by Heather Knox
“Who are you?!” she growls.
“Chick fight!” the large, ugly man admires. He’s taken up a baseball bat, the handle whittled down to a sharp point, and tosses it from left hand to right and back as he approaches with a sneer. “Come on Pierce—we may be dead but we’re not dead, if you know what I mean . . . ” Despite his lewd words, I can almost hear his inner Beast snarl as I manhandle his packmate.
“We always know what you mean, Johnny,” Pierce says, rolling his eyes. He eyes his helpless packmate with concern but makes no move to help her.
I yank the knife from her caught hand, eliciting a sharp kick that would have shattered a human’s tibia but instead meets mine—sharp pain but no lasting damage. She reaches her free hand behind her and grabs my hair with a hard yank.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you, gorgeous,” Pierce warns. “Lydia doesn’t like people touching her things.” He takes a few steps towards us.
“A little help, guys?” she hisses.
“Oh, so now you need help,” he mocks in an almost brotherly way, putting his hands out in front of him in mock-surrender. “I seem to recall a lengthy lecture just last week about how you’re more than capable of handling yourself and—”
I barely have time to pull back so I can gather the momentum needed to plunge her knife into her ribcage from the side when someone catches my arm at the elbow.
“Hey now,” Pierce continues, now at my side, standing close enough I feel the chill of his skin nearly touching mine. I turn my head to gape at him in surprise. He holds my arm hard enough to cause bruises to bloom. “I’m trying to have a discussion with my packmate that you’re rather rudely interr—”
Once recovered from the stun of his speed—greater than any Everlasting I’ve traded blows with—I release Lydia’s arm and spin on Pierce, flicking my wrist to toss aside the knife which hits the pavement with a clatter, and punching him below the belt, hard, with a tightly clenched fist. He grunts as I connect. Some things hurt no matter how immortal you are. Lydia stifles a laugh as her packmate drops to his knees, eyes wide. I, against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world—truer for none than for the Praedari.
That’s when I notice her: a statuesque woman with sharp features and red hair that seems to reflect the moonlight. At her hip, a sword in its scabbard; strapped to her back by a few thick ribbons of leather that cross above and underneath her breasts, framing them, rests a shield. The index finger of one hand rests on her lips as she takes careful steps behind and towards Johnny; in her other hand a sharpened scrap of wood but gleaming black. Or is it shadow? I blink in shock—where did she come from?—my predator within faltering a moment, allowing me to swallow instinct down and carry out this fight myself, unaided for the moment by the ancestral bestial cunning of a berserker in the throes of battle.
My being distracted offers Lydia a chance to snatch up her knife and take a defensive stance next to her now-staggering packmate, both facing me, unaware of the precarious situation Johnny unwittingly finds himself in. I see the woman’s arm draw back, away from her plea for my silence, as she moves the other to clench a long shaft of wood or shadow by both hands.
The rest unfolds in slow motion, in an eerie simultaneity. Pierce growls and rushes me—still staggering and halfway hunched over—but my attention remains fixed on Johnny as the woman deftly plunges the length of the makeshift wooden stake into his back and out his chest. His cry rises into the night, quickly building to a loud, wet gurgle, causing Lydia to turn his way as Pierce succeeds in tackling me to the ground. We crash to the pavement in a tangle of limbs, jaws snapping at the other—not a puppy’s playful nips but two killers looking for blood.
“Johnny! Noooooooo!” she screams as she takes a few running strides towards her skewered packmate.
Pierce leaps off me to join her. Both stop mid-stride as shadow envelopes Johnny from behind, where the woman once stood and from where she launched her covert assault—though they never saw her, only the thing bursting through his chest with a spray of blood. In an instant nothing stands before them save for a shrinking pool of flickering shadow on the pavement which, too, dissipates. I am left to imagine the pile of ash that should have been, the pile of ash all Everlasting leave for their allies to mourn and their enemies to spit upon. In a cruel twist of fate it seems Johnny’s pack will not be given even that.
