Chapter Fifty One

Emilio's hand wraps around my arm immediately after my knees hit the wooden, yanking me roughly to my feet. My wrist stings as he grips me tighter and tighter, holding me up more than my own legs.

Though I don't necessarily notice nor care, angels begin to glance our way, their expressions ranging from curious to annoyed to furious. This I'm sure does not go uncounted in Emilio's book.

"Excuse her," he chuckles nervously, throwing my arm over his shoulder and wrapping his around my waist, like he's going to help me limp home rather than drag me up the stairs like he'll have to. "Any stress just sends her wailing. It's a condition, I believe. I'll send in another waitress."

And, without another word to his superiors, without waiting to be dismissed by anyone in charge of human forces, Emilio twists me around and begins marching off. He attempts to get me moving independently as well. My feet drag over the ground as I frantically try to keep up, stemming my tears and burying my face into his shoulder.

"I'm sorry," I choke out between tears, willing to stop the sobs rocking through me but unable to dam the emotions that keep sending more and more tears. "I'm sorry… causing a scene…"

"No." Emilio's voice is adamant. "If you reacted in any other way, you'd be just as bad as all of them. Hold yourself together for just a moment more, though…"

I do, stifling my sobs as we escape through the little servant's hatch. The second we pass through the kitchen doors, another tidal wave of emotion hits me, and my knees go weak again. This time, the kitchen staff is my audience as I stupidly think of how I'd comforted Belle last night, and how I'd refused her company just earlier.

Emilio murmurs something in Spanish as I sag lifelessly against him with a burst of tears, but, though I'm not certain I want to know what they mean, his words are not unkind and his arms are gentle. Continuing to chant gently to me in his lively language, Emilio strokes the back of my hair.

After a few moments of attracting attention from the kitchen servants that'd began to trickle back to their posts, a burn of shame defiles my heartache, and I attempt to hide myself behind Emilio, unwilling for any of these people to see me like this – they don't understand, they don't know what's happened, and there they sit upon their thrones and watch me. They didn't know Belle. If they did, they would be in tears, too.

Noticing my change in manner, Emilio scoops me up into his arms like a baby, falling silent as he shoulders his way through the humans around us. I try to hide myself against his chest, keeping my face shadowed and tossing hair into the streaks of tears down my cheeks.

He pauses at the foot of the stairway, but it doesn't occur to my grief-drowned mind that he might be taking me back to Raffe's apartment until he whispers to me, "Do you wish to go to your aunt's, or… his?"

Raffe. My throat feels as if it's about to rip apart as I burst into another bout of sobs. "Not. Him."

Emilio sighs sorrowfully, looking down at me with big almond eyes and a sad, sad smile pulling at his thick lips. He curses something softly in Spanish before unfolding his long, muscled wings and taking to the sky. As he soars upwards, the occasional window paints silver streaks over his swift wings, over his magnanimous face.

There's something oddly soothing about flying – the cool air massages my face as we soar upwards, gently brushing my hair from my eyes. Emilio's warmth repels any chill that the cold weather might bring to the wind, allowing its cool fingers to purely serve as comforters.

My heart squeezes, glimpsing his white feathers in a shaft of moonlight, reminded of Belle's little white wings as she'd frantically flapped after Bryon and Raffe at Sercem Domu, and I suddenly am quite thankful for the fact that Emilio's flight has come to an end.

His breathing is heavy, I notice through a thick glaze of tears, but he doesn't seem otherwise winded.

Tap, tap, tap, his feet down the hall, brisk and almost angry, as if his saccharine pity for me is morphing into something more heated. Once, I hear a door open, as if an inquisitive she-angel is looking for the reason for the pound of his shoes, but with my blurred vision, I see one of his wings snake out and slam the door shut with the tips of his stiff primaries.

