A beast of nine horns, p.48
A Beast of Nine Horns, page 48
part #3 of Into Vermilion Series
Breathing hard, thoughts on Tamara, Coral found the strength to straighten herself. A surge of warmth buoyed her, a feeling of self-worth she’d never known before. Because even the Baroness had missed what was right in front of her eyes. “I know this is all in my head. Whatever the hell you are, you ain’t really here. And that means Tams is still standin’ by my side, right here, just outta sight. And she wouldn’t have come all this way with me if she was gonna drop me like a spent muter.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“Belief’s got nothin’ to do with it.” Strength surged through Coral’s heart, beating back the crush of the void. “That’s just how it is. And I hate to break it to ya, but I didn’t come this far and shed all this blood to make friends. I was never gonna be a heroine, anyway. I don’t give a shit how many people curse my name, ’cause Tams will never desert me. And she’s all I need.”
The Baroness sneered. “Do not deceive yourself. Your lover will abandon you. She will come to curse your name as your parents did.” The darkness cackled, echoing with her parents’ voices. The words were stitched in the embroidery of her heart, familiar and raw.
But Coral resisted the hissing tendril that tried to ensnare her. She stayed silent, standing stoic against the invading surge of anger.
The Baroness held Coral’s gaze steady, like she was expecting her to crack and let the hate come gushing through. The pressure on Coral’s skull gradually increased, a dizzying storm of shadow playing at the edge of her vision from the deepest depths of the void.
“Your resilience is such a strange thing,” the Baroness said at last. “You fight to your limit for a single human’s love. For a lie that has tricked you into blindness.” Her form shimmered, momentarily gaseous and overlong. “But you waste your tenacity. The hemoclasm cannot be averted, least of all by a Vessel, no matter how imperfect.”
Coral felt a grin form. She could see through the Baroness now. “If you really believed that,” she said, “we wouldn’t be here in the first place.”
Irritation flashed in the woman’s eyes. “My patience thins. You will break, as was fated. You will break, and the Beast of Nine Horns shall be whole again!”
The dark frothed and foamed, unseen clouds of dark matter screaming and chorusing. The pain and anger pressing in on Coral intensified. But drawing on her well of resolve, she stood strong, pushed it away. She thought of tomorrow, when this would all be over. Whatever shape the world took, even if she was hated, that was alright. Because they’d face that tomorrow together.
The Baroness glowered at her. “Perhaps it was foolish of me to choose you. Despite your utter despair in the surgery, your lifetime of suffering has clearly been insufficient to crush your spirit.” A smile burned across her face. “But your tenacity is lit by such a meager spark of love. It shall be easy to snuff it out.”
The woman spread her arms, again dipped her chin to let her horns fan out. The dark answered, whirling faster around them like a galaxy in motion. Coral tried to shift, but found the pressure bearing down on her too much to pierce. A dappling of light swarmed through the dark.
“I have worn many masks through the eras,” the Baroness said. “Many Vessels have risen before you, Coral, allowing hate to shape your world in ways you cannot fathom. You will break, my girl. And I know just the mask to crack that endless optimism of yours.”
The Baroness’s body scintillated, shimmering with a foggy breath of coruscant light. And though Coral knew this place only existed within her mind, she still drew her arm over her eyes to shield them from the blazing corona. The void itself trembled. From within the glare, a new form emerged, elegant and sharp and devilish.
Polished silver armor hugged a feminine form. Six massive wings of pristine ivory feathers radiated from the woman, holding her aloft with languid beats. Hair of spun gold billowed around her beatific face, where a crown of horns still grew. In her hand, an artistic facsimile of Crux Caedis pulsed with false light. And Coral couldn’t help but shudder, for she knew this icon well. It was part monster, part angel, and all hatred.
“As I once ushered in the end of the hemomancers’ golden age,” Saint Isabeau proclaimed, “so too shall I close the curtain on this sinful world.” The angel stretched an arm out toward Coral. Then the dark was burned away by an impossible blaze, a brightness like a million suns that flared from every angle.
