Quietly, she began to sing.
She’d written the song just for this time, this place, this lost heart. As much as she hated songwriting she had to admit it was good; if she’d recorded it, she would have another hit on her hands.
She didn’t need another hit. She needed to make an offering.
For just a moment the wind stilled and it seemed like the night was listening.
She hadn’t intended it, but a capella with the chorus of crickets and the forest canopy beyond the cliff rustling in a sea of dark leaves, the song had an almost Elven feel to it, and on the last chorus she changed it up a bit to emphasize that. What had started as a fairly standard ballad now sounded haunting, hollow, and sorrowful, with the wind blowing through it. She tried to think of that emptiness as potential, not annihilation.
Kai would be proud.
As the song wound to its close—returning to the original theme in a kind of spiral, another Elven thing she’d learned—her voice faded out into the damp air.
“Sorry the candles are out,” she said quietly. “I didn’t bring a lighter. But…”
Curious, Miranda focused all her attention on one of the glass votives as if she were going to move it with her mind, but instead she concentrated on the wick drying out, heat gathering in its fibers and the wax around it, and—
It lit.
She got to her feet and stepped back, looking around in apprehension, but of course there was no one to see her except Avi, who had been resolutely not watching her in her private grief.
Her suspicion was confirmed, then—even with the Atlantic Ocean and a continent between them and Eastern Europe, their gifts were contagious. She had not yet heard Jacob, Cora, or Olivia mention picking up any of theirs, but if they were to try instead of waiting for it to happen, it might be a different story. They were all still a little spooked at the idea of their abilities merging. Miranda didn’t blame them, but she’d had more time to get used to the idea.
Miranda absently dusted off her jeans and leaned down to unstick a leaf from the toe of her boot; as she started to straighten, though, something in her peripheral vision made her pause.
She held still and waited. There it was again: as its flame fought against the wind the candlelight had caught something metallic on the ground. The object was half-covered in dirt, but still flashed like a star, or a tear, against the earth.
Cautious, she reached over to brush the dirt away; it was probably just some kind of construction debris, but something about the way the light hit it made her close her fingers around the small object and pluck it from its resting place.
Her skin recognized it before her mind did, and her hand began to tremble as she took the hem of her shirt and cleaned off her prize. By the time she held it up to the light — unnecessary given her eyesight, but still, essential to verify to herself that she was looking at what she was looking at—the tremor had spread through her body, and she nearly sat back down in the dirt.
Silver, moonstone.
Nico’s ring.
What was it doing here? If it had been in Deven’s pocket that night it would have fallen out down below the cliff somewhere, and if it had been blown here all the way from their suite surely it would have sustained some kind of damage. The explosion had been intense enough to melt what metal it didn’t pulverize. Aside from the dirt, the ring was flawless.
She turned it over and over in her palm, heart pounding even though she wasn’t sure why. Yes, it was strange that it had survived, but it could be that Elven silver was stronger, or that there was some sort of protective enchantment on it.
Even thinking it, however, she knew better. Nothing in their lives happened by coincidence. In their world tattoos changed shape, ravens landed on the ground exactly when thought about, and Elves just happened to be holding magic communicator stones when the vampire on the other end made a call for help.
The moonstone rings were worn by the priesthood of Theia, the Elven goddess, signifying the bond between her and their souls. According to Nico the term “priest” could be applied to adepts of a number of different disciplines; he and Kai both were considered priests. As far as Miranda knew, the priesthood of Persephone had all been ecclesiastical in nature, but anyone who reached full initiation into the Order of Elysium received a labradorite ring a lot like this one.
Nico had given Deven his as a token of love and a promise to return…and Nico was no longer a priest of Theia, technically, as he was no longer a pure Elf and had been thrown out of his homeland. Was the ring useless now? Were they supposed to do anything besides look impressive? This one had opened the Codex of Persephone even though it was made for a different deity. What else could they do?
Miranda closed her hand around the ring and also closed her eyes, grounding herself firmly in the earth beneath her feet before reaching out with her senses and tentatively touching the ring. She no longer had the Sight, whatever David might believe, but she could still feel the tendrils of energy that connected things—changing their bond that night had changed her abilities as well, giving her senses a precision they’d never had before.
She felt the ring as a hum of energy in her hand, as if it weren’t a solid object, but a vibration. David had told her during one of his enthusiastic verbal meanders about science that the whole universe was dancing every moment—at its most basic level all matter was in motion. Holding the ring, she could believe it.
“Why are you here?” she asked. “Are you magic too? I guess I should take you back to Nico.”
She frowned. The stone was starting to feel warmer than it should. Each passing second it grew warmer and warmer, until it was genuinely hot. The energetic vibration she’d sensed became a real physical buzz that left her hand numb—and before she could really register what was happening, the ring grew so hot she cried out and dropped it.
“Jesus!” she gasped, clenching her hand against her chest. She heard footsteps rushing toward her; Avi had apparently decided to throw reverence to the wind and come to the aid of his Queen.
“My Lady, are you all right?”
