Page 14 of The Serpent's Bride
The silk fabric and lack of a brand label told her it wasexpensive.The black stilettos and the makeup she had been brought were also clearly the best that money could buy.
Not because Raziel wanted to give his fiancée nice things, of course. But because he wanted her to look exclusive, like everything else in his life.
She was just an accessory to him.
Disgust boiled in her, but she swallowed it down. He was playing a game with her. And she was playing with him too. But they weren’t playing on the same board.
Curling her hair up into an artfully messy bun, she stuck the two long, pointed pins into it to keep the knot of hair secured. They were her only weapons here.
If Raziel attacked her, they wouldn’t be of much use. In her line of work, she relied on stealth and surprise. Not brute strength.
But she could at least turn them on herself if necessary. Nadi refused to become another rumor of the disgusting things Raziel did to his enemies. And his lovers. She knew only too well what he was capable of.
The sound of screams echoed in her memories.
Jaw twitching, she took a breath and let it out. The memories of that night flashed back to her unbidden.
The underground caverns of the Wild were something to behold. She honestly sometimes pitied the humans and vampires who had never seen them. The darkness held wonders, if you weren’t too afraid to see them.
All fae clans were nomadic, traveling in packs and wandering with the chaotic currents of the Wild. Any attempts to buildstructuresandcivilizationslike the humans did would be a total waste of time and effort down there. Fields of crops would turn to forest overnight. Twisting roots and vines would tear buildings down days after they were made.
Her father had been an Iltani, a member of the few fae clans who dared to trade illicit goods with the upper world and whose ranks were more human than fae, half the time.
It had left her and her family cast out from most of the other fae in the Wild, but…it had also meant that Nadi and her familyhad never gone hungry, or without the finest fabrics, or really had ever wanted for anything.
So, Nadi had spent her youth gathering mushrooms from the Wild that her family would then sell to the humans, and she spent her life living closer to the surface than most—in those places where the faintly glowing vines had begun to overtake buildings and structures that the humans and vampires had surrendered to the fight against nature.
All the world was a gradient. Nothing was truly black and white. Good and evil. Life and death. Civilization and Wild. And growing up, she’d lived in those liminal places, those forgotten spaces—abandoned by humans and shunned by fae. Neither in the metropolis nor in the Wild, but in the spaces in between.
At the time, Nadi didn’t understandwhythe humans were so interested in the ugly mushrooms she worked to gather. They couldn’t even be turned into anything useful.
Now, she understood that they made for someincredible hallucinogenicdrugs. It had made her clan influential, if not wealthy. But she hadn’t known why. As a child, she hadn’t knownwhyher uncle Luciento had joked with her father that “he could really use a shapeshifter like her in his ranks when she got older.” And why her father would laugh and say it’d cost him the two moons in the sky to let him recruit her. Luciento would snort and say “Sold.”
They had been staying in a warehouse recently overtaken by the Wild when it had all gone wrong. Their clan had overstepped their bounds. They had grown too bold. And like the Wild, they needed to bebeaten back.
But it was not their blades and their fire and their machines that came to destroy them. It was something much, much worse.
A vampire had come for them. But not just any vampire.
It had beenhim.
The Serpent.
Even then, she had stared at him. At his stark beauty against the natural world around him. He didn’t belong there, with his long black hair, pale skin, and sharp red eyes. Her world was untamed, all tangled vines and leaves. Not pinstripes and tailored suits.
She hadn’t known his real name then. Only the title. Only the legend that when the Serpent came, everyone died. She’d never seen a vampire until that moment.
Chaos had struck almost instantly. He and the other vampires had swarmed into the warehouse, coming at them from all sides. They had moved faster than she could even see. Things with wings like bats, or—things that couldbecomea swarm of bats, she hadn’t been quite sure.
The vampires had set fire to the warehouse, forcing her family farther out above ground, blocking any safe escape into the Wild. They’d driven them out into the street. At the time, she hadn’t known where she was. Now, she could see it in her mind’s eye. Somewhere deep within the metropolis, underneath an overpass of the stacked roadways that hid the undesirable world from those above.
They’d run directly into a waiting squadron of humans. The sound of gunfire had echoed in her ears. Her mother had grabbed her arm. “Hide—shift! Be one of them—” And had pushed her down behind some crates by a wall.
In her head, time and time again, she replayed that night. In her dreams, in her nightmares, in her waking moments. She imagined herself being brave. She imagined herself standing up and sayingnoand fighting alongside her family.
Instead, she had done exactly what her mother had told her to do. She’d shifted her form into that of a human, crawling along the ground in the smoke and the dirt, glad that her clan generally wore the clothing common to human women. It made it easier to blend in if she needed to.
And in that moment? She’d needed to.
