“Tired and just generally feel like crap.” He finished for her as he got up and walked around the round conference table to take a seat beside her.
“You helped your Aphrodite through visions, too?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“That’s nice of you.”
He raised his hands and then let them fall in a whatever gesture. “It was just part of being in love with a Prophetess of Nyx. And I didn’t mind. At all.” Kev tried to smile at her, but it came out more like a grimace. “Plus, it made me feel useful. She was gorgeous and talented and really special—and I’m just me.”
Aphrodite took off her dark glasses and studied him with her bloodshot but somehow still unsettlingly beautiful eyes. “By just me do you mean just the youngest red vampyre in your world and the only vamp of either color who has an affinity for all five elements?”
“Um, yeah.”
“Always remember that a talented Prophetess of Nyx chose you as the love of her life. Don’t underestimate yourself. That denigrates her choice.”
He nodded but couldn’t find the right words to respond.
“Goddess, you’re young,” she said softly. “And that’s not a bad thing. Don’t think I’m patronizing you or calling you a child or some stupid shit like that. I just hate that this happened to you before you were even eighteen. You should be getting in trouble for flirting with fledglings, not trying to heal a broken heart.”
“War tends to make you grow up … Even if I hadn’t loved Aphrodite, I still wouldn’t be all carefree.”
“If you hadn’t loved Aphrodite, the red fledglings and vampyres in your world would still be lacking their humanity and your civilization would be on fire—metaphorically and literally.”
“No, I believe she would have—”
Aphrodite’s raised hand silenced him. “This is something I know better than you. I’m a version of her—just like she was a version of me. To be better, I needed help, just like she did. If Darius and Zoey and the rest of the Nerd Herd hadn’t come along, I probably would still be lost in my own ego. You did good, Kev, even if it feels bad right now.”
He looked down at his hands, not sure what to say.
“Thanks for catching me. Darius said you didn’t even let me hit the ground.”
He looked up at her. “I recognized a vision coming on and I was closer than Darius. It was no big deal.”
“It was a big deal to me. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
“So, how are you?”
He shrugged. “Trying to deal. Just taking it day by day. It helped to see her, even though I couldn’t touch her.”
Aphrodite leaned forward, obviously intrigued. “Oh, that’s right! You saw your Aphrodite in Nyx’s Realm. Wait—you couldn’t touch her?”
“No. She was just spirit, and since I’m flesh, we couldn’t touch, even though she looked totally solid. It was weird.”
“Sounds like it. How is she doing there?”
“Good. Really good. The same, but different.” Kevin wiped his palms on his jeans and relaxed a little. Even though it was weird to be talking to Aphrodite about Aphrodite, it was also a relief. Everyone, even Z, tiptoed around him—which made him feel even more broken than he already was. “She was more of herself there.”
“What do you mean?”
“Okay, don’t freak.”
“Saying that is making me freak. Just tell me,” she said.
“She looked different—more relaxed. Her hair was different.” He paused and smiled—and then, without even thinking about it, he reached out and brushed his fingers over a long strand of her thick blond hair that had fallen across her shoulder. “I didn’t know you straightened that.”
She snorted. “Of course I straighten my hair. This kind of perfection does not come without work. Wait—she’s not straightening her hair? Is she in a version of hell?”
Kevin surprised himself by laughing. “No! And you should try letting your hair go sometime. It was adorable and curly and kinda frizzy.”
“You blaspheme, but you’re in mourning, so I’ll let it go. What else was different about her?”
“She was wearing a cute long skirt with a lot of lace and a simple tee tied up.” He grinned and added, “And she didn’t have on any makeup or shoes.”
Aphrodite clutched her pearls dramatically. “And you’re sure she’s not in hell?”
“Positive. You want to know the absolute truth?”
All teasing went out of her voice. “I always want you to tell me the absolute truth.”
“It was like she was who she would’ve been without carrying around the weight of what her crappy parents did to her.”
Aphrodite looked down and nodded.
“Hey, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“You didn’t. It’s just that I understand what you’re saying all too well. It’s good to know that there is a place and a time where my past won’t have the power to hurt me anymore.”
Kevin slowly covered her hand with his. “There’s more. You get to take love with you when you die. You get to remember everything and everyone, but something happens and the loss and grief and feeling like you miss someone so much that it might kill you goes away and leaves you with love—always love.”
She covered their joined hands with her other one. “I wish I could help take away some of that hurt for you.”
He met her gaze. “I thought you could. I was wrong. You’re great, but you’re not her. You’re stronger and wiser. I love her exactly as she was, but if she’d been more like you, she would have been able to survive the loss of so much of her humanity like you did.”
“Hey, I’m still learning and growing. I’ve been her—the difference was that I learned to let people in and to rely on my friends. I want you to remember that. Let people in. Let your friends help you. Any world is too damn difficult to survive on your own.” She lifted her hand and touched his cheek gently. “Love again. She wants you to. I know it because even though it breaks my heart to think about it, if I died I would want Darius to find happiness again. The only thing worse than losing him would be knowing that he was living a miserable, lonely, loveless life.”
