Lilith's Children

by Rachel Pudelek

  Shawna sank her mouth into the Hunter’s exposed trapezius, bit down, and pulled away with a mouthful of flesh. Her mother, Abigale, screeched and leaned away. Standing behind the Hunter’s right side, she’d gotten the best view of her daughter’s retribution.

  Huge Hunter knocked his head into my sister’s and fought to be free. Marcus punched him in the face, leaving him bleary between the impact and the blood loss. My coterie members released the male and stepped back, allowing Shawna the freedom to do as she willed.

  “Finish him,” Marcus commanded through gritted teeth.

  I shot him a look, but he was too focused on my sister to notice.

  Tears streamed down Abigale’s face.

  Blood dripped from Shawna’s jaw.

  “Do you think he would have helped you?” Marcus asked Shawna. “Do you think, if he were there at that cabin, holding you against your will, he would have been kind?”

  I thought back to the day we rescued my sister, to the large Hunter at my sister’s bedside, in control of the IV drip attached to her arm, the one in the white lab coat who made jokes about growing a Hunter/huldra hybrid within my sister, about personally inseminating me with one.

  The Hunter I bit. Repeatedly.

  “No,” I warned. “Don’t Shawna, it’ll only make your huldra harder to control.” I spoke from experience. I couldn’t tell if my sister had blacked out the way I had, but it didn’t matter.

  “What huldra?” she screeched. “They took her from me. They stole my wildness!” She zeroed in on the Hunter whose body she clung to. “You took my wildness.” She shoved his head to the side again. “I’m taking it back!”

  I didn’t know whether to stop my sister from making a huge mistake, or to join her. She ravaged the huge Hunter like the Washington Hunters had no doubt threatened to ravage her. In a second of clarity I peered around the warehouse in search for the winemaker and his son. They were gone, thankfully.

  The Hunter’s tirade of obscenities toward my sister and our kind lessened as my sister’s light green shirt turned a deep red. The scent of blood filled the warehouse and my huldra yearned to be let loose.

  But this was Shawna’s battle, a war I’d witnessed her fight since the day she came home from the Hunter’s complex with ash on her face and the seed of revenge in her heart.

  Seeds are funny things. You never know, just by looking at the seed, what it’ll grow into. If it’ll even take root, or wither and die. Shawna’s seed was sprouting in a hurry. And despite its inability to cause vines to grow from her fingertips, I had no doubt it took root and pulled her huldra from wherever she hid deep inside my sister.

  Shawna clung to the Hunter’s back as he hit the floor with a thud. Marcus distanced himself. Smart.

  I, on the other hand, moved closer to my sister. Maybe not so smart.

  A low growl vibrated in her throat and she paused, not taking her eyes off her prey.

  “I’m not trying to take him from you, Shawna. He’s dead. You did it.”

  She pulled her head away from his chest and turned to look at me.

  I’m not easily scared. But the huldra who looked back at me through Shawna’s eyes scared the shit out of me. My huldra tried to rise to the surface, to meet the one staring at me, but I urged her to let me handle things my own way.

  “You stopped him,” I said in an even and firm tone. “He’ll never hurt another Wild again. You did that.”

  She looked back down at her prey, measuring her accomplishment.

  I wished desperately that she’d blacked out, that I were shaking her into consciousness rather than placating her huldra. I shoved every worry of how this would impact my sister into the crowded “future problems” portion of my mind and called my sister’s name.

  “Shawna, I know what you’re feeling.” Except I didn’t. Yeah, I’d experienced attacking a man and a Hunter, and each time coming to with blood on my lips. But that was as far as our shared experience extended. “Slow, deep breaths will help you control yourself. Once you’ve got your breathing down, imagine roots growing from the soles of your feet, anchoring you to the earth.”

  She didn’t nod or say anything to confirm she’d followed my directions, but her chest rose and fell a little slower.

  “Good,” I said. “Keep going.”

  Her fingers unhinged from his neck and shoulder.

  She took a few more slow breaths.

  Her legs straightened and she stood over the dead Hunter.

