Death Mask (Wraith's Rebellion Book 3)
Page 11
“No, she was kept apart because they were both women,” Daisy said. “Look, werewolves don’t care, all that means for us is that she couldn’t become a Bitch through the usual methods, which is to have children of her own. The witches, on the other hand, the more magic you’ve got, the more you’re just a breeder to them. They don’t even encourage the strongest among them to use magic, just to breed like rabbits. Don’t want to? Well, there’s a spell for that.”
“But that’s rape,” I said.
“Doesn’t matter to them,” Balor said.
“But that’s rape,” I snapped.
“Yeah, but Makers also do it to Progeny,” Daisy said.
“It’s still rape. No matter how you put it, it’s rape. Would you call what Lu did to Quin sex or making love? Hell no. It was rape. That is rape. God, are all the races a bunch of rapists?”
“Even humans rape,” Balor muttered.
“Werewolves tend not to,” Daisy said. “If you beg, you’re free game, but if you had done the begging, I wouldn’t have expected it of you because you didn’t know what that would entail.”
“So, you think the Great Maker is at the bottom of the ocean right now?” I asked.
“Goodness no,” Daisy said. “That would have gone both ways. She’s probably tied up somewhere, vibrator between her legs and a gag so she can’t protest.”
“Now there’s an image to entertain me for years,” Balor purred out.
“You’re a sick man, Balor,” Daisy said.
“I know.”
“Quin will be ready to fight soon,” Daisy said. “Balor, go get him and head out with my boys.”
Balor opened his mouth, then closed it and stood. He walked over to Quin and said something in another language. Whatever he said? Surprise played over Quin’s face, then a devilish sort of grin.
Quin pulled Troy away gently and sent him towards Daisy and I. He said not a word to me as he stood and left with Balor.
“Now ask,” Daisy said to me.
“Ask what?” I asked in response.
“All the things that you want to ask, for your little device there.”
“Oh? I thought you’d make me delete this all.”
“No, what will mortals do? Find my den? You… you didn’t write in a detailed description of my den, did you?”
For a moment, I felt as if I had and was ashamed. Then I pushed the emotion to the side.
Quin had taken the tablet from me before we had reached the den because he knew that I might do just that. I was curious about all the things, I wanted to know more.
“True,” I said. “All right, let’s start with the boy you had draped in your lap. You said you were weaning him into clothing.”
“Only certain ones need to be weaned into it, and he’s my pup, not a boy.”
“Which I’m guessing is why Quin reacted like he was a puppy dog being dropped in my lap,” I said. “He may have even forgotten that the pup was anything more than a young dog.”
“That is possible,” Daisy said. “Is that all?”
“Quin’s been coming to you specifically to be chewed on, going through Morris. He seemed to make it sound like he paid for that, uh, right, let’s say.”
“He did,” Daisy said. “When it comes to Quin, it’s a bad idea to do something nice for him without asking for something in return. If you offer to look after his stock, he’ll think you’re going to eat them. Offer to look after his place while he’s gone and he will fully expect you to rob him while he’s gone.”
Trust issues. That’s what that said to me. Quin had trust issues with anyone besides Sasha. He trusted his life to her, his safety, hell, even his cock to her. But anyone else in the world, anyone at all? Yes, I could see him having trouble accepting any sort of help.
“That’s at least one thing we have in common,” I muttered.
“Which is why we charged him instead of doing it for free.”
“Next is a question about your boys. Obviously, they are full grown men. One of the ones behind the bar is surely older than you are, but a Bitch is only allowed to call her sons her boys.”
“Werewolves thoroughly support adoption. If I kill an Alpha, his pups are at risk of being killed because of my actions. To prevent that, I adopted the boys as my own before our Elders. Two were adopted by law, one of which is my pup.”
“You’ve killed before?”
“It is a requirement of the title that I hold. I have also served in this country’s military abroad. No medals, I was not decorated, and I did not become a leader of any sort. My role in the military had to remain submissive unless my commander put our lives at risk. He never did, he was a good man.
“Taking over a pack without executing the Alpha was also a requirement. That would be the boy you see as older than I am. He was the second of my boys to become Alpha, as I gave the pack back to him.”
“I’m guessing that’s not something that can happen amongst the wolves.”
“It is something that takes a great deal of control. But that too was a requirement.”
“How did those of previous generations earn the title, if women couldn’t serve in the military of their countries?”
“Women have served as long as men have. We may have had to hide our true form, but we still served. Those women who served in your human myth? They weren’t human. They were werewolf Bitches earning their right. Except the one, damned if I wouldn’t submit to her. The balls on that woman, the courage and drive to do what was right. Mm, I’d love a mate of that stature.
“If you were caught and outed serving in an all male military, you had to try again. With the world wars, well, we were just having a howling good time.”
“But the generations in between, your mother and your generation, they didn’t earn the title.”
Daisy frowned at me. “How old do you think I am?”
“Twenty?” I asked.
