My blade lay across the aisle, a hint of steel behind the shadow of his body, and my sword arm thrummed with agony from the bite. I was the fastest of the sunstriders, but he was too fast by far. I hadn't even seen him coming. When we had last tangled in the trees behind Chatham House I had held my own, despite the sinking light of day, but now... Now I hung on by a razor's edge.
And yet I had not been idle in my own learning since that meeting. I whipped Roisin's borrowed pistol from its holster and fired. His body jerked under the force of impact, his left shoulder rocking backward as he staggered a few steps. Black blood painted the pews behind him, and white bone glistened from the hole the bullet had carved. Though the bullet hadn't lodged, the taint of gold did its work. Sickly lines of black branched out from the wound site, winding across his shoulder, up his neck and down his arm. He hissed and clutched at the wound, swaying sideways.
"Now we're even."
He grinned at me, and before I could line up another shot he lunged again. We crashed together into the pews, wood splintering and cracking from the impact, digging into me every time we thrashed, struggling against one another for purchase. The gun was lost, my blade a distant memory. All thought bent to the struggle, the grasping and tearing of claws—his and mine—rending, digging.
Outside, so far away, the crunch of tires on gravel, the screech of brakes. Shouting. Words I knew, voices I recognized. Help, or something like it, was coming but all I could see was the commingling of our blood sluicing across my eyes and all I could feel was the press of his claws, searching beneath my rib cage, angling up, closing upon my heart and the hesitance, the resistance in his muscles as his mind—his memory—screamed at him to stop but there was nothing he could do, nothing either of us could do.
Shouts at the door, a blast of gunfire but still Lucien was there, face contorted in agony that had nothing at all to do with the wounds lashing his body. Tears, silver and heavy, broke beneath the spheres of his eyes and his voice, far away and gauzy, whispered:
"Stop me."
Something in me snapped. I reached for power, dove for it, searched out every cavity of my being—no sunlight, no mortal blood, all the providence given me by my immortal heritage burned away until there was no power left. Nothing but plain strength, worn down to nothing under the glare of the moon.
Except... Except...
A needle, a mote. A suspicion of something deeper lurking beneath the entity I believed was me. A splash of silver in my eye. A whisper of forbidden power.
Stop me.
I screamed. Screamed with everything I ever was and ever had been, siphoned up from the dark edge of my being a power that should not be and lashed out, wrapping shadows around Lucien, peeling his broken-dark armor away as my ropes of void coiled around his body and flung him, flailing, off of me.
A dreadful sucking sensation shook me as his claws retracted from my body cavity, the crack of a rib rocking me with pain, and another vacuum—another void—opening up within me that had nothing at all to do with the violence done to the meat of my body.
The voices reached me now. Gunfire peppered the night.
"Mags! Stay with me girl!"
DeShawn, hovering above me, his hand tangled in the bloody mess of my hair as his gaze tracked Lucien. A shatter of wood and glass echoed throughout the church as the thing I had loved escaped into the night.
"Jesus," DeShawn whispered, clutching his weapon like it was the golden crucifix hanging from his neck. "We're here. It's all right. You're safe. It's gonna be all right."
The words ran together, a litany without meaning, a sing-song tale built more to lure him into comfort than me. The way he looked at me, sidelong and terrified, had nothing at all to do with my wounds.
He'd seen the darkness that'd thrown Lucien. Seen that I had been the one to summon the shadows.
Before unconsciousness took me, the tinkling laughter of Luna echoed through the dark hallways of my mind.
Ten: Black Veins
Silver mist encircled me. All around, nothingness stretched for endless space and time. Nothing but the mists, and the endless emptiness, and then, as if it had always been there, a pillar beneath my feet. Cold. Stable. I crouched down, feeling the stone through the shroud of grey. Marble, chilly in the way that stone always is, even under the full blast of the sun. Pale, like undead skin.
Not so much a lack of color as an intrinsic lack of life, if a stone could ever be said to live. Thin, grey veins traced maps to imaginary places across the stone, and if I stared long enough, they seemed to pulse with a stuttered heartbeat. Slow, ponderous. Patient.
I stood up. Patterns in the mists mimicked the tracery of the veins. Thin spots hinting at roads, or pathways, between the cumulus, though I could find no trace of solid ground outside of the square of my plinth. Though I wore no clothes in this strange place, the ghost of Maeve's charm lay upon my breastbone, a glowing oval casting a pale yellow light across my skin. Its power was warm, in this place where only the cold lived.
Darkness covered all. Whatever ambient light had allowed me to see vanished. Even my night vision failed to penetrate the blackness that subsumed me. I could not remember the last time I hadn't been able to see, and cold fear trickled through me. I reached for my blade, but it was not there. My fingers brushed against the loose strands of my hair, and nothing else.