With the nothingness that lingers nearly palpable, I use the distraction to scramble towards the van, keeping to the shadows and making sure I’m not seen. They shout after him as though his name alone could conjure him from the darkness, could bid him return from his Final Moment—a reaction I know all too well and for a moment my own grief over my own loss threatens to rise up and seize control, a familiar heaviness in my limbs as my eyes sting with tears. The choke of a sob forms in my chest, at once a boulder and a hole.
As they scan the alley, hackles raised, I climb unnoticed into the driver’s seat, slam the door, and peal backwards, screeching in the opposite direction they survey. Through the windshield I see them shouting and giving chase, see Pierce fling himself at the hood of the van, hear him near-miss as he bounces off with a thud, see him roll noiselessly on the pavement behind me.
I do them a favor, leaving them to their grief.
LYDIA WATCHES AS AURELIE—EVERY BIT AS DELICATE as her name, every bit as delicate as their Usher—slides like silk from the settee, her feet not making a sound as they land on the marble of the floor of her penthouse suite.
“It’s barely past sunset,” Lydia pouts, wrapping a throw blanket around herself.
“Mistress needs me,” Aurelie explains, slipping on an ivory cardigan. Against the light fabric, her dark locks fall in stark contrast, grazing her waist.
Lydia rolls her eyes. It irritates her that Aurelie would call their Usher that after so many years; the girl’s years far outnumbering her own. She looks on as Aurelie plaits her hair into a loose mermaid-style braid, wondering what she sees in the vanity mirror. Were she mortal, would she be dust? Putrid, worm-eaten flesh? Something else?
“Don’t be jealous, mon petit oiseau. This target requires . . . finesse.” She sets the antique metal brush down on the marble vanity, the expected clink lost to Aurelie’s Gift of Silence. Her reflection frowns at Lydia through the mirror.
Aurelie inherited not their Usher’s gift, but instead blossomed to become her own: silent as the sunlight that was her namesake, but far deadlier. Truly the only gift like it in the world; the most prized of their Usher’s collection.
“You mean she doesn’t trust me,” Lydia challenges, her voice taking on the edge of a predator whose territory is being threatened. Indeed, that within her slinks nearer the surface, a phantom flush warming her skin. She lets the blanket drop to the floor as she stands, stretching and crossing to the window overlooking the city. A welcome chill rolls off the glass.
Below, traffic drags itself through the falling snow, muffled by a flurry, the street entirely swallowed in white. She always thought the winter beautiful, even when she was between homes. Perhaps that’s why she found herself so comfortable with Aurelie: the silence. She never asked how Lydia came to their Usher’s fang and she returned the favor in kind.
Lydia startles as fingertips graze her skin, sweeping a few stray hairs off the nape of her neck.
“Hush, now,” the woman whispers into her ear. “You know she trusts you. Where is this coming from?”
Mon petit oiseau. My little bird. The nickname rings in the hollows of Lydia’s ears, the innocuous phrase—indeed, a common term of endearment in French—morphing to carry a bile Lydia could nearly taste, a bile something within her could. She’d first come across the words in a letter, written long ago in the scrawling, even handwriting of their Usher and kept in the girl’s copy of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. She’d happened upon it when Aurelie was called away on another of their Usher’s tasks and it had sparked a fight. Their first
and only fight after they became friends. Temperance loved Aurelie best, the letter made that much clear, and still she sent her prized assassin after dangerous targets to settle petty, ancient grudges. Didn’t she care she might lose her?
Aurelie holds her arms out to Lydia—a peace offering. Lydia turns slowly, stepping just slightly forward, closing what little gap remains between them. She wraps her arms around her friend.
“Goodbye,” Lydia whispers into Aurelie’s ear.
The room falls silent, even the sounds of the traffic below quelled as Aurelie’s blood gurgles from her throat and pools on the floor. Lydia needn’t see to know how wide Aurelie’s eyes were as she’s drained of life. Tears wet the cheeks of both women.
Better my fangs in her neck than another consuming her Heartsblood. A mercy kill.
For a moment, everything exists as if in a mirror: the pooling blood and the dull gray of the knit throw blanket. Then ash, her sunlight lost.
