Her daughter hadn’t understood that nesting in the coarse dirt with jagged rocks at her back and crags beside her knees was the closest Lilith had ever been to the primordial dirt that sprouted the Garden of Eden.
Could a vampire get any closer to the womb, the grave?
Tonight, Nhang’s jumpsuit was the epitome of utilitarian. Lilith’s finery weighed her down with fifty pounds of bustle, girdle, frill and frock. Her breath smelled like almonds and corked wine: earthy, vinegary.
Her daughter was a frightful, inspiring vision. All her teeth were pointed and long, as if she’d been sharpening them on bone.
Nhang’s eyes, green as a crocodile’s, shifted from Lilith to Haniel, who had been forced to his knees behind her.
“Who’s this?” Nhang asked.
Lilith didn’t answer.
Catherine did. “That’s her slave. Look, if you’ve come to discuss family business, then it’s no matter of mine, is it? Take your mob outside and leave me in peace.”
“Her slave?” Nhang set her hands on her hips. She was long like a river weed, like an eel. “Surely not. Such material trappings only drag you down, don’t they? Lilith?”
It was ‘Lilith’ now, not ‘mother.’
Poppy asked, “Then who is he?”
“Good question.” Nhang’s reflective eyes flared.
Catherine interrupted. “I can’t imagine what you want or why you would have come into my house, but I’ve had enough of this.”
“Boxer?” Nhang said. “Strike her cheek for me.”
The Gentleman smacked Catherine across the face. The blow knocked her aside. Catherine cried out and covered her face, but Lilith had heard her cheekbone snap.
Catherine acted delicate and regal, but Lilith had seen her tear an ox limb from limb. One casual whap from a Lazarite shouldn’t break her bones.
The Gentleman isn’t what he seems.
Lilith stared at his trunky thigh and realized why he was so brawny when everyone else was wraithlike. She’d seen his sort before, once, when seven powerful bloodlines mingled to create a new vampire.
Mixing blood always compounded the magic in unexpected ways.
“What is all this, daughter?” Lilith asked, using the title on purpose, declaratively, hoping to emphasize their relationship to Nhang’s followers. Would this new family care if Nhang executed her own bloodline?
Nhang reached into her pocket and pulled out a tuft of paper. Worn, weary edges, smelling of Nhang’s dank skin and a fetid nest. Lilith knew what the paper said—she’d written it, after all. Her blockish handwriting carved out a curse: I hope you get every damned thing you ever wanted, stupid girl. Even more so, I hope you get what you deserve.
Her daughter had kept the note.
Among immortals, grudges had a chance to live forever.
“What happened to you?” her daughter whispered, looking like she’d been punted in the gut. “Why’d you leave your sacred desert?”
“Everyone needs a vacation now and then,” Lilith said.
Nhang snorted. “And where’d you get that dress? You made me live in squalor—naked, sleeping in the dirt—and here you are, gussied up like a pretty princess? Drinking with the bourgeoisie?”
Catherine scowled.
Lilith waved her hand at the crowd. “Obviously you didn’t hate your upbringing that much. Here you are, still dressing in rags and sleeping in filth.”
Nhang’s face flushed. The vertical slit in her eyes expanded quickly, flashing a mirror-like reflection.
Probably shouldn’t antagonize the mob leader until I have a strategy, Lilith thought, but the urge to teach her daughter a lesson messed with her common sense.
Nhang’s smile gleamed. “We’re tired of living in the gutters, mother.”
“No one said you had to live in the sewers.” Lilith rolled her eyes. “Build a hut.”
Nhang snorted. “Don’t be obtuse. You know what I mean. The Exalted have subjugated us for too long. They’ve abused, tortured, and enslaved us. For centuries, we’ve killed each other for their table scraps.”
“True,” Lilith said. “So what?”
“Our family deserves better. My brothers and sisters have the right to be respected, autonomous, and equal. Unfortunately, that’s not possible under the Old Law, is it? We’ll always be second class citizens.”
“We’ll always be Lazarites,” Lilith said. “We’ve never tasted the Great Maker’s blood. You know this. Everyone knows. You cannot change our blood.”
