Of Shadow Born (21 page)

Sometimes she stood in front of her most recent canvas, another in the series trying to capture the faceless woman from her dreams. In this one the woman stood only a few yards from the viewer, looking back over her shoulder; her clothes seemed to be spun out of spiderwebs and shadows, and on her outstretched hand perched a raven.

Olivia couldn’t stop staring at her, waiting . . . for what, exactly? For the painting to come to life and tell her fortune? She didn’t need a painting for that.

The nights were growing warm, another round of rainstorms making its lazy way through the Hill Country and into Austin. Olivia still wore her coat—most vampires did, even here. Texas was warm enough that they didn’t need the extra layer—at least not outdoors. Walking into an air-conditioned building was enough to give a vampire chills for hours, so most of the time they could be seen skulking around town in jackets no matter what the weather.

She’d had a long night. The entire city was practically vibrating with awe and fear; news had gotten out, and though so far only a few had seen him, everyone knew the Prime lived. He had either come back from the dead or survived in the first place—and either possibility was terrifying . . . as much to his allies as to his enemies.

No one knew what to think or how to react. Was their ruler a god? The devil himself? Had the whole thing been a hoax? So far the Elite weren’t talking, and while the ordinary vamp on the street was grumbling about the lack of any real news, Olivia knew that the truth was the Elite had no idea what to say either, because no one did. Not even the Prime himself.

The anxiety hovering around the Shadow District made it hard to concentrate on work. She wasn’t an empath, but she sure as hell could sense fear as well as any of her kind. She’d nearly committed a cardinal sin of tattooing and fucked up a word—fortunately she’d quadruple-checked the image and realized it was reversed in time to fix it without alerting the client. Granted, it was in Japanese, and she doubted he had any idea it really said
fish bicycle
rather than
inner strength
, but research wasn’t her job.

She dug in her coat pocket for her keys as she rounded the corner to her building. It had become habit to check the ground outside for unfortunately placed bodies, although chances were when they came to get her they’d be on the front stoop instead of—

“Good evening, Liv.”

She froze.
Oh God. Oh God, no. No no no . . .

Jeremy Hayes, who was sitting on the steps waiting for her patiently, gave her a wry smile. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

She started to step back, to bolt, but he asked, “Where do you think you’ll go?”

She was shaking violently as she took the last few steps and knelt. “My Lord Prime.”

He rolled his eyes. “Oh, get up, for God’s sake. I’m not here to kill you.”

She clutched her coat tightly at her throat, standing up slowly. “You aren’t?”

He smiled. She had missed that smile—once he’d been such a witty, lighthearted man, so apt to laugh. She’d never thought he was bloodthirsty enough to be a Prime, but she would have followed him willingly . . . she had tried. “If you hadn’t rabbited that night, I would have told you then that I wasn’t angry at you. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“I failed you,” she whispered, eyes burning. “I failed Melissa and Amelia. I should have gone down fighting to save them.”

His smile faded. “No . . . I should have listened to you years before that and left the Signets alone. But fate had its own ideas, it seems.” He shut his eyes a moment before continuing. “Amelia’s dead.”

“Hart—”

“I got her back from him, but it was too late. He had already murdered her in spirit. She just finished his work. After everything I did to rescue her, after all the blood and death . . . I lost her anyway, Liv. I killed a Prime . . . and Faith . . . for nothing.”

They were both silent for a while, and then Jeremy asked, “Is it true? Did he really come back from the dead?”

Olivia nodded. “Nobody knows where he was or what really happened, but he showed up here on my doorstep.”

Jeremy shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense. The whole point was to take all of his power, send it through the Stone, and that would open the door. Who can come back from that? Who can just . . . wake up after having all the life energy sucked out of them?”

“David Solomon,” she replied, going over to sit next to him on the steps. “Why did you do it?”

“Lydia, one of the priestesses of Elysium, came to me and said she would free Amelia if I performed the ritual. It had to be done by a Prime—even one without his Signet would do. She assured me that Hart’s downfall was a guarantee once the door was open . . . maybe I did something wrong and it didn’t work. If I had any idea where the Cloister was, I could ask them, I suppose. I haven’t noticed any goddesses walking the earth, have you?”

