The Serpent's Daughter

by Suzanne Arruda

  With her right arm pinned behind her and Jade’s blade pressed to her back, there was little Lilith could do.

  She did it, anyway. Jade had to give the woman credit. She was a fast learner. Perhaps she felt Jade’s grip relax slightly. Perhaps she heard the approaching footsteps and, knowing it wasn’t de Portillo, decided this was her last chance to escape. Whatever gave her the impetus, Lilith took the chance. She rammed her head back against Jade’s, spun around, and pulled her wrist free when Jade stumbled. For a fleeting moment, Lilith hesitated, as if trying to decide whether to grapple for Jade’s dagger and stab her or flee. Someone to the side shone a flashlight on her face. The appearance of reinforcements made the decision for her.

  Jade made one desperate grab for Lilith, but it was too late. The woman ran from her and the light towards a distant enclosure. Jade gripped the dagger in her right hand, pulled back, and threw with all the force she could muster. Lilith had too much of a head start, and the blade clattered to the pavement behind her.

  CHAPTER 27

  El Badi Palace stood for 114 years, after which it was gutted, sending its beauty

  to other palaces, like a captive woman sold into a distant harem,

  and leaving its empty husk behind in a big pile of earth.

  —The Traveler

  “COME ON, SAM,” yelled Jade as she started running after Lilith.

  “I’m not . . . Sam.” Short panting breaths broke the words, as though the speaker were unused to sprinting.

  Jade spun around. “Mother! What in blue blazes are you doing here?”

  “There is no time for that,” Inez said. She tugged on Jade’s sleeve, trying to slow her down. “Are you all right? We should get out of here before he comes back.”

  Jade shook her head. “Bennington isn’t a he. That’s Olivia Lilith Worthy, David’s mother. Give me the flashlight. I have to find her.”

  Inez stumbled and Jade slowed for a moment. “Forget the . . . amulet.”

  “It’s not just the amulet, Mother. Lilith cannot get away. You have no idea what that woman has done. Now, either wait here or find Sam.” Jade stooped and picked up her own knife, the one Lilith had dropped, and took off running, not waiting for an answer or the light.

  Sam followed Bachir through the short maze of side alleys to the main street, then south as quickly as Sam could manage with a false leg. His right hand kept straying to his Colt as though he couldn’t wait to shoot someone. In the back of his mind he wondered if it would ever be possible to spend time with Jade without her running headlong into danger. Possible, but highly unlikely given her temperament, he supposed. If that was the case, would he ever get used to it? Probably not. Could he accept it? Maybe. After all, that spirit was what had attracted him in the first place.

  You go and buy a woman, and what does she do? Runs off after another man.

  They met no one on the streets, and very few lights burned through the upper screened windows. The faint cry of a restless child was shushed by a woman’s voice cooing an Arabic lullaby. The most active life as the time neared midnight was a dozing, swaybacked mule, swishing its tail and stamping a hoof as the flies irritated him. Even the cats seemed to have vacated the area, or else Sam and Bachir’s hurried steps chased them away.

  “El Badi,” said Bachir, pointing to a distant shadowy ruin ahead of them.

  “I see someone,” said Sam. “It’s not Jade.”

  “It is her mother.”

  Where was Jade? Had Bennington gone someplace else? Had he taken Jade? The thought that he’d lost her again made Sam’s guts twist.

  “Mrs. del Cameron,” Sam called out. “Are you all right? Where’s Jade?”

  “Oh, Mr. Featherstone. And Bachir,” she added with a nod of genuine appreciation for her Berber ally. “I’m so glad you’re here. Jade has run off into the ruin, chasing that terrible woman.”

  “Woman?” exclaimed Sam. “I thought she was following Bennington.”

  “She was, but Bennington is really a woman. Apparently the mother of Jade’s former beau.”

  “Mrs. Worthy?” Sam smacked his forehead with his open palm. “That would explain why Mrs. Tremaine was poisoned. She must have seen Lilith in that steam bath and figured out that Bennington was really a woman in disguise.”

  Inez nodded. “When I found Jade and this Lilith person, they were fighting with knives, but Jade had the upper hand.” Pride tinged her voice. “And to think,” she mumbled to herself, “that I used to scold Jade for letting the men teach her that.” She sighed. “Jade had her, too, but I must have startled them and the woman got away.”

