Every Star in the Sky Read online

  “So beautiful,” he whispers. His words are cursive and velvet. “I should make you my queen, daughter of Reya.”

  “Who are you?” I say, staring back at him without falter or fear.

  “Only everything you’ve ever desired, Jayrose Hart,” he whispers, his beautiful lips brushing against my cheek.

  I swing around him and thrust my blade through his back. I’m ready to die right then and there as the claw people screech in horror and vengeance, when I see a flash of silver.

  Then a big black horse.

  Then a man.

  “Take my hand,” Leon says, reaching out. I grab him and he pulls me up into the saddle single-handedly, and we gallop off into the night.

  I am too scared to speak, too exhausted to move.

  “Grab my waist or you’re going to fall off,” he says over his shoulder, and I see the intense silvery glint of his gaze.

  I ask no questions and wrap my arms around him.

  “Where are we going?” I manage after a few seconds.

  “Somewhere safe,” he yells back over the thunder, the heart-wrenching screeches of agony that grow ever smaller as we fade into the night.

  We are running through a straight pitch of forest, and it seems like the further his horse gallops, the more we disappear.

  We eventually come to a small stone building in the middle of the midnight wood. He helps me off of his massive black steed, and swings off easily himself.

  He takes his horse’s split reins and ties them together by the tips, before he lightly slaps the animal’s flank. “Home, Dante!”

  The horse flips around and gallops back into the shadows.

  Leon opens the door to the little stone building and gestures me inside. I’m too terrified of the outside world to not follow him. The door leads to a little one-room building, with a bed, a tattered rug, and some bookshelves.

  “Where the hell are we?”

  “Nowhere, yet,” Leon mutters, gently pulling on the upper spine of a book until there’s a click, and the bookshelves vanish into the walls to reveal a stairway.

  “Come.”

  I don’t question him as I follow him into the basement, and the shelves click back into place behind us. Before us is a hallway, lit only by torches on the stone wall.

  We walk in silence until we round a corner. Hundreds of men and a few women fill a sort of underground mess hall.

  Everyone turns to look at me, eyes filled with hope. I hear a few angry yells, a few cat calls, a few cheers. I don’t know what to think.

  “Jay? Welcome to the headquarters of the Nightingales.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  I shake my head, “Nightingales?”

  “Follow me,” Leon says, starting down the length of the mess hall without waiting for a response. I jog to catch up, swallowing uncomfortably as hundreds of sets of eyes look at me, judging every inch of me. Most of them are young men, no older than 30. I can’t imagine how Leon knew these people, how he found some sort of society headquarters under a stone shack in the middle of nowhere.

  I accidentally stumble over a man’s foot, and apologize profusely.

  Leon closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose, grabbing my hand-- the ugly one, now uncovered by makeup after the downpour washed it away-- in his.

  They are warm. His hands are definitely warm.

  I shudder.

  “Cold?”

  “Cold. Scared. Confused. Scared. And also scared. Why are they all looking at me like that?” I whisper over his shoulder.

  “Keep your voice down,” he mumbles, “Don’t worry about them yet.”

  “But I’m whispering.”

  “Loudest damn whisper I’ve ever heard.”

  I look down at my feet, where a pair of white, crystal-studded flats once were. Now there’s only a layer of congealed mud. I don’t even remember losing my shoes. I reach under my dress just enough to be convinced that the bluebird feather is still firmly pressed to my breast, despite being damp with rainwater, and I feel the garter underneath my dress to assure myself that my blade is still in its original sheath and still in my possession. I could lose neither.

  That’s when I feel my brain drop to my stomach.

  I stop in the middle of the pathway to the other side of the room.

  Leon looks back at me, a single brow raised, his lips pulled firm over his face.

  “M-my d-d-dog,” I say. I feel panic’s fingers begin to caress my shoulders seductively.

  “Safe. I promise.”

  “How do you know?” I choke back.

  Leon whistles and Bear runs up to me, nearly bowling me over with his fuzzy boulder of a body.

  “I missed you, buddy,” I say into his fur.

