Still grieving the loss of Joslyn and the Sphinx Sabine, and craving revenge upon Beltran, his Vampire nemesis, Amedeo the Cruxim is destined to learn more about his past in the sequel to Karin Cox's critically acclaimed gothic paranormal romance Cruxim.
When he meets a female of his own kind, Skylar, who takes him to the hidden stronghold of Silvenhall Creche to learn Cruxim lore, the secrets revealed in the holy book of the Cruximus, and the lies told to him by his own kind, force Ame to question who he is really is, where his loyalties lie, and whether there is anything he desires more than vengeance.
“I highly recommend Cruxim to lovers of true gothic horror and paranormal genres. This story provides a fresh spin on old-world vampire lore. I will be stalking this author for the rest of this series and beyond!”
“I absolutely can't wait to read the next installment in this series, Creche. This, to me, is like the next Anne Rice series. There's a love story alongside some pretty gruesome and evil stuff. I like the contrast and the fact that both can live in harmony in a very well-written, character-driven novel. Bravo to the author, Ms. Karin Cox!”
“I loved how the author was able to bring what was usually mortal enemies and have them work together to resolve the conflicts the characters encounter.”
“Cruxim is filled with passion, revenge, action, and love all mixed together to form this story that is unlike any I've ever read. The ending had me in near in tears, but now I have to find out what fate lies ahead for Amedeo in the next book!”
“I fell in love with the Cruxim. Amedeo is like no other paranormal hero. He's not infallible. He bleeds, he grieves, he suffers in affairs of the heart and personal conscience. He must make choices that no man, or angel, should ever have to make. I recommend this debut novel by Karin Cox.”
“I thought the blend of paranormal and mythology brilliant. The grammar flawless. The prose, poetic. If I could give this book a higher rating, I would. It is simply the most intriguing, creative and original paranormal I've ever read.”
"A wonderfully new, and fresh novel of vampire lore. A dark world of a wide range of oddities. It’s a story that you must read to understand the complex array of characters, and the remarkable way that Ms Cox has woven this phenomenal world in which they exist in. Karin Cox is most definitely an author that I will and look forward to reading more of in the future.”
Check out this Huge Excerpt!!!
“Come.” The female Cruxim put out her hand to me, but I made no move to take it. I shrank away, as if her touch might scar me, even as some force greater than myself seemed to tug me toward her.
“Why should I follow you?”
She shrugged. “Why would you not?”
I passed my hand over my face, the sand scratching at the makings of a beard. That I felt it at all—that I felt
anything—hurt me. I wanted nothingness, to be as blank and empty and ephemeral
as a wave that might turn and roll far back out to sea, where the tortured
statue of my Sphinx love, Sabine, had yesterday plummeted to the ocean’s
depths. I half wished that instead of diving for her, I had flown at my enemy
Beltran, the Vampire orchestrator of all of my sorrows, and had plunged my
fangs into his neck. That I had ended it, and him, for good. Instead, once more
Beltran had beaten me. Once more, he had escaped me. Once more, he had
destroyed me.
“I don’t know you.” I vomited
saltwater into the sand, but when I looked up, she was still standing,
watching, her face a beautiful but indifferent mask.
“Leave me!” I flung one arm toward the
sea. “I do not wish to know you.” But the eyes I turned on her were as curious
as her own.
Her mouth quirked up a little at one
corner, and then she answered. “You may … one day. I already know you.”
“Stalking is not knowing. Being Cruxim
is not knowing.” I snorted. “You know nothing of me. You think you know me from
seeing me once, in a circus—on a
cross and in a cage. Why did you not come to poke and wonder at me then, like
all of the others?”
“Very well.” The grace of her stride,
as she turned away, highlighted the litheness of her body. Her hair swung like
silver silk over her shoulders, catching the sparkle off the ocean.
My grief craved her departure, longed
for loneliness, but the thought of having nothing and no one—not Sabine nor
Joslyn, nor this mysterious female with eyes that shone like a mirror—terrified
me.
Almost as much, it terrified me that
she might know me.
She was the only one of my own kind I
had ever seen, outside of my dead mother, my infant sister and her sullen
father, and Monsieur LeRay: the mortician I had watched from afar in Paris.
When I had approached him, brimming with questions, LeRay had simply hissed at
me, drawing his black cloak in tighter around his wings, and vanished. I had
followed, but he was quick and he did not wish to be found. We were solitary
creatures, so it seemed. But if so, why was she here?
I shook my head again. Was everything
I thought I knew about Cruxim a lie? Could she tell me why, after the
exultation of the boy’s blood, I was still here, alive, on a beach with human
blood still coursing through me.
“How?” I raised myself to a crouch and
shouted, “How do you know me?”
“Come,” she answered, turning back to
me and holding out one hand again, “and find out.”
