Familiar laughter that had always reminded the immortal of a full harvest moon echoed around Kalona. He closed his eyes against the pain of her absence, even as hope increased his heartbeat.
“You watch me. I know you do,” Kalona whispered.
The laughter faded. Kalona opened his eyes. Feeling as if he carried a great weight, he started walking. He needed to get back to watch over the fledglings. That one thing he could do, and do well.
“No other fledgling will be allowed to do anything stupid enough to be condemned for—not as long as I watch over them,” he spoke his thoughts aloud. What Kalona didn’t say, didn’t even like to admit silently to himself, was how he could not get the two fledglings’ cries for mercy from his mind. Beheading the vampyre hadn’t been difficult. Dallas had attempted to murder a vampyre and had been justly condemned. It was the two fledglings who haunted him. They had been boys who had simply chosen unwisely and followed the wrong leader, he thought.
“Compassion.”
The whispered word halted Kalona’s. “Nyx?”
“Compassion.”
The word was repeated. It was spoken too softly for Kalona to be certain, but the warmth, the infinite love in it, had to be Nyx. And then Kalona realized where he had stopped. He was standing before the wooden door to Nyx’s Temple.
The door that turned from wood to stone under his touch as his Goddess denied him entrance.
Slowly, as if moving up through the centuries of longing for her, Kalona lifted his hand. He pressed his palm against the door and waited for it to turn to unyielding stone.
It remained wood.
Kalona’s hand trembled when it touched the door handle. He turned it and pushed, and with the sound of a woman’s sigh, the wooden door opened.
Kalona stepped into the foyer of Nyx’s Temple. He heard running water, though he hardly glanced at the glistening amethyst fountain that was recessed into the niche in the thick stone wall. He passed beneath an arched doorway and entered the heart of the Goddess’s temple.
Vanilla and lavender scented candles filled the room with sweet, heady fragrance. They were suspended from the ceiling in iron chandeliers. Freestanding tree-shaped chandeliers along the wall held more scented candles. Sconces shaped like a woman’s graceful hand were lit in the corners of the room. An open flame burned from a recess in the stone floor. Kalona barely noticed any of that. His sole focus was on the ancient wooden table in the center of the temple. It held an exquisite marble statue of Nyx. Kalona stumbled forward and knelt before the statue. He stared up at her. She seemed to glisten, and Kalona realized his eyes had filled with tears.
In a voice choked with those tears, he spoke to her. “Thank you. I know I do not deserve to kneel at your feet yet. I may never deserve it. Not after what I have done to us both. But thank you for allowing me entrance to your temple.” Then Kalona bowed his head and, for a very long time, knelt before his Goddess and wept.
Neferet
Neferet curled in upon herself, hugging the threads of Darkness that still covered her, and she relived the end of her journey.
Cascia Hall was what the humans had called the preparatory school that had been built in the heart of midtown Tulsa on the land that so called to Neferet. All male, of course, the human school had been newly founded by an Augustinian branch of the People of Faith. In the year 1927 it was not for sale. That fact had not troubled Neferet. The High Council was not ready to purchase another school in America—at least not in the Tulsa, Oklahoma, that existed in 1927.
Neferet had known that time was in her favor. In the seventy-five years it took for her to manipulate, intimidate, guide, and bribe the High Council into making the Augustine monks an offer they could not refuse, and appointing her High Priestess of the newly acquired House of Night in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Neferet discovered her true nature.
She was Tsi Sgili. No, she was more than a simple Native American ghost story. She was a powerful High Priestess whose gifts were so much more than they had seemed. Neferet was Queen Tsi Sgili.
Little wonder she had been so drawn to Oklahoma. It was through the Cherokee people who had settled there that Neferet discovered a hidden aspect of her intuitive gift. Not only could she read people’s minds—she could also absorb their energy. But only at the moment of their deaths.
The old woman had taught her that. Neferet had done more than steal her thoughts as she’d died. She had absorbed the old woman’s power.
Death became a drug, and Neferet had not been able to get enough of it.
She’d followed the echoes in the crone’s mind and begun to ask questions about the Tsi Sgili.
