“The sleeping darkness,” Lydia replied. “They are said to slumber far beneath the earth. Even I know little else about them—they were gone long before I was made. But the Secondborn, the sons and daughters of Persephone … from them came all other vampires, and the Signets were given the power to rule over and guide them. But as the centuries passed, the old gods were forgotten, and eventually the Signets were sundered from one another, loving power more than they loved their Creatrix.”
David snapped the lid of the box shut and put his head in his hands. “Religion? That’s all? You expect me to believe any of this?”
“Believe what you will about the past, Lord Prime. What matters here is the future. Change is coming; that much your Queen could tell you. The Council has lost its way. A grave threat looms against all our kind … and when it comes, we will need more than a group of power-hungry egomaniacs to defeat it. We will need a Prime … a true Prime.”
He looked at her, feeling a surge of strange sorrow. “That’s why you sired me, then? To further some kind of ridiculous prophetic agenda on behalf of your cult?”
She smiled. “There is a little more to it than that.”
“Such as? What is this thing supposed to be, anyway?”
“I am not sure. It can be activated only by the Signet chosen to wear it, so we have never been able to learn much; perhaps you will have better luck. The closest guess is that it functions as a power amplifier.”
Miranda asked suddenly, “Why would someone use this symbol with just one moon on it as opposed to all three?”
Lydia said, “There are three branches of the Order, and each has its own version of the symbol. The Triple Moon is used by the priesthood itself.”
“And the waning Moon alone?”
If Lydia thought it an odd question, she didn’t comment. “The warrior class,” she replied. “The Swords of Elysium are known for their weaponcraft as well as their prowess in battle. Only those who have been initiated into the Order may use the symbol, and it carries a great deal of weight … in some circles.” She was looking back at David as she said that. “You expect me to prove myself to you, to offer you some sort of empirical evidence to back up my beliefs and my words. I would expect nothing less … but alas, I cannot give you any proof.”
“So you want me to take a strange object that may or may not have some kind of voodoo hex on it … on faith. You’ve come to the wrong Signet.”
Miranda put her hand on his arm and said, “I’m afraid David isn’t exactly the religious type, Lydia. And he has a hard time believing in magic.”
Lydia looked the Queen in the eye. “And you?”
Miranda shrugged. “I believe the world is way bigger and weirder than I can possibly know. I don’t know if I believe in any sort of gods, ancient or otherwise … but maybe I’m just not old enough to see my error.”
Lydia’s expression became speculative once again, and she reached over and pushed the box toward the Queen. “Then I give this to you,” she said. “Do with it what you will … my task is done.”
“What makes you think she’ll take it either?” David asked, but Miranda had already done so, drawing the little box toward her. “Miranda—”
“Thank you, Lydia,” Miranda said over his protest.
Lydia nodded; there was new respect, and appreciation, in her eyes. She stood smoothly. “You are welcome. I take my leave of you, then … and may the Dark Goddess bless and guide you both.”
“Wait …” Miranda called after her. “This Goddess of yours … what does She look like?”
The blonde paused. “Everyone sees Her a little differently,” she said. “Most often She is pictured as a warrior, with black hair and black eyes, accompanied by a hound at Her feet and a serpent coiled around Her shoulders.”
David felt Miranda’s energy change completely as Lydia spoke, from bemused to frightened; he turned to her, saw how pale she had become, and started to tell Lydia to wait right where she was—
But Lydia was already gone.
“Faith, track her,” David said into his com.
“Sire … we don’t have a signal. She’s not showing up on the sensor network at all.”
“Recalibrate based on Ovaska’s amulets, then.”
“Already done, Sire. Whatever she’s got on her to block the signal, it’s different from what Ovaska used. We could see her when she came in, but the minute she stepped outside … shit … Sire, I don’t think she blocked the signal. I think she Misted.”
“Well, then, search the area. I want her back here—she hasn’t even begun to answer my questions.”
“Yes, Sire. Right away.”
David took Miranda’s hands and peered into her face. “Beloved … what did she say? What’s got you so spooked?”
Miranda was clutching the box to her chest with one forearm, as if to keep him from taking it away from her. “Nothing,” she ventured, but the look of disbelief on his face made her half smile and amend her statement. “It’s just … Cora said something to me the other night, and … it had to be a coincidence. I mean we’re talking about mythology here. Vampire mythology. It’s all just folklore, there’s no truth in it … is there?”
“Well, you already know how I feel about it.”
“But what if …”
“What if what? What if there really are old gods and sleeping Firstborn and the Signets were created by some moldy old deity?”
“David … you told me, years ago, that some power had created the Signets, and that meant some power could destroy them. What if that power is this Order of Elysium? What if they really are that old, and even if the myth is just a myth, aren’t you dying to know what that thing really is? How it was made? The David I know would be champing at the bit to get this box to the lab.”
The urgency in her voice, the absolute need to make him understand, was as disquieting as anything else he’d heard that night. Miranda wasn’t gullible, nor was she easily impressed; something in Lydia’s words had struck her, had reached the precognitive part of the Queen that knew things it didn’t want to know.
