Of Shadow Born (25 page)

“First they used Ovaska to go after Miranda, and caught you in the process, intending to kill you but take her alive.” Jacob added it up. “Then they sent someone after Miranda who would probably have killed her mortal friend as well—a mortal friend who could help you get your bond back. Now they’ve come after me. You’re right, Deven . . . it can’t be a coincidence.”

“But what the hell is so special about us?” David wanted to know, and Deven could practically see him, in his mind, leaning his forehead in one hand, the line between his eyes appearing both from tension and from the inevitable headache.

“How would you like that list? Over e-mail, or verbally?” Deven asked archly. “I think the fact that we all keep having the same premonitions and feeling each other’s pain would be enough to make us pretty damned special.”

“But that’s just it. Why is it happening to us? Why now? And what the hell does Morningstar have to do with it?”

“Good questions, all,” Jacob noted. “None of which we have the answers to.”

There really wasn’t much more to say. A few minutes later, when the call ended, Deven looked over to where Jonathan sat listening. “What do you think?” the Prime asked.

Jonathan interlaced his fingers and sat back, considering. “Well, I think . . . no, I’ve got nothing.”

Deven had no intention of leaving the situation alone. He switched over to the Red Shadow network and sent out a divert command. “I don’t care what Jacob says. 7.4 Carmine concluded his op two hours ago and didn’t have a new contract yet. I’m sending him to Prague.”

“I had a feeling you’d say that.”

“You’re sure you haven’t had any sort of premonition or even an inkling as to what’s going on here?”

“I wish I had, Deven. Things are getting a little out of hand.”

“Understatement, love. You were right about one thing: Lydia set the dominoes falling. But we thought the last one was David . . . Now I think we might have underestimated the scope of her plan.” He pulled up a global map of the Signet territories with each Haven location marked, linked to information about whoever held it. One of them was vacant. “Kelley is dead . . . but that was almost certainly Hayes.”

“Did you figure out why?”

He touched the screen and brought up another image, enlarging it so Jonathan could see. “Credit card statements,” he said. “They put McMannis and Hart in Chicago a week before the Council meeting. That’s a long way to travel from Australia just for a pub crawl—Kelley was up to his ass in the plot to overthrow Hayes. I don’t know exactly what he did to earn a fiery death, but I’m one hundred percent certain he had it coming.”

Jonathan looked like he was trying to decide whether to say something.

“Out with it,” Deven told him.

The Consort smiled slightly. “Do you really want to stop Hayes?”

Deven held his eyes for a moment, and Jonathan added, “I mean, this is Hart and McMannis we’re talking about. If Jeremy can kill them, why not let him?”

Suddenly, uninvited, images flashed in Deven’s mind: terrified faces, blood flowing . . . the sound of screams . . . Eladra’s agonized, but accepting, eyes. Smoke in black, choking clouds . . . the lick of flames . . . and a whisper over and over again:
Nothing. We died for nothing.
By the time he managed to shove the memories out of his mind, his hands were shaking.

He put his hands over his face for a few seconds before saying, almost too quietly for Jonathan to hear, “Kelley had eighty-seven Elite, twenty-two servants. There were twelve Elite out on patrol, and they all came home to the Haven on fire—the security systems overridden, window shutters locked, bolts on the doors. Do you think they could hear their comrades screaming inside as they burned to death? We can’t die by smoke inhalation, after all. They would all have been conscious for every second until their flesh was burned past the point of no return. No matter who they worked for, they didn’t deserve to die that way, and neither do McMannis’s or Hart’s Elite.”

When he lifted his eyes back to Jonathan, the Consort was staring at him as if his Prime had morphed into a new creature, one Jonathan had never seen before . . . and then his expression changed slightly, to something Deven recognized, that look Jonathan got just before sweeping him up in a breathless kiss.

But Jonathan merely nodded, gave him a soft smile, and said, “All right . . . what are we going to do?”

* * *

Fire—

Miranda woke with a start, eyes on the fireplace and heart pounding. She looked around in confusion.

