“What?”
“What those bastards did to you was monstrous,” Deven replied. “Don’t let it make you a monster. Don’t give them the satisfaction of letting your suffering become your identity. If you want vengeance you have to seek it as yourself or it’s meaningless.”
Nico made a derisive noise and started to walk away; Deven easily kept pace with him. “You do not get to lecture me on coping with pain, ghost,” Nico said icily.
“It’s only advice, Nico. And you should hear it from me—no one knows better how not to heal from trauma. You’ve seen me do everything wrong from the night we met.”
“And somehow out of nowhere you’re all better.”
“No. Not even remotely. Right now the nightmares are staying in my sleep, but I’m not fool enough to think that will last. I don’t think I’ll ever be all better. But I can be better than I was. I think that’s all any of us can do, most of the time.”
Nico rounded on him. “So here we are, then. You spend all this time ignoring me, making me weak and sick and near suicidal, but now, because you paid attention to me for one night, you have the right to counsel me? You may have the authority to command me not to kill, but you have forfeited all right to the state of my heart. Too little, too late, my Lord.” He infused the last word with all the spite he could.
To his surprise, Deven nodded. “Fair enough.”
Nico started to walk away again, but Deven’s voice called him back: “Do you hate me?”
He looked back over his shoulder. “Yes.”
He had hoped the word would sting, but it was no less than Deven expected, apparently; he just nodded again. “I understand.”
But Nico couldn’t help it: he laughed.
One eyebrow shot up. “Why is that funny?”
Nico walked back to him, letting his far greater height give him some semblance of power in the situation if nothing else. “Because I’m lying. I want to hate you. I want to so badly. I want to dedicate myself to making you as miserable as you’ve made me. Everything would be so much easier if I could hate you…but I can’t. I don’t. And that makes me want to hate you even more. So no matter what situation we’re in, you still have the ability to hurt me.”
The anger he’d been wearing as a shield was swiftly unraveling into a tangled snare of despair as he went on, “Do you remember the night we walked in the woods, and you said that you feared your God would cast you into hell over who you loved? Well, congratulations: that’s what you have done to me. Your sad little broken heart possessed mine and dragged me down with you. And now here we are, both of us broken, a mockery of a Signet bond tethering us to each other until one of us summons the courage to end it. Well done, my Lord. Well done.”
He saw that Deven was about to reply but didn’t give him a chance. Nico shook his head in disgust, reached across the distance to the Haven, and Misted away before the Prime could say a word.
*****
Stella was nervous as she slid into the booth opposite her dad, but she tried to be casual, not act as if he was trying to get the needle for one of her best friends and that there was no internal drama dragging the last shreds of hope out of everyone at the Haven.
“Hi Dad,” she said.
He looked so relieved. “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” he said.
She didn’t say that she didn’t have much else to do these days. She had run from the Haven with both Miranda’s understanding and Miranda’s credit card, and the Pair had set her up at a ridiculously nice hotel for however long she needed a hiding place. They understood that she needed to be…away for a while, until she could get her head around what had happened to Nico and what was happening with Miranda. Guards followed her everywhere, but they were good at their jobs; if she hadn’t been told they were out there she would never have noticed.
“I was worried about you,” the Witch admitted. “You look kind of beat. And look, you haven’t even touched your eggs.”
“I ordered for you,” he said sheepishly. “The Kerbey scramble with French toast, right?”
“Yeah.” She grinned, leaned over, and kissed his ruddy forehead. “Thanks Dad.”
They nursed their coffee for a moment; it made a good distraction with the pouring and spooning of sweeteners and whiteners.
The waitress arrived in record time with Stella’s food. Once she had departed, Stella said, “I know you can’t give me many details, so I’m not asking for any, but: how’s the case going? I mean is it long hours, lots of pavement-pounding, or are you in a holding pattern waiting for lab results?”
Maguire considered for a minute between bites of his Denver omelet, while Stella loaded her French toast with an obscene amount of syrup. “Okay, this is off the record, because I shouldn’t be telling anyone before they formally announce it…but…”
Stella held her breath.
“We’re going to have to drop all charges against Miranda Grey. The DNA wasn’t a match. It wasn’t even close to a match. They fast-tracked it through the lab because it’s such a high profile case. It led us on a wild goose chase, and the analysts finally deemed it useless.”
“Did they double check?”
“And triple. They used up the entire sample running different tests, and not one iota of data supports Miranda Grey as the killer.”
“Well thank God.”
“Just for my own peace of mind, have they…has anything been said?”
“About you? APD? Not really. I promise, Dad, Miranda and David both know you guys are just doing your jobs. Their main area of concern is where that video came from that just happened to fall in your lap. They have some enemies that would be positively gleeful to see Miranda go down.”
“Stella…”
She looked up from her fork, where she was swirling a piece of toast in the syrup-and-melted-butter puddle. “What’s wrong, Dad?”
“I don’t want to make things weird with all of you.”
“Daddy, I don’t think it can get any weirder.”