I AM JUST OUT OF THE ALLEY, STILL GUNNING IT IN reverse in the opposite direction of Lydia and Pierce, when I glance in my rearview mirror. I am only just able to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting the figure I see there. Within seconds the passenger door opens and the red-haired woman from earlier hops into the seat as if invited.
“Well met,” she says brightly as the door slams behind her.
“What the—”
“Drive!” she orders, adjusting the scabbard at her hip as one might a seatbelt, as if it were the most normal thing she could possibly be doing.
“Not until—”
“Delilah, drive,” she orders again, this time her voice more stern than excited. “Those two aren’t going to find their ashed packmate any time soon and they’re out for blood now. Soon these streets will be crawling with Praedari.”
“‘Well met,’ alright,” I mutter, shifting into drive and slipping my foot to the right to depress the gas pedal evenly. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” I sigh to myself without thinking.
“I’m not the enemy here, Delilah,” the woman says, offering a smile. “But I know who you think is—even though you’re not quite sure yourself, anymore, are you?” I glare at the road, a proxy for her. “Who the enemy is is rarely clear—and always subjective—but I can take you to their nest if you wish. You can find out for yourself if you’re right.”
Nest. Not many Everlasting use that term, as it’s considered vulgar—as in, a rodent or insect nest. Something you want to get rid of, a nuisance. It’s fallen out of use by the Keepers because the word itself evokes the idea of a problem to be solved, something to be disposed of—something capable of becoming a threat if left too long—and they left the problem of the Praedari far too long. The Praedari never preferred the term out of pride: nothing that “nests” rules from the top of its food chain.
“Hands on the dash where I can see them,” I demand, knowing full well that had she wanted to kill me she’d just have done to me what she did Johnny. What did she do to Johnny?
She leans forward with a smirk, placing her hands on the dash. That’s when I catch her reflection in the passenger-side mirror, the same reflection I saw in the broken vanity mirror in the alley the other night as I retraced Zeke’s final moments. Was she there? Did she follow me?
“You see my reflection as I am, and yet you wonder what I am,” she muses. “You wonder if what you see is what I see, if I, too, am cursed as you. And if I am not, why?”
“How do you know my name? Why were you back there?” The questions tumble from my lips before I can stop myself. I add, in an attempt to recover a sense of being in control, “This is unclaimed territory, belonging to neither the Keepers nor the Praedari, and rarely do either risk traveling through it.”
“I knew your Usher,” she offers without really answering. “I was there because I knew you would be. You’ve been digging, looking for the one who killed your beloved.”
“Who are you?” I ask, voice edged in threat.
“I am the one who killed Ezekiel Winter.”
“What did you just say?” I demand. A knot in my stomach forms, surges past my ribs up into my chest cavity where once my heart beat and continues to press up into my throat. I don’t need to breathe, but I couldn’t if I tried.
“I said, ‘My name is Quinn’ . . . ” She cocks her head to the side as if to study me. “But that’s not what you heard, is it, Oracle?”
My knuckles turn chalk-white as I clench the steering wheel. My jaw aches with the effort of choking off the Beast within, my top and bottom molars grinding into one another to form the blockade. I swallow down bloody bile, the urge to vomit nearly as great as the urge to tear out this woman’s throat with my teeth.
Since I offer no response, she sits back in the seat and continues. “The Seeker had been searching for us for a long time. Longer than you’ve been one of the Everlasting and nearly as long as he had been.”
“Choose your words carefully . . . ” I warn from clenched jaw.
“I know well your lineage, Oracle—Childe of Ezekiel the Seeker, Grandchilde of Ismae the Bloody—and I know well the carnage you are capable of, even if you are not. What I offer now is the truth, nothing more. It is rare we get involved in the dealings of the Keepers or the Praedari—”
“We?”
Her gaze remains steady, never leaving the road. “Turn left here. There’s a safe house where we can drop the girl.”
