David, on the other side, had his hand on the doorknob as well, and was pushing as she pulled.
He gave a quiet yelp and jumped back. “Jesus, Miranda!”
She stepped back too, staring at him as if she’d never seen him, trying to make sense of what was racing through her body and the accusations she had no idea how to make even if she knew what they were.
“Where have you been?” she managed, wincing at how shrill she sounded.
His eyebrows shot up. “In the Batcave,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep.”
She looked him up and down. “You’re wearing city clothes.”
A blink. “This is what I had on before bed—it was the first thing I grabbed.”
That was true. Same long-sleeved shirt, same pants. No coat, which surely he would have worn if he’d gone into town in this freezing weather.
Now, he said patiently, “It’s noon, Miranda. Where would I have gone?”
That was also true.
She shook her head, moving back out of the way to let him in. Reality was starting to reassert itself, and the utter absurdity of what she was even contemplating contemplating was hitting her as the dream wore off.
David watched her as he walked past, worry on his face, but was he worried about her losing her mind, or her knowing something? And what would he have had to call Novotny for in the daytime?
What was she even thinking? That he would lie to her, to all of them? That he could? One of the most valuable parts of being Signet bound was that it all but destroyed the possibility of dishonesty between partners; they were simply too closely linked to each other’s minds.
But Deven had blocked Nico out…
“Are you all right?” he asked, half-sitting on the back of the couch. They were both speaking quietly to avoid waking the others, but Deven was muttering and shifting toward wakefulness.
“I…” She tried to force her mind back to sense, out of paranoia and into the facts; she had absolutely no reason to distrust him, even assuming he could block them all out enough to have some hidden agenda, except for a dream about Kai that had been far from conclusive.
She decided to go for the truth, or most of it, while she tried to figure the rest out. “I had a dream,” she said. “A dream about Kai—he told me you were in trouble. That someone had you.”
The confusion in his face turned to concern, and this was definitely for her. “You’re really shaken up,” he said, coming forward to put his arms around her. “I’m sorry, beloved. You don’t usually react when I get up in the middle of the day.”
She clung to him, trying to shove away her fears—baseless fears. They had to be. The whole thing was insane. What could he be up to, anyway? What could possibly be worth lying for? He was one of the most honorable men she’d ever known.
“We’re going to find Kai,” he said, voice rumbling against her ear. “And I’m here…like I always will be.”
She nodded. “I know…I’m sorry for freaking out, I just…”
“With your precog I’m surprised all of your dreams don’t send you into a fit,” he said, a smile in his voice this time. “Let’s go back to bed, my Queen.”
Miranda nodded again and let go of him so he could take his clothes back off; she was starting to feel foolish, on top of everything else, the longer she was awake.
And she probably would have dismissed the whole thing as the random firings of her overburdened mind if her eyes hadn’t caught one tiny thing, a single anomaly in the life of a vampire who had taken dinner from a glass last night and had not spilled a drop:
There was a bloodstain on his sleeve.
*****
Nico perched on the edge of the table next to where Dev stood while the others assembled in the study, settling into the plush sofa and chairs, none looking much the worse for wear even after their ordeal the past few days.
Jacob and Cora seemed to be holding each other’s hands even more tightly than usual, but after plenty of rest and blood looked completely recovered; Olivia and Avi were much the same, and if anything Avi was more comfortable here among them than before, either because he had realized he was welcome or because after the trial-by-fire of becoming Thirdborn, what did he have to feel inferior about?
Miranda sat down next to David but, Nico noticed, didn’t immediately snuggle in against him. She was a little stiff for a second, but took a breath and sat back, drawing her legs up and crossing them. David squeezed her knee and she smiled at him, and there was nothing worrisome in their faces, but…something didn’t feel quite right with the Queen.
There’d be time to ask later, he supposed. They might have had a fight, though echoes of it would probably have made it to Nico at some point. She might just be in a bad mood. She was hardly obligated to share every detail of her inner world.
Once everyone was seated and wine and other “adult beverages,” as the Queen called them, had been poured, Deven took the lead with the meeting.
“First of all, let’s start with what we already knew about the Firstborn. Jacob, you start.”
The Prime looked around, smiling faintly at having been “called on” like in school, and cleared his throat. “Well, there never was a lot, just the usual bedtime stories—that somewhere sleeping in the Earth were the first vampires, so old they had no sires. Mindless killing machines, monsters, with no conscience or remorse. Some people said there were thousands of them, some said a dozen. Some said they were leaderless. Some said they had a king. All anyone really agreed on was that they probably weren’t real.”
Deven nodded. “Anyone else hear differently?”
“I heard they were buried in Russia,” Avi spoke up a bit reluctantly. “That Dzhamgerchinov knew where they were and kept them secret so he could raise them if he liked. I always thought it was nonsense, but some do believe it.”
Deven chuckled. “The old bastard probably started that rumor. It sounds like something he’d do.”
Everyone blinked at him. “Wait,” David said. “You actually know Dzhamgerchinov? Personally?”
