Lilith Thornveil's Arc

Chapter 1 of 11

Lilith Thornveil crouched at the edge of the black orchard and pressed her palm to a stranger's bleeding side. The stranger was a vampire, black-haired, violet-eyed, her red corset slick where a blade had opened her ribs. Lilith had come here to scout hollows for the shelter she meant to build — a place in the Starless Abyss where the hunted could always find her. Instead the hunted had found her first, and the hunters were close behind. "Selene Nightshade," the vampire said through her teeth. "My master's dogs. Please." She caught Lilith's wrist with more strength than a dying woman should have. "He bought me. I ran." Lilith heard them then — boots in the leaf litter, three sets, maybe four, spreading into a line. Her chest tightened. She hated bullies more than she feared them, but hate was not a plan. She looked up. The spindly trees around her hung heavy with clusters of black fruit. Her grandmother had called them a bittersweet medicine and a blissful danger. One bite dulled pain. Three put a body under. A handful, crushed and burned, put anything with a nose on the ground. Lilith yanked her cloak off and pressed it hard against Selene's wound. "Bite down on this. Do not make a sound." She stripped fruit from the lowest branch in fistfuls, cracked them open on a stone, and smeared the pulp across the moss in a wide arc between them and the sound of boots. Then she whistled once, low. Two small shapes dropped from the branches — a bat and a rat, both fat and tame, both hers since they were pups. "Lead them wrong," she whispered. She rubbed clean fruit on their fur. "Go." The bat lifted. The rat scurried east, dragging the scent of her hands across the roots. Lilith hauled Selene up under the arms and dragged her the other way, into a split in the ground her scouting had already found — a narrow crack behind a curtain of roots, barely a grotto, unfinished, unstocked. Not yet a refuge. Only a hiding place. The boots reached the smeared moss. A man swore. Another coughed, then a third. She heard one drop to his knees. The rest staggered off after the false trail her Snugglewing Pals had laid, calling for dogs that would not come. When the wood went quiet, Selene's eyes were half-shut. "You don't know me," she breathed. "I know they were hunting you," Lilith said. "That's enough." She tied the cloak tight around Selene's ribs. The bleeding slowed. The vampire's master would send more, and soon, and the crack in the earth would not hide two people twice. Lilith looked at the dark walls around them and understood, plainly, that the shelter she had been planning had to exist by morning, not by spring. She had just taken in her first refugee, and the door was not yet built.