For just a moment, Kevin closed his eyes and rested his cheek against her warm, soft, familiar touch.
“There’s someone in your world who will help you forget the pain that losing love has caused you, and when you do that you’ll be able to remember the joy it brought you.” She took her hand from his cheek. “Promise me you’ll try.”
He opened his eyes. “I promise. I’m just not sure how to do it.”
“The awesome thing about love is that as long as you’re open to it, not only will it find you, but it will also teach you things you never even thought you needed to know. Trust me. I’m an expert on unexpectedly being taught things by the people I love.”
“Thanks for talking to me like this. I needed it,” Kevin said.
“So did I. This attraction thing doesn’t just go one way, you know. I see why your Aphrodite fell for you. Were our situations and our worlds different, I would show you just how attractive you are to me.”
Their gaze met and held, and Kevin had to force himself not to lean forward and kiss her.
Aphrodite grinned. “Good choice. Like you said—I’m not her and being with me wouldn’t fix that break in your heart. But come here. I would like to hug you, if that’s okay with you.”
Instead of answering, he pulled Aphrodite into his arms and held her for a long, long time. Before they let each other go, she whispered, “Always remember that you and I are friends.”
“I’ll remember,” he whispered back—and when he left the Council Room, the break in Kevin’s heart began to heal.
Neferet
The electricity returned not long after her delightful, loyal tendril
s returned with her dinner—two young, semiattractive men who might have been considered handsome before they’d been possessed by her children and walked zombielike through the icy rain to the midtown villa she was borrowing from dead girls. She’d commanded her tendrils to leave the men’s bodies just before she began to feed from them, as it was rather incestuous to drain the blood from someone possessed by her children. The young men made an annoying amount of noise and fuss for the few moments they were aware before she ripped out their throats and drained them of blood.
Delicately, Neferet used the corner of a thick bath sheet to wipe the blood from herself as she left the scarlet bathroom suite. “Children, drag these corpses to the backyard and eat them. Do remember to finish your meal completely and then hide the remains, and by that, I mean bones only, in the shrubbery. And we insist you lick up the blood in the bathroom as well. We cannot abide a mess.”
Then she stretched her elongated limbs before going to the master closet and choosing a long, red silk slip dress to wear. It wasn’t as formfitting as she wished it was; she’d become too thin for it to hug her skin tightly, and instead of brushing the top of her feet it came only to her knees, but when Neferet stood before the mirror, she admired herself. Her limbs were long and bone white. Taut flesh stretched beautifully, powerfully, over lean muscle. Her hands slid down the silk, caressing her ribs where they jutted out from her chest like armor. Her breasts were small, but firm, and her nipples pressed sensuously against the slick fabric. Her neck had lengthened—not like a swan—like a magnificent praying mantis. Neferet turned and peered over her shoulder, sweeping the thick fall of silver-streaked auburn hair aside so she could appreciate the strength of her sinewy back. No, she wasn’t as she used to be, and her appearance should reflect that.
Neferet was not vampyre nor human. She was a dark goddess and as such, she no longer felt the need to conform to any world’s standard of beauty. She felt good—so very good. Neferet did not allow herself to think of the months and months she’d spent in that dank burrow with only her children and the dark as companions. It would not do to think of such unpleasantness. Instead, she went from room to room in the villa, lighting every candle she could find. She eschewed electric lights as too harsh. They were not as flattering to the long, graceful lines of her new body—and she was discovering that her eyes were sensitive to light, which only made sense after what she had so recently been through. All that darkness. All that hunger. All that—
“No! We shall not think of it. We shall act instead to be quite certain no one ever imprisons us again.” She clapped her hands. “Children! Come to us!”
From all around her, the faithful tendrils of darkness slithered from the shadows. They were still smaller than they were before they were entombed with her. She knew why. They had fed her while she had been trapped. Briefly, Neferet wondered what would have happened had they remained entombed for uncounted years. Would they all have become dried husks—mummified—unable to die, but also unable to live?
Neferet shuddered and closed that door in her mind.
“Darlings. How are you feeling?”
The tendrils swarmed her, crawling up her legs, wrapping around her waist, dangling from her arms and neck like living strands of serpentine jewels. Once again, they felt warm and pulsed with energy.
“Ah, that pleases us.” Neferet stroked them. “Now, will you soon be strong enough to travel?”
Their wriggling became even more excited, and she understood them perfectly.
“Do not become too eager. We are going to a world we know little of—except that there is a lesser version of us there who has control of someone who is our property.” Just the thought of Lynette being subservient to anyone else angered Neferet so badly that she had completely forgotten that she had already killed her Lynette. What mattered to Neferet was the fact that someone else had claimed something that belonged to her—and that would never do.
“No. It will not do,” Neferet said. “But it will also not do for us to enter a world ignorant and unprepared. We need information and cannot ask him for it. We cannot go to him weak and needy.” Neferet stroked the tendrils that slithered over her body. “Where shall we get the information we desire?”