The girl. I’d forgotten about her. No telling what injuries she’s sustained or what emotional state we’d open those doors to find her in, but I take some comfort in learning that Quinn wishes to keep her safe as I do, even if my desire has taken second-fiddle to knocking together some Praedari skulls. Though we have an obligation to protect humanity, Keepers aren’t perfect, either. Duty at odds with desire, it’s rare the former wins out. With little reason not to, I follow her instructions, turning down the street. We’ve edged closer to Keeper territory, at least.
“A Keeper safe house out here?” Often the Keepers would erect safe houses in or near enemy territory for operatives infiltrating to have access to. Some the Keepers maintained, with high-tech security, blood stores for emergencies, caches of weaponry for both offensive and defensive maneuvers, and the means to take one’s own life if one’s identity and affiliation were compromised. Most of these safe houses were derelict, having been ransacked by the Praedari or locals or just crumbling from disuse and neglect.
She shakes her head. “As I said, we rarely get involved in the dealings of either sect—nor do we rely on their efficacy, or lack thereof. This is a Valkyrie safe house, operated by my sisters. Once we leave, your memory of having visited it will fade until it is nothing—a precaution, of course, nothing personal.”
I glare at the road. So much of what I’ve been through, who I am has been lost to the Becoming. Whenever Zeke would tell the story of how we met, of how he came to choose me for the rite, it would echo as distantly familiar only to be swallowed up by sunrise. For some reason nothing stuck unless I dug it up myself—and it seemed that my mortal me had a reason to make sure nothing could be dug up about her.
“You are not pleased,” Quinn states, interrupting the silence.
“I do not like my mind being messed with. By anyone.”
“I understand,” she says in a soft tone that makes me want to believe her. “I know you’ve lost a lot to memory, perhaps more than you know. But you will discover all of this in time.”
“You know I have visions,” I state, choosing my words carefully so they cannot be dodged. “You referred to me as the Oracle, but the Council of Keepers has not honored me with a title as per our custom.”
She smiles. “You are correct—they haven’t. Yet. Others have. All will unfold in time, of course,” she says with a sigh, “but your Usher understood why he had to make a choice now. I hope you, too, will come to understand what is being asked of you. For now, don’t worry—no one will invade your privacy. The magic is in the place, not those within.”
“SHE’S HEAVY, FOR BEING SO OLD,” LIAM COMPLAINS, his fingers and palms rubbing raw from where they struggle to support the bottom of the cement burial vault. “She can’t be that big, right?”
The vault: roughly seven foot by three, cement-reinforced with steel rebar, wrapped in heavy chains. A vault of utility, not vanity, the cement dull gray and not polished to gleaming, the coarseness of medium-grit sandpaper. The weight not beyond what Liam alone could carry, such the blessing of their Blood, but Victor instructed them to be careful, that though Ismae Slumbers in a coffin within the vault, she’s, as he put it, “precious cargo.”
“Come now, brother, surely it’s not all bad,” Mina teases from the other end of the vault, smiling as they both shuffle underneath the weight and importance of what they carry. “You’ve turned the head of nearly every woman we’ve passed, and most of the men.”
Liam laughs, glancing down at his own shirtless chest, the fine sheen of sweat broken out over his skin and the runes there, carved into his flesh post-mortem as he hovered between the worlds of the Living and the Dead, in the tradition of their family Bloodline. The muscles of his chest and arms bulge, no longer the lean muscle of a predator giving chase, but transformed into the savage beauty of the predator tearing into his kill. His sister’s strength nearly matching his own, he notices her silhouette likewise transformed but to lesser degree, another trick of their Blood.
He doesn’t bother obscuring his strength the way she does, but then he’s not burdened with the double standard of beauty that women are: be strong but not too strong. He’s lost count of how many idiots have fallen to his sister’s fang, too distracted by the threat they perceive in him that they underestimate her. Her Keeper-kills probably out-tally his own, but it’s a good tactic for them, tried and true.
Why take another packmate when they have each other?
“YOU SHOULD TELL HIM,” PIERCE SUGGESTS, NUDGing Lydia in the ribs as they trudge up to the ranch house.
