Shadowstorm (The Shadow World Book 6) (13 page)

He gingerly tapped at the ring with one fingertip, then touched it a second longer. “It is perfectly cool, my Lady,” he said, picking it up. “Whatever possessed it is gone now…” He pondered the silver in his hand, frowning.

“Something on your mind, Lieutenant?” she asked.

Avi looked a little sheepish, but replied, “I believe you are mistaken about this stone. The Queen I served before had an extensive collection of jewels, and if I recall correctly, moonstones are white.”

“Of course it’s white—”

He held it up.

Miranda froze.

“No,” she breathed. “That’s not…how…”

Stupid question, really.

Sure enough, the ring Avi held out to her was no longer set with a moonstone, but with a labradorite.

*****

There wasn’t enough alcohol on the North American continent to satisfy a 766-year-old Irish vampire’s drive for self-destruction, even if he could maintain the degree of falldown drunkenness he needed. Not only could he drink anyone in the bar under the table, he could drink them out the door, down the street, to another bar, and under one of
their
tables.

Still, Anodyne was as pleasant a place as any to waste a life; to run up a thousand-dollar tab each night, pretend not to notice when other patrons hit on him, and dodge the bartender’s curiosity.

Since that night he’d met Kai everything had been wrong. After all those months working so hard to be too exhausted to dream, he’d begun having nightmares…nightmares of being trapped beneath a falling building, crushed under concrete debris, unable to reach help or find any comfort in his final moments…but those moments went on and on, an eternity under that wall, screaming into the pitch darkness long after the battery in his phone died and took the last light with it.

Then the dreams changed and he was digging—desperately trying to move the ruins, sure he had heard someone call him. He shifted mountains of rock every day until he uncovered the tomb…but it was too late, always too late. Sometimes Jonathan was down there, and sometimes Nico, sometimes even Miranda. She lay lifeless in the rubble, blood obscuring her beautiful face, sightless eyes fixed on the smoke-filled night sky. He pulled her out, holding her body close, weeping, thinking over and over,
I have to tell David…how am I going to tell David?

Nico’s fate was the same, but as soon as he was untangled from the wreckage Deven felt himself dying. He wanted to embrace it, to let go of this hateful life, but in the dreams he fought, fought for his Consort’s life and his own.

He failed every time.

In another version of the dream, he found Nico alive, but when he tried to pull the Elf free, Nico pushed him away. “I don’t want you,” he said coldly. “I want him.”

Deven turned in time to see David arrive and immediately dive in to free Nico without even looking at Deven. The Elf smiled at the Prime as if he were some kind of god come to earth, and they both ignored Deven entirely…he no longer existed in their world.

Worse yet, the dreams followed him throughout the night after he woke—he wandered around Austin like a sleepwalker, stopping here and there to heal humans, barely remembering having done it. He couldn’t get rid of the power fast enough; all he could do was use as much as he could and then drink until the rest was dulled.

It wasn’t hard to interpret all of the dreams. His psyche wasn’t exactly a master of obscure symbolism. This pathetic creature he had become was trying to survive under the crippling weight of who he’d once been…who everyone wanted him to be again. Why couldn’t they understand that, even if he were to lower the shield and let Nico in, even if he took up his sword and Signet again, it could never be the same? That life was over. It had died in the wreckage of his home, and now it died over and over again in his sleep.

“Another?” the bartender asked.

He lifted his head blearily and nodded.

She clunked two more ice cubes into his glass and then filled it nearly to the rim. “I know it’s cliché and all,” she said, “but you spend so much time here I have to wonder what your story is.”

The alcohol had stopped burning a long time ago—in fact he barely felt its effects anymore, swallowed as they were by the other two bottles of whiskey he’d already downed tonight. “Do you know who I am?” he asked.

She shrugged. She was, he supposed, an attractive woman; tattooed and pierced, with load-bearing Germanic hips and hair dyed about eight colors, she was sort of a cross between Stella and Olivia, but more muscular than the former and more conventionally pretty than the latter. “A hot guy with a broken heart, who drinks his blood volume in really expensive liquor every night?

