Lilith Shadowflame's Arc

Chapter 17 of 21

The last row of worshippers rose from the altar and moved to the walls to make room for the next. Lilith kept her hand on the obsidian edge and watched them find their places under the arches. None of them looked at Damien and questioned why he stood level with her. None of them looked at her and questioned why a man stood level with her at all. That was the problem she had to solve before this night ended. Damien leaned close. "They're waiting for you to speak again." "I know." She kept her voice low. "They think you're part of the rite. They don't know what you are." "What am I." "Closer to me than any of them will ever get." She looked at him. "If they understood that, they'd stop kneeling." He didn't answer. His hand brushed the inside of her wrist, light, the way he had touched her the first time. She felt the pull of her own power sitting under his skin. She could take it back tonight in front of all of them and end the problem. She could strip him down to a marked follower again and stand alone on the dais. She didn't. She stepped away from him and walked to the front of the altar. The purple fire fell behind her in a steady column. She raised both hands. "Look at him," she said. The hall turned. Damien stood where she had left him, one hand still on the altar's rim. "He was marked before you were. He was bitten before you were. Tonight I gave him a second bite and made him deathless. He stands where he stands because I put him there." She let that settle. "When you kneel to him at this altar, you kneel to me. When he lifts the cup, my hand lifts it. He is the shape my power takes when it walks." A murmur moved through the rows. She watched faces. She watched them accept it. A man in the third row pressed his palm to his marked chest and bowed his head toward Damien without being told. It worked. She felt it work the way she felt the altar draw. The story she had just told them slid into place over the truth and covered it. Damien's mouth moved. Not quite a smile. He inclined his head to her, the smallest bow, and the front row copied him. She had kept her secret. She had kept her worshippers. The cost was a sentence she could never take back: he is the shape my power takes when it walks. She had named him her vessel in front of a hundred mouths that would carry the words down the mountain by morning. Every prayer they spoke from now on would run through him before it reached her. Her shadow dragon lifted its head at the altar's base and looked at Damien for a long moment before it looked at her.