Of Shadow Born (11 page)

She was the last client of the night. Olivia cleaned up her station feeling closer to happy than she had in months—she’d missed this. The ritual of setting up, working, cleaning up . . . she liked every part of it when it went well.

She left work about two hours before the sky began to lighten. She was hungry—funny how quickly she’d forgotten what a drain the work was—but she didn’t stop to feed until she was well out of the Shadow District. The less time she spent there, the better.

Once upon a time she’d spent nearly every waking hour in a District very similar to the one in Austin, stalking around the city with a sword at her hip. Now she slunk home with her tail between her legs, living not in a Haven, but in a crappy warehouse loft on the East Side, surrounded by humans.

If Jeremy could see her now, he’d laugh . . . right before he killed her.

It was possible he didn’t hate her. It was possible he understood she wasn’t to blame, and that what happened after that night was punishment enough . . . but she wasn’t going to call him up and ask, show him the scars, swear she had tried to protect them . . .

She shook her head with a sigh. There was no use thinking about it. What was done could not be undone. She had failed, broken her promise to him, and the best she could hope for now was to live out her life here, where no one had the slightest idea what she had once been.

Still, when she heard the Second was dead as well as the Prime, part of her had the idea, for just a minute, that she could go back to her old life, this time working for a new Prime—

Oh, hell no.

She had built something of a life here, and as long as the Queen still lived and the regime didn’t change, she could keep living it. The kind of people she had worked for, who would know her, didn’t live in this territory. Now that Jeremy was gone, as long as she kept her head down, she would be safe.

She was no fool. Not anymore. Maybe once in a while she missed having a purpose larger than etching butterflies into skin, but that part of her life was over. She was just a vampire now, just a tattoo artist and painter, and she had no intention of getting within ten miles of a Signet ever again.

Really, she should have known better.

The walk home was long, way longer than from the café where she’d been working, but the buses didn’t run again until way too close to dawn for her comfort. If she had been human, she might have been nervous as a woman alone in East Austin at night, but muggers and gangbangers were pretty laughable as a threat to even the weakest vampire, let alone one who had once been trained to kill. She didn’t travel with a sword—that would draw more attention than she wanted if she happened across any Elite—but she had a stake in her bag and a knife in her boot. Outside the Shadow District, she had little to fear other than the sun.

She came around the corner of her building and froze.

Her unit was up a short flight of rickety wooden steps; it was the only one that had its own entrance, which was part of why she had chosen it. Everyone else who lived in the converted warehouse had to go in through the front of the building.

The streetlight was dim and tended to flicker, but it shone brightly enough to warn her: There was something on the ground in front of the stairs . . . no . . . someone.

Olivia’s hand snaked into her bag and pulled the stake, and she moved sideways out of view, approaching silently. Her body automatically slipped back into guard mode, senses on alert; it was probably just a homeless guy, passed out drunk, but she hadn’t survived this long without being paranoid.

She got close enough to see that yes, it was a person, face down on the ground, unmoving. He or she was clearly unconscious, but Olivia wasn’t going to let her guard down until she was safely inside with the door bolted. She approached in a wide circle, sniffing the air; if it was a homeless person she’d be able to tell pretty easily by scent.

Strange. No smell of alcohol or accumulated filth. In fact . . .

Oh shit. Oh shit oh shit.

Vampire.

There was no way a vampire showing up outside her home was a coincidence. There simply weren’t that many of them in this part of town.

Closer still, and she saw something else that made her stomach twist with dread. He wore a long black coat, but something metallic that caught the light stuck out from under it.

A sword.

Elite. Goddamn it.

Most likely he’d been on patrol and gotten injured, which meant there would be others arriving any second now. She had to get inside, and quickly, before they saw her.

She didn’t stop to look any closer. She jumped over the unconscious vampire, her boots thudding dully on the steps, and started to run for the door.

“Olivia.”

Terror, instant and overwhelming, short-circuited her brain, and she spun around toward the voice, stake at the ready.

There was no one there . . . except the body. And while the vampire on the ground was male, the voice had been unmistakably female.

Breathing hard, she looked around the street, just barely stopping herself from calling out.

No one in Austin knew her name was Olivia.

Since arriving in the States after her flight from Australia, she had gone by her mother’s name.

The street was silent; even the wind had fallen still. She saw movement in a tree across the street and clamped down on a horror-movie scream as she realized it was just a bird—a raven, sitting in the branches, watching her. Well,
it
certainly hadn’t called her name.

She stared down at the man on the ground, heart in her throat, and before she could make herself run and hide, she descended the steps to the body and, with her free hand, took him by the shoulder and shook lightly.

“Hey. Hey, mister . . .”

The only answer was a soft groan. Cursing herself inwardly, she cast one more hunted look around the scene and then turned him over.

“Oh my God,” she gasped.

Ten years ago, she had flown to London in service of the Signet; she had taken part in the Elite tournament . . . and she had seen the face before her once, standing among the others of his kind, watching the fights through deep blue eyes that held the quiet power and nobility reflected in the red stone at his throat.

It was impossible. Completely impossible. But she knew, even as she wanted to deny it and escape while she still could, that this was no lost Elite.

Prime David Solomon lay on her doorstep . . .

. . . and he was alive.

Six

“What are your orders, my Lady?”

Miranda walked from one end of the line to the other, examining each of the five vampires her Elite held captive. They all looked petrified, and with good reason.

She nodded to the lieutenant, who gestured at the others; they shoved their captives to their knees, and seconds later, the sounds of steel swinging and the dull thud of heads severed from necks ended the last handful of Jeremy’s thugs.