“We’re different.” Nhang insisted, “But not unequal.”
Lilith shrugged. “Who can say what is best or better, what is more or less equal? Anyway, I have nothing to do with the law and no influence over those who enforce it.”
She didn’t tell her that Lane was dead. Nhang might be happy to hear it, and Lilith wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. “I have nothing to do with your quarrel here.”
“Because you’re a coward,” Nhang said. “You’d rather cower in caves and dig in the dirt than fulfill your obligations as an Elder. As a mother.”
Nhang’s words rankled and cut deeper because she was Lilith’s only daughter. Family, even estranged, had a special innate ability to get under each other’s skin.
Nhang thought her mother was a coward?
Lilith wished everyone would stop saying that. Maybe courage wasn’t her strongest quality, but she was fighting. The whole damned point of the spell was to fight back—because for once, running was the dumber option.
“I’m not a coward,” Lilith griped. “I refuse to play a game that’s rigged from the start.”
Nhang leaned closer, her long hair draping down. “We can make everyone play fair.”
Lilith laughed. “Good luck with that.” She waved at the door. “Can I go?”
“But Lilith—” Catherine said.
Nhang interrupted. “We can’t let you leave before the party, can we? Stay and watch us work. Tonight, we’ll destroy Catherine’s house. Soon, we’ll level Boston and build a new kingdom on its ashes.”
“Why?” Lilith frowned. “Why demolish this home when your army needs quarter? Why burn all the wealth when gold can buy slaves and comfort? Isn’t your family hungry?”
The horde licked their lips. Lilith noted their purple veins, dry skin, and shallow breath. A starving army was a mutinous one. They waged a war on empty bellies.
Nhang may have sparked a widespread revolution, but it wouldn’t sustain itself this way.
Ideals only stretched so far. Soon, Nhang’s loyalists would be killing deserters. Beheading mutineers.
These famished Lazarites stood among the luxury they craved, but Nhang expected them to deny their basest impulses. Few had the discipline to live without—as Lilith had taught Nhang to.
Nhang stood there like some messiah fresh from the desert, calling the Lazarites to elevate themselves through suffering and abstinence. She might be happy to starve and scrape, but her army didn’t seem to share her beliefs.
Lilith picked at the wound. “Don’t your soldiers deserve a warm hearth? A bed filled with blood-ripe slaves? Full veins and pulsing hearts?”
Across the crowd, vampires sucked their teeth, and a few groans of hunger arose.
“Sister,” the Corporal said. “Perhaps your mother’s wisdom—”
Nhang raised her hand. “Don’t mistake fear for wisdom. She’ll exploit your appetites to sway the weak-minded.”
Lilith accused, “You’re a silly idealist.”
And because family always hurt each other best, Nhang’s cheeks flared with pink embarrassment.
“This is only the beginning,” Nhang said. “Exalted vampires have flocked to Boston for the Ecclesia, leaving their homes unprotected. Those who survived the queen’s slaughter are weakened, distracted, and primed for an ambush. No one thought the Graveborn would dare revolt. They’re staring right at us, and they still can’t see us coming. Isn’t that right, Catherine?”
Catherine seethed,
side-by-side on her knees.
Not looking good for either of us, Lilith thought. Meanwhile, her scion pontificated.
“While the ancients fight over which laws to follow, the slaves will overrun the kingdom. Not a pebble will be left standing, mother.”
Lilith shook her head. “Your armies will burn out and turn or starve. Either way, they’ll turn on each other. This isn’t a family.”
“What do you know about family?”
Pinching the bridge of her nose, Lilith grumbled, “What do you want from me, Nhang?”
“Look around you,” her daughter spat. “We’re building a new world, a better one. Change is possible. Admit you were wrong and I was right.”
Lilith scoffed.
Nhang leaned in, teeth glinting, pupils flaring. “When you’re all alone, heart burning up with envy, remember you could have been a part of us. You could have stood beside me. If you weren’t such a coward.”