She smiled and looked away. “We’ve been discussing coming out ourselves. Surely humans know other races must exist.”
“The witches aren’t concerned.”
“The witches share the lifespan of the humans,” Daisy said. “I am sixty, still very young for a wolf, make no mistake, but I could live upwards of three hundred years with modern technology.”
I struggled to align what she had said with what I knew of the world of supernatural races.
“What happened to the Bitches, then?” I asked.
“A vampire swept through them. Normally you select your successor and raise her up, train her, bite her, challenge her. Then you may die at her hands, but only if you made a mistake. It is the ultimate gamble because if she kills you, then she is killed and your heritage is gone.”
“Why did a vampire sweep through the werewolves?” I asked.
“She was afraid because in the light of the day she heard a child’s laughter and a name. Good, strong, powerful, the name of many Bitches before and many after.”
“Who would wield the tool and kill her?” I asked.
Daisy nodded. “My grandmother named me, but she spoke my wolf name to me. Only she ever used it, and she did not hold the title. But we knew by then, any woman born with a strong name would be killed.”
“Your name doesn’t make you,” I said. “You’re Daisy, and whether your name was Daisy or Victoria or Cleopatra, that doesn’t matter. Do people think less of you when they hear your name?”
“They do, especially wolves.”
“Oh,” I said, flushing with embarrassment. “Names have a traditional meaning, then?”
“They are as if being reborn,” Daisy said. “We have our human name and our wolf name. That which we go by among the humans, and the name we respond to when on all fours.”
I struggled for a moment, then sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose.
“Her werewolf lover.”
“Yes.”
“You’re named after her werewolf lover! Oh, for the love of Christ Almighty, are you kidding me?”
“Oh,” I said, feeling stupid. “Sorry, the vampires are all pretty, uhm.”
“Cliché… drama queens?” Daisy asked, arching an eyebrow. “Yes, they are.”
“Just, just to go back for one second,” I said, then waited until she nodded. “You said Rosalyn told you about all this, buts she’s only about twenty years old.”
“Our lifespan is three times that of a human. Our minds tend to develop a little faster, but it’s still about three to one. So for every year it took you to age, it took me three.”
“So if you were forty when Rosalyn was born, then you would have looked… uhm…”
“Thirteen,” Daisy said. “Getting through the military was difficult. Easy to prove I was older than I looked, though, that was the best part.”
“She made an impact on your life, didn’t she?”
“She did start our relationship by mashing my face into a puddle of mud and making me eat worms,” Daisy muttered. “And she was young at the time. The balls it takes a witch to use her magic in public? That girl will be a force to be reckoned with.”
I found it hard to believe that the Younger Oracle I had met just the week before would mash someone else’s face into a mud puddle. Let alone make them eat worms. There was no doubt that she had power and was capable among witches, but to have the resolve to be physically violent? No, I couldn’t see that.
“What will you do after?” I asked.
“I’d like to find an equal,” Daisy muttered in disgust. “The lesser men are good for a round or two, but then I get bored. I want a man who isn’t afraid to stand on my toes, who can keep up with me.”
“You won’t retire?” I asked.
Daisy barked out laughter, which caused some heads of the others in the room to turn toward us.
“Retire? My girl, I wasn’t just plucked off the street randomly. I was chosen because I love this. Every moment of it. Every bit of blood, sweat, and tears. This is how I want to live my life.”
I nodded once, just to have some response. It was a polite sort of nod.
“What can you tell me about her?” I asked.
“That we don’t like saying her name often. Superstitious, maybe, but it’s usually better that way. Say the devil’s name, and you draw his attention. Same could be said of her.”
“Do you pass down an oral history? Even for your people, it must have been hundreds of generations.”
“It has been,” Daisy said, then seemed to consider carefully. “It’s hard for me to separate what wolves are told from my preparation for this experience. I remember my grandmother telling stories about a darkness in the night. I remember when the Bitches first started dying, we all just seemed to know.”
“I’m guessing it was bloody in nature.”
“You’d be correct on that. The type of bloody that would have started a war otherwise. She lived among the wolves for a time, both as mortal and vampire. She knows our ways of killing an opponent.”
“Did she want to start a war between the packs, or to mark her territory?” I asked.
“No idea, don’t much care. She wiped them all out, though. Even when they came together. Swept through them like a reaper.”
“She did train Death.”
“Death is scary to vampires. And humans. He would come back to life, which for us is an inconvenience, but not a trouble.”
“You keep talking about him in the present tense. We killed him.”
“By banishing him from the mind of a baby vampire? Please. Never underestimate your enemy. Tell me, who told the authorities you were murdered?”
I struggled to come up with an answer. “Well, the Council. They told the human authorities that we had been turned.”
“No, they told the authorities that someone had been turned. Then the police proceeded to drop the whole thing.”
“The interviewers—” I stopped, then shook my head. “They have been of help, and know better than to leak the names and help to create drama.”
“Plus, it was your name and Troy’s name. First and last, nationality, isn’t that suspicious to you?”