“The evidence clears Miranda of this murder. But I was looking into the missing persons stats for the last year, and…there’s a pattern. Two people go missing every month at the same time. Some are found dead in dumpsters or other out of the way places; some never resurface. The common thread is that they’re all violent offenders or have hurt lots of people in other ways. Some get a cursory investigation, but none of them receive a lot of police attention.”
“They’re evil,” Stella mused.
“You could say that. It’s not drug users, or even average dealers. It’s dealers selling to kids, dealers trading sex for product from kids. Rapists, child pornographers. The guy in charge of that big dog fighting ring on the East Side last Spring was found half eaten by coyotes on the edge of town. Whoever’s killing them knows exactly what they’re looking for.”
“So Austin has a vigilante?”
Maguire took a deep breath. “A vigilante who drains every drop of their blood. Every month there are two, found in separate locations. And it happens every month around the New Moon.”
Stella felt the bottom drop out of her lungs. “Wow, that’s…you think it’s vampires?” she asked softly.
“We find puncture marks, but we already tried comparing them to Miranda’s dental impressions; they never seem to line up right. The holes are almost always closed, leaving just bites like a great big mosquito. As they heal—even postmortem—they pull farther apart as the skin tightens. I asked the medical examiner’s office if there’s a way to calculate the distance based on the rate of decomp, but there are too many variables.”
Stella knew where he was going, and as much as she dreaded what he’d say, she asked, “Do you think Miranda’s the killer?”
“To be honest, Stell…I know it’s probably going to get me killed if I speak up, but I think it’s both of them. I don’t know why they do it when they never did before, but they’re out there killing evildoers every month, and leaving
almost no trace.”
“But isn’t that good? I mean hypothetically…you get criminals off the streets that the system has let walk.”
“But we have that system for a reason, Stella. And I know Signet authority is absolute, but I was under the impression that meant over vampires, not us. I know in my gut that somehow David Solomon tampered with the DNA, but our lab has airtight security and I can’t prove it. But if he did it once he can do it a dozen times, so trying to prosecute either of them is pointless. There’s really nothing I can do but step back and let it happen—even if every cop bone in my body knows it’s wrong.”
She swallowed her now-tasteless toast. “If you keep digging you can always find evidence—that’s what you used to tell me.”
“Well, that’s before I had a beer with the things that go bump in the night. Myers’s career and life are on the line here too. If we keep tilting at Miranda Grey and coming up empty it’s going to ruin both of us. Once the charges are officially dropped I’m going to gather up everything on all of these cases and hand it over to Solomon, along with the original video of the murder. It’s a huge breach of procedure and all the rules, but staying alive is more important to me these days—and keeping you safe.”
“Dad, Miranda adores you,” she insisted. “And David may be…scary…but he’s fair. Neither of them is going to hold you responsible for anything APD does.”
“They’re not even my big worry. They have powerful friends, and powerful enemies who aren’t as kind to humans. The fact is we don’t know where that video came from. Someone did it to manipulate the police into investigating what they wanted us to. I’m not going to be somebody’s dancing monkey just to give them a shot at the Signets.”
Stella tried not to let her relief be too obvious, but she wanted to hug him until he squeaked—she was so, so grateful he was doing the smart thing, even if it wasn’t the Law Enforcement Right Thing. APD was out of its depth here, and he knew it, and if he pushed too hard he could get good men killed in the pointless pursuit of David and Miranda Solomon.
As she made her way back to the hotel, though, a box of leftover French toast in her hand to warm up for breakfast, she wondered how to ask Miranda if any of it was true…and deep down, Stella knew it was. She wanted to know more—why they were doing this, what they gained from it. It probably had something to do with the Thirdborn thing, but why? What had they received in return for such a sentence? Or did the ancient instincts of the Thirdborn just need to kill? Was it food, or fun?
She couldn’t think of Miranda murdering anyone. She just couldn’t. David, she certainly could, probably because he was so much older and, as she’d told her father, scary. Miranda could certainly be fierce and dangerous, but she was still much closer to human. David liked Stella, but there were moments Stella looked at the Prime and knew without a doubt that the man in front of her was not human…not even a vampire the way the others were. The full extent of that had yet to claw its way out of its chrysalis, just as with Miranda…so what was it waiting for? And God, what on Earth could be waiting in there? It was all well and good to say they were an older form of vampire, made by the hand of the Goddess Herself, but…did any of them have a clue what that really meant?
And if Nico never recovered from all of this, could they ever find out? That summoning spell he’d half-translated made one thing clear: all eight members of the Circle had to be there, along with one additional participant to actually do the spell. Stella had assumed, perhaps naively, that the reason she kept escaping death was that Persephone wanted her to be that participant, to help open the gate between Her and Her wayward children. If Stella was chosen for that, Seph would do everything She could even from the other side of reality to make sure Stella lived to see that night.
Everything depended on that ritual. Naturally Persephone would want Her priestess protected.
Some Witches might have felt important, knowing that.
Stella was scared shitless.
And now, with Nico “gone,” she had no one to talk to about it.
She’d missed those nights, back before Jonathan died and Nico had come to Earth, when she and Miranda had eaten ice cream and just laughed about the kind of nonsense young women laughed about. A few hours here and there of avoiding reality could be really therapeutic.
