Miranda had said it hadn’t come naturally to her. Stella wasn’t totally sure she believed that—the Queen seemed like she’d been born with a Signet around her neck. But there was definitely something to the theory, and Stella imagined she could pull authority and power up around her like it was a black leather coat, sweeping in past the doormen with a smile and nod of acknowledgment, headed for the elevator like she already owned the place.
*****
Are you out there? Can you hear me?
David didn’t really remember his mother. He had fairly clear recollections of his father, mostly surrounding the forge and the sound of a hammer striking metal, but he also remembered his father drawing out plans for machine parts he was making for…a windmill, perhaps? Or something like that? It was something the town council had hired him to build. David’s mother, however, had died when he was ten, expelling a stillborn child conceived far too late in life for her safety.
Still, that night as he lay on his side on the couch ignoring his inbox, he found himself wondering about her, trying to remember what she’d looked like. He’d been born essentially a carbon copy of his father, so she might have looked like anything, though most of the villagers were painfully drab and ordinary in appearance. She was probably a brunette, with brown eyes or hazel, skin milky pale from the lack of sunlight in their bleak region of England—but she might have been unusually tall. His father had been several inches shorter than David, as were all the men of their line. David wasn’t exactly a giant but for the time, he was considered one.
He closed his eyes and tried to call up her image. The shape of a woman, round-hipped and strong-backed, began to form, standing on the far end of the wooden bridge that led into town over the burbling creek where everyone got their water. She was dressed like most of the women in town, in plain-colored and unadorned but beautifully woven and sewn clothing, her hair tucked up under a bonnet.
In his mind, she noticed someone was approaching, and turned toward him—and as she did, her clothing began to morph, turning black, its hem dropping down to the ground and losing its edges so it seemed to blur into the mist that began to rise around her. Hair as red as old wine cascaded down over her shoulders and nearly to her waist, scandalously unbound.
The bridge, the village, the creek all disappeared. They were standing in a forest, the sky above filled with stars. The Haven, too, faded from sight, the light of the fireplace concentrating into the jewel at her throat.
Silver-black, luminous eyes met his.
The reaction was as immediate as it was instinctive: he crossed the space formerly occupied by the bridge and knelt before Her.
Her hand touched his head, and a wash of power like nothing he knew in the real world spilled down over him. Everything that had been tense and afraid in the last week felt soothed, as if there was no such thing as fear in this place.
This place…
“No,” She said with an affectionate smile. “You are not dead. Rise, child.”
“Then how am I here?” he asked. “Is this a dream?”
“It is, and is not. There are avenues of consciousness down which I can walk even now, to drop into the dreams of the others, but you are the only one who can come here.”
“Why me?”
She tilted her head to the side.
He had to smile at that, both because it was a dumb question and because her expression was such a Miranda thing to do. “Well, okay. But still. Why show up at this particular moment?”
“You have been calling Me.”
“I have? Oh…I have, haven’t I.” He hadn’t even realized that was what he was doing, but he’d been silently conversing with Her for months, embarrassingly the same way people often did with God, basically either complaining or bargaining. “Sorry.”
“It is I who am sorry, My son. I want nothing more than to give you the help you need—the help you deserve after all you and your family have endured. Even were I close enough to speak to all of you face to face at will, there are limits to My intervention in the world of form. We are all subject to natural law except in rare cases. My power must come through one of you to affect reality.”
“Like Drawing Down the Moon,” he mused.
“Just so. I find it easy to work through young Stella as she has training in her Craft.”
“So what kind of Craft are we going to need to help Nico?”
Sadness entered Her dark eyes, and She looked up at the night sky. He wondered what She was seeing—clearly something more than stars, or perhaps stars were wonder enough. “That is why I am here now. You already know: only one thing can help Nico.”
“Breaking the barrier.”
“Yes. Right now his mind and heart are dangerously imbalanced—until now he was able to maintain balance because of the strength of his heart, but no longer.”
“He needs to be hit with that much love to balance out the hate?”
“Not hate. The opposite of hate is indifference, not love. Love informs the entire universe—its opposite is nonexistence. Love and hate are remarkably similar in that regard, but only one endures beyond death, and only one heals. Nico does not need a sorcerer; he needs a healer.”
“But Deven said he can’t lower the barrier without killing Nico. It’s too much power.”
“Deven is afraid.”
“You mean he’s wrong?”
“Far more often than he would care to admit.”
“How am I supposed to convince him of that? I can’t force him to take it down.”
“Force is not necessary. There are much gentler, and more effective, methods of persuasion. You and your beloved have everything you need—yourselves. It is by your hands that Deven can lay down his fear.”
“And what about Nico, in that case? The power wouldn’t overwhelm him?”
“Are you certain that would be a bad thing?”
“It wouldn’t kill him?”
“He is far stronger than even you know. Regardless… blackening eyes are not your only new ability, child. Channeling and controlling power of that magnitude is part of what you were made for.”
