Page 124 of Better in Black
“Come sit by me and tell me a story. I wish for some pretty words to ease me into a dream.”
And that night, and many nights after, I sat by the Queen’s bed. I told her the story of my sisters, and how I had lost them, one by one. Each night a tale of love and death.
That first night, I began with Celithe.
—
The Queen was many months with child, on the night I found Sebastian in her chambers. That night, the room had taken on the cast of fire, as if in his honor. Scarlet flames licked the walls; the floor was glowing coals. I imagined I could see faces in the fire, howling in a silent scream of damnation. Though when it came tothe Queen, one could never trust this was imagination. Sebastian was sprawled catlike on the Queen’s bed, his gear the same color as the scarlet silk covers, stretching toward the flickering firelight as if it were the sun.
“Oh, Nene!” the Queen purred. As if she’d forgotten I was coming. As if, in Sebastian’s presence, she’d forgotten all but him. “You need not attend me tonight.” The Queen traced her fingers along Sebastian’s shoulder, his waist, his hip. “I have another to guide me into sleep.”
Sebastian grinned at my Queen like a wolf. “Tonight is not a night for sleeping.”
She let her robe slip from her shoulders, revealing the graceful curve of her rounded belly. Their child.
Did she notice, I wondered, that his smile never reached his eyes?
Sebastian climbed out of bed, and knelt before her, caressing the flesh stretched across her womb. He leaned in, that wolfish smile lighting his face—and for an insane moment, I thought he meant to devour them, the Queen and her baby both. Instead, he bestowed a kiss. “My son,” he said. Then he rose to his feet, and kissed the Queen on the lips. “My lady.”
The Queen’s look was fixed on him. “You may go now, Nene.”
Sebastian turned his devouring gaze on me. All black hunger, an endless pit of emptiness demanding to be filled. If I let him, he would use me; he would make me forget everything but the pleasure and pain he would cause me to feel. He was careful with the Queen, for she had power. He would not be careful with me. “Unless, of course, you’d rather stay.”
“Alas,” I said. “My lady has bid me go.”
“Nene,”he said, and I froze. “I know this name.”
I didn’t like that he recognized it. I liked even less the reason why.
“Now I know why you seem so familiar,” he said, as he got closer. “You’re related to the half-breeds, Mark and Helen Blackthorn.”
Miach and Alessa. I felt a chill run through me, that he knew even their mortal names. That he knew their faces, well enough to see them in mine.
He was close enough now that I could feel his breath on my face.
And I could not flee, not until I understood what threat he posed to my blood. I owed that much to Nerissa.
The debt of blood is not love, but it is not nothing.
“How do you know them?”
“Oh, I paid them a visit.”
If I had known then what I learned only later, if I had known what hisvisithad meant, and that the next time he would visit their home, it would be for blood, that it would be the beginning of his war to end the Shadowhunters, and that my niece and nephew’s family would be the first to fall, if I had known that he would spirit Miach away from his life and into the Wild Hunt, where the death collectors would do what they could to hollow out his humanity and make of him the loveless monster my sister never wanted him to be—what, then, would I have done?
Would I have struck against him, foolishly, uselessly? Dealt him a blow he would shrug off with a laugh, before gutting me and leaving me in a bloody heap for the other handmaids to wash away? Would I have warned the Queen against him, beseeched her to sever this brutal alliance before all was lost? Would I have found a way to stop Sebastian before he started and avert all the bloodshed that was to come?
How could I?
I was only Nene. I was nobody of importance. It was not my story.
“I hear you’re looking after the health of my son,” Sebastian said. “Do you think the child will be like me?”
I hope not.They say Shadowhunter blood breeds true, but Sebastian was no ordinary Shadowhunter. Whatever darkness had infested his soul, perhaps it would end with him. Or perhaps—the thought had not occurred to me before, and I vowed never to think it again—the child would be darkness distilled and refined, pure as acid.
“There’s no way to know what a child will be like,” I told Sebastian.
He looked as if he did not agree. “I will raise him as my father raised me.”
