A/N: Avian Lullaby takes place about 500-years-after Snake Singer. I remember reading in Hawksong that Amelia Atwater-Rhodes describes that shapeshifter's can live for hundreds of years but have never gotten the chance because of the war killing so many so young. This is my interpretation of that statement. Perhaps its not the way that Amelia Atwater-Rhodes saw it but I can't stifle my creative mind, this is just what came to me. I would also like to thank TallemeraRane for her wonderful editing help with this story.
Chapter One~
When I opened my eyes it was dark.
My room in the Acevedo house was suited for any seventeen-year-old boy, with a stereo and a TV, as well as large glossy posters of movie stars and models. Their full lips and desire-filled gazes should have been enough to make any teenage male proud and happy. However, it was different for me, I suppose, than it would have been different for any other Shapeshifter as old as I was.
I blinked my eyes stiffly, hoping that the strong force of my eyelashes breaking together would vanquish the sleep from them. When they opened again, I searched out the window. The waxing moon came shimmering through the thick glass and was my only source of light with which to see by. I raised myself up from the bed where I had been sleeping since before it had gotten dark and staggered over to the other side of the room where I hastily turned on the light switch. The room filled with luminosity like a manmade rainbow of candlelight.
I stood in front of the mirror as soon as my eyes got adjusted to the light. My reflection, the image that I allowed people to see was that off a tall and muscular boy against the backdrop of jet-black hair and dark eyes. My eyes. She loved my eyes.
"You have nobility about you!" my chosen grandmother Diane Acevedo always said to me, and I had been sure for several years that that is how the world saw me. Slightly mysterious, but always giving off the facade of the lie that I had perfected so well over time. I had been called many things in the years since I left my family: "Outcast," "Drifter," "Orphan," "Son," "Grandson," "Brother." But never my true name, and never given with the true nature of who I was.
Zane Cobriana, leader and king of the Serpiente people, husband to Danica Shardae of the Avians, my greatest and oldest enemy.
Shakespeare wrote about, like many authors have done over time, but I lived it, and it ended like a bittersweet novel that was too beautiful to put down when you read it, but when you were through you felt just as empty as you did when you picked it up. My life before was glimpses, me picking that book up and reading through it until it ended, and so it has remained closed for hundreds of years, never to be opened again.
I am not Zane now, or king or leader to anyone, and Danica is like a whisper of wind that blew across my face on a warm summers day and then flew away on the wings of the Golden Hawk that she so loved to take shape in. My name is Alex Acevedo, grandson of Simon and Diane Acevedo, both affluent and influential people in the Seattle area. Their daughter Christina was a drifter; like me almost. She made her way from place to place until at twenty she found herself pregnant and involved with an ex-con named Michael Judd. I remember reading about her murder in a newspaper in Spokane back in the 80s. Big news! Ex-Mayer Simon Acevedo's daughter found murdered in her apartment and her infant son Alex missing, as well as Michael Judd, her boyfriend, and the baby's father. The cops never found Judd, and I don't know where he and the real Alex are, or if either of them are alive or dead. And both Simon and Diane remain haunted with the realization that they outlived their only child, and that they lost so much of their grandsons life. I came to them a few years ago, with the story that my father Michael Judd had abandoned me when I was eight on a Texas turnpike and that I had been taken in by strangers and then eventually sent to a few foster homes in that area. I showed them a picture (a newspaper clipping) of a woman that my father said was my mother and they believed me. I think that they would have believed any boy who came along with the same story; they were more desperate to love someone then they were to find an actual blood connected relative. We served the others prepuce- they got what they wanted, and I got what I wanted.
I took only a moment to look at my reflection: Wrinkled white shirt that I pulled at with my fingertips to straighten and dark blue jeans. A James Dean look almost. Just call me the clean-cut rebel from Seattle. I slicked back my long hair with the palm of my left hand and with my right I reached over to the chair against my desk and grabbed my black leather coat that I had placed there when I had gotten home earlier. I pulled the jacket on and slammed the light switch back down with my hand. The room was dark again.
The Acevedo's house was at the top of Queen Anne Hill, a posh and high-class part of Seattle that was filled with every kind of person from original founders of the city to new and up coming bank brokers and Boeing executives. The house was large, but not too large and my room was the last room down the hall from the stairs overlooking the Space Needle and the waterfront.