At the end of the hall, Emilio awkwardly jostles with the door handle without releasing me, pushing his way through and kicking it shut behind him. The familiar light of Audiat's stained glass windows pour over me, and the dreamcatchers twirl with cheerful hellos. It's too happy, too halcyon, as if nothing had happened – as if Belle were just any other pawn on the chess board. As if her death wasn't to be rewarded with anything more than a few half-assed apologies from the one she loved the most.

Raffe.

Moaning pathetically, I begin to cry again, throwing my hands around Emilio's neck – he supports me generously, stroking at my hair, hushing me with gentle Spanish words.

It's not really him that I seek out, but his comfort, just someone here to even get a glimpse of the pain like hot iron in my heart. I want someone to know that I'm not just blubbering like a pathetic little girl; it's pain, and he seems to get that, seems to understand. It's not a pathetic sort of pity I see in his maudlin eyes, but the sort of pity on the faces of veterans when they see wounded soldiers. It makes me cling to him like a wet rag, but all the while, he takes it calmly and patiently.

Once, as he walks slowly through the room, it occurs to me that it's his job to do so, and nothing more – but then he gingerly sweeps the hair from my face, murmuring something in Spanish to me, and all thoughts of his dishonesty are banished from my mind.

"It hurts, I know," Emilio mumbles, my sense of up and down shifting as we enter a darkened space and he begins to lean over. "And it won't stop hurting for a while. Trust me, it's best to sleep, now." My back touches a soft comforter, and my eyes snap open as I realize he's easing me down onto Audiat's lower bunk.

He pauses, and blinking the tears from my eyes, I watch him bite at his lips as my shoulders rock. "Unless," he considers thoughtfully, "you'd like to take a hot shower first? That helps with grief."

"No…" My voice sounds like the creak of an old wooden door. Clearing it, I swallow painfully, the corners of my mouth tugging down and my eyes threatening tears again. "No. But to hell with this dress…"

Nodding, Emilio sets me against the bed and promptly turns around, stalking out of the room. "I'll be in the kitchen, making you some chamomile. Call out if you… need anything…"

As he walks hesitantly from the room, as if wary about leaving me alone with the demons haunting my thoughts, I curl up in a ball on the bed, not bothering to strip from my dress as I'd claimed, instead pressing my face up against the cool, cold wall and weeping to myself.

Gone. One of my little babies is gone.

Raffe'd killed her. He'd killed her.

Just before I lapse into sleep's awaiting arms, I feel Emilio drape a heavy blanket over my shoulders, and hear him gently sing a soft, Spanish lullaby, before silencing and moving off as if he'd never been there at all.

Hesitantly, Maion shifts her weight, edgily watching the noisome corpse's body as it lies in the middle of the floor – though the cleanup crew of humans had swept through and pushed all the tables and chairs back into place, they'd left it there. There's something hair-raisingly eerie about the dead Nephilim – its calico scales shine brightly, still maintaining an aura of life beyond death despite its rigid muscles. Though one of them is half-drenched in the blood the head drowns in, its eyes seem to follow her as she walks through the room, like a silent accusation.

In one big gust, Audiat and Ariel swoop into the cafeteria through the balcony, causing Maion to whirl around abruptly. Ariel stalks forward, a deadly gleam in her dark eyes and a frown held at her lips – tall and towering, she insinuates fear in Maion, despite the skipping fairy dancing at her side.

"I'm sorry," Maion stammers, quickly walking up to them. "I didn't –"

"It's sad, isn't it?" Audiat sighs, nodding in understanding. "The baby Nephilim. I thought for a second it was the bastard's own – such trust in its eyes! Hugo said that, according to the little dragon, he might as well have been her father. And poor Penryn! It's sick, just sick."

"Focus, you." Ariel casts her a chastising glance. "Your husband will be here any hour now, and you can mope together. Hold it together until then. Maion, did you clean up nicely? No hidden presents, left behind by our dearest archangel?"

"No bugs." Maion smiles, relieved to have been forgiven by the she-aerie's most deadly. "You must've freaked Uriel out, Audie. There wasn't anything at all beneath any of the tables, chairs, anything. Or on top of them, for that matter."