He lifted his eyes from his glass to her face. “Broken heart?”

“Happy people do not drink like that.”

“You must not know a lot of Irishmen,” he replied listlessly. “Birth? Drink. Wedding? Drink. Death? Drink. Tuesday? Drink.”

She grinned. “So I can add ‘Irish’ to the list.”

It occurred to him that she would have a lot more for her list if he actually looked like he had before. Right now he was ordinary, boring, blending in when he was used to standing out. “You should see me when my heart’s not broken,” he said. “I have a lot more piercings.”

“So when you’re feeling well-adjusted you put holes in your face.”

He half-smiled. “I have to hurt myself somehow, don’t I?”

She smiled back. “Do you do your own?”

Deven nodded, thinking of the wooden box back in his room, a box with a cracked corner—his piercing kit, one of a handful of things that had survived the bomb intact. His belongings were an odd assortment: the kit, Jonathan’s copy of
Les Mis,
one of Jonathan’s sweaters, a few other garments, and the sketchbook where Deven had been working out a new tattoo design. Everything in the piercing kit was cradled in foam, the box one he’d acquired in India that was as solid as a brick wall—more solid, it turned out.

The bartender had gone to fetch another patron a drink, but when she returned, she said, “Okay, let me just get this out of the way so I know where this is going—are you into women at all?”

He found he couldn’t help a slight smile at that. His life had blown apart, he’d lost everything of who he was, except that…or, he was 95% sure of that. “No.”

She nodded. “Okay, then, I won’t waste time flirting.”

“Flirt all you want,” he replied. “I probably won’t notice.”

“Claudia,” she said, extending her hand.

He took it. “Deven.”

If she connected the name with an identity, she didn’t say so; he appreciated that. “Nice to meet you, Deven,” she said. “Thank you for all the awesome tips.”

He shrugged. “What else is money for?”

“A philanthropist on top of that! Who’d have thought?”

Philanthropist. Hardly.

One of the first things he’d done once he’d come out of shock two years ago was to donate a million dollars to the Human Equality Coalition. He kept thinking about what he’d said to Jonathan about never doing anything to support the cause, and then about how that one night of marriage had made him happier than he’d been for most of his life. He’d gone from newlywed to widowed in 24 hours; he was in a perpetual fugue state and cared about nothing now, but that one thing haunted his thoughts until he picked up the phone and called his accountant. The money had come from the Pair’s joint account rather than the Signet account or his private one where the Red Shadow’s business flowed in and out; he had, therefore, made the donation in Jonathan’s name. Then, at least one of his legion of demons was put to rest.

If only all the others could be pacified with money. He could have been a well-adjusted, happy man decades ago.

He snorted quietly, earning a look from Claudia.

“As much as we here at Anodyne value your patronage,” she said wryly, “there must be a better way for you to deal with your baggage than what you’re doing now.”

“You think so? I haven’t found one in 766 years.”

That impressed her; now he was sure she knew who he was. This was a Signet bar, after all, meaning both the Pair and the Elite were its main source of income, so any astute bartender would learn all sorts of interesting things about the ruling class just by listening. To Claudia’s credit, she didn’t give any obvious sign, but he saw the ever so slight widening of her eyes, the quirk of one brow, the briefest pause in the midst of mixing a drink.

He sighed inwardly. He should have given her a fake name, should have kept his mouth shut, but he was too mentally wobbly from the alcohol to play things out logically.

“766,” she said. “Really?”

He nodded…but…wait, where had he gotten that number? He didn’t know what year he was born, or what day; he had it narrowed down to about a three-year range, but until the monastery he’d had no sense of what year it was. It wasn’t important where he came from. He’d been born in early Summer, just after what modern Witches called the feast of Beltane. That was all he knew for sure. His mother had been in labor for almost two full days and he’d killed and resurrected her before he’d even cried; that had always added to the confusion. His people weren’t stupid, but they were busy, and he and his birth were meaningless to everyone but his father.

“
Why the tears, lad?”

