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He didn’t even bury her. Aurelia doesn’t know why after all these years, after the flaying and bone breaking and deep gnawing hunger only barely satiated by rotting carrion, this is the indignity she remembers most. Perhaps in some ways she should see it as a blessing, not having to drag her undead body through six feet of dirt, the feeling of drowning from unbreathing lungs filling with soil. But, no, what happened was worse.
Having to watch her brother’s face as her body changed and distorted over the course of days, and then at the end of the metamorphosis before the door was unlocked and she was whisked away, looking at her brother and hearing his heart and wanting more than she had ever wanted anything to bury fangs in throat, the sweet copper rush of his blood filling her mouth.
When Cazador threw open the door, it was the only time she ever felt grateful to him. As though saving her from the monster he made her was some act of kindness.
She knew some of the others wondered ‘why me?’ but she had the misfortune of knowing exactly why she was chosen. She grew up knowing her brother was special, everyone said it. She didn’t resent him, not really. She resented a world where a Tiefling girl from the lower city simply could never be a part of the academy, that she couldn’t spend the rest of her life hidden away in some dusty library. But her brother wasn’t part of that, she saw how other sorcerers looked at him, how people treated him like a cambion when all he ever wanted was to help people.
Her brother was special, and she was a schoolteacher, unassuming, quiet, friendly and helpful in the way that follows a street kid into an alley to help him find his dog. And her brother the type to openly reject a vampire lord who approached him hoping to broker a deal with her family’s demonic ancestor. Some days she wished she resented her brother, at least outwardly, that she had made him hate her rather than be an instrument of his downfall.
At first, she had begged her brother to kill her. On her good days, she believed that it was due to some noble impetus, a belief that whatever a vampire lord would want with a devil could not possibly be worth her life. On her bad days, she believed that it was because of how terrified she’d been, not of Cazador but simply of what she had become. She’d sob in his arms and tell him to end it, but he never did.
Cazador promised him that he’d free Aurelia if her brother simply did as he asked. It was a lie because of course it was a lie, if her brother had believed the lie, she would never truly know. Cazador told her decades later that her brother had been an easily manipulated fool, believing Cazador until his throat was slit. She liked to imagine her brother as brave, as spitting in Cazador’s face, there had to be a reason Cazador didn’t turn him. He must have done something clever.
But she didn’t really know, and she never would. Only that one day, Cazador took him from their cell and returned with her brother’s head. Cazador compelled her to be still and watch the head until it decomposed to a skull. He left the cell door open, just to taunt her.
As she watched the flesh rot and fall from the bone, her own body aching from stillness, she couldn’t help but think: well at least I’ll never forget his face.