As I turned the corner and headed down the corpulent staircase, I saw Diane Acevedo in the living room. Her back was turned to me as she sat in the high back blue chair that faced the lit fireplace. I stopped, watching her for a moment. The older woman was still grief stricken over her daughter's death even though it had been a good fourteen years since the incident. Diane was religious- a little too religious for me, but she was a good woman underneath all of her fears and insecurities. I gazed at her as she stared into the leaping flames before her. I didn't need to see her from the front to know what she was doing. I knew that in her hand she held a silver rosary, the same one that she always wore around her neck and that her fingers were weaving over and around the silver beads that connected to the small statue of Jesus Christ at his crucifixion. I could hear her mumbled prayers even from the staircase and could practically recite what she was saying by heart. She prayed to the Saint of Lyon, Claudine Thevenet and asked her to help her daughter Christina, I listened as she mentioned me as well: "Bless Alex for his courage and let him know how much we love him and regret that he did not come to us sooner!"
I made it down the stairs a few seconds latter, with Diane still praying in front of the fire.
"Grandma?" I whispered, a lie, but a lie that I was good at just the same.
"Oh Alex!" she said, a hint of surprise in her voice as she stood up from the chair. Her figure regal and statuesque from years of playing the part of the wife of the Mayer, doting companion, and mother. I had always suspected though that when she was young she was quiet a wild child. She held her arms out to me, and we embraced. "Are you going out darling?" she asked brushing her hands over the slick material of my leather coat.
"With friends, I won't be home late." I kissed her sweetly on the cheek like a child kisses his mother before going to bed. We said our goodbyes and I left.
The streets outside were slick and wet. Most people imagined Seattle as a gloomy and dreary place and in truth it was, but when you've lived here a while you don't really notice it. After three straight months of rain and gray clouds end and you see the sun you kind of begin to miss the rain.
I'd been living in Washington for about thirty years, since the seventies when the woman I was living with in Florida died in a car crash and I as her only surviving family member received all of her estate. I had lived in Florida too long to go to another family and invent a new role for myself, so I decided to get as far away as I could and Washington seemed like the best place.
My grandfather Simon Acevedo had an old red corvette from his younger days sitting around in storage and for what he thought was my sixteenth birthday he gave it to me and I as soon as I was out onto the street I jumped in. Its feel fit me perfectly and I treasured the car and the day that it had been given to me. Not since the old days in my Serpiente land had I felt so loved, not since my real family were all still living and the war with the Avians was just something that was happening and had not truly touched me yet.
I drove the car down Queen Anne with ease and onto the freeway. My journey was a short one as I headed for Squally Forest. The kids at my High school loved to hang out there; it was one of the only real untouched lands near the city.
I drove the car up a short road, to my left was the city, and to my right was a stretch of Evergreens that went on as far as the eye could see and went as deep as twenty-three miles in. I parked the car on the edge of the road, still a long way from where my friends would be.
I stopped a few feet away from the trees; breathing in the cold crisp air and watching my breath come out silvery against the wind and travel up to the sky. I reached my hands out, feeling the tips of the forever-green branches as they grew wildly from the trunks of the trees. I listened, but could hear no noise, and I watched but I knew that no one was around for miles.
Finally with a deep breath I pushed the human form of myself deep inside and felt the pure snake form emerge. My skin glowed and shimmered as my veins blackened. The blood that once filled my body with warmth froze and the sting of ice cooled my body in seconds. Smooth pale skin morphed and changed into black scales. About a minute after I began the change my legs and arms caved in, forcing my body to the ground but before the force of gravity caused me to fall the change completed itself and my light thin body caught itself and I stood perched against the ground, half of my body erect and watching the surroundings around me.
Everything was different in this form, everything felt different, smelled different, tasted different.
The ground was jagged and hard but it felt magnificent below my scales, itching and scratching at them as I slithered deep into the forest. I could travel faster this way, cover much more distances and I would get to my friends faster this way then I would if I was still driving.
About a half an hour latter and five miles deep in the forest I began to hear the muffled sound of loud music, silenced by the distance. Voices, quiet voices to me but they would be louder when I got where I was going. I traveled in my snake form only a bit longer, not wanting to risk anyone seeing me as I changed back into my human form.
In a clearing, behind a fallen and rotting log I hid myself. I could see movement in the trees and bushes up ahead and knew that this would be the best place to morph again. I concentrated, pushing the snake deep within myself as I had earlier when I pushed the human form in. I let myself spread out, feeling the stiff tightness of my arms and legs reshaping and renewing themselves against the ground. My skin was being pulled in a thousand different directions but I felt no pain, only the longing to stay in this form that seemed truer to me then that of Zane or any other person that I had been over the years. The ice in my veins melted fast and a heat wave splashed over me like water against the sands. My skin smoothed, my face relaxed. and I was once more human again.
