The pyres saw our smallest bodies today.
No wonder Kallie hates me.
“Was Zoe lost with them?” Tanis asked quietly. “I made a promise to Priska.”
Barbara sniffled. “No, as it happens. She’s been in with the True Daughters. They like her—the leg like a tail. They think it’s cute. I think it saved her life.” Barbara dashed at her eyes with the back of her hand and sniffled before blowing her nose into a paper towel that had seen better days.
“Bernie shot Priska,” Tanis said simply. “But on the right side. Rhea was getting her help. She’ll be back for her.”
Again Barbara said nothing, not judging, not doing anything other than sitting among the debris of the nursery and mourning those she’d cared for most. Tanis looked at her. “I’m going to go get Zoe, and then you need to get her out of here, for when Priska comes back.”
“What? Out of where?”
Tanis looked at her, hard, and repeated herself. Slower. Each word heavy. “Go to my apartment. Take my keys.” She fished them out of her pockets and forced them into Barbara’s palm. “Do you know how to drive?”
“...yes, I learned years ago, but I don’t understand. You know I don’t go out there.”
“I know you don’t, but this needs to be the exception. Please. I lost Bernie, I lost Fi. I don’t want to lose you, too. The kids are gone. You’ve got no reason to stay. I’ll write down my—here.” Tanis rummaged through the debris until she found something to write on. It was a Frozen coloring book, half full of crayon scribbles, and her breath caught in her throat seeing the marks left by little ones who’d never get the chance to finish their pictures. She scribbled her address with a broken blue crayon and a grimace, and—realizing Barbara might not know how to get to the apartment anyway—she pulled out her phone. “Fifty-five twenty-two. The code on the phone. Use the GPS. I probably won’t need this anymore. Just... please? Please.”
Barbara looked from the phone to the scrap of paper in her hand. “I don’t like to go out there. They’ll see me.”
“It’s worth the risk this time. Wear a hat. Shit, there’s at least three hats in the trunk of the Honda. You can hide after you get to the apartment. Gaia is in Percy’s Pass, at the apartments I moved into early on. She’s in my contacts list. Call her and tell her you need to hide. She’ll help you and Zoe both.”
“What’d you do, Tanis?” Barbara asked quietly. “What’d you do that I should go hide with Zoe?”
Tanis didn’t answer her. She put the shotguns aside and walked away.
OF ALL THE True Daughters, Mariam most looked and behaved like their mother. Large, pale, pendulous udders with purple nipples that rested on a thick midsection, a slab for a mouth, tangled dark hair and brown scales from the waist down. She wasn’t quite as awful as Lamia, but she held rank in the Den and wasn’t afraid to use it. One time, at three o’clock in the morning after Tanis had dropped off a boyfriend-du-month for their mother, Mariam had thrown a tantrum until Tanis had agreed to get her two Quarter Pounders with Cheese, making for an extra hour of work after a twenty-six-hour stretch of hunting. All Tanis had wanted to do was go home and sleep on Naree. What she’d ended up doing was popping three 5-hour Energies, dancing with a heart attack, and producing the hamburgers so Lamia didn’t bash in her skull for upsetting one of her favored babies.
Of course of all the True Daughters, it was Mariam lazing about with Zoe clasped to her jelly chest. Zoe looked content enough, her dark hair in a French braid, her cheeks flushed with blush and her lips rouged red. Her snake-tail leg lashed against Mariam’s thick, scaled trunk, and all Tanis could think of was an annoyed cat. The little girl didn’t appear to be upset, though, as she voraciously pawed through a well-loved copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.
Tanis passed the two guards by the door. Both eyed her warily, but she ignored them, sweeping aside diaphanous drapes to stand on a pair of overlapping Oriental rugs with colorful medallions. The big chamber was home to real beds with headboards and footboards and soft, jewel-toned comforters. Hanging drapes separated each ‘room’ to afford some illusion of privacy. Mariam was among five other True Daughters, all of them in repose. One had an e-reader in hand. One watched old movies on her television. One napped. One skimmed a magazine while she shoveled chocolates into her face.
