As soon as he saw the web of light on the card he shook his head, sick inside; yes, she had tried to warn them as well as she could, but she couldn’t stop what they began with their choices. At any point during all of this Jonathan could have shared his knowledge. He had chosen not to, accepting his own fate, even though they could have stopped it if they’d known.
Or maybe they couldn’t have. Maybe if they’d stopped the Haven’s destruction, they would have walked into another trap later. Maybe there could be a thousand means but only one end.
He didn’t blame Jonathan, exactly, though he was angry at the Consort for his silence—but he knew how hard it was to have precog and know what was going to happen. An ability like that took its toll. He imagined Jonathan walking around acting like everything was fine when he knew that night was approaching . . . the way he had known that Deven and David would crawl into bed together and nearly destroy everything three years ago. David had no idea how he would deal with that kind of power. He couldn’t judge Jonathan for his choices.
But he was still angry.
There was a soft knock on the hallway door. “Come,” he called.
Miranda was pale as she entered the room, and her expression set off all his internal alarms. “David . . . there’s someone . . .”
Before she could finish the thought, he saw there was someone behind her, and froze. Whatever emotion he’d been feeling evaporated into thin air so that pure, unabashed wonder could take its place.
The creature that walked into the room was not human, nor was he a vampire. Like their kind, he gave off an air of agelessness, though without the darkness that dwelt in a vampire’s every cell. An enormous aura of power surrounded him under perfect, precise control, but it was not the power David or Miranda had; it was spun out of moon and star. And though he looked young, the equivalent of a human in his early twenties, he was certainly not young. Whatever he was, he’d been working magic for longer than David had been alive.
He fixed his eyes on David’s, and there was something familiar about . . .
Purple. They were purple.
David lowered his gaze back to Deven, then looked up again.
“Good evening, my Lord,” their visitor said. He had a calm, reassuring voice with a musical accent and moved with the grace of a young wild animal . . . a deer, perhaps, gliding silently through the woods.
David stared at him, unable to tear his eyes away. “You’re Nico.”
“I am.”
The only thing David could think to say, which immediately made him cringe inwardly, was, “Nice ears.”
Lame it might be, but it earned him a sweet smile from Nico. “Thank you. I grew them myself.” He sat down on the bed and gazed at the vampire who lay there. Deep sadness touched his face and his voice. “Oh, my love . . . I am so sorry.”
“Can you fix this?” David demanded.
Nico looked up at him gravely. “I will know more once I have looked more closely into what has happened here.”
He reached over and gently took Deven’s hand from David’s. Their fingers touched as he did so, and David felt a jolt—similar to static electricity, but a less physical kind of buzz, like one aura recognizing another.
“Do you have any idea why he hasn’t woken again?” Miranda asked.
The Elf frowned. “He probably cannot. With the combined trauma and the energy imbalance he would essentially shut down—it is the body’s way of preventing death from psychic burnout, even in vampires. He may go in and out of lucidity until this is all dealt with one way or another.”
Nico took both of Deven’s hands in his own and closed his eyes, sinking into a trance state within a matter of seconds.
Miranda edged over to stand behind David, rubbing his shoulders. “Stella’s spell reached him,” she explained quietly. “He didn’t know exactly what happened, but he knew he was needed. I was sitting in the garden calling to him, and he felt it and used my thoughts as a homing beacon.”
“Reached him . . . where?”
She sat down next to him, close enough that she could speak without distracting Nico. “A place called Avilon,” she said. “It’s like a parallel world. Anyone who survived the genocide of their people hid there, and they sealed it off.”
David stared a moment longer before he turned to her and said, “Elves.”
“Apparently they’re not as extinct as we thought,” Miranda said, and then to Nico: “What do you See?”
“A terrible shame,” he replied. “I was quite proud of my work. At least I know it took a broken soul-bond to destroy it.”
“But can you stop the leaking?” she asked. “Can you keep all those broken places from draining us?”
Nico smiled faintly. “Of course I can. Here.”
David felt something change—somewhere deep within all three of them, a surge of energy moved through, and within minutes the feeling of being slowly bled dry faded. David gasped, and Miranda did, too; suddenly he could think a hundred times more clearly, and the pervasive hopelessness that had been grinding them under its heel dialed down about 80 percent.
“I would recommend you feed soon,” Nico said. “It will help replenish your lost strength. But that, I fear, was the easy part.”
“Does that mean you can help us?” David asked.
The Elf sighed. “Yes . . . but I would prefer to discuss it with you elsewhere. If he wakes it would be best if he didn’t hear what I have to say.” He looked over at them. “If you would come to the guest room where the Queen has installed me, perhaps in an hour? I would like a few minutes alone here to try to shore up some of the remaining matrix.”
David and Miranda exchanged a look and nodded. “All right,” David said, rising. “Call if you need anything.”
“I shall.”
David couldn’t call what he felt hope, exactly, but at the very least, he felt a lightening in his heart for the first time since the California night had erupted and turned their world to ash and rubble. He could tell she felt it, too; she took his hand and led him out of the mistress suite, back to their room where they could call for blood and with any luck start to feel like themselves again.
