“Forgive me, Vincent,” I said.
I stood beside him, seething with regret. Ashamed that this stolen kiss had given me vigor enough to rise to my feet. Ashamed that I couldn’t spare the strength to carry him into the house like a strange inverted version of Snow White.
The best I could do was straighten out his legs, brush sand from his cheek, drape a blanket over his body to ward off the night chill.
Morning would wake him. His last two weeks would remain forever hazy in his memory, like a vaguely recalled dream. I would be the only one to carry the history of what happened between us. In a better world, he wouldn’t have to forget, but there are never memories.
Not for them, the humans I loved.
Time was running short. I couldn’t spend this fresh bout of energy keeping vigil over Vincent. In the agent ex-girlfriend’s closet, I found a black Ann Taylor jacket and trousers combo and a sensible pair of casual flats. Everything fit like a charm.
I drove the Infiniti despite the moisture blurring my eyes. One stop, an In-n-Out for five Animal-style burgers, quick and dirty fuel for the furnace. Just maybe I was feeding my sorrow as well.
I wanted to turn back and wake Vincent from his sleep, make him fall for me all over again, but love was never my lot in life. I had to reach Koreatown. I had to warn my sisters.
Chapter 32
A steady rain was falling when I hit Olympic Boulevard past five in the morning. I had to get on the network, and I knew Seong would be camped on her cot in the back of her store, vigilant as a soldier in the trenches.
But when I turned toward Seoul Market, blue and red emergency lights painted the wet streets ahead, colored the clouds, flashed in storefront windows.
“Please no,” I begged the indifferent night. Let this be someone else’s horror for once. My body went so weak I could barely steer. I should’ve turned around, but some shred of hope, or maybe despair, forced me to pull alongside the curb.
Police cars choked the parking lot, and the lone ambulance sat idling. All the shops were dark except Seoul Market, where figures moved without haste behind the display windows.
Officers loitering everywhere. I longed to burst out of the car and banish all of them. This wasn’t their world. They had no authority here.
But what purpose would that serve? I knew full well that Seong was dead at the hands of Deus Inversus. The certainty struck me like an air-bag blow. I heard a guttural moan and then realized it was mine.
“Move along!” shouted a cop on the sidewalk. He motioned me on with his flashlight, but I lowered my window instead. I didn’t know what I was doing, couldn’t think straight. If this attack was a trap meant to lure me in, I was blindly taking the bait.
The cop pulled back the hood of his rain parka and crouched to get a look at me through the window. “Ma’am, we need you to keep—”
“What happened?” I snapped. “The woman who owns Seoul Market. Seong Lee. She’s my…friend. I know she stays here at night.”
He stretched back upright, glancing toward the crime scene behind him. I had to restrain myself. I wanted to leap from the car and throttle him for answers.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You mind telling me why you’re out here checking on your friend at five o’clock in the…”
He seemed to be gawking at my chest. I followed his eyes to the heart-shaped patch of blood dampening my blouse. And in the backseat where I had sprawled out bleeding, the upholstery surely looked like a slaughterhouse floor.
He let out a yelp when I twisted his parka in my grip.
“Listen to me. This is only blood. It’s nothing at all.”
“R-right,” he said.
When I let him go, he didn’t grab his gun or shout for backup. He stood obediently and let the rain patter against him. The officer had come around to my way of thinking.
“Tell me what you know,” I said.
He spoke of Seong’s murder with the heartless inflection of a crime statistics report, never once altering his tone, even when I pressed my forehead to the steering wheel and sobbed.
Broken glass on the entry door, a concerned neighbor. Asian female victim, approximately fifty years of age, discovered in a storage room containing only a computer terminal, undeniable evidence of a struggle.
I don’t know why I thought of Seong’s father just then, his nimble fingers folding dumplings in his steamy kitchen, that muted smile I could provoke only after a few shots of whiskey.
He had passed his serenity down to Seong. Among the sisters, the rest of us could be so brash, so impulsive. She deserved to be kept out of the fray.
