Shadowstorm (The Shadow World Book 6) (31 page)

And if Nico never recovered from all of this, could they ever find out? That summoning spell he’d half-translated made one thing clear: all eight members of the Circle had to be there, along with one additional participant to actually do the spell. Stella had assumed, perhaps naively, that the reason she kept escaping death was that Persephone wanted her to be that participant, to help open the gate between Her and Her wayward children. If Stella was chosen for that, Seph would do everything She could even from the other side of reality to make sure Stella lived to see that night.

Everything depended on that ritual. Naturally Persephone would want Her priestess protected.

Some Witches might have felt important, knowing that.

Stella was scared shitless.

And now, with Nico “gone,” she had no one to talk to about it.

She’d missed those nights, back before Jonathan died and Nico had come to Earth, when she and Miranda had eaten ice cream and just laughed about the kind of nonsense young women laughed about. A few hours here and there of avoiding reality could be really therapeutic.

Come to think of it…when had that stopped? Right around that time…around the time things got busy, yes, but also when it became clear that David and Miranda were going to be the lynchpin around which the Circle spun…could that have been when Miranda started killing humans? It would explain why almost all of Stella’s overtures were gently but firmly brushed off. Miranda knew Stella had the Sight, and who knew what Stella might pick up from a casual touch or an unguarded moment? Miranda had been trying to shield her from the truth, which was as touching as it was infuriating.

“You should be indoors by now,” came a voice that nearly sent her out of her skin. “Storm’s coming.”

Stella spun around, hoping her guards were fast enough to—

“Christ, Deven, don’t do that!”

The Prime smiled slightly. “My apologies. I forget sometimes that your hearing isn’t as good as ours.”

Stella snorted. “I’ve seen you do the same thing to David. It’s not vampires, it’s just you.”

The smile broadened a hair. He bowed slightly. “May I walk you back to the hotel?”

“Um…sure.”

This was a weird one. She’d been in Deven’s mind, was more familiar with what made him tick than a lot of people, but she couldn’t think of a time they’d been alone together. In fact she wasn’t sure she’d ever stood this close to him; walking beside her, he was a good inch shorter, and she wasn’t even wearing platforms.

His reasoning for joining her became clear momentarily. “Is there something you want to ask me, Stella?”

She let out a breath. “I get it. Okay. But that means you already know the question.”

“And if you’re asking me instead of Miranda, that means you already know the answer.”

Damn logic. “I guess I do.”

“It’s unfortunate that your father had to get mixed up in all this—there was no way it was going to end in a triumphant conviction and justice for all. Between David’s IQ and their net worth, there was no way Miranda was ever going to jail—now or in the future.”

“That’s what my dad said.”

“You don’t seem terribly upset finding out your idol is a killer.”

“My idol is a vampire,” she pointed out. “Finding out she
wasn’t
a killer was a shock. Most of my ideas about vampires came from TV, but I know you don’t get as powerful as you guys are on the bunny diet.” She looked around at the slowly-quieting city, the thinning crowds. “I feel bad for her, really. I know she’s not the killing kind — in defense of what she loves, sure, but just for food…I can’t imagine how hard that is, even if they find nothing but bad guys.”

“She’s dreadful at it,” Deven affirmed Stella’s earlier thoughts bluntly with a nod. “That’s why she got caught in the first place—guilt makes people stupid. In this day and age, and given her husband has the entire United States wired up with sensors, it’s foolish to think there’s a corner anywhere without cameras on it. Very few can get a good picture of us, but all it takes is one at a lucky angle. David knows that. She’s got to accept that dark deeds have to be done in the dark.”

“Speaking of which…” She trailed off, but again, she didn’t have to ask.

He shook his head, eyes on the ground. “He nearly killed a human tonight—she was lucky I stopped him when I did or she might not have made it. I don’t think he really planned to…I could feel something…something set him off.” A moment later he lifted his gaze back to her. “I don’t suppose you have any ideas how I could reach him? You know him better than anyone else here.”

