White Lies: (The Uruwashi Series #4)

by Christina Moore

  “This is madness,” Ash hissed, more to herself than for other’s ears. She spun to face Yuki fully. “You let her stay here alone?” Who protects her?

  Even as Ash wondered, Tristan knew. Lilith protected Lilith. Her immense power as a pythia protected her. Death would only ever come for the pythia because she herself willed it. But it was Ash’s human concern for a niece that let her forget these simple truths and it was endearing to Tristan.

  Yuki’s eyes widened and she stumbled back. Ash’s earlier show of power had frightened the older vampire, they could taste it. She knew Ash was doing herself a great disservice by not actively feeding on humans but she had no idea just how suppressed the young Master truly was. Add on top of that a need for vengeance slowly showing itself and the skill of the oldest of their kind and Ash was the last person Yuki should cross.

  Yukihime was afraid of Ash.

  Tristan felt a surge of pride again, bolstered by Ash’s own.

  “This is what I wanted you to see, Asta-chan,” Yuki said in a shaky voice, her speech falling into Japanese. “Everything, the lies, manipulation… leaving Lilith in this cave, everything I’ve done has been dictated to me by one person. I’ve not my own will.”

  Ash balked. Somehow, Tristan didn’t feel as surprised. “What? What are you saying?”

  Yuki moved forward and grabbed Ash’s arm so fast that she yipped in surprise, jerking away. Yuki frowned. “Not her.”

  “Then who?” Ash asked with furrowed brow and racing heart. Sure, she didn’t have to breathe, but that heart, it needed to pump and it pumped too hard for her liking sometimes. It was the last symbol humanity any vampire possessed, proof that they’d once been good.

  Tristan mentally scowled, not liking her line of thought but understanding it. That was Ash for you.

  “I’ve been there,” a voice said, filling the cave. There should have been an echo. Tristan understood that voice even before Ash, having heard it moments before in the same fashion. This was not a voice made by vocals cords but one pushed directly into everyone’s head with such seamless skill that it seemed as if their ears were hearing the sound and not their brain.

  Sudden realization that only Tristan had seen Lilith’s body at the hearth washed over him as Ash only just registered it herself. Next to her Yuki’s fear flashed again as she finally saw the girl too.

  Ash took a stiff step forward. She was wound tight and for good reason. “Lilith, you…?”

  The figure at the hearth didn’t move but Ash would be damned if she didn’t know that voice.

  “I’ve been to that dark place,” Lilith said coldly. “I’ve seen what lays in the void.”

  Confused, Ash glanced to Yuki, not for guidance but to keep her attention on the room and not just her niece. “The void?”

  “She comes,” the older vampire said quickly.

  “She who?”

  Yuki frowned. Ash may have not clearly felt it, but Tristan did. The old vampire had a monumental and irrevocable decision to make, one that might mean her life. She hissed a curse under her breath and then, deciding she owed Ash, she would tell her. If it meant her life, then so be it. She’d gotten enough from life anyway and was growing tired of the lies.

  Tristan wasn’t so sure he believed Yuki, even thoughts directly from the source but when the ancient being rang out a single word, he didn’t care to decipher Yukihime any longer.

  “Mother.”

  Tristan’s tension was his own, but Ash bristled too. “Who, by the Goddess, is Mother?”

  Being so closely tied to Ash in that moment, the second she spoke the words, he understood her adage ‘By the Goddess’. Ash’s God, the goddess she worshiped in life as a defunct pythia with no quickening power. The goddess of light, moon and sorcery, Hecate. But this was not the ‘mother’ Yuki referred to now, this was something… darker.

  The old vampire licked her lips in a gesture Tristan’d never seen from her—unsure and nervous. “Izanami.”

  Ash shook her head, not understanding. “Izanami no Mikoto?”

  Tristan started. He knew the Shinto stories of the gods, Izanami and Izanagi. They created the islands of Japan and their children created a many number of things themselves. Tale states that during the birth of her last child, Izanami died and went to hell, yomi. Izanagi went in after her to bring her back but she’d already eaten from the underworld and become one with it. And he ran from her when he saw how hideous she was and she refused to let him leave her, vowing to kill a thousand humans every day until he returned to which he vowed to give life to fifteen hundred. But that was all Japanese folklore, mere tales.

