Shadow's Fall (36 page)

Ghostlight was cleaned first, sheathed, and placed on the mantel. The other knives got similar treatment, but the stars and stakes would have to be refitted with new wooden parts and sharpened, and they’d keep until later. Dev placed them all together in a locked box until he had a moment to care for them.

Jonathan followed him into the bathroom, where he began the next phase of purification: his clothes. Red Shadow standard black BDUs, soaked and stained with blood and grime, stripped off and dropped with far less ceremony than the weapons; they were essentially disposable. The only thing Deven kept were his boots, of course, wiped down carefully and lined up by the door near the rest of the weapons.

When he was undressed, Deven climbed into the shower, and still, neither of them spoke as he scrubbed and rinsed smear after smear of blood from his body, none of it his.

Jonathan picked up the discarded clothes and looked them over. No rips or slices. The Cloister had no armed guards. It depended on its remote location and secrecy for protection; it had apparently not occurred to the priesthood that any of the Order’s members might want to hurt them. The blood was mostly splatter, except for what looked like a handprint around the left ankle … had someone in her death throes begged for mercy? Had Deven given it?

He probably had … but Deven’s brand of mercy was to deal out a swift death, not a long life.

Jonathan had clean clothes waiting when Deven emerged from the steam a very different creature: softer, smaller somehow, his hair falling into his weary eyes, his thin body looking frail instead of graceful. Jonathan held out a huge towel to fold the Prime into and held on to him for a long moment, feeling the mix of emotions twisting around themselves in Deven’s mind. Satisfaction, yes, and
triumph, but also a deep sadness he was trying not to let surface.

“I’m fine,” Deven said, almost sounding angry. “Stop looking at me like you think I’m going to keen like a widow. I’ve been an assassin for most of seven centuries—why should this be any different?”

Jonathan just looked at him for a moment before he said, “You just killed your sire, Deven.”

“So?” Deven withdrew from Jonathan’s embrace. “She wanted me to be her successor—it’s really rather poetic when you think about it.”

Another long look. Deven shook his head, losing patience, and turned to go to bed, where a special sort of nightmare would likely be waiting for him this time.

Deven paused at the bedroom door. “Call Miranda,” he said softly. “Tell her not to worry anymore.”

Jonathan nodded.

Miranda leaned the side of her head against the chimney and sang quietly into the darkness, punctuating each line of the song with a sip from her beer:

The stars at night are big and bright …

Deep in the heart of Texas …

Out there, in the glow of the city far below the stars, her husband and her friend were in mortal peril, again, trying to bring the city back under control. This was the third night of the insanity. Somehow Jeremy Hayes had brought in dozens, if not hundreds, of vampires he had hired to tear the city down, and ordered them all to strike, to cause utter chaos, to destroy the Pair’s hold on their own territory using the bodies of innocents whenever possible.

Last night David had given up trying to coordinate from the Haven and moved an entire mobile command unit to the Hausmann, one of the few vampire-owned establishments that hadn’t already been vandalized. From there he ran the
sensor network and coordinated all the teams, including the visiting Elite from California and, in a surprise move, another cadre of loaner warriors, this one from Eastern Europe.

Jacob wanted answers about the explosion. David needed help getting things under control so he could give Jacob answers. It was logical, then, for Jacob to send as many Elite as he could spare, which amounted to only a dozen, but that was damn fine by David; the sooner they got this over with, the sooner they could turn their attention back to the explosion and what the hell was going on in the bigger picture.

Miranda knew that David had been reluctant to accept outside help, for fear of appearing weak, but the word had already gone out that the South was under a massive and coordinated attack, and rather than delighting the Council by falling into riot and looting, the South had circled its wagons and was eliminating the threats one by one with a ruthless efficiency that had, Miranda could tell, shocked the shit out of most of the other Primes. David enfolded the loaner Elite into his own troops seamlessly and already had half the city back in hand that second night. The uprisings in other cities had been far easier to put down, but it was still just a matter of time. Tonight, the new moon, there were only pockets of resistance left in Austin, and while David ran the network and dispatched teams to hot spots, the vampires of the Haven showed the world once again what they were made of.