Good news: it sounded like Lilith would leave the house alive. Bad news: Nhang would never get what she wanted. Lilith would never admit to that philosophical failure. Once she escaped Boston and returned to her hovel, she’d probably forget all about Nhang’s insurrection.
“Poor girl,” Catherine spat, “all this, and you’re still craving your mother’s approval.”
Lilith clenched her teeth. Don’t talk to my daughter that way, she thought, but she wouldn’t give Nhang the satisfaction of defending her.
The Gentleman smacked Catherine again, knocking her face-down. Arm torn, cheek broken, nose smashed: Catherine was no longer recognizable.
Lilith squared her shoulders and tried a different tact. “With Lane dead and Arachne gone, I’m the oldest vampire on the continent. Doesn’t that make me queen?”
Catherine twitched in surprise, gaze riveted on her. Nhang’s face washed out, clean as a newly hung sheet.
Everyone always underestimates me, Lilith thought.
“Time for a history lesson?” she asked, coquettishly. “Yeshua made us all, Bloodborn and Graveborn alike. Arachne may be the first of the Bloodborn, but my legacy is just as great. When Yeshua’s life magic found me in the nothingness of death, I became the first Graveborn. I, along with five hundred others, began the Lazarite line.”
She grinned up at Nhang. “Maybe your band of rebels should remember that I’m the oldest surviving Graveborn. Any law, old or new, demands you treat me with respect. I suppose I could claim some matriarchal authority based on that fact.”
Nhang’s mouth pursed, twisted, and she broke into laughter. “Oh, don’t even try, mother. You can’t rest on the security of a society you’ve avoided for centuries.”
Lilith put her arms akimbo. Her daughter mirrored her.
“Look, Nhang, I’ve had a rough week. I fought two werewolves tonight. I’m not in the mood for any revelations or epiphanies or revolutions.”
Poppy asked, “Is that true?”
The Corporal said, “What would you give us if we lifted you atop a throne?”
And the Gentleman scrunched his cap in his fist.
Lilith, who wore borrowed clothes, had begged for her supper and slept on the floor, was about to leverage wealth against her spirited daughter, who was as noble-minded as any vampire could hope to be.
Never mind that Lilith was ready to tear her clothes off and crawl back into her den, into the dust and dirt and bone shards, among the graveyard debris of a million serpent skeletons—not human remains, she always tossed those out. If she pretended to be a lofty, aspiring heiress, she might turn the dynamic of this mob.
Then the Gentleman spoke and ruined everything. “Promises made under duress are no promise at all. She’ll say anything to get out of this.”
Nhang sneered at Lilith’s dress, but her voice cracked when she asked, “What happened to you?”
“I’ve evolved,” Lilith lied.
Nhang pointed at Haniel, who’d been kneeling mindfully behind her. Since Lilith usually traveled alone, it warranted the question: “Who is he?”
Thankfully, Haniel kept his mouth shut.
The Gentleman rubbed his hands together. “Want me to question him, Sister?”
Lilith lied, “He’s mute.”
“Don’t lie, mother,” Nhang said.
Lilith balked. She hated that someone was familiar enough with the minutiae of her expressions and the range of her emotion that they could say if she was lying or not. It was a violation of her privacy.
I never should have made a daughter.
Perhaps Lilith never should have kept her, tried to live with her, tried to love her. Yes, that’s where she went wrong: with cohabitation and affection.
Never again.
She’d sworn a similar thing the night Nhang left her to die alone in the desert.
Unfortunately, when Lilith pretended Haniel was her slave, it betrayed the core philosophy Lilith had tried to beat into her daughter’s head. Now Nhang would be convinced Lilith was a hypocrite who abandoned solitude—not for her daughter’s sake—but for a ‘human’ slave.
“What did you promise them?” Lilith said. “Did you tell them the grown-ups are keeping you down? A trite rags-to-riches daydream? Overthrow the masters and run the plantation?”
“I promised them equality,” Nhang said. “A community that respects them for who they are.”
Lilith snorted. “Why burn the Exalted’s mansions? Do you think you’re punishing dead kings, that they’ll give one shit about your political statement? They’re gone. Why not redistribute the wealth among your family?”