She was right … there was more to this than fairy tales.
“All right,” he said. “We’ll take it to the lab and check it out. But I’m not letting it into the Haven until we know it’s not a bomb or a transmitter. We’ll go by Hunter when we leave here and see what Novotny makes of it.”
He started to take the box, but she flinched, her arm tightening around it. “No,” she said plaintively. “Let me keep it … she gave it to me.”
He stared at her for a while, then relented. “Okay, beloved … if it’s that important to you, you can keep it on you … but you’ll have to let it go for the lab to analyze it. Can you do that?”
She nodded. “I can.”
He waited a moment for her to relax before asking, “Can you tell me why it feels so important to you?”
“I can’t,” she said in a half whisper. “I know it’s irrational, and I know it’s probably just a piece of random jewelry, but … the minute I touched it I was scared of what would happen if I let it go.” She looked up at him. “Can Novotny analyze that? That could be part of the spell that’s on it, to make me want to keep it.”
Relieved that she was thinking at least a little logically, he nodded. “Come on, beloved … let’s get to Hunter, then.” He found he wanted to wrap his arms around his Queen to reassure her. The edge of panic he could feel from her worried him intensely, and he wanted only to make it better. If that meant keeping the damn box, so be it. The sooner they got it to Novotny—and away from the Queen—the better.
* * *
Deep in the night, Austin was quiet, for a city, its constant rattle and hum almost like the sound of the ocean.
Oh, how she missed the ocean … the peace and solitude of the Cloister, nestled in the coastal forests where once, the legend insisted, Elves had lived. And now a myth occupied the land once occupied by a myth, and who was to say what was real anymore? Lydia certainly didn’t know.
She had been to Austin once, three years ago, to see for herself if the prophecy had proven true and the Prime she had sired was, indeed, the one they were waiting for. The minute she laid eyes on Miranda, and later David, she had known it was all true. She could feel it. And so she left Austin to set the next part of the plan in motion, to find someone who could do what must be done.
She walked the long road through Austin alone, her steps feeling hollow even on the concrete. How long had she been walking to this very destination, with single-minded focus on one goal: to deliver the Stone of Awakening to its chosen vessel and then … nothing? Her task fulfilled, her mission completed, she could now go home to the Cloister and find peace … but only if she stopped now, Misted away, and was not seen in Austin again.
“Did you do it?”
Lydia stopped walking and sighed without turning toward the voice. “I did, my Lord.”
The man who came to face her was all too familiar, for he, too, had had a part to play in all of this. She had spent centuries carefully moving the pieces into place. The cause she worked for was not one the Signets shared, power-hungry as they were. The first she had found had agreed to help, only to be killed and replaced with one far less sympathetic to the Order. She had tried to win Hart to her side, thinking that his hatred of the South would make him want to help her, but he was smarter than she had realized. Just when she began to fear her plan would fall apart, she found someone who could do it.
That bastard Hart had nearly destroyed everything, but now, in Jeremy, there was hope.
Jeremy Hayes faced her with his arms crossed. “Good. Then I can do what I must, and all will not be lost.”
“Let us hope not.”
He had old, old eyes, aged by sorrow and agony. She knew the weight of what he had lost and the weight of what he was still forced to carry. “Did you bring it?” he asked.
Lydia nodded and held out what he wanted: a scroll, yellowed and crumbling from age, but still legible under the right light. “Here you will find everything you need, save a single item.”
“Which is?”
Sorrow rose in her throat, threatening her voice. “A hammer,” she replied. “You will need a hammer.”
Jeremy looked at the scroll in his hand with something like fear. She would have feared it, too, if she were him; it was death, written out in ancient script, and his instinct would be to destroy it. It wasn’t even a danger to her, and she wanted to stomp it into dust.
“Remember your promise,” he said. “Once this is done—”
“I swear on my life I will fulfill my end of the bargain.”
He nodded and melted back into the shadows.
A tear made its way from her eye as she continued her walk … a long walk, going nowhere. Her time was nearly come. She had played her part. She had pledged her life to the Goddess, and now the Goddess would collect; and though Lydia should have felt satisfied that things were at last falling into place, instead she simply felt weary, and sad.
The voice came just when she expected it to. “Miss Lydia?”
This time she stopped and turned toward the Elite who were standing there, waiting to escort her to her last meeting on this journey. “Yes.”
“Come with us, please.”
They surrounded her, and even had she not been willing, it would have been easy for them to overpower her and drag her bodily into the huge, luxurious hotel across the street. She was strong, but they were many. They passed through the lobby unnoticed at this late hour; even the concierge kept his eyes on his ledgers as they walked by.
She was escorted into a beautiful, elegant suite of rooms, where her … host … was waiting, seated at the end of a table.
“Lydia,” he said.
“Lord Prime.”
He was such a young-looking vampire, born from the frail body of a boy who would in all likelihood have been murdered at the hands of the Inquisition if he hadn’t vanished into the darkness of a Dublin night and emerged reborn … a healer turned into a killer. Did he feel the dissonance between one calling and the other?
