Of Shadow Born Read online

  “What do you see?” Miranda asked softly. “Is there any hope?”

  “Just . . . give me a little bit,” Stella said, daunted by the task ahead of her. She wasn’t sure she wanted to get nearer to those blasted ends, but she had to, if she was going to see a way to help them. “I need to get closer . . . I need to touch you both, if that’s okay.”

  Suddenly she felt a line of energy wrap around her wrist; the tendril was gentle and cool and had silver-violet in its aura.

  She looked up at Deven.

  He smiled. “An anchor,” he replied. “And extra strength should you need it.”

  Stella grinned broadly at him. “Thank you. That’s . . . that’s exactly what I needed.”

  Taking a deep breath—and sending up a quick prayer to Persephone to keep her from doing anything that would make the situation worse—Stella settled in to tease apart the ragged edges of the bond, to follow the lines where they led, to try to find a solution.

  It was strange, really, that of all the vampires in the world, she’d met one who had these gifts, this bloodline . . . one that stretched back to the making of the world, to people who had taught the first Witches how to harness the power of nature.

  Her heart leapt with excitement—she could only imagine the things she might learn from him about her own gifts . . .

  “Stay on point, Stella,” the violet-eyed Prime admonished her gently.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, smiling breathlessly. “Back to business . . .”

  The first question was, why did the end of the Pair bond that should lead to Miranda not seem to recognize her anymore? It was as if the roots wanted to stretch toward her but weren’t sure what they would find there.

  “Miranda,” Stella said, “I need to dig around in you a little, is that okay?”

  The Queen nodded. “I appreciate your asking.”

  “Just give me a tap on the shoulder if I make you uncomfortable.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Stella settled back into her Sight and reached for Miranda’s web, first learning more about her energetic makeup. She could see the thread that represented Miranda’s empathic gift—Jesus, it must have driven her insane back before she learned to control it. Any psychic gift that strong was a surefire ticket to a closed ward. It was under control now as firmly as it had been when Stella met her in the clinic. Nearby ran several other strands that she guessed were other powers Miranda had as a vampire, varying in strength and texture.

  She approached the torn-out bond cautiously. Mentally she compared what she was Seeing to the same connection between Deven and Jonathan, and a picture began to form, one she wasn’t sure she liked.

  Finally she sat back to catch her breath. She had to be careful how long she worked with it, or she’d burn out as she nearly had saving Miranda. She had much better control than she’d had that day—in fact, since Miranda had come back and saved her, Stella’s control and accuracy had bumped up by a factor of five at least, and this whole thing, which would have scared her shitless a week ago, felt perfectly normal, just a little draining.

  They waited patiently but expectantly until she took a deep breath and said, “I think I know what’s going on.”

  Miranda gave her an encouraging look, though from her face she already had a bad feeling about what Stella was going to say.

  “First of all, you’ve all been finding connections among you that didn’t exist before, and you don’t understand where they came from. Well, I can’t tell you that last part, but what we’re dealing with looks like this.” She grabbed pen and paper and hastily sketched out what she’d seen.

  The three Signets stared at it. “It looks like an atom,” Deven observed. “David, what element is that?”

  David smiled. “The closest would be oxygen, although the electrons wouldn’t line up quite like that, but rather in concentric shells with two in the first and . . . never mind. You’re right, though—it does look like an atom. A circle with four Pairs placed around it, each Pair bound to itself, and the whole circle bound to all of them.”

  “You said that a Pair has to be made up of two vampires—that a human can’t hold a Signet. Right?”

  The Queen nodded. “It would be like trying to mate a deer with a horse.”

  “Well . . . you started out with two horses. When the bond between you was broken, it was broken on David’s end since his Signet was the one smashed. But when he came back, it should have reconnected, except . . . he didn’t come back . . . quite the same. Now, instead of a deer and a horse, or two horses, you’ve got a horse and a freaking unicorn.”

  This time Deven snorted. “David’s a unicorn? That explains so much.”

  Neither David nor Miranda seemed to find it as funny. “So . . . what am I, then?” David asked hesitantly.

  “I have no idea. I mean, you’re still a vampire, at least mostly, but . . . the change is still going on. I wish I could tell you what it means, or how it’s happening, but I am so far out of my league I can’t even see my league from here.”

  Miranda sighed, defeated. “You can’t help us.”

  “Even if I knew exactly what was different about David, I’m not nearly powerful or trained enough to go trying to reattach a bond like this. I don’t think any garden-variety Witch has that kind of juice—not even a High Priestess.”

  David gave Deven a piercing look. “I don’t suppose a vampire Priestess might be able to.”

  Deven looked away, shaking his head, but Stella went on. “It’s not just the power that’s the problem—it’s ability, too. Sight. Deven can See almost as well as I can because . . . um, because of his healing talent. But even as strong as you two are, neither of you can See energy like I can, so you wouldn’t be able to fix it—you’d be working blind. We need someone who can See and who has the strength, and frankly . . . I have no idea where to find that.”

  “If we’re the most powerful of our kind, and that’s still not enough, then we’re screwed,” Miranda said. “There aren’t any Signets with Sight like yours, Stella . . . are there, David?”

