She remembers. Remembers the way they had curled themselves around one another, hissing and spitting and giggling with wild, reckless youth. She had belonged to him then. And her mother had come to fetch her and Gospel, she had pledged her allegiance to the darkness. Adna had been powerless to drag her away from him and her father had not even tried.
She bristles at his display of weakness, though his voice is hard now. Should anything happen to him. How she loathes his willingness to acknowledge that he, too, is merely flesh and blood and sinew when he has always been so much more than that. To her and to everyone else.
She remembers, too, when he had come to her delighting in his own blood.
His greatest friend. She sets her jaw and looks away, out over the water, wonders what this all means.
She does not doubt that she has what it takes to lead. And it does not surprise her that he has decided that she is the only one he can trust to look after the land in his absence. She skirts her tongue across a fanged tooth.
“Bring me Bethlehem,” she says.
Because now, more than ever, her father is absolutely nothing. But she smiles then, something cold and calculating, though he cannot see it. “It’s time that he and I spoke.”