They were out in full view of the Shadow District, and Miranda knew she was being watched—she could feel eyes peering out at her from the windows of the businesses and clubs that rose up on all sides of the execution. She wanted them to see her, to know that the rumors were true: The Queen lived, and she would suffer no disobedience. Nothing had changed in Austin. They all had to understand that.

She stood over the bodies as the Elite piled them on plastic sheeting and dragged them away, up to the roof of a nearby building to wait for the sun; another Elite opened a fire hydrant and sprayed the blood off the street, and all the while the Queen stood, impassive, watching with her arms crossed, allowing herself a moment of grim satisfaction at the sight of those who had brought such chaos to her city getting what they deserved.

If there were any more out there, they would most likely flee now. She was fine with that. Hunting down these five had been more of a show of dominance than anything else, to make an example of them and reinforce the fact that she was still in charge.

Dawn was coming; she could smell it, feel the fragility of the night air. Time to head home . . . to spend another morning locked in the music room, losing herself in the piano until her body gave out and she had to sleep.

Harlan piloted the Town Car back toward the Haven, and she sat in the back trying to stay awake even though the motion of the car was hypnotic and she was constantly on the verge of falling asleep these days.

The thought of sleeping filled her with the kind of dread that made her stomach hurt and her hands shake. She didn’t want to sleep . . . she didn’t want to dream.

It was the same every night, over and over until she thought she would go mad: She dreamed his death, feeling him fall, the night torn by her screams . . . then the horrible, endless emptiness, the cold in her mind where his presence had been, that safety and surety ripped from her forever.

She didn’t know how much longer she could take it. At night, when she was awake and active, it wasn’t as hard; she never stopped moving, never ran out of things to do. There were patrols to coordinate, network reviews to conduct, spats among members of the Court to mediate; the night-to-night business of the Signet didn’t stop, and she was thankful for that, as it left her with little time to think.

She had the earpiece and knife she’d taken from the vampire at Stella’s apartment sent to Novotny and was waiting to hear back; she made rounds of the Shadow District while the Elite hunted down Jeremy’s hired hands; she took condolence calls from a wide array of Primes who didn’t seem to know how to talk to her.

She couldn’t tell if they were afraid or simply in awe. No one had ever heard of a Queen surviving a Bondbreaking by more than a week. By now she should be raving insane and throwing herself out a window into the sunlight, but instead she was lucid, strong, as perfectly composed as her Prime had always been, managing her territory with total confidence as if she’d been doing it for years.

Then the day broke, and she had to face the afternoon hours alone . . . at first she tried sleeping, but the bed was so empty, her mind so full of memory, that it forced her to her feet, down the hall to the music room, or the psychic training room, or through the tunnels to the Elite buildings where she could work out until she literally fell over from exhaustion. The more tired she was, the less she dreamed.

There weren’t enough hours in the night, but there were far too many in the day.

It was not fair of her dreams to do this to her. She wanted to keep going, to accept David’s death, not wallow in her mourning for all eternity; though the thought of curling up and dying was tempting sometimes, she had no intention of letting this defeat her.

Her heart apparently had other ideas. She woke every evening weeping, so lost and haunted, and there was no one to hold her, no one to reassure her that she would be all right.

She could call California if she needed to, but she was afraid of letting them become a crutch . . . she had to depend on herself now. No one else could do it for her. She had had three years of Pairhood, three years knowing what it was like to have a soul mate—those years had hardly been perfect, but she had never been happier, never been more sure of her place in the world.

That was over now.
It’s over,
she told herself again and again,
and you have to keep going. You can do this . . . you’re strong enough. You didn’t go through all of this for nothing; this is why you’re here.

And as night became day and her nightmares continued, she fought like hell to believe her own words.

* * *

Olivia sat staring at the bed for nearly an hour, trying to figure out what to do and coming up blank.

Whatever madness had seized her and prompted her to drag him up the steps and into her home, depositing him on his back on her bed, had passed, and though the smart thing would have been to reverse the action and drop him back on the street, she didn’t. She sat and stared at the man, who stubbornly refused to stop breathing, and waited for something to happen.

She had no idea how he had ended up at her door, much less still alive but without his Signet, but she knew she was right about who he was; even if she’d never seen him before, she would have known what she was looking at. She could feel it, that aura, the same one they all had.

Whatever he’d been through, he looked dreadful. His skin was drawn and ghostly pale, with dark circles around his eyes; it was obvious he hadn’t fed in days, maybe even as long as he’d been missing, and even unconscious it looked like he was in pain. His breathing was shallow but steady, and she felt for his pulse, which was weak.

He didn’t stir when she spoke to him, shook his shoulder again, even lightly slapped his face—the sort of thing she knew in different circumstances would probably have gotten her beheaded. Nothing.

She supposed she should call . . . someone. But who? It wasn’t as if there was a Haven hotline, and he didn’t have a phone on him so she had no access to his emergency contacts. The sun was up now, but after dusk she could venture out and try to find a patrol team; there was one that passed through her neighborhood. For now, though, they were stuck with each other.

Olivia tried to busy herself straightening up the apartment; she was way too wired to sleep, and somehow the idea of the Prime waking up to a room with dirty laundry in the corners was more than she could take. Her bed was in the loft, with her studio space taking up most of the main floor, and she ran around nervously rearranging stacks of canvases and wiping the rarely used kitchen counter for a while before giving up and returning to her vigil. She thought about trying to paint, but she didn’t think she could concentrate with him there.

A couple of hours after dawn, something changed.

She had just sat back down by the bed when she saw his eyelids flutter. She sat very still, waiting, watching.

Slowly, his eyes opened, staring up at the ceiling.

She said quietly, “You’re safe, my Lord. It’s all right.”

At the sound of her voice, he turned his head toward her, and she sucked in an astonished breath.