  Abigale ran to her daughter, sobbing, and before I could warn her against it, she wrapped her arms around Shawna and squeezed.

  Shawna released the longest exhale. Her eyes closed and she leaned her head on her mother’s shoulder. Abigale’s crying quieted. “It’s okay. It’s going to be okay now.”

  Olivia leaned back against a barrel and Patricia bent forward to rest her hands on her knees. Seeing as none of us had experience in subduing a rogue huldra, we all sighed in relief.

  I made my way to Marcus and kept from smacking him in the arm. “What was that?” I whispered, knowing full well the only people in the warehouse that couldn’t still hear me were the human males probably holed up in the restroom or an office.

  “It’s how she’ll heal and move forward,” he answered unapologetically.

  “By losing control of herself?”

  “By taking back control, which is exactly what she did.” Marcus rubbed the back of my bicep. “They took her and drugged her and there was nothing she could do about it. Today she got to fight back. She got to release the anger and hurt onto a Hunter.”

  “You just shook a bottle of soda and popped the top off. We won’t be able to get it all back in. What’s out is out.” I shook my head. “Her huldra is out.”

  Marcus cupped a hand to my cheek and leaned in toward me. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  His comment caught me off guard and I reassessed my thoughts. My huldra had saved my sister and just now my partner sister accessed her own wildness to save herself. There was nothing wrong with that. Nothing to be ashamed of. It’s not like she killed an innocent human, or even another Wild Woman. This huge Hunter tracked us down to either take us in or kill us while trying. We defended ourselves.

  Shawna defended herself.

  “I hate that what they taught us still hides in my thoughts,” I confessed.

  Marcus pulled me in for a hug and rested his head on top of mine. “Welcome to the club, babe. Welcome to the club.”

  Two

  Fiberglass skylights lit the messy warehouse, made messier by our little scuffle. We didn’t set out to end the lives of five more Hunters today, but that’s what had happened. And all before dinner. Which gave me an idea.

  “Anyone else hungry?” I asked while heaving the largest Hunter onto the pile of his brothers.

  Marcus dropped the arm of the Hunter he’d been helping to move and wiped his hands on his dark khaki cargoes, now stained with blood, dirt, and…was that wine? Well, didn’t we make a wine-stained pair. “Seriously?” he asked. He glanced from me, to Shawna, and back to me.

  “What?” I said, unafraid to talk about the elephant in the room. “Just because she had a snack, I shouldn’t be hungry? The partner sister bond doesn’t work like that.” I went back to work hauling the Hunter, but without the help of my coterie and Marcus, the body didn’t move an inch.

  Abigale stifled a gasp. Shawna went back to coddling the skittish cat who’d found her after the fighting ended. My coterie members fidgeted and wiped dirt from their hands.

  I dropped the leg I’d been tugging on. “Oh, come on.”

  Olivia spoke up. “You’re being insensitive, Faline.”

  “Really?” I wiped sweat from my brow. “How so? I attacked and killed a human man, then watched a rusalka kill a mermaid friend of mine with a snip of her birch scissors, and then I killed a bunch of Hunters. So excuse me if being present to my sister taking a few bites of her enemy didn’t leave my stomach in knots and my appeti
te on the fritz.”

  Shawna laughed. “I know I shouldn’t be, but I’m hungry too.”

  I wanted to fist-bump my partner sister right then and there, but I withheld the urge. Instead, I smiled at her.

  Her words changed the energy of the warehouse and my coterie relaxed—brows un-furled and arms uncrossed.

  Celeste peeked from the hallway leading to the restroom and offices, leaving the wine owner and his son behind. “I have to get back in there. Don’t want them worrying enough to call the police. Just, let us know when it’s safe to come out. It’s not like they can live in that tiny office.” Celeste rested her hands on her hips and took stock of the almost-pile of Hunters.

  Don’t ask me why we’d decided to pile them up; it’s just what they do on TV.

  “No one’s getting anything…else…to eat until we deal with this mess.” She retreated back the way she came.