  Sam reached for Inez and held her firmly but gently by the shoulders. “Where did they go?”

  Inez pointed in the general direction with her left hand. “There’s a big courtyard, then an arch on the other side with some large rooms. Before I came out to find you, I followed for a while. I ended up in some room that looked as if it once held columns, judging by all the circular depressions in the floor. That is when I quit. I had my light off and slipped in one and twisted my ankle.

  “Are you hurt badly?” Sam asked.

  Inez shook her head. “I’m fine. But we have to go find Jade. I think she ran underground. At least I thought I heard sounds below me.” She wiggled her fingers to show walking and pointed to the ground.

  Bachir could not follow the conversation, but he recognized the hand gestures. “Cachot,” he said.

  “Dungeon,” Sam translated. He started to run into the ruin, but stopped at the broken entryway. “We’re going to need more light than that little fading flashlight you’re holding. ” Inez shut it off to preserve the cell. “We need a lantern or a torch. Incendiez. Lumière,” he added to Bachir.

  Bachir nodded and ran back to one of the nearest streets, his hairlock bobbing. He returned with one of the street lanterns, a piece of bamboo taken from the street’s canopy, and a dirty rag. Inez tore the bottom foot of fabric from her ripped dress and added it to the cause. After Sam wrapped the materials around the bamboo and secured it with a knot, he lit a makeshift torch from the lantern and handed it to Bachir.

  “Let’s go,” he said, and led the way into the ruin.

  Jade followed Lilith deeper into the ruins. For a while it was easy, as Mrs. Worthy used the flashlight to guide her way. By now Jade’s eyes had readjusted to the dim starlight and every once in a while she saw something glisten on a bit of mosaic floor or a stone: blood. As long as the light moved, Jade moved, too. She tracked her prey back into what had once been stables and stopped. The light went out.

  Knowing Lilith might be lying in wait or possibly back-tracking, Jade froze, every sense on alert. She tried to get into the woman’s mind, to think as she would. She has no real weapon. That meant her best bet was to lie low and escape later, or lie in ambush. How badly does she hate me? The answer came back in Lilith’s own words, echoing Jade’s own doubts. You killed my son! No cobra had ever spat as much venom as Lilith had in that one short phrase. No, Lilith wouldn’t just hide like a frightened mouse. She’d feed on her pain and rage like a wounded Cape buffalo, waiting and planning her next move. She won’t stop until she’s killed me.

  A slight noise reached her, a leather sole slapping on stone. Then another. Both had a hollowness to them. An echo? Then it registered in her brain. Lilith had found steps leading underground.

  Jade moved cautiously in the direction of the first sound and found the steps leading down. She took her time, planting each foot carefully. In the meantime she listened. She also focused on her left knee. Once more she needed it to play the game of hot and cold. Presently it only ached a little, a pain she would have ignored previously. At the bottom of the stairs she found herself in what seemed to be a tunnel. She felt the walls, noting the low arched ceiling above her and the narrowness of the passage. She heard a noise ahead and followed it.

  Spit fire. It’s darker than a bat’s innards down here.

  The blackness of the tunnels became abs
olute until she couldn’t see her hand when she moved it across her face. It was as though this was no mere absence of light; it was an entity itself. It closed in on her, making her feel smothered.

  Think, she commanded herself. Animals live in this darkness and survive. I can, too. Touch. That’s the sense. Touch and sound.

  She felt along the left-hand wall, using it as a guide. Every so often her fingers touched cold metal and cracked wood rather than stone and mud brick. Doors. She didn’t try any of them. If Lilith had gone inside one of the rooms, she’d have heard the noise already. Those hinges wouldn’t open without a serious protest.

  Another sound came from ahead. Again Jade followed. This time her fingers felt a gap in the wall. As they wrapped around the old doorjamb, Jade knew this room had lost its door. Was Lilith inside? She waited and listened for breathing but heard only silence. Was it a trap? Should she go in?

  She edged her body against the inner frame and snaked her hand along the inner wall. Her fingertips brushed against metals chains. Jade groped down the chain and found the wrist iron at the other end. It was occupied, at least partially. The rest of the skeleton had long since fallen away and probably been consumed by rats. Only the lower arm bones and hand remained, held together tenuously against the ages by mummified sinew.

