by Lillian Grey
"Alik," Aaliyah purred, pulling me into a kiss that I returned with passion. "How is your new little shadow? I hope she is living up to your expectations of an attendant."
"She is a smart girl, very powerful thanks to your blood. She will be perfect," I praised Luna and she smiled.
"Good, however she is not who I came here to discuss. Lucifer has taken the bait I left for him and Eden will soon follow suit. I think it is time you were filled in on my plans." she turned and left down a hall and Luna and I followed.
Ceil wasn’t too far in front of me and I reached out and placed a hand on her shoulder. She tensed and then relaxed as she looked back at me. We came out into a large room that seemed to be at the center of the pyramid. You could see the large black cap stone at its peak if you looked up. In the center of the room was a large stone table and above that sat a clock that told time by the movement of the planets made of interlocking gold gears and springs powered by a steady stream of water that I could hear flowing through the pyramid's structure. We sat at the table, both Ceil and Luna standing behind us, respectfully.
"Alik, do you love me?" Aaliyah asked.
"I do," I lied.
"Do you love me, or the power I hold?" I looked at her for a moment, but she waited.
"Our people have forgotten how to love, I haven’t. It is you I want."
"Good, well I used to love another, you know very well. Oddly enough, he is now with someone you used to love very much as well. Vanessa desperately wants you back. My sentries from Lycuian's coven have told me. After his death, they remained loyal to me and have been more than useful. Also letting me know that Lucifer knows Eden's location as well, in Jamaica of all places, if they don't kill each other soon they will be called back to New York on urgent business."
"Business?"
"Lilith is dead." Aaliyah's words were cold and flat. I showed no expression and made no move to react; I couldn't react as I was now numb. "She was a traitor, conspiring with Lucifer and Vanessa to kill me. I had to strike first. In three days, they will all make their way here to confront us and we will be ready."
"Ready for what?" I asked and she slid a book to me.
"By now, I’m sure you have figured out this is a very special place. The pyramid sort of records history as it goes on and collects examples of man’s greatness, growing with man as he advances. When I was twenty, this place was no more than a story high and you could only find a short journal and a small room to hold it. That is besides the point. That book holds the histories of the Lunarian and Solarian people within their respective dimensions, Heaven and Hell. I had hoped to use Lucifer or Eden, having one of the realms behind me would have been comforting but they would only be a liability and must both die. Their people have banished them to walk the Earth forever and their power is fading with centuries of non-use. I see now that I will have to settle for the earth for a while and for that we will need June on our side. She is the key. I know that Lilith never raised you to take command, not that you couldn't. Still, it is June that knows all of Lilith's secrets, while you kept her alive. June only lived in your shadow to keep her safe."
"With our mother gone, June will not come to your side willingly. She will not see sense like I have especially if she knows you were the one who killed Lilith."
"Make her. I will need the vampire united under the cause of breaking the veil. I must provoke Heaven and Hell into action if I am to take them for my own."
"Provoke them? I don’t understand."
"Mass murder on a global scale. Whoever the God and Devil are now will have to act when they see that their new source of power is drying up. It is how I will bait them out, Aryara and Ario have raised a great army, and now June must replace Lilith and rein in Aryara and Ario so that they may discipline my forces."
"What about me?"
"You, my love, I will need by my side. No other on this planet has shown such a talent for the Lunarian Arts as you have. I wish you to study the book and know your enemy. When you have the power, move on and master the other books. Once we have the earth under lock and key, I will need your help to start breaking down the defenses of Heaven and Hell, further provoking action."
"A bold plan, love. To rule all three realms; you will make a fine queen." She made her way around the table to sit on my lap.
"I, love, will make a fine God," she whispered in my ear, then she kissed me as she waved Luna and Ceil away.
Alyon Alik
Chapter 42.0
Time passed differently within the garden, days here could sometimes be minutes or hours in the outside world so keeping track of time was difficult. I might have been here for almost four days; in the outside it had only been about a day and a half. Aaliyah's plan was sick and she would need to be stopped somehow, but I did not have any way to contact June or even Vanessa. The only thing I had done right was leaving with Aaliyah to keep Vanessa alive, but I might have well just killed her in New York as when she got here she would be just as dead. I couldn’t sit in the pyramid anymore and left to walk the garden. I found myself heading to the tree of forbidden fruit with Luna in tow. As I made it to the base of the massive tree, nearly half the height of the pyramid and almost forty feet thick, I saw Ceil with her eyes closed at its base. She sat up as I got closer, her hand moving to her weapon at her side.
"I am not here to fight," I said, raising both hands. Luna who was growing bolder every day clutched her weapon ready.
