Lineage of Zeal, Book One: Rosemary

Chapter Twenty-one: Angel of Death

They're here.

Leviticus woke curled into a ball, gasping. The pain in the arm that Rosemary had shattered in their last training session had passed as it healed in the days that followed, but the scar running diagonally across his chest throbbed red-hot with fresh ache. Leviticus groaned into himself, thinking back to the moment when he had underestimated Rosemary's strength and, as a consequence, reacquainted himself with Death.

The blade that had fallen upon him was weightier than it had appeared. When her sword crushed the inadequate defenses Leviticus had hastily thrown up as he lay on the ground, it felt as though Rosemary had attempted to split him into halves with not only a large, crystalline tool of destruction, but with her very essence, as though the black crystals that formed her blade had grown directly from her anger, her hopelessness, her fear. Her shame. Her pain.

Her every bitterness.

As Leviticus lay back and placed an arm across the wound that refused to fully heal, his thoughts turned to Mara, his mother. Or rather, to the succubus who had birthed him. It was the same with her, that uncanny weightiness of her attacks. When a freshly conscious and aware Leviticus thought to ask after his father's identity, Mara had struck him across the chest in much the same place Rosemary had, with a feather she had pulled and not bothered to turn into a weapon. But the feather had deceived him for, as with Rosemary's sword, there had burned within it such anger, such hopelessness, such fear, shame, and bitterness that it had cut him deep. As Leviticus had lain there bleeding out on the rust-orange ground of the Realm of Darkness before his mother, first and only child of Rose and most powerful demon in that Realm outside of the original Fallen, she told him his father was a skilled naphil from the desert, but not the man she was looking for. She went on to tell the young Leviticus never to remind her of her failures if he wished to continue existing, and that was the last he'd seen of her.

Wincing as he propped himself up on an arm, Leviticus looked over to where Rosemary slept. As his eyes traced the cascade of red hair that hid her sleeping face, he sighed and shook his head. How could he not have noticed it before! Though Rosemary's hair was a different color, her eyes were just like his mother's: deep red, and full of sorrow and loss, fierceness and defiance. Even the clothing they fashioned from their feathers had a tendency to be black and a similar red. And though his mother had had countless millennia to refine her personal combat style and abilities, the weighty essence of their attacks was the same. Perhaps Rosemary's mother was not as unknown as Rosemary believed. Perhaps Leviticus's mother and Rosemary's mother were one and the same.

"I wasn't aware you were the kind of pervert who liked to watch women sleep."

The voice startled Leviticus, and his arm slipped out from under him. With no support under it, his head met the ground with a thump.

"Ah, no, it's," Leviticus stuttered as he righted himself, sitting cross-legged while he rubbed his head. "It's just that, I was thinking, and you, uh..."

"And I what?" said Rosemary, propping herself up on a fist. "You were thinking about what it means to be an incubus and you set your sights on me to see what you could remember?"

When Leviticus didn't immediately laugh but blinked and tilted his head, Rosemary rolled over and muttered something under her breath, of which all Leviticus could understand were a few swears and something about a joke.

"No, I, it's," Leviticus paused, took a breath, and tried again. "Rosemary, didn't you say something about meeting your mother that one night?"

Rosemary grunted. "I might have. What of it?"

Leviticus looked down at the folded hands in his lap and watched his thumbs dance around one another. "Could you describe her to me?"

"Why? What difference would it make?"