Once upon a time, there was no snake, but a dragon who devoured the moon. There was no more light, and only keening rang through the darkness.

~*~

They had many names, as many names as faces. Gareth called them his demons; though the name itself was the sort of morbid joke he preferred. He named them such because their terror, as well as their danger, was entirely imaginary.

Gareth was a fool, as were his names; I shall speak of him no further.

I first met them the night I met Leah. I had awoken starving and disoriented to her startling smile; I doubt I even understood what I was doing as she guided me to my first meal, as blood sweeter than life itself stained my teeth red for the first time. That night, I truly understood bliss; in the light of the moon, I wanted for nothing.

It was that night they came for me for the first time. It would not be the last.

"What has happened to you, my sister?"

I dropped the limp, lifeless body without any further ceremony. Marina Katsaros, pale and lovely as a morning mist, stood beside me, black hair cloaking her face in shadow. One hand touched arm; the contact was as light and cold as a midnight breeze.

I took a shuddering breath. Entirely unnecessary, of course, but old habits are hard to break. "Life, I suppose. Or rather, death. The same could be asked of you, older sister."

Sluagh. That was what Leah named them: the ghosts of fallen sinners, in the legends of her homeland. They had beset me after I gorged myself that first night, raging and crying out against the indignities I had committed, the life I had taken. I screamed and struggled against beings that lacked faces, that lacked any quality at all besides rage. Their hands, cold as corpses, raked across my arms and grasped at my throat.

Eventually they left; and I was alone and shivering. She comforted me with gentle reassurances, or as gentle as she knew how to be. I was told the apparitions were harmless, but sometimes they came when a vampire indulged on too much blood. Some enjoyed the apparitions, even, or at least accepted them as the price of blood-borne bliss.

I once asked her how they appeared to her. Did she see faceless shades, howling a lament that only she could hear? Did they grasp at her with crushing anger and speechless grief?

She had gone very still for a long time, so still I wondered if I had angered her. Then: "No. They are not faceless. And they are not angry; merely cold and empty. Give the sluagh no more thought, child. They cannot harm you."

I obeyed her then, as I knew of nothing else to do, even though I flinched at shadows for days afterward.

Battle erupted shortly afterwards, and war with Leah's clan raged for years. The sluagh and bliss alike faded into distant memory as the world was stained red with blood, Higher, Lower, and human.

Forgotten, not gone. That's the true distinction; after all. Much as we might wish it, the dead are never gone.

"I barely recognize you, Zoe. You promised America wouldn't change you. Now, you speak Greek with an accent. I loved your hair, you know, and you've let it grow tangled and filthy. Did Mama raise you that way?"

I smiled sardonically at her. "If I've let my hair get tangled, Mari, you've let your skin get pale. You aren't my sister, you know. My sister was eaten years ago. You're a figment of my imagination, and nothing more. Can't you leave me to eat my dinner in peace?"

She tilted her head, an expression of puzzlement so typically Marina that my gorge rose. As she did so, her hair fell away from her face and neck, revealing large, ugly wounds in the shape of teeth. "I am your sister in all the ways that matter, Zoe. I am everything you knew me to be. When Marina Katsaros died by your hand years ago, I was all that remained. Can't you at least honor that, if nothing else?"

Something curdled in my stomach. Nausea and anger swelled as one, and the soft buzzing of blood-bliss twisted, becoming darker and crueler. "I didn't kill you. That dubious honor belongs to that bitch Ayezza, or maybe Leah herself. They're the ones who drank you up until only a corpse remained. I avenged you—"

"And did you avenge me?"

The voice was unfamiliar. I turned around; a man who had reached his thirties and was not yet willing to admit it watched me with eyes lined with heavy black makeup. I scowled at him.

"I don't know who you are. Go away before I kill you."

The man didn't flinch, though I was radiating killing intent sufficient to cow the remaining humans into quiet whimpers. "You already have. It's beyond your abilities to do it a second time. Don't you even remember? You threw a little girl at my head. She used me as a cushion to continue her battle with you. My neck hit a table and tada!"

A sickening crack! split the air, and his head jerked at an unnatural angle. The face was unchanged, though, and grinned at me without humor. "A neat magic trick. With your lovely assistant, you made me disappear."

My left hand flickered out and grabbed a weeping woman by her dull brown hair. She screamed and struggled futilely as I stalked toward the man, stopping only inches from his face.

"You cannot possibly imagine," I said softly. "How little I care about your life or death."

I very slowly and deliberately turned from his lifeless eyes. I yanked the woman up to my level, bared my teeth, and plunged my fangs into her throat.

Blood, sweet and sustaining, poured into my throat, and I shuddered with the relief of a diver who had finally reached the surface of the ocean. She screamed at first— most do, of course, but in seconds the sound petered out as her life trickled away into my gullet. The bliss swelled once again, but the twisted, straining anger had not abated, but grown.

