Lilith's Children

by Rachel Sullivan

  Each foot slammed into the back of a Hunter and my roots broke through their black shirts and bore into their tattooed skin. I willed a portion of the poison to release from my body as I wrapped my arms around the neck of the Hunter in the middle of the two screeching out in pain, trying to slice my roots from their backs. Middle Hunter wasted no time pulling his dagger from its sheath. He tried to plummet the thing into my arm, but my thick, russet bark held the blade at bay long enough for me to shove the fingers from my free hand up into the flesh under his chin and shot vines from my fingertips.

  I didn’t will my fingers to release poison, but the middle Hunter fell seconds after the other two. I had two left. I pulled my vines and roots back into me, and jumped from Middle Hunter’s back to crouch behind the row’s remaining Hunters.

  With me representing the huldra coterie in the best of ways, the two rows of succubi banded together to take down the five Hunters on the other side of them.

  The two Hunters in the closest row of five, before I’d whittled their numbers, turned their attention to me. I flashed a smile from where I crouched. I hadn’t realized it earlier, but my huldra was antsy and the more the poison left my body, the stronger my huldra became. Letting her come out to play felt pretty damn good.

  “So are you two boys from Washington or Oregon?” I asked, which took them off guard.

  “Oregon, demon bitch,” the one on the right answered. He looked to be near the tender young age of eighteen or nineteen; not even the faint hints of stubble graced his chin.

  “Now, now,” I chided. “You must be new to the brotherhood, aren’t you? Because I’m not a succubus. But hey, real quick, are any of you here from Washington?”

  The Hunter on the right spoke again. “They’re in that room upstairs.”

  The Hunter on my left elbowed the younger one and chided him for giving me information. “Shut up.”

  Huh, so the Washington Hunters were guarding the Washington Wild Women along with the harpies, which they probably hadn’t thought they’d find. I should have assumed as much.

  Before I could thank the young Hunter, they unsheathed their daggers and rushed me.

  “Faline!” Out of nothing but pure, dumb, reaction, I turned toward the open double doors, toward Marcus’s voice.

  And paid the price for that costly mistake.

  Thirty-Four

  “Faline!” Marcus called for me again as the younger Hunter grabbed my arms and pulled them behind my back, hoisting me up to my feet in the process.

  The other Hunter put his dagger to my throat and pushed. The blade hit bark, so he trailed it up my jaw, across my chin, and pushed the tip against my right temple.

  I froze.

  “You know the one move, the one way to kill anyone?” he whispered into my ear as he brought his face within licking distance to mine. “It’s a sharp object to the brain, through that sweet, sensitive spot in the temple. It’s a humane death, though, not one fit for a Wild Woman such as yourself. But,” he shrugged, “it’ll have to do.”

  “You’re not from around here,” I said, trying to speak evenly and stay calm despite the fact that one move from him meant certain death for me. If I kept him talking, I kept from dying.

  I snuck a quick glance at the succubi who still fought hard with waning strength and had only taken out two Hunters for their troubles.

  “Well, you’re perceptive,” the Hunter answered in his southern accent. “I’m from North Carolina.”

  If I lived through this, my next stop would be his home complex. I had to keep him talking, so I thought of more questions, ones that wouldn’t piss him off enough to drive his dagger through my skull.

  “What brought you out west? It couldn’t have been the sun,” I tried to say jokingly.

  He scoffed.

  “Don’t talk to her,” the younger Hunter piped in, still holding my arms behind my back and facing my hands down. “You told me to shut up when I talked to her.”

  The older Hunter kept his eyes on me, studying my face, as he answered his brother. “This is different, she’s about to die.”

  Well, that didn’t sound promising for me.

  “The complex got a little too…full,” he went on. “So I put in for a transfer.”

  “Full of Hunters?” I pushed further, just watching and waiting for him to be done with me.

  He scoffed again, clearly unhappy with the direction his Hunter organization headed in. “Whores. It’s full of whores.”

