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Cardinal Companion (14) : In the dismal whites and blues and greys of winter, the bright red splash of a cardinal is a welcome difference. It’s not uncommon to see birds out and about, and it’s easy to spot these especially after a fresh snow. Wild birds typically mind their own business and don’t really care about you–except, this one does.

An unusually curious cardinal finds you the subject of interest in its day, and oddly enough–it feels familiar to you. You can’t explain it, but the moment your eyes land on it, it feels like coming face to face with someone dear to you. The cardinal isn’t afraid of you and feels comfortable enough to approach you, or maybe even land on you. Perhaps it’s even brought you some small gift. The more time you spend with it, the more you pick up on its unique habits, which seem to have an uncanny resemblance to someone you’ve lost. Sometimes the cardinal even smells of them, or has similar traits.

The cardinal doesn’t ever stay for long but when it leaves there is an undeniable feeling that someone very important to you has paid you a visit.

CW: implications of offscreen religious abuse & stalking, very much onscreen CUTE HOLIDAY ANIMAL MURDER.

Only slightly over a year ago, Cryptomelane had first met Sonora of Ida in the exact alley in which he found himself tonight, between a seedy-looking bar and some indistinct building that, as far as he could tell, appeared disused.

Much as he’d done that evening, Cryptomelane had lain in wait tonight. From the disused building’s roof and the cover of shadows that it provided, he had watched people slinking through the alley and waiting for someone to appear who blatantly did not deserve the privilege of keeping their own soul. Anyone who passed him by without getting starseeded still donated some energy toward his quota, never enough that any of them would have noticed, but enough that the cumulative contributions added up.

After some time, the ideal victim had finally presented himself: an older man, tall and stately, with his salt-and-pepper hair slicked back, a dignified mien, and the telltale collar of a Catholic priest visible beneath his unexceptional winter coat.

A quick breath to ready himself—to steady his nerves and prevent any unnecessary mistakes on his own part—Cryptomelane pounced. As he leapt from the roof, he swung his flail at the off-duty priest. The jack-o-lantern ball whanged into the man’s jaw and knocked him back, but Cryptomelane caught the priest before he could finish falling. Specifically, he thrust a grasping hand inside of Father What’s-His-Name, which delayed the man’s collision with the ground so Cryptomelane could more easily obtain the prize he truly wanted. A warm rush of power accompanied this action, as it always did. The sensation of literally holding someone’s life in his hand—of closing his fingers around all possible future lives they might have had—never managed to lose its luster.

Had anyone (Sonora, mostly) been there to impatiently tap her foot and press him on the matter, Cryptomelane couldn’t have given a satisfactory reason why tonight’s Father so thoroughly deserved Cryptomelane’s hand clawing into his chest, squeezing his starseed until he knew the priest had hurt, then finally removing the crystalline soul container in question. No evidence, true, yet Cryptomelane had felt certain of his choices. He might have begrudgingly yielded the starseed to Sonora specifically, but only out of personal affection for the starry-eyed Knight of Ida and her endearing, if fundamentally unrealistic, hope that she could make the world a better place by insistently refusing to enact violence on anybody else.

Still, Sonora’s disappointment could not wound him if she didn’t know that he’d done anything to earn such. The car Cryptomelane saw lurking while he skulked out of the alley, on the other hand……

For months now, Cryptomelane had—both powered up as he was now and, far more often, powered down as Preston—seen cars that had, in one way or another, strongly resembled Brother Horace’s beloved 1962 Bentley R-Type Continental. Never had he snagged such a direct and up-close view of one, however. They’d always been at the periphery of his vision: a flash of pristine white passing by him as Preston walked from his bus stop to the university campus. A long-nosed coupe lying in wait around the corner from the campus gym, close enough for Preston to see its shape but not so close that he could discern anything else of note about its details. A Bentley sitting at a red light long enough for Cryptomelane to take in its general shape from whatever rooftop he’d occupied, but rushing off before he could discern more than the symbol on its tail that marked it as a Bentley.

