Page 45 of Property of Prophet

“And Lilith?”

“Lilith went out into the world, and she was not alone in it. Other things were already there—the Primordials, the old entities, beings made of elemental force before humanity existed. She moved through them. She learned. She was the first human to exist outside the order God intended, and that made her something new...” I pause. “Her children were the first of what the world would eventually call supernatural. Not monsters or aberrations... the result of a woman who refused the plan and built something outside it.”

Lily is very still.

“Vampires,” I say. “Shifters. The older bloodlines, hellhounds, dragons, the incubi. All of them trace back to Lilith and what she became when she chose the world outside Eden over the one inside it.”

Lily is quiet for a long time.

“Her name,” she says finally.

“Yes.”

“My name is Lily.”

“I noticed.”

“My mother named me after a flower,” she says.

“Probably,” I say. “Most things have more than one reason.”

Lily picks up her coffee, and this time, she drinks it. When she sets it down, her voice is back to its usual register, the surgeon returning from wherever the woman went for a moment. “So, your MC has a bear shifter, a werewolf, a hellhound, a vampire, and whatever else, and they’re all descended from the first woman who ever told God ‘no.’ ”

“In broad strokes.”

“And they’re coming here in two days.”

“Yes. Maybe sooner if they can.”

She looks at the window. “Bear will lose his mind,” she says.

“Probably.”

“I’ll look after him.”

What comes across her face then is not fear. It’s the thing underneath fear, the thing in the chest of a person who has already decided they’ll do what needs doing, now dealing with the cost before the cost arrives. She’s been carrying it since the porch. Since the light went out, she got me inside, kneeled in front of the chair, and said, ‘We need help,’ with the same flat certainty she brings to everything true and difficult.

I look at her across the table.

The weight of weeks sits in the air between us, and the cut is on my back, and Blade’s voice is still finding its place in me alongside the faces that surfaced with it. I know who I am. Not everything, not yet, but enough. I know my chair. I know my brothers. I know the ritual, the cost of it, and the reason I paid it. I know that I would pay it again. And I know what’s on the other side of two days, the full weight of whatever Calix brings to this clearing. The question I’ve not asked since I was well enough to ask is whether I survive as more or less than what I currently am.

The man sitting at this table is not the angel who fell. He’s also not only the body that woke up in the snow with nothing. He’s whatever comes after both of those things. He has aching hands and silver hair, a cut on his back, and a woman across the table who pulled him out of a crater and kept him through the winter. She hid his cut for weeks because she wasn’t done. I’m looking at her and thinking that if two days is what I have, then I know exactly how I want to spend the part that doesn’t belong to grief.

“Lily,” I say.

She looks up.

“What comes next is going to change things.”

“I know.”

“Blade gets here, I’m not staying hidden on this mountain.”

“I know.”

“I’m going after Calix.”

“Prophet, I know.”