She Dies at the End (November Snow #1) (31 page)

November stood before her and felt strangely sympathetic.  She knew what it was to be helpless and alone.  “Why did you choose me?” she whispered to Lilith.

“Because you’ve been here before,” she replied cryptically.

“What?” November asked, confused, sure she had misheard.  But Lilith would say no more.  She simply closed her eyes and waited for the final blow.

“Now, little one,” Ilyn urged gently.

So, November took a deep breath, pulled back her hand, and drove a sharp wooden stake into her enemy’s chest.  As the blood of centuries began to pour forth, Ilyn picked her up at the waist and swung her out of the way so that not a drop of that awful woman landed on her.  Almost immediately, the blood turned to ash, and Lilith was no more.  November dropped her stake, squeezed her eyes shut, and covered her mouth and nose, not wanting any part of Lilith inside of her.  Ilyn gave her his silk handkerchief and walked her quickly to clean air.  The crowd released its anticipation and its rage in a cheer loud enough to make her ears ring.  Cries of “Long live the king!” alternated with that of “Oracle, oracle!”  Fangs began appearing in vampire mouths, provoked by the excitement of the execution.

“Well done, little one,” Ilyn praised her before turning toward Pine.  “This would be a good time to get her out of here, before they start looking for food,” the king instructed her entourage, who swiftly ushered her back into the building.  Zinnia followed close behind, taking her hand to squeeze it in support.  With great relief, they collapsed in their room.

“Wow, Em, you’re a slayer now.  A fairy and a vampire under your belt.  I can’t believe she made you do that.”  Zinnia shook her head in disbelief.

“You and me both,” November concurred.  She didn’t bring up Lilith’s cryptic final words.  She wanted to hold them close for awhile, worry them a bit, roll them around in her head.  It wasn’t until that moment that November started to shake.  
I just killed someone.  On purpose.  She’s dead now.  Like, permanently.
  Zinnia, sensing her distress, moved to sit next to her friend.

“Hey, there was no getting around it.  She was dead before she even said your name.  Besides, after what she did to you, she seriously had it coming,” Zinnia said reassuringly.

“I know,” November sighed.  “But I just looked a woman in the eye and killed her.  And people cheered.”  She leaned her head against Zinnia’s shoulder, not crying, simply overwhelmed and exhausted.  “I’m never going to have a normal life again, am I?”

“Did you have one before?” Zinnia asked gently.

“No,” she admitted.  “But nobody died because of me, directly or otherwise.  And there were no geriatric vampires waxing hot and cold, or magic knives, or forced exchanges of blood, either.”

“Fair enough,” her friend allowed.  “You know, if I thought there was any way to get you safely away from this, I would do it.  Sometimes I couldn’t care less about the war and the kingdom.  The whole situation is terribly unfair, and you don’t deserve any of it.  I’m pretty sure Pine feels the same way.  He is super upset about everything you’ve gone through.”

“I know,” she said, smiling gratefully at her friend.  “But, per usual, I am at the mercy of forces beyond my control.  And I am seriously sick of it.”  She flopped back onto her bed before continuing, “So, what happens in the Assembly now?”

“The lords meet in private session tomorrow night to determine a course of action against Luka.  Mom will need me to be an errand runner, so you’ll be on your own up here, unless they summon you to ask questions about your visions.  I wouldn’t think they would, but after tonight, anything’s possible.”

“I’ll pray for a boring night, then!” November replied.  “Hey, what’s going to happen to Ben?”

Zinnia looked around furtively as though afraid of being overheard before revealing, “They're sending him with a message for Luka, one last offer for him to give this up and accept exile rather than risk war.”

“But if he knows where Luka is . . . I don’t understand,” Em replied.

“Oh, he doesn’t know.  He would have spilled by now, believe me.  After you almost died, that kid became an open book.  No, the king’s people just assume that Luka’s people will find Ben and snatch him up.  They'll just put him on the street.  They'll try to track him, but of course, Luka’s people aren’t going to be careless enough to lead our guys to the secret base or whatever.”

“But Luka will kill him,” November protested.

