Gabriel and the Swallows (The Volatile Duology #1) by Esther Dalseno Page B

a lifetime, just to think. I crawled in and to my surprise, the hole opened marginally, and I saw a little path of descending steps carved out of the tuff. Cautiously, with one hand upon the wall to keep my balance, I walked down. There the steps turned right as they fell into darkness. I inhaled sharply the scent of birds’ nests, old eggs and feces before I found myself in an enormous cavern, perhaps fifteen feet below the ground.
    Awe brushed every thought of the lavatory incident from my mind. I had heard of these places. Ancient Etruscan caves that riddled the bowels of Orvieto, huge enclosures that once housed cattle and goats, olive oil mills, entire wine cellars, fugitive popes and their wayward cardinals. I was beneath Orvieto.
    The air was dusty and it was cold, and I noticed several precise squares carved into the back wall, as my eyes adjusted, perhaps fifty or so. Pigeon holes, of course. Where the birds once flew with the sun through the one window and returned in the eve to roost in these notches before they were slain for supper. The three layered water troughs, the first designed to spill over into the second and third, which the pigeons were trained to drink from. All empty now, save for dry mint-green lichen that sprouted like clouds. And a mass of something. A mass of a quivering, dusky, shadowy something, covered with a substance dark and dense, like hair.
    I couldn’t help it. I screamed.
    The mass jolted and became alive, a heavy blur of blackness. It happened so fast, but I can still see it in my memory to this day: the shadow took form, white skin caught the sunlight and glimmered, wings unfurled, and a face I recalled with glittering green eyes and waving light brown hair.
    “Volatile?” I whispered.
    The swallow-girl jumped out of the water trough, hovered in the air for a moment, her wings stretched to their full capacity, reminding me of one of the frescos in Signorelli’s Duomo. When she landed on her feet, the wings immediately folded around her body, to protect it from my sight. She was taller, and her back was straighter. Her face had become sharper, more angular.
    “Hello, Gabriel,” she said softly.
    I felt shy all of a sudden. “What are you doing in here?” I demanded, my voice sterner than it should have been.
    “Sleeping,” she said, and did I imagine it, or was there a bite of sarcasm to her words? Did bird-girls even know of sarcasm?
    “Underground?” I looked around distastefully. “But it’s all wet and smelly…”
    “It smells fine to me.”
    “But it’s so dark.”
    “It keeps me hidden from predators and hunters.”
    “How long have you been here?”
    “We’ve been here for three weeks now.”
    “ We ?”
    It was then that it emerged from the shadows.
    This is how he appeared to me then, when I was a child and knew no better. A tall, monstrous being. I remember his arms, muscular and powerful, skin as pale as marble and riddled with veins like blue cheese. I recall his wings: oil-spill black and so enormous they seemed like a cape that engulfed him. His eye fixed on me: I believed they were blue at the time. But one thing I recall, and I dare anyone who has met him to defy me: that his pupils were shaped like crucifixes. And it dawned on my childish mind that he was the shadow of death, the Grim Reaper, Hades – and I would meet him again one day, when he came to collect for the underworld. Suddenly, there was a sound like a hurricane, and then he was gone.
    When I returned to my senses, I saw a single black feather, still quivering from the speed of the creature’s movement. I deftly rescued it and pocketed it. “Who was that?” I demanded.
    But Volatile would not answer. Instead, she watched the window, as if she could see him fly away.
    It was getting dark. I was hungry and increasingly aware of the smell of drying urine from my pants. I could hear the birds in the valley, crying out to each other, preparing to come home. Soon swallows would invade