And as the light fell upon Coral, she felt her defenses washed away in a scalding wave of heat. Her mind was flooded with images, and she lost herself to a sea of lifetimes.
Chapter 62
Coral saw through eyes that were not her own.
She heard a hundred thousand voices flowing like water over her tongue.
She was born, lived, died, was born, lived, died, was born and lived and died and lived and died and lived and died and lived.
Coral saw the Red Death unfolding from thousands of angles at once, stretched thin and elongated by time compression. Wounds wept open and angry from the hordes of the dead and dying. She saw the terror and singing anger of the afflicted, felt it crying out for release like a building static charge.
Coral saw the hemo-hunts. She saw the torches blazing in the dark, setting fire to homes. She saw bodies pitchforked and tossed onto roving carts filled with the corpses of the lynched. She saw the makeshift morgues, the rivers running red with the butchered.
Though thousands were massacred in the hysteria of the hemo-hunts, only a hundred or so were actually hemomancers. And now Coral was each and every one of them.
She was stabbed, strangled, burned. Smashed, racked, twisted. Hung, crucified, vivisected. Gunshots, saws, improvised spears. Doctors craned over dozens of her fragments, grimacing down at bare organs. Gawking mobs cheered and howled as ropes were pulled taut and the air vanished from her lungs.
Endless lifetimes of pain and suffering played out like overlaid filmstrips, skipping and stuttering. The cascading superpositions overwhelmed her senses. Anger and hatred and fear and agony slicked her brain. She tried to throw up, tried to resist, tried to move, if only to stop herself from completely losing her sense of self. But she only receded further behind as lifetimes spanned the gap between moments.
Time sloshed sideways.
She was Jacques Leblanc, afraid for his children, giving his life to defeat Malthus in their famous duel. She was his children, Jules and Fulbert and Aurore Leblanc, noughts one and all, each murdered by their sister Lucienne to deprive Malthus his cure. Thrice over she felt their fear, the enveloping despair of her betrayal.
Then she was Lucienne Leblanc herself, but a girl when her life was destroyed. First her mother, and then her father, claimed by the Rosarium. Left alone, a bloodline’s matriarch at thirteen years old, there was only one path for her. She felt the anger beating through her every breath, guiding every piece across her chessboard. She felt the surge of relief when Malthus was declared dead. So too did she feel the utter, complete loss when Tamara stood before her, arms spread wide, and held a mirror to Leblanc’s life. Her last thoughts were of her siblings when she hefted the pistol to her temple and pulled the trigger.
And the illumination continued, manifold lives unfurling, pain indescribable and inescapable. Coral tried to scream, and it came out a choir of dying gasps. She was drowning, crushed under a universe of pressure and misery.
Scoured by the light of the dark angel, Coral lived the life of every hemomancer who ever was, decades passing in microseconds.
She was a nameless nought, a familiar curse. But this time, she knew what that meant, knew the danger coming for her. Her life became a hopeless chase, constantly being hunted, looking over her shoulder, not a moment of rest. Until she was finally murdered by Gavin.
Until she murdered Gavin.
Until she was Gavin.
Wailing. Gnashing. Tears streaming down her cheeks. Playing hide and seek before being discovered and brained with a stick, dragged off and beaten until the dark set in. Witnessing that pain and murder from another vantage point, wind in her sails, delivering her right into an endless vignette of violence and death.
She was the Beast of Nogales, a sting of betrayal bleeding her pride as she set her gaze on her small Arizona hometown. And even as terror blossomed through Nogales, she was hollow and empty. And when Father Sullivan defeated her, part of her welcomed her ending. Her pain was never in dying, but in living.
She was a broken boy, blood-soaked childhood birthing a blood-soaked present. Flashes of an azalea crown preceded a plunge into nerve-deep pain, decades long, caused by the Amaranth heiress in her quest to prevent the hemoclasm.