“Margaret upon dying caused an effect where information leaked.”
“They caught all that in time,” Daisy said, making a hand motion as if encompassing the room with her hand. “A television show has announced an interview with two new Makers tomorrow morning. Even they don’t know who the baby vampires are because they are protecting your identity. So that humans don’t go hunting for you.”
“My parents,” I said, pulling out my phone.
“How much do they love money?” Daisy asked, pulling out her phone. She tapped something out on her phone, then frowned at it and made a face. “They’ve been visited by police, who were told that Quin killed her baby. But they know to behave. Your brother was bitten.”
“W—” I gaped at Daisy for a moment as that information sunk in. “Wait, you have wolves at my house?”
“At the house of the loins which birthed you,” Daisy said. “As someone seems to like saying. This ain’t my first rodeo.”
“How long?” I asked.
“They arrived after you did. Once I heard the news, I knew it was tonight. I knew it was coming, what with all the rest, so I’ve collected my boys and taken over a few more packs. We are ready.”
“Yeah, except Death can head jump into mortals.”
Daisy smiled wolfishly.
“Why can’t he ride you?” I asked, rather than leading up to the question.
“Something about us being a predator makes it difficult to use magic on us. The witches learned that when they tried to banish wolf and witch pairs with magic. Worked, now it just makes that taboo feeling oh so good. Like they added a magical vibrator to the relationship.”
“And my brother is now a wolf?” I asked.
“No, it takes more than a bite, though like vampires we have a venom in our bite. Mainly it hurts like a bitch, paralyzing prey when we need to. So, he was screaming like a human child whose ice cream had been stolen.”
“I notice almost none of you say like a little girl,” I muttered.
“Have… have you met the supernatural women?” Daisy asked. “I’ve started wars over insults. Rosalyn can turn you inside out and teleport you to the middle of the ocean. I'm serious about that. She has a spot in the ocean where she drops people who upset her and the occasional dead body. The vampire women were all turned during a time where being a woman was the worst thing you could be. They’ve clawed their way to their positions and had to be twice as vicious as the men to hold onto what is rightfully theirs.
“A woman is not weak unless she makes herself so.”
“But victims—”
“Happen. Know what takes strength? Leaving. Rebuilding your life and then not going back. It’s seeing yourself in others and not breaking down again. It’s rescuing them from the same situation and not judging them because they stand when they piss.”
“You sound like you’re talking from experience,” I said.
“I am,” Daisy responded. “I adopted my first boy when I was the equivalent of twelve. He was nearly fully grown and being beaten by his father. Called him a half-breed because his mother had been human. Called him a murderer because she had killed herself a few years later, unable to live with his father any longer.
“Wolves, like any race, are both darkness and light. There has been a breaking down of our traditions, thanks to the modern age. We’ve lost what made us stable and those who have floundered turn on others. Those who held too tightly to the old ways drowned in them.”
“It could be said that Rosalyn didn't just mean for you to save humans or vampires from the tool.”
Daisy made a sound and looked around the room.
“My Rosalyn is a strong witch, a powerful magic user, and she never wanted that. Her vision of the wor
ld is different than what you see when you look around.”
‘My.’
That’s what Daisy said, ‘my Rosalyn.’
The wording made me want to run away screaming, because I knew that those two words together wasn’t just claiming. Daisy had some connection to Rosalyn, a connection that could never be repaid. In those two words I heard so much submission and love that I couldn’t quite put words to it.
No doubt, Rosalyn might say the same about Daisy. They were almost friends, but something… more. Not quite lovers, or perhaps more than lovers. They would never cross that line into sex, but they loved and cared for one another very much.
“What does she see?” I asked.
“The supernaturals being rounded up and used as weapons. Tonight isn’t just about the tool,” Daisy murmured, turning her attention back to me. “If we fail at this, all of us are outed. The fight is filmed, goes public, and like all those poor people almost a century ago, we are going to be rounded up and put into camps for the safety of humans.”
‘Almost a century ago,’ wasn’t really accurate. But Daisy had been born just a decade or so after that, she would have grown up amongst the rumours and the true facts. She might have even had companions who lived through that.
Who was to say a werewolf couldn’t also be Jewish?
She knew the horrors of that world and Rosalyn had told her that it would happen again, except this time to the actual races instead of the so-called races. Supernaturals rounded up, their jewelry taken from them, separated by sex, starved to death and gassed.
Yes, I could see that happen.
“Used, abused, and enslaved because everything that lives, lives to serve humans,” I said. “But the fae, surely they have another world.”
“Nope,” Daisy said. “Those myths are based on small pockets of the world which are purely fae. Their magic is so concentrated that even when standing on the spot, humans are caught in an illusion so powerful that even your cameras see only the illusion. The fae would also fall.”
“How can I help?” I asked.
Daisy considered me. She seemed to bite her bottom lip as she did so. The two of us stared at one another for a moment, then she turned to one of the others and made a motion.