  “Dude!” the other Hunter exclaimed with wide eyes.

  A wry smile grew on the slightly older Hunter’s face and I knew we were done talking. He pressed the dagger’s tip harder against my temple. I fought to wriggle away, grew vines to wrap around the younger Hunter’s hands and squeeze them to loosen his hold on me, but nothing worked. He only cut my vines with a painful slash of his dagger. The blade’s tip bore into my temple. Blood trickled from the wound as the older Hunter pushed slightly harder with each breath, reveling in his slow kill.

  When I’d had enough, when I knew I wouldn’t make it out of this one, I let go.

  And I let my huldra free.

  Only this time I didn’t black out completely. Like standing in a closet, its door opening and closing quickly, blanketing me in darkness and then showering me in light, my huldra flickered in and out. She moved quicker than I thought possible, slipping from the Hunter’s grasp by dropping out from under them. Pain sliced along the side of my face where the dagger cut against my skin, but it was muted and I knew it wouldn’t kill me. She killed the older Hunter first, with his own dagger, twisted his arm enough to plunge the dagger’s tip into his right temple.

  I gave in as she released my inner beast and allowed me to watch from the sidelines. And my inner beast, the suppressed wild part of me? Yeah, she was pissed.

  We, my huldra and I, turned our attention to the younger Hunter.

  “I’m not a demon, asshole,” I heard myself say, but in a guttural voice, animalistic. “I’m a motherfucking huldra!”

  I lunged at him and slammed into his brick wall of a chest. He grabbed my ponytail to yank me down to the ground, but I flipped up and kicked him in the groin. Out of what I assumed was instinct, he released his hold on me to cup his jewels.

  My huldra and I went in for the kill. And when we were done with him, we helped the succubi finish off the rest of their Hunters too.

  Our band of bloodied Wild Women tromped up the stairs to help on the main floor.

  They seemed to have everything covered, especially since the succubi’s snake Wild sisters were fighting in full force against the few Hunters still standing, so I made my way to my temporary room. My huldra wanted her coterie and as thankful as I was that she was playing nice with me, I wasn’t about to try to stop her for reuniting with her family. I passed the front entry. The door had been left open, a Hunter’s body lay on the cement porch and two stunned Hunters hung from the old oak tree in the yard. Aleksander stood below them, his arms raised as though he’d flung the men onto the branches with the sheer force of killer energy.

  I grabbed the knob to my room and swung the door open, nearly pulling the thing from its hinges. “Shawna!” my huldra called in that animalistic voice. “Shawna!”

  “I’m here, Faline! I’m here!”

  I caught sight of my sister standing over a dead Hunter, her dreads a mess, her shirt torn, blood streaked across her arms and jeans.

  I thought to run to her, to catch her in my arms, to mutter thanks to Freyja for keeping my partner sister safe.

  But the sight of Marcus in the middle of a standoff with an older Hunter who resembled him in the eyes and chin, froze me in place.

  “I should have known,” his father seethed. “You are weak as a sniveling little girl.” The man styled his thick, silver hair very much like his son. It was as though I stared at an older version of Marcus. Unlike the other Hunters, a silver dagger emblem attached to a black ribbon, hung around his neck. Marcus’s father was
a Hunter leader, and from the looks of it, high up in the chain of command.

  John scaled from the open bedroom window, making his escape. Marcus’s father was the only Hunter left, and surrounded. But Marcus only stared at the man, both with their daggers drawn. My aunts and sisters had already left the room, to check on the other Wilds. Only Shawna, Marcus, and his father remained.

  Marcus’s father jabbed the dagger forward, shocking his son, and throwing Marcus off balance. Rather than taking a step back, Marcus jumped to the side and hit the dresser with a crack, flinging him back toward his father, toward the dagger. His father’s dagger scraped his side before I rushed in between them and pushed Marcus onto the bed, away from the blade. I shot a thin branch from my palm, but his father made quick work of slicing through the plant with his dagger, sending scorching pain up my hand and arm.