  The Prime thought a moment, then shook his head. “I’ve never heard of one.”

  Deven, who had been sitting with his eyes closed, said, “You’re not old enough.”

  “What do you mean?” David asked him.

  “I mean, the kind of magic we’re dealing with here isn’t just amulets and shields. It’s not like what Ovaska used, or even what Volundr worked with. We’re talking about reshaping someone’s soul. No vampire—not even the High Priestess of Elysium—could do that.”

  “Then who can?” Miranda asked.

  “No one. Not anymore. Once, long ago . . . there used to be people who worked that kind of magic, and their power was enough to cast even the greatest Signet into the shade.”

  Stella’s breath caught. Was he going to tell them?

  “Who?” David pressed. “And where are they now?”

  “Dead. Hunted to extinction by both humans and vampires. By the time I was born, they were almost gone . . . almost.”

  Miranda and David both looked baffled. “What the hell are you talking about?” the Queen wanted to know.

  Stella saw him struggling, trying to force himself to speak the truth after hundreds of years of hiding, and she realized she couldn’t let him do it, not yet. “Elves,” she finished for him. “He’s talking about Elves.”

  Ten

  Olivia knew that eventually they would come for her. She had run—again—but this time only as far as her loft. She was halfway through shoving her belongings into a bag when she simply stopped, dropping the bag on the bed, and gave up.

  She had nowhere left to go.

  She hadn’t done anything wrong this time. But as soon as the Prime carried his unconscious Queen up the steps to the clinic, and the Elite guarding the place clustered around them, she knew they would have questions for her . . . too many questions. They would want to know where she had come from, who she was . . . and David knew. He knew, an
d others would find out. Any thought she’d had of hanging around to see what happened evaporated as the fear took hold, and she fled.

  Perhaps the Prime could protect her. She might have thrown in her lot with them, gone back to work for a Signet, even joined the Elite and become Second . . . she certainly still had the skill. But the thought filled her with the kind of fear that had driven her over the face of the globe, from her old life in Australia to the anonymity of a tattoo studio in Austin.

  And now they would find her. Now that David knew where she lived, he could go through old network data to track her and then follow her signal; she had no idea what the extent of his reach was outside Austin, but he had a lot of allies in the Council, and rumor was he had eyes everywhere. One way or another she would be running the rest of her life . . . it was just a question of how long that life would be.

  So she just stopped. She put her things away, went out to hunt, then came home and slept; the next night, she went to work, letting the hum of the needle soothe her rattled nerves. She re-inked a piece that was two hundred years old and repaired shoddy workmanship that had barely seen a full presidency. She gave another young, naïve vampire a butterfly tramp stamp.

  And she waited.

  She watched blood roll down the back of one of her clients while he held the wound open as long as he could, and she wondered if her own blood would flow onto the street, or perhaps the concrete floor of her loft to mix with the paint that had been splattering its surface for months. She hoped whoever came to kill her wouldn’t destroy her paintings. Of course, what difference would it make? There was no one to leave them to.

  Sometimes she stood in front of her most recent canvas, another in the series trying to capture the faceless woman from her dreams. In this one the woman stood only a few yards from the viewer, looking back over her shoulder; her clothes seemed to be spun out of spiderwebs and shadows, and on her outstretched hand perched a raven.

  Olivia couldn’t stop staring at her, waiting . . . for what, exactly? For the painting to come to life and tell her fortune? She didn’t need a painting for that.

  The nights were growing warm, another round of rainstorms making its lazy way through the Hill Country and into Austin. Olivia still wore her coat—most vampires did, even here. Texas was warm enough that they didn’t need the extra layer—at least not outdoors. Walking into an air-conditioned building was enough to give a vampire chills for hours, so most of the time they could be seen skulking around town in jackets no matter what the weather.

  She’d had a long night. The entire city was practically vibrating with awe and fear; news had gotten out, and though so far only a few had seen him, everyone knew the Prime lived. He had either come back from the dead or survived in the first place—and either possibility was terrifying . . . as much to his allies as to his enemies.

  No one knew what to think or how to react. Was their ruler a god? The devil himself? Had the whole thing been a hoax? So far the Elite weren’t talking, and while the ordinary vamp on the street was grumbling about the lack of any real news, Olivia knew that the truth was the Elite had no idea what to say either, because no one did. Not even the Prime himself.

  The anxiety hovering around the Shadow District made it hard to concentrate on work. She wasn’t an empath, but she sure as hell could sense fear as well as any of her kind. She’d nearly committed a cardinal sin of tattooing and fucked up a word—fortunately she’d quadruple-checked the image and realized it was reversed in time to fix it without alerting the client. Granted, it was in Japanese, and she doubted he had any idea it really said fish bicycle rather than inner strength, but research wasn’t her job.

  She dug in her coat pocket for her keys as she rounded the corner to her building. It had become habit to check the ground outside for unfortunately placed bodies, although chances were when they came to get her they’d be on the front stoop instead of—

  “Good evening, Liv.”

  She froze. Oh God. Oh God, no. No no no . . .