  “Yes!” Yuki jumped forward, intent on touching Ash, but pulled back when Ash balked. “The very same. But she’s no myth. They are no myth.”

  Tristan echoed Ash’s confused frustration in his space hitchhiking in her mind. “I don’t understand, are you telling me you actually know where we come from?”

  Yuki nodded and said emphatically, “Yes.”

  Ash studied her, her skepticism more than apparent in her expression. How was she supposed to believe anything this woman—this child told her? And yet, her words felt true.

  And for Tristan, sequestered to the corner of Ash’s soul, seeing the full truth of this moment, he knew Yuki was telling the truth as she knew it, he could feel it with a certainty that made him sick.

  “Lilith, she… I’ve seen her,” Yuki whispered, her voice quavering. “Mother is real. She is the poisoned darkness from which nightmares are born.”

  Ash moved through the room and went to crouch down across from Lilith, catching glimpses of her niece through the fire. This was the closest she’d been to the girl in over three-hundred years and she didn’t know just how close she was allowed to get.

  “Is this true, what she says?”

  Lilith’s tiny voice filled the room again, simple and to the point. “Yukihime is a liar.”

  Ash shot Yuki a look. The other vampire only frowned in return. Tristan felt Yuki’s shame and disappointment. Did Ash not feel it too? Did she even care? Yuki had told the truth and Ash refused her. For some reason, Tristan felt the urge to reach out and tell the conniving, manipulative vampire he had. He believed her, felt the truth in her mind.

  “Yukihime always lies,” Lilith’s voice continued. “We all have choices, even against them.”

  “Them?” Ash questioned.

  Lilith looked up, her white linen hood pulled down over her face to hide her missing eyes. “Mother and Father.”

  Ash glanced back at Yuki. The other vampire was wringing her hands nervously.

  “Mother and Father,” Ash repeated dryly as if she didn’t believe. “So, Yukihime did not lie about our origins? Our parents are truly Izanami and Izanagi?”

  Lilith’s attention remained focused on Ash though she had no eyes to see with and did not actually speak with formed lips. “Izanami and Izanagi are our parents. The architects of sin and balance.”

  “Sin and balance?”

  Lilith went back to tending the soup on the fire. “Mother is sin and Father is balance.”

  Ash shifted uncomfortably as Yuki came to sit next to her. She didn’t want the Master near her. Couldn’t trust her, couldn’t abide her face some days and she was nearing that point now.

  Tristan actually felt bad for the old crazy. She was trying to get Ash to understand but Ash was just shutting her out. Surely what Tristan felt, hitching along a ride with Ash, Ash felt too. He sort of smiled in his vacuum, realizing she was more hardheaded than him.

  “We all had to come from somewhere,” Lilith’s voice was saying. “You come from Izanami, I from Izanagi.”

  The vampires exchanged an uncertain look. When Ash looked back to Lilith, she was facing her way and Ash started, uneasy by the pythia’s focus. Never in her life could Ash have imagined that this would be either of their lives. Her dead and Lilith…

  “They are our parents and together, the shinwa and the heikō are their children.”<
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  “I…” Ash licked her lips. “Please, go on.”

  Lilith looked away again, returning her attention to the soup, which was apparently ready as she poured herself a bowl. Not only for herself, but the other two. Without fully acknowledging their presence, she nudged the extra two bowls away from her and went about eating.

  Yuki’s nose curled up in disgust but something in Ash’s stomach stirred. Still, she left it untouched.

  “Shinto tales of Izanagi and Izanami are mostly fact. The couple did create the islands of Japan and bring forth many deities. Izanami died during childbirth and was sent to yomi. What was not part of the tales was that the divine beings were flesh and blood and lived as humans on the islands they bore before Izanami’s mortal body died. Izanagi, he lived life well, a model citizen. But his wife, Izanami was not so virtuous.

