Shadowbound

by Dianne Sylvan

  Nico looked at him, amused. “Do you honestly believe in coincidence, my Lord?”

  He had no answer for that. “Then what happened?”

  “As soon as I touched the stone I could see you, and as shocked as I was to find out you existed—probably the only creature left on earth with enough of our blood to have our eyes—I knew immediately what was wrong, and I knew I had to help.”

  Deven stared at him, unbelieving. “You were willing to leave your home and come to this world you knew nothing about, all alone . . . and then stay here for weeks to fix a broken-down vampire whose entire life has been devoted to death . . . just because I’m one quarter Elf?”

  “Not just because of that,” Nico answered.

  “Then . . . why?”

  The Elf lifted a hand and brushed his fingers across Deven’s lips. There was a touch of humor in his eyes, but his voice was full of a sudden vulnerability that made Deven shake inside. “Is it not obvious?” he asked softly.

  They stared at each other, so close together he could hear the Elf’s heart racing, and Deven almost, almost let himself sink into what he knew could very easily happen . . . but he shook his head, turning away from Nico, away from those damned eyes.

  He felt it clearly: The Elf was hurt. “I am sorry,” Nico said.

  “I can’t,” Deven told him, trying to keep the words gentle. “It isn’t you, it’s . . . all the memories you’ve stirred up seem to have one common denominator: I hurt people. I’ve done nothing but cause Jonathan pain for sixty years. He’ll say he doesn’t mind—and the truth is he probably doesn’t . . . but I mind. I have so many deaths and so much suffering on my conscience already.”

  With a deep breath, Nico rose and stood silently until Deven looked up at him.

  The Elf was smiling regretfully. “Well done,” he said.

  “Well done?”

  “I thought, after spending so much time in your mind, that you could not surprise me.” Nico reached down and touched Deven’s face, fingers slipping around to his lips before he withdrew the hand, stepped back, and bowed. “If you have no more need of me, my Lord, I shall retire.”

  Deven nodded, not entirely trusting himself to speak, but before he had much time to consider any possible fallout of the last few minutes, he heard a familiar footfall approaching, and Jonathan called, “What happened?”

  Dev had no idea what to say. The Consort joined him, his face concerned; his hazel eyes fell on the still-open door from the terrace into the guest suite, and Deven felt himself flushing with undeserved shame.

  “You weren’t answering your phone,” Jonathan said a bit sternly. “I was starting to freak out a little.”

  Deven groped in his pockets and sighed. “I must have left it in the bedroom—I’m sorry, love.”

  Jonathan leaned forward and kissed his forehead, and thankfully he didn’t push the issue. “Well, aside from that . . . you look like you’re feeling better. You look like you again.”

  Deven nodded. “That’s why I texted, to tell you how well the magic was working. What were you doing in town, anyway?”

  Jonathan frowned. “There was a . . . weird disturbance. Normally it would have been strictly an Elite matter, but they thought it was far enough from the ordinary that they called for one of us to evaluate the situation.”

  “What situation?”

  “Just after sunset two vampires, a couple, were walking down McMillan Boulevard and were attacked. One was killed; the other managed to escape and run for it until she found a patrol. The attackers followed her and went after the Elite as well. There was a pretty bloody battle, but we were lucky—none of ours was killed, though there were some significant injuries. Two of the attackers went down, but the rest got away.”

  “So . . . was it a gang we know, or something new?”

  “Oh, it was new, all right.” Jonathan looked like he could scarcely believe his own words, and after the next sentence it was clear why: “The attackers were human.”

  Dev gave him a quizzical look. “Humans that could keep up with a vampire on the run and then take on an Elite patrol and live to tell the tale? How does that happen?”

  “The Elite who fought them said they were way stronger and faster than humans are supposed to be—as fast as vampires.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “It gets worse.”

  “Of course it does.”

