Winterly (Dark Creatures Book 1), стр. 99
Chapter Forty-Seven
Arcanum Arcanorum
The daylight was nigh spent from the windows, and the hour Emma had given herself had all too quickly flown away. Her driver would be looking for her; the master himself would soon be looking for her.
Emma stared hard into Ana’s anemic eyes; they were uncanny, to be sure, but they were not half as frightening as Markus’s vampyre eyes. Whatever Ana was, she wasn’t a vampyre. “I haven’t time for nonsense, I know very well who and what I am. Tell me, Ana, what manner of beast are you?”
“I believe I answered that already—I am a watcher.”
“A watcher of vampyres?”
“My kind are scholars and scribes. When necessary, we are protectors.” Ana cast another leery glance at the fallen darkness lying at the fringe of lamplight beyond the glazing. Indeed, all three of the Strange sisters appeared most watchful tonight…and restless. Ana went on. “We too are an immortal race—”
“Ahh, then you are vampyres!” Emma clapped her hands over her mouth.
“Keep your voice down!” Mina hissed, having materialized at Emma’s ear without warning. She moved to stand beside Ana, her eyes tawny with choler. “I am no accursed vampyre, I do not siphon from the veins of the living like a damned wyrm!” Another furtive glance at the window. “Not like Markus and certainly nothing like that fiend Gabriel.”
“So you are none of you fallen angels?”
The sisters were evidently discountenanced by her question. “Markus told you?”
Emma answered with a smug grin and a nod.
“No, we did not fall from heaven,” said Ana. “My sisters and I are something else entirely. But, like you, we descend from that race—the Fallen.”
“Me?” Emma was aghast. “But I am nothing like you!”
Ana shook her head. “No, you are nothing like us, but you are not altogether human either.”
“The Fallen,” said Mina, “were watchers before they fell. Vigiles Angeli—watchers from the sky. But the Lord of Death ceased to watch from his throne in the north and began to interfere.”
“For love, he told me. He fell for love.” Without hesitation, Emma had sprung to Markus’s defense. Like, she thought belatedly, a wilting rose succoring the very worm feeding from her blighted stem. “You are only affirming his veracity, you know.”
“Love?” Mina gave a snort. “God does not punish love, Emma.”
Emma wanted to believe that, for she herself hoped not to be punished for her love of him, and yet how could she defend Markus against such sound doctrinal reasoning.
“What my sister means to say,” said Ana, “is that he succumbed to self-love; to pride. You are to understand that not all angels were created alike. Some wield greater power than others and, in some cases, with that endowment of power comes the desire for more. It is universally acknowledged that the stronger the angel, the easier he is to corrupt, and the greater his susceptibility to mortal appetites. Those that fell succumbed to earthly decadence because they were covetous of man.
“They became ruled by the same ravening mortal need for flesh and power, and for that God cast his children from heaven for their trespasses and damned them to that same realm they had so desired to occupy and dominate.”
“For what reason was Markus disgraced if not for love?”
“For interfering in a life he was charged only to watch.”
The more these watchers disclosed the more questions they evoked. Emma pulled her watch from her dress. The feeling of dread gnawed all the more insistently the longer she tarried and the deeper the darkness fell upon the streets without. But she could not bring herself to leave, not now that Ana appeared ready to expound everything.
“When they were cast out of heaven,” Ana went on, “they forged for themselves a corrupted army. From blood and violence, their legion propagated. Your sister’s friend, Victoria, is one such underling—sired by blood and death. Markus’s lover and his daughter.”
Emma’s hands flew to her mouth to stifle the cry of disgust that escaped her. “No!”
“He nourished her from his very veins and from his blood and venom his child was reborn to the night a new creature: a vampyre.”
His lover and his daughter?! Emma felt her skull rending in protest. And his sister? This was all too much. “You’re lying!”
“Why should we lie?” Mina threw her a disgusted look. “At great risk to ourselves we came here tonight to warn you.” She then turned to Ana. “I told you, we should have left her alone to her folly.”
Emma’s fingers were like ice as she slipped them around Ana’s wrist. “What do they want with me and Milli?”
“For the same ignoble reasons any parasite desires a host. They lust for mortal blood.”
Well she knew that already, didn’t she? He’d admitted as much, and then last night…
“It is the source of their immortality and strength,” said Ana. “But that is not all. Your angel of Death was far more than merely just a watcher before his downfall. You are perilously out of your depth, Emma; you have allowed into your bed a Cardinal Lord.”
“A Cardinal?”
Ana nodded. “There were once four of them—the gods of the four winds; the lords of the cardinal points. All of them watchers. In your Book of Revelation they are the four horsemen of the apocalypse: War, Famine, Death, and Pestilence.”
Mina folded her arms over her chest. “Pestilence is the worst of them.”
Emma glanced bemusedly between the sisters.
“He is known to you as Gabriel,” Ana clarified.
“But it is Death,” said Mina with rancor, “the blood eater, who will find you wheresoever you run because your blood nourishes his flesh.”
“Which is why—” Mina turned her glare on her sister “—we should leave now, we have stayed too long