  “That was the reason she ended up in the dark underworld. In his vein attempt to bring his wife around, Izanagi went to her. But it was too late, she was already a part of the underworld, she belonged to yomi. And when they fought, sin burst forth from her in the form of the seven shinwa.”

  Ash gasped softly, Yuki making a little noise of understanding even as her expression fell in horror.

  “The elves are the personification of wrath, the fae are pride. Kitsune are greed and lycan are sloth. The shinigami are envy, the troll—”

  “Gluttony,” Ash whispered and then louder said. “And we, the vampire are—”

  “Lust,” Yuki filled in, meeting Ash’s gaze. And from the look on her face, Ash believed she really didn’t know.

  In his mind—Ash’s mind, Tristan shifted, feeling the first hints of his own emotion leak into the space. Could Ash feel him? Would she know he was there and well?

  Lilith continued talking as if the others had never interrupted her. “From Izanagi, the seven heikō were born to balance out the sin of shinwa in compliment or counter. The angels were meant to counter the shinigami; the dragon, the kitsune. Dryads, the elves; giants to compliment the troll, mermaid to compliment the lycan; pixies, the fae and—”

  “The pythia counter the vampire,” Ash interrupted again, her voice breathy with wonderment. By the Goddess, it all made so much sense that it seemed almost silly that none of the shinwa or heikō had even so much as hypothesized such a tight connection to one another.

  “By design,” Lilith said as if she could actually read other minds. “We were all engineered to never more than question our origins. We were made to never figure out the connection. You may even forget all of this shortly… I honestly do not know what you are permitted to remember once learned.”

  “How do you know all of this then?”

  Lilith put down the bowl of food she’d been eating all through her lecture. Having such a disembodied voice meant that her body could act independently.

  “Because I’m the child of the First Pythia.”

  “You, you’re what?” Ash snapped. “But how?” No matter how she tried, she couldn’t remember anything of Lilith’s father, Evangeline’s husband. But he didn’t stand out in her memory as special, he was just another pythia. As was Eva, they were just a normal pythia family.

  Tristan started as got a flash of Ash’s thoughts, her memories. He saw her then, Ash’s doomed twin, there so clearly in Ash’s mind. Evangeline was nearly identical to Ash, the only difference the shade of color of their eyes and the shape of their hairline. He ached with Ash at her memory, the poor twin so brutally murdered.

  The thought of the word ‘murder’ brought with it its own images and Ash echoed Tristan’s gasp as those memories surface. If he’d had a body of his own in that moment, he would have felt sick at what he saw. Evangeline’s death, it wasn’t a simple matter of ripping out her heart at Malik’s frustrations, he tortured both sisters.

  Did she sense Tristan then? His apathy and sorrow?

  Lilith gave them no time to right themselves. “It’s true,” she said matter-of-factly. “My father is the First Pythia. I have been in communication with him ever since I could see and have done everything that I was told to.”

  Ash’s eyes widened. “But Eva… she married… Goddess, I cannot remember his name. But he was just a normal pythia.” Right?

  Lilith said nothing.

  “Please, will you tell me his name? So that I might remember something of my life before death…”

  Again, Lilith said nothing.

  Ash’s frustration made Tristan fidget. He wanted those same questions answered.

  Ash spun to Yuki. “You. Was this one of your accidental memory grabs?”

  The old vampire actually paled. Tristan was impressed at how ashen she looked and wondered if she might not pass right out. “Absolutely not.”

  Ash harrumphed, not fully believing her and turned back to Lilith, imploring her with a look the girl could not see. But Lilith refused to answer; she smiled slyly and Ash let out a frustrated cry. Tristan rolled in Ash’s mind, feeling suddenly trapped. He wanted to pace and rant, he needed to curse and have his voice heard. As it was he was really trapped, left to his own devices as an unwilling hitchhiker in his lover’s mind, unable to leave on his own. Not until Lilith let him out.

  Ash found herself distracted in that moment, thinking of Tristan and he wondered if he’d done that, made her think of him. But her thoughts weren’t clear and he wasn’t sure what she was really thinking.

  “Is your father the man who manipulated us in Greece?” It would make sense. Those spells, the impossible spells, only the first of the pythia kind would ever know who to stir like that, right?