Deven lifted an eyebrow. “Of course I do. Not well, and not as anything like an ally. He doesn’t do allies. But I was hardly going to let him off without an introduction.”
The focus of the meeting momentarily fell by the way as wild curiosity overtook everyone’s intentions. “So…what’s he like?” Jacob asked.
“Like? He’s an asshole. A lot of what you’ve heard about him is true—he’s brutal, violent, looks like a boulder covered in hair. One thing he’s not is an idiot—he manages the stories that circulate about him very carefully. He threatened me with disembowelment, I threatened him with rumors that he liked to wear show-pony livery while being fucked with a giant leather dildo. We had an understanding.”
More blinks. Deven saw their faces and laughed outright.
“The point being,” he went on, still laughing, “while it’s entirely possible the Firstborn were buried under his territory, he had no idea where they’d be and wouldn’t have wanted to. He liked using the imagery of the myth for his own gain but he would never have let anything that unpredictable near his Haven.”
They all looked like they wanted to ask more questions, but at least for the moment everyone let Dev get back on topic:
“The going story is that Persephone created the Firstborn to win a competition with Theia over who could better manage humanity’s uncontrollable breeding. The Codex has a slightly different version. In it the goddesses were asked for help by a third deity—the one that had created humans in the first place. The Codex is notably disinterested in the identity of that deity; all we know is they wanted to see which of the sisters could come up with a better solution. They apparently found Persephone’s idea appalling, as you might imagine.”
“The Firstborn,” David said with a nod. “She created them, and whoever this deity was said no thank you.”
But Dev shook his head. “Not them. Him. To begin with there was o
nly one Firstborn—a prototype, let’s say. Seph made him out of pure darkness.”
“I thought She is pure darkness,” Cora said.
Another slow shake of Deven’s head. “No. That’s the distinction we all need to grasp about Her, just as with Theia. They are, neither of them, pure anything. They’re yin and yang, each containing a touch of the other. How can we know light exists? Only by comparing it to darkness. The night contains light of all kinds, and the day contains shadow. They’re both meaningless without each other. So it was with the Firstborn—Her mistake was to create him without any light at all. No Moon, no stars, only the abyss—like a black hole, swallowing everything, never satisfied. The Codex called him the Hungry One, or simply the Hunger.”
Miranda started. “The what?”
“In Elysian Elvish—the Elvish in the Codex—it’s—”
Miranda said it at the same time: “Agnilath.”
Deven glanced at her, nodded. “There are about a dozen other names for him, but the takeaway is that he was the very first of the Firstborn. When the deity who’d asked for help basically told Her to fuck off, She decided to try again, thinking it was the power that was too great and that weakening the Hungry One would make him manageable. So She split him in half.”
“This is starting to sound awfully familiar,” Jacob said with dismay. “Let me guess—She made him a Queen.”
“Agdilan,” Deven confirmed. “That was pretty egregious failure too, so, Persephone decided to start over. But She didn’t destroy them, not yet. She thought the basic design was sound, and that by further weakening the darkness in them She would hit the right concentration. It was Theia who pointed out Her mistake.”
“All of this is making Persephone look like kind of an idiot,” Olivia pointed out dubiously.
“Perhaps. I think it’s closer to the truth to say She was young and inexperienced—creating things wasn’t Her area. But if it’s any consolation, Theia was screwing up just as badly. She started with the other extreme—all light. But Her creatures were just as useless because they did nothing but shine—blinding everything around them, leaving no room for thought or will, just purity. Still, Theia was the first one to get the hint, and being the nicer sister shared it with Seph. They had to borrow from each other’s toolboxes if they were going to get anywhere.”
Now, Nico took up the story. “At this point, Persephone took the Firstborn and buried them—She should have destroyed them completely, but She couldn’t bring Herself to. She felt pity for them, grotesque beasts that they were—they were Her offspring, and She wasn’t ready to give up on them. Once they were locked away She set to work on the Secondborn, and taking Theia’s advice, tempered their darkness with moonlight and starlight, as well as with a touch of humanity. She made them out of humans to ground their power in the mortal world, and from that they gained compassion and a need for family. They were still made to kill, and that purpose would drive their hunger, but She made sure they had reason and intelligence and self-control. And She kept one important aspect of the Firstborn: Duality. The Secondborn too would be split down the center, with the power and temperament of each balancing the other. They sired more vampires, but the next generation had less of a hunger for death—only for the power in blood. So while many still killed, many chose not to, and the Secondborn were given the authority to rule them and keep them from killing too many at once in one place. But in Her devotion to Her new children, Persephone neglected the old, and years later, they escaped their prison.”
“That’s how the first war started,” Deven said. “Agnilath and Agdilan vowed to kill Persephone before She could kill them. In the meantime they started slaughtering everything in their path, human and animal, and destroying the Earth in every way they could think of. And worse yet, the Firstborn were after Theia too—in fact their ultimate goal was to murder all the gods and rule creation themselves.”
“How would that even be possible if Firstborn themselves weren’t gods?” Jacob demanded. Clearly the whole story was straining credibility to his ears, and Nico didn’t blame him his doubt.