“It is? Why?”
David thought he saw a slight smile. “That will have to wait.”
“And where exactly do we learn to do that?”
“One of you already knows.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Miranda. She learned Weaving before Jonathan died — but she claims she forgot how. She’s wrong, too?”
Now She was definitely smiling. “Far more often than she would care to admit.”
Slowly, he nodded. “I think I understand.”
“Good. You are about to wake up—I would hate for our meeting to end without you learning what you needed to.”
“I have about a thousand questions for You,” he said. He could feel the vision, or whatever it was, beginning to dissolve, its edges unraveling like fabric. He held onto it as long as he could. “I don’t even know where to—”
She smiled again, reached out, and touched his face. He fell silent; in fact, the urge to kneel again was difficult to resist…almost as difficult as the urge to throw himself into Her arms…but he sensed doing that, while probably as comforting as he hoped, would do far more to him than he was ready to deal with right now.
“Every time you come to Me, you will be further changed,” She told him quietly. “You have always been a warrior—you are becoming My warrior, and that is an even greater burden than the one you bear around your neck. But I chose you for a reason. There are no four creatures in the World of Shadow more worthy or better suited to My lineage. Fear not, my son…by the time you need it, you will have full knowledge, and full power.”
He nodded. “As You will it…wait, four? What do you mean four?”
Too late.
David jolted awake to see worried green eyes peering down at him.
“I said, it’s after four,” Miranda said, stepping back out of flailing range. “It�
�s been a long night—you should come to bed.”
He was breathing hard, momentarily confused. Where—the Suite, the couch. He’d fallen asleep. The sound of wind in trees was fading from his mind…but what he’d learned was not.
“Are you okay?” the Queen asked, sitting down next to him and taking his hands, drawing him upright. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“Not exactly, but…” He met her eyes, a spark of hope kindling in his chest. He squeezed her hands, leaned forward and kissed her firmly; she was giving him a dubious look as he leaned back, like she wasn’t entirely sure about his sanity.
“It’s okay, beloved,” he said. “I think I have an idea.”
Chapter Thirteen
For a couple of days Miranda walked around fairly sure her husband had lost his mind.
Soon enough, however, she began to realize he might have stumbled on their only viable option at this point.
At first she’d flat-out refused to try the magic again. The first time she’d used it had been awful…but it had worked. She’d blundered through it, but she’d been able to un-bind the Pair and bind Deven to her and David. Compared to the magnitude of reworking Signet bonds, the idea of breaking through a barrier wasn’t nearly as intimidating.
She didn’t even have to bring it down all the way—just push it open wide enough that its own energy would break it like a dam. After that it was a matter of standing between Prime and Consort and helping dampen the wave to keep it from killing either of them. With her on one side of it and David on the other, their strength combined with whatever Weaving knowledge she could recall could do it. She knew, in her bones, that they could.
Honestly it was less the idea and more the execution that left her speechless.
Still, at this point it was just an idea. They didn’t have a whole lot of time to waste before Nico did something disastrous and unrecoverable, but she couldn’t just jump into it without at least trying to remember what she’d learned in her dreams two years ago.
She could hammer at the barrier with sheer force of will and probably knock it over, assuming she could get in past Deven’s shields…but she didn’t want to traumatize either of the Pair any further. She had to believe that magic as ancient as the Signets would find its way to balance once that initial surge had passed. Everyone just had to survive that long.
Miranda leaned her head on her piano and shut her eyes, groping after the vision. How had she found it before? She remembered little of how she’d done it; that night had been so catastrophic it was hard to hold onto any part of it willingly.
Nothing came to mind. She might as well have been trying to remember someone else’s life.
On the other hand…she did remember another time that the Web had shown up in her mind. She’d been high as a kite, thanks to Deven’s Better Living Through Illegal Pharmaceuticals program, but it was still before the explosion. The night of the wedding had been a good one…she’d felt happy enough to burst for her friends. She remembered the club, and its noise and teeming crowds; she remembered being surprised, and yet not really, when Deven kissed her, giving her the E-21 he had on his tongue. She wondered now…had that been an excuse? She was pretty sure the list of women he’d made out with was list-able on one hand.
Don’t get distracted. Keep going. What happened then?
The drug had kicked in quickly, and she’d seen it…the curtain of reality parting, as Deven had said, letting her see behind it.
There it was. The memory glimmered in her mind’s eye: thousands of threads of light, informing everything around her, herself included. She had been terrified at first, but he’d reassured her: Find out what it wants. It had just wanted to dance with her.
And if it could dance, could she play it?
Miranda didn’t move her head, but reached down and lifted the lid off the keyboard, fingers finding their places out of years of practice. She knew the chords didn’t really matter: it was the motion, the undulation of matter and space making love to itself. That’s all any of it was, really. The universe in love.
She kept her eyes closed and started playing, improvising a slow and rolling melody. She held the image of the Web in her mind, not trying to do anything with it, just letting it be there; even though it was just a memory, before long, it started to move.