She was the assassin sent to recover the Amaranth heiress, slaughtering dozens of innocents on Cedar Island with the hypercryst whip Tornslangen. And when the lab burned and she faced Falk herself, still she didn’t feel a thing—
—until she was gazing out through another pair of eyes at Love-Lies-Bleeding. Bodies spilled out on the ground like rose petals over a grave. Indignation and fury, unsated for decades. Until fate cast them into the battle to save the world.
She was a wayward son of the Tsubaki, chasing her father’s ideals, only to be thrown out of home forever. And when her father came to take her eyes, she endured it in shame, becoming one more cast-off of the forgotten bloodline.
Bathed in the Lady Saint’s light, Coral saw everything, including how it all began.
She was a poor peasant girl, a brothel rat scarred by every man she’d ever known. When the Baron showed her his favor, she was foolish and believed. Hoped. But only greater pain awaited her. Though dozens of others suffered at his hand, she was the one with the least to lose. And so she sank the blade into his heart, then stole away into the dark recesses of the French countryside.
That was when the dreams began. Dreams of blood and carnage, feeding off her misanthropy. Visions of a demon that demanded her attention, her servitude. The occult called to her and her disciples. And the demon grew stronger, supping at their zeal, until at last it guided them to the vast, impenetrable mountains in the East.
The voyage was long, and half their number perished. They were twelve when they arrived at the hidden monastery high in the Himalayas, following the copper-sweet whispers.
When they eventually overcame the communication barrier, the monks bade them leave. Their monastic order existed only to protect that which was meant to be hidden. Feigning deference, the Baroness begged the monks to permit them to stay the night by their fires, out of the snow and the wind. The monks agreed. And the Baroness repaid their kindness by slaughtering them in their sleep and torching the monastery to the ground.
Among the cinders, they found the stone.
It was large, impure, glistening with filaments of an impossible metal as pure as silver but rimmed in red where the light kissed it. The stone ran with something thick and crimson, pooling in a depression on its top, deep enough to wash one’s hands in ablution.
Drink, the voice in her head commanded.
So the Baroness and the eleven others did just that, taking communion from cupped hands and the charred remains of wooden dinnerware. And the Beast moved in delight as its blood spread through them, gifting its power, preparing itself to multiply.
In a flash, the Baroness’s life was gone. But not entirely. For she lived on through the noösphere, invading the weak and broken, resurfacing through lifetimes to stoke the embers of a burning world.
Coral saw the Lady Saint as she rallied humans to her cause and slaughtered hemomancers across the French countryside, aiming to lop the heads off three bloodlines so the demon could be brought forth in physical form. Her fingers clenched Crux Caedis as she spilled their blood—
A glimpse of lucidity.
A white-knuckled grip on a blade forged from the demon’s ore—the literal body of Kakrinolas.
A stirring of her senses broke through the flood of memories.
Coral still held the sword. She clung to that sensation, used it to anchor herself. She was not in the blender of light and birth and death. She wasn’t even in the dark of the void.
She was on a rooftop in the city of Saint Isabeau, Crux Caedis in her hand and Tamara at her side.
Malice poured over her in crashing waves, but now she saw them for what they were. Every glimpse and flash playing out before her eyes was tinted, poisoned.
Grounding herself, fighting through the sea of intoxicating loathing, she dug deep for light in the dark. And as soon as she knew what she was looking for, she found it. Words caressed her between the flashes, gave her the strength and hope to endure.
Every Vessel before you has been twisted unrecognizable by hate.
Somehow, you twisted hate itself.
If you truly want to save this world… If you want to earn the world you desire…then fight.
This is a battle only you can win.
“Do you see now?” Saint Isabeau cried, dragging Coral out of the sea of lifetimes and back into her horrific radiance. “You fight not only me, but the hatred of two races crushing against one another for a thousand years! You fight the very concept of hate itself!”
In agreement, the void came alive. Galaxies of grimacing visages emerged from the dark. Hundreds. Thousands. People of all races and features, unified in the pallor of death, all hissing with a voice older than the very planet. Hemos, one and all, debtors of the Carnage Father, souls lost in the thousand years of bloodshed.