  “Why don’t you call Marie and see if she knows of a good service for something like this,” Marcus suggested.

  I had no idea why a peaceful succubi leader, who only used her energy manipulation powers to heal others and have fantastic sex, would have contacts for a body-removal service, but I doubted the human winery owners could point us in the right direction, so it was worth a shot.

  Renee scoffed. “No, thanks. We’ll be just fine without the manipulating succubi. Especially that one.”

  Old xenophobia dies hard.

  “No, he makes a good point,” I said, speaking more from a desire to fill my growling stomach than actual logic. My coterie had gotten accustomed to Marcus, though I wouldn’t say they liked having him around by any stretch of the word. Abigale appreciated him. Shawna needed him. And I had the hots for him and still waited on bated breath for the moment we could spend a full night together rather than midnight rendezvous while Shawna slept. The others weren’t too keen on the male. Not that they didn’t like him; they barely made an effort to get to know him. I couldn’t blame them, though. If I were in their shoes, I’d probably feel the same way.

  “This isn’t our territory,” I added. And maybe Marie would know of someone who discretely disposed of bodies. She might be peaceful, but she was also highly sexual, and I could imagine how many secrets were spilled between the sheets with a succubus. “Most of you have never even left Washington until yesterday. How will we know what to do with the bodies? We don’t even know our way around without a GPS.”

  “So we’re in agreement?” I said, pulling my for-now-phone from my back pocket. I inspected the screen for cracks while I waited for a unanimous response. Not one crack. The heavy duty case had been worth its expensive price tag.

  “Fine,” Renee said with all the grace of a toddler whose opinion had been overruled.

  My sisters and other aunts nodded, and I called Marie. We hadn’t spoken since the Wild Women left our home to go back to theirs the day after we leveled the Washington Hunters’ complex. I’d been meaning to call, to discuss the dates for the next Wild gathering in North Carolina to overrun that Hunter complex. But honestly, I’d been putting it off. I needed to rest and unwind before playing mind games with Marie again.

  “My favorite huldra,” Marie answered with a smile in her voice.

  “I have a favor to ask,” I said, cutting to the point. The quicker we cleaned up our mess, the quicker I could sit down to a table and order food.

  “What? Did you lose another sister?” Marie laughed and a man moaned from her side of the call. Was she ever by herself?

  “Nope, all huldra are present and accounted for. Your Oregon Hunter complex is missing five members, though.”

  The phone rustled and a door shut. “You killed Oregon Hunters?” Marie asked with a whisper. It interested me what Marie deemed private versus what she deemed public.

  “My coterie, Marcus, and me, yeah,” I answered.

  “You still have that Hunter dropout hanging around?” she said with contempt.

  I almost told her to watch her mouth, that Hunter dropout was my boyfriend. But then I realized Marcus and I had never actually had that talk. That morning before I met with the harpies, when we’d spent the night together in the dank hotel, I’d promised him we’d discuss the topic of us after I got my sister back. A pit formed in my empty stomach. When would Marcus collect on that promise?

  Thankfully, Marie didn’t have the ability to read my emotions over the phone. “What should we do with the bodies, Marie?” I asked, changing the subject from Marcus to dead Hunters.

  “How should I know? Succubi give life, not death.”

  If she were standing in front of me, I’d shoot her a level gaze. Come on. “Seriously, Marie. I know you know people.”

  The line was quiet for a few breaths before she answered. “I’ll send a crew out. Once they arrive, you should leave. Are there humans present?”

  “Celeste is keeping them company in the back room,” I said.

  “Perfect. My sisters will wipe their memories. Where are you, exactly?”

  I eyed the line-up of wine bottles that were supposed to be our selections for tasting, six bottles that ranged from a dry chardonnay to a sweet dessert wine and a few different pinots and red blends in between. The gold label read Sass. “We’re at Sass Winery. It’s a small winery, in a warehouse overlooking vineyards. You have to go up a gravel road to get here and their only sign is an old oak barrel with their name on it.”

  “Okay, my sisters are on their way.” The line went dead and I slid my indestructible phone back into my jeans pocket.