“I did. But I don’t think I knew anything different from what you know—he’s—he was—endlessly kind, compassionate. Brilliant, really funny in a dry sort of way. He’s always been a little sad, for obvious reasons, but underneath that was this kind of quiet, unquenchable hope that I think came from his spiritual life. Once he became a vampire he lost that—or, he ran from it, because he didn’t believe Theia would want him anymore, and had no way to know if Persephone would take him in.”

Deven had stopped walking, and she looked back to see a stricken expression on his face. “After he spent all that time trying to heal me from exactly that kind of pain…he drowned in it himself…and I had no idea.”

She shrugged. “I don’t know if that can help you now. But what will help is—”

“Taking down the barrier, I know. But unless you have a way to dampen the power that will flood him when I take it down, I have no way to do it without killing him. He could probably do it himself, but I’m guessing the likelihood of that is somewhere in the ‘fuck off’ area.”

Stella shook her head, frustrated. “I wish I knew what to tell you. My magical career up to meeting you people was mostly tarot readings, money spells, and one really ill-advised love spell for a friend that luckily ended up getting her a dog instead of a dude.”

“Lower maintenance,” he remarked. “More comfortable to share a bed with. But men have their positives, too.”

“Like reaching things on high shelves?” she asked, deadpan.

He grinned and inclined his head to the right. “We’re here.”

She grinned back. “Thanks for the company.”

“Be safe.”

He faded from sight, leaving her smiling at nothing in front of a ritzy hotel. Stella glanced over and noticed one of the hotel staff—a bellhop, maybe? Did people still use that word?—giving her an odd look. She cleared her throat, squared off her shoulders, and strode up the sidewalk to the grand double doors, trying not to look like a goat hopping up to a banquet and chewing on the tablecloth. Like Miranda had said, the secret was to walk like you need fear no evil because you were the biggest, baddest motherfucker in the Valley of the Shadow, even if you were, like Deven, a slight 5’7” eternal teenager or, like David, wearing a Donkey Kong t-shirt under your trench coat.

Miranda had said it hadn’t come naturally to her. Stella wasn’t totally sure she believed that—the Queen seemed like she’d been born with a Signet around her neck. But there was definitely something to the theory, and Stella imagined she could pull authority and power up around her like it was a black leather coat, sweeping in past the doormen with a smile and nod of acknowledgment, headed for the elevator like she already owned the place.

*****

Are you out there? Can you hear me?

David didn’t really remember his mother. He had fairly clear recollections of his father, mostly surrounding the forge and the sound of a hammer striking metal, but he also remembered his father drawing out plans for machine parts he was making for…a windmill, perhaps? Or something like that? It was something the town council had hired him to build. David’s mother, however, had died when he was ten, expelling a stillborn child conceived far too late in life for her safety.

Still, that night as he lay on his side on the couch ignoring his inbox, he found himself wondering about her, trying to remember what she’d looked like. He’d been born essentially a carbon copy of his father, so she might have looked like anything, though most of the villagers were painfully drab and ordinary in appearance. She was probably a brunette, with brown eyes or hazel, skin milky pale from the lack of sunlight in their bleak region of England—but she might have been unusually tall. His father had been several inches shorter than David, as were all the men of their line. David wasn’t exactly a giant but for the time, he was considered one.

He closed his eyes and tried to call up her image. The shape of a woman, round-hipped and strong-backed, began to form, standing on the far end of the wooden bridge that led into town over the burbling creek where everyone got their water. She was dressed like most of the women in town, in plain-colored and unadorned but beautifully woven and sewn clothing, her hair tucked up under a bonnet.

In his mind, she noticed someone was approaching, and turned toward him—and as she did, her clothing began to morph, turning black, its hem dropping down to the ground and losing its edges so it seemed to blur into the mist that began to rise around her. Hair as red as old wine cascaded down over her shoulders and nearly to her waist, scandalously unbound.

The bridge, the village, the creek all disappeared. They were standing in a forest, the sky above filled with stars. The Haven, too, faded from sight, the light of the fireplace concentrating into the jewel at her throat.

Silver-black, luminous eyes met his.

