“I know you’re awake,” came David’s voice, terse. “I need you both in the Batcave.”
Deven rolled his eyes and said, “You have reached the bedroom of two people about to shag like mad rabbits. Unless you plan to participate, please leave a message after the—”
“Tanaka is dead.”
The change in Dev’s expression was disconcerting to say the least. “What?”
“Mameha isn’t.”
Taking a deep breath, holding Nico’s eyes, Deven said, “Five minutes.”
*****
The office echoed with the silence that hung over the conference line. The entire Circle was present, but no one seemed to know what to say; as everyone joined in Pair by Pair, the quiet waiting turned into a vigil.
Miranda sat gripping David’s hand, and he hers, tightly; the Prime looked as shocked as she’d ever seen him. So did Dev, for that matter, who mirrored her position on the other side of the desk, fingers laced with Nico’s.
Finally, Jacob cleared his throat and said quietly, “We have her.”
Another pause before he went on, “The Red Shadow Operatives in Tokyo got to her before Morningstar could, and they got her someplace secure—Tanaka’s surviving Elite and mine are coordinating to keep her under guard. Does anyone…how long does she have?”
Miranda realized she was crying—tears were running down her face even though she hadn’t even felt them start. All she could think of was Mameha, the towering woman she’d met only twice and been terrified of both times…a stately, elegant pillar of absolute strength in her midnight-black kimono, gold and silver glistening from the crests around the bottom, her face impassive but her eyes bright with wit. Miranda imagined that woman torn apart by screaming grief, her soul rent to shreds, all the dignity and intelligence in her face giving way to madness before she finally burnt out from the inside and fell dead as her Prime had.
No one was sure exactly what had happened—Tanaka had been attacked while out on business in downtown Tokyo, and Mameha had been home at the Haven, miles away. The Morningstar attackers hadn’t tried to kidnap Tanaka to use his Signet for blood magic; but they hadn’t just killed him, either, or Mameha would have died instantly. For some reason they’d shattered Tanaka’s Signet, leaving Mameha to die slowly. The Order of Elysium’s Awakening ritual had used a Bondbreaking to free Persephone…what had Morningstar done?
“Kill her,” Miranda said softly.
All eyes turned to her.
“Don’t make her go on. Open the door and let her walk out into the daylight if she wants to. Don’t make her live like this. Just…”
David immediately pushed his chair back from the desk and turned to her, and she fled into his arms, shaking. She stayed as quiet as she could, not wanting to make the situation even worse with hysterics, but she couldn’t keep it all clamped down like he could.
She tried to ground enough to listen to the others, who politely went on around her.
“Maybe a week,” Deven said, and though his attention was on the call she felt him offering strength, which she took, as well as more from Nico, then Cora, and all around the Circle—the eight of them were on different continents and some had never met, but they held her, and each other, as closely as they could.
“She’ll fade quickly assuming she doesn’t find a way to kill herself. She’ll either lapse into catatonia or go feral—whatever you do don’t let that happen. That’s not how she would want to go out.”
Jacob took a long, slow breath. “I don’t know if I can kill her,” he said. “What if…”
“Don’t, Jacob.”
Silence again as it registered that, for the first time since taking her Signet, Cora spoke up in a conference call. She was almost always present for them but stayed out of the spotlight; often she had insights to offer later, once she’d thought it over, but she tended to keep quiet and take everything in first.
Cora sounded a bit surprised at herself, but her voice was firm. “We have had our miraculous resurrections and the cheating of death,” she said. “You know, as do we all, that there will not be one for Queen Mameha. We must let her go if she will go.”
The Prime sighed. “I know.”
Miranda looked up at David, and to her surprise his eyes were bright with tears; she knew he was thinking about his old friend, and the Queen, but also about Miranda—he’d only seen a moment of what her life had been like after the Bondbreaking but he remembered the pain as well as she did.
Still, he was calm as always as he said, “We have to deal with Japan. Were there any contenders?”
“Not that I know of,” Jacob replied. “My intel suggests there were a few extremely minor warlords with eventual designs on the Signet but none of them were considered a real threat. Tanaka had that territory for a century. He might have been the Council’s peacemaker but in his own reign he was about as Zen as a stake to the heart. Not one challenger ever made it close enough to face down his Second in Command.”
“What about Zang?” David asked. “Did they take him out too?”
“Yes. Him and the entire top tier of lieutenants. The battle was, to use the American idiom, epic. Even if the Signet wanted Zang, it can’t have him. Right now there’s just a massive power vacuum, and you know what that means.”
Miranda watched the acknowledgment settle over David; she’d seen that look before. Her eyes lifted to the glass case where a growing collection of empty Signets hung; so far they were only from North American territories David could manage without stretching his resources too thinly.
Everyone had expected challengers—surely there would be upstarts trying to lay claim to those Signets. But there had not been a single one. David insisted he was only keeping the Primeless territories from falling into chaos, but something very different was happening. As soon as he had his hands on a Signet, took over and reorganized the Elite, absorbing them into his own forces and imposing his temporary rule, that territory was no longer contested. The wars stopped before they could start. No one wanted to take a run at the Signet anymore.
