Of Shadow Born (26 page)

The only response was a low hiss in her ear and a tightening of the hand around her wrists. He pushed her harder into the wall and bit her solidly on the neck.

It was hardly the first time he’d done that, and usually it was an intense turn-on, but something about it made her stomach lurch this time. She could feel something akin to anger radiating from him . . . that wasn’t right. Miranda twisted hard to the side, wrenching her wrists free. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” she demanded.

Their eyes met, and she gasped.

She hadn’t been imagining it before. His eyes were black, two cold obsidian chips that seemed to glow in the room’s low light. There was no humanity in them whatsoever, nothing she recognized, only darkness.

“David!” she said desperately. “Wherever you are, get back here!”

He blinked, frowning, and in half a second the black was gone and he jerked back, almost stumbling away from her, blue eyes wide and horrified.

“What . . .” Confused, he looked around the room, then back at her, a touch of fear making its way into his voice. “What just happened?”

Miranda leaned back against the wall, crossing her arms over her chest. “I don’t know.”

“God, Miranda . . .” He groped sideways until he found the chair and sank into it, putting his face in his hands. “What’s wrong with me? How could I even think of hurting you?”

She took a few deep breaths to steady herself. “Don’t freak out about that,” she said. “Honestly, you being a little more aggressive than usual isn’t the scary part. You checked out on me . . . your eyes went black. I don’t know what I was looking at, but it wasn’t you, or at least, not all you.”

Shame, fear, and repulsion were all evident in his face as he replied, “You mean you
hope
it wasn’t all me.”

“Tell me what you were feeling,” she said. “Did you go somewhere? Did you feel . . . possessed or anything?”

“No,” he answered. “I was there. As much as I ever am anymore . . . but sometimes . . . just now . . . something comes over me, like a shadow wrapping its hand around my throat. I can feel it . . . like when I killed that human. Or when I saw you fighting in the city that night. All question of reason or logic is swallowed whole and all I can think of is blood. I’m off-balance in a way I never was when we were bound.”

Miranda bit her lip, watching him for a moment. Finally she recalled, “Stella said it looked like whatever was changing you wasn’t done yet. Maybe that’s the problem—you’re caught between two lives and they’re at war with each other.”

David looked up at her, anguished. “I don’t want that one to win.”

“I know you don’t. Neither do I.”

“You were right,” he said, closing his eyes. “No matter how awful it is, we have to know what’s happening. We can’t go on like this. The Witches may be our only hope.”

Thirteen

Lark’s reaction on seeing the Haven for the first time was priceless.

“Come on,” Stella told her, bumping her forward with her shoulder, laughing. “We’ve got a lot to do.”

Lark snapped her mouth shut and nodded. “Lead the way,” she said, shifting the backpack she’d brought.

Once she was inside the building, Lark’s mouth fell open again and she made a squeaking sort of noise. “How much money do these people have?” she wondered, falling into step with Stella down the hallway.

“Enough that nobody’s batted an eye over anything I’ve asked for,” Stella said.

Lark’s eyebrow lifted. “What’s that thing on your arm?”

“This?” Stella held up her wrist. “It’s a communication device. They all wear them—it keeps track of where you’re at and even records your DNA so they know who’s who. This one’s limited access, though—I can only call Miranda or my door guard and I can’t spy on the others.”

“How does that flat little thing record DNA?”

“Beats the hell out of me. There’s a lot of crazy-ass technology around here. Hell, all I did was mention my laptop is a couple years old and David upgraded it in about four minutes. With his
phone
. While eating ice cream with the other hand.” Stella held her com up to the lock on her suite’s door; it beeped and opened.

It was still daylight so she didn’t have any guards—there was one at the end of the hall and another posted at each exit, and special network alarms were turned on during the day. They’d had a regular cab bring Lark out, and Stella had special permission to open the front door with a day guard standing around the corner. They could have waited until dark, but Stella wasn’t sure how much preparation they’d need before the exact moment of the solstice, and she didn’t want to leave anything to chance.

“Not bad,” Lark noted, looking around the room. “I see you’ve got your hard-core shields rocking. Not as trusting as you seem?”