“The fate of every hemomancer is to hate and be hated, to kill and to die! Behold, how all have suffered! So too shall you suffer! In the end, you will know only sorrow and rancor until you wish for death! Death for yourself, death for everyone! This is what you have chosen, girl! This is what you were born to become!”
Coral glared through the light at the Lady Saint. “You made a mistake, Izzy,” she said, the words hot gasps quivering on the verge of laughter. “You’ve shown me all I need to see.”
The void rang with mockery, filling Coral’s head with the scrape of scales over bone. “Have I, now?” Isabeau asked through a smirk.
And though it hurt every muscle in her body, Coral looked up into the woman’s blood-red eyes and smirked right back.
Because the vermilion illumination had shown Coral everything. It had shown her all the pain and wrath of the hemomancers. But mixed in were motes of light and warmth. She saw the evil, the rage, the anguish. But she saw the rest of it as well. She saw what the first hemomancer never had.
She saw the love in Lady Descoteaux’s eyes when Jacques Leblanc stood before her, begging for the lives of his children. She saw the love his children had for him. Fulbert’s awe. Lucienne’s reverence.
She felt the hungry kisses shared between two scientists, a human and a verm, a thousand feet beneath Cedar Island. She felt the raw passion in her body as they made love on a couch that smelled of disinfectant and dusty coats, drunk on champagne and the promise of a future without scourge.
She felt the sisterly love Lena had for her twin. And though her life had ferried her from one tragedy to another, she’d never broken. Even now, she fought with hope in her heart—hope that the next generation might be different.
She felt the warm, unconditional friendship a Tsubaki girl shared with a human. There was no hemomancy nor humanity to them, just a world away from everything else, whiling days away in arcades and outside convenience marts.
She felt Falk’s heart break for Noelle Leroux, dark daughter of the Hyacinth, whose lover was stolen from her by her cruel mother. She saw their friendship burn bright and prevail, if only temporarily. One Viscountess died, and another was born; and though their paths diverged, they never stopped caring for one another until the very end.
She felt Clive’s fear of humans melt into quiet infatuation, then felt it replaced with something soft and warm that beat for a daughter of man and hemo.
She felt all the quiet hours passed in loving embraces, all the shimmering hope buried amid the animosity. She saw and heard and tasted a hundred thousand lifetimes’ worth of joy made all the sweeter by the world’s cruelty. And because of the horrors of the Crimson Wars, of Saint Isabeau’s crusade, of the hemo-hunts, those moments echoed even louder in defiance.
She saw those humans who, despite all else, put their faith in the Scourge Maiden. Secret shrines. Furtive hopes. Bargains whispered in silent prayers to the Almighty.
And in the center of all this, she saw Tamara, her love, her fallen angel. A girl who traded everything for a future nobody else believed in. A future just for the two of them.
Her heart full to bursting, Coral held all that warmth in her mind. She held it there, so tangible she could touch it, and condensed it into a thoughtform of her own. Then, she slammed that cavalcade of singing thoughts and images and feelings and flutters into the unholy sword within her grip.
And Crux Caedis shook.
Something in the abyss changed. The derision echoing through Kakrinolas’s entirety melted into something palpably like fear.
Saint Isabeau’s razor smile vanished. Realization came a moment later, attention flicking toward the sword and then back to Coral. “No,” she growled. “You cannot deny the fury of a thousand years of strife! Humans and hemomancers will never coexist! The gap between them is hatred itself! Surely you understand that!” Her voice careened through the vastness, penetrated Coral’s chest, filled it with the sensation of sawdust exploding.
Coral grinned through the immense pressure resisting her mental incursion into the blade. “Oh, I understand, alright. Kakrinolas is hatred—but I twist hatred!”
At that declaration, the magnetic resistance humming from Crux Caedis surrendered, and Coral’s mind shuddered with release. The blade cracked. A howl reverberated through their sealed-in universe, a deafening chorus of agonized shrieks, a million death knells just missing harmony.
