Shadowstorm (The Shadow World Book 6) (40 page)

It made more sense now. In Avilon there were few things he could do that would hurt someone as much as humans hurt each other. Cruelty simply wasn’t something the Elentheia were normally capable of, especially after having so much of it visited upon them by the Inquisition. Only the truly aberrant among his people would be able to willfully cause pain.

Humans didn’t know how to forgive themselves. Forgiveness must be asked both through a window and before a mirror, but all the glass here was dark.

He feared he was beginning to understand that too. Whatever had happened had been
that
unforgivable.

Wrestling with these thoughts drove him toward wakefulness, and finally, he started awake in a blind panic, expecting that when he tried to move his limbs would still be chained down…

They were not. In fact, he was comfortable, and felt…

The word took a moment to arise. The room was warm, dimly lit, familiar—it was his own, he realized. He’d been living here for two years now. He had chosen the linens himself, and had been told to change whatever he liked, so he’d asked for more bookshelves, and for plants that could bear the continual shadow in the room. The twin smells of chlorophyll and vanillin from leaf and paper were like a soothing balm for his frayed nerves.

Safe. He felt safe.

Well, he could discard his theory. He was clearly alive. No one dead could ache so much. He felt like he’d been clenching every muscle in his body for days, especially in his neck and back. He could move everything now, but it hurt so badly to try.

Slowly, painfully, he sat up, rubbing his eyes to clear them though it didn’t really help. His vision wasn’t the problem; his mind was.

Thus he only sensed a presence a mere second before the words: “Hey sweetie.”

Nico turned toward her with a half-smile. His voice was a bit croaky as he said, “Stella…you have no idea how glad I am to see you.”

She hesitated for a moment, her eyes searching his, but then hugged him. Her warmth and the quick beat of her heart were another comfort. She smelled like she always did, squeezed him tightly like always.

“You’ve been out for days,” she told him. “Do you…what’s the last thing you remember?”

Nico frowned. “I…” He groped for the memories, any memories, but everything seemed to be happening at once in his mind, and he couldn’t place anything recent in context or time. “I don’t know…everything is…damaged.”

“You don’t remember anything?” She actually sounded hopeful.

Dear Theia.
“Stella, what did I do?” When he didn’t get an immediate response he went on, “You can barely look at me, and you apparently
want
me to have amnesia. All I know is I have this sense of terrible things that happened and I was involved, but I don’t understand what or why.”

Stella bit her lip. “We’ll get to that…first, you might want to take a look at the Web.”

He might have accused her of dissembling, but her tone was too serious, so he obeyed, bringing up the Sight effortlessly in the time it took to blink. It didn’t occur to him that was odd until he had already turned the vision to where he could see himself.

Nico felt himself go pale as he stared at it, unbelieving. “What…what happened here?”

“What does it look like to you?”

“My magical strength has more than doubled — I’m easily where I was before I left Avilon…no, stronger. How can that be with the bond…strangled like…oh.”

Now she cracked a smile at what was no doubt a memorably gobsmacked look on his face. “Yeah.”

“But…” He could only think of one appropriate phrase. “What the fuck?”

Stella giggled in spite of herself. “To give you the short-short version, Miranda took her second stab at Weaving, to bring down the barrier between you and Deven.”

“Did Deven know she was going to do that?”

“He helped, sweetie. The three of them, well, apparently they used the world’s oldest magic to fuel the work. It was actually a really sound plan, except they didn’t know how strong the barrier you made was.”

“I made.”

“Yes. In the last week things have been…” She had to stop and take a deep breath, and when she looked at him again, her eyes were bright. “Bad things happened. You kind of…”

“Went batshit crazy,” came a voice.

Nico turned toward the door in surprise to see the Prime standing there, looking very different from before. Nico remembered the last time he’d seen Deven, that night David had brought him home and they’d bathed and dressed the elder Prime together. David had shaved off the facial hair, but that was it. After that, Deven had apparently taken over for himself. His hair was black again. He looked ten times healthier, and there were metal loops in his eyebrow and another in his nose. When he spoke Nico caught a flash of silver in his mouth.