Beads of perspiration cascaded down my face slowly and with the sleeve of my leather jacket I pushed them away. Changing always took a lot out of me; it was changing to and from my snake body that could be sometimes unpleasant and awkward. I was out of breath, but I wasn't willing to lie against the cold earth until my heart rate calmed down. I stood up, my boots smudging the moist dirt as I walked the rest of the distance to the group on foot.
The group was larger then usual tonight, more like a party then a gathering which I would have preferred. "Hey, Alex!" A kid shouted to me waving his only free hand which was also cupped around a beer can, his other hand around the waist of a girl that he had been kissing. I waved back; nodding my head in teenage approval of snagging the girl whom to me already looked drunk.
I continued to walk, though rows of teenagers all half wasted and drunk continued to pass my sight. "Brian!" I called out seeing the only person in the world that I would call a friend. Brian Tyake had befriended me when I first came to the Acevedo's. Brian was noble, and reminded me of many good soldiers that had served under me so long ago.
"Alex," he gestured reaching his hand over for me to shake it. "What happened to you?" He asked with raised eyebrows, as he looked me over, "You look like you've just run a marathon."
I smiled; "You wouldn't believe me even if I told you."
His look in return to my joke was complex, as if he knew that I really wasn't joking but playing along just so I wouldn't feel to revealed.
Brian handed me a beer, but I didn't accept it. I, like any creature of the earth on a night like this, was breathing in the cool crisp air and watching the winds high above us move and part the clouds into shapes and forms and then disappear.
"Hi, Alex," a sweet voice said from behind me as I watched the stares. I lowered my head and turned around and saw that Veronica Inmen stood behind me. She was pretty and I knew that she had a crush on me, but I really wasn't interested. "I got you one!" she said cheerfully as she handed me a can of beer. I had to accept it, she looked like she would fall to pieces if I declined.
"Thanks," I said taking a sip and letting the chill of the sweet liquid flow down my throat and chest as I swallowed it. It was almost like the chill of my snake's blood.
Veronica smiled, the sweet and sinful smile of a devious little child who was playing nice just to get what she wanted. "Come on," she said taking a hold of my hand. "I have something to show you."
With my hand in hers, Veronica Inmen led me away from the crowded party and deep into the woods behind it. She led the way, and as she pulled me along I took in her features. She had short red hair, the reddest hair that I had ever seen, and I would have thought that it wasn't natural had I known that it actually was. She was small, short, and skinny with long legs. She had a black dress on, short with a low neckline and a gold locket around her neck, she turned around to face me and smile or tell me that we were almost their several times as she dragged me along and each time she did I saw her locket gleam and shimmer in the moonlight. I wondered whose faces were in that locket, and why she wanted to keep them so close to her. Around her shoulders was a dark green leader-men's jacket that was at least twelve sizes to big and hung around her elbows and left her shoulders bare revealing the outline of high shoulder blades and a thin back line. She was drunk, I could tell by the way she moved, and by the way she addressed me as we made our way further into the forest.
"Here!" she said with a great out take of breath. With one of her hands, she pushed me against the trunk of a large Evergreen, its base three times larger then me and I leaned up against it with several feet of tree on both sides of me. Carefully, slowly, she instructed me to sit on the ground and I did so without objection. I watched her, like a predator watches its prey. Every fumble, every crooked smile as she did what she could to please me.
She stood above me smiling as I sat against the tree stump. "Oh, Alex," she said lightly, stroking my cheek with her warm hand. "You look like a Greek god in the moonlight." I choked out a smile and a laugh; what a ridiculous notion. "Don't laugh at me!" She said innocently as she kneeled down before me, the skin on her slender legs smashed into the dirt. "Oh, Alex," she said again, as if she were in a dream, and she leaned down, and kissed my jaw line where the two sides of my chin diverged. Her kisses were like happy bursts of love and need, but I felt nothing from them, only what she felt, and what she wanted me to feel.
Her lips danced along my jaw line until they reached my neck and shoulder where she continued to kiss tenderly. "Oh, Alex," she moaned, and I put my arm around her waist; I wanted more to comfort her then to egg her on. I leaned my head against the tree behind me, my eyes focusing on the sky above me, and the canopy of trees that veered in and out of my upward glance. Veronica continued to make her advances, bringing her warm kisses down my chest and I felt the fullness of her lips through my white shirt. I felt her locket, too, as it was pressed against my skin from hers, its outline burning a whole of wonder in me as I continued to question whose picture it was that was inside.
"What's this?" I asked, pulling her away slightly as I reached for the locket and examined its pure gold surface and felt with my finger tiny designs of ivy and flowers.
"It doesn't matter!" she choked, leaning back in to continue where she had left off.