“Apparently they could have become gods,” Nico replied, causing Jacob’s eyebrows to shoot up almost into his hairline. “There is something called the Godspell—in the Codex it’s called the Dialora, but there’s no further description, no indication that such a thing still exists or even really ever did. But it was their endgame. Whatever it is, if they use it, they become deities, or at least as powerful as deities…again, the Codex isn’t clear. What’s important is that they didn’t find it.”
“What they did figure out was that they could use the blood of their victims—their lives, and their death-energy—to do magic.” Deven tapped his Signet. “And these.”
“And the Prophet knew how to do it,” Miranda said softly. “The Prophet knows.”
“Agnilath,” David said into the silence that followed.
“We still don’t know exactly how the Hungry One was freed,” Deven said at length. “We know that Morningstar raised him using a ritual like the Awakening. Based on what I’ve read in the Hallowed Diaries, there’s always been the threat that he would return. But the rituals needed—this Codex of Morningstar’s we’ve heard about—I don’t know where it came from, or who found it.”
“How did the war end?” Miranda asked.
Nico and Dev exchanged a look. “Cataclysm,” Deven said. “At this point in history there were around fifty Primes, even though the human population was still pretty low; there was already a lot of bickering going on, threats of war. But the Hungry Ones started capturing them, two by two—not killing them like they are now, but saving them up for one very, very powerful ritual. Because Persephone had spun Her own being into the Signets, they could be used against Her. Agnilath murdered so many Signets at once that it essentially broke Persephone’s power—just long enough for the Firstborn to take Her prisoner and banish her to someplace called the Outer Dark, which isn’t really even a place, just…nothingness.”
“There was only one thing to do,” Nico added. “The strongest of the remaining Signets, the Circle—the first She had made, a close-knit group of eight—came together one last time, and in essence repeated the ritual Agnilath had performed, sacrificing themselves in order to destroy the Firstborn. The Hungry Ones fell to dust, their souls—or whatever passes for souls in such filthy creatures—were scattered and buried deep. The entire Circle was vaporized…except for their Signets, which remained whole and were found to be indestructible. They, like all other Signets, passed from bearer to bearer, while empires rose and fell. The Order of Elysium became all but extinct, and the book of magic written down by the first Hallowed, one of the Circle, was passed from Hallowed to Hallowed, copied over and over, even the parts none of them could read. There were prophecies, of course, that one day it would all begin again—that the Raven Mother would return, but so would the Hungry Ones, and there would be another war, this time to decide the fate of everyone—even the Goddess Herself.”
This time the silence went on for a while, each of the others absently touching their own Signets, trying to wrap their minds around what they had just learned. Nico had intended to tell them about the Gate spell and other discoveries from the Codex, but in truth it might have to wait for another time.
He knew that they would need time to consider the full import of the story on their own lives, on their own possible fates. If it had taken the destruction of the Circle to defeat the Firstborn before…what chance did they have now?
A very good one, he had already realized. After all, the first Circle had been working without Persephone’s help or true power; he could only imagine how traumatic it had been for them to lose their connection to Her, yet they had given everything they had left to ensure the survival of Her children and, in doing so, of the entire planet.
“Is he raising the others?” Cora asked softly. “He must plan to, or at least his Queen. And if only an immortal body could conta
in him…”
“He probably used an Elf for her too,” Deven realized.
Nico felt his stomach lurch with nausea—any one of the captured Elves, including Deven’s mother, could have been taken over by one of those monsters by now. And only the luck of being close enough to the forest to hide had saved Kalea from a similar fate.
“But he hasn’t been stockpiling Primes,” David said, sitting forward suddenly. “He’s been killing them for comparatively minor magic—creating what amounts to a zombie army. There are far fewer Signets than there were back then. So we can conclude that his intention isn’t to attack Persephone the same way as before.”
“Then what is he planning?” Olivia wanted to know. “What does he want this time?”
“What he didn’t have last time.” All eyes turned to Miranda. “It’s obvious. Why did he banish Her instead of annihilating Her? Because he couldn’t kill Her. Even a creature made of pure darkness with godlike power can’t kill a god. But my guess is something can.”
“Another god,” Nico finished. “This time he’s not throwing away his shot on a wound…he’s going for Her throat. He wants the Godspell.”
*****
The second limo pulled away from the Haven drive, and the Tetrad watched its taillights gradually fade down the long road to the edge of the property where the exterior gate and guard towers stood.
No one had wanted to leave. The embraces were long and reluctantly released; smiles turned into tears. In the space of a few days the Circle had become even more of a family, and putting a continent between them was more painful than anyone expected.
“I’ll start working on the permanent Gate spell tonight,” Nico said, determination fixing the thought in his mind. “We can have them among all of our Havens and visit any night we wish.”
“What do you need for the spell?” David asked.
“A room we can dedicate to the purpose, ideally. Something small, perhaps one of the studies we never use. We’ll clear out all the furniture and each wall can hold its own Gate.”
Shadow Rising (The Shadow World Book 7) Page 28