  Leon’s warm, sculpted features show no emotion. If I were to write a poem about him, I would compare him to one of those ancient Grecian sculptures my dad was always showing me in his art books. He looked more striking than Michelangelo’s David, his eyes more piercing than Van Gogh’s starry night sky.

  I realize that this man is beautiful, and that I want to touch him.

  I look away as my breath falters.

  Leon takes my injured hand again, very gently, as though he knows the trauma it has seen, as he leads me to the end of the mess hall. Nobody seems bothered by the fact that a dirty black dog is sniffing under their feet for scraps as he trots alongside me.

  We slip into the door at the end of the mess hall, which leads us to another hallway, littered with rooms with names carved into the doors on either side.

  “This is where most of us sleep,” Leon says. “But it’s not what you need to see.”

  The rooms must either be very large, or the Nightingales, whoever they are, must be very lenient with their personal space. I can’t imagine all of them fitting into rooms on the sides of the hallway. It can’t be long enough.

  Leon leads me down another stairway, though the darkness neither intensifies nor relents. For an underground facility, everything is very clean, organized, and well-lit.

  The room that greets me is the thing of nightmares, the thing of dreams.

  It is the size of a stable, separated into four quadrants by a set of dividers in the middle of the room. Each quadrant is labeled by a hanging wooden board with rough engraved lettering-- One, Two, Three, Four.

  “What is this place, Prince--”

  “Just Leon. Please skip the formality. Well, I’m sure you have an idea, don’t you? Tell me about what happened today.”

  “But you were there, you know. You… you saved me.”

  He shakes his head, “That, I didn’t. In fact, I likely made things worse for you. He would have saved you. Calico Exodus, the scourge of Avis.”

  “That was his name-- the man amongst all those… those… things?”

  Leon nods. “Exodus has been taking women left and right. For what, I don’t know. All I know is that the plague doesn’t affect women, but they’ve still been disappearing rapidly under reports of being carried away by a man with black eyes.”

  “So the plague… The crows… There’s a link?”

  “Miss Jay!” Dr. Rolphe scurries over to me. “You’re healing so well. Welcome to my little home away from home.”

  “Rolphe? What are you doing here?”

  He smiles, “Well, not to interrupt your little conversation, but I have been studying the bird carcasses of the previously living homo sapiens. Not to mention the Crow People, of course.”

  I wipe a hand over my eyes. “I don’t understand.”

  Rolphe starts mumbling something but Leon puts a finger over his lips to effectively silence the bumbling little man.

  “Calico Exodus is a son of Deno, the sun spirit. Or, at least, he has Deno’s blood within him. Many people think of Reya and Deno as people in form, but they’re not. They are great masses of energy. And when something in the world must happen, good or bad, those energy masses shudder and change the world. But something within those masses went awry the day the pl
ague burst into existence. At the very same moment this plague became something of reality, the two masses fought-- light and darkness, death and life. Neither side won. Instead, both masses created a human from within them. From within Deno’s mass came Calico Exodus. From within Reya’s came you, Jayrose Hart, along with four others. We have found the other four, and you are the last piece to the puzzle.”

  Forgetting where I am, I take a seat on the cold stone floor. These are lies. He is spewing out lies, a torrential fountain of lies, an erupting volcanic mouth of lies--

  He sits beside me. His body is warm, and his clothes soft, despite their dampness, against my icy skin.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “Rolphe told me everything. He said he knew it was you when he heard your voice.”

  I find myself struggling to breathe. “What the hell does my voice have to do with any of this?”

  “The five daughters of Reya each possess a particular domain. Kira is the daughter of knowledge. Lynn is the daughter of nature. Regan is the daughter of strength. Charlotte is the daughter of spirituality. Rose is the daughter of art.”

  “So my name is…”

  “Rose, yes.”

  “I’m the daughter of art?”

  “Art is broad, but it encompasses painting, singing, dancing, poetry, so on.”

  “I can’t dance.”

  A faint smile shows up on Leon’s face. “You don’t need to dance to save the world.”