“We aren’t like them,” she said, “and if we pretend to be, we’ll lose what makes us unique. Just like if we take their wealth, we’ll become as vapid and unprincipled as them. It’s time for the Exalted to acknowledge that we, the Graveborn, deserve a place at the Elders’ table.”
Lilith folded her arms. “Carving out a new world from the ashes of a fallen empire is hard work. A few comforts would go a long way toward strengthening your army’s resolve. After all, they deserve a reward.”
Behind Nhang, several of the vampires perked up, a hungry gleam in their eyes. The Corporal glared at Nhang with a feral anger.
I’ve stumbled upon an argument they’d had before. A pivotal disagreement. The army is hungry for more than equality.
Poppy said, “We hunger for justice. We only envy equality. We have no need of material trinkets.”
A ripple of fidgeting fingers and shifting weight and downcast eyes passed through the crowd. Guilty glances, lying eyes, clamped mouths. A third of the army disagreed.
Lilith gulped. The circumstances were worse than she’d assumed. Nhang—Sister—was a charismatic, headstrong vampire. Naturally, others flocked to her. But if she expected to deny them all the glittery spoils of their victories, she had miscalculated. Apparently, they didn’t all aspire to the same austere morality.
“Join us,” the Corporal said. “Fight with us.”
At first, Nhang and Lilith didn’t acknowledge him. The room was quiet. The Gentleman put his cap back atop his head, and Lilith couldn’t read his expression. Catherine’s chest took to rising and falling, panting with breath and fear and hunger. Lilith examined Nhang’s eyes, the multifaceted green and gold kaleidoscope, the slit of a pupil, the sclera so white it was like a flash of lighting.
Lilith remembered the night of Nhang’s Becoming, that ultimate creation of blood, ash, and flesh. Lilith’s first ritual. That one time, it was like the spark had burned through her chest and hurdled from her blood, rampant and sweet, and wormed directly from Lilith’s veins and into Nhang’s.
And her daughter’s eyes…
Lilith had stared and stared, marveling, knowing she’d done something more miraculous than turning sticks into serpents.
She’d also made the biggest mistake of her life.
With one dreg of blood, she’d voided her isolation and condemned herself to consider the scope of the world and her impact in it. Lilith could no longer abstain fr
om everything. She was part of everything now, because of Nhang, and for her daughter’s behalf.
She was complicit to every drama and evil that dared trouble the world while her daughter still walked through it. Guilty by association.
And Nhang continued to make it worse.
Lilith had stayed to her caves, ignored the beyond, the people, her kind, and every kind except her serpents and her daughter.
But Nhang, the idealist, had to go and change things. She wasn’t content with the old ways and the fact that life was just goddamn unfair, wasn’t it, and what the hell was anyone to do about that inconvenient reality?
Nhang—Sister—had gathered an army numerous enough to fill a five-story house from dungeon to attic.
“I bet you’re proud of yourself,” Lilith said, wondering how many vampires across the globe had joined Nhang’s revolution. “The proletariats arise, aspiring to better themselves.”
“We’ve already risen,” Nhang said. “It’s all over, mother.”
Nhang leaned in, bending her whipcord body nearly in half, slinking into Lilith’s space. So close that the grime and patchouli smell of her wild hair scraped down Lilith’s senses.
“Admit you were wrong,” Nhang whispered, but they both knew not a soul in the room couldn’t hear them. “I did it. I changed something vital. We reshaped the future of our kind. We rattled Destiny.”
“You think too highly of yourself.” Lilith tipped her face up, lips almost brushing Sister’s chin. “Destiny is never rattled. That bitch does all the shaking. If you’re here, it’s because Fate manipulated you.”
“Not this time.” Nhang smiled a grin so big and perverse that Lilith couldn’t help but believe it. Her pupils were like blades. “This time, I manipulated Fate.”
Chapter 19
Nhang believed she could get the best of Fate?
Lilith thought back to the three Fates in Lane’s mansion the night he died. They’d been at odds, two of them turned against one. Or was it one who’d turned against the pair who thrust Lane into the fire?
Things were changing, but Lilith sure as hell didn’t understand it.
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