"That's good." Caught in her acute visual search of the room, Ariel sounds slightly distant, her approval devoid of its usual hard, focused edge. Ariel's leonine eyes scrape the high ceiling, her brow pinching at the purple wine stains on the ceiling. "My, looks like they didn't all make it to the parlor before they dipped into the good stuff."

"Raphael seemed a bit anxious to get onto it," Audiat adds, smiling grimly, as if recalling memories she'd rather never dwell upon again. "Or maybe he was more anxious to get out of it. I frankly couldn't tell."

"Yes, well." Ariel sounds immensely displeased with her decision to allow him amongst her people. "His discomposure leads to an ugly smudge on our ceiling. I can barely look at it. And ugh, that smell – it's even worse than wet dog, alcohol. We'll have to spend days scrubbing this floor to get the odor out of it, never mind the ceiling."

Maion shrugs. "That adds one more mess of his creation to our pile, I suppose. Speaking of messes, what should I do about…?" Awkwardly, she sidesteps, moving a hand towards the dead creature. "It's going to start to smell even worse, but I don't want to just throw it away…"

"Then don't," Audiat suggests coldly, her tone abruptly icing over.

Blinking, Maion double-takes, glancing towards the comically short she-angel in confusion. "…Excuse me?"

"I say we leave it there." Audiat crosses her arms over her chest, shards of flat, dull frost glazing over her eyes. The moonlight coils with her hair, looping in bands and erasing the streaks of soft pink. "I say we let it smell and mold and decompose onto our floor and never, ever move it. Let that body turn to dirt before we move it, and only then to put it in a pot to cherish forever. Let that poor little dragon serve as a monument describing the one thing we must always carry in our hearts as we play a game of cards with these he-angels."

"Oh?" Ariel glances down at Audiat, her dark lips twitching downwards. "And what would that be?"

"That Raphael isn't and will never be anything but Wrath of God." She blinks docilely, tilting her head to one side and smiling, eyes dancing with latent malice. "We may come to appreciate him, to trust him, maybe even to love him, but should the need arise, he will strike out at us without a second thought – just like he did to that Nephilim."

"Let me in," the archangel growls from the other side of the door, jostling with the knob. "I need to see her."

Detecting the fuzz in his voice and the way his words seem to all blur together, Emilio makes a rapid decision, and settles his weight against the door in a casual precaution. "No, I don't think you need to. You can wait until she wakes up and decides to face you herself."

"Get out of my way," he pleads, a threatening note lain beneath his cries for help. "I need to make her understand. It wasn't my fault. It wasn't!"

"I'm sure your excuses are utterly logical." Emilio's lips twist in distaste. "And you can tell them to Penryn tomorrow morning. Trust me when I say she needs her sleep. Go bark up another tree until then."

"I will knock this door down!" he slurs angrily.

"I don't advise it," Emilio informs him coldly, his blood turning to ice – Bryon's words echo in his ears, warnings about how an archangel is to be feared when drunk, and tales of the mercurial state Raffe is thrust into when he dips a little too heavily into the punch bowl. Once the archangel's fuse has been lit, nothing can be done to mollify his rage, and, despite the frost in his voice, Emilio doubts he can hold the angel off for very long at all.

"I didn't want to!" Raffe snarls, pounding his fist against the door. "It wasn't my fault!"

"Is it your fault that the angels descended?" Emilio demands coolly. "Is it your fault that they killed thousands if not millions of people? Is it your fault that your people crushed an entire civilization? Not everything is directly your fault, you insolent child, but everything can be blamed on you. Now, run along, before I lose my patience."

"Penryn –"

"– doesn't want to see you." Emilio grinds his teeth. "If you won't do this for your own good, do it for hers. She needs to think. She needs to sleep. She's had precious little to cherish and care about and now she's got even less. Give her some time, Raphael, and then, I'm one century – ah, one hundred percent certain that she'll be more open to your claims."