  The thumb broke loose and Jade felt the bones slip. She grabbed for the radius and ulna before they hit the floor and alerted Lilith. She mentally apologized to the long-forgotten prisoner left to rot in this ancient dungeon. Sorry. Then just as she knelt to lay the bone on the ground, she hesitated. She couldn’t just keep following Lilith through these passages. For all she knew the woman had already backtracked. No. I need to lure Lilith to where I want her. Time for some light.

  She pulled her kerchief from her back pocket and tied it around the arm bones. Then she fumbled deep into her trouser pockets. The tin of matches had been taken from her back when she was first captured, but she remembered that they’d spilled out in her pocket. Sure enough, down in the recesses of the seam lay one lone match, the one they hadn’t bothered to fish out.

  She wouldn’t light her grisly torch yet. Once the dry handkerchief caught and burned, she’d only have a few minutes of light to work with.

  “We can’t just all wander in there,” whispered Sam. The three of them stood at the entrance to the dungeons. “We need to flush this woman out, and one of us needs to stay up here in case she comes out.” He repeated his statement to Bachir in his own particular brand of garbled French.

  “I will wait here,” said Bachir. He hoisted the curved dagger that Jade had thrown. He’d found it on the ground near the back of the courtyard.

  “Good,” said Sam. “Mrs. del Cameron, you should stay here, too. Hide back in the stables, maybe.”

  Inez stood her ground, hands at her hips. “You do not order me about, Mr. Featherstone. This horrid person is not going to run out just because you are chasing her. If you truly want to bring her into the open, you’ll need to offer her what she wants.”

  “I’m afraid to ask what that might be, ma’am.”

  “Vengeance on Jade, Mr. Featherstone. I think it is obvious. I will be the bait.”

  Jade slipped back out into the narrow tunnel, feeling her way. She soon discovered that the blasted place was laid out like the streets of the Medina, with no rhyme or reason. They branched off, sometimes into dead ends, sometimes looping back on themselves, seemingly at the whim of the builder. By now she had lost her sense of direction—perhaps what the builder had intended. It will call to you. Well, why not? Jade listened and was rewarded with a faint sound like an ethereal humming coming from the left-hand tunnel. As good a choice as any.

  Time to light the torch. She struck the lone match against the rough walls and set the flame to the handkerchief. The flame burned blue, not providing much light, but perhaps that was better. Then when it went out her eyes would take less time to adjust. In the short time available she covered as much ground as possible and made a small amount of noise. She needed to let Lilith know where she was, to draw her out, but at the same time not make it appear too obvious.

  Most of the kerchief had burned and the gristle sputtered and smoked. It seemed her plan had failed. Then, at the far end of one corridor, Jade saw a glint of light. The humming sounded louder now. She let her macabre torch burn itself out as she waited for Lilith to make her move.

  Perhaps it was simply the result of stress and fatigue coupled with holding a smoldering, dismembered skeleton arm in a maze of black tunnels, but Jade would have sworn she heard voices. Not again. This was no time to hallucinate. She gave her head a quick shake to clear it, but a faint murmur persisted, a voice disturbed and growing in anger. This time another recognizable voice overrode the others: a faint whisper calling her name.

  “Jade. Jade.”

  That’s Mother. The tunnels’ echo distorted the sound, making it difficult to pinpoint the source. Jade moved, hoping to hear from another location and triangulate her mother’s position. She hadn’t gone far when she saw the glow of lantern light washing over the walls.

  “Jade? Where are you?”

  Jade watched as her mother crept past along the distant corridor. To her horror, a shadow slipped out from where she’d originally seen a faint light. Lilith. And now she’s stalking Mother.

  Sam didn’t know why he was so surprised. Did he expect someone like Jade to have an ordinary, sit-at-home mother? He could have said no to her plan, should have said no. But what the hell good would it have done? Even Bachir didn’t try to dissuade her and agreed to wait at the top with the torch in case Bennington slipped back out.

  There’s a man with a sense of self-preservation. But Bachir, Sam noted, seemed more confident. The man had positively come to new life once he’d seen Mohan’s corpse.

