Neferet's Curse (House of Night Novellas #3)(42)

I didn’t need her approval.

The night I finished the necklace, I had been cutting the wire to crimp around the emerald clasp and I’d pricked my finger with the raw, sharp edge of the wire. I’d watched, fascinated, as my blood had followed the slim thread to disappear within the pearls. It had seemed right that my blood had sealed the remaking of the necklace.

The long, single strand had been a comforting weight against my bosom as I left the House of Night and began the three-mile walk to South Prairie Avenue. The waning moon was high in the sky, but shielded by clouds it afforded little light. I’d been glad of the cloud cover. I’d felt comforted by the darkness and as one with the shadows, so much so that by the time I reached the Wheiler House it seemed as if I had become a shadow myself.

It was well past midnight when I unlatched the garden gate and, moving in silence, retraced the path that just one week ago I had left splattered with my blood.

The servants’ entrance was, as usual, unbarred.

The house slept. Except for two gaslights at the base of the staircase, it was dark. I snuffed the lights as I reached the stairs. In shadow, I moved up one landing and another. I felt as if I floated with the darkness.

His door was unbarred. The only light in his room came from the cloud-shrouded moon shining through his long beveled windows.

It was light enough for me.

His room stank of him. The noxious scent of alcohol and sweat and foulness had my lip curling, but it didn’t deter me.

Silently, I moved to his bedside and stood over him, just as he had stood over me one week ago.

I lifted the pearls from around my neck and held them, taut and ready in my hands.

Then I gathered phlegm in my mouth and spit in his face.

He woke, blinking in confusion, and wiping my spittle from his face.

“Awake, are you? Good. You need to be. We have things to settle between us.” I’d repeated his words to him.

He’d shaken his head, as if coming inside from a rainstorm. Then, his eyes opened wide in shocked recognition. “Emily! It is you! I knew you’d come back to me. I knew what that Simpton boy had said about a vampyre Marking you and taking you away had been a lie.”

As he struggled to sit up I struck. With speed and strength no human girl could have commanded, I wrapped the pearls stranded on wire around his fat throat. Then I closed the noose. As I squeezed and squeezed I locked my gaze with his and in a voice that held no hint of human softness I spoke.

“I didn’t come back to you. I came back for you.” His body began to convulse and his thick, hot hands beat against me, but I was no longer a sick, weak girl. His blows marked me, but they did not stop me. “Yes, hit me! Bruise me! That will only give evidence to my story. You see, I had to defend myself when you attacked me again. I’d only wanted you to admit what you did to me was wrong, but you tried to violate me again. This time you failed.”

His eyes had bulged in his scarlet face until it looked as if he wept tears of blood. Just before he choked on his last breath I told him, “And I am not Emily. I am Neferet.”

Afterward, I unwrapped the pearls from around his neck. They had cut deeply into his flaccid flesh and were covered in his blood. I carried them carefully as I retraced my path through the dark streets of Chicago. When I reached the metal State Street Bridge, which spanned the fetid depths of the Chicago River, I paused and dropped the necklace into the water. It seemed that it floated on the dark water for quite a long time and then black, oily tendrils lapped over it, pulling the pearls under the surface like a sacrifice accepted.

“That ends it,” I vowed aloud to the darkness of the night. “With his death my new life as Neferet begins.”

When I reentered the gates of the House of Night, Cordelia was, again, awaiting me. As I went to her I began to weep. My mentor opened her arms to me and, with a mother’s kindness, she comforted me.

* * *

Of course I had to tell my story to the School Council. I explained that, though I can now see it was unwise, that night I had simply wanted Barrett Wheiler to admit that he had done a ghastly thing to his daughter. Instead, he had attacked me. I had only been defending myself.

It was agreed that I should leave Chicago while the local police were bribed and the bank board was silenced. It was a happy coincidence that a House of Night train was leaving the very next night and heading southwest, to the Oklahoma Territory, as they scouted a location for a future House of Night. I would join their party.

And thus I have. At this moment I sit in a lavishly furnished railcar, and complete my journal.

Cordelia tells me that Oklahoma is Native-American land—sacred and rich in ancient traditions as well as earth magic. I have decided that I will bury my journal there, deep in the land, and with it I will bury Emily Wheiler, her past, and her secrets. I will truly begin anew and accept the power and privilege and magick of my Goddess, Nyx.

No one will ever know my secrets for they will be entombed in the land, safely hidden, silent as death. I regret none of my actions and if that curses me, then my final prayer is to let that curse be entombed with this journal, to be imprisoned eternally in sacred ground.

So ends Emily Wheiler’s sad story and so begins the magickal life of Neferet—not Queen of Little Egypt … Queen of the Night!