Maybe then they would figure out the second step.
David’s phone rang, and he groped after it halfheartedly. “Solomon.”
Miranda didn’t want to listen. She wasn’t sure she could take anything else falling apart.
“Oh, God.”
Damn it. She shut her eyes. When he hung up, she said wearily, “Jacob calling with another assassination?”
“No.” Something in his tone made her open her eyes. “Jacob and Cora never made it to the airport,” he said. “They’re gone.”
Sixteen
Cora fought her way out of oblivion, forcing herself to open her eyes even though her eyelids felt like they each weighed a ton.
At first her surroundings made no sense. She lay on a tile floor, freezing cold; directly in front of her was a metal door. The chamber she was in was empty of furniture and had no windows.
She didn’t understand. The last thing she remembered was being in the car, on her way to the airport with Jacob and Vràna. They’d gotten stuck in traffic because of an accident ahead, and the driver took an alternate route. Had they stopped? Had someone attacked the car?
“Jacob,” she said, her quiet voice echoing off the tiles. “Jacob!”
Very, very softly, she heard to her left, “Cora?”
She crawled over to the wall and pressed her ear to it. “I am here.”
“Are you hurt?”
“No, are you?”
“No. Do you remember what happened? We were in traffic so long we missed our flight, so we stopped to have a quick hunt and they got the drop on us. I think we were sedated.”
“But where are we?” she asked.
“My guess is Morningstar headquarters.”
“Can you Mist?”
“I tried,” Jacob said. “These cells are shielded. Clearly they know their audience.”
Cora swallowed hard, the reality of their situation beginning to sink in. They had been captured, were now imprisoned . . . and everyone knew what Morningstar did with Signets.
She struggled against paralyzing fear. “What should we do?”
“Wait,” he answered. “That’s all we can do for now. That and pray.”
“Did you see where they took Vràna?” she asked.
“No. She’s a smart dog—she probably pulled a Lassie and ran all the way back to the Haven for help.”
Cora didn’t really understand the reference, but she was too shaken to say so. She pulled her knees up to her chin, trying to get warm and trying not to cry. In addition to her present fear, she could feel something . . . a great, gaping chasm of sorrow in her heart. She knew it wasn’t hers, but if the room was shielded . . . either the shields weren’t as strong as they thought, or whatever was happening in the outside world was terrible enough to reach her even here.
Distantly, she heard men’s voices, growing closer. They were coming.
She heard the cell door next to hers open, heard a struggle. “Get the other one!” one of the men yelled.
Keys rattled outside and the door swung open. There were four men outside, each one holding a crossbow loaded with a wooden stake, all of them pointed right at her.
“Try to fight and we’ll turn you into a fucking pincushion,” one of them said.
They dragged her out into the corridor and pushed her down the hall. She couldn’t see Jacob anywhere. She couldn’t try to escape if she didn’t know where he was; if she left him behind they would surely kill him and end her anyway.
The hallway opened up into a large room full of people. Row after row of black-clad soldiers sat on wooden pews lined up in front of a broad stone altar.
The men hauled her up to the front of the room and grabbed her by both arms to hold her still. She pulled in her energy and tried to Mist, but this room, too, was shielded—whatever went on inside was protected and hidden from the outside. That suggested to her addled mind that this place was still in the city; if they were out in the country like the Haven, they wouldn’t be so keen on keeping their activities concealed. In fact, each area she’d been dragged through reminded her of the courthouse they had been to—shabby, decades old. This might be an abandoned school or something similar.
She was trying to distract herself from what was coming. It was working until a second group of men entered the room, this group bearing Jacob.
They held him at stakepoint, forcing him up onto the altar and onto his back, where they shackled him down and roughly took his Signet, laying it on a nearby table.
She knew they must have threatened to harm her to get him to cooperate. He was not a man of rash action—he would wait for an opportune moment, taking his time to assess the situation before acting. She hoped he had a plan.
Seeing him chained there, Cora nearly fainted from the intensity of her fear but held herself up by inches—she wasn’t going to embarrass Jacob or herself by swooning like a Victorian lady.
Jacob turned his head and caught her eyes. She could feel his love for her reverberating from one end of their bond to the other. She refused to look away. If they were going to die, the last thing either would see was the other’s eyes.
A man in cleric’s clothes came forward. The Shepherd. Her English wasn’t quite good enough to follow everything he said, but he was delivering some kind of sermon, and she caught words like “demon” and “lake of fire.” The next part, though, she did understand, and suddenly the sadness she had felt earlier made terrible sense.
“As you all know, brothers, tonight we celebrate our victory over the Archdemons. The judgment of God has rained down upon them, turning their fortress to ash, and when silence fell, two of them lay dead. This war is won, my brothers—but now comes the most important part. We must lay to waste all of the remaining demons who walk the earth, starting with their leaders and finishing with every last vile beast of their kind. Tonight we will begin our new chapter by taking the power of these two remaining Archdemons, and with it we shall bring in more to our cause . . . hundreds more. Let us pray.”
Cora wanted to wrestle her way out of their grasp and shake the Shepherd, demanding to know whom they had killed. If a Pair was dead . . . there were only two possibilities.