“Not so much. Although if Solomon were a god it would explain a lot.”

He stared off into space, and she wasn’t sure how to interpret his expression. It was somewhere between anger and sadness, but it had an edge to it that made her deeply uneasy for reasons she couldn’t name. “It wasn’t so much the Pair . . . Signets die all the time. None of us really live that long once that thing’s around our necks . . . it’s a noose on a timer, that’s all.”

“You hate what happened to their Second,” she guessed.

“I . . .” He put his head in his hands for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was heavy with guilt. “I used her as a detonator. She shouldn’t have gone out like that. She should have gone out fighting. I’m pretty sure she made the bomb go off herself—I never hit the switch. I think she was trying to give the Queen a chance to escape, assuming my people would have killed her.”

“She gave her life for her Queen, then,” Olivia said. “For a Second there’s no better death, fighting or otherwise.”

He almost smiled again. “Spoken like a true Second.”

She shrugged. “Not much of one.” She took his hand, squeezing it. “I’m sorry about Amelia. I should have helped you. I would have.”

“I didn’t want to drag you back into all of this. But now . . . there’s no one else I can turn to. I have nothing left in this world . . . Hart and McMannis and their friends took everything from me. I have only one thing left, one purpose. For that I need your help.”

“Anything,” she said. “You have only to name it. I made an oath to serve you, remember? As far as I’m concerned you’re still my Prime.”

Jeremy met her gaze with eyes that had gone abruptly hard and steely. She had never seen the cold in his gaze before—the hatred she could feel roiling beneath the surface. He had never been a man who hated easily. The uneasiness in her gut redoubled. “Vengeance,” he said. “I want you to help me bring an end to this. I want you to help me destroy them all.”

* * *

David managed to find his voice first.

“Elves.”

“Yes.”

“Elves.”

“Keep saying it, David, until you believe it.”

“That’s ridiculous,” David said. “There’s—”

“No such thing,” Deven concluded with a nod. “You’re right. They’re extinct. The last few were hunted down and killed around the time I was still mortal. But they did exist once, and they had the kind of power Stella is describing.”

Miranda wasn’t sure what was funnier—Deven telling them there was such a thing as Elves, or the look on David’s face trying to make sense of Deven telling them there was such a thing as Elves. For all that Deven insisted he was an atheist, he seemed to acknowledge a lot of odd supernatural things, and David kept having to readjust his idea of how far Dev was willing to suspend disbelief.

Stella cleared her throat. “Before you both dismiss the idea as totally bonkerdoodles, you should probably remind yourselves that you’re vampires and I’m a Witch and you all wear magical amulets that light up.”

Miranda had to chuckle at the Witch’s choice of words. “Okay, so, Dev, have you ever
met
an Elf?”

Something tugged at her empathic senses, and she frowned, trying to figure out what Deven was feeling without violating his privacy. His expression remained neutral, but his voice had an edge to it she didn’t know how to interpret. “Not in person.”

“Then how do you know they existed?” David demanded. “I thought you didn’t believe in anything you haven’t seen with your own eyes.”

Deven gave a world-weary sigh. “The same way I know most of what I know: none of your damn business. The point is, they’re all gone and can’t help you.”

Stella was giving Deven an odd look, but after a moment she said, “There is one other place you could go: Persephone.”

Miranda’s heart skipped a beat. An image formed in her head: a woman robed in shadow, with endless black eyes. “And . . . how would we do that?”

The Witch shrugged. “Step between the worlds.”

The Pair gave her a long blink.

“I’m serious,” Stella told them. “Witches go between worlds all the time—trance journeys, vision quests, that sort of thing. Sometimes we even invite the Goddess to enter our bodies and speak through us. It’s called Drawing Down the Moon.”

Deven lifted his head from his knees. “Aspecting?”

“That’s another term for it. I’ve never done it before, but I’d be willing to give it a try—the summer solstice is next week. That would be a good time.”

“Is it dangerous?” the Queen asked. “I’m not putting you at risk.”