  “The Elite patrol leader found these on the bodies.” Jonathan reached inside his jacket and took out a plastic baggie, handing it to Deven.

  He stared down at the bag for a long minute before he said, “Get David on the phone.”

  • • •

  Miranda didn’t remember the first human she had killed as a vampire. She’d been in the grip of her transformation to Thirdborn and the whole day was a blur. She knew it was a woman who had killed her own baby, and afterward the Queen had given the woman’s husband an anonymous donation to help him move on. She knew that gift for what it was: blood money. She didn’t know how else to atone.

  It was, as David had said, depressingly easy to find another one like her.

  Once upon a time the combined misery and evil of the human world had assaulted Miranda’s mind as men had assaulted her body, and since then she had stayed away from minds like theirs, feeding only on perfectly average women, those who were healthy and wouldn’t suffer for it.

  She no longer had that privilege.

  “Slowly, beloved,” David murmured in her ear. “Don’t make yourself sick.”

  Her Prime’s hand pressed against her back, reassuringly strong, as she pressed against the body she had pinned to the wall. Blood flowed freely from the four perfectly round holes she had punched in the woman’s throat, and this part, at least, was familiar. Prime and Queen both kept a hard hold over the human’s mind, stilling her struggles. She might feel some pain, but essentially her mind was already asleep and would not awaken. It was a kindness the human didn’t deserve; she had scammed dozens of elderly people out of their savings, leaving them penniless and often homeless.

  Miranda paused and looked over at her husband, who was watching her, his eyes still black, desire there that should have disgusted or at least frightened her. The first time she’d seen his eyes change she had been afraid, but now . . . the intense emotion and power that brought about the blackness affected her in a very different way than it had before. She gestured for him to come to her, to wrap his arm around her waist and hold her, whispering encouragement into her ear. Being so close to him set her skin on fire, made her want him so badly . . . but more important, his added power helped her keep the human from fighting without losing her own focus. She didn’t want to make anyone suffer.

  This was it: the point of no return. Her heartbeat fell into sync with the human’s, signaling that if she didn’t want to cause permanent damage, she had to stop.

  She didn’t stop. She couldn’t. It was too late to go back to what she had been before. She had accepted all of this, knowingly or not, the minute she lay down with David and bared her throat to his teeth.

  She had read that when people died, as in hospital rooms, it was a quiet, gentle thing, a sigh out, eyes drifting shut, machines flatlining the only loud sounds in the room.

  To her kind, it was a little different.

  The woman’s death erupted from her as if her soul were exploding out of her body in its desperation to win free of her life. Perhaps her soul went somewhere and perhaps it didn’t, but her death, that last burst of energy, rushed out through her veins and into the Queen’s mouth—it filled her body, her mind, with the deep, hell-dark energy of the woman’s last moment. Miranda drank it in, shut her eyes, and standing there with blood still trickling from her mouth, the Queen was at last renewed.

  She gripped the woman’s shoulders and kept her where she was until the last drop of blood had hit Miranda’s tongue, and with a hard swallow, she finally let the human drop to the concrete in a lifeless heap.

 
She was crying, but she had no idea whether it was from sorrow or joy; relief, sweet and hot and black shot through with red, surged through her, her cells washed in that darkness, carrying healing and an almost sexual enjoyment through her body. Her vision sharpened again, sounds became clearer.

  Her shields were restored to their normal strength. She hadn’t even realized they were wobbling until that moment. No wonder she had felt so horrible, if her empathy had been creeping up on her against her knowledge or will.

  She had let it go too long. Another night and her shields might have collapsed, her sanity falling with them—and this time it might not come back.

  She stared at the body for a minute. I hope the money was worth it. Better luck next time.

  Breathing deeply, she looked over at her husband, who gave the corpse a faintly disgusted look and waved his hand over it dismissively to banish it.

