Chapter Forty-Two: The Spring

Helaine

A groan of protest left my body before my eyes deigned to flutter open. My head was pounding, and my mouth felt impossibly dry. 

A black spider with spindly legs skittered across my field of vision, but I was too exhausted to scramble away from it like I might’ve otherwise done if I were coherent enough to be afraid.

My body felt unreasonably heavy when I tried to adjust myself into a sitting position, and it became clear exactly why when I looked over my shoulder to see the whitish feathers, sticky and flecked red, matted together with dried blood.

Choking out a ragged sigh, I rolled my head back as I tried to rub the pain out of my aching throat. If the wings were real, then everything that happened to me last night was real.

And Evan . . . well, I had no idea where he was, which meant that he probably had no idea where I was.

Hell, I didn’t even know where I was.

Getting to my feet was a struggle with the added weight of the extra limbs now protruding from my back, but it wasn’t as much the weight giving me problems as the distribution.

Whatever dark power created them also gave me the strength to carry them, but I wasn’t use to it, so I stumbled with each heavy step I took. Clusters of spiders crawled out of the hay, moving out of the way of my feet as I took each hesitant step.

There was an odd glittering, something glass half-buried in the hay that caught the moon’s light shining through an open hatch in the barn’s roof.

Crouching to push aside the hay, I lurched backward, terrified by some hideous painting . . . before I realized that it wasn’t a painting at all.

It was a mirror, and the terrifying imagine I saw was my own face, caked in the dried remnants of the inky tears and the black bile I spewed last night.

My fingers curled around the edges of the mirror, facing my reflection with a morbid curiosity—like one might observe themself after a grievous injury.

I was still me, but god, I looked disgusting. Trying to wipe the dried bile off of my face was no good, it was stuck on, and it’d take more than my awkward scratching to get it to come off.

Seeing my wings in the reflection made the whole situation all the more real—they were mine, and I couldn’t ignore that when I was staring down at myself, at the spot where they connected to my back.

Gingerly, I tried to flex the wings, making my first real conscious attempt to move them, but they were so caked with blood that they crackled and snapped as I moved them. My wings stung where the stuck mess pulled at the feathers.

A heave racked my body from the revolting sight and sound, but mercifully, nothing came out of me.

My body was completely empty after last night’s vomiting, and that left me dizzy—lightheaded. It had been a while since Evan let me go so long without eating something sugary and laden with carbs to fortify me, especially after he accidentally took too much of my blood.

But Evan wasn’t here to take care of me now.

“You’re a mess, Hell Daughter.”

My heart dropped into my stomach and I practically leaped out of my skin when I whipped around to see Valek standing behind me, her hand raised toward the barn’s loft to catch a creeping spider as though it were a beloved pet.

She wore a witch’s hat now, and the spider joined its kin on the wide brim while she remained completely unbothered.

Evan and I spent most of our time around relatively modern mirrors, so it hadn’t even occurred to me that Valek wouldn’t appear in this one.

That meant it had to be made from silver, and maybe if I had an opening I could break it and use the shards to get an edge over her.

But when Valek stretched a hand toward me, gentle in a way that made me wonder exactly what she was plotting, I realized that I didn’t have the strength to fight her in my current state, silver or no. “Come. You need a bath, and a meal.”

My stomach rumbled its assent, and without other options I took her hand, my eyes fixed on a spider that seemed to wander the brim of her hat. “Why are there so many spiders here, anyway? They don’t seem to be threatened by me at all.”

With a sharp toothed smile of pride, she simply said, “They are my children,” and nothing more.

Following her out of the barn, I didn’t know what to expect, but the serene homestead around me wasn’t it. Valek seemed more like the type to lurk in dank tombs or wade through mass graves, but the quiet of the forest around us was genuinely . . . peaceful.

She wrapped an arm around my back to offset the weight of my new wings as we climbed up a small hill to a natural hot spring, haloed by massive ferns that gave the whole area a mystical feel.

“You can bathe here. I’ve got a stew cooking in the cabin,” she offered, her eerie black eyes fixed on me. “Go on, the water is hot, but it needs to be to clean you in this sorry state.”

Shuffling awkwardly, I only stared dumbly at her. “I . . . would prefer you leave before I get undressed.”

Almost predictably, she scoffed. “I was born before humans bothered to clothe themselves. It’s only a body. What do I care?”

Before clothes . . . Evan had told me who she was, but it hadn’t really sank in when he said it, before I was staring Valek in the eyes.

“Is it true that you’re the daughter of Lilith and Adam . . . that Adam? Like, from the Bible?”

Valek nodded. “God transformed Lilith into a demon when she was cast out of Eden. I, the child in her belly, was cursed in her womb. Unlike my half-brother, I was born a vampire. The first.”

She spoke about her half-brother so casually . . . but if she was the child of Adam, she could only be talking about Cain.

From the stories my dad used to tell, I knew that Cain was said to be cursed with immortality for murdering his brother. Valek suggesting that he was a vampire lined up.

It was real—all of it. The fact was anything but simple, and it carried a gravity that made my head spin.

I fell back against the edge of the spring and Valek sighed, taking off her spider-laden hat and resting it on a post before she began unlacing the leather cord that held her simple, tight outfit together.

Maybe I should have looked away as she stripped, but she was so casual about it that I didn’t feel I needed to, my eyes falling on her eerie snow-white skin. 

It was as though she didn’t have any pigment in her body at all, contrasting with the black hair that flowed down her shoulders as if it were ink pouring from her head.

I supposed it made sense that she didn’t look human if she was born a vampire. After all, she was never human. Unlike Evan, Valek never lived a moment where she wasn’t a monster—the first born to Lilith.

No wonder she held so much power.

She dipped her feet into the spring, and soon the rest of her body followed suit as she joined me.

“Turn around,” she commanded, and I was powerless but to obey. It wasn’t the same way that I submitted to Evan—I had no eagerness to give in to Valek’s will, but the simple truth was that I knew her even bothering to verbalize the command was a courtesy when I was so weak compared to her. “Your wings are filthy.”

I stood there in stunned silence as Valek massaged my wings, freeing each individual feather from the caked on grime. It was such a humble gesture that I didn’t know how to react, so I didn’t speak a word, didn’t move a muscle as her skilled hands moved over the new limbs.

“Don’t look so sad, Hell Daughter,” she mused, guiding me to lean back into the warmth of the spring until my wings were fully submerged. “Your champion won’t rest until he finds you.”