“If you don’t take the proper precautions, and if you’re Drawing Down an aspect of deity that’s too much for you, it can be. It’s a demanding ritual. But I know what I’m doing—in theory at least.”

David rubbed his temples, his classic headache tell. “So . . . you’re going to invite an invisible superbeing to come hang out in your body and tell us what’s wrong with me.”

Deven shot him a rather aggravated look. “I can give you a list of what’s wrong with you right here and now.”

“Boys, please,” Miranda said. “Stella . . . are you sure? We’ve already asked way more from you than we have any right to.”

Surprisingly—or no, not really at all, given who she was—Stella looked excited at the prospect rather than nervous. “I’m sure. I can do it. I know what precautions to take. The worst that happens is nothing happens, and we know as little in a week as we know now. Besides, it’ll be fun.”

“I’m surrounded by crazy people,” David muttered.

The Witch grinned. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

* * *

The next night, they decided it was time the city saw them again—alive, strong, and very much still in charge.

“Did Dev get back to Sacramento?” Miranda asked.

David, who was thumbing along the screen of his phone to read the network status report, answered absently, “No . . . he said he had a stop to make on the way.”

She relaxed into the corner of her seat, listening to the steady thrum of the car’s engine and feeling more at ease than she had in days. Something about being here, on their way into town with Harlan driving and David on his phone, was so comforting, a familiar ritual that made life feel almost normal for a moment.

“He was acting kind of weird,” she added. “Did you notice?”

David lifted his eyes to hers and gave her a smile. “Beloved, with all the weird going on lately, I’m having a hard time keeping up. How was he acting weird?”

“I don’t know, just . . . he was awfully quiet when he left. Preoccupied. And not with some matter of state or Red Shadow business. Something personal. It’s not like him to let that kind of thing show.” She fiddled with the lapel of her coat.

He finished what he was doing and gave her his full attention. “When you get to seven hundred years old you’ll have a lot on your mind, too.”

“I can’t imagine being that old. When he was born the printing press hadn’t even been invented.”

“Neither had whiskey,” David said. “Imagine what that must have been like for him.”

“Do you remember what it was like when you were human? The world, I mean?”

He got that look—the one that meant he was trying to access a memory—and said, “It was dark, quiet, at least in the village where I lived. Cities were beginning to be lit up at night, but sleepy towns like ours were dark. Now . . . there’s constantly light and noise everywhere, no matter what the hour. Everything moved more slowly back then, and life was short and hard. You didn’t have time to think about much beyond work and food and babies and death.”

“It sounds awful.”

A shrug. “Not really. Most people were pretty content with what they had. There was joy and sorrow, loss and celebration, just like now. People are people. Then of course you had the oddballs like me, eyes on the horizon, a mind full of ideas—troublemakers.”

She grinned. “You? Never.” Miranda toyed with her buttons for a moment before asking, “Do you think he was right? About there being Elves?”

David leaned back, sighing. “At this point I have no idea. I want to laugh at the very notion . . . just like I want to laugh at Stella’s delusions of goddesses, and I wanted to laugh at Marja Ovaska using magical talismans and at things like Awakening rituals existing . . . but it seems the universe is determined to make a fool of me.” He held up his phone. “See this? When I was human, a device like this would have been considered demonic. The thought that you could use your thumbs to send words through the air to be read by people thousands of miles away—at the speed of thought, no less—was beyond impossible.”

Miranda nodded in understanding. “It’s possible, then, that there are still things that haven’t been measured in a scientific way but are real all the same.”

“I always said that about the Signets—that it was just some form of electromagnetic or other energy that couldn’t be measured yet—but I tried not to analyze it any further because I think deep down I knew I couldn’t explain it away.”

“I never thought I’d hear you admit that magic might be real, even if it whacked you over the head.”

“That’s pretty much what happened, isn’t it? I was killed by magic, resurrected by magic—my tattoo changed by magic.”

Miranda thought of her dream, the one she couldn’t remember that had woken her to searing pain in her back, and Deven, too. “So . . . the tattoo thing happened nearly three weeks after you disappeared . . . that means when you initially came back, you were still regular old you.”