DYING LIGHT | James Patrick March [paused]

13

Three days felt like a long time but Lilith couldn't stop thinking of it as seventy two hours. Seventy two hours until she got reparations for the shit storm she'd lived through. Seventy two hours and she still didn't have a good plan.

The idea of it all made her as sick every bit as much as it thrilled her. A severely annoying contradiction.
She'd been daydreaming about this for months but the closer it got, the more she began to realize her day dreams were an extremely idealized version of the event. All action, no plan.

All she knew was she was going to kill them and she was going to enjoy it until she didn't anymore. It didn't help her brothers were hard to plan for. Professional murderers weren't exactly easy to predict.

Lilith spent the day pacing and chain smoking, scribbling down ideas just to throw them away. The whole thing made her feel wildly out of her league. Cain and Abel would be rolling in with their guard at it's maximum, ready for anything and as eager to kill her as she was to kill them. It wouldn't be easy.

She needed a blind spot, something they wouldn't expect. They most definitely wouldn't be expecting her to have planned to take their lives, she knew that much. Little Lily-Livered Lilith couldn't take the wings off a fly. She needed to find a way to use that to her advantage. They expected the weak little girl who ran at the first sign of danger but she wasn't that anymore. She hadn't been for a long time.

This couldn't just be a crime of passion, she needed to premeditate. Of course, deciding to kill them at all was premeditation but she couldn't go in half cocked. Even if losing her life in the hotel meant she could exact her revenge on their way out, she didn't want to go out like that. The last thing Lilith could fathom was giving them the pleasure of taking her life. She wanted them to die surprised and horrified by her hand, it was the perfect end.

When this was all over, she could finally rest. It would be the perfect end to this horrible narrative. Her life read like a Shakespearean tragedy, exaggerated and melodramatic. It was lucky she didn't soliloquize more often, she'd leave that to James.

It made her heart softer than she'd ever admit that he wanted her to die in the hotel, to spend eternity meeting him for drinks and flirty banter. It sounded nice but she imagined it would lose its charm quickly. Lilith had had quite enough of purgatorial existence and she certainly couldn't imagine willingly condemning herself to one. Then again hell wouldn't be much better. It was a conundrum.

After pacing so much she'd warn down a path in the ancient carpet, Lilith forced herself to sit down at the little table in her room. Cracking open a notebook to hopefully devise her murder plan, the glasses from last night's drink with James still remained. It would be nothing to ask James for help. He was the master of murder after all, it was foolish not to seek some mentorship from him. Even still, she wanted to come up with her own plan— maybe a few and then present them to James for his counsel.

It would be easier if she could get them separated to deal with them one at a time. Abel first, to get him out of the way. For a time, she'd debated trying to get him to come to his senses. Kill Cain and then when Abel realized it was just them left, maybe he'd see sense. It occurred to her quickly that vulnerability like that would be her death. Tears were blood in the water. If she killed Abel first, it'd be a hell of a lot easier to kill Cain. Not that any of it would be easy but she could foresee the effect Abel's death would have on her. None of this would be easy.

Her only consolation was that she wouldn't have to stew in the guilt for long. It couldn't eat her alive if there was only a corpse left to gnaw at.

Abel would go quickly, that would be his gift for the time he'd protected her. Cain, however, she wanted him to suffer. It scared her how badly she needed to see him in agony. Her daydreams were riddled with visions of taking his fingers off, knuckle by knuckle. Peeling the skin from his flesh and forcing it down his throat. Gouging out his eyes.

Lilith shook her head slightly, pinching the bridge of her nose. This wasn't planning. Every time she started to plan, she'd start fantasizing and get totally off track. She wouldn't get to the point of her fantasies if she didn't have a strategy.

The embarrassment that she would yield running into this half cocked would be something she couldn't bare. Her rage burned like hellfire inside her but it offered no hint, no guide, only a bloodlust like nothing she'd ever felt before. If she went in there with nothing but bloodlust behind her, she would fumble and suffer a miserable defeat that she would live with for all eternity. Even if the hallowed halls of the Cortez brought her back to fulfill her purpose, it felt like cheating.

Trying to make this a bona fide premeditated murder was proving far more difficult than she thought it would. The semantics were confounding beyond belief. It took a until the end of her pack of cigarettes, which had been half full at the beginning, before she crumbled.

Lilith knew better than anyone she wasn't born to kill, it had never been her life's calling or even a flicker of her desire until the last six months. It didn't come naturally and perhaps it was time to accept that. It was time to swallow her pride.

I'm back and inconsistent as ever :)