“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Jonathan went on hoarsely. “I swear I didn’t know.”
Dev lifted his hand from David and wiped the tears from Jonathan’s eyes. “I believe you, love. This wasn’t your fault.”
“Wasn’t it? Didn’t we both do this, in the end?”
The Prime looked over to what was apparently the wreck of an altar; there were puddles of spent wax, and on the ground, discarded like trash, a shattered Signet.
“We did what we thought was right,” Deven said softly. “I did what I thought was right. I just wanted to keep them safe. But you were right all along … none of it made any difference.”
“What do we do now?” Jonathan asked, trying not to break down completely and sob.
Deven touched David’s face one last time: eyes that had looked on him with both love and rage, lips that had touched his a thousand times, and those hands … how much of the world had they changed? What would become of the South now?
He forced himself to stand, to step away from the body. “Now we find Miranda,” he said.
Jonathan swallowed hard. “She’s dead. She must be. That’s how it works.”
Deven bent and picked up the broken Signet, holding it up where Jonathan could see the stone. “Maybe not.”
The Consort frowned. “He broke it? But isn’t that how you—”
“—break a Signet bond,” Deven finished with a nod. “Break one stone, kill one half of a Pair. The other half goes mad from the shock and power imbalance and rarely lives more than a week. If that’s what Hayes did, she could still be alive.”
“Alive and in pain,” Jonathan said. “Wandering around the city alone … We can’t leave her out there, Deven. We have to find her. If she’s going to die, it should be among friends, not alone.”
“We will,” Deven said, looking out from the roof into the city. “But for now we have to get indoors and hope to God Miranda is somewhere safe.”
“We can’t just leave him here like this …”
Deven took a shaky breath. “It’s just a body, Jonathan. David is … he’s …”
He couldn’t say it. The tremor in his bones seemed to spread outward until he could barely even stand. He felt Jonathan’s arms around him, and with the broken Signet in one hand, Deven clutched his Consort’s shirt with the other, fighting desperately not to weep.
All around them, he could feel the Shadow World mourning.
“Come on,” Jonathan said. “Let’s go.”
“Wait …” Deven bent over the body one last time and picked up David’s hand, sliding the wedding ring off his finger. “Miranda will want this. And we shouldn’t leave his phone here for some random human to find.” He fished in David’s pocket until he found the phone and stuck it inside his own coat.
Then he returned to his Consort’s side.
The Pair disappeared from the roof, leaving the body behind to meet the dawn for the first time in 350 years. The night began to fade, the sounds of the city shifting subtly from late night to early morning, with the fire department personnel still working to make sure the building was roped off and there were no hot spots to put out. It was too risky to send anyone up to the third floor or the roof just yet—they were waiting for a structural engineer with blueprints of the building to tell them how best to proceed.
And just half an hour before sunrise, with no one to bear witness except the slowly lightening sky …
… David breathed.
Shadow’s Fall Page 33