“By all appearances,” said the officer, “the safe and cash register were left untouched, though the perpetrator left bloody fingerprints on the computer keyboard.”
At that last detail, I belted out a rueful laugh. Fingerprints. As if there would be an investigation and an arrest, an efficient exhibit of the criminal justice system in Los Angeles.
As our talk stretched on a moment too long, another nearby cop stitched his brow and stepped toward us. I eased my foot off the brake and let the car drift forward. In my rearview mirror, the two police converged in the glow of my retreating taillights.
I howled my grief into the confines of my car. Seong was dead, and it was surely my fault. I was struck certain that Asmodeus had followed me here from Gardena. He’d sent those three Mellado soldiers as decoys to flush me out of hiding. The silent hunter, tracking his prey.
The devastation made me want to crawl into a cave for a century of mourning, but other sisters remained, and I had to warn them, had to protect them.
Those bloody fingerprints on the keyboard could only mean that Asmodeus tried to hack into our message board. If he succeeded, the entire sisterhood, usernames and locations, could be exposed.
Hannah was the closest now. She was at her desert safe house with Gloria and her abuela, far beyond the reach of any cellular network. The only way to reach her was in the flesh.
I veered onto the freeway and floored the accelerator.
Chapter 33
I raced into the Mojave dawn, and my heart beat just as fast. Out in the desert, the rain clouds gave way to wide blue sky. I swear I saw a vulture circling, just on the edge of my vision, but it could’ve been my weary eyes.
The surrounding wasteland was like the surface of Mars or some mythic underworld. Asmodeus would be out there. I knew it in my soul.
On the edge of a basin, amid a few Joshua trees, sat Hannah’s dusty trailer and outer sheds. I could see it from several miles out. The final approach was a test of my nerves as I looked for signs of life in vain.
There could be no stealth in this terrain. I took the access road straight up to the trailer, then circled the car around in preparation for a fast exit.
This hardscrabble land held a silence as deep as death. The only noise was the clatter of the dried snake skins hung from the awnings.
Instead of knocking or announcing myself, I wrenched the trailer door from its hinges and ducked inside. The energy I’d borrowed from Vincent was flowing through me, rejuvenating me.
But there was nowhere to direct it. All I could see of the trailer was empty. One rifle was absent from the wall-mounted gun racks. Dust danced in the slatted sunlight coming through the blinds. My pumping breaths felt amplified.
“Hannah?” I called, crouched in a defensive stance. Distress prickled in the deepest regions of my brain, that same signal from the ether I’d caught so often these last few days.
“Gloria, it’s me, Lilly Anna.”
The response was a muffled yip from beneath the floor. I flipped the area rug aside just as the trapdoor beneath it lifted open. Gloria peered from the bunker below, aiming a trembling pistol two-handed. Her abuela cowered behind her, clutching her miniature dog.
“Where’s Hannah?” I demanded.
“There were lights outside,” Gloria explained. “Just before the sun came up. She told us to hide down here until she got back
.”
As Gloria climbed up the ladder I asked, “How long?”
“Maybe half an hour? Please tell me you’re getting us out of here.”
“You get me out!” the grandmother squawked in Spanish.
We helped her up while the dog skittered around us snarling. When she was on her feet again, she kissed the crucifix on the end of her necklace.
After all the hot and frenzied exploits we put her through, I couldn’t bear to tell her what a mess I’d made of her Gardena house. I just wanted to get these women out of harm’s way.
I pressed the key fob into Gloria’s hand and instructed her to head east nonstop until Vegas. There, she was to make contact with the FBI field office and tell them Agent Vincent Medeiros had facilitated her escape from the Mellado Cartel.
“But what…”
“Go now. There’s five thousand dollars in cash in the glove box.”
The money seemed to settle things. Gloria nodded resolutely, still clutching the pistol. She’d probably never handled a gun before Hannah whipped her into shape, just like she’d done for so many sisters over the years.
