Page 16 of Be the Serpent

My sweet, silly, bratty, traumatized niece. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye. I was never going to be ready.

“W-why?” choked Jessica.

I don’t know what I was expecting. Malicious laughter, maybe, or bestial shrieking. Instead, a hand was withdrawn from her throat, and as the knife slid into her side, a calm, unfamiliar voice said, “Leave nothing behind. Be the serpent, be the shadow. Be nothing, or never come home.”

“Ah,” sighed Jessica, and closed her eyes. Her heartbeat was slowing, her lungs aching as the last of the air left them, and there was a stabbing pain in her side, and another in her chest, and—

And I broke the memory with a gasp, opening my eyes on the blood-soaked living room and the crumpled body of a little girl who had died trying to be a hero for her brothers. I pushed myself to my feet. Tybalt was already behind me, and he didn’t flinch from the blood on my hands as I collapsed against him, trusting him to hold me up.

Everything was falling apart so quickly.

FIVE

No matter how upset I was—and I was plenty upset—I couldn’t allow myself to wallow in it for more than a few seconds. All too soon, I was pulling away from Tybalt, sniffling and wishing I could wipe my tears away without getting blood all over my face. “Any sign of Stacy in the garage?” I asked, voice thick.

Neither answer would be a good one. Either she was dead or she was gone, but there was no way she’d stood idly by while someone broke into her house and assaulted her children.

He shook his head grimly. “No.”

“Okay. Okay. Maybe the person who . . . the person who killed Jess, maybe she took her for some reason?”

“It’s possible.”

I took a step back, standing up as straight as I could manage under the circumstances. “Okay. I need to wash the blood off my hands before I go back to the boys, and I need you to go wait out front for everyone else to get here.”

“I assume we still wish to avoid attracting mortal attention?”

“Yeah. Come out the back door with me, go cat, and go sit at the foot of the driveway.” No one would think it was odd for a stray cat to be hanging around in the middle of the day. Colma is full of strays. And while Mitch and Stacy didn’t have any pets, they did have five kids, two of whom they were still homeschooling. Any one of them could have been encouraging a stray to hang around.

It was good logic. It held. And I held on to it as I made for the bathroom to rinse Jessica’s blood off my hands, scrubbing for as long as I dared. Tybalt stayed close. He wasn’t going to argue about splitting up once we were outside, but it was clear he didn’t want to leave me alone in here again. After what I’d just seen—what I’d just halfway lived through—I didn’t want him to. I can be a little self-destructive sometimes. That doesn’t make me a fool. If there was any chance at all the woman who’d killed Jessica was still here, I wasn’t going to let myself be caught alone with her.

Jessica had fought. When that woman was holding her down and squeezing the life out of her eyes, she’d fought, as long as she could. She might have been able to fight hard enough to get away if not for the second knife, the one that had disappeared with her killer. But while it was possible a human forensic team might find differently, I hadn’t felt her draw her attacker’s blood. The roses were entirely a byproduct of whatever magic this woman had used to get into the house. I might be able to follow them anyway.

Not until we finished dealing with the boys.

Once my hands were clean, I pushed past Tybalt out of the bathroom and made for the back door with him in close pursuit. I was so grateful for his presence that it was almost a physical ache behind my breastbone. When had he become so predictably my anchor?

I could never have guessed how important he’d become to me, and I to him, in just six years. And if I was lucky, I’d never do anything to make that change.

The smell of blood still hung in the backyard, fainter now, as if the bleeding had mostly stopped. We approached the little castle cautiously, stopping far enough away that we hopefully wouldn’t frighten the boys.

I crouched, pitching my voice soft and gentle as I called, “Hey, guys, Auntie Birdie here. Some friends are on the way with my car, and they’ll be able to take you someplace that’s safe. But right now, I need to look at Tony’s injuries. Sweetie, I know how he got hurt. I know why he’s bleeding. And I need you to let me see.”

There was a long pause, followed by a scuffling sound before Andrew’s round, worried face appeared in the castle window, eyes open so wide that I could see the whites all the way around. He had a streak of blood on his right cheek. “You swear?” he said.

“I swear,” I said.

“Pinkie promise?”

“Need to come close enough to touch pinkies for us to do that.”

Andrew hesitated, clearly pondering this. He looked further up, focusing on Tybalt. “She’s telling the truth?”

“I don’t know precisely who’s coming, although I could hazard some fair guesses, but October gave her keys to her father before we left Court. Your sisters were there with us. I’m sure they’re very worried about you.”

I didn’t want to go into the topic of sisters right now, not with Jessica dead in the living room. She’d died in the mortal world: when the night-haunts came for her, they were going to leave a perfectly realistic human corpse behind. Andrew didn’t need to see that. Neither did Anthony. They were kids. Let them be kids a little bit longer before they had to face the fact that their world had just changed forever.

Andrew sniffled, looking from me to Tybalt and back again before he appeared to make a decision. Slowly, with exquisite care, he crawled out of the castle and onto the grass. There was blood all the way down his side, staining his shirt, but none of it looked like it was his. All the blood that did seem to be his had come from a long scrape along his left forearm, probably banged against something in the rush to get out of the house and into the castle. Lots of opportunities to take off a layer of skin when you’re not paying attention during that sort of headlong flight, and most people don’t heal the way I do.