“Miranda held the balance as well as she could, but it overwhelmed her. It almost killed us all, but then, you happened.”

Nico stared at him. “I happened how?”

“You woke from a coma and fixed the whole thing like you were untying a shoelace. I don’t know if you were working alone, or had help, but regardless, you not only restored our Signet bond, you—”

Nico drew an astonished breath when he followed the line of the bond from where it had been half-dead and starving for energy. It flowed like water from one of them to the next…and the next…and the next.

He shook his head, hard; it was too much to comprehend, too much to accept. “That’s not possible. No one is that powerful. Not even me.”

“Like I said,” Deven replied, “I think you had Help.”

Nico heard the capital H. “Oh.”

“The upshot is, we’re a bit of a quad now, in more ways than one.”

His mind had gone from blurry and empty-feeling to far too full. He had no recollection whatsoever of doing any of that, but it felt like it had happened. And when he touched the lines of the Web where magic had been worked, he could feel his own energy signature, and Miranda’s. He didn’t sense anyone else, but there was clearly something else at work within the threads; as he’d said, no single being could work at that magnitude, that quickly, and that perfectly, and live to tell of it.

“Are the others okay?” he finally asked, blinking out of the vision.

Deven smiled. “Very.”

It occurred to the Elf that the sex dreams he’d been having before he woke had probably really happened.

Nico thought back to those flashes, and felt himself blushing furiously. He’d been there, then—asleep, mostly, but there, while…

Apparently the entire world had changed profoundly in the last few days and he’d missed
all
of it.

“Stella,” Deven said, “Would you mind giving us a moment alone?”

The Witch looked from one of them to the other and nodded. “Of course. I’ll be in my room if you need me, Nico.”

“Thank you.” He caught her hand and squeezed it as she climbed off the bed and left the room, closing the door quietly behind her. She gave him a strange parting look that might have been worry, or fear, though at what, he wasn’t sure.

Deven came over and sat down on the edge of the bed, regarding him in silence for a while. Nico didn’t know what to do with himself under that stare. He settled for looking himself over—something seemed off about his body, but he couldn’t pinpoint what it was, not even well enough to ask about it.

“Your hair,” Deven told him.

Suddenly Nico understood: his head felt too light, there was no weight on his shoulders, no constant movement on his neck. For centuries he’d moved through every day unconsciously drawing it out of the way; all Elves did. Now, when he shook his head nothing moved. It wasn’t falling into his face. He reached up, hands trembling, and touched what was left. It was perhaps two inches long.

“Who did this to me?” he asked.

“I evened it out. It was ragged and torn out in places.” The Prime crossed his arms, seeming to weigh several unpleasant options before choosing one. “You remember nothing about the last ten days?”

“No. My memories are washed out like a drawing left in the rain. I know something terrible has happened, but that’s it. The last thing I remember is…” It came to him, and relieved, he finished, “leaving the concert hall with Stella and Kai after Miranda’s performance. We were to meet the others at the car, but something…yes, it was the police; they came and snatched the Queen. What did they want?”

“To charge her with murder,” Deven answered almost flippantly. “That’s all dealt with now. I wish I could say you’ll never get those memories back, but traumatic amnesia is a mercurial bastard. You might get flashes, whole days, impressions, all of it, or nothing at all, and it might take years or minutes. I’ve seen it before, and the ones who got through it with the least damage were those who already knew about the events they’d experienced and were prepared for what they might see. So I’m going to tell you, flat out, most of what happened. You don’t need all of it now.”

“All right,” Nico said around the knot in his throat that was rapidly sinking into his stomach. “Simple is best—just give me what’s important.”

This was already one of the longest conversations they’d ever had, and it made Nico nervous. After a minute or so of choosing his words, Deven spoke, and every sentence made Nico’s heart grow colder and colder, wanting not to believe, but unable to deny a word.

