Of Shadow Born (27 page)

She felt something sort of like eyes on her, as if holding her up to a jeweler’s lamp to look for flaws. A presence circled her slowly: weighing, measuring.

“You are strong,”
the voice observed,
“but not strong enough to contain that knowledge. Should I speak through you, your own voice may be lost.”

“You know why I’m here?”

She almost heard a smile.
“Of course. I have been waiting for you.”

“Then you know I have to try.”

The voice became sympathetic, gentle.
“To step into this world is to accept a life unlike any other of your kind . . . a life that may bring you to grief. If you do this, there is no turning back . . . and it will not be only your life that changes.”

Stella asked, almost in a whisper, “Is there any other way?”

“No. To speak to my children I must speak through one with your abilities. It is not yet time for them to come to me directly—only in dreams. With your help they will find me soon, but without your help, it may never be, and when war comes, my children will be unable to win.”

“I take it that would be bad.”

“Do you consider the loss of many thousands of human lives bad?”

She nodded, understanding. The vampires couldn’t come here yet. They weren’t ready. Without the knowledge she would bring them, they might never be.

“What do I have to do?” she asked.

She could sense approval, even pride.
“Only open yourself to me, child, and I will do the rest.”

Stella closed her eyes.

* * *

A scream split the air.

Miranda was on her feet before she could even register where it was coming from. She hit the music room door at a run, and emerging into the hallway she saw the suite door guards as well as several other Elite running toward the sound.

She knew, with a sinking heart, where it had originated: the room where Stella and Lark were doing their ritual. And even in that single scream, the Queen knew it wasn’t Stella’s voice.

She also knew it was a bad idea to burst in on them—but there was no other choice, if they needed help. She flung her arm up to unlock the door, not even waiting for the lock to beep before she turned the knob.

The scene inside was surreal. The air was hazy with smoke that smelled like burning dog hair and church; the floor was, as she anticipated, covered with white symbols in concentric circles around an altar. On the floor in front of the altar, one black-robed young woman lay in a heap, and another knelt beside her, sobbing incoherently.

“Stay back!” Miranda yelled at the Elite, remembering the dizzying sensation of walking into Stella’s room. She braced herself for something even worse.

It seemed, however, that whatever had happened had blown the Circle to smithereens. There was no barrier at all when she ran into the room, though the entire place was crackling with energy. Miranda dove to the girls’ side and dropped to her knees next to Lark, who was cradling Stella’s head in her lap, begging her friend to stay with her.

“She’s not breathing,” Lark moaned. “Please, do something, please—”

Miranda spared a second to call out to the others: “Get Mo down here now!”

She felt Stella’s chest for a heartbeat. It was there, but faint. She wasn’t exactly CPR certified, but she had to do something—she blew hard into Stella’s mouth, hoping against hope that something would happen, that she hadn’t sent a friend into this room to die. At the same time, she
reached
, willing Stella’s lungs to work, her heart to keep beating.

Footsteps thundered outside the room, and Mo appeared, just as Stella drew a ragged, gasping breath.

Relief made the Queen feel weak; she sagged backward, letting Mo get to the Witch. Lark was still sobbing, clinging to Stella’s hand.

“We must get her to my clinical room,” Mo said urgently. “She needs oxygen and an EKG.” He stood up, taking the Witch with him, and carried her out the door, Lark running to keep up behind him.

Miranda rose, intent on following.

Before she could take a step, thunder seemed to roll through her head; the room pitched and spun, and she collapsed where Stella had lain.

* * *

Austin was quiet that solstice night.

A summer storm was rolling steadily across the Hill Country and would reach the city in an hour at most, but for the moment the air was calm, even as high up as the roof of the Winchester Bank building.

He stood watching the city’s heart pulse with the rhythm of hundreds of stoplights. People were trying to get home before the rain started. The blare of horns punctuated the relative quiet, but from up here, the sound was just part of the symphony.

Waiting. Too much waiting. The Prime had no choice but to be patient, and it was maddening.

They were waiting on the Witches. Waiting to find out more about Morningstar. Waiting for intelligence about Jeremy Hayes.

In the meantime, Miranda was talking to her agent about going back onstage, and the Prime was standing on a roof, so all was right with the world again.

He hadn’t slept that day; between the stress of all this waiting and the fear that he might lose himself in his sleep and hurt Miranda, there was simply no rest for him, not yet.

He was afraid of himself. His entire life he had been reasonably self-aware, able to think his way through any problem. The only thing that had ever caught him off guard was love—and who could blame him for that? Love caught everyone off guard, after all. But this new thing, this darkness that had taken root inside him . . . he feared it . . . and he was not used to fear.

There was nowhere to turn, no one who would understand. He had no Second to turn to, and even if he had, he couldn’t imagine confiding in anyone the way he had Faith. The closest, he supposed, would be Olivia, since she had been there to witness some of what had happened, but he had no way to reach her.

There was something he trusted about her implicitly; he couldn’t put his finger on what, but he knew, once again somewhere deeper than logic, that he hadn’t seen the last of her. There was some kind of strength in her, some kind of power that his own power seemed to recognize. Olivia’s part in this was not yet over . . . and if he could find her, he would tell her so.

The first few drops of rain fell on his coat, and he sighed. Time to head home.

It was getting harder. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could face his Queen, seeing the way she looked at him when she thought he wasn’t aware of it. Now that they were separate, there was a very real possibility that she could turn away from him, even leave. She didn’t need him anymore. He didn’t truly believe she would give up on them, but it was still possible and never had been before. Who could blame her, after all she’d suffered because of him? It seemed that whether living or dead, he brought her nothing but pain.

Self-pity, Prime? Very nice.