With one last pound on the door that causes its hinges to squeal in protest, the archangel lumbers off, grumbling whole way down the hall.

My dream consists of fragments – like jagged edges of glass piercing my heart, their pain sharp, rigid, and cracked, as if I'm viewing them through a broken mirror.

A flicker of Paige – an adult Paige – crosses my view first, staring down at someone, like she's clutching a child's hand. Dark hair tumbles gorgeously over her shoulders. Her laughter, rich, soft, and full of adoration, echoes over the dream as slowly it fades into black, replaced by a high-pitched scream.

Babbling whispers like those that come when White Wolf is present echo in the corners of my mind, and, eerily, Raffe's thundering laugh towers above them as slowly, their cadence becomes more frightened, more frantic, as if each of their words are haggard fingernails with which they chip away at me, scratching at my walls, at my sanity.

Out of nowhere, a quick flash of a queen of hearts card shines in the moonlight, Paige's face looming beyond it, smiling benignly, then of a bright blue eye, its pupil widening so that it almost swallows the iris, before shrinking to a minuscule speck.

And back to the whispers with utter blackness my dream goes, only to rapidly return, this time with a terrifying image.

Bryon chokes as the whisper curl around him like caresses, a great fire with flame that seems quite literally golden flaring around him. His eyes bulge in terror and his face goes red – horror consumes his expression as he falls to his knees, gagging, trying to jam a hand down his throat for whatever reason. And, in the last second before my dream returns to black, I swear that, as his hand falls away and his head arches backwards, one of his eyes is a ghostly blue.

Black once more, the whispers growing softer, my dream mellows, allowing a smooth female voice to ripple at the edges of my imagination, sounding mourning – it takes me a few moments more than necessary to realize that it's my mother's song, but not my mother's voice.

A noise like thunder echoes over my dream, and suddenly, I'm looking at my mother and father lying beside each other in bed, their window thrown open in the middle of a thunderstorm for whatever reason. Lightning illuminates the sky, revealing to me the little body a tiny dragon sitting on the windowsill, watching, causing one bronze eye to blink with light. All the while, the woman softly sings my mother's lullaby.

"He killed me." It's Lucius voice, echoing through the darkness, sounding as if it's choked through sobs. "My own father. He killed me and turned me into… into… that thing. Into this thing."

Lucius's face appears to me, grinning slyly, his white eyebrows angled sharply downwards with the full moon blazing behind him. For a split second following the creepy second of memory, I glimpse a limp puppet with a fluttering cloak beside one with golden wings.

"Save me," Lucius pleads, breaking into sobs. "Help me! I'm doing what has to be done! I'm not a monster! Does no one see that? I just want to live a life where all of me is alive! Do they not care about the demon the way they did the boy? Can't they see it's still me?"

What becomes even more eerie is when Bryon's voice begins to overlap, just as ridden with emotion.

"I see you," his heartbroken whisper echoes. "I see you! Your cycle of good and evil, your pain, your cuts. See me, please! PLEASE! See my good and evil, my agony, what I cut into myself. Why can't they see me? Does no one know who I am? Help me! PLEASE!"

And then, suddenly, with a single of Raffe's thunderous chuckles, everything reverts back to silence.

My gaze from the point of view of something racing over meadows, something small and close to the ground, like a dog or a cat or maybe a little, little Nephilim, whirls around to show me what lies behind it – a coiling, bronze-scaled tail, a distant burning town with a great billowing smoke rising from it like a feather's plume, and a little brown dragon, its silver eyes wide, little maw opened in a scream.

Laid over the image is a shrill, female scream: "HELP ME!"

Something slams down from above, something with white feathers in a sea of darkness and a shining, silver blade.

A little boy's terrified breathing laces through the darkness, panicked and short, riddled with gulps of fear.

Abruptly, a vision of Bryon's bronze eye, much younger and set on a scaled face, appears, its pupil narrowing to less than a pinpoint as blood bursts over its eyelids and even onto the iris of the dragon.