• • •
In the silence that followed the Pair’s departure, Nico returned his gaze to Deven’s drawn, ashen face and had to fight not to shed tears.
“I did not know it would come to this,” he whispered, brushing his fingers over Deven’s lips. “I only knew what my part would be. And I thought we all had more time. Years. I had no idea that . . .”
He thought of the tall, broad blond he had spoken to on the terrace that night: his good humor, his fierce love for his Prime, and the underlying sadness that Nico understood now, too late. He should have recognized it. He’d been feeling it himself for a long time.
He had spoken a half-truth to the Pair. He could try to strengthen the few remaining threads of what he had created. He would certainly like to. But it would do no good.
In reality, he had wanted a moment alone with Deven, just to catch his breath and try to come to terms with the full extent of what had happened. He had never seen damage like this . . . and he had never, ever seen a vampire try to Weave. Miranda’s work was adequate to keep Deven alive, but it was dangerously clumsy, made with force and desperation but not skill. A big part of what he would have to do involved just undoing what she had done.
Yet the fact that she had done it at all with no experience whatsoever was miraculous. Magic at that level was something only a few Weavers could aspire to. She had mentioned having dreams of the Web, and that she had learned what to do without even realizing she was learning it. That could only be divine intervention. It would have taken a century or more for Miranda to learn the right way, but in the time she had, she’d learned an effective way.
If Miranda had that much favor from Persephone when the chasm between Goddess and vampires was still so wide, the potential the Queen held was more immense than any of them knew.
He felt the f
ingers he held tighten almost imperceptibly and stared into Deven’s face, waiting.
It took the Prime—or whatever he was now—a moment to find the energy to open his eyes, and when he did, he drew an astonished breath. “Nico?”
“Yes . . . I am here.”
Deven almost smiled. “I knew you would come. I knew you would make it right.”
Nico touched his face but said only, “I am here to help all of you. You must trust me, i’lyren, as you trusted me before.”
Again, that flicker of a smile, and Deven’s eyes closed again as he drifted back into sleep.
Nico leaned down to kiss him softly, then rose and left the little room, which he was fairly sure adjoined with the Pair’s dwelling. The Queen had shown him to a small suite down the same hallway—guests usually stayed in another wing, she said, but she knew they were going to need him to stay close.
The guards he passed stared at him, wide-eyed, and he smiled. Ah, yes. This again.
The room was comfortable, though not as beautiful as the one in California had been; there were fewer windows in this Haven, much less light and air. His two bags sat on the bed where he’d left them.
He thought back to the lecture he’d received from the Enclave when he returned from California to Avilon. Several of the members had ranted at him for quite a while about how dangerous it was to set foot in the mortal world, how he had no business helping vampires, how his duty as a Weaver was to his own people, and how he must never, ever do such a foolish thing again.
He had arrived back in Avilon weary and heartsick, already missing the Prime he had fled. Needless to say, when the Enclave demanded he appear before them, he was in no mood.
He knew that both Kai and Lesela had tried to explain the situation to them, just as he knew they wouldn’t listen. So as soon as the lectures were done, he looked the High Elder of Avilon straight in the eye and asked in a steely, cold voice, “And what exactly are you going to do about it?”
The answer was what he thought it would be: nothing.
In truth, he’d been waiting his whole life to make the High Elder make that face.
Nico opened the first bag, shaking his head. He busied himself unpacking to pass the time, and before long he heard a knock.
The Prime and Queen swept into the room and took a seat by the fireplace, where there were two chairs; he considered pulling the desk chair over for himself, but really, he was far too nervous to sit still. The best he could do was try not to pace. The Pair waited expectantly for him to gather his words.
In any other situation Nico would have taken far more time to admire them; the Queen was exceptionally beautiful with her riot of bloodred curls and her perceptive green eyes, and every inch of the Prime was written in nobility, power, and intelligence. He could certainly imagine them commanding the loyalty of hundreds of warriors. It was easy to see why Deven loved them both so much.
Finally, Nico said, “Here is how the situation stands. Problem one: The three of you are Signet-bound to each other, but such a bond was never intended to contain three souls. All things being equal, it would eventually drive you all mad.”
“But all things aren’t equal,” Miranda observed.
“They are not. Problem two: The two of you are Thirdborn. Your energy and his are not compatible at such an intimate level. Because of your combined strength the bond would hold together for a while, but in time it becomes another imbalance, with the same result. Problem three: Deven’s sanity has been all but destroyed. The trauma of Jonathan’s death, the violence of their broken bond, and the shattering of the matrix have left his mind in ruins. This is particularly dangerous for you, my Lady, as your empathic gift would cause you to lose more and more of yourself to the black hole of his psyche—in fact, it speaks to your strength and talent that you have not lost your mind already.”
He leaned against the side of the fireplace, arms crossed. “Then there is problem four: your Circle. There is a new empty space in it; even if your Trinity could survive as it is, that empty space would ensure you will never reach your full power, the power needed to eliminate the threat of Morningstar.”