She nodded, feeling dizzy, and looked down at her palm. An oval had been burned into her flesh, but it immediately began to heal, the searing pain fading until it was just sore, then itchy, then gone.
“That moonstone ring,” she said, pointing. “Can you touch it—very carefully—and see if it’s still hot?”
Avi was perplexed, but didn’t argue. As he bent to retrieve the ring she wondered, briefly, if she could bear a Second who didn’t argue with her when she did something dumb. Faith had been loyal to a fault, and had never disobeyed a direct order, but she had questioned her Pair regularly, just as they wanted her to. Signets who thought themselves infallible became complacent, and complacency had cost many of them their heads. Given the same rank, would Avi speak up when needed, or was he too obedient? Was she sensing a lack of willfulness where there was in fact just a quiet man who didn’t feel the need to constantly hear his own voice?
He gingerly tapped at the ring with one fingertip, then touched it a second longer. “It is perfectly cool, my Lady,” he said, picking it up. “Whatever possessed it is gone now…” He pondered the silver in his hand, frowning.
“Something on your mind, Lieutenant?” she asked.
Avi looked a little sheepish, but replied, “I believe you are mistaken about this stone. The Queen I served before had an extensive collection of jewels, and if I recall correctly, moonstones are white.”
“Of course it’s white—”
He held it up.
Miranda froze.
“No,” she breathed. “That’s not…how…”
Stupid question, really.
Sure enough, the ring Avi held out to her was no longer set with a moonstone, but with a labradorite.
*****
There wasn’t enough alcohol on the North American continent to satisfy a 766-year-old Irish vampire’s drive for self-destruction, even if he could maintain the degree o
f falldown drunkenness he needed. Not only could he drink anyone in the bar under the table, he could drink them out the door, down the street, to another bar, and under one of their tables.
Still, Anodyne was as pleasant a place as any to waste a life; to run up a thousand-dollar tab each night, pretend not to notice when other patrons hit on him, and dodge the bartender’s curiosity.
Since that night he’d met Kai everything had been wrong. After all those months working so hard to be too exhausted to dream, he’d begun having nightmares…nightmares of being trapped beneath a falling building, crushed under concrete debris, unable to reach help or find any comfort in his final moments…but those moments went on and on, an eternity under that wall, screaming into the pitch darkness long after the battery in his phone died and took the last light with it.
Then the dreams changed and he was digging—desperately trying to move the ruins, sure he had heard someone call him. He shifted mountains of rock every day until he uncovered the tomb…but it was too late, always too late. Sometimes Jonathan was down there, and sometimes Nico, sometimes even Miranda. She lay lifeless in the rubble, blood obscuring her beautiful face, sightless eyes fixed on the smoke-filled night sky. He pulled her out, holding her body close, weeping, thinking over and over, I have to tell David…how am I going to tell David?
Nico’s fate was the same, but as soon as he was untangled from the wreckage Deven felt himself dying. He wanted to embrace it, to let go of this hateful life, but in the dreams he fought, fought for his Consort’s life and his own.
He failed every time.
In another version of the dream, he found Nico alive, but when he tried to pull the Elf free, Nico pushed him away. “I don’t want you,” he said coldly. “I want him.”
Deven turned in time to see David arrive and immediately dive in to free Nico without even looking at Deven. The Elf smiled at the Prime as if he were some kind of god come to earth, and they both ignored Deven entirely…he no longer existed in their world.
Worse yet, the dreams followed him throughout the night after he woke—he wandered around Austin like a sleepwalker, stopping here and there to heal humans, barely remembering having done it. He couldn’t get rid of the power fast enough; all he could do was use as much as he could and then drink until the rest was dulled.
It wasn’t hard to interpret all of the dreams. His psyche wasn’t exactly a master of obscure symbolism. This pathetic creature he had become was trying to survive under the crippling weight of who he’d once been…who everyone wanted him to be again. Why couldn’t they understand that, even if he were to lower the shield and let Nico in, even if he took up his sword and Signet again, it could never be the same? That life was over. It had died in the wreckage of his home, and now it died over and over again in his sleep.
“Another?” the bartender asked.
He lifted his head blearily and nodded.
She clunked two more ice cubes into his glass and then filled it nearly to the rim. “I know it’s cliché and all,” she said, “but you spend so much time here I have to wonder what your story is.”
The alcohol had stopped burning a long time ago—in fact he barely felt its effects anymore, swallowed as they were by the other two bottles of whiskey he’d already downed tonight. “Do you know who I am?” he asked.
She shrugged. She was, he supposed, an attractive woman; tattooed and pierced, with load-bearing Germanic hips and hair dyed about eight colors, she was sort of a cross between Stella and Olivia, but more muscular than the former and more conventionally pretty than the latter. “A hot guy with a broken heart, who drinks his blood volume in really expensive liquor every night?
He lifted his eyes from his glass to her face. “Broken heart?”
“Happy people do not drink like that.”
“You must not know a lot of Irishmen,” he replied listlessly. “Birth? Drink. Wedding? Drink. Death? Drink. Tuesday? Drink.”
She grinned. “So I can add ‘Irish’ to the list.”