"Perhaps you ought to care more!" Iron-strong fingers yanked me away from the woman, who collapsed bonelessly, already drained beyond survival. Another woman, this one with hair of midnight and a furious expression, stared at me with eyes no less stormy for their ghastly pallor. "Was I nothing? I had a life, before you tore my head off for moving too slowly out of your way. I had a girlfriend! A nephew! Do you know how much they wept when I died? Was your pointless squabble worth it?"

I snarled my displeasure and ripped my arm from her grasp. Blood-drunk or no, I was still of the Lamia's brood, and no shade could match my strength. One hand swept up and grabbed her by the throat. I stormed forward, my grip unyielding and slammed her against the wall.

"Apparently, the beheading didn't quite take," I hissed. "If it had, I wouldn't need to deal with this kind of nonsense. Perhaps the second time's the charm."

Something—another human— grabbed my arm, gabbling pleas to stop, to spare them. I idly backhanded it with my free hand. Its neck snapped with the force of the blow, and the begging abruptly ceased. I watched her with eyes unblinking, bloodlust and bliss and rage singing through my veins in an endless call of terrible hunger.

"I have a better idea," I told the woman. "As penalty for disturbing my dinner, perhaps you ought to become my dinner. It seems only fair, after all. Do you have blood? Can you die again? My, but I hope the answers to both are yes."

However, I was not holding the pale-eyed goth any longer— instead, my hands gripped the throat of Ayezza, who had died with her all those years ago. She broke my hold with a deft flick of her wrist, and one foot kicked me in the chest with more force than any human, particularly a child, could muster. I stumbled back, and she stalked forward.

"Oh, darling." Her voice was as high and sickly-sweet as I remembered, and her eyes held a predatory gleam. "That's not nearly enough to trouble our kind. I do hope you haven't gone soft; it would be beyond embarrassing if the legendary Ayezza fell to some lightweight upstart. Perhaps we should have Turned your sister after all. She would have likely proven a more capable Lamia."

My blood was on fire. "A more capable Lamia," I snarled. "Would be the end of the world."

The bloodlust roared within me, and I let out a shriek of unearthly fury. I charged forward, each step cracking the stone tiles beneath my feet. The world dissolved into blurs of red and black, broken tables and shattered windows, vampiric snarls and human screams. More than once, I felt something soft underfoot, which burst like a ripe fruit under the force of my advance. It was only Ayezza for a short while; I tore at goths, at paperboys and mail carriers. Enemy vampires I had killed as easily as thought ripped enormous gashes in my arms. My victims and foes gripped me tight, hauling me about as I dispatched them all anew, their dead eyes as empty as the faces of the sluagh on my very first night as the Lamia.

No more would I cower before the dead. Tonight, I lived. Tonight, they would cower before me.

I lost myself in the blood and the battle, and countless eons passed before I realized I was smiling, smiling with a joy so primal and mighty it seemed as though the earth itself would shatter before it.

A pale hand reached out of the shadows; with speed that mocked the tick of time flipped me hard onto my back and drove the air from my body. A cold weight settled down upon my chest as impossibly graceful legs swept and pinned my arms against my body.

I looked up blearily. Leah was sitting on my stomach, the position a straddle that kept me still and helpless. She smiled down at me, everything about her achingly lovely, her hair a red that made human lifeblood seem dull in comparison.

"Impossible child," she said, her voice turning the insult into a joke, a secret shared in the whispers between two lovers. "Your temper will get you into more trouble than you can handle, one of these days. Do you find your sins too heavy to handle?"

"None were too heavy, O Mighty Leanandsidhe," I drawled through bruise-swollen lips. "At least, not until you settled on my chest."

She gave me another smile; this one was not sensual, or wicked, or amused. The English term escaped me. "That would be because I am the first, my little serpent. The sin of saying yes, of release. Perhaps you could shrug aside the others. I, however, am not so easily forgotten."

Gone, but not forgotten. Never forgotten, no matter how much I might wish it.

Bleak. That was the word. Her smile was a corpse, alone and frozen at the top of a mountain.

She leaned down and kissed me on each eyelid, her hair a crimson curtain.around the two of us.

"I cannot be forgotten, impossible child. And I will always open your eyes."

I blinked.

There was no Leah. There were no ghosts, no enemies.

I lay in the center of a pool of blood that occluded the floor of the feasting hall. The furnishings, sturdy wooden tables and chairs, were barely recognizable as such, so small were their pieces. 

Every window save one was smashed, and the walls themselves were alternatively dented, perforated, and stained crimson in every direction. The lights were out, and only starlight shone through the holes.

The mangled bodies of ten humans lay in various degrees of dismemberment and exsanguination. No fewer than twelve vampires lay in similar states, though I noticed three or four that still groaned with ongoing agony.

I stood unsteadily; the cuts on my arms were closing slowly, no doubt aided by the blood that covered me from head to toe. At the far side of the hall, a flash of movement caught my eye; Gareth himself sat with his back against the wall, his breathing labored. A fist-sized crater had shattered the ribs on the right side of his body. He watched me, eyes glittering with feline wariness, as he slowly, painstakingly, reached into the hold itself and began to rearrange the pieces into their proper position.

It was then that I realized I was laughing.