Mariam lifted her head from her pillows. Her thick fingers toyed with Zoe’s hair as she regarded Tanis coolly, eyes hooded, her extra lid blinking every few seconds.
“Consort.”
Tanis frowned.
Wait, does Mother expect me to service all of these bitches, too?
Oh, no. No, no, no.
“I need Zoe for a few minutes,” Tanis growled.
“Why?’
“I’m going to see Barbara.” Mariam didn’t look convinced that was a good enough reason to do anything she didn’t want to do, so Tanis embellished. “She’s upset. Ma”—she didn’t want to scare the kid with the horrific reality of their mother murdering other children, so she chose her words carefully—“She left Barbara all alone. She could use a kid’s company for a bit. Plus I saw Priska. I wanted to tell Zoe about our visit.”
“Priska?” Zoe perked up, hearing her name. “Where is she? Is she coming home soon?’
“You bet. I talked to her just the other day. She’s with Rhea.”
Recovering from a shotgun blast. Because she dared come for me.
We’ll leave that part out.
Zoe wriggled away from Mariam and loped over. The one leg, one snake tail combination meant she canted left, but she moved fast all the same, the prehensile limb as strong if not stronger than its mate. She paused midway through the chamber to eye Mariam.
“Can I borrow your book, Miss Mariam?”
“Of course you can. Just bring it back to me when you’re done. Kisses.”
“Kisses!” Zoe dashed back to hug Mariam, her face disappearing into folds of soft flesh, her arms wrapping around Mariam’s arm because they weren’t going to be able to get around her middle girth. Most of the True Daughters slanted fat, both because Lamia didn’t let them out to move and because they were expected to breed whenever they were in season.
Which apparently Mariam was, because as Tanis led Zoe out by the hand, she called to Tanis’s back. “Consort!” When Tanis refused to answer to the title, she switched to her real name. “Tanis. Stop.”
Tanis’s shoulder’s tensed.
This won’t be good.
Can’t be good.
“I’ll need servicing later. Would you like me to bathe? I will, out of consideration. I know you live among the humans and have, perhaps, acquired some of their ridiculous sensibilities.”
Tanis rolled her eyes up to the ceiling, glad her back was turned so Mariam couldn’t see the abject loathing screwing up her features. She could feel it—the pinch of her brow, the frown, the strain behind her eyes that made her squint. The idea of the thing, of being used, of being handed back and forth between Lamia and the True Daughters, made her skin crawl and her cocks shrivel inside her shorts.
It makes it so easy to hate them. The presumptuousness...
“No,” she managed, guiding Zoe along.
Because you’ll be too dead to matter soon.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
NO ONE ASKED questions as Barbara led Zoe outside. Seeing the denmother walking with a kid wasn’t unusual, and despite Barbara’s preference for down-below, she would often take children out to play, to air them out and get them some exercise so they wouldn’t tear down the walls with their exuberance. That she walked a little beyond the circle wasn’t noteworthy.
That the Honda was parked just out of sight was convenient.
Barbara looked self-conscious, exposed as she was to the world beyond her tunnels. She ran her hands over her scales, her dress. She shuffled her feet. She looked skittish and nervous despite Tanis and Zoe being her only companions. Tanis went to the trunk of the car and produced one of the promised ha
ts, handing it over and, when it didn’t quite fit on her skull, adjusting the band in the back so it wouldn’t fly off with the first breeze.
“Do I look silly?” Barbara whispered.
“Nah, you look great. Let’s get you out of here.” Tanis piled Barbara and the child into the car. A part of her wanted to climb in, too, to go with them and make a great escape, but until she knew Lamia was gone for good, until she could be sure that the Gorgons upheld their part of the deal, she couldn’t risk it.
Naree and Bee are out there, vulnerable.
They’re my responsibilities. They’re counting on me even if they don’t know it.
“Tell Gaia you have Zoe. She’ll know how to get in touch with Priska,” Tanis said, leaning into the driver’s window.
Barbara nodded, fussing with the GPS, so Tanis reclaimed her phone and set the address for her. A crisp British accent informed Barbara she had to drive a half-mile south and take a left.