The reaction was as immediate as it was instinctive: he crossed the space formerly occupied by the bridge and knelt before Her.

Her hand touched his head, and a wash of power like nothing he knew in the real world spilled down over him. Everything that had been tense and afraid in the last week felt soothed, as if there was no such thing as fear in this place.

This place…

“No,” She said with an affectionate smile. “You are not dead. Rise, child.”

“Then how am I here?” he asked. “Is this a dream?”

“It is, and is not. There are avenues of consciousness down which I can walk even now, to drop into the dreams of the others, but you are the only one who can come here.”

“Why me?”

She tilted her head to the side.

He had to smile at that, both because it was a dumb question and because her expression was such a Miranda thing to do. “Well, okay. But still. Why show up at this particular moment?”

“You have been calling Me.”

“I have? Oh…I have, haven’t I.” He hadn’t even realized that was what he was doing, but he’d been silently conversing with Her for months, embarrassingly the same way people often did with God, basically either complaining or bargaining. “Sorry.”

“It is I who am sorry, My son. I want nothing more than to give you the help you need—the help you deserve after all you and your family have endured. Even were I close enough to speak to all of you face to face at will, there are limits to My intervention in the world of form. We are all subject to natural law except in rare cases. My power must come through one of you to affect reality.”

“Like Drawing Down the Moon,” he mused.

“Just so. I find it easy to work through young Stella as she has training in her Craft.”

“So what kind of Craft are we going to need to help Nico?”

Sadness entered Her dark eyes, and She looked up at the night sky. He wondered what She was seeing—clearly something more than stars, or perhaps stars were wonder enough. “That is why I am here now. You already know: only one thing can help Nico.”

“Breaking the barrier.”

“Yes. Right now his mind and heart are dangerously imbalanced—until now he was able to maintain balance because of the strength of his heart, but no longer.”

“He needs to be hit with that much love to balance out the hate?”

“Not hate. The opposite of hate is indifference, not love. Love informs the entire universe—its opposite is nonexistence. Love and hate are remarkably similar in that regard, but only one endures beyond death, and only one heals. Nico does not need a sorcerer; he needs a healer.”

“But Deven said he can’t lower the barrier without killing Nico. It’s too much power.”

“Deven is afraid.”

“You mean he’s wrong?”

“Far more often than he would care to admit.”

“How am I supposed to convince him of that? I can’t force him to take it down.”

“Force is not necessary. There are much gentler, and more effective, methods of persuasion. You and your beloved have everything you need—yourselves. It is by your hands that Deven can lay down his fear.”

“And what about Nico, in that case? The power wouldn’t overwhelm him?”

“Are you certain that would be a bad thing?”

“It wouldn’t kill him?”

“He is far stronger than even you know. Regardless… blackening eyes are not your only new ability, child. Channeling and controlling power of that magnitude is part of what you were made for.”

“It is? Why?”

David thought he saw a slight smile. “That will have to wait.”

“And where exactly do we learn to do that?”

“One of you already knows.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Miranda. She learned Weaving before Jonathan died — but she claims she forgot how. She’s wrong, too?”

Now She was definitely smiling. “Far more often than she would care to admit.”

Slowly, he nodded. “I think I understand.”

“Good. You are about to wake up—I would hate for our meeting to end without you learning what you needed to.”

“I have about a thousand questions for You,” he said. He could feel the vision, or whatever it was, beginning to dissolve, its edges unraveling like fabric. He held onto it as long as he could. “I don’t even know where to—”

She smiled again, reached out, and touched his face. He fell silent; in fact, the urge to kneel again was difficult to resist…almost as difficult as the urge to throw himself into Her arms…but he sensed doing that, while probably as comforting as he hoped, would do far more to him than he was ready to deal with right now.

“Every time you come to Me, you will be further changed,” She told him quietly. “You have always been a warrior—you are becoming My warrior, and that is an even greater burden than the one you bear around your neck. But I chose you for a reason. There are no four creatures in the World of Shadow more worthy or better suited to My lineage. Fear not, my son…by the time you need it, you will have full knowledge, and full power.”