“Wait,” Gloria said with a frown.
“You don’t know how to drive,” I realized.
The abuela hiked her chin, scooped the keys from Gloria’s hand, and marched out the door with her dog tucked against her bosom.
While Gloria’s getaway car threw dust in its wake, I loaded a shotgun with shells. Close combat was my style, but out here, a ready gun was better than nothing.
Outside, the harsh sun was already spiking the heat index. When my eyes readjusted, I sighted the tracks of Hannah’s ATV headed off toward the ridge out back.
I threw aside my jacket, ignored my bloody blouse, and hurried along the tracks. Hannah was a half hour out. I buried the thought of what that must mean. I had to reach my darling girl in time to protect her, just this once, after so much loss.
My girl, at seventy years old. But I remembered her birth at that hospital in Prague, her blast of jet-black hair, how downy it felt on my fingers. Her father was a Czech resistance fighter. She was conceived in a Nazi prison camp, just before her father and I escaped.
I wished I could’ve sheltered her forever, but this was war. Sooner or later your soldiers must fight, even when you’re desperate to keep them safe, even when they’re family. You call your daughters, your sisters, and you send them out to battle.
Only a hundred paces out, I paused. The growl of a motor rose above the ridge mere seconds before the ATV appeared with Hannah at the helm. She was just a distant blur, but I recognized her telltale silver mane rippling in the breeze.
I fell to my knees and dropped the shotgun in the sand.
In my centuries of life, forty-eight women had joined my cause. I loved them all, the living and the dead, with a primal frenzy that only a mother could appreciate.
They were my legacy, my history, born of my womb, every last one of them. My cambion daughters, the only souls in this world I could truly trust.
While I sobbed with relief, Hannah drove her ATV down the rocky slope within fifty yards of where I knelt. There, she raised her scope rifle into position. For a moment, I was too lost in reverie to accept what was happening.
Then my instinct kicked in. I snapped my head to the left just as a bullet screamed past my ear. The shot echoed on the distant hills.
My daughter was trying to kill me.
Chapter 34
Asmodeus had turned my own daughter against me. He’d lured her from shelter and then violated her mind. The thought of his penetrating gaze bearing down on her…
I scrabbled over the desert rocks in a frantic bid for escape. The sandy turf threw my steps off-balance, but I couldn’t stumble, not even once. If I hesitated, however slightly, I’d die.
Hannah was an expert sniper, trained since the day she was old enough to hold a gun. Her second shot punched through the trailer’s aluminum siding just as I dove for cover. It was a hairline escape, close enough to leave me rattled.
Her ATV snarled back into motion, closing the distance between us. I’d left behind the shotgun, but it hardly mattered. I wasn’t about to fire back at my child. My only choice was to subdue her and dispel the trance.
Just as the vehicle fishtailed onto the front access road, I leaped inside the trailer through the doorless entry I’d made. The chorus of my wounds sang out, and I howled right along in harmony.
“Hannah! Stop! Hannah!” I yelled, knowing full well my voice alone wouldn’t break her trance. I slid behind the kitchen counter and prayed she’d come inside.
The ATV went quiet. Hannah’s boots scuffed the rocks as she dismounted. She’d always been a woman of few words, and she had none to spare for me now.
I armed myself with a cast iron skillet from the stove top. It wouldn’t shield a bullet. The idea of smacking her head made me sick. My own flesh and blood. How I’d dreaded a catastrophe like this. How I’d known in my heart it was inevitable.
Her shadow cut through the light cast along the kitchen backsplash. I held my breath and gripped the skillet handle. Her boots trudged, then faltered. She slumped to the floor with such force that the plates in the cupboards rattled, the blinds shivered in their windowsills.
She grunted, her breath fast and obscenely wet.
The sound of her suffering dropped my defenses. I crawled to her aid, oblivious to the threat, ignoring the chance she could be baiting me.
She turned onto her back, her face flushed and drenched with sweat. I swiped the damp hair from her eyes and watched the clouds clear there. With just a glance, she was herself again.