Naree liked the British voice better than the American one. She called her Brittany.
“Is Priska there, where we’re going?” Zoe demanded, holding the Harry Potter book in her lap, her fingers rustling through the pages.
“Not yet, but she will be, I promise. She asked me to come get you. But it’s time for you two to get going, okay? Take care of yourselves.”
Tanis pulled herself from the car and turned to go, but Barbara snatched her hand, squeezing her around the wrist. “Best of luck?” she offered, blinking slowly beneath the hat brim.
“I’ll be fine,” Tanis lied, stepping back. She waved at Zoe. “Be good for Barbara. Say ‘hi’ to Priska for me.”
She watched the Honda pull away, the finality of their departure settling in and leaving her cold. She was probably scared on some level, but there were too many things to think about, too many what-ifs and worries about other people, she didn’t have time to entertain it. There was probably some guilt, too, but it couldn’t roost because the Gorgons were due soon. She didn’t have a clock anymore, not after giving her phone to Barbara, but it had to be closing in.
If they show up. But why wouldn’t they?
She headed back to the Den, again passing Kallie and her helper as they brought out yet another pair of bodies from the pile they’d amassed below. Tanis couldn’t fathom a guess as to how many their mother brutalized, but it was at least thirty or forty if it included the children.
Kallie was almost at the edge of the town when Tanis called her name. She paused without looking back, tossing her head, droplets of sweat flying in every direction.
“What?” she snapped.
“When are we leaving?”
“Tomorrow night or the morning after. Bethesda and Lois are getting U-Hauls for Mother and the True Daughters. We have a car convoy planned, too. How many can your car take?”
“Four,” Tanis replied, not mentioning she’d just given it away.
Kallie didn’t waste another word on her, trudging through the woods with her gruesome load. Tanis headed back into the tunnels and recovered her guns from Barbara’s broken nursery. They wouldn’t do her a whole heck of a lot of good anymore, but how did the saying go? Better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it?
She was picking her way around the nursery debris when her mother’s voice rumbled down the pipe, a loud, ugly squawk that filled all available space, bouncing off of the pipe walls and rippling onward and outward forever. Every instinct Tanis had told her to flee, but she couldn’t do that, not so close to the end of all things, and so she walked toward it, hoping beyond hope that the Gorgons would come before her mother tortured her or worse, raped her.
Her steps were heavy. All eyes were on her.
Past the tent town. Past the ladder exit. Past the entryways of the True Daughters’ chambers, where the daughters lined up, some curious, some hungry, some disgusted. Past the guards at her mother’s door, watching her and eyeing her guns warily. Her boots splashed down the waterline, steps heavy, legs leaden. She stepped into the birthing chamber with its distant twin lights suspended over the stacked mattresses. She looked around, she listened. She didn’t dare sniff. Her grip on the gun tightened.
She came.
Lamia was damned fast, careening in from the right side of the room with a snarl. That huge body went from far to near in a heartbeat, coils circling Tanis’s legs and wrapping her up, all the way to her chest and tearing her feet from the floor. Tanis dropped the gun she was holding, to clatter and bounce off the wall. The other shotgun was plucked away from her, snapping the sling and tossed like so much garbage, which left her only with the pistols, digging into her ass in her mother’s death grip. She was hostage to a beast, to the corpulent, blue, veiny she-beast that loomed over her, her nipples pressed against Tanis’s chest and leaking milk, her maw opened and revealing yellow stubby teeth and two enormous fangs.
Tanis jerked her gaze away from her mother only to see, in the corner, Lamia’s last clutch—Luke’s clutch—that had been born while she was gone. The eggs were shattered into pieces, the yolky insides leaking across the floor, no doubt adding to the abysmal stench of the place.
I’m so glad I didn’t have to smell that.
“Look at me. Look at me, Consort.”
Tanis set her jaw and did as she was told, staring into her mother’s wide, monstrous face. A gob of something had congealed on Lamia’s upper left cheek, crusted rivers running down to her chin.