“Yeah, well, I trust Miranda and David, and mostly anyone they’ve vouched for, but I only have to be wrong once.”

“Are we doing this in here? There’s not a lot of space.”

“Nope. Down the hall. Did you bring everything?”

Lark nodded and hefted the backpack onto Stella’s bed, unzipping it; there were overnight clothes and sundries, but also a cloth-wrapped bundle that turned out to be Lark’s ritual robe with everything else wrapped up in it for safekeeping: a ritual chalice wrapped again in a velvet altar cloth, a package of round charcoal tablets, a stone incense burner, and a wood box.

“Did you find all the ingredients?” Stella asked, picking up the box and opening it. Inside was about a quarter cup of mixed herbs and resins. The combined scents wafted up to Stella’s nose and gave her the impression of some wild place in the woods, heavy on evergreen trees, with a faint berrylike undertone.

“Foxglove gave me one hell of a look when I bought this stuff,” Lark mentioned as they transferred the ritual items from her backpack to a tote Stella had already loaded halfway with other tools. “Mugwort, myrrh, wormwood, pomegranate leaves . . . the makings of a hard-core trance-inducing blend.”

“Did you get the critter bits?”

“Yup. Snakeskin, a pulverized raven’s feather, and hair from a black dog. You do know all this is going to stink like ass when we burn it.”

“I’m hoping this will even it out,” Stella said, pulling a bottle from the tote. “I knew this stuff would cost an arm and a leg, so I asked Miranda to get it.”

“
Liquidambar orientalis v. nigrus
 . . . Pure Black Storax oil,” Lark read. She gave Stella a wide-eyed look. “There are only like five dozen of these trees in existence. This bottle’s worth about five hundred dollars.”

“Like I said,” Stella said with a grin. “Money is no object around here, especially when it’s this important. Just don’t spill it.”

Lark, who had lifted the bottle’s cork just a little so she could smell the fragrant liquid inside, immediately recorked it and looked sheepish. “Right.”

Stella laughed and hauled the tote up onto her shoulder. “Come on.”

She’d spent most of the previous afternoon preparing the room. The Queen had offered help, but Stella wanted to make sure it was done right, and the only way to do that was to take care of it herself. She had, however, asked for extra hands moving the furniture out—two vampires had done in twenty minutes what would have taken her all day on her own.

“Wow,” was all Lark said when she saw it.

In the center, Stella had hauled a small rectangular table to use as an altar, and she’d started painting based on its position. Radiating out from the altar and filling most of the room’s scuffed and scratched floor were glyphs, protective sigils, and a variety of other symbols standing out stark white against the dark wood. They lined up with the four directions and with several celestial bodies including Pluto and Mars; she’d researched the entire configuration for days before settling on exactly what she wanted.

Lark walked slowly around the circle, reading the glyphs to herself, until she got to one: “A triple moon and the infinity symbol? What does it do?”

“The Order of Elysium—the vampires that worship Persephone—use it as their seal. I figured it would be a good idea to include it. The version of Persephone I’m used to and the one they call on aren’t exactly the same, so I thought we should specify.”

Lark paused in front of the altar, then looked over at her friend. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Stella had been expecting that very question. She sighed, opening up the tote to start pulling everything out, and said, “I’m sure.”

“Did you tell your friends everything that could go wrong?”

“They didn’t need to know about all of that. They would have just tried to stop me. I need to do this, Lark. They need answers, and nobody else can help.”

“You know, I get that you love Miranda and all, but . . . it’s an awfully big thing for you to do just out of fangirl loyalty. Let’s not forget you almost died for this chick once already.”

Stella set a pair of thick candles on the altar and added the incense burner. “It’s more than that. I know you don’t remember much of it, but that night we were attacked, it was Miranda’s Elite that saved us. If another Pair had been in charge, we would probably be dead. In most parts of the world, the rules about feeding on humans are lax, if not nonexistent. Miranda and David are working to change all of that. If they can’t do their jobs, they’re vulnerable, and someone could take them out—for real this time.”