Faith had thrown herself into the fray like a berserker; she was at the head of every major operation, kicking down doors and slicing off heads and hauling in witnesses without breaking a sweat.

Miranda was worried about her. There was something wild and almost desperate in her eyes these last few days—like she was looking for one fight too many. David was pretty clumsy with emotions, but Faith did her level best to make it seem like she didn’t have any at all; Miranda, however, could feel Faith’s all-business exterior cracking, and it was only a matter of time before she did something stupid. If they could just get the city calmed down again, Miranda would talk to her.

Then there was Miranda, poor left-behind Miranda, too chicken to fight in case someone might see her and figure out her super-secret alter ego.

She really did try not to be angry at or feel sorry for herself. There was more than just her career at stake, here—until they found a way to stop the Awakening ritual, she was vulnerable, and there was no telling what was going to happen to her when those Elysium crazies did their magic hoo-hah and tried to suck the life out of her.

But so far there was no deus ex machina ringing her up to deliver good news and tell her that the truth was the Stone was really just a very Goth paperweight or change purse or something. She didn’t know what to expect or when to expect it … Would she just drop dead? Would it hurt? Would it really kill David, too? Or had there been some kind of mistake, and Lydia was right all along?

As the hours ticked by, her hope that Jacob—or even Deven—would call with a reprieve diminished, until it was just Miranda, sitting on a roof, singing to the sky.

Her phone rang.

Miranda listlessly dug around for it in her pocket. “Hello?”

“Don’t hang up,” came a British accent, almost unrecognizable in its gravity.

“Okay,” she said. She no longer had any fight left in her. The enormity of her own failure in all of this, confronted with the insanity of the thought that she’d ever get to choose what life she wanted to lead, had drained all the fight from her body and voice. Maybe it would be better if …

“It’s done, Miranda.”

She frowned. “What’s done?”

“The ritual … the Awakening. It won’t happen. It can’t happen. Ever. You’re safe. I give you my word.”

She stared out over the Haven grounds, uncomprehending. “Wh … what did you do?”

Jonathan sighed. “I did nothing, Miranda. Don’t worry about the details this time … This time just let it go, all right? The ritual can’t be performed.”

“Why not?”

He paused, then said quietly, “There’s no one left to perform it.”

Miranda felt herself go cold. “He killed them … all of them … to save us.”

“Down to the last Acolyte. Down to the servants. Twenty-eight total. He slew them all and then burned their bodies and their texts. The priesthood of Persephone is no more, Miranda. That thing around your neck is just metal and will be forever.”

She clutched her beer bottle as if it were a life preserver. “Just like that … he just … killed them all …”

“Yes. Every last one, with his own blade. He couldn’t trust an agent to do this.”

“And … what will that do to him?”

“Why do you care?” Jonathan asked harshly. “He doesn’t have feelings, right? It’s all just a game to us both.”

Miranda caught herself halfway through a sob, and Jonathan’s voice immediately gentled. “I’m sorry, Miranda. I don’t mean to be a bastard.”

Miranda was crying, though why, she didn’t know; it could be relief, but it didn’t feel like relief. It felt almost like capitulation, like she had lost something precious, some chance she’d never get again.

“Thank you for letting me know,” she half whispered. “We’ll talk later once things settle down, okay?”

Now he sounded relieved. Deven getting David’s forgiveness would take a while, but at least Jonathan still had a friend in Miranda. “Yes. Of course. I’ll check in on you tomorrow night.”

They hung up, and Miranda wiped at her eyes.

She looked down at her Signet, turning the amulet over and exposing the Stone. She was glad, of course, that she wasn’t going to die, but …

What if they’d been wrong about what it did? What if … what if Lydia was the one who knew the truth, and now all those vampires were dead … What if Deven had destroyed the entire Order of Elysium and all the knowledge of Signet history they might have been able to
share—knowledge they still needed, even if this Awakening never took place—and it was all for nothing?