This time, however, Cryptomelane got a perfect look at the offending vehicle. Pristine white like Brother Horace painstakingly kept his car, despite all the winter grime and snow-melting salt that currently cluttered Destiny City’s streets. As he emerged into the streetlamp’s halo of light, Cryptomelane traced his eyes over the still-familiar curves and lines of the R-Type Continental’s long nose, the dips and grooves in the metal casing, the almost comically small rearview mirrors that rested nowhere near the windows, where they might have been useful to anybody driving, but closer to the place where the coupe’s body-casing covered the wheels. Crouching beside the currently inert headlights, Cryptomelane wondered if they’d been replaced recently and, if so, had the car’s owner put LED bulbs in place of what a vehicle like this had actually been built to handle.

Not that Cryptomelane himself had any true experience with things like that. He had taken driver’s education and gotten himself a license during his first undergraduate semester at DCU, but only because it had felt like a necessary series of first steps toward what he’d planned to do. What he had eventually accomplished: legally severing himself from the flock and Brother Horace, and most importantly, obtaining the order of protection that meant his so-called “brother” could not come near him without risk of penalty.

However, even with the salary Cryptomelane received from the Negaverse and how much stress it eased in his life—even with the pay increase he’d received upon his promotion to Captain—buying a car of his own felt too far-off a possibility to be worth considering. True, he could have started saving for a purchase such as that. Or, as he had done consistently, he could have put his Negaverse paychecks toward more immediately helpful matters that improved his quality of life more tangibly than a car would have done. Things like more reliably buying enough food for any given week, rather than buying whatever he could afford and getting creative about how he made it last.

Tilting his head, he squinted at the headlights, scrutinized them even though he knew that doing so wouldn’t mean much of anything. Without electricity actively coursing through the bulb, he couldn’t easily tell a normal light from an LED one. As he gave up and pushed himself up to his feet, though, he hoped that whoever owned this car had the decency not to install LED bulbs in headlights that hadn’t been built for them. The ways that normal headlights reflected would make the already-quite-bright LED bulbs burn like the sun must have done before Icarus’s eyes, distracting him from noticing as the heat melted the wax from his painstakingly crafted wings.

Again, Preston-Cryptomelane had no practical experience with this himself. When he’d gotten his license ten years ago and had needed to practice driving at night, LED bulbs hadn’t been nearly as common on the roads as they’d apparently become of late. He had read about the shifting trends, though, and as he dusted himself off, Cryptomelane hoped that whoever owned this car had more respect for other drivers than the people who’d installed LED bulbs where they hadn’t belonged and, in so doing, pushed others into accidents that could have been avoided.

…………Eugh.

Cryptomelane sighed, catching himself in the third round of thinking something like that. “The car’s owner.” “Whoever owned this car”—he mentally whipped his own back for thinking in such abstractions when he knew that he all too likely knew exactly who owned this car.

True enough, Bentley had more class and elegance than printing a date of manufacture on their cars in giant red letters as if marking up an undergraduate student’s poorly written essay. But everything about the hood, the body-casing, the windshield, and the pathetically insulting rearview mirrors—it was all exactly as he remembered it. Only the tires and the rims differed from what Cryptomelane recalled, and even if that had not made perfect sense—driving a car at all eventually made replacing those pieces unavoidable—only so many white R-Type Continentals existed in the entire world, much less in the specific vicinity of Destiny City, Virginia, United States. The likelihood of this car belonging to anybody else but Brother Horace felt so infinitesimally small that it hardly merited consideration.

As Cryptomelane started toward the Bentley’s tail—he could check the license plate, give himself something more definitive to latch onto—something red rushed across his path. A fluttering sound came with it, the rustling of wings and feathers, followed by a not-entirely-inconsiderable weight plopping itself onto his shoulder. His stomach turned as the scent of Brother Horace’s favorite incense assaulted his nostrils. Grimacing, Cryptomelane waved a hand in front of his nose as though that could banish the offending stench……but there wasn’t any smoke for him to sweep aside, nor any immediately apparent source for him to lash out at.