She didn’t dare touch it. Not yet. And just playing wasn’t going to be enough. But for now it was enough to watch from a place beyond fear. Before she could become too drained, she wound the music down, giving herself time to withdraw. It had been little more than a meditation but she had to be careful.
When she opened her eyes, she finally sensed she wasn’t alone. She turned her head to see Stella standing in the doorway, eyes huge.
“What the hell were you just doing?” the Witch asked.
Miranda considered the piano in front of her. “I don’t really know,” she answered. “Just experimenting with something. What did it look like?”
Stella hovered in the doorway and said, “It looked like Weaving.”
“It did? Good.”
The Queen had to take a moment to ground, hands on the piano lid. She made herself breathe in fours: four counts in, hold for four, four counts exhale, hold for four.
She was tempted to ask Stella for help — Stella had been learning Weaving arts, after all—but she wasn’t quite ready for the Witch to know what she and David were up to. Right now she wanted to get used to the magic on her own terms.
Finally she looked over at Stella and said, “You’re back.”
“Yeah…I didn’t check out of the hotel, I just wanted to see how things felt here. I knew if anything had changed you’d call, but…this place feels like home now. It’s hard to stay away. Funny, really.”
“Not that funny.” Miranda smiled, thinking back. “There was a time I was still human and fell in love with this place. This life gets in your blood somehow.”
Stella half-smiled. Her demeanor was unusually serious—given the situation Miranda couldn’t blame her for losing some of her sparkle. “Was it the place, or the owner?”
The Queen chuckled. “Both. I think even at the very beginning, when I was a screwed-up shell of a person scared of everything and without hope, I knew this—he—was where I belonged.”
Nodding, Stella said a little too casually, “I bet you never thought you’d end up killing people.”
At first, Miranda didn’t get it, and jumped to the wrong conclusion: “The Blackthorn were killing all over the city, and they did kill me. I didn’t think twice about defending what was mine.”
Stella’s eyebrow lifted. “But before that…the night you came here, you killed humans.”
Miranda had been through enough since that night, and had learned enough, that talking about it wasn’t as hard as it had been. “I don’t know if I’d classify them as human. Or maybe human but not people. Either way…I regretted it for a while, the fact of ending lives. I don’t anymore.”
“Because of people like Annalise Vitera?”
The Queen froze. Suddenly Stella’s behavior and tone made perfect, terrible sense. She’d been to visit her father, Miranda knew, and between whatever the Detective had said and what the Witch’s intuition must be telling her…
Miranda sat back, crossing her arms. She cared too much for Stella to keep bullshitting her; and there was no way to sugarcoat it, either. “You know that when David returned from the dead there was a price. In order to serve Persephone he had to become something new. To regain our bond I had to make that same choice. Once in the month, on the dark of the Moon, we have to kill. It wasn’t something we knew specifically going in, but it was clear there would be consequences. There’s only so much power a vampire can attain without the power of death.”
Stella didn’t react quite the way a normal human would have. She looked down at the floor for a minute and then nodded. “You don’t seem too upset about it.”
“I hate it, Ste
lla. I love what I am, and who I am. But I hate what I have to do. Please, please remember something: Every single one of our kind wants to kill. Every cell in my body fights with my will, every time I hunt, not to drink until there’s nothing left. We’re born starving. A lot of us are still good people in spite of it, but the facts are the facts. We were built as predators…hell, we’re practically the ultimate predator. Not only are we bloodthirsty and fast and strong, we can pass among our prey unnoticed for years.”
“So you enjoy it?”
“Yes.” Miranda said bluntly, but added, “Not for the reason you might think. David and I use our empathy to find the evil ones so that we can live with ourselves and to make something at least marginally good out of a tough situation. But I’ll tell you the truth…it’s a relief to stop fighting for a night. It’s like handing over this huge burden—putting it in Persephone’s hands once a month. Is it okay? Not even remotely. For a long time I haven’t even been able to admit there was anything satisfying about it. But there is. In a twisted sort of way it’s like She’s given us a reward.”
Strange. Up until this very moment she hadn’t been able to articulate any of that. Was it telling Stella that made it easier, or was it what she’d just been doing with the Web? Those endless strands of light were the truth of the universe. Maybe touching that truth made all truth easier to speak.
“I suppose the question is whether you can live with it,” Miranda told her. “You don’t have to. You can go back to the hotel and then leave town—we can take care of it for you. You can even take your father if he’ll go.”
Stella smiled sadly. “No, I can’t. I’m bound up in this too, remember? There’s work for me to do. Knowing that you have no choice doesn’t exactly make it better, but it does make it easier. Look what I’d be giving up if I walked away—you’re my friend. And if we ever get Nico back…I want to be there for that. And I want to help you burn Morningstar to the ground if I can.” She shrugged. “Just don’t ask me to kill anyone.”
Shadowstorm (The Shadow World Book 6) Page 25