  “But I do need to paint, sing, and write poetry. Got it.”

  “You mostly just need to kill things, actually. The power of your own personal talents is there for a reason, of course. The five of you encompass all that is good in the world. The reason… well, we don’t know that yet.”

  I shudder. “I’m not a good person, Leon.”

  “How so?”

  I can’t breathe. Am I supposed to tell him I tried to seduce his brother? Am I supposed to tell him I don’t know how to love other people? “I wore this… because I wanted to… I wanted to be desirable… So I could stay.”

  “But you knew you had to stay. Something told you that this was coming. Following your gut doesn’t make you a bad person. Quite the opposite.”

  “I can’t love. I don’t know how. I mean, I love my parents, and your sister, and Grace, but I’ve never really love-loved a person.”

  Leon’s nose wrinkles. “Romantically, you mean?”

  I nod.

  He just shrugs, “Maybe you’re just not interested in that kind of thing. That doesn’t make you a bad person. I saw you, when you pushed Grace back inside at the palace. That’s when I ran to grab Dante. I saw when you held her crying in the ballroom. I see the way you hold your dog. I saw you hug my sister. I saw the look on your face when you heard me play the piano.”

  “You’ve been watching me.”

  “Guilty. You fascinate me. How you can cry if a stranger waxes your legs, and on the same day kill a horde of monsters single-handedly-- with a little dagger, no less.”

  I cross my arms over my knees and look at the floor. “I’ve never heard anyone play piano the way you do.”

  “Music keeps the darkness away,” he whispers.

  I look up to him, but his silver eyes are distant. He is somewhere else entirely.

  Rolphe rushes over and kneels beside me. “Miss Rose, if I may see your dagger?”

  Leon nods, as though to assure me the dagger is safe in his hands.

  “Look away,” I mutter, dragging up my skirt and pulling the blade from the ring of lace. I hand it to Dr. Rolphe.

  He unsheathes it, eyes glimmering in fascination. He runs his thin fingers up and down the blade, tapping it and scratching it with his fingernails. This guy was freaking nuts.

  “I knew it!” He exclaims at last, racing off with the blade.

  “Where are you going?” I ask, horrified.

  I hear the sound of running water and some vigorous scrubbing, the sound of cloth on rough paint and metal. Eventually, the water is running, but the scrubbing is nearly silent. The water stops, and he hands the dagger back to me.

  The silvery hilt is now obviously rose-gold, and the blade, formerly black, is a stunning marbled white, metallic rainbow veins spreading along the dagger’s middle, resembling the texture of a leaf.

  “What the hell did you do to my dagger?” I yell, getting to my feet and readying a fist.

  Leon grabs me, “Stop it! It’s the same thing; look.”

  Rolphe, instead of showing fear, looks at me with partial curiosity as he hands the blade back. He’s right. It’s the same thing as before, just a different color.

  “Somebody painted over it. This is not an obsidian blade-- this is a rare shade of opal. And the rose gold… Whoever made it was quite clever indeed.”

  Leon releases me, spinning me around, his face close to mine. His silver eyes look like moonlight.

  “Who made this blade?”

  “A-a friend of mine. Evan Olson.”

  Leon shoves a hand in his dark hair, suddenly looking ill. “You’re kidding.”

  He starts pacing frantically around the room until he sets a clenched fist on the wall and leans against it.

  “L-Leon?”

  He releases the wall and turns to me. “When did he give this to you.”

  “A few days ago, but please, tell me what you know--”

  “Evan Olson has been dead for three years.”

  My heartbeat is a jagged line of emptiness.

  “He was one of the greatest soldiers I’ve ever known. He was a good friend of mine. He was always spending all of his time working on something, whittling wood, carving through stone… I didn’t know this is what he was working on. He grew… addicted. He never talked to anybody anymore after a while. He was too busy with whatever he was making. If anybody tried to come into his tent he would throw empty beer bottles at them. I… I didn’t know what to do anymore. But this… I never expected this.”

  He grabs my shoulders again. “Has he ever shown you any others?”