What she’d been dreaming faded into a much less dire reality: She had dozed off on the couch. Her guitar sat leaning on the coffee table near a scattering of notebook paper covered in her scribbles. Right, she’d been working on another new song, taken a break, and fallen asleep.

She frowned, trying to make sense of the dream. It was painful, laden with crushing guilt. An old stone building somewhere in a forest . . . populated entirely by vampires, but not a Haven . . . burning from the inside, destroying the corpses of the inhabitants who were already . . . dead . . .

“Oh, God,” she murmured. She knew what she had seen.

Suddenly she couldn’t stand to sit there anymore. She grabbed her guitar and pushed herself up off the couch.

The guards were used to her bursting out of the suite hell-bent on the music room; their Queen’s idiosyncrasies had stopped worrying them no more than a year into her tenure. She waved them off, so they wouldn’t feel it necessary to follow her, and all but ran down the hall.

Once inside, she returned the guitar to its stand and dropped heavily onto the piano bench.

Even the worst realizations felt a little less overwhelming with her fingers on the keys. She shut her eyes and let her hands talk for a moment, starting with one of her favorite pieces—the main theme from
The Piano
—and then improvising her way around it for a few minutes. The rolling melody translated through the dark echoing depth of the Bösendorfer eased some of the tension that had tightened all her muscles even before she woke from the dream. Still, the thought remained:

He killed them all for us. All those people. And . . .

Something occurred to her that she hadn’t really put together before, and she found herself fighting back tears.

He knew them. From a long time ago. They were his friends once, and he killed them . . . for us. To stop the Awakening . . . but it happened anyway.

She stopped in the middle of a chord, causing a rather harsh sound from the piano, but she needed one hand to pull out her phone.

Without a greeting, she said, “They were your friends.”

He didn’t seem surprised to hear from her. Nor did he pretend not to know what she meant. “Yes.”

“Even after David said he didn’t want to see you again, you did that for us.”

“Yes.”

“And it’s killing you.”

A pause, then: “Yes.”

The weariness, the ache in that one word nearly made her weep, but she held herself together and asked, “What can I do to make it better for you?”

Another pause. “Don’t waste it,” he said.

He started to hang up, but she interrupted, “Deven—”

“Yes, Miranda?”

“I know you would do it for David . . . and you have to save me to save him, but . . .”

“Miranda,” he said, a sort of gentle firmness in the word that brooked no disagreement, “I thought by now you would understand—things aren’t like they were three years ago. If I never expected to still love him after all those years, well, let’s just say I was utterly blindsided by you.”

“By me?”

“Yes . . . I would do anything for you. Anything. Ask for the stars and I’ll do what I can.”

They sat in silence, he thousands of miles away, she safe in the Texas Hill Country, sitting at a piano. “I don’t need the stars,” she finally said. “But I would like to see you happy for a change.”

A quiet chuckle. “I’ll do what I can. Good night, my Lady.”

“Good night.”

She was still sitting there, staring at her phone, when David found her a little while later. Still in his coat and armed from his night in the District, he poked his head into the room first as always and inquired, “Clear?”

Miranda lifted her head and nodded.

As David approached her, he saw her expression and frowned. “What is it? What happened?”

She looked up at him, down at her phone, back up. “I think Deven just sort of told me he loves me,” she said.

David stared at her. “He did?” He sat down in one of the chairs nearby.

She recounted the conversation, and his expression grew more and more thoughtful.

“I’m sure he says that to a lot of people,” Miranda ventured, but even without the
Are you kidding?
look David gave her, she knew better.

David said, “I wonder if perhaps he’s picking up on your empathy, too. He’s always been something of a guilt-ridden mess on the inside, but I’ve never known him to show it. Whatever this connection thing is could be changing all of that. Of course, it might also be that the two of you have something now that you never did before—genuine friendship, which for Deven is a rare and precious thing.”

Miranda looked down at her hands, still on the piano keys. “For me, too.” She smiled a little. “All of my friends have a tendency to get killed or justifiably run screaming.”

He got up from the chair and came over to her, leaning in to kiss her forehead. “Not all of them, beloved.”