Breathing through his mouth helped somewhat, he supposed. At least the reek of incense felt less intense this way. Although long-buried memories still scratched at the door in the back of his mind, mewling to be allowed inside, Cryptomelane’s thoughts did not wander quite so easily to the way his alleged brother used to swing the chapel’s gilded censers in slow, heavy motions. When Cryptomelane felt besieged by the thought of how watching Brother Horace with his censers had often made Preston feel that he’d fallen to the bottom of a pitch-black pit, that his so-called brother now stood above him with a pendulum that marked his looming death sentence.

Beneath his ear, on the shoulder where <******** something had landed, there came the sound of delicate metal and perhaps gemstones tinkling against themselves. As Cryptomelane nudged his glasses up and massaged the bridge of his nose, that quasi-song like klink-dink-rrrink grew further away. He was digging his thumb and index knuckle hard into his own upper lateral cartilage when he heard the delicate metal (give or take some gemstones) clatter into the pavement. Dragging his hand off his face, Cryptomelane rolled his eyes. Curiosity moved him to bow his head and look at what had fallen, but the part of his mind that considered himself A Proper Adult didn’t enjoy allowing him to do so.

In a heap on the ground there lay a rosary. Even from up here (all five feet and ten inches of his height), even with the chain obviously so much longer than most normal rosaries, Cryptomelane couldn’t mistake it for anything else.

Small black beads shone beneath the streetlamp’s light, each of them delicately, no doubt painstakingly carved in ways that Cryptomelane couldn’t quite discern up here. After every ten black beads sat a larger one, thirteen in total, each a similar-but-slightly-different mix of pale jade-adjacent green, very fine and equally bright teal, white or only slightly off, a greenish-blue so dark that it was nearly black, and/or an earthy shade of brown (sometimes pale but sometimes not). Each of the larger beads had been engraved with a shape Cryptomelane recognized instantly: a radiant heart with a crown of fire, stabbed through with a sword and encircled by a garland of thorns and roses, the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

A fourteenth bead of the same stone—amazonite, Cryptomelane distantly recognized—sat at the bottom of the lengthy string of beads. As Cryptomelane crouched down to pick it up, he found himself staring at, all too predictably, a portrait of the Virgin Mother herself. He scoffed, but……well, Christians did consider it the season, he supposed. Beneath that portrait sat another amazonite bead engraved with the Virgin’s Immaculate heart, then three of the little black beads (with them closer to him now, he realized they’d been carved in the shape of roses), one final Immaculate Heart bead (bringing the count of amazonite pieces up to sixteen), and then, a silver crucifix. The last matched perfectly with the delicate silver chain that peaked through between the beads.

As Cryptomelane scrutinized the rosary—which really was heinously long, he thought; ten decades on a rosary would have been more than sufficient, never mind thirteen—the weight that had settled on his shoulder departed. Wings fluttered once more, but they didn’t travel far. When he looked up, he found himself blinking at a cardinal, flapping before him as if treading water, looking more pleased with itself than it deserved.

“Leave,” Cryptomelane snapped as he stood up, his voice colder than the air around them and twice as harsh.

Although it seemed cleverer than a typical cardinal, the bird did not heed his warning. Instead, it followed Cryptomelane around to the Bentley’s tail, watching him as if it expected thanks or at least acknowledgement of the “gift” it had bestowed on him. Transfixed by his purpose, Cryptomelane ignored the bird as much as he could manage. He steeled his nerves and looked down at the license plate.

A chill burst within his chest, rushing out through his veins and muscles. He knew that collection of letters and numbers. Sure enough, Brother Horace owned this Bentley. If it had been the one Preston-Cryptomelane had seen throughout Destiny City over the past several weeks—months even; he’d seen the first long-nosed coupe at the corner of his vision toward the end of springtime—then Preston’s so-called brother had been coming around for a while now. Always in high-traffic public places, where he would’ve had plausible deniability to shield him from any potential accusations of violating Preston’s order of protection.