  He saw her watching and inclined his head toward the nearby Dumpster. “We’re going to have to think of a better place to put them,” he said. “One or two will probably pass unnoticed, but two every month increases the odds of someone seeing a body in the trash.”

  He spoke so casually, as if it were any of his myriad logistical operations and just another problem to solve.

  Miranda pulled her sweaty hair back from her face and held it with her hands for a minute. “This is our life now,” she said quietly.

  He came to her, held her close. “We’ll make this work,” he said. “I think . . . I think it will come again every new moon.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I can feel it,” he replied with a sigh. “And I don’t think we should wait until we’re losing our minds next time—we pushed it too far. Technically the new moon was yesterday afternoon; if we’d given in last night we could have avoided this misery. We don’t have to get to that point, if we just . . .”

  “Kill people,” she finished for him. “Every month for the rest of our lives.”

  He didn’t try to justify it, or make it less awful, which she appreciated, even though she knew he was far more okay with it than she was. Three hundred fifty years did offer a certain perspective that she, still young enough to be alive by human reckoning, still lacked.

  She knew there had been a time when he’d taken human life as wantonly as many vampires did. Most of them realized over time that it was unnecessary and would lead to discovery and death at the hands of Hunters, but a few kept going until they were taken down either by the Hunters themselves or the Signets. In “civilized” vampire society, killing humans was looked at as a silly phase the young went through that wasn’t sustainable for the Shadow World as a whole. Most of the Signets who had no-kill laws did so not because of a love for humanity but because they didn’t want Hunters infesting their territories.

  “I guess it’s a good thing we’re above our own law,” she said tiredly. She didn’t feel guilty . . . at least not yet. She was in a strange emotional place that was sort of like shock, except not numb—detached, more like. She felt detached from what she had done. Was that how it was supposed to work? Did becoming a killer mean she would no longer care? Was she condemned to devolve into a sociopath?

  David seemed to sense her confusion and paused, kissing her forehead and telling her, “We both know you’re never going to become a mindless killer, Miranda. You’re not capable of not caring. That detachment you’re feeling may keep you sane until you can make peace with this.”

  She stopped and stared at him. “I got off on it, David. Where am I supposed to find peace in that?”

  He didn’t have an answer for her.

  They started walking again, and he let out a breath and returned to the previous subject. “I can talk to Maguire about finding prisoners—Texas does love its capital punishment, and death row is always a busy place.”

  They had, at last, reached the car, and he waved Harlan away so the driver wouldn’t have to come around the limo—a much bigger pain than circling the Lincoln—and opened the door himself, settling Miranda into the seat as if she were an invalid. She didn’t complain; it felt good to be fussed over, to be treated like a treasure instead of . . .

  She closed her eyes. Don’t think about it yet. Let it be until you’ve rested. Just let it be.

  Miranda curled up against her Prime and let the rhythmic motion of the car lull her into the first peaceful sleep she’d had in days.

  • • •

  PLEASE COME. HE’S ASKING FOR YOU.

  The words on the screen wavered in front of her eyes. The longer she stared at them, the less sense they made. English seemed to have a short life cycle in print—after a few minutes the words broke apart in the mind until they were unrecognizable and lost all meaning. If she stared at a word too long, she started doubting the spelling. “Please” . . . what did that even mean?

  Her hands were shaking on the keys. She couldn’t keep her fingers there any longer.

  Her eyes fell on the sterile package on the other end of the table and the vial of clear liquid sitting beside it, unassuming, innocuous. From this distance it could have been anything. Whatever was in the vial could be something as harmless as vitamin B12, or it could be the difference between life and death for its recipient.

  In her case that was only metaphorically true.

  As always, the shame crawled its way up her spine and clamped its jaws around her throat. The litany began: How could you? How could you? He’s an old man. An old dying man. How could you?

  He doesn’t know the difference, her other internal voice, the one she imagined as a petulant child in a dirty pinafore, wailed. I need it and he doesn’t! There’s no way anyone could find out. What difference does it make?