“John and Finn were trying to hurt one of Báb’s pups. I got in the way and they hit me. Then they laughed at me for crying.”

“That’s because your brothers are fools…there’s no shame in having a heart. What about the pup, did…anything happen?”

He was an enormous man, at least to a scrawny child, with a beard as big as his laugh and callused hands that could bring untold comfort just by resting on one’s head. He tolerated the other boys—they were needed to work the farm—but for some reason, the only one he really seemed to love was the runt of the litter who was useless for anything but the nightly Bible reading. And even with the backbreaking labor involved in keeping food on the table for seven people, he always had time to soothe hurt feelings, of which there tended to be many.

“I don’t remember,” Deven murmured, putting his head in his hands and leaning his elbows on the bar.

“Are you okay? What don’t you remember?”

“His name,” he said. “I don’t remember his name. It’s been too long and it hurt too much, and…the only person who loved me when I was human, dead and gone for seven centuries…no one even remembers he existed. There was no point to his life at all.”

“You remember,” Claudia said, reaching over to lay a hand on his arm. “Maybe not his name, but you remember. There’s a point to every life—even if it was just that someone loved you.”

It had been a very long time since he’d felt this kind of pain. He nodded vaguely, muttered a farewell of some sort, threw money on the bar, and stumbled out, fighting desperately not to fall down weeping.

“
No, Da…nothing happened. I didn’t touch the puppy.”

“Good lad.”

Then:

“We can’t go on like this, Dónal…you heard what they were saying. The Church is sending people here to flush out heretics—one look at the boy and they’ll know there’s something wrong with him.”

“There’s nothing wrong with him except your bloodline, Elendala, and there’s naught we can do about that. But you’re right; he’s not safe here anymore. I’ll send a message to my brother…”

Dónal. It was Dónal. Of course it was—where else would Deven have gotten his old surname? Relieved, Deven sagged back against the outside wall of the bar, ignoring the inquisitive looks of the bouncers. He was here enough that they knew to leave him alone.

Dónal…I remember you, Da. You lived. If that has any meaning at all…I remember you.

Something odd about the memory gave him pause, though. He could remember his mother’s name, Sorcha…but the night he’d been eavesdropping on their conversation, his father had called her something else…something that was not Irish.

He’d had no context for it until now. Now he understood.

Elendala—it must be Elvish, her birth name. He knew nothing about her break with their people, but it seemed strange that her husband would still call her by that name when she had denied her entire heritage out of fear. It confirmed that he’d known who his wife really was, though, and that opened a whole new set of questions.

For the first time Deven realized he could find out more. Nico had said his grandmother still lived; he could meet her. She could tell him…

…what, exactly? What difference did it make what the story was? They were all dead, long gone, into dust and shadow, as he should have been.

Angry for no reason he could really define, he shoved himself off the wall and started walking toward the rendezvous point. He was done with Austin for one night.

He was a mile from Chris and the car when a wave of dizziness hit him, along with the assault of another long-forgotten memory—no, memories, twisted around each other, some he wasn’t even sure were real. He put his hands on his temples, trying to force the images back into the dark, but they kept pushing back, and soon he had wandered into an alley and sunk down on the ground with his back against a wall.

“
Hello, little one. It is lovely to meet you.”

He stared up at the strange woman, heart pounding. She was so beautiful—her hair was dark brown like his own, but it shone and fell down to her knees. Her eyes were deep violet and full of moonlight.

“He has the gift, Elendala. You must let me take him. He would be safe among us.”

“No…I told you before…my boy is human. He’s cursed with your demon powers, but he’s not one of you any more than I am. He can learn to block it out.”

A sigh. “Daughter…your child is not human. You would condemn him to a life of fear and probably a horrific death at the hands of your Church…he could be at peace with us. He has enough of the blood that the Enclave would allow it. Please…do not damn your son to this world because you hate what you are.”

“No. I’ll not have him learning all your heathen ways and praying to your false gods. I’ll not coddle his life in exchange for his soul. He’ll go to the monastery and live away from normal people where it’s safe.”