"Neither am I," Ceil sat back down and closed her eyes.
"Have you seen Aaliyah?" I asked, sitting down.
"She is with Lycuian's coven in the world," she said bitterly.
"And she didn?t take you?"
"Nope, she hasn’t taken me anywhere lately."
"Then I have a question for you, where do your loyalties lie?" She sat up.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"Is Aaliyah your queen?"
"Aaliyah is my creator and nothing more.”
"What am I to you?”
"No king." She looked me up and down. "Maybe a good sparring partner, almost a friend even.”
"Will you do me a favor then?"
"I don’t know. What’s the favor?"
"I want you to kill Lucifer or Eden if you get the chance to.",
"Trying to gain more of Aaliyah's affections?"
"No, I just need her off guard is all."
"Why?"
"It’s just good if she’s overly happy and confident."
"Okay, I understand,"she said and laid back down and closed her eyes. I stood and started to head back. "What makes you think I won’t tell Aaliyah you mean to kill her?" shouted Ceil.
"The fact that we both want the same thing," I said under my breath, not even stopping to glance back.
Vanessa Stanton
Chapter 43.0
Aaliyah’s message seemed to mean very little at that moment, despite her declaration to end my life. I sat there not able to take my eyes off of Lilith now. Tears were falling from my eyes again, but I had no idea what I was feeling. There was no sense of loss or sorrow now; no pain or remorse. I felt empty and hollow. June moved toward Lilith and gently lifted her off the ground; Eden and Lucifer seemed to be thinking in separate corners of the room.
“Where will you take her?” I asked quietly, and Lucifer and Eden also looked up.
“Can you please bring my sword to the roof? I will meet you there; use the elevator.”
“Of course,” I said, reaching for her sword when she vanished.
I took the elevator to the roof; I had never been up there. A small rooftop garden covered most of the space. In the center of a small circle of hedges, June stood looking down. June laid Lilith’s body
on a small circular bench, which stood a few feet off the ground. She crossed her hands over her chest and Lilith looked to be merely sleeping.
“Has Alik ever explained to you how vampire view each other?” asked June.
“Yeah, he did once. From how he ex
plained it, I got that power is the power of power to vampire,” I said timidly.
“On the whole, that is pretty much it. Death is a weakness that should not be honored; immortal vampire who mourn the dead are weak, and those vampire who die are viewed as weaker.”
“Sounds like a cruel existence,” I said in a low whisper.
“It isn’t. To lack the ability to feel the impact of death is bliss like you wouldn’t imagine. If we were like those vampire, we would not be here right now, crying,” she said, fresh streaks of blood on her face. “Even so, among the few and most powerful, there is a common understanding of death even if the young choose to ignore this. Death is real and an ever lingering presence to even the immortal and should be respected.”
“I don’t understand where you’re going with this.”
“I doubt Lilith would be angry if I told you this story, but there is a reason she only ever made three vampire.”
“She told me once,” I said timidly. “It hurt her a lot with what she asked you to do and the things she made you see. She said she was surprised that you did not resent her.”
June turned from me to look back at Lilith. “Is that how you felt, mother? I could never resent you for anything,” she whispered, kneeling and placing one hand on Lilith’s. She stood again, her eyes still on Lilith. “That however, wasn’t the only reason; Lilith had created a fourth vampire.” I turned to look at her shocked. “Every year, on the seventh of July, she would make a trip to Egypt and I always wondered why, so I asked her one year.”
June Tuski
Chapter 44.0
This was just one of my mothers secrets I would have been ok not knowing…
“Would you like to come along with me, dear?” she asked in return. Of everything I was expecting her to say, that wasn’t it. I agreed and we were on a plane to Egypt the next day. She was very quiet on the trip and I was still surprised that she let me come, so I didn’t bother to ask anymore. When we landed, there was already a car waiting for us and we got in and she drove for two hours until we got to the edge of the city and parked the car. We got out and headed directly into the sand. By this time, I was confused as to where we were going and she seemed to sense that. “Are you wondering where we are going?” she asked me.
"Yes, what could possibly be out here? All we have seen is sand for the last hour."
“Have you ever heard of the expression ‘a diamond in the rough’?”
“So there is a diamond out here that you’re looking for?”
“I’m not looking for anything dear; I have already found it and have found it every year since for the last four thousand plus years today.'”
“You have been doing this for over four thousand years?”
“Every year on the same day, yes.”
“What have you been doing?”