  “He’ll never belong to you,” his father jeered. “His Hunter blood will always bring him back to his roots.”

  I flung my other hand up and shot vines from my fingers, but before they could wrap around the man’s neck, he spun on his heel and catapulted himself from the window, landing on his feet and running in the opposite direction of the front yard, where I presumed Aleksander finished off the Hunters in the tree.

  Marcus jumped from the bed. “They left!” he yelled, leaning out the open window. He pulled himself back inside. “Damn it!” he punched a hole in the wall. “I let them get away!”

  I let my huldra slink back to her resting place, pleased from a job well done as I stood, stunned, beside Shawna. What kind of power did Marcus’s father hold over him that he caused his son to freeze up in his presence?

  “You let him go,” Shawna uttered. Tears filled her eyes. Her hands shook and bark stayed thick across her skin as though it wasn’t safe to let her guard down. As though Marcus was no longer safe to her. “You let my captor go.”

  Thirty-Five

  Our total Hunter body count for the day topped out at eighteen. Marie assured us that once she and her sisters had gotten something to eat and drink, they’d dispose of the bodies. Their snake Wild sisters offered to help, and as curious as I was about what they did with dead bodies, I asked no questions. The harpies looked disgusted by the idea and didn’t offer to help.

  As expected, one of the neighbors called the cops from all the commotion, but Aleksander shifted the energy surrounding the property, settling a peaceful calm over the place, that somehow caused the cop car, its siren blaring, to drive right past.

  Marcus only sat on the bed in our room, his head in his hands. After my best efforts to comfort him, and my assurance that he’d done what he could, he’d asked me if he could have some time alone.

  My coterie and I, along with the harpies, incubi, and Rod, cleaned and treated gashes for one another and stuffed any blood-stained quilts, wall and bed decorations, into large, black trash bags.

  “We’ll cover the expense of not only the Airbnb rental, but the damages too,” I assured Aleksander as I stood, taking in all the destruction around us. The full trash bag on the ground beside my leg only held a tiny portion of what was left to clean up.

  Aleksander shrugged as though whether we paid or not was no big deal to him.

  When only morose silence greeted my offer, I thought to bring up another topic, anything to get people talking. “So Rod, how’d the Hunters know we were going to visit them? I mean, it seems perfect timing to me that they came over here during that small window we were at their empty complex.”

  All eyes swung to me and the claimed ex-Hunter.

  I hadn’t meant to accuse him—Marcus had assured me Rod was trustworthy. But, the words were out and I couldn’t take them back.

  “Well,” Rod started, calmly, as though he were deescalating a tense situation in a way that only a decorated police officer could. “I think it’s safe to assume the Hunters took the succubi galere as bait to draw your group to their complex.” He paused. “And from a strategic standpoint, I’d say they were waiting, in their vehicles somewhere, for a lookout to give word that you’d set foot on their complex before entering your temporary home.”

  “But how did they know where we were staying?” Eonza asked. “They’d snuck in through the doors and windows and blindsided us. We’d tried to fight back, but there were too many of them and we weren’t prepared, our guard had been down. They herded us into the bedroom where other Hunters had broken in and already began setting up the red stones. It all happened so fast. How?”

  Rod shook his head and exhaled. “Now that one I couldn’t tell you. I have no clue how they knew where to find you.”

  “They’ve banned together,” I said, thinking of the Hunters I’d taken down earlier and what they’d said about the North Carolina complex. “Which means they’ve got more resources than Rod or Marcus know of, since they’re mainly familiar with the Washington Hunter ways and intel.”

  The room quieted again, as we all went back to work and no-doubt back to considering what exactly it meant for us that the Hunters had banned together.

  As I cleaned and made my way back into my room, my mind buzzed with new information.