  “That, I cannot say.”

  Ash’s ire was growing. “Was he the man I encountered? The one who fixed me of that horrid humanization spell? The one who—”

  She stopped short and Tristan felt himself swell with frustration, dying to know the same thing. Was that man who claimed to be his father the man who’d been fucking with him all this time or was he just a simple lackey and a liar? One of Lilith’s father’s grunts? Was Lilith’s father this mysterious Professor?

  Lilith said nothing and Ash’s next outburst was a surprise to everyone, even Ash herself as she surged to her feet and proclaimed, “This is bullshit!”

  Everyone took a moment, breaths held. Ash’s eyes were wide and then she sucked down a shuddering breath, trying to calm.

  Where did that come from? she wondered and Tristan grinned, knowing exactly where it came from.

  Ash sat again, carefully, trying to look composed even if she felt anything but. “What about Tristan… do you, do you know what he is? What he’s meant to be? His future?”

  Tristan felt as if he held his breath then, but knew the answer before Lilith even said it.

  “Of course I do.” It was flippant.

  Ash felt a rush of defeat despite the affirmation. “But you can’t tell me, can you?”

  “Of course not,” the pythia answered in the same candor.

  “Dammit,” Ash shouted as she jumped to her feet in a new explosion that had Tristan smiling again, “why tell me of Mother and Father then! You are just making everything worse! This doesn’t help, not even a little!”

  Of course it did. It just put more dark thoughts into Ash’s mind, many of which passed through Tristan making him sigh in sorrow. Maybe he was so calm about this all because Ash was the one losing her shit. Whatever the reason, Tristan was content on just sitting and listening… for a change. Not that he could do anything about it anyway, trapped like he was, both in mind and body. Christ, how was he going to get out of that closet back at Wren’s?

  Lilith, unfazed by the outburst, answered in her calm manner, “Because she comes. Mother comes and Father is not strong enough to stop her anymore.”

  Next to her, nearly forgotten in her utter stillness, Yuki suddenly shifted. They met eyes and some sort of understanding passed between them. They were confused and frightened, but they were in this together. Yuki was done with the games and would put true effort into what she
saw as right. Ash just hoped Yuki’s sense of morality was better than she suspected it to be.

  “What do you mean?” the old vampire asked calmly. “Why is it so bad that she comes?”

  “If there was ever such a thing as pure evil in this world, then Mother would be the only definition.”

  “The darkness awakens,” Ash whispered, reciting the words of Lilith’s prophecy.

  “Yes, Mother is the darkness and now she comes. She comes for Tristan and what she wants, she takes.”

  Tristan felt himself reel. He reached out in his empty mental space and, to his surprise, found warmth. It was Lilith, her aura taking ahold of him, offering him comfort. Peace.

  “But why him?” Ash asked in a tiny voice, beyond terrified. She suspected but didn’t want to believe.

  “Because he is special, an abomination, but irreplaceably important in the history to come. He is responsible for waking Mother and it’s his duty now to either fall to her desires and become her cohort or stop her. He is destined for a great many things, terrible and good alike no matter what side he takes.”

  Lilith paused for a moment to let it all sink in and then added, “His very existence has tipped the stability of all life on this planet and now which side it sways is entirely in his hands. Balance will never be had again but can be… imitated, with care. A side must be chosen and once it’s chosen, there is no going back.”

  Horrified, Ash fell back on the sofa. Beside her, Yuki was a perfect stone statue, unable to find the words to express what she was feeling. Tristan felt the same way. He wanted to walk away, to wake up and talk to the real Lilith, the child who held his metaphysical hand in this dark place. More made sense, but made more questions, too. He couldn’t accept it. How could he, really?

  Abomination.

  She called you a fucking abomination. You are the monster you always thought you were. And more…

  Lilith shifted, something in her candor telling him he was both right and wrong, but there was no explanation as the material Lilith spoke again.

  “You’re the only thing that’s keeping him from doing what he needs to do now, Asta. You must stop fighting fate or you will pay the price. And the toll is already so great. The longer you stave off the inevitable, the worse it will be for you.”