He regarded her through those lavender-blue eyes—eyes whose rare color she knew the origins of, even if he didn’t, and whose age betrayed the apparent youth of his body—as he toyed with a wooden throwing stake with an expertly crafted steel hilt. “I’m glad we found you before you had a chance to do what the Order called you here to do.”
She chose her words carefully. “And what is it you think the Order called me to do, my Lord?”
“I don’t know,” he replied, just as carefully. “But I would advise you to tell me, Lydia, and persuade me not to do what I’ve been asked to do.”
She sat down opposite him. “Someone has hired the Red Shadow to kill me?”
“I did receive an offer on your life.” He turned the stake over and over in his hand. “But before I take it, I want to know why anyone would want you dead.”
“I imagine there are a great many people who would like to kill me,” she mused. “Anyone who wants to see the Order fail in our quest. Anyone who wants the current Signet system to remain unchallenged. That would include most of the Council.”
“Tell me, Lydia … you are, essentially, the agent of the Order, yes? You do whatever dirty work is necessary to ensure that the future unfolds as they see fit?”
“It is not as they see fit,” she insisted. “It has been foreordained that the Awakening will come and with it the war. I am burdened with the work of making sure that happens, by any means necessary. Certain events must take place. They cannot be stopped. Ask your Consort—ask him what happens when we try to circumvent fate. I am only an instrument of the Order, Lord Alpha. We have been trying to Awaken Her for centuries … and only now has there come a power that could do it.”
“And in order to bring this about, you’ll hurt or kill or destroy anyone you have to.”
“You of all people must understand that.”
The Alpha nodded, smiling a little. “You’re right. I do.”
There was something almost like sympathy in his face just then, if indeed he was capable of such a thing. They were kindred spirits in a way—each manipulating the entwined strands of probability to ensure an outcome … yet, though he would not admit it, his motivations were far kinder, born out of love. It was that love that would prove his undoing, ultimately. Unless, of course, he was the one who succeeded in saving them all.
He took a sip from the glass of blood on the table. “For most of my life I’ve wondered, do we truly have free will, or is it all an illusion? Having a Consort who sees snatches of the future complicates things even further. How much of what he sees is incontrovertible, and how much can be changed? I’ve done my best to make sure that God or no God, fate or no fate, those I care for will be taken care of and that anyone who tries to hurt them will pay a terrible price.”
“I never wanted to hurt anyone,” she insisted softly. “I’m trying to help all of us. If events do not unfold as they are meant to …”
“Lydia,” he interrupted, just as softly, “There’s something I think you’ve forgotten in all your grand plans and epic destiny-making … something you didn’t see on the chessboard even as you lined your pawns up one by one.”
She felt tears in her eyes again, and the quiet knowledge she had been waiting for. “And what is that?” she asked.
The Alpha held the stake flat on the palm of his hand. As she watched, it rose into the air and began to spin like the needle on a compass.
“You aren’t the only player in this game,” he said.
The stake whistled across the room, and Lydia gave a strangled cry of pain as it struck her in the chest.
Thirteen
Miranda stood with her arms crossed, watching the talisman rotate inside the imaging machine very similar to the one David had built at the Haven—but much, much larger and more powerful, capable of detecting submicroscopic traces of evidence. A matrix of lasers and other types of scanners passed back and for
th over the talisman’s surface, bringing screens and screens of data up on the monitor that were already being analyzed and logged by the database.
She was still holding the box the talisman had come in. Novotny planned to scan it, too, but could do only one thing at a time, so she had managed to keep her hands on it for a little while.
“Nice blanket, Linus.” Faith came to stand next to her. “I hear you’ve lost your mind.”
The Queen looked down at the box in her hands. “Honestly, Faith, I have no idea what came over either of us. The minute I saw this thing I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. Weirder still, David didn’t want to touch it. He didn’t pick it up, didn’t examine it, didn’t express any sort of curiosity about it.”
Faith looked surprised at that. “A possible relic from Signet history shows up, and he doesn’t want anything to do with it?”
“My point exactly. You know how he is—he has to press every button and take things apart like a little kid. Even now he’s not acting interested. He’s over there on the phone with APD about that dead guy. The only reason he even came here was to humor me.”
“That is odd.” Faith scrutinized the talisman inside the scanner. “What do you think it does?”
“I don’t know. Lydia didn’t seem to know either—she was just the messenger. But even if it’s got some kind of curse on it, I think it’s important to find out more. David was right not to want to bring it into the Haven, but I’m right, too. I know it.”
“So you couldn’t get anything off Lydia with your empathy? I thought there weren’t a lot of people who could shield against it.”
“There aren’t … but if she is who she says she is, it makes sense she’d have more than the average training.”
“Well, now, let’s have a look,” Dr. Novotny said, joining them in front of the machine. “It is a pretty little thing, isn’t it? The carving’s definitely a variant on ancient Greek—in fact it might even be an antecedent, given the shape of the vowels, as you can see.”
Miranda smiled. “If you say so.”
“Can you read it?” Faith asked.
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