Standing, I shook the sand and
shellgrit from my clothes and swiped at my face again with one salt-specked
hand. My hair was crusted stiff, my body sore from the long night on the beach.
My senses felt taut, crackling with exhaustion and loss. I wondered what I was
doing. Then again, what did I have to lose?
They were both gone: Joslyn and
Sabine. The two women I had loved, each differently, each equally, or at least
I thought, were lost to me. Beltran had left me nothing to live for but
revenge. A sharp, hopeless pain shot through me, far worse than the hunched
cramp of my shoulders.
I took a tentative, lurching step
toward the Cruxim on the beach.
She extended her hand further and
assessed me with a squint.
“You have been following me.” I
accused. “Haven’t you?”
“Yes.” The answer came too simply,
dismissing my accusation.
“Yet you did nothing!” Salt and sand
and sea foam spat out with each syllable. “You could have helped, could have
stopped them. You could have helped me save Joslyn … but you did nothing.”
“For what?” It was just a question
matter-of-factly stated, but its coldness formed a fist.
“For love.” I set my jaw, biting back
angrier words.
“Your
love.” She blinked and then turned her eyes away from me. “She was a
Vampire.”
“She was a human being ... once.”
“Yes. But you never were. And nor was
I.” Her gleaming gray eyes held a question. “Why does it matter to you so that she
was human?”
“She had her soul.” I sank to my knees
again and retched into the sand. “In a soulless world.”
Silence passed between us, but
thoughts swarmed thick in my head. Since my sister’s birth, all those centuries
ago, never had I met another Cruxim. So why now?
I shook my head to clear the hammering
of a headache. “You did nothing to help me—to help them, either of them.”
“I am helping you now.”
“You call this helping? You did nothing!” My fist, pounding the sand again, sent
missiles of tiny shells into the air.
“She was a Vampire,” she said, softer
this time. “They will all die, Amedeo … eventually. It is our mission. Have you
forgotten that?” She put her hand on my shoulder and I looked up at her.
Her face was still free of emotion,
her brow unwrinkled, her pillowed lips full. Neither frown nor smile tugged at
her noble features. She was blank, as unmoved as the ocean had been at dawn
when its stillness had mocked the tumult of my anguish.
I stumbled to my feet. “You think I
can forget? You think I can just put aside what he did to them? Or what I mean
to do to him?” The bite of my nails puncturing my clenched palms was nothing
compared to the pain of knowing Beltran still lived. I turned away from her
again, sick with the knowledge that perhaps no one could have helped them. The
only help for Joslyn and Sabine would have been never to have met me. I was the
cause of their damnation! Part of me wished neither had ever known me—not the
blue-eyed child who had believed me her guardian angel until the Vampire
Beltran had his way with her, nor the brave, golden-haired Sphinx who had loved
me yet thought herself my pet. Yet the thought of never having known either of
them drew bile up from my stomach.
What
point is there in following this Cruxim, or even in going on? I thought.
Nausea overtook me again and I fell to
the sand, curled like a shell, my back to her.
“There is Sabine.”
It seemed she had read my thoughts.
I felt the growl forming before it
even left my lips. “What do you care?”
“She fought valiantly. I had hoped she
might free herself from Beltran.”
“You hoped.” I raised myself again and
glowered at her.
“Yes.”
I passed my hands over my face,
swiping away tears. “And Joslyn? What did you hope for her?”
“Must we argue again?” She sighed, as
if she had hoped my love for the woman who had given her life for mine might
have already faded. Then she kneeled beside me. Her pale skin gleamed argent up
close.
“I mean you no harm, Amedeo. Nor her.
I did not save Joslyn or Sabine, because…” Her eyes reflected the luminescent
strip of the horizon. “Because…”
“I know.” My thoughts were as dull as
my words. “They were not Cruxim.”
“No, they were not. But … there are
many things you do not know. Many things I might teach you about yourself if
you come with me.”
My eyes were dry, but my heart still
cried for them both. “Now? Now, you
wish to teach me these things. Why not before? Why not then, when such
knowledge might have helped me save them.”
“It was not the time. It was never the
time before.”
“Before!” I let out a bitter laugh
that my throat was too hoarse to give life to. “How long have you known of me?”
Her silence was heavy with secrets I
knew she would not divulge.
“Since I was a child.” She stood and
put a hand down to help me up. “But I did not know where you were, not until
the rumors began. All of France had heard: a winged being in a circus and with
him a Sphinx, half female, half lion. All of Europe questioned what monsters
Gandler was parading, and whether they were real. Did you think such things
would not reach the ears of another Cruxim, or of Vampires?”
I nodded, considering it, my eyes on
her still outstretched hand.
“Come with me. It is not safe here.” She
glanced around. “It is too open, too exposed for us to hide ourselves and our
wings from humans easily. And look at you.” For the first time, I saw warmth in
her silvery eyes. “You are exhausted.”
