TWENTY-TWO
“I believe,” Lilivra’s quiet voice carried an impossible weight of authority, “that it is high time that old prophecies were brought to light.”
She raised her gauze-wrapped hands to her face, and the room seemed to hold its breath.
The first layer of silken gauze fell away, drifting to the marble floor like shed snakeskin. Then another. And another. Each one revealed more of what lay beneath—not the withered, ancient flesh everyone expected, but something else entirely.
Something impossible.
Something that changed…everything.
Nadi watched in stunned silence as the gauze continued to fall, revealing first a graceful neck, then a delicate jaw, then lips that curved in a smile that had no sign of age in it.
The wrappings around her head came free, and a cascade of hair spilled forth—not gray, not white with age, but white like pure starlight. White like fresh snow. White like the bioluminescent flowers that pulsed through the deepest reaches of the Wild.
And her eyes.
When the last of the gauze fell away from her face, Lilivra opened her eyes, and Nadi felt something in her chestshatter.
They weren’t the orange or red or golden eyes of a vampire.
They were white opal.
Like her hair, they reflected captured starlight, swirling with colors that only had names in one language that Nadi knew. They were the eyes of somethingold. Something that had watched civilizations rise and fall. Something that had been ancient when the first vampires walked the earth.
Something…
Fae.
Lilivra stood before them now, the gauze pooled at her feet like discarded chains. She was beautiful—stunningly, terrifyingly beautiful. Her features were delicate and sharp at once, ageless in the way that only fae could be ageless. She wore a simple white gown beneath all those wrappings, and it clung to a form that was slender and graceful and utterly inhuman.
She looked like a goddess descended from myth.
She looked like what she was.
And when she smiled?
Nadi could see her fangs.
“No,” Mael breathed, and there was genuine horror in his voice. “That’s not—that’simpossible?—”
“Is it?” Lilivra’s voice was different now too—clearer, more melodious, freed from the muffling effect of the gauze. “You’ve always known something was wrong with me, haven’t you, grandson? Something that didn’t quite fit the stories you were told. The grandmother who never showed her face. Who spoke from behind curtains and veils. Who gave prophecies that always came true.”
She began to move through the room, and Nadi noticed that her steps were no longer slow and pained. She walked with thefluid grace of a predator—the same grace that Nadi saw in the mirror when she forgot to hide what she was.
A gait that would have given her away for exactly what she was.
Fae.
“I am a vampire,” Lilivra said simply. “Do not mistake what your eyes might see. But yes…I am fae—one of the first, and the eldest of my kind still walking this world. All this?” She gestured smoothly with long, delicate fingers at the home around them. “It is of my design.”
Lana had gone pale—paler even than her usual vampiric complexion. Her magenta eyes were wide with something that looked like terror. “The original vampire,” she whispered. “But—but stories say you created us. That you were the first?—”
“I did create you.” Lilivra’s starlight eyes found Lana’s, and the Sweetheart Mistress flinched as if struck. “But not in the way you imagine. There was no divine blessing. No dark curse. No mystical transformation that birthed a new race into the world.” She paused, letting the words sink in. “I was simply blessed by the moons to be given the hunger to rise above the Wild that bore me into this world.” A soft laugh escaped her. “As I have imparted that hunger on all of you and have waited for the next who would strive for the next step.”
The silence that followed was absolute.
Nadi’s mind was racing, trying to process what she was hearing.