  You’ll lose your license.

  Oh, who the fuck cares?

  She had to smile at that. The little girl in her mind loved to curse. She’d started cursing, in fact, after George told her about his secretary—such a cliché. He moved out, and the little imaginary girl stamped her foot and threw things.

  Six months later, alone in the house she’d grown up in with an old man she barely recognized as her father drooling and raving in a hospital bed in the room that had once been her mother’s art studio, Mari knew something had to give.

  It wouldn’t be long—a month, at most—before the old man shuffled off his goddamn mortal coil and finally got out of her life. She couldn’t hide here much longer. There would be estate sales, paperwork . . . what she really wanted was to take a gas can to the property and burn it down with his corpse inside. No fuss, no muss. A modern Viking funeral. It should be so simple. As it was, the indignity of death wasn’t enough for Americans—no, after you died all the possessions you had worked your whole life to collect were sold off, stored, dumped in the trash, anything to get them out of the way of the living who would move into your house and erase your existence.

  One of these days she would die, too, and Jenny would be forced to observe the ritual of sorting, culling, trashing. Mari had left the seven-year-old with George for a couple of weeks, since she was out of school and Mari didn’t want to force her to deal with a mean old man who pissed himself and looked like a haunted-house ghoul. Jenny sounded happy on the phone—absentee father figure guilt equaled lavish attention and a lot of fun trips. That was fine, for now. Mari hated a lot of things about George but knew he’d take good care of their daughter.

  She realized she had been staring at the vial for several minutes and wrenched her eyes away, but they landed somewhere else she didn’t want them to: the copy of Rolling Stone that had been lying there since she had returned to Rio Verde to pose as a one-woman hospice crew. She had most of the magazine’s glossy insides memorized, but nothing so well as the cover.

  A woman with ridiculously gorgeous red curly hair falling all around her shoulders stared with intense leaf-green eyes at the camera like some modern-day Medusa daring people to meet her gaze. She wore black, tight leather that showed off the milk-and-honey of her complexion, including
thigh-high boots and a corset top providing a perfect laced-up frame for her breasts. She wasn’t posing provocatively; she was just standing there, one arm resting on the side of the black acoustic guitar that hung around her shoulder. And right there between and above said breasts was that weird necklace she never seemed to take off, the huge ruby on a heavy antique silver setting.

  She was smiling with a hint of mischief and a lot of humor. Mari didn’t remember her smiling at all when they were young.

  The headline beside her read: Miranda Grey Bares Her Teeth: The Rolling Stone Interview.

  She couldn’t take it anymore. She lurched up out of her chair, nearly knocking over her laptop, and seized the package and vial, dropping back down into the chair with the items clutched to her chest.

  It wasn’t any different from vaccinating a toddler. She tried to think of it that way. She was giving that imaginary little girl in her head a vaccine against reality.

  The ritual was calming: roll up her sleeve, run her fingers over the skin to find just the right spot. Her veins were in abominable shape after six months of this, but at least there was no one around to notice, and when she left the house she wore long sleeves even in the Texas heat.

  Open up the syringe packet. Watch the clear liquid fill the syringe, then flick the air bubbles out. It was the same kind of magic that warded off chicken pox and polio.

  The old man was on about twenty different drugs, a great many intravenous, and given his condition there was no reason for the hospital to bat an eye at a little extra morphine here and there. At this point if he wanted to spend his remaining days in an opiate coma, who were they to say no?

  Nobody was watching anyway. This was Rio Verde—the people here had known her since she was born. They whispered about her mother, but they knew Mari and her father were normal people, stable people. They were a family of doctors and lawyers.

  And Miranda.

  Mari hadn’t spent enough time in town since arriving here to really get a sense of how people felt about their local-girl-done-good. The local teenagers were probably fans, wearing holes in her CDs and dreaming of a day when they, too, could get the hell out of this town and make something of themselves.