  First, my huldra and I had come to some sort of agreement to work together, which opened new doors for me when it came to fighting—doors to truths I still hadn’t quite figured out completely. Second, and the part that made my bounty hunter side the happiest, according to the North Carolina Hunter, the women being stolen from the Seattle area and trafficked were being funneled through the Hunter’s North Carolina complex. That had to have been the “whores” he’d referred to.

  The Hunters clearly had a detailed system set up of transporting the women for holding and then shipping them off to wherever their buyer lived.

  “But it makes no sense,” I said to Marcus who’d tired of sitting on our bed and now scrubbed a blood stain on the wooden floor beside the nightstand.

  He paused to look up. I eyed his amazing traps through his t-shirt from my vantage point and quickly felt guilty for ogling him when his eyes clearly expressed his inner pain. Although, he didn’t want to discuss that pain at the moment. So I changed the subject.

  “What doesn’t make sense?” he asked.

  “If the Hunters value chastity and feminine virtue so much,” I said. “That they don’t let their betrothed daughter be alone with single Hunters, why would they kidnap women to sell for sex?”

  Marcus shook his head and scrubbed harder. “Just the idea of them selling women for sex makes me wish I could attach dynamite to each and every one involved and light them all up like Christmas trees. Makes me sick to call them my brothers.” After a few beats of him scrubbing so hard it looked as though he were wearing a hole into the wood, he paused and leaned back to sit on his knees. He exhaled slowly. “But to answer your question, they say their rules are for their women’s own good, that the rules protect their virtue, but that has nothing to do with it. To them, women are objects.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  “Would you want someone messing around with your new car?” he continued. “Say you were picking it up from the lot, brand new, and you saw that there’s already someone else’s scent in the car, and coffee stains on the seat. Then you go to drive it and the steering wheel keeps pulling to the right.”

  “But what does a car have in common with a woman?” I asked, pausing from disinfecting the broken dresser.

  “Nothing,” Marcus answered gruffly. He returned to his scrubbing, his strong shoulders moving back and forth under the thin layer of cotton. “But to them, everything. No one wants their one and only car to be used, with used car problems. They want brand spankin’ new. The fact that they liken cars to women sickens me.”

  “So, then,” I clarified. “You’re saying they don’t value unvirtuous women because those women are no longer wife material and therefore have no value?”

  Marcus nodded. “Disgustingly, yes.”

  “It’s archaic,” Aleksander added, striding into our room like h
e owned the place, which in a rental-agreement way, he kind of did. “Don’t worry about that dent, Faline. I know a guy.”

  “Speaking of worrying,” I said to Aleksander. “You were in the front yard. Why didn’t you use your energy powers to stop John and Marcus’s dad from running away? Couldn’t you have forced them to stop and walk back?”

  “I had just finished bringing a deservedly slow and painful death to the Hunter’s who had tried to follow you down the stairs. The moment their weakness set in and allowed their deaths, I had found myself otherwise occupied, bringing a succubus back from the brink of death,” Aleksander replied. “Such a use of energy takes all my concentration. I hadn’t noticed the leader Hunters’ escape until it was too late.”

  Wow, so incubi had the ability to bring people back from the brink of death. Good to know.

  A toilet flushed and then Rod stood in the doorframe to the bedroom, making the room feel more cramped. He worked his sore and swollen muscles, a side effect for Hunters after being around so many Wild Women, releasing their wildness. I was actually impressed that he’d been able to keep it together and not accidently turn on one of us during the fighting. It was in their genes to want to kill us.

  “So, Rod,” I said, tying another black bag of bloody items. I wasn’t about to try to remove blood from an orange and white mandala quilt, so into the new empty bag it went. “What do you know about the whole human trafficking thing your brothers are involved with?”

  Rod sat on the bed and exhaled. “Marcus told you then?”

  I shot a questioning glace to Marcus.

  He sighed. “No, I haven’t had time to tell her. And then today happened, and—”