“The night of the concert Morningstar took you. They had you for a day, and in that time they tortured you so unbearably you snapped. It was some of the worst I’ve ever seen.”

“Coming from you,” Nico murmured, trailing off.

Deven nodded. “I’ve seen bloodier, more violent. I’ve seen psychological torture that didn’t leave a mark. But this was beyond that—it wasn’t just torture, but defilement. David says they vivisected you. They were trying to learn things about you. Pain tolerances, primarily. They cut you open and did exploratory surgery…and you were awake for all of it.”

Nico felt suddenly nauseated — the memories still did not come, but he could feel their echo, and hear the echo of his own screams…for hours…cold metal, and the stench of his own blood, and that man…standing over, his giddy enjoyment obscene and humiliating.

“I feel it,” he said hoarsely, putting his hands over his eyes though it did nothing to help. “Just…keep going. How did I get away?”

“Miranda and I rescued you, sort of. You had already broken out, but we had to knock you unconscious to get you home. You…you killed the men who hurt you, except for the Prophet—he got away unscathed. By the time we reached you, you were completely out of your mind. The next few days were terrifying. You stayed, but you were a different creature entirely. Full of hate and anger you’d turn on anyone…and did.”

The peculiar inflection of the last word startled Nico. He swallowed hard. “Who did I kill, Deven?”

The Prime took a deep breath. “Lesela.”

He shook his head, again denying, though the truth was raw in his mind. He remembered a familiar energy that wanted only to heal, and that compassion had enraged him so much…

“David and I fought,” Nico whispered, head in his hands. “And then I killed her…I killed her…she only wanted to help me, and…no, no…no.”

He heard something strange and new in Deven’s voice: the need to reach out, himself, and try to heal what could not be healed. Deven had never reached for him before, never wanted to get that close.

“There’s more…but only one thing you really need to know for now. It’s not something you did, but you need to know.”

He was shaking already, limbs drawing in, curling up on himself like a contracted muscle. Maybe that was why he’d been in pain when he woke.

Deven pushed the words out as if saying them quickly would get them into the air where they could evaporate and do no more harm…but words never went away, any more than actions did. Even those never written on paper were written in the Web to be read for all time.

“Kai sent a message to Lesela asking her for help. She expected him to follow it home, but he didn’t, and she grew worried. She had the other Weavers Gate her here, thinking he had stayed to watch over you…but he wasn’t here. He never made it home. We’re pretty sure…we think Morningstar has him. David’s theory is that what they did to you was to figure out if a regular Elf could survive whatever they have planned—they needed to practice on someone they couldn’t kill. But we don’t know. David’s been searching the whole region for any sign of him but so far there’s nothing. He’s just gone.”

Nico had been turned into a vampire in the most painful way imaginable. He’d been rejected by the person whose soul was joined to his. He’d spent a year and a half drained and depressed, nearly suicidal, knowing he could never return to Avilon again.

Now this.

If he had snapped, that was why. No one thing was too great for him to bear, but all together, these months were a burden so heavy he could not stand beneath it. He was a tree whose roots had been carved away one by one until there was nothing to hold him up.

Now there was nothing left to snap. It was all broken.

He closed his eyes and lay back down, curling the rest of the way into a ball the way his body seemed to crave, folding his arms over his head, uselessly warding off blows that had already come.

There was a long moment of silence.

Then, he heard, softly, “Oh no you don’t.”

He felt weight shift on the bed, and a hand came to rest on the nape of his neck—bare now, exposed. Nico sensed energy shifting as well, moving in a slow and gentle wave from Prime to Consort…the way it was supposed to work…

It was
working,
he realized, feeling it in a way he hadn’t when he was just looking at the Web. After all these months and so much sadness, amid all this destruction and despair, the thing he had longed for—nearly died without—had found him.

The palm of Deven’s hand began to heat up. Healing power. He’d said he couldn’t heal minds or hearts, though…

A chuckle. “With you it’s a little different. I can’t fix it, but I can give you some room to breathe.”