He refused to admit it out loud but they all knew what was really happening. Those unclaimed Signets would never be claimed again…because they already had been. The territories hadn’t been placed under protection. They had been annexed. The oldest and most powerful governing body of the Shadow World had been unable to stop David Solomon from reaching out and taking control…no vampire with anything but a death wish would try to do what the Council couldn’t.
The Council had claimed that regardless of his intentions that much power was dangerous, and what was there to stop him from taking any territory he wanted from whomever happened to have it if this went on? At the time Miranda had laughed at their paranoia.
She looked up at the Signet map to the vacant territories across the ocean. India was still clawing itself to pieces. Japan had gone dark. David hadn’t tried to grab anything outside the US because of the logistical insanity involved…but Tanaka had been his friend. The thought of letting Tanaka’s legacy be one of war and bloodshed after all he’d done for the Shadow World was unacceptable.
Her eyes met her husband’s. He lifted an eyebrow.
She nodded.
“All right,” David said. “Here’s what’s going to happen.”
*****
In her dreams, she heard screaming. Why did she always dream in screaming?
She stood in the center of an inferno, watching helplessly as people—men, women, from all parts of the world—ran in fear, the way she knew the Elves of Avilon had run, fighting blind panic to escape into the forest…a different forest…even though the sounds and the stench of burning were eerily similar.
Where was this? She turned in a circle, feeling strangely disconnected from the carnage, watching the ranks of humans advance on the little cluster of stone buildings so lovingly hidden among the trees. There were two other Avilons out there somewhere, with different names and different customs, but these were no Elves. In fact…<
br />
She fixed her gaze on one of the women and followed her as she sprinted for the treeline. Her body moved preternaturally fast, and for just a second Miranda saw it: silver eyes.
Vampires. Vampires? Living out here, like this? This was no Shadow District, it was more like…
…a monastery.
Quickly, she turned back toward the fires and tried to memorize everything she could. What did the trees look like? What kind of weather could she smell in the air? What accents clung to the voices of the vampires trying desperately to escape? The humans were growing closer, but unlike those who had destroyed Avilon these did not have guns. They had crossbows, swords, and it turned out flame throwers. Efficient.
Burn it all down. Bring me the Stone. Kill them all. Only the Stone matters.
Stone? She reached down out of reflex and felt the metal disc attached the back of her Signet. They’d called it a Stone, even though it wasn’t one. It had once been in the safekeeping of people like these—creatures of darkness living in quiet, shadow-robed peace.
What did they eat out here in the middle of nowhere? She wondered, unbidden. Deer?
She knew she’d be awake soon—she should have been afraid, or angry, or upset in any way, but apparently this wasn’t that kind of vision. All she could do was watch and try to remember. She needed to know where they were, if there was still time to avert fate. Had this already happened? Was it happening now?
Suddenly a dark-skinned woman running past where she stood froze and turned to her, eyes wide.
The woman was covered in sweat and soot, and all of hell was snapping at her heels, but she stopped and fell to her knees, her hands extending past her head to offer something she was carrying.
“Please, my Lady,” she cried. “Please take it—only the Stone matters. Take it and save us all.”
Miranda tried to speak, but the woman had already scrambled to her feet and raced away, leaving the thing she’d held out in the grass.
Amid the cacophony and the sound of dozens of bows firing, she stood over the object and bent toward it, wondering what it really was.
To her surprise, it really was a stone…and that wasn’t all.
There, in the grass, shining softly in the dark, was an oval-shaped labradorite in a heavy silver setting. The stone was glowing even without a neck to adorn. Her heart froze in her chest. She knew what it was…and to whom…to Whom…it belonged.
A Signet.
The Signet.
She reached toward it, but before she could touch its cool surface, her hold over the dream—if a dream it was—was shaken loose, and she tumbled upward, toward the feeling of someone gently shaking her shoulder.
“Miranda…wake up, beloved. Wake up. It’s only a dream.”
She laughed as she woke. Only a dream?
No such thing.
*****
“The woman you saw…you said she was black. Was she short, curvy, maybe wearing a dark robe with red trim?”
Miranda let out her breath. “Sounds right.”
Deven, too, sighed. She could hear him moving around—getting dressed, probably, for their hunt. The sun would be fully set in an hour. “It had to have been Xara. She was next in line to take over for Eladra. The amulet you saw wasn’t a Signet exactly, though it had the same essential function—they call it the Moriastelethia.”
“Gesundheit,” she heard David mutter from his desk.
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“I don’t know…it’s not Elysian Greek. Back in the day every time I asked Eladra what it meant she said it wasn’t ready to be known yet. She loved her damned riddles. But—”
“It’s ancient Elvish,” Nico said, sounding half asleep. None of them had gotten much rest today. “Sounds like the archaic dialect from the Codex. I have most of it translated now, and if I’m right, that name would mean…something like, the Hallowed Star, but…no, more specific than that, a Darkened Star. The suffix ‘thia’ would indicate it’s a holy relic, but it wouldn’t need to be said in so many words. Darkened Star. That sounds right.”
“So this Darkened Star was the High Priestess’s Signet?” Miranda concluded. “More or less, I mean.”