Things would be clearer once he got some sleep. Before, he’d been able to push through entire weeks with only a couple of hours snatched here and there, but for some reason since he’d come back from the dead, he found it incredibly difficult to function without enough sleep. Whatever he was dreaming about, it was obviously very attractive to his subconscious.

Having done the math, he estimated that he had regained 98 percent of his memory; the things that had always been fuzzy, like his human life, were still fuzzy, and parts of his life that had been a blur were still a blur, but almost everything else was back where it belonged.

Unfortunately that 2 percent was the part he needed right now. He needed to know where he had been, how he had come back. He needed to know how to make things right again. There had to be something. Things couldn’t just . . . be like this now. How were they supposed to work as a Pair this way? How could he rule his territory if he couldn’t even control himself?

His thoughts were not helping.

He needed to focus on something normal for a while to stave off the creeping madness. Programming, perhaps. He’d been digging through the sensor data to figure out how Hayes had confused the network; he had come up with a couple of algorithms that might make detecting Signets more accurate even without the presence of a Signet itself. Knowing how powerful a vampire was would be very useful, but he had to figure out what kind of data to collect to calculate it.

There was also the camera project he’d left unfinished. He’d made a lot of progress before everything had gone to hell, but it needed more than a few refinements to be genuinely useful. If Miranda was going back onstage, she would probably need the camera/mirror illusion again, so he needed to get back on it.

David shook himself a little, then stretched, rolling his head from one side to the other to unkink his neck. He’d been standing there staring far too long; it was beginning to rain in earnest, and if it weren’t for his coat he would be soaked. As it was, his hair was already dripping.

He couldn’t help but laugh at himself. Brooding in the rain in a long coat—all he needed was a British moor to wander around and he could be a reject from any Brontë novel.

“All right,” he muttered, stepping down from the stone surround and turning toward the stairwell, “enough gargoyling for one night, Prime.”

As he walked across the roof, though, he felt something strange; his mind got suddenly blurry, as if he were drunk. It almost seemed that time was slowing down—he was afraid for a moment he would pass out, but everything was moving so slowly . . . or was it moving backward?

He pushed himself over to the door and leaned against it, trying to center himself and figure out what was going on, but the strangeness only grew. It wasn’t painful, really, it was . . .
wrong
.

What the hell . . .

He could hear something—someone speaking, or rather reciting something that had a rhythm, but the sound was far away, and it wasn’t possible; he wasn’t anywhere near another person, and neither his com nor his phone had alerted him to a message. The longer the voice went on, the harder it was to think. He could feel something . . . something coming closer . . . reaching for him . . .

David slid down the door to the ground, weak all over. It felt like the inside of his entire body was shaking, poised on a knife’s edge between nausea and pain, and something was reaching into him—

He gasped. Thunder seemed to split his skull, wave after wave of tremors starting in his mind and rolling outward. Was the thunder outside, or inside? He could barely feel the rain; there was nothing but that horrible shaking, and something trying to force him open, trying desperately to get in before it was too late—

Lightning struck the Prime’s mind . . .

. . . and with it,
memory
.

Fourteen

“Hello, David.”

He stared at her, uncomprehending. “Who . . .”

Her eyes, black and full of stars, lit on him with kindness. “I think you know.”

One moment, she seemed to be just a woman, as Faith had been, a little colorless but still real. Her hair trailed around her shoulders, dark and bloodred, its tendrils moving almost like snakes; she was robed in mist, in shadows, in the suggestion of iridescent black feathers. Her feet dissolved into the ground beneath them, as if she had arisen from the night itself . . . or was the night itself.

He took a step back. “Persephone.”

She inclined her chin in confirmation.

“It was true,” he said. “The Stone, the Awakening . . . my death freed you.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Who was holding you captive, then?”

She smiled. It was a familiar smile . . . a predator’s smile. “You will find out soon enough.”

Suddenly he remembered—“Miranda,” he said. “She’s alone, and hurt—”

“She is safe for now. Worry not, child . . . you will be reunited soon. But first you must listen to me; there is not much time before dawn . . .”

Dawn . . . he could smell it in the air . . . he was so weak, and so afraid . . . ten feet to the stairwell might as well be a thousand miles . . .

It would be so easy just to give up and let it happen.

No.

Miranda.

The name brought strength from somewhere too deep to understand, and with agonizing slowness, he moved one hand . . .

Cold. So cold.

First one abandoned building, then another; the second had recently been a squat and still had the remains of a vagrant’s camp inside. There was a blanket, filthy but warm, and nearby a closet that would block out light. He collapsed inside, pulling the door shut, and hit the ground already unconscious.

In the squalid depths of the city, he was no one; no name, no memory, no purpose except to stay alive. This much he knew: He had to feed. Neither he nor she could keep their promises until he was strong enough to survive what was coming.

The first was a homeless man. He was old, mentally ill; it was a miracle he’d survived another winter, even one so mild as Austin’s. His blood tasted like loss. Like a family long gone, like service in war, like being left out in the cold. But it was blood, and the man died peacefully, to be found by police the next day. They wouldn’t look hard for a cause.

The power of the man’s death wasn’t enough. It burned out quickly. There had to be more.

One by one, he took them from the streets, choosing easy targets that, by coincidence, were those least likely to arouse suspicion. Each one helped, but by the time another day had passed, he thirsted for more. His body was still so weak that it took days, and days, to even leave the block.

There was someone he had to find. Someone who would help. Someone who had to be a part of this . . . was already a part of this. She would take him in, she would know what to do, and then she could be . . . what she was meant to be.

That knowledge drove him, step by stumbling step, a block turning into half a mile, a mile turning into half the city, until he found the warehouse . . . just in time for his few precious scraps of energy to exhaust themselves.