“Maybe.  Probably,” Zinnia responded, unconcerned.  To her, Ben deserved to die after what he’d done to them all. “So it’s true, then?  You asked the king to spare him as your reward?”  November nodded.  “Why?”

“I’m not sure.  I mean, I kind of felt sorry for him, what with Luka taking advantage of how screwed up he was, but I don’t think that’s why.  The idea just, sort of, came to me,” November replied.

“Well, at least this way he has a chance, I guess,” her friend said a bit skeptically.

“I guess.”

Shortly thereafter, Zinnia’s phone buzzed, and she returned to her mother’s side where she had been spending almost every hour since they had arrived in Las Vegas.  This left November to the task of calming down enough to eat before taking a much-needed bath and tumbling into her comfortable bed in her favorite white nightgown, hoping against hope for a dreamless sleep.

A dead woman in threadbare clothes swings from a noose as birds peck at her dead eyes.  A young girl screams at the hands of merciless priests.  A woman rides a horse dangerously fast, her hair streaming behind her, her belly round with pregnancy.  A fairy, silver-haired and silver-eyed, addresses her troops from horseback.  A woman, running, becomes a wolf mid-stride.  Lilith and Ilyn, arm in arm.  Lilith and Ilyn, feed together.

She slept exceptionally poorly, even for her.  This was not too surprising, given the execution in which she’d just played a starring role.  It seemed she couldn’t sleep more than an hour without jerking awake, shaking, sweating, occasionally screaming.  Pine came to check on her more than once.  In the end, he just sat in the room with her, which made her feel a little better, or at least, less alone.  When she finally gave up on sleep, she opened her eyes to see him still sitting in the little armchair next to the television, his eyes trained on her, watchful and concerned.

“Morning,” he said as she sat up in the bed and turned to check the clock.  “Had enough tossing and turning?”

“Yeah,” she said.  “Maybe some food and some sunshine will make me feel human again.”

“Do you want to check out the atrium?  There’s a café down there, and it usually isn’t too busy this early in the afternoon,” Pine offered.

November smiled.  “That sounds cheerful.  Let’s do it.”  

She dressed carefully, not wanting to look like a slob if she ran into any of the dozens of important fairies she had met the previous night.  She might have been beyond caring about politics, but she still had her pride.  She no longer felt like an imposter in designer clothes, but she was still acutely aware of the luxury of them.  She put on a little makeup, mostly to cover up the constant dark circles that plagued her pale face.  Then she stood staring at her hair, wondering how to hide it this time.  It was growing back out pretty quickly, but it was still only barely an inch long.  “Eh,” she said out loud.  “What the heck?”  She found some gel, spiked it up all crazy, and called it done.

Pine smiled when he saw it.  “November Snow, trend-setter.  It’ll be on the cover of Vogue in two months.”

“Right,” she replied, rolling her eyes.  “As if fairies have room to talk about weird hair.  Shall we?”

The atrium was quite impressive: all glass and water and green plants quite out of place for the desert.  She especially liked the waterfall.  Most of the restaurants and night clubs at the resort had their entrances off of this central space.  It was still afternoon, so it wasn’t yet swarming with the people who would fill the place after dark.  There were some families with children, and a number of fairies who nodded politely to her and kept their distance when they saw her formidable entourage of fairy guards.

All the vampires were, of course, still resting.  November wondered what Ilyn might be doing.  He was usually awake by 2 or 3 pm.  She immediately caught a glimpse of him alone at a desk, drinking cold blood from a mug, his lit pipe lying forgotten in an ornate ashtray.  
Stop looking for him
, she told herself impatiently.  
He doesn’t want you.  He doesn’t deserve you.

After a light meal, she returned to her room to change before heading to the pool complex.  She was in desperate need of relaxation after the previous evening’s violence and endless bad dreams, so she thought she might as well take advantage of the fact that she was trapped in a fancy hotel.  The resort boasted four different pools and a number of steaming whirlpools.  November chose the very well-heated salt water pool.  It was located in a shady sort of grotto underneath a stone overhang, and with most everyone catching the last few rays of sun beside the outdoor pools, it was mostly deserted.  Only one other woman began swimming laps as November floated aimlessly in an attempt to wash away her tension.

