“I’ll remember,” he whispered back—and when he left the Council Room, the break in Kevin’s heart began to heal.
Neferet
The electricity returned not long after her delightful, loyal tendrils returned with her dinner—two young, semiattractive men who might have been considered handsome before they’d been possessed by her children and walked zombielike through the icy rain to the midtown villa she was borrowing from dead girls. She’d commanded her tendrils to leave the men’s bodies just before she began to feed from them, as it was rather incestuous to drain the blood from someone possessed by her children. The young men made an annoying amount of noise and fuss for the few moments they were aware before she ripped out their throats and drained them of blood.
Delicately, Neferet used the corner of a thick bath sheet to wipe the blood from herself as she left the scarlet bathroom suite. “Children, drag these corpses to the backyard and eat them. Do remember to finish your meal completely and then hide the remains, and by that, I mean bones only, in the shrubbery. And we insist you lick up the blood in the bathroom as well. We cannot abide a mess.”
Then she stretched her elongated limbs before going to the master closet and choosing a long, red silk slip dress to wear. It wasn’t as formfitting as she wished it was; she’d become too thin for it to hug her skin tightly, and instead of brushing the top of her feet it came only to her knees, but when Neferet stood before the mirror, she admired herself. Her limbs were long and bone white. Taut flesh stretched beautifully, powerfully, over lean muscle. Her hands slid down the silk, caressing her ribs where they jutted out from her chest like armor. Her breasts were small, but firm, and her nipples pressed sensuously against the slick fabric. Her neck had lengthened—not like a swan—like a magnificent praying mantis. Neferet turned and peered over her shoulder, sweeping the thick fall of silver-streaked auburn hair aside so she could appreciate the strength of her sinewy back. No, she wasn’t as she used to be, and her appearance should reflect that.
Neferet was not vampyre nor human. She was a dark goddess and as such, she no longer felt the need to conform to any world’s standard of beauty. She felt good—so very good. Neferet did not allow herself to think of the months and months she’d spent in that dank burrow with only her children and the dark as companions. It would not do to think of such unpleasantness. Instead, she went from room to room in the villa, lighting every candle she could find. She eschewed electric lights as too harsh. They were not as flattering to the long, graceful lines of her new body—and she was discovering that her eyes were sensitive to light, which only made sense after what she had so recently been through. All that darkness. All that hunger. All that—
“No! We shall not think of it. We shall act instead to be quite certain no one ever imprisons us again.” She clapped her hands. “Children! Come to us!”
From all around her, the faithful tendrils of darkness slithered from the shadows. They were still smaller than they were before they were entombed with her. She knew why. They had fed her while she had been trapped. Briefly, Neferet wondered what would have happened had they remained entombed for uncounted years. Would they all have become dried husks—mummified—unable to die, but also unable to live?
Neferet shuddered and closed that door in her mind.
“Darlings. How are you feeling?”
The tendrils swarmed her, crawling up her legs, wrapping around her waist, dangling from her arms and neck like living strands of serpentine jewels. Once again, they felt warm and pulsed with energy.
“Ah, that pleases us.” Neferet stroked them. “Now, will you soon be strong enough to travel?”
Their wriggling became even more excited, and she understood them perfectly.
“Do not become too eager. We are going to a world we know little of—except that there is a lesser version of us there who has control of someone who is our property.” Just the thought of Lynette being subservient to anyone else angered Neferet so badly that she had completely forgotten that she had already killed her Lynette. What mattered to Neferet was the fact that someone else had claimed something that belonged to her—and that would never do.
“No. It will not do,” Neferet said. “But it will also not do for us to enter a world ignorant and unprepared. We need information and cannot ask him for it. We cannot go to him weak and needy.” Neferet stroked the tendrils that slithered over her body. “Where shall we get the information we desire?”
When the answer came to Neferet, she laughed aloud at the simplicity of it. “Of course! The usurper called on their power—so shall we. They are probably still near, lurking like the little spies they have always been. We just need something to pique their curiosity so that they will appear to us.” Her smile was reptilian. “We know what those meddling sprites would like—something they have not tasted for uncounted years. And we know where to find one.”
Neferet hurried from the villa. She paused on the doorstep. It was still the deep of the cold, rainy night, but cold and rain weren’t enough for her purposes. She imagined stretching up into the low-hanging clouds to agitate them. It felt good to use her power. Neferet was still enough vampyre that she could reach the elements, but now she called to them with something darker than what a High Priestess would invoke. As in all things, there was a balance between Dark and Light. Neferet remembered her priestess training that, more than one hundred years before, had taught her to join with the elements and