"Save her," comes a desperate croak through the darkness that immediately follows. My blood runs cold – I can't quite place the voice, but I know it, I know it as sure as I know the back of my hand. "Save her, please. Please, Junior, she doesn't know what she's getting into. Oh, my little boy."

First an image of Paige shows, mature and beautiful, her skin as pale as milk in the light of the white moon, the leaves she rests her face against darker than ebony, darker even than her midnight eyes. I see her panting for breath, trying to feign a smile through the agony boiling in those dulling eyes. For the second time in the midst of my dream, my blood goes cold as two eerie blue eyes slam to life in the foliage of the forest behind her.

"Run!" screams little boy Lucius. "Run!"

Again, Paige's screams, her terror leading me back into darkness.

And there it stays dark for so long that I think I've escaped my nightmare, until a little boy's voice takes the place of the woman's that'd been singing earlier – he drifts over the notes like a sparrow, sweet and high and pure, pouring his heart into every strange word. The song rolls over me, drawing both nostalgia and hesitance.

Lucius's face appears, but not like I know him – soft and round and smiling, his bronze eyes young and naïve. The pudginess of his cheeks is haloed with a silvery glow, perhaps cast by the light of the moon. With a black forest behind him, he crouches before my point of view. Though it seems bizarre to me, he looks utterly divine, like an otherworldly god.

"Shh," his voice whispers above the singing I suddenly realize is his. "Shh. Stop shivering, there's no reason to be afraid anymore. He –" Lucius's voice catches, and he swallows painfully. "He took what he wanted. He's gone now. Come on out, Belle. He loves you – family doesn't hurt family; he'd never hurt you."

The world goes black, and Lucius's eerie singing continues.

"Bryon?" Sugary and inquisitive, a girl's voice I've never heard before enters the blackness – but I feel as if I should know it, as if somehow, I do know it.

"Yes, Belle?" Lucius's voice sends a shiver down my spine – Bryon? She'd been talking to Lucius – why say Bryon?

"If family doesn't hurt family…"

Her voice trails off, and through the darkness, with a bloodcurdling scream accompanying it, a vision cuts through. Lucius's head is thrust back, his expression a candid blend of terror and absolute, complete, chill-inducing agony. An eruption of scarlet stains the toddler's white grabs, oozing around his fingers as he clutches at the sword through his torso. He slips down the jagged length of a silver blade impaled through his stomach with an earsplitting shriek, all the while sliding closer to a mammoth of a man draped in black with the bluest of eyes shimmering in the darkness. His tortured scream is the sort that haunts nightmares.

The girl's last words seem to hang in the air.

"Then why did my father hurt you?"

"Oh, please," Lucius purrs, strutting slowly into the center of the room, like a tomcat taking the stage. "I see what you're doing, dearie. Good scene, but the play's over now, you can come out of your costume."

His heart receiving a sudden splutter of panic, Emilio shrinks into the shadowed alcove in the wall where the kitchen doors swing slowly from side to side, the light from beyond them causing a beautiful flash of yellow to play over the floor. Curling one hand over his shoulder to grasp the hilt of one of his swords, he curses the vulnerability his disguise as a servant provided him, and instead tugged a knife from his boot. Holding it uncertainly, he watches the monster approach the dead little girl in utter silence.

"Going to play coy, are we?" Lucius chuckles, sidling lazily towards the body. "Darling, two can play at that game, but only one can be convincing. A clue: it's not you."

Emilio's eyes flick from the demon's pale face to the corpse and where it sits, illuminated by a single tear of moonlight dripping through the window. Madness in the dealer of insanity would not be an odd thing for him to accept, but this doesn't feel like madness.

"Oh, come on out." He chuckles boredly, fishing a deck of cards from his pocket to play with absentmindedly, black tongue flicking along his lips. "The sooner you do, the sooner you and I can get along with our little games. Remember our games, Belle? The fun we had? Do you want some more?"