What Neferet learned was her own story. A Tsi Sgili lived apart from her tribe. They were powerful and delighted in death. They fed on death. They could kill with their minds. That was the ane li sgi the old woman had thought of just before her death—death caused by the mind of a powerful being.
The old woman’s Cherokee husband had inadvertently taught Neferet how to use her gift more fully. He had been less brave than his wife. Thinking to save himself he had opened himself to Neferet. Through the memories he willingly shared with her, Neferet learned much more about the Tsi Sgili. She fed from the tribal stories he had in his memory and discovered it was possible to slide into a mind and stop the beating of a heart while she fed on her victim’s thoughts, energy, power until he was drained dry. Draining the body of energy was so much more satisfying than simply draining it of blood. And so much more effective.
As Neferet had grown in power, so too had her dreams of the winged immortal, Kalona. He made love to her as she slept. Not as her inadequate human or vampyre lovers had attempted. Kalona had taken possession of her body and used pain for pleasure, and pleasure for pain.
All the while his whispers painted pictures of a future where they ruled as gods on earth and ushered in a new age of vampyre enlightenment. Where she was his Goddess and he her adoring, powerful, seductive Consort.
“But first you must free me,” he had said as his cold fire had deliciously scorched her body. “Follow the song to Tulsa, and there you will complete the prophecy and find the means to free me!”
Neferet had listened to him. Oh, but she had found so much more than the means to free him. She had discovered the means to free herself!
She did not fully understand until she had taken possession of her own House of Night in Tulsa. There was power in that land that had resonated within her. It was there in 1927, and it had remained there after the turn of the twenty-first century.
The red earth had drawn her with its ancient power, but it was the death of her first fledgling that had truly set her fate.
Neferet had, of course, witnessed the death of many fledglings before she became High Priestess of Tulsa’s House of Night. She had often been summoned to soothe a dying fledgling’s passage with the gift of her touch. Neferet was revered for her ability to calm a fledgling who was rejecting the Change. Not one vampyre ever guessed that she took as much as she gave. The fledglings knew it, though. In their last moments, as Neferet held them in her arms, they knew she fed from their energy. Of course by that time they were beyond the ability to share that knowledge with anyone else.
So when the young fourth former who had named herself Crystal began to cough out her life’s blood in the middle of Lenobia’s first equestrian class at the new Tulsa House of Night, Neferet was immediately called for—not just because she was their High Priestess, but because she had been known far and wide to be able to soothe the pain of the dying.
“Move aside! Make room! Lenobia, take the fledglings to the field house and have Dragon Lankford bring Warriors and a gurney for the child,” Neferet had commanded as she’d rushed into the stables. Then she had turned her attention to Crystal. The fledgling had crumpled to the sand and dirt floor of the arena, convulsing and bleeding from her eyes, nose, mouth, and ears.
Neferet paid no heed to the blood and mud. She’d pulled the fledgling into her arms, soothing with her magickal touch as she began to slide into Crystal’s mind and to absorb her waning life energy. Neferet had been prepared for the surge of power that came with the absorption of life force. She had not been prepared for the pure and delightful gift that came with the death of her first fledgling.
In her den Neferet’s body trembled in the pleasure of reliving that powerful moment.
Crystal had stared up at her through blood-soaked eyes. “No!” she’d coughed and gasped and managed to cry, “I’m not ready to die!”
“Of course you are, my dear. It is time. I am here.”
“Won’t leave me?” the child had sobbed.
“You won’t leave me,” Neferet had whispered as she took Crystal’s mind.
The fledgling’s life force cascaded into Neferet. So pure, so strong, so sweet, that it was as if the fledgling hadn’t been dying at all, but had instead been transformed into a being of light and power that would now live within Neferet.
Neferet had bowed over the dying girl’s body reverently, accepting this new gift that came to her with the Tulsa House of Night.
The Warriors had believed that Neferet had been overcome by emotion at the death of the first fledgling at her own House of Night, and that is why she had been found bowing over Crystal’s body, sobbing hysterically.