  “He wasn’t dead. I saw him. We held hands. He kissed me.”

  “Answer the question, dammit! Did he or did he not show you any other blades?”

  I shake my head.

  “We’re leaving,” he says to Dr. Rolphe as he whisks me out of the room, “Take good care of that dog!”

  “He’s not dead,” I whisper.

  Leon runs an angry hand through his hair. “Where did that bastard put the other blades? God dammit!” He takes a deep breath and turns to me. “We buried Evan in the cemetery. He is very much dead. I don’t know what you saw, but it wasn’t him.”

  I open my mouth to say something, but Leon talks again, “I’m going to get a small party of soldiers and we’re going to the cemetery, okay?”

  I grab his wrist before he can run off. “Who are the Nightingales?”

  “I can just tell you on the way--”

  “Tell me now,” I say, clenching his wrist tighter.

  He sighs, “In a way, we’re hunters. In a way, we’re villains. In a way, we’re saviors. For some time, Julian was very sick. Silas would study medicine books and bring him all sorts of poultices and foul-smelling drinks and nothing worked. He used to be so bright, joyful, and full of life, back when he was alive. But then, something went wrong. He died. Right in front of me. My mother scoured the kingdom looking for somebody who could bring him back… And that’s how I met Calico Exodus. He came to the palace and stood over Julian and started chanting, doing these weird things with his hands-- his dead body turned into a dove. Exodus kept working, but the more he worked, the worse Julian looked. He started to look like a person, but instead of arms and legs, he has these horrible onyx bones and claws. Black wings shoved out of his back and what skin was left bled. His face was still there, but his eyes were empty, his soul gone entirely. My mom begged Exodus to reverse what he had done. She’d rather her son be at peace and dead than hellishly miserable and barely alive. Supposedly Exodus t
ried to reverse the spell. He had brought dead people back to life before after morphing them into a living bird, and it was like nothing had changed. But this time it didn’t work. He reversed the spell, in a way, and we somehow ended up with the Julian we have now. Perpetually angry, dark, soulless, empty, bloodthirsty Julian.

  “My father wanted Exitus dead for putting a spell on his dead son and turning him into the monster he is today, so Calico Exodus fled. People say he turned evil, then. I don’t know how or why. But now he reanimates the victims of the plague into the crow people. Something changed where now the victims of the plague are birds automatically. There’s a great deal of speculation, but a lot of us believe that he can talk to birds-- summon them to him so that he can reanimate them as he forms his army.

  “The Nightingales are the resistance against Calico Exodus. Nobody in my family knows that I created The Nightingales, or that I helped build this barracks. If I told them, I know they would join me. They’d try to protect their quiet little brother. But I made the Nightingales to protect this kingdom, and to protect my family. I knew Rolphe was brilliant and could keep a secret, so I made him our main scientist. He researches the best ways to kill the crow people, what the plague is and how to stop it, why the victims turn into birds. All things I could never discover or understand myself.

  “How old do you think I am?” he asks.

  “What kind of game is this?” I snarl.

  “Answer me.”

  I shake my head, “Twenty.”

  “Yes. I used to join the soldiers in their trips to the slums of the city, for nights of getting dead wasted and having sex with whoever we found there.”

  I don’t want to hear any more, but I can’t look away, and I can’t keep his voice out of my ears.

  “We were both eighteen. I didn’t love her. I’ve never loved anybody, like you say you don’t, except for my son. He was the most precious thing I’ve ever seen. When he slept, he would wiggle his nose, and he always cried quietly, like he never wanted to be too loud. He was five days old when the plague took him and his mother. I don’t even remember her name any more, but I remember his. She named him Jacob. When I saw you by the piano, when I learned your name, I felt hope, the way he gave me hope for a brighter future for those short five days. When Anna was looking for brides for Elliot, I gave her another mission. Find someone different. Someone who strikes you in a weird way, who makes you feel something otherworldly, find someone you’ve never met cloaked in somebody else’s body because people like this girl I’m looking for don’t exist in anybody but themselves.