A sparrow. One of the bronze statuettes from the garden pedestals.
His father raised a trembling hand to his skull, palpating the damage. His eye rolled helplessly in that direction, knocked partially loose in the damaged socket. “You—cunt—” he wheezed, shaking the gun as he staggered towards her, drunkenly and half-blind.
Cal shoved her aside again, forgetting about her wound in his haste to get her out of his father’s line of fire. She collidedwith the empty pedestal and screamed. The two both went tumbling to the ground, the plaster column missing her by mere inches. On her hands and knees, she crawled, grasping at the damp earth.
His father turned towards the sound, trying with both hands to correct his aim.
Cal lunged.
Pain lanced through his knee, bright and hot, as he landed on a stone. His father, trapped beneath him, hissed as the air left his lungs. Mud sucked greedily at their writhing bodies, creating a vacuum that made moving feel like swimming through syrup. He was taller but his father had more bulk and the rather dubious benefit of having nothing to lose.
“Damn you—” There was more pain, hot and fiery, as his father swiped at his face. Blood swept down his cheek in coursing rivulets, hot and steaming. “You’re no son of mine—the blood runs thin in you, too—you’re weak—weaklike your mother—”
A shape moved in the dark. Nadine again, clutching another animal statue to her chest.
Cal grappled with his father’s wrist as he attempted to force the gun away from his chest. “You can’t even follow your own fucking rules.Fucktradition.”
“Tradition.” His father laughed as he regained control, euphoric in his madness, shifting the pistol slowly in his direction. “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.”
(Wouldn’t that make for an amusing ghost story?)
“His sparrows watered these flowers. Yours will, too. In blood and cinders—”
The gun went off. Cal managed to shove his father’s hand away as the strength of his grip shifted to his fingers. “It still fires!” he crowed, as the bullet ricocheted off the bronze statue in Nadine’s trembling hands with a deafening clang. “How’sthatfor tradition?—tonight, a deer will roast—”
Cal’s hand closed over the sparrow statue that Nadine had thrown earlier. He smashed it into his father’s jaw, knocking loose teeth and skin. He paused, a heartbeat of shock before the pain set in—but Cal did not wait. Again and again, he brought the statue down, until the bronze was black with blood and pulp, and his father had sunken back into a lake of his own blood.
He dropped the statue with a clang. Blooded, after all. But by necessity, not by choice.
Nadine stood there, wide-eyed and shaking, still clutching the statue.
“Now you see,” he told her, panting. “Now you see what we really are.”
If she were wise, she would beat him over the head with that bronze casting and run off into town, never to return. He didn’t think he would stop her. No matter how prettily she ran—he would not become his father. She would leave him with her life.
Nadine braced herself visibly before stepping forward, reaching around him to touch his spine. Cal stiffened, arching involuntarily as her palm slid down the small of his back.
“I wonder,” he murmured, “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. He was crazy.”
“If that’s the case, then it was a shared madness, Nadine. I still half-believe it myself.”
“In the sparrows?” she asked, taking her hand away. “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.”
He took in her tangled hair and matted clothes.
“I suppose you’ll try to leave now. That’s the way of a sparrow, after all,” he said bitterly. “To refuse.”
Her eyes slid past him to his father. “What are you going to do with him?”
“Bury him, I suppose.”
“Beneath the hellebore?”
It was such aCullravensort of question that his laugh was torn from his throat like a thorny vine. Cal cupped her jaw, smoothing the flyaways back with his thumb. His fingers were still wet with his father’s blood and they left rusty streaks over her cheek with each pass.