“Stella Maguire, indirect savior of the human race,” Lark laughed. “I like it. Maybe they’ll make you their official Haven Witch. Like a mascot.”

Stella shot her the finger. “I’m not wearing a big animal head for anybody, I don’t care how awesome they are. Now get changed.”

Lark grabbed the robe Stella held out to her, sticking out her tongue in the process. “You, too. Persephone isn’t going to hang out in your skin if you’re wearing that ratty-ass tank top.”

Once they both had their robes on, they sat down in the middle of the floor with Stella’s notebook to go over the details of the ritual. They had about an hour before it was time to begin—astronomically the Earth’s axis was tilted just right at 10:34.

It wasn’t that Drawing Down was so difficult—every High Priestess was trained to do it, and disaster was rare. But Lark was right; there was always a possibility of something going wrong. The darker deities tended to be a little less gentle with their followers and could be almost cruelly demanding. The rewards, however, were equally great: They could confer amazing strength and new abilities, and if you wanted justice or vengeance, they were the way to go. Stella couldn’t imagine vampires having been created by a soft-and-fluffy goddess.

At precisely ten o’clock, they both rose from meditation and got to work.

Stella drew a line of salt over the circle she’d painted to contain all of the glyphs, marking the outermost boundary of the space they were creating; Lark got the incense charcoal burning and sprinkled powdered frankincense on it, sending up a fragrant billow of smoke that filled the air in the room and almost instantly changed how it felt. That smell was so familiar, it put them both in a ritual frame of mind without even trying.

“You cast,” Stella said. “You’ll need to hold on to the boundary if anything goes kaput.”

Lark made her way around the boundary, pausing at each compass direction to invoke the powers of its associated element. She spoke aloud, using invocations they’d used before but adding an extra request for protection.

Stella could See the Circle taking shape, a sphere of energy that reminded her of a soap bubble, shimmering in the candlelight. It was far stronger than a soap bubble, though, and once it was up, it would keep unwanted energies as well as unwanted people from entering. The way they’d set it up it was like a magical electrified fence, and only Persephone herself could walk through.

Finally the two Witches met in front of the altar.

“Okay,” Lark said. “You ready?”

Stella met her eyes and nodded. “Let’s go.”

Lark took the incense and mixed the oil into it, then dropped a spoonful onto the glowing charcoal. This time the smoke wasn’t a comforting, familiar scent. It was thick and acrid, and Stella felt her lungs rebelling against breathing it in; she calmed herself, though, and inhaled.

Her senses spun off axis. She blinked, trying to make sense of it, watching as Lark’s aura doubled in intensity and everything around them began to glow. She could feel her shields opening up—without any effort on her part—and could, at a great distance, hear Lark intoning the words they had agreed on for the invocation.

Lady of the darkened moon,

Queen of the endless underworld,

We ask for your presence here in this Circle.

Descend into the body of your priestess . . .

Stella didn’t know how much time passed. It could have been seconds or minutes. The smoke had clouded her mind so much she couldn’t form a coherent thought, and realizing how helpless she was, she felt herself hyperventilating out of panic. Fear overcame her—what was she doing? Who did she think she was, calling on a deity whose children were predators of the human race? Was she expecting hearts and flowers? She’d been such a—

Just as the terror began to buckle her knees, time seemed to slow down. She could see Lark in front of her, but the Witch was barely moving, her lips forming words but no sound coming out. The candle flames froze midflicker. Stella saw the ladders of smoke climbing toward the ceiling stop halfway there and hang, suspended, waiting.

For a moment the only sound was Stella’s labored breathing. Cold crept up over her skin.

The room fell away, smoke obscuring her view and then clearing, without anything actually moving.

She heard the rush of wings.

She stood in a woodland clearing, feet rooted to the spot, staring all around her with her heart in her throat. It was deep night, the sky overhead heavy with starlight, a soft breeze lifting the leaves of the forest that surrounded her.

The voice that filled her ears was made of that breeze, of wings, of stars . . . of shadows.

“You are brave, child.”

Stella took a deep breath and said, “I come seeking knowledge to help my friends.”