The Shepherd shifted from prayer into intonation, reading something from a large leather-bound book with symbols all over it. She felt a crawling, slimy energy from the book, whether part of some spell or due to the kind of people who had used it.
He took up a large bowl and set it down on the floor next to the altar, then said quietly to Jacob, “Fight me, and before we kill her we’ll pass her around and make sure she’s begging for death.”
The Shepherd seized Jacob’s arm and yanked it out to the side where it hung over the bowl. She saw the knife in his hand a second before he sliced it across Jacob’s wrist, and blood began to drip down from the cut, splashing into the bowl.
Cora thought she understood—they would use the blood to create their warriors, but to activate the spell they needed a Signet’s death, and they intended to use a Bondbreaking. That way she would be alive a little longer, and they could repeat the blood ritual with her death as a catalyst.
She watched, helpless, as the Shepherd laid the Signet at the head of the altar six inches or so from Jacob’s head. She saw the hammer nearby, and sheer panic swept her up in its fist; she began to struggle in their grasp, harder and harder. The Shepherd barked something about holding her still, then yelled to Cora, “Make one more move and I gut him!”
He took the knife and held it over Jacob’s midsection. They were going to die regardless—she had to try. She jerked sideways one more time and very nearly wrested herself free.
The Shepherd’s mouth tightened into a severe line, and he plunged the knife down all the way through Jacob’s stomach. The Prime didn’t scream, but he let out a strangled cry. Blood flowed out of the wound and over his side, coating the white stone with red.
Cora stared at the blood, and suddenly something inside her . . . snapped.
All th
e noise in the room faded away, and her fear evaporated beneath the fire of something else entirely: anger.
How dare you? How dare you hurt my friends, even kill them, and then try to take our power? How dare you lay a hand on him? Or on me? How dare you . . . human!
She felt her body temperature rising. She breathed hard, glaring at the Shepherd through a red haze of growing rage, imagining she could take her strength and hit him with it, make him hurt the way her friends had hurt.
The Shepherd saw the look on her face and went pale, grabbing the Signet and the hammer and backing away from the altar. He darted over to the wall and held the Signet up against it—the hammer swung toward the stone—
Cora felt her rage rising up through her body, and she welcomed it. She let it wash through her, and pushed, screaming, “NO!”
The Shepherd burst into flame.
He shrieked, trying to bat the flames out on his clothes, but they leapt up over him too fast, and the fire consumed him. The Signet tumbled out of his hand and hit the floor.
Cora felt the men behind her drop their grip, and she spun around toward them, pushing.
All four ignited at the same time. They ran for the exits, screaming, but didn’t reach them before they were completely immolated. Meanwhile all of the other soldiers were shoving each other, fighting their way out of the room in a panic, while each pew went up in flames as they cleared it.
The more she pushed, the easier it was, and soon she was surrounded by fire, the intense heat like balm on her skin. She breathed in the heat, loving how it felt, what it promised.
“Cora!”
She turned to see Jacob trying to jerk his arms hard enough to break the chains. She came back to herself and ran over to what remained of the Shepherd’s body and, not far away, found a ring of keys he had dropped next to his knife, and Jacob’s Signet. The latter she shoved into the pocket of the coat she still had on, and she kept the knife in her hand as well while she unlocked the shackles.
Unchained, Jacob sat up but wavered; he’d lost a lot of blood. It was a pity he couldn’t just drink it back and be fine again—he would need a live human.
But she was not about to leave that bowl there for them to use in their unholy games.
One last push, and the blood began to burn.
“Come on,” she said, shouting to be heard over the din of screaming and the roar of the flames. She pulled Jacob along with her, past the crowd of soldiers trying to organize themselves to put out the fire, down the hall, running until she saw an Exit sign in one of the corridors.
Jacob threw himself at the door, and it shuddered and opened. Thankfully, it was dark out—the whole escape would have been cut very short if it were still daylight. In the distance, as they ran, she could hear sirens approaching the building.
They ran as fast as they could until Jacob’s blood loss caught up with him and he had to stop and rest. She helped him sit down on a bench and started looking around for suitable prey.
She felt his eyes on her and looked down into his face.
“What the hell did you just do?” he asked. He was staring at her like she had become some new, wild creature . . . and in fact, she felt like a wild creature. She was thankful he wasn’t afraid of her. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“I do not know,” she answered, sitting down next to him. “I was angry . . . they were hurting you. I wanted them to stop.”
“Does that always happen when you get good and pissed off?”
She smiled a little. “No . . . I do not remember the last time I was good and pissed off . . . at least, not enough to hurt people.” She took his hand. “No one has ever tried to harm you in front of me before . . .” Something new and strange had taken root in her, and she concluded, the fire now in her voice, “. . . and no one ever will again.”
The adrenaline was beginning to wear off, and she began to wonder herself: What had she just done?
Suddenly, she remembered her recurring dream . . . the raven woman . . . those last few words:
You guard the heat of a will on fire . . . just let it burn.
• • •
So Cora was a firestarter.
That was a new one.