When the answer came to Neferet, she laughed aloud at the simplicity of it. “Of course! The usurper called on their power—so shall we. They are probably still near, lurking like the little spies they have always been. We just need something to pique their curiosity so that they will appear to us.” Her smile was reptilian. “We know what those meddling sprites would like—something they have not tasted for uncounted years. And we know where to find one.”
Neferet hurried from the villa. She paused on the doorstep. It was still the deep of the cold, rainy night, but cold and rain weren’t enough for her purposes. She imagined stretching up into the low-hanging clouds to agitate them. It felt good to use her power. Neferet was still enough vampyre that she could reach the elements, but now she called to them with something darker than what a High Priestess would invoke. As in all things, there was a balance between Dark and Light. Neferet remembered her priestess training that, more than one hundred years before, had taught her to join with the elements and manipulate them, though now she wielded the power of immortality granted to her through Darkness and death. So, she awakened rain with the wrath of storm clouds and the violence of thunder and lightning.
The trickle of rain changed to a downpour and fell in thick cords of water from the black sky. Thunder rumbled and lightning sliced the clouds.
“Now, my darlings, come to us. Cover us with the deep of your black, endless shadows. Do not let prying eyes—neither human nor vampyre—see us.”
Her tendrils, still recovering from their year of famine, rushed to her. They swarmed her body, blanketing her in shadow and familiar darkness.
Neferet smiled.
“Let us hunt, my darlings.”
24
Neferet
It wasn’t difficult to find a Sons of Erebus Warrior—not even in the downpour Neferet had instigated. They prowled the waterlogged streets of Midtown Tulsa like lackeys of the Tulsa Police Department. While humans patrolled in the protection of their police cruisers, Warriors remained in the elements—heads bowed against the onslaught of rain and cold.
Neferet watched a small group of Warriors from behind a cluster of tree-sized crepe myrtles that slumbered the winter away. She murmured to her children, “Were we in charge, we would not subject our Warriors to such humiliation. Why do they do the bidding of those lesser than them? Oh, we know. It is because a lesser High Priestess rules. Let us follow them, children, and await our opportunity.”
Silently, Neferet glided after the Warriors. Because they were on foot, they were able to trudge up and down alleyways and peer into windows. Neferet thought it was rather amusing. What did they expect to find? That she would be watching television and awaiting them in a living room? Did they really expect she would be easily captured?
The thought almost made her laugh aloud.
Finally, one of the larger groups of Warriors—Neferet counted ten of them—made their way to the intersection of Peoria and Cherry Street, where they cut across the street to head west, toward Maple Park, which gave her a brilliant idea.
“Go ahead, my darlings,” she told several of her children. “Enter Grumpy’s Garden, the little store there, across the street from that wretched McDonald’s. Hide among the outdoor chimeneas. As the Warriors pass, create a distraction. We shall do the rest.”
A clump of tendrils fell from her body and became one with the rain and night. Neferet followed more slowly, keeping to the shadows and avoiding the garish light of the fast-food establishment. She and her horde crept around the rear of Grumpy’s Garden—the little outdoor novelty store and nursery that perfumed that section of Cherry Street with piñon and incense, cutting through the yards that framed it to find the per
fect spot near the privacy fence that was the store’s property line. There, Neferet waited.
The Warriors trooped past and as they did one of the chimeneas fell over, breaking against the cement lot with a sound that was more jarring than the thunder rolling intermediately overhead.
The line of Warriors turned—instantly on guard.
“Check it out!” their leader commanded.
Seven of the ten Warriors rushed to the chained gate across the lot from where Neferet was concealed. The other three Sons of Erebus Warriors stood stoically peering through the rain and waiting to be sure no one escaped.
It was laughably easy. Neferet emerged from the shadows and wrapped her arms around their leader from behind. With strength magnified by her dark powers, she pulled him from the sidewalk and back into the darkness with her while her tendrils covered his mouth.
Neferet didn’t pause. She carried the Warrior swiftly through the storm to the villa. In the distance, between crashes of thunder, she could hear the Sons of Erebus calling for him.
“Odin!” they shouted impotently. “Odin! Where are you?”
“Odin. One of the old gods. How utterly appropriate.” She purred the words into his ear.
The Warrior struggled to break loose. He was strong—a big, muscular vampyre in his prime. But he was no match for what Neferet and her children had become.
When they reached the villa, Neferet detoured to the backyard and the expansive grounds that were so tastefully maintained. There, she placed him on a wrought iron chair that belonged to small bistro table near the frozen koi pond. Her children tethered his wrists and ankles to the chair, as well as covered his mouth. Quickly, she went inside the villa. Neferet knew exactly what she sought and went directly to the sickeningly sweet Sevres urn that she had glimpsed in a niche just outside the garish downstairs sitting room. She tossed the blue and gold lid aside so that it shattered against the wood floor and carried the urn outside with her. Then she stood before the Warrior, smiling.
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