  And Sam had to admit it. The plan was the best one yet. His own unspoken idea of going into the tunnel and shooting it out with anyone not Jade might have worked. Then again he might have shot Jade instead. So he grudgingly went along with Inez’s plan.

  Can’t stop a damn tornado, anyway. Just get out of its way and let her run.

  Besides, he thought, he wasn’t trying to catch de Portillo or some burly Arab guard. He was after a lone widow. How hard could that be? She nearly bested Jade in a knife fight. That’s how hard. And she’s not a widow. She had her husband murdered. He gripped his Colt and readied the flashlight that Inez had given him in exchange for the lantern. He counted on the light coming back on dimly enough so he could follow Inez without being seen. This better work.

  Jade’s torch gave a few feeble sizzles. The kerchief was long gone to ash, but its heat had ignited the residual pockets of dried flesh and sinew around the hand and wrist joints. As a torch it was useless, making more smoke than light. As a weapon it still held value, and so Jade kept it in her left hand. One by one, the small wrist bones loosened and dropped to the floor as the connective tissue burned or melted away.

  “Jade, where are you?” whispered her mother.

  The other voice and the hum increased in intensity, buzzing in Jade’s head.

  Inez’s lantern threw jerking pulses of light like flaming shadows behind her. One of those shadows took human form, creeping with hunched back and bent knees as it stalked Jade’s mother. The shadow passed the end of Jade’s intersecting corridor. To Jade’s horror, she saw what looked like a long, sharp digit extend from the shadow’s fist. Lilith must have found another weapon.

  Jade hurried down her corridor and came up a few feet behind Lilith, close enough to see the iron spike in her hand. “Mother, run!”

  As she shouted, she gripped her own knife. This time, she would kill without hesitation to save her mother. Jade charged after her enemy, clearing the distance in two leaps. But both her warning and her attack came too late.

  Lilith grabbed Inez from behind, one arm around her throat, the other knocking the torch to the ground. She pivoted herself and her prisoner around, placing Inez betw
een Jade and herself. “Stop right there, bitch!” screamed Lilith. She held a rusty but still sharp iron spike to Inez’s throat. “Stop or I’ll stab her.”

  Jade dug in her bootheels and plowed to a halt less than a foot away from her mother. She held both the knife and the skeletal arm ready to attack. “Let her go, Lilith. If you hurt her, so help me, I’ll kill you.”

  Lilith sneered, her once delicate lips twisted in a snarling grimace, blood coating her false mustache. Her blond wig hung awry, exposing bits of her natural taffy-brown hair. But what made her a truly hideous apparition were the streaks of clotted blood draping down over one side of her face, like fringes of a scarf.

  “You’d like to do that, wouldn’t you?” Lilith said, the words coming out in a hiss. “And you probably would, so I’m going to use your dear mother as a hostage to see myself safely away.” She tightened her vicelike grip around Inez’s throat. “Hello there, Inez. Want to come with me and stay with my dear auntie?” A shrill, hysterical laugh burst from her lips. “Ever wonder why you never saw the two of us together? Oh, Mrs. del Cameron,” she said in a high, quivering falsetto, “how kind of you to ask after me and my dear nephew.”

  Around them, the hum rose in pitch like a disapproving murmur. Jade tried to meet her mother’s eyes for some sign, some clue. All she noted was that Inez appeared unduly calm. She didn’t even seem to notice the sounds. But Lilith did. Jade saw her shake her head quickly and blink, as though trying to drive off a persistent insect. Then Jade noted something else. Her mother was taking very tiny steps backward, driving Lilith inch by painfully slow inch back down the corridor. Jade kept pace. She had no idea what her mother had in mind, but she needed to maintain the same distance so that Lilith wouldn’t notice they were moving.

  Lilith laughed, the edge of hysteria in her voice. “I can do many voices. I can even be a French woman. Isn’t that right, Jade?” She switched to a well-schooled French accent. “Yes, you may rent my automobile.” Then Lilith’s voice grew cold as she addressed Jade again in English. “Now listen to me, bitch. You are going to drop your knife and that ridiculous thing in your other hand. Otherwise, Mummy here takes a spike to the throat. Oh, and yes, I get to keep the amulet. There must be something very powerful hidden inside of such a pretty little box. Either way, it’s ancient and that means it’s worth a fortune.”