Even now, Brother Horace would have been quite insulated, had he actually been here. For one thing, he knew that Preston didn’t much go out to bars (the last time he had, it had been the Club Biolumina opening, which had been a strictly professional engagement and not an experience he yearned to repeat). For another, the magical protections of Cryptomelane’s powered identity meant that Brother Horace wouldn’t have recognized his little brother in the Negaverse Captain. All up, Brother Horace couldn’t have been in Destiny City for Preston’s sake this time, and yet……

Trilling birdsong crashed into Cryptomelane’s ears, shattering his ability to finish that thought. Perching on one of the Bentley’s taillights, the cardinal puffed up its chest and preened. For a moment, it stared up at him, its black eyes all aglow with anticipation. Then, it resumed its singing. Distantly, Cryptomelane thought he heard the tune of “Silent Night” coming together in the notes the cardinal warbled out at him.

The song abruptly dropped into a squawk as his free hand clenched around the cardinal’s body.

It struggled valiantly against his hold, but Cryptomelane had a Captain’s enhanced strength on his side. He didn’t particularly relish in this moment. Later, he expected he’d feel disgusted with himself for doing this at all. Even among the Negaverse’s ranks, who honestly bothered expending so much deliberate energy to strangle a cardinal for the crime of existing and reminding them of their alleged brother? But at the same time—

“I told. you,” he snarled, crushing his thumb down, down, down into the offender’s tiny windpipe, “to leave!”

Teeth grinding like they were huddling together for shelter from the cold, Cryptomelane clutched onto the stupid bird. Lips and arms and shoulders trembling with tension, he felt its bones give way beneath his grip. Insides burning electric with too many emotions that he couldn’t name, all tidal wave smashing into him and threatening to drown him where he stood, he kept his hold tightly clenched until the cardinal gave up and just stopped moving.

Once it was dead, he tossed its corpse into gutter where it belonged.


Already, shame bubbled up in Cryptomelane’s chest, a cauldron of nausea that said he probably shouldn’t have done this, that no one else in the Negaverse would’ve considered it acceptable behavior and they would have been rightfully disgusted with him.

He deserved that. Any judgment he would have attracted for his actions tonight, he would have earned it. And he deserved to feel this way, he knew perfectly well. The medals he wore on his jacket jingled as he trudged back to the sidewalk. The glint of streetlight on their metal surfaces seemed, to Cryptomelane, a reminder that an officer of the Negaverse was meant to be above such petty lashing out as what he’d just done. He was supposed to be better than this, supposed to be more in control of his emotions—

Still in his jacket pocket rather than his subspace, the priest’s starseed felt like a ten-ton weight. Nothing had actually changed it. But shifting the right way reminded Cryptomelane of its presence, and the hand with which he’d pulled it wriggled into his pocket of its own volition.

For a moment, Cryptomelane considered the crystalline thing that glittered before him. Saving it for later would have been the wiser choice, he realized. Starseeds contained such power, such potential. Wasting them was even worse a decision (by Negaverse standards) than surrendering them to Sonora’s care as thanks for her protection.

Still, Cryptomelane’s fingers brought the starseed to his lips. His breath hitched and his heart fluttered as his teeth crunched into it. Chewing felt like such an automatic process, something over which he lacked complete control. But even so, he did it—and a warm rush of relief surged into the frozen void that his actions with the cardinal had left inside his chest.

With the starseed’s jolt of power racing through him, Cryptomelane’s hand found its way into his subspace. His fingers curled around something else: a knitting needle, strong and thick, which had recently been used to make a scarf for Lucette, a longer-lasting gift than the box of tiny pastries Preston had made for her.

Before he realized what he was doing, Cryptomelane had jabbed the needle into all four of the Bentley’s tires. He stabbed each of them over, and over, and over again, letting the air rush out and desperately hoping that Brother Horace would be gone so long, the rims got damaged or even stolen.

Whatever happened, though, Cryptomelane wouldn’t be around to watch.

Fingers clutching the rosary so tightly, the beads dug into his flesh, he teleported to the safety and protection of Negaspace. The warmth and power that the starseed had given him remained, raging through his veins with a sense that everything would be fine and that he would destroy anything that threatened to change that……but Cryptomelane couldn’t let himself believe in that idea. Not until he materialized in the safest place he knew. Not until he stared up at the castle above him and the dark city below.

wc: 3,012.