“I’m pretty sure it has powers ours don’t, but of course I wasn’t privy to what they were. Another five years and I would have been. Too bad.”
“But where are they? Is there time to save them? And why would Morningstar want it?”
“Forgive me, beloved, but that’s a pretty silly question,” David said around a yawn. “If it’s anything like a Signet God knows what they could use it for, but blood magic is a certainty. And if it’s got that kind of symbolic value…it’s exactly the sort of thing they’d want. We may not know exactly what the Prophet’s endgame is but it involves destroying Persephone, and that amulet is as close as we have to Persephone’s own Signet.”
“Yeah.” Miranda rubbed her forehead with both hands. “We need to get our hands on that Stone before Morningstar can, assuming it’s not already too late. You know their location, right, Dev?”
A pause. “Based on your description, I’m afraid not. Both Cloisters I knew have been destroyed, and even if they rebuilt Eladra’s the buildings wouldn’t be as old as the ones in your vision. The trees you said were most prominent weren’t right for that area. It’s almost certainly in the US, though—after the Inquisition most of the Order moved Westward.”
Nico was starting to sound a little more alert. “As soon as we get home tonight I’ll talk to Stella about locating them—finding things and people seems to be one of her particular talents. Any details you can remember to help us narrow the search would be useful, my Lady.”
She waved a pad of paper in the air even though they couldn’t see it. “Wrote it all down as soon as I woke up. We can get on it tonight, like you said. Meantime, you guys meet us at the car in half an hour—let’s get this show on the road.”
“See you there.”
David was still working—hadn’t stopped, in fact, since the conference call. He’d contacted the surviving upper-echelon Elite in Japan that he could track down and had them organizing those who remained at the Tokyo Haven; Dev’s operatives and Jacob’s Elite had the place secured already and were keeping watch over Mameha. The Queen wasn’t being confined—if she wanted to kill herself, the guards were not to stop her. But right now she was unresponsive, and they’d decided to just keep her safe for the moment to see if she became lucid long enough to make her desires known. Miranda doubted they’d have to wait more than another day.
Meanwhile David had deployed teams of his own Elite from the Midwest, where things were quiet and could spare the swords, to Japan to help secure the city. Where Tokyo went the rest of Japan would follow; keeping the city stable was key to holding the whole country.
“We should probably go,” Miranda said, hating to interrupt him. Tanaka’s death had been rather inconveniently timed—especially for Tanaka, she supposed—given what they had ahead of them tonight.
“Right,” David said, sighing. He had never been back to sleep so he was already dressed and just had to arm himself. She joined him by the door where all their gear was waiting.
He was quiet, thoughtful—not a new phenomenon, but she knew the trouble weighing down his mind. Still it was something of a surprise when he said, hands resting on the Oncoming Storm, “The Council was right about me, weren’t they.”
“That you’re a tyrant in the making who wants to subjugate the entire Shadow World? Hardly. You’ve been responding to the situation as it unfolds—it’s not like you had some master plan for world domination.”
“But I did,” he said. “I do.”
She looked at him. “Say again?”
“When I designed the version of the sensor network that I licensed out to the other Signets I left a backdoor in the code so I could get in and slave them all to my original network. I told myself it was programming access in case a problem arose that their admins couldn’t handle. It�
�s barely even a backdoor—it’s more like flipping a switch. A few commands and ownership of the whole thing transfers back to me. My original plan, or so I told myself, was to close the gap later on once they’d gotten everything up and running for themselves…but I didn’t. I left it wide open. Why?”
She didn’t know how to answer, but he went on. “And as soon as I had California, even though I hoped it was only temporary, I started thinking bigger and long-term. How would I manage far-flung territories in the corners of the world if something went wrong? It was an intellectual exercise at first but before I knew it I had an entire drive full of plans and data on half the territories in the world…just in case. What did I think was going to happen? Apparently I thought this exact scenario was coming.”
She hadn’t been aware of all that. “David, you always make plans for crazy scenarios. World-conquering strategies are like Sudoku for you. Don’t read so much into it.”
“I’m not saying I have any intention of changing my mind,” he replied. “Not as long as you’re on board. But there are times I worry myself, Miranda. I’m not comfortable with how comfortable all of this is.”
She leaned over and kissed his forehead. “Well, quit it,” she said, aiming for at least some semblance of a good mood to help lighten his. “I don’t like it when you’re insecure about things. It screws with my notion of universal order.”
He made a squinchy face at her that contrasted quite amusingly with all the leather and edged weapons. “Just let me know if you catch me monologuing or saying things like ‘death is too good for my enemies.’ Then we’ll know I’ve lost it completely.”
“Deal.” She slid her arm through his as they left the suite. “For now…let’s try and act like we’ve got it together. We need to present a stable front for Nico. Tonight’s going to be hard enough on him without us being all weird.”
“True.” A different sort of uncertainty touched his expression. “It’s not too late to—”
“We talked about this,” she said firmly. “I know you wanted to do the whole thing somewhere safe and indoors, but it was Nico’s decision and we have to honor it.”
Shadow Rising (The Shadow World Book 7) Page 4
