable, their hearts beating and vibrating all of Yiyuyan and then two approached.

  Wolf!::Young wolf!::You have::come::brought e
ven another::but also::also Death stands beside you::Wolf!::dear wolf!:: We knew you::you would come::so long ago and::so many years have we waited:: for you::to come to us::yes::yes yes yes::but you are here::you are here and::now::we may begin::come with us::wolf::perfect wolf::and what a perfect wolf!::and who::who is this girl?

  They slithered, their bodies ecstatic but the sound of their metal limbs moving, their metal hearts steaming turned their mystique to horror, malevolent and deceptive, and when they approached the wolfgirl, Sao growled and demanded they not touch her.

  She didn’t know what to think but she felt afraid and at peace, as if all the world belonged to her and now she had made him whole, opened his heart and set him free, to be the wolf he was born to be.

  Oh wolf::wolf wolf::wolf::we would never hurt the girl::wolfgirl::but you brought Death::to the land of Life::to the place::where we no longer::die::why::why why?

  Sao snorted and that was enough. Their bodies all swayed together as if this was a dance or a ritual.

  It was. Both. Everything else.

  The wolfgirl was afraid so she clung to Sao and the shadow kept close because he was most afraid. Quivering, his vibrations working in opposite direction to the Yi, counteracting their sway and their dance, but Sao stepped within it and bent it to his will, the seismic aberrations coursing through the air changing the wolfgirl’s heartbeat, the cadence and rhythm of her blood and she walked with him and would never be afraid because of the promises made.