David set his phone aside and put his face in his hands for a moment, sweet relief breaking through the storm clouds. At least something had ended well.
Aside from reeling at Cora’s gift suddenly waking up, and grieving when David told them what had happened in Sacramento, they were completely unhurt. The California Elite searching the city for them also found Vràna—the Nighthound had returned to where her mistress had been taken and was, apparently, sitting there the entire time, waiting for her to return.
Olivia was the only one of the Circle who had gotten home without incident. He could tell she felt guilty. When he told her the news, she had offered to come to Texas and do . . . whatever she could, which unfortunately was nothing.
There was nothing anyone could do.
His phone rang, and he leaned back with a sigh. “Lieutenant Murdoch—report.”
“Most of the territory is quiet, my Lord Prime, except Los Angeles—two warring gangs have taken advantage of the situation and are tearing each other apart all over the city. Our numbers simply aren’t great enough to put them all down.”
“Are these gangs only fighting each other, or have they become violent toward the local population?”
“Only each other so far, my Lord.”
“Well, then, let them kill each other. If the conflict spills out into the Shadow District as a whole or threatens the human citizens, I’ll pull more swords from Seattle—work on keeping it contained, and let me know the second anything changes.”
“As you will it, Sire.”
After they hung up, David rubbed his forehead wearily. He rose from his chair and left the workroom without doing whatever it was he’d intended to do when he got there. There wasn’t much point—he couldn’t focus. Neither of them could.
It’s only been a few days. Give it time.
He returned to the suite and hung up his coat. It had been a long night, after a sleepless day; aside from fielding phone calls from half the Council, he was trying to coordinate cleanup and recovery efforts, and there was also the little matter of having become, essentially, Prime of half the United States.
The West and the South were adjacent, so for the time being, he had taken control of all of it. That way the West wouldn’t degenerate into all-out war; he kept the Elite organized like they already were, reallocating a few of his own from some of the less populated areas of the South and putting them under Lieutenant Murdoch’s command. His reputation would hold things together . . . for now.
That was what most of the calls were about. The Council didn’t care who had died; they just didn’t like what he was doing. They considered the Western Signet dead. He should by their rules let the West descend into chaos until a new regime arose. Instead, he was breaking the rules, presuming that he had the authority to simply claim someone else’s territory and, in their words, create his own empire.
He had told them, one by one, with the exception of those two or three whom he still respected, to fuck off in no uncertain terms. After all of their denials, even with the evidence staring them in the face, they still refused to believe that mere humans could be a real threat. Even though Jacob Janousek was well liked in the Council, they pretended not to hear that he had been attacked, nearly killed. One of the most powerful Pairs on the planet had fallen, and they looked the other way.
It was a losing game, and up until now it was one he’d been willing to play.
He was done playing.
When Tanaka called with his condolences, David told him, “I’m sorry, old friend . . . if you ever need my help, you need only ask . . . but I hereby sever all ties with the Council. They’re on their own. They’ve made their bed . . . now they can die in it.”
Tanaka hadn’t been surprised at all. David sensed that a full-blown dissol
ution wasn’t far away, and that it might just be Tanaka himself who declared it. Even without Morningstar attacking them all directly, the Council was falling apart. He might have been impressed with how vampire history was unfolding if he could have summoned the energy to give a damn.
David crossed the room and knocked lightly on the far door. Rather than a verbal reply, the door opened a few inches by itself, and he slipped into the dark little room, closing the door behind him.
“Any change?” he asked.
Miranda shook her head. She was sitting on the bed, and surprisingly, Stella was with her. The young Witch was staring intently at the sleeping figure in the bed—doing something with her Sight, he realized.
David joined them, taking a spot at the foot of the bed. Miranda reached for his hand.
They had agreed as soon as they got home that the best thing would be to put Deven in the mistress suite for now. Neither of them wanted him to wake alone.
Miranda had hardly left his side all week. David knew it was as much guilt as it was worry. Jonathan had all but held a gun to her head, but still, she had chosen to act on her visions and do the unthinkable. She knew that she was violating Deven’s free will—he wanted to die, and denying him that when his Consort was dead was utterly monstrous. She knew what it was like to be left behind, her soul torn in two, but that hadn’t stopped her . . . and David was glad it hadn’t.
Stella opened her eyes, shaking herself a little. “Jesus,” she muttered. “I mean, just . . . Jesus.”
“What did you See?” Miranda asked.
The Witch looked down at Deven. “The matrix that Nico guy built . . . it’s beautiful. I’ve never seen magic like that in my life. The power it would take to make something like that is staggering. I don’t know how a mortal could possibly control that kind of power. It’s so elegantly crafted, it’s breathtaking . . . or, it was.”
Miranda nodded. “I figured as much.”
“The way it was designed, it ran on a sort of low-voltage current of Jonathan’s energy. But now . . . when you . . . when the bond broke, the matrix fractured and fell apart. There are pieces of it left that could possibly be repaired, but for the most part, it’s gone. So everything that was wrong before is wrong again—and his soul mate is dead. The kindest thing would be to kill him, but you can’t.”
Shadowbound Page 28