“You can’t help us there,” David said tiredly. “The last scion of any of our bloodlines was killed last month, and she was of Miranda’s line, not Jonathan’s.”
Nico nodded. “In a situation like this one, hypothetically the wisest course would be to unbind you, closing Deven up as an individual and restoring you two as a Pair. Then a scion could step in, also as an individual. It would not be nearly as strong as a Circle made up of Pairs, so there would be limits on how much you could do as a group, but victory would still be highly possible.”
“There’s nothing like that you could try? Why not?” the Queen wanted to know.
“Problem three.” Nico paused, letting them think about it.
David shook his head. “If we let him out of the bond, without someone to hold him here, he’ll kill himself. There’s no question about it.”
“I can rebuild the matrix to save his mind, but it requires a battery—a powerful vampire with an intimate and very strong connection to him.”
“So the only thing that will save him is a Consort,” David said. “No other connection would be deep enough to power the matrix, and no other connection would stop him from committing suicide. He wouldn’t do it if someone else’s life is at stake.”
“You think he wouldn’t,” Miranda told her Prime. “But we don’t know for sure.”
“The question is moot anyway,” David pointed out, the impossibility of their situation clearly beginning to wear out what resolve he had left. “Even if we had someone of Jonathan’s bloodline, they wouldn’t be a true Consort. We get one soul mate. That’s it. If we fit a new person in, it would have to be as an individual, like Nico said . . . and the fact is, there are no more scions of Jonathan’s line. They’re all long dead.”
Nico was quiet for a long moment before he said, “No, my Lord . . . they are not.”
• • •
The Elf watched them, and they both stared at the Elf, and nobody spoke for a minute.
David broke the silence. “What are you talking about?”
Miranda knew before he even replied, but she waited, praying she was wrong.
“When I first met him, I saw that Jonathan’s precognitive gift was exceptionally strong. I was curious as to where it had come from. Often such gifts speak of distant Elven blood. But I did not wish to pry, so I thought nothing further about it. Then, not long after I returned to Avilon, I began having nightmares. I saw horrible things that I cannot even describe, and all of you were in them. I had never even seen your faces, but I dreamed you.”
The Elf’s eyes grew haunted as whatever gruesome images he’d seen in his sleep paraded through his mind again. “To reassure myself I went into the Web and looked for all of you. I thought perhaps if I saw you were all well, I could sleep again. But something caught my eye, and even though I knew it was an intrusion, I followed the threads before me until I ran into the last thing I expected.”
“What was that?” Miranda asked.
“Myself.”
David’s eyebrows knitted together. “Come again?”
“As I had suspected, generations ago, one of Jonathan’s female human forbears lay down with an Elf and rose up with a daughter. That particular Elf, Kael, already had one daughter, a full Elf who had fled to Avilon. So while Kael’s half-human child grew up, married, and had children and grandchildren of her own, his fully Elven child grew to maturity and, two hundred years later, gave birth to twins.”
He smiled a little. “Multiple births are practically unheard of among my people. It was said the twins were born under a dark star, for one was born with black hair and the other with dark eyes. The twins were whispered about, and inspired fear, though neither earned it. It did not help that they were among the most powerful ever seen in Avilon. And then there was the prophecy . . . a woman named Lesela, gifted with prophetic talent, sa
w the death of the dark-eyed Elf. She said that he would first give his heart, and then give his own life, to stop the destruction of three worlds.”
Miranda saw the resignation on his face, and beneath it a deep alienation; despite having a twin, he had been lonely his entire life, living in the shadow of his own potential darkness. She took a deep breath and said what they all already knew. “You’re the scion.”
The Elf nodded. “I can unbind the three of you and then bind Deven to me. Not only can I power the matrix, I can continually adapt it so it will never break again. The two of you will be whole again, and the Circle will be as it was.”
“But . . .” Miranda sat forward, hands clasped. “Deven wouldn’t want that. We’d be forcing it on him.”
Nico gave her a look that actually made her lean back. “You did not trouble yourselves with that before,” he said sharply. “Why now?”
Miranda’s eyes filled, and her face burned with shame. “I was doing what Jonathan wanted,” she said. “There wasn’t time to debate.”
When she raised her eyes again, the Elf’s expression had changed, and he walked over to her and touched her head. “I am sorry,” he said. “My words are undeservedly harsh considering the love behind your actions. Miranda . . . none of this is what any of us wanted. You did what you had to do. Jonathan’s last wish was for you to save Deven. But he is not saved. You put a tourniquet on a gaping wound that I alone can heal.”
The weight of his hand was more comforting than she expected; a faint current of energy seemed to radiate from him naturally, and it helped keep her from losing control of her emotions, though her shields had been trembling off and on since they had come home.
David spoke up sharply. “You’re forgetting one very important little fact in all of this.”
Nico nodded. “I have not forgotten. Believe me, I have thought of little else.”
Miranda caught Nico’s gaze again, and he said, “I am already immortal, like you. But that alone is not enough.”
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