She leaned against him for a moment, closing her eyes. He couldn’t give her the kind of reassurance she craved, but the solidity of his presence was no trifling thing. She remembered how she had broken down over his scent, and here it was, warm and real and alive, with her.

“Tomorrow is the solstice,” David said, voice vibrating against the side of her head. “Have you spoken to Stella about this ritual of hers?”

“I have. She asked if her friend Lark could help her, and I didn’t see any reason not to let her. They’re going to work in one of the unused rooms in our wing—I’m having the furniture cleared out tonight so they’ll have all the floor space they need.”

“Wouldn’t they be better off in a shielded room?”

“Stella said that the way they do their rituals, they create a sphere of energy that protects them, then take it down when they’re finished. Plus they often work outside, where it’s a lot harder to keep a permanent shield. There’s a storm in the forecast or they would have found a place in the gardens somewhere.” She shrugged. “Stella swears there’s nothing I can do to help. She gave me a list of things she needs, and I gave it to one of the Elite to take care of.”

“What kinds of things? Eye of newt?”

She leaned back to give him an irritated look. “Candles, incense resins, that type of thing. And white paint.”

“Paint?”

“To draw some sort of symbols on the floor.” Before he could object, she said, “Nobody’s used that room for anything in ten years—Esther told me so. And I looked at the floor; it’s in pretty rough condition. If we need the room later, we can refinish the floor. I think it’s worth some sanding if we get answers.”

“True.” He looked like he wanted to say more, but he returned to the chair, something troubling in his eyes.

“What is it?” she asked.

“This thing they’re doing . . . I have a bad feeling about it.”

Miranda groaned. “God, you don’t have precog now, too, do you?”

He laughed. “I don’t think so. It’s nothing that strong. Just a feeling of unease I can’t shake. Do you feel it?”

“Well, I will now, thanks a lot.”

“It’s not that I can see anything going wrong, but . . .”

She missed being able to simply intuit what he was thinking and finish his sentences; she had depended on the bond so much for that, it was difficult to read him just as an individual. Even when they’d met and she was human they’d had something connecting them, that force of nature that had driven them together.

Still, she had some idea what he was thinking just because she knew him. “You don’t know what would be worse: for the ritual to work, or for it not to work.”

“That’s it in a nutshell. If it doesn’t work, we’re still adrift, not knowing anything. But if it does work, we could learn something we really don’t want to know—something that makes it all worse.”

“I’m not trying to tempt fate here or anything, but . . . what could possibly be worse?”

He smiled faintly; she couldn’t help noticing, in spite of the conversation, how amazing he looked sitting there in his coat, hands on the arms of the chair, utterly and effortlessly regal. He no longer had the drawn, exhausted look he’d had when he returned. She had always thought he had the most ridiculously perfect posture—straight but not rigid, every inch a king, unless he was sprawled out on the couch or bed, in which case he reminded her more of a drunken octopus.

“. . . staring at me,” he said a little more loudly, and she felt herself blushing. She hadn’t heard a word he said.

“Sorry, what was that?”

The smile grew a tiny bit. “I said that I have an irrational dread of the whole thing—some part of me knows I’m not going to like what we discover.”

Miranda closed the piano and stood up, coming over to slide into his lap. “I think even learning something awful is better than knowing nothing,” she said. “I also think there’s not a thing we can do about it right now. The sun’s coming up.”

He was staring at her mouth. “I hadn’t noticed,” he replied.

She grinned and kissed him, her hands winding around his neck. The response was as enthusiastic as she’d hoped; he wrapped a hand around the back of her head and the other arm around her waist and pulled her as close as he could, kissing her hard enough to bruise her lips.

“Come on,” she said breathlessly, all but jumping off his lap and hauling him to his feet.

They had barely reached the door when she felt his hands on her hips, spinning her around so her back hit the wall. He pinned her there, gripping both of her wrists in one hand above her head.

In between kisses she frowned . . . He knew she didn’t like being held down or pinned. “Hey,” she murmured, pushing against his arm as a reminder.