The Discarded

Alone Chapter 18 - 1

Sunday April 5th 2015

The wood breathed into quiet life as her presence filled the air. An ethereal thing as profound as it was nebulous. Creaks and groans that had been dead wood settling in the sun sounded like the greeting sounds of an old friend.

She was an avatar of life. People live in a dead world of stone, wood, and superficial realities. Elizabeth walked through a world of breathtaking life. Plants flushed with life, graced with her abundant energy, dead wood told tales of the trees they'd been, stone spoke of old mountains and lost times.

Cesare never heard the words, they weren't for a thing of bitter darkness like him. Steeped in cruelty and naked malice, he'd never know the light she breathed into the world, but he could still feel it. The darkness knows the touch of the sun; death is intimately familiar with life. A burn along the edge of the senses, a threat in the air, a grace that savaged shadow.

Cesare was a survivor forged in death and cold. Jagged edges and shattered souled, he didn't have a place in the sun with her. She wasn't whole by any measure, but she'd never know the depths to the poison in his soul. He lusted for her warmth as much as he did her body.

Maybe it was best she'd never look at him the way he did her. Getting close to him meant seeing the cancerous thing he called a heart. There was no way a person like her could look at his diseased soul and feel anything but disgust. No, better she kept her distance and stayed a friend

He felt that life-giving aura burn against the dark umbra of his soul. May all the old gods forgive him, he yearned to be burned by her as much as he thirsted for her wet heat. She was the flame, and no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't help dancing around it, waiting for it to set his wings on fire.

"What are you working on?" Elizabeth's quiet words were a cool breeze soothing the agony tipped edges of his spirit.

His hands remained steady on the glass spheres he was working on. As big as the tip of his thumb, they were perfectly spherical with only a small hole in the top. Fitted into a special clamp, he slowly filled the beads with a clear solution piped through a labyrinth of glass tubing and beakers.

"Sodium hydroxide was a good start, but I need something lethal for Alexandra. More corrosive, meaner, deadlier, and that means special," Cesare said, turning off the drip. Dabbing the sphere with gray putty, he sealed it up.

"Piranha Acid." The words were description enough, a devouring never ending hunger. "Three parts sulfuric acid, one part hydrogen peroxide." The bead he was working on followed its brother into a towel lined bowl of clear filled glass spheres. "I'll stagger the ammunition in her weapons so every fourth one's filled with hydrogen peroxide."

Uneasily, Elizabeth watched the casual way he handled the deadly liquid. "The vampires stronger than you give her credit for, this might be for nothing."

"And if she isn't, I get to watch something beautiful die, butchered by a bug without the decency to enjoy the kill."

"You love her?" It was neutral, all emotion stripped away, the words barren and sterilized.

"You can't look on a tiger and not love it for the purity of its being." The soft words whispered into the air, soaked with feelings raw and primal. "Muscles rippling in every step, claws shaped perfectly for hooking prey, living in a world of meat. But it's more than its body that pulls at the heart. Untamed by civilization or compassion, an animal that takes what it wants without shame or guilt. In the world of the common, Alexandra's unique with a soul of shining, ebony madness." Cesare's mind slipped down into the unknowable darkness of his soul.

"She'll never love me, not as anything more than an advantage or a challenge." The hard truths swam before him, long and sinuous, gleaming with evil. "I'm useful, a tool in her crusade to bring Christianity to Primrose. A weapon against those that would see her fail. A safe harbor from her family that sees her as a weapon to throw into their never-ending war. I fill a need, like a good steak." His words dropped into the ghost of a whisper. "But once your full, you see the steak for what it is, dead flesh rotting on the plate."