It occurred to him that she would have a lot more for her list if he actually looked like he had before. Right now he was ordinary, boring, blending in when he was used to standing out. “You should see me when my heart’s not broken,” he said. “I have a lot more piercings.”
“So when you’re feeling well-adjusted you put holes in your face.”
He half-smiled. “I have to hurt myself somehow, don’t I?”
She smiled back. “Do you do your own?”
Deven nodded, thinking of the wooden box back in his room, a box with a cracked corner—his piercing kit, one of a handful of things that had survived the bomb intact. His belongings were an odd assortment: the kit, Jonathan’s copy of Les Mis, one of Jonathan’s sweaters, a few other garments, and the sketchbook where Deven had been working out a new tattoo design. Everything in the piercing kit was cradled in foam, the box one he’d acquired in India that was as solid as a brick wall—more solid, it turned out.
The bartender had gone to fetch another patron a drink, but when she returned, she said, “Okay, let me just get this out of the way so I know where this is going—are you into women at all?”
He found he couldn’t help a slight smile at that. His life had blown apart, he’d lost everything of who he was, except that…or, he was 95% sure of that. “No.”
She nodded. “Okay, then, I won’t waste time flirting.”
“Flirt all you want,” he replied. “I probably won’t notice.”
“Claudia,” she said, extending her hand.
He took it. “Deven.”
If she connected the name with an identity, she didn’t say so; he appreciated that. “Nice to meet you, Deven,” she said. “Thank you for all the awesome tips.”
He shrugged. “What else is money for?”
“A philanthropist on top of that! Who’d have thought?”
Philanthropist. Hardly.
One of the first things he’d done once he’d come out of shock two years ago was to donate a million dollars to the Human Equality Coalition. He kept thinking about what he’d said to Jonathan about never doing anything to support the cause, and then about how that one night of marriage had made him happier than he’d been for most of his life. He’d gone from newlywed to widowed in 24 hours; he was in a perpetual fugue state and cared about nothing now, but that one thing haunted his thoughts until he picked up the phone and called his accountant. The money had come from the Pair’s joint account rather than the Signet account or his private one where the Red Shadow’s business flowed in and out; he had, therefore, made the donation in Jonathan’s name. Then, at least one of his legion of demons was put to rest.
If only all the others could be pacified with money. He could have been a well-adjusted, happy man decades ago.
He snorted quietly, earning a look from Claudia.
“As much as we here at Anodyne value your patronage,” she said wryly, “there must be a better way for you to deal with your baggage than what you’re doing now.”
“You think so? I haven’t found one in 766 years.”
That impressed her; now he was sure she knew who he was. This was a Signet bar, after all, meaning both the Pair and the Elite were its main source of income, so any astute bartender would learn all sorts of interesting things about the ruling class just by listening. To Claudia’s credit, she didn’t give any obvious sign, but he saw the ever so slight widening of her eyes, the quirk of one brow, the briefest pause in the midst of mixing a drink.
He sighed inwardly. He should have given her a fake name, should have kept his mouth shut, but he was too mentally wobbly from the alcohol to play things out logically.
“766,” she said. “Really?”
He nodded…but…wait, where had he gotten that number? He didn’t know what year he was born, or what day; he had it narrowed down to about a three-year range, but until the monastery he’d had no sense of what year it was. It wasn’t important where he came from. He’d been born in early Summer, just
after what modern Witches called the feast of Beltane. That was all he knew for sure. His mother had been in labor for almost two full days and he’d killed and resurrected her before he’d even cried; that had always added to the confusion. His people weren’t stupid, but they were busy, and he and his birth were meaningless to everyone but his father.
“Why the tears, lad?”
“John and Finn were trying to hurt one of Báb’s pups. I got in the way and they hit me. Then they laughed at me for crying.”
“That’s because your brothers are fools…there’s no shame in having a heart. What about the pup, did…anything happen?”
He was an enormous man, at least to a scrawny child, with a beard as big as his laugh and callused hands that could bring untold comfort just by resting on one’s head. He tolerated the other boys—they were needed to work the farm—but for some reason, the only one he really seemed to love was the runt of the litter who was useless for anything but the nightly Bible reading. And even with the backbreaking labor involved in keeping food on the table for seven people, he always had time to soothe hurt feelings, of which there tended to be many.
“I don’t remember,” Deven murmured, putting his head in his hands and leaning his elbows on the bar.
“Are you okay? What don’t you remember?”
“His name,” he said. “I don’t remember his name. It’s been too long and it hurt too much, and…the only person who loved me when I was human, dead and gone for seven centuries…no one even remembers he existed. There was no point to his life at all.”
“You remember,” Claudia said, reaching over to lay a hand on his arm. “Maybe not his name, but you remember. There’s a point to every life—even if it was just that someone loved you.”
It had been a very long time since he’d felt this kind of pain. He nodded vaguely, muttered a farewell of some sort, threw money on the bar, and stumbled out, fighting desperately not to fall down weeping.
“No, Da…nothing happened. I didn’t touch the puppy.”
“Good lad.”
Shadowstorm (The Shadow World Book 6) Page 10