"No wait," I said, "whose picture do you have in here?"
She sighed, and I knew that she was annoyed with me. She pulled the locket and opened it with the tips of her long fingers and pulling the two hearts apart I could see the small pictures of an elderly woman on one side and an elderly man on the other. "They're my grandparents ok."
I opened my mouth to speak, hoping to branch out on conversation from what she had just said, but she didn't let me. She pulled my head down and kissed me on the mouth, her warm face against mine, her hot breath inside of me. I wanted her to stop, but at the same time I longed for a woman's touch, a touch that I had neglected for so long. I tilted my head, allowing her lips to travel down the other side of my neck.
I could see the sky again; full of blues, and blacks, and grays and a moon that seemed so powerful and commanding. I could feel all of Veronica's body against me, the feel of her young breasts against my chest, and her legs near mine. In a moment of passion I kissed her back, full and hard as I hadn't kissed anyone since Danica. I wanted it to be Danica, I needed it to be Danica, but as I took my lips away from hers I realized that it wasn't.
I slammed the back of my head against the tree again, racking my brain with a way to get out of this mess. I needed to stop Veronica before she went to far, but I didn't want to hurt her.
My breathing intensified as I contemplated going further with her. The sky was like a book of instructions that I was trying to read and understand.
And then I heard it.
The cry of the Golden Hawk. It was like music that I had heard as a child and would never forget. It was as loud as a thousand sirens in my head. I pushed Veronica away completely, and yelled at her until her protests ended and there was silence. I had heard it! I know that I did! I don't think that I breathed for almost a full minute.
I searched the sky like a mad man, examining every breath of wind which might have been caused from the breaking of her wings in the sky. Every moving branch became a perch for her to watch me upon. I listened, I waited. Then, as a jewel against the heavens, I saw it. The golden Hawk sore across the sky, its feathers highlighted by the shin of the moon above her, and its cry as beautiful as the sound of her own voice. "Danica!" I yelled, pulling myself up from the ground and holding my jeans that Veronica had unbuttoned up so that they would not fall. "Danica!" I screamed again, ignoring Veronica's questioning voice in the background.
I called out her name several more times, but she was gone, her presence and the cry. Was it Danica? Had she found me after all of these centuries apart? I didn't even know if she was still alive. "Danica!" I whispered into the night, I knew that if she were out there she would hear my voice, hear me calling her even if I only ever whispered it. Her Hawk's hearing was acute and accurate, and she would be able to hear my voice from miles away.
"Danica," I beckoned, "come back to me."
I got home a few hours latter, exhausted and weary from the night's events. By the time I got home both Simon and Diane were asleep, I could hear their mute breaths from behind the door and I knew that they both were in a deep sleep. I made my way to my room, the ache of longing and dissatisfaction curling around my bones. What I was doing made no sense. Thinking about her would only hurt me more, yet there had not been a day sense I left her that I had not thought of her. I made my choice though, however much it hurt to be away from her I would have lost her eventually. There was no group amongst our people that would have allowed our union to continue for long. No Avian would have been ruled by a Serpiente King for long, and no Serpiente would have done the same with and Avian Queen. What I did was for the best, not just for her but for me as well.
When I entered my room I hit the light switch back on. The clock on the wall opposite me read 3:00 AM and I sighed at the thought of the late hour. I took off the leather jacket, letting it drape over the chair at the desk again, and I pulled off the dark blue jeans, placing them on the floor near the closet and allowing my white shirt to hang over my boxers. I hit the light switch again and the room was back in darkness. I started to make my way for the bed but stopped when I saw the window out of the corner of my eye. It was late winter, but I didn't care. I went to the glass, and pulled the hinges up until the lower half was open and exposed. A burst of fresh cold late winter air hit me hard, sending prickles of Goosebumps across my arms. The wind brought the branches from the tall Chestnut outside my window against the house and the scrapping sound reminded me of butter being spread over burnt toast.
I took one final inhale of wild wind before turning around and coming to the bed where I pulled the covers aside and clamed in. I felt my bones relax, and lighten above the soft cushioning of the mattress and closed my eyes, hoping the serenity of deep sleep would take me. I feared that if I dreamed I would dream of her.
Sometime during the night my eyes burst open. The cry of the Golden Hawk awoke me. I jumped out of bed quickly, Danica's name readily on my lips but when I got to the window I saw nothing. The sky was clear and the sounds of moments had been silenced. The world was in a dead calm, no wind, and no noise. All I could see was a single branch on the chestnut swaying, only one branch as though a bird had been perched there and suddenly flown away.
I sighed heavily. Could it be? After so long.