“We are going to visit the resting place of someone very close to my cold heart.” She smiled. We continued to walk and the wind began to blow up a small sandstorm, but Lilith just continued on through without a care. I was slightly behind her and I noticed she had stopped and looked around, I stopped too and she looked over her shoulder. “June, why are you standing there? Come out of all that sand,” she called and I walked to stand by her side and the sand calmed until it lay still. I looked behind me and there was a wall of sand, it was like that on all sides of a clear space about three-square miles. I looked up and the sun even felt less intense in this space.
“What is this place?” I asked.
“I’m not completely sure myself. When Javed and I first found this little oasis, the sand didn’t act this way. It kicked up the day I lost him.”
“Javed?”
“My first son,” she said, and she started to walk toward the center. I stood there, unable to move. She stopped after a few more steps and motioned for me to follow. It snapped me out of my shock and I caught up.
“You’ve always said Alik was the first.”
“True, but to a young vampire who has grown up in the chaos that surrounds me, the scope of your life, which has been blinded by the veil of immortality and the importance of death, ruined by the blood of so many that you carry with you, it would be a hard concept to grasp for him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Javed was ten when I found him, starving in an alley in a old Egyptian city ruined by war. There had been fighting in that area and I guess his parents were casualties. As I moved through the ruins, he followed me in the shadows until I sat down. He slowly approached me and sat next to me. I smiled at him; it had probably been the first friendly thing someone had done for him in a long time. His returning smile was so full of joy that his jade eyes glinted in the dim sun. He was twelve when I made him a vampire; one of the hardest decisions I had ever made. He contracted an illness and I had grown so attached to this boy that I could not lose him. He would have been fourteen when I lost him here.” I didn’t notice that we had been walking through a small grass patch with a few trees and other plants scattered around a spring of cool water. We seemed to be heading to a patch of roses that were growing naturally black.
“Just four years?” I asked, not sure if she would tell me.
“I hadn’t explained to him what I had done; he was so innocent. I made up wild stories to explain why he no longer slept, why he was never hungry, and why people wouldn’t wake up after he fed on them. I didn’t want him to know what he was.” She laughed then. “I’m sure Alik has told you his stance and how he will never create.”
“Yes, he says we are monsters.”
“He is right; we are scary monsters. Well, at least to humans. He will someday find someone he loves so much that he will be selfish and turn him or her. I didn’t see that then; I tried to hide what Javed had become from him. We often spent days here together and this hadn’t been the first time I had left Javed on his own before, so thought nothing of it when a message from Ayara reached me. There was trouble in a nearby valley and she wanted my help; the death I already exposed him to when he fed was enough. So I suggested that he go to the oasis and play while I was gone, and that I would be back in about a week. He happily agreed.” She knelt down next to the roses and lightly stroked its petals. Streaks of blood rolled down her face in the sunlight, but it didn’t burn. She read the look on my face. “Have you never seen a vampire cry before? Probably not, it’s not something our kind embraces, or maybe I should say it’s something that most of our kind have lost the ability to do.”
“The blood doesn’t burn?”
She shook her head. 'No, it won’t. Our emotions affect us much deeper than humans. They control us so completely that they can change our blood chemistry. I found this out when I found Javed slowly burning just in front of where I am now. He pricked his finger on a rose and it allowed the smallest amount of sunlight to touch his blood to the point he slowly burned to death from the inside out. It was too late for me to do anything for him when I fell to my knees next to him. I lifted his tiny hand to my face and he smiled.”
“Mommy, you’re so warm,” he smiled. “I’m sleepy.”
“I will be here when you wake up, dear.”
He smiled. “I guess the fairies can’t steal my sleep forever, huh?” he said softly.
“No, I guess not,” I said, trying to smile as best I could as his eyes slowly closed and his hand fell from my face.”
“Mother… I’m…” I didn’t know what to say to her.
“Sorry? It’s okay. Javed didn’t seem to feel any pain. He just slowly drifted away. He was never suited to be a vampire; I turned an innocent lamb into the wolf.” She took her finger and wiped a small amount of blood from her face and traced a rose in the sand. “This is why I trace the rose wherever I go, my eternal protection for those who carry it. I won’t lose them as I have lost Javed.”
Vanessa Stanton
Chapter 45.0
June then raised her hand to her face and wiped away a small amount of the blood. On the back of Lilith’s palm, she
traced a rose and held out her hand for her sword. By this time, the sun had risen and was shining on Lilith’s body. With the tip of the blade, she retraced the rose and with every stroke, it glowed a dull orange that spread throughout Liliths entire body. A strong gust of wind then blew my hair all around my face and when it stopped, Lilith’s body was gone. All that remained was a faint red glow of ash in the cusp of a single black rose petal that sat suspended in the center of a glass box in Junes arms.
“How…” I asked, stunned.