“I should rip you apart for your disobedience.” Lamia tightened her coils until Tanis thought her legs might break. Lamia reached up to grab her hair, jerking Tanis’s head back and leaning in to press their noses together. Tanis could feel her hot, moist breath on her chin, on her throat, and she shuddered in revulsion.
“Did you think to kill me? With your guns? With your silly human toys? Is that what you thought?” Lamia screeched. She shook Tanis like a ragdoll, Tanis’s neck jerking back and forth. She’d hurt the next day, assuming she got to see the next day.
The way things were going, that wasn’t likely to be a concern. Especially not when she said, “Nah. If it was that easy, I’d have shot you years ago.”
Lamia’s fury was immediate and absolute. Her hands clasped around Tanis’s neck, thumbs digging into the soft flesh beneath Tanis’s jaw like she’d pop off her head, and squeezed. Tanis’s world shrank, blackness encroaching upon the edges of her vision, her bones grinding together inside of Lamia’s coils.
“I loathe you. I loathe everything about your pink skin. I may need you, but I hate you. Do you understand? I hate you. You are the means to an end. We are not equals, you and I, and we never will be.” Her coils dropped from Tanis’s shoulders to loop around her waist. Her hands let go of Tanis’s neck. Tanis gulped air, grateful for the reprieve, but it was short-lived. Lamia’s hands went to Tanis’s biceps, fingers biting into the muscle hidden beneath her snake tattoos, and jerked. She didn’t rip Tanis’s arms off—that would make Tanis bleed out, denying her a proper baby daddy—but she did pull both arms from the sockets, the muscles stretching like taffy before they shredded inside their skin prison, the ligaments snapping like cords on a collapsing suspension bridge.
Tanis screamed. Her head tilted back, mouth gaped open, and she wailed her agony, her cries filling the Den, telling all who heard it that Mother had begun meting out her punishment. This was the cost of overstepping yourself in Lamia’s world. This was how disloyalty was rewarded.
She couldn’t move her arms properly, and she didn’t want to. Any attempt felt like someone hammering nails into her flesh. She went limp, jaw grinding, cheeks wet with tears she loathed shedding. She bit back a snivel, even as Lamia lifted a hand and pressed a thumb to her right eye socket, rolling it around threateningly.
“Do you think you need this? Both of them, really? Perhaps I’ll leave you one. I’ll sew it open so you always have to look at me when I breed you. So you can’t think of that girl of yours, that swine you like to fuck. What say you, Tanis? Do you want
to shoot me with your guns now? How will you lift them?”
She pressed on the eye, slowly increasing the pressure until Tanis thought it’d pop like a grape. Lamia’s talon dug into the skin beside her brow, the flesh splitting like a peach, blood streaking down Tanis’s cheek and over her nose to splash down onto her T-shirt. She shuddered in her mother’s grasp, the pain in her eye somehow managing to pull her attention away from her ruined arms. Lamia shoved again, the squishy orb close to bursting, white flares dotting Tanis’s vision as the tension mounted.
Push. Push. Push.
Maybe she’ll go too far. Accidentally kill me.
Please. Please.
Tanis groaned through the pain, trembled inside her mother’s grip, when the first panicked screams echoed through the Den. Lamia’s hand dropped from her face, her coils loosing and unceremoniously spilling Tanis onto the hard floor. Tanis’s shoulder made first contact, the impact knocking the wind from her. She cried in agony, rolling onto her stomach, her arms useless meat to either side of her body as she inched forward, reduced to more worm than woman.
Lamia hissed and eased toward the chamber’s entrance, her giant scales whispering as they coursed over the rock.
“KALLIE!” Her voice thundered out as she cocked her head to the side, listening, her nostrils flaring as she tried to smell the threat soiling her snake hole.
Tanis closed her eyes. She hurt in ways she’d never thought possible, her arms useless weights, her eye throbbing and birthing a blinding headache, but somehow, she found a smile.
They’re heeere.
“What? What is this. KALLIE!” Lamia bellowed again. “ATTEND ME.”
Kallie did not attend her. Lamia’s guards, however, did, running down the pipe as fast as their legs would carry them.
Snake Eyes Page 24