But I had no cause to celebrate while her bloody hands worried at the hilt of a bowie knife stabbed into her stomach. She reached for me, but her fingers fell short.
“A man in the desert…” she said.
“Hannah…just please hold on. I’m going to give you—”
Behind me, Asmodeus called my oldest name, “Lilith.” The word lingered in the air of the trailer like dust motes, everywhere at once, yet he wasn’t inside with us.
He stood out on the dirt road where I’d parked my car only a few minutes before. His scalp was shorn bald, as if in some war ritual, and he wore only a pair of weathered dungarees. The sunlight cast his colorless chest almost blue.
Here was the devil who tempted Hannah in the wilderness, who stabbed her with a knife on her threshold. He spread his upraised hands and said, “All this I will give you, if you will bow down and worship me.”
Chapter 35
I went out to him. I didn’t bow down, even though my trembling knees fought to defy my will. This time I couldn’t run away.
Don’t face him alone, Shanti had warned.
My eldest living daughter was dying nearby. It was too much to bear, but I had no choice. If I failed, if I died, Asmodeus would slay my daughters one by one. First Hannah, then Shanti. Hester and Claire in Chicago, Amelia in Toronto, Nalini in Mumbai. He’d find them all, eradicate my line.
“What an honor, to kill the last succubus,” he said.
“Why didn’t you do it days ago?” I asked.
He paced a small circumference of ground, as if anticipating my attack. “I was curious. I wanted to admire your work. The Mellado strain, it had become too volatile, too crazed with power. They had to be put down.”
The earth around him was alive. It moved like a mudslide in sleek, undulating currents. When I realized what I was looking at, a shudder rocked my spine.
Snakes. Kings and Sidewinders, Diamondbacks and Whips. They trailed him by the thousands. In one great mass they slithered, weaving atop one another, all of them bound to their pater dominus.
I’d heard legends. Scales for the incubus, wings for the succubus. I might’ve soared above their fangs if I hadn’t crippled myself, just to walk with humankind.
I spotted Hannah’s rifle propped against the footrest of her ATV. In a flash I took it in hand, leaped onto the seat, and vaulted off the rear car
go rack.
I landed amid a hissing, thrashing horde and thrust the gunstock at Asmodeus’s bare head. He lurched out of my reach with a derisive laugh, but I struck my knee against his chest hard enough to end his gloating.
The ground was alive beneath me, sliding like a current. I couldn’t keep my balance. A cacophony of rattles arose as I swung my makeshift fighting staff again. It cracked Asmodeus across the chin and shoved him against the wall of a shed.
I slapped the gun against my hip and took aim, but even as I did, serpents twined my legs in caduceus pairs. Another reared back and thrust its fangs through my pant leg, into the meat of my calf.
My only shot went far afield. Asmodeus crushed the distance between us, faster than my eyes could track, and twisted the rifle from my grip. A blow to my temple, a bolt of blinding light, and I was down in the sand spitting blood.
The snakes circled in with their malicious black eyes and their darting forked tongues. Asmodeus tracked the gun toward my head, but I knew he wouldn’t shoot. He’d let the snakes do their damage.
“Your sisterhood,” he said. “They’re all your cambion. You could’ve offered any one of them your gift. You could’ve had an army at your side. But instead, you die alone.”
Chapter 36
“Kill me and you’ll get your Kingdom on Earth,” I said. “But you’re a destroyer. How long before you ruin everything?”
Asmodeus smiled. The sun cast its brilliance around his body, like he was the Angel of Light himself.
And then came the eclipse. A long shadow passed overhead, like a low-flying plane, though I heard no engine sound.
Asmodeus snapped his head skyward just as a second flying object followed the first. Massive birds, bigger than the vulture I thought I’d seen.
I flung away the snakes that had managed to slither onto me. Another pair of fangs sank into my wrist as I rolled away from the mass of serpents.
Diary of a Succubus Page 9