Suddenly, a hand closed around November’s ankle like a vice, jerking her violently underwater.  She kicked out frantically, struggling to escape as her assailant pulled her ten feet to the bottom of the pool and held her there.  Unable to keep her eyes open in the salty water, she heard rather than saw her guards dive into the pool.   Her lungs began to burn as her security team worked quickly to disentangle her from her attacker.  Strong hands tugged her in several directions.  Finally, just as she began to panic and her vision began to darken, she felt herself being pulled toward the surface.  

The next thing she knew, she was on the pool deck, coughing and gasping for breath as Pine pounded on her back.  The whole episode couldn’t have lasted more than twenty seconds.  She said a silent prayer of thanks for fairy speed.  She looked around to see Willow and two other guards dragging away a dazed-looking fairy.  “Who?  Why?” she managed to ask between coughs.  She began to tremble, and Pine wrapped her up in a towel.

“That fairy from the gas station – you know, the one you killed in the bathroom?  Apparently that’s his mother,” Pine explained.  He shook his head.  “I’m sorry we didn’t see her as a threat in time to head her off.  I should have been suspicious – no fairy chooses shade when the sun is still out.  Do you think you can walk?  I’d like to get you back to the room before anything else goes wrong.”

“Yes, let’s go,” she agreed in a weak voice, standing unsteadily and pulling on her bathrobe.  “Better get me back in my cage before Dogwood’s sister gets here with a machine gun or Lilith’s hairdresser shows up with a chainsaw,” she added in a voice made stronger by bitterness. “Maybe Ben’s old college roommate can stab me with a ski pole.”  Pine pressed worried lips together as he led her back to the elevator.    

Back in her room, just after sunset, she lay curled up in her bed, buried under a pile of blankets, still in her bathing suit and wrapped up in a robe.  She just couldn’t seem to get warm.  On the other side of her locked door, a whispered conference was taking place.  She heard it all with her gift rather than her ears, though she was too upset to give them her full attention.  She cried soundlessly, her fist in her mouth, as they argued over her in the living room.

“How could you let this happen?” Ilyn asked, furious and pacing, his ire directed at Willow and Pine.

“The assailant was cleared to enter the hotel by your people, as well as the security in her own delegation from Maine.  No one suspected her of anything.  We neutralized her within seconds of her making contact with November,” Willow protested.  “There’s also no indication she was sent by Luka.  He wants the girl alive, after all.”

“Is she injured?” Savita asked with characteristic calm.

“It looks like just a few bruises,” Pine answered.  “But she refuses to see a doctor or let us heal her.   I would say guess the pain is more mental than physical.”

“What is she thinking?” William asked his older sister.

“I cannot tell from here.  I’ve told you many times: she’s not as easy to read as other humans.  I have to make physical contact to get much of anything, and I very much doubt my telepathically assaulting her would improve the situation at the moment,” Savita replied with some irritation.

The meeting was interrupted by the arrival of young Zinnia, who was decidedly less calm than Savita.  She slammed the door before demanding of her king, “What the hell did you do this time?”

For a moment, Ilyn’s hackles went up, and he seemed about to take the blue-haired fairy to the woodshed.  Zinnia was uncowed in the midst of her fury.  Finally, he relaxed as though acknowledging his guilt, and all he said was, “It wasn’t me, this time.  At least, not proximately.”

“That gas station kid’s nutbar mother tried to drown her in the pool,” Pine explained sucinctly to Zinnia.

“In theory, that should make her pissed off and frightened,” Zinnia answered.

“But she’s not?” Pine asked quietly.

“No,” Zinnia said, looking accusingly directly into his eyes.  “This is more like--.”

"Despair," Ilyn finished for her.

“I think today was just one more thing on top of everything else.  She’s barely sleeping.  That nonsense at the execution last night shook her up, I imagine.  It’s not as though she’s accustomed to dispatching people,” Pine added.  “She’s overwhelmed.”