  Jeremy Hayes, who was sitting on the steps waiting for her patiently, gave her a wry smile. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  She started to step back, to bolt, but he asked, “Where do you think you’ll go?”

  She was shaking violently as she took the last few steps and knelt. “My Lord Prime.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Oh, get up, for God’s sake. I’m not here to kill you.”

  She clutched her coat tightly at her throat, standing up slowly. “You aren’t?”

  He smiled. She had missed that smile—once he’d been such a witty, lighthearted man, so apt to laugh. She’d never thought he was bloodthirsty enough to be a Prime, but she would have followed him willingly . . . she had tried. “If you hadn’t rabbited that night, I would have told you then that I wasn’t angry at you. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “I failed you,” she whispered, eyes burning. “I failed Melissa and Amelia. I should have gone down fighting to save them.”

  His smile faded. “No . . . I should have listened to you years before that and left the Signets alone. But fate had its own ideas, it seems.” He shut his eyes a moment before continuing. “Amelia’s dead.”

  “Hart—”

  “I got her back from him, but it was too late. He had already murdered her in spirit. She just finished his work. After everything I did to rescue her, after all the blood and death . . . I lost her anyway, Liv. I killed a Prime . . . and Faith . . . for nothing.”

  They were both silent for a while, and then Jeremy asked, “Is it true? Did he really come back from the dead?”

  Olivia nodded. “Nobody knows where he was or what really happened, but he showed up here on my doorstep.”

  Jeremy shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense. The whole point was to take all of his power, send it through the Stone, and that would open the door. Who can come back from that? Who can just . . . wake up after having all the life energy sucked out of them?”

  “David Solomon,” she replied, going over to sit next to him on the steps. “Why did you do it?”

  “Lydia, one of the priestesses of Elysium, came to me and said she would free Amelia if I performed the ritual. It had to be done by a Prime—even one without his Signet would do. She assured me that Hart’s downfall was a guarantee once the door was open . . . maybe I did something wrong and it didn’t work. If I had any idea where the Cloister was, I could ask them, I suppose. I haven’t noticed any goddesses walking the earth, have you?”

  “Not so much. Although if Solomon were a god it would explain a lot.”

  He stared off into space, and she wasn’t sure how to interpret his expression. It was somewhere between anger and sadness, but it had an edge to it that made her deeply uneasy for reasons she couldn’t name. “It wasn’t so much the Pair . . . Signets die all the time. None of us really live that long once that thing’s around our necks . . . it’s a noose on a timer, that’s all.”

  “You hate what happened to their Second,” she guessed.

  “I . . .” He put his head in his hands for a moment. When he spoke again, his voice was heavy with guilt. “I used her as a detonator. She shouldn’t have gone out like that. She should have gone out fighting. I’m pretty sure she made the bomb go off herself—I never hit the switch. I think she was trying to give the Queen a chance to escape, assuming my people would have killed her.”

  “She gave her life for her Queen, then,” Olivia said. “For a Second there’s no better death, fighting or otherwise.”

  He almost smiled again. “Spoken like a true Second.”

  She shrugged. “Not much of one.” She took his hand, squeezing it. “I’m sorry about Amelia. I should have helped you. I would have.”

  “I didn’t want to drag you back into all of this. But now . . . there’s no one else I can turn to. I have nothing left in this world . . . Hart and McMannis and their friends took everything from me. I have only one thing left, one purpose. For that I need your help.”

>   “Anything,” she said. “You have only to name it. I made an oath to serve you, remember? As far as I’m concerned you’re still my Prime.”

  Jeremy met her gaze with eyes that had gone abruptly hard and steely. She had never seen the cold in his gaze before—the hatred she could feel roiling beneath the surface. He had never been a man who hated easily. The uneasiness in her gut redoubled. “Vengeance,” he said. “I want you to help me bring an end to this. I want you to help me destroy them all.”

  * * *

  David managed to find his voice first.

  “Elves.”

  “Yes.”

  “Elves.”

  “Keep saying it, David, until you believe it.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” David said. “There’s—”

  “No such thing,” Deven concluded with a nod. “You’re right. They’re extinct. The last few were hunted down and killed around the time I was still mortal. But they did exist once, and they had the kind of power Stella is describing.”

  Miranda wasn’t sure what was funnier—Deven telling them there was such a thing as Elves, or the look on David’s face trying to make sense of Deven telling them there was such a thing as Elves. For all that Deven insisted he was an atheist, he seemed to acknowledge a lot of odd supernatural things, and David kept having to readjust his idea of how far Dev was willing to suspend disbelief.

  Stella cleared her throat. “Before you both dismiss the idea as totally bonkerdoodles, you should probably remind yourselves that you’re vampires and I’m a Witch and you all wear magical amulets that light up.”

  Miranda had to chuckle at the Witch’s choice of words. “Okay, so, Dev, have you ever met an Elf?”

  Something tugged at her empathic senses, and she frowned, trying to figure out what Deven was feeling without violating his privacy. His expression remained neutral, but his voice had an edge to it she didn’t know how to interpret. “Not in person.”