She took a deep breath. Right or wrong, it was done.

The ruby in her Signet shone gently in the darkness, its light comforting to her frazzled nerves. After a moment she took a deep breath and dialed David.

“Can’t talk now, beloved—kicking ass,”
he said a bit breathlessly, and hung up before she could reply.

She had to smile. Such a strange life she’d stumbled into. She would never have thought she would consider her own life worth the lives of two dozen others … and she was hardly proving that worth right now, sitting here doing nothing. Far more than twenty-eight lives were at stake right now, and it was supposed to be her duty to protect them.

Her smile faded, and she tucked her phone back in her pocket and touched her Signet again. David and Faith were out there defending the city. She should be there, too.

And if someone recognized her, they’d deal with it somehow … She couldn’t worry about that now, with so much at risk. If the entire Order of Elysium had died so she could remain Queen, and all her Elite and her Prime were risking life and limb to protect Austin’s people, immortal and otherwise … what was she doing here?

Miranda stood up on the roof, heartbeat quickening with a sudden and overwhelming sense of purpose.

To hell with this. I have work to do.

She left the roof and ran down to their suite, took up Shadowflame, and headed for her car.

Some people found their way to Witchcraft because of spiritual longing. They weren’t satisfied with mainstream religion and yearned for something different: something that honored the divine feminine, perhaps, or that didn’t threaten to cast them into hell for falling in love with the wrong person. In Wicca and the other neo-Pagan faiths that practiced the Craft, they found something that had been missing from the church services of their youths.

Then there were Witches like Stella who went hunting for something a little different.

She had known she was strange from childhood, of course; people looked at her funny when she said certain things, and one of the questions she heard most often, usually in an accusatory tone, was, “How did you know that?” She tried to explain it for a while, but eventually she realized that what she was Seeing scared people and she had to cut it out if she wanted to have friends and not end up in the nuthouse.

Most kids with psychic gifts went one of two ways: They clamped down on their talents until those talents disappeared, or they went crazy. Stella knew that mental hospitals were full of people who had been medicated out of their gifts, who couldn’t make sense of what they knew or told the wrong person and got sent away for it. She could only imagine the kind of hell that would be.

Stella was one of the quiet ones … but her gifts never went away. She never denied them. She just learned when to keep her mouth shut … until she got to college and learned there were people out there whose entire religion was built around the idea that the kind of thing she could do was perfectly normal. Not all Wiccans were outstandingly psychic. Lark, for example, could do magic but didn’t have a strong individual gift like Stella’s Sight. Those who weren’t psychic learned to use whatever they had, and those who were found their way to teachers like Foxglove.

Well … most did. A few still went crazy. But at least in the Pagan community they had a fighting chance.

She remembered when she’d been a new little Witchlet and had been determined to share her discoveries with her father. She’d worn a giant pentagram and carried her books around proudly. It wasn’t as though they’d been devoutly religious before that. The last time she could remember being in church was for her stepmother’s funeral.

Still, tell an Irish Catholic guy his daughter’s a Witch, and the result was pretty predictable.

Now they circled around each other on tiptoe, carefully avoiding The Subject. And in the handful of days since
Stella and Lark were attacked, her dad was even more careful with the eggshells he walked on. Apparently seeing her in a hospital bed had shaken him up enough that questions of Satan were no longer quite so pressing.

Stella sat at her altar, which was basically a wooden banana crate with a piece of discounted sari fabric draped over it, decked with her favorite religious knickknacks and, just now, a deck of tarot cards.

She stared at the resin statue of the Goddess in front of her; it depicted the two faces of the Goddess Persephone, one a maiden with a loving smile and the other a raven-haired queen holding a basket of pomegranates. Stella hadn’t been sure when she bought the statue whether the nice half was Persephone’s alter ego, Kore, as she was known before she was taken to Hades, or her little-known twin, Theia, whom Stella had only seen mentioned once or twice in really esoteric out-there literature and who, most archaeologists agreed, had never been widely worshipped.