Cal, on top, struggled to subdue his father, who despite his awkward position in the fray, appeared to have gained superhuman strength from his pain and rage. In the shadow of the garden, with darkness and mud dripping from their limbs, they really did resemble two fighting birds.
Sometimes they turn on each other, she thought, eyes wide with horror.
“Damn you—” Nathaniel dug his fingers into Cal’s face, twisting, drawing ragged ribbons of blood that made his son cry out hoarsely. “You’re no son of mine—the blood runs thin in you, too—you’re weak—weaklike your mother—”
Nadine struggled to one knee, favoring her wounded one, and grabbed another animal statuette. She watched as Cal’s hand tightened around his father’s hairy wrist, trying to force him to relinquish the pistol that he was attempting to aim at his bare chest.
“You can’t even follow your own fucking rules,” Cal snarled. “Fucktradition.”
“Tradition.” Nathaniel’s voice was high and shrill with manic glee as he slowly regained the upper hand. “Yes.Tradition. Did you know, Caledon Cullraven used to drink the blood of his kills? He thought it would make him live forever. And so he has—he lives in this house—in this statue—in this very garden—undying . . .forever.”
Remembering Ben’s sinister words to her in the woods, Nadine found herself gripping her own hand.Tradition, she thought sickly. The image of a young Ben poring over that book like an avid pupil as his father watched, coaching the exercise, offering words of depravity, popped into her mind and would not be shaken.
“His sparrows watered these flowers,” Nathaniel said. “Yours will, too. In blood and cinders—”
The pistol went off with a deafening report. Nadine jumped, heart in her throat, but Cal was had managed to shove at his father’s arm, causing the bullet to fly wide.
“It still fires! How’sthatfor tradition?” His fingers squeezed the trigger again and Nadine screamed as she felt the bullet ricochet off the bronze sculpture she was holding, throwing it back against her chest like a battering ram, hard enough to bruise. “—tonight, a deer willroast—”
Cal’s hand closed over the fallen sparrow statue. He brought it up, snapping his father’s head back and causing a few teeth to fly loose.
It stunned him, but Cal did not give him chance to recover. There was a meaty thud as he brought it down again. And then again. Over and over, until the bronze was red and glistening, flecked with pieces of flesh and hair, and his father had collapsed in a halo of his own blood, surrounded by the silent, unseeing statues of the animals, and the blue-black shadows of the hellebore.
Watered by blood, Nadine thought, giving a single dry heave at the sight.
For years, they had grown from the buried flesh and bones of Jesamyn Cullraven.
Now, they would feed on their old Master.
Cal dropped the statue with a clang.
His hair was mussed, thick with leaves and blood. A stray lock had fallen into his eye. She saw his body tense when she slinked forward, arms folded as she came to stand beside him.
“Now you see.” His voice was rough from exertion. “Now you see what we really are.”
Every part of him seemed to bristle with tension. She might have thought it was fear, if she hadn’t known better—if she wasn’t already familiar with that rise and fall of his chest, and the sudden darkness in his eyes. It was hard to tell how much of his family’s madness had pooled down to him, or how deeply the roots of the doctrines had permeated to poison his heart and mind with their promises, but she had seen him kill twice tonight.
And she knew it excited him.
Nadine swallowed hard and put the tips of her fingers to the small of his back. She saw his hand flex and then relax as she laid her palm flat, just a few inches above his waistband.
Even in the darkness, she could see that he was hard.
“I wonder,” he said, in his usual affected tones, “if this is how the late citizens of Rome felt, watching the empire fall at last. As if they had watched the demise of a once unstoppable god.”
“Your father wasn’t unstoppable,” Nadine pointed out, redundantly. “He was crazy.”
“If that’s the case, then it was a shared madness, Nadine. I still half-believe in it myself.”
“In the sparrows? Or the killing?”
“You heard my father. It was a fairytale. A dark one, perhaps, but a fairytale nonetheless. I had convinced myself that if I somehow found a willing sparrow of my own—one whochoseme—the past would rewrite itself. But I suppose that’s the difference between fairytales and delusion, isn’t it? Delusion doesn’t have to follow logic.”
Cal turned from his father’s body to face her, his head tilted at a sharp, observant angle.
“I suppose you’ll try to leave now. That’s the way of a sparrow, after all. To refuse.”
Her heart knocked against her ribs. The impulse to beg rose to her lips, sharp and sour—but she was afraid that any assurances he gave her now would be staunched by the cruelty of his bloodlust. “What are you going to do with him?” she asked instead.