  “I think,” Shawna said in a far-off voice, “that whatever the Hunters gave me to suppress my huldra had something to do with me being able to carry a child with Hunter DNA. They were trying to suppress my body’s nature to only birth females.” She set the cat onto a huge square plastic vat of wine. The cat walked back and forth under Shawna’s hand for pets, arching its spine with each pass.

  We all shot each other looks as though one of us could explain what the hell was going on with Shawna.

  “That would make sense,” Marcus said, nodding. “Wilds only give birth to females. Hunters can only be male. If they’re making hybrids, they’d need to come up with a way to bridge that gender gap. Suppressing the huldra probably wasn’t the goal as much as suppressing the female-only Wild genes.

  Yeah, what Marcus and Shawna were saying made absolute sense. But what shocked my sisters, aunts, and me, was the fact that Shawna was even saying such things—discussing her experience with the Hunters. It was as though fighting back today cracked open a scab and now she processed the pus flowing from the wound, wiped it away to reevaluate the damage.

  “Do you think I could be pregnant?” she asked calmly, gazing at the purring cat.

  Renee’s chin snapped up and she shook her head. “Let’s hope not. But either way, we won’t know for a few weeks. It’s too soon to tell.”

  “Do you remember them doing any other procedures to you, rather than inserting the IV?” Olivia asked.

  Shawna thought for a moment. “No. But there were times when I woke up from a drug-induced sleep and hadn’t realized I’d fallen asleep. So I wasn’t coherent the whole time.”

  Renee, always the nurse, prodded, “Faline told us the substance in the IV was green. Do you remember anyone coming in with a syringe to put something else into the IV drip? Something that wasn’t green?” She turned to address the rest of us. “They could have given her a numbing agent via the drip and completed the procedure without her knowing.”

  Whether the “procedure” meant through her abdomen with a long needle or vaginally, I shivered at the thought.

  “When we leave here, I’ll find us an herbal market and pick up some black cohosh. It’s powerful stuff and can induce a miscarriage. Just in case.” Patricia, the acupuncturist, pulled her phone out to browse herbal shops within driving distance.

  And that’s how the next hour played out. Long stretches of silent minutes, followed by an uncomfortable truth spoken from Shawna’s
trauma, followed by more silence, followed by someone’s attempt to fix it. How Celeste kept the two winery workers occupied in the back, I had no clue.

  Shawna was my partner sister—not partner as in the same sex relationship kind, but as in we were born at the same time on purpose so we’d have someone to help us raise our children. Huldra didn’t marry, for many reasons. Her health, both mental and physical, meant the world to me. And if talking helped her, I’d sit and listen for days on end, no matter how hard it hurt to know that while I was trying to build a Wild Women army, my sister had been enduring her own personal hell. I wished they’d taken me instead.

  She quickly shut up, though, when a black van full of succubi parked directly outside the open roll-up door to the warehouse. Eight succubi jumped from the van. Gravel crunched beneath their combat boots. They all wore black and each had some sort of snake tattoo on their bodies. Even if I couldn’t see it all under their black tank tops and tube tops, I knew it was there. It was the symbol of their Goddess.

  I didn’t have to tell them anything. Despite our teaming up only a week ago and having fought a battle together, they didn’t act like old friends. The blonde succubus with the thick braid and a snake tattoo weaving from the back of her neck and around her left ear seemed to notice Shawna for the first time and offered a lingering smile. Shawna smiled back.

  “Where’s the humans?” the blonde succubus asked my partner sister.

  Shawna lifted her hand from the cat and pointed to the short hallway beside the makeshift tasting area made up by one black countertop with bottles, crackers, and a stereo resting atop it. “Back there, with Celeste in the office. It’s the last door on your left, I think.”

  “Thanks,” the blonde said before ducking into the hallway.

  The others quickly went to work loading the bodies into the back of the van. They allowed Marcus to lend a hand and soon the rest of us joined in. Couldn’t let the ex-Hunter make us look bad, even if he did weigh enough in sheer muscle to make two of us.