Though his better judgment says otherwise, Emilio begins to ponder whether the demon truly had misplaced a few of his marbles.

"I know you're scared," the demon whispers susurrusly, voice strained with his mad eagerness. Sinking into a crouch before the dead body, he grins patronizingly at it. "And you've got every right to be – being born as something and reborn as something else isn't a walk in the park." His smile turns bitterer. "Trust me. I know. But you've just lost your virginity, darling. Once it happens, it's going to happen again, and you should learn to defend yourself. Good looks don't last forever."

No words echo around, physically or mentally, as best Emilio can tell – but the silence feels different this time, pressing against him, living, conscious, breathing around him. He toys with his blade uncertainly, not knowing what he should stab.

"Well, at least my father didn't cut my head off." Lucius sighs, rising from his crouch and turning his back, fanning the cards in his hand. "I suppose this means that you and I are rivals, dearest. The god and the devil – that's always the way these things play out, isn't it?" He half-cocks his head back to the corpse, and Emilio's blood runs cold. "Drop the act, Belle. Pretending to be something you're not is immature."

Emilio's blood runs cold as the dead body begins to quiver.

It spasms wildly without a head, that stump flailing in the air, losing the stiff quality it'd had earlier. It's as if something is writhing around inside its belly, waiting to be born, shivering and jiggling and trying to burst from its womb. His mouth drops open as, along its spine, spikes suddenly jab – what startles him even more is that they're not truly spikes. They're the same sort of sharp scales that she has along her back, along her neck, and now, they're piercing through her hide.

The sound of ripping flesh is quickly followed by a pungent stench in the air, like rotting meat. Coughing slightly, Emilio cups his hand around his nose, watching as another creature emerges from the belly of the old, like a reptile shedding its skin. Hunks of fat and muscle still cling to the spine scales, impaled along their calico barbs.

"Greetings." Lucius curtseys before the hellbeast crouched before him, its body draped in the blackest of shadows as a cloud crosses the moon's path. "Glad to finally meet you."

Fast as a strike of lightning, the creature darts forward, causing Emilio's heart to rattle in his chest. His fingers fumble around his knife, and a sense of absolute primal terror stamps out his logical thoughts as the creature coils around something.

Emilio's stomach lurches as the creature tosses the decapitated head up into the air. Those empty, jewel-bright eyes glitter as the head twists, falling down. It falls squarely in the mouth of the waiting creature below.

As its throat bobs and carries those beautiful eyes down its gullet, Emilio realizes the morbid horror of what he'd just witnessed.

I'm drowning in the whispers. They're all around me, their words like snake tongues flickering in my ears, tickling, hurting, snapping with poisonous teeth. Accusing, wailing, sobbing, hissing, insulting, they whirl around me with the chaos and disorder of a tornado. But abruptly, as if interrupted, they pause, and suddenly, the black turns an unearthly white. Two bronze eyes stare at me in the distance, the only other splash of color a pair of pure black wings.

It's a voice like an icy bark, gruff, terrible – a cold voice like an axehead being dragged over cement, grating in my ears. Heartbreak sings in its frigid, defeated words.

"YOU HAVE FAILED."

"Belle…?" Emilio whispers uncertainly as the cloud passes the moon, bathing the creature perched eerily on the back of an empty chair in silvery light.

Its arched neck twitches, and slowly, slowly, ever so slowly, it opens its huge, terrifying eyes, fixing their dead, cold gaze onto him as her neck stiffens and erects, her tail fluttering despondently in a breeze. Slowly, those eyes blink, and their glowing, spectral beauty is accompanied by a pure white smile bristling with ivory fangs.

Call me Theobella.

Theobella.

I'm so very, very excited.

One by one, puzzle pieces are fitting together. You might want to either start rereading dream scenes or use those brilliant memories of yours.

POLL: What is the likelihood of good old Lucius's name truly being Lucius? His mother more likely than not suffered from an unwanted pregnancy, and what sort of mother names their child after the one to have raped them?

Ciao,

~wolfluvermh