What harm could there be in it? She
was right: I was exhausted, weak, and stricken with grief. What harm could she
do me, a Cruxim like myself? And if she could, would I care? If she possessed
the honor of our kind, she might protect me until my strength returned.
“Follow me,” she pleaded, “and we
shall talk.”
“I have had enough of talk.” I
shrugged off her hand. “All I need is vengeance.”
“Where did revenge get you? There will
be time enough to make the undead pay for their sins. First, you must atone for
your own, as all of our kind must.” She glided over the sand towards the
water’s edge.
“Come.” Her gentle wing flaps became a
flurry as she rose up over the water.
I felt sure I would be too weak to
fly, but as I watched the air currents stroke her feathers, I knew all I wanted
to do was flee far from here, feeling the weightlessness, the lightness, the
clarity of nothing but air.
I rose into the air after her,
catching the wind’s breath in my wings. Then, with a last look at the mercurial
gleam of the only Cruxim I had met in hundreds of years, I spun and flew as
fast as I could away from her.
I would find Sabine, even if it meant
kissing every stone on earth.
* * *
Hours passed in a whirr of tired
wingbeats. I traveled far and fast, a willing Icarus shooting up towards a
reluctant sun, craving the heat that might plummet me down into the ocean,
where Sabine waited for me. She had not deserved the fate that found her. A
Sphinx, with the head and breast of a woman and the lithe, winged body of a
great cat, her only vulnerability had been the anchorstone her spirit returned
to by day. With the stone safe, like me, she was otherwise immortal. We had
found allies in each other, companions, and kindred souls, and lovers, too, had
not the impracticality of our love stalled my passion. She had waited for me,
searched for me, the forty years I had spent imprisoned in a tower in France,
considered some kind of superhuman devil by the townsfolk. Unable to find the
anchorstone, Beltran had cast her body, encased in molten metal, deep into the
sea, but still she would be waiting for me.
“She
is loyal, just like a lioness.” The thought came too easily into my
head, and it was some seconds before I realized it was not mine.
“Why are you following me?” I snapped,
thinking I should have asked instead how it was that she had come to know my
thoughts. Perhaps it was a thing between Cruxim, although I could not read hers
when I tried.
“Yes, it is.” She answered my second question aloud as soon as I had thought it.
“You cannot read my thoughts if I do not wish you to. At least not yet.”
“And yet you would read mine
uninvited.”
I felt the wind of her wings as she
shrugged in mid-flight. “I imagined you might be less prickly, Amedeo.” Her
expression hardly changed; I could not tell if she was hurt or angry.
“I told you—you did not know me.”
They were words to wound, but the
serene face betrayed no hint of a frown.
We flew on in silence for some time.
Then a voice, softer than the wind in the Cypress pines, entered my head again.
“She is not dead, remember, only
sleeping.”
“Sleeping!” I swooped away from her,
Beltran’s mocking words ringing in my head: Think
of her as just asleep, Cruxim. A very long, very cold sleep. Such a shame cats
just hate water.
“A sorry euphemism. Sleeping on the
ocean’s floor,” I spat.
“But living. Still living. Just like
you.” With a great flap, she shot forward to face me, and this time her
expression was of pity. “Do you know where her anchorstone is? Is it safe?”
I tried to keep any surprise from my
features. She knows of anchorstones. What
else does she know? I wondered.
“Would I be here if I did?” I answered
her, above the wind. “But I will find it, and I will wake her. Alone. What can
you offer me now that I have lost everything while you stood by and watched it
slip away?”
“That,
I can’t tell you. Perhaps I can offer you only fate, if that is what draws me
to you.”
“Fate!” I spat. “What is fate?” Get out of my head, I screamed
internally.
She smiled. “You can hear me now, as I
hear you. You are a fast learner. Perhaps you should have more faith in fate.”
It was not the time for novelties. The
pounding of my wings and muscles had become a dull throb that matched the
numbness of my heart and mind. “Enough of fate, and of flight. I need rest.
Leave me!”
She fell back a little. “Don’t you
want to know who I am?”
“Leave me!” I screamed. “Leave me! I
care nothing for fate, or for you, or for life.”
“Skylar,” she said softly.
I thought I detected a brief smile
before the sharpness of the wind tugged it away.
“My name is Skylar Emmanuel.”
She spun in the air like a sparrow,
rising on a draft before plummeting headfirst down towards the earth, her wings
creating a magnificent silver V as she dove.
Summary from Goodreads:
Josh Grayson was born in Mexico, raised in Massachusetts, and now lives in Martinsville, Virginia. It was his move to the South that stirred his imagination and gave him the courage to start writing. During his free time, Josh enjoys reading, jogging, swimming, and watching YouTube videos.
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