Chapter 361: Feeding Time
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Sekhmet asked, "Did you make your decision?"
Lily’s eyes sharpened.
The resistance inside her did not vanish, but it changed shape. It was no longer the resistance of someone trying to deny what she had become. It was the resistance of someone being asked to use that new self properly. That was better. Harder too, but better.
She looked at Sekhmet for a long moment, his words settling into the places inside her where hunger and judgment now had to learn how to live together.
Then she asked, "You mean the place."
"Yes."
"And the target."
"Yes."
He held her gaze steadily.
"You refused the wrong blood before," he said. "That was good instinct. So now you choose better."
That settled into her more deeply than she expected.
He was trusting her with it.
Not only with the bite. Not only with whether she could hold herself together once blood touched her mouth. With selection. With standards. With the shape of the hunt itself.
Good. Very good.
Lily breathed in slowly, still feeling the warmth of his blood inside her, still feeling the bite marks on her throat like a memory too close to name cleanly. Then she nodded once.
"I know where."
Sekhmet’s mouth moved faintly. "Tell me."
She did not answer immediately. Instead she stepped away from him and went toward the open section of the upper room where the city could be seen in fragments through the lattice and beyond the dark rise of roofs. She stood there with the night pressing quietly against the house and let her senses spread.
The world after transformation was never truly silent for her anymore.
That was one of the stranger things she was still learning.
Even when she was not in active Cruoraphim form, blood existed around her like hidden music. Not loud. Not always. But present. A city like Slik could never become only stone and trade and distance again. It was always heat in bodies, pulse under skin, old dried stains in alleys, fresh butcher cuts, fear-sweat in dens, sickness in beds, labor in muscles, and vice under lamps.
Tonight she sifted through that with more purpose than before.
Not random hunger. It was a search. It was a selection.
When she spoke at last, it was quietly.
"The west lower road."
Sekhmet came to stand behind her, close enough that she could feel his warmth before he spoke.
"What is there?"
"A contract hall behind the cart depots." She looked outward, seeing it through memory and scent rather than direct sight. "Not the official one. The hidden one. The kind where men bring people they do not want written down properly." Her face cooled. "I smelled it before when we crossed that side of the city. It has women there. Children too, sometimes. Debt stock. Stolen labor. Bought bodies."
Bat Bat, who had been outside the door for the last full minute pretending she was not absolutely listening, failed to keep quiet and came winging through the half-open entrance in her bat form. (With practice she can now transform from bat to human form.)
"Oh," she said brightly. "That does sound like a good place to bite people."
Sekhmet did not even turn his head. "How long were you listening."
Bat Bat landed on the edge of a shelf and considered the ethics of honesty for less than a second. "Long enough to be useful."
That meant all of it.
Of course.
Lily looked at her and, perhaps because the heat of the feeding was still in her veins and had left her less patient with nonsense, said, "If you are coming, you do not talk unless needed."
Bat Bat’s eyes widened.
Not because of the command.
Because Lily had given it.
Interesting.
Bat Bat looked at Sekhmet, then at Lily again, then nodded solemnly. "I recognize the authority of first wives during hunting situations."
Lily blinked once.
Then, against her own will, almost smiled.
Good.
That helped.
Sekhmet turned and called for the twins.
He did not have to raise his voice much. Vera and Vela appeared a short time later from the inner corridor, both already in dark fitted night clothes, both carrying the quiet readiness of women who had expected another hunt the moment Sekhmet kept them waiting after the earlier discussion.
Their eyes moved first to him.
Then to Lily.
Then, because they were not fools. No one commented. There was no need for it.
The air already knew enough.
Sekhmet told them the target.
Vera’s expression sharpened first. "The hidden contract hall."
Vela nodded. "Raka’s men heard of one there. Lower runners. Bought flesh. Unregistered chains."
Lily looked at them. "Then I chose correctly."
Vera held her gaze.
Then inclined her head once.
"Yes."
That one word pleased Lily more than she expected.
Sekhmet gave the order simply.
"We move now."
They left by the upper side route, avoiding the main hall and sleeping household lines. Elena knew they were going. Of course she did. There was no point making a ceremony of every hunt when the woman who ran Dawn House’s real pulse could probably hear intent in floorboards.
The city night received them as it always did. Not warmly. Not coldly. Indifferently, like a living beast too large to care who crossed its back so long as they did not bleed in the wrong place.
Tonight, however, Lily did not follow the others by instinct alone.
Tonight she led.
Not openly at first. Not with arrogance. Simply by knowing where she wanted to go and moving with growing certainty as the scent lines strengthened. Sekhmet let her take that place without comment. Vera and Vela noticed too. Neither challenged it.
That mattered.
The route wound them through the western merchant edge first, then down into a lower cart and labor district where daytime traffic left behind night filth like a second economy. The place smelled of animal sweat, rotting straw, damp timber, spilled grain, stale cheap liquor, old leather, and men who worked bodies too hard for too little and then sold those same bodies if cornered hard enough by debt.