Come to think of it…when had that stopped? Right around that time…around the time things got busy, yes, but also when it became clear that David and Miranda were going to be the lynchpin around which the Circle spun…could that have been when Miranda started killing humans? It would explain why almost all of Stella’s overtures were gently but firmly brushed off. Miranda knew Stella had the Sight, and who knew what Stella might pick up from a casual touch or an unguarded moment? Miranda had been trying to shield her from the truth, which was as touching as it was infuriating.
“You should be indoors by now,” came a voice that nearly sent her out of her skin. “Storm’s coming.”
Stella spun around, hoping her guards were fast enough to—
“Christ, Deven, don’t do that!”
The Prime smiled slightly. “My apologies. I forget sometimes that your hearing isn’t as good as ours.”
Stella snorted. “I’ve seen you do the same thing to David. It’s not vampires, it’s just you.”
The smile broadened a hair. He bowed slightly. “May I walk you back to the hotel?”
“Um…sure.”
This was a weird one. She’d been in Deven’s mind, was more familiar with what made him tick than a lot of people, but she couldn’t think of a time they’d been alone together. In fact she wasn’t sure she’d ever stood this close to him; walking beside her, he was a good inch shorter, and she wasn’t even wearing platforms.
His reasoning for joining her became clear momentarily. “Is there something you want to ask me, Stella?”
She let out a breath. “I get it. Okay. But that means you already know the question.”
“And if you’re asking me instead of Miranda, that means you already know the answer.”
Damn logic. “I guess I do.”
“It’s unfortunate that your father had to get mixed up in all this—there was no way it was going to end in a triumphant conviction and justice for all. Between David’s IQ and their net worth, there was no way Miranda was ever going to jail—now or in the future.”
“That’s what my dad said.”
“You don’t seem terribly upset finding out your idol is a killer.”
“My idol is a vampire,” she pointed out. “Finding out she wasn’t a killer was a shock. Most of my ideas about vampires came from TV, but I know you don’t get as powerful as you guys are on the bunny diet.” She looked around at the slowly-quieting city, the thinning crowds. “I feel bad for her, really. I know she’s not the killing kind — in defense of what she loves, sure, but just for food…I can’t imagine how hard that is, even if they find nothing but bad guys.”
“She’s dreadful at it,” Deven affirmed Stella’s earlier thoughts bluntly with a nod. “That’s why she got caught in the first place—guilt makes people stupid. In this day and age, and given her husband has the entire United States wired up with sensors, it’s foolish to think there’s a corner anywhere without cameras on it. Very few can get a good picture of us, but all it takes is one at a lucky angle. David knows that. She’s got to accept that dark deeds have to be done in the dark.”
“Speaking of which…” She trailed off, but again, she didn’t have to ask.
He shook his head, eyes on the ground. “He nearly killed a human tonight—she was lucky I stopped him when I did or she might not have made it. I don’t think he really planned to…I could feel something…something set him off.” A moment later he lifted his gaze back to her. “I don’t suppose you have any ideas how I could reach him? You know him better than anyone else here.”
“I did. But I don’t think I knew anything different from what you know—he’s—
he was—endlessly kind, compassionate. Brilliant, really funny in a dry sort of way. He’s always been a little sad, for obvious reasons, but underneath that was this kind of quiet, unquenchable hope that I think came from his spiritual life. Once he became a vampire he lost that—or, he ran from it, because he didn’t believe Theia would want him anymore, and had no way to know if Persephone would take him in.”
Deven had stopped walking, and she looked back to see a stricken expression on his face. “After he spent all that time trying to heal me from exactly that kind of pain…he drowned in it himself…and I had no idea.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know if that can help you now. But what will help is—”
“Taking down the barrier, I know. But unless you have a way to dampen the power that will flood him when I take it down, I have no way to do it without killing him. He could probably do it himself, but I’m guessing the likelihood of that is somewhere in the ‘fuck off’ area.”
Stella shook her head, frustrated. “I wish I knew what to tell you. My magical career up to meeting you people was mostly tarot readings, money spells, and one really ill-advised love spell for a friend that luckily ended up getting her a dog instead of a dude.”
“Lower maintenance,” he remarked. “More comfortable to share a bed with. But men have their positives, too.”
“Like reaching things on high shelves?” she asked, deadpan.
He grinned and inclined his head to the right. “We’re here.”
She grinned back. “Thanks for the company.”
“Be safe.”
He faded from sight, leaving her smiling at nothing in front of a ritzy hotel. Stella glanced over and noticed one of the hotel staff—a bellhop, maybe? Did people still use that word?—giving her an odd look. She cleared her throat, squared off her shoulders, and strode up the sidewalk to the grand double doors, trying not to look like a goat hopping up to a banquet and chewing on the tablecloth. Like Miranda had said, the secret was to walk like you need fear no evil because you were the biggest, baddest motherfucker in the Valley of the Shadow, even if you were, like Deven, a slight 5’7” eternal teenager or, like David, wearing a Donkey Kong t-shirt under your trench coat.
Shadowstorm (The Shadow World Book 6) Page 24