"What is this place?" I demanded of the emptiness. My voice did not so much as echo. It fell flat, as if the mist soaked up the sound and held it.
Maeve's light. I pressed my fingertips against the place where the amulet had rested, willing that brilliance to come back to me. A golden sphere fizzled and flickered over my breast, a candle flame beset by heavy winds. Stay, I willed the flame, wondering at what I was doing. I had no magic in me, outside the supernatural prowess granted by my blood. And yet, I prayed as if I could call up a spell with my will as easily as the Venefica. Stay.
Maybe I could. She claimed I was of her bloodline, but I felt no flicker, no awakening of magic. The flame sputtered and died beneath my touch.
Things moved through the dark. Panic twisted in my chest. I was not meant to be the hunted, I was to be the hunter. Not a single one of my instincts taught me how to be prey, how to survive in a place where I held not only no advantage, but no weapon at all. My fingers curled, struggling to burst forth into the claws I had been able to summon since the very day my sire turned me but—nothing.
Powerless. I was all but mortal. I hunkered down, curling my arms around my bent knees, trying to make a smaller target for whatever hunted me through the dark.
Pressure built, the air pressing in, the mists coalescing until I could feel them condensing, cold and suffocating, against my skin. I wanted to cry out, to ask for help, to demand a way free of this hellish place, but my throat stuck and the words died on my lips. There would be no help, not in this place.
But I could help myself, an inner voice purred to me. The thought, even as it emerged, made me feel oily and unclean. There was no light here, no blood for me to beg for. Nothing but shadows. And hadn't I made a slave of shadows before? Hadn't that mote in my eye, that sliver of moonlight, bent to my will and come flooding with power when I reached for it?
I put my hand out, as if to ward off the things that moved through the dark, all the worse for I could not hear them, or scent them, or see them. Only the weight of them made me aware of their presence—massive, burgeoning, creatures born of this shade I was rejecting. If only I could see, I could at least defend myself.
Black veins raced up my outstretched fingertips, my wrist. The shock of sight after what felt like an eternity of nothingness made me shudder with exhilaration. But the sight was no gift, no trick of this place. It was born of me—a desperate grasping for my hidden strength—and I felt the silvery lick of moonlight across the palms of my hands as those black veins crept higher and higher up my arm with every moment I clung to the sight Luna granted me.
Just long enough to get free, I told m
yself, but I did not move, could not move. I stayed, curled on the podium, watching that black ink spread further and further as the hidden things shifted through the secret pathways in the mists.
Out was through those pathways. To be free, to escape, was to embrace more than I dared.
"Enough," I whispered, recalling the black orbs of Lucien's eyes, the total eclipse of the man he had been by the very same power that fed me strength now. "Enough."
Laughter, sharp and echoing, like metallic wind chimes chilled me. It came from no direction, simply resonated from within the core of my being as if tearing its way out. I clenched my fist, gritted my teeth, and willed the power gone, willed the black veins to retreat to nothing, for my vision to mist into the void once more.
The moon's strength was not mine. I did not want it.
Faint grayness in the mist lured me to my feet, a hint of exit, a teasing curl of smoke saying: here, here is your way to freedom. Yet my feet stayed planted on the cold stone, my body trembling as I strained, rejecting the thorn of moonlit power in my body. The power did not listen.
A trace work of black lace encompassed me, painted my veins darker than any shadow. The grey mists reached up, caressing me, welcoming me to their fold, begging me to use them, to dig deep, to throw back my hunters, which lurked so, so, close. The gold that had been on my skin—Maeve's amulet—called me back to myself, a memory of sunshine, but the pressure in my mind was too much. Too much.
I threw back my arms, reached my chest toward the sky, and screamed.
Sunlight speared through me, pinning me to the podium as a needle would pin a beetle to a board. My skin burned, coiled in flames, all the shadow in me dissolving to ash—I was dissolving to ash—tasting nothing but cinders and pain. And light.
Purifying light.
It was only then that I realized that, in this place, my shoulder was whole.
Eleven: Other Weapons
I woke on grey sheets, and for a moment feared myself back in that place, cold panic gripping my belly in its claws. Warm candle flames flickered at the edges of my blurred vision, slowly coalescing into something like normalcy. Something as mundane as a candle could not exist in that other-world, I was sure of it.
How long? How long had I been asleep? The phantom memory of the oubliette clung to me like a filmy gauze. I stretched my mind, reaching back through memory, finding the faded paths that had been left behind after the Venefica had restored part of my memory but nothing else seemed amiss.
"Mags?" Seamus's voice, gentle and close. But wary, too. As if he feared waking me might do some irreparable damage.
"I'm here," I said, wondering why I chose those words. Wondering where else I had been.
His hands, warm mortal hands, closed around mine and squeezed. I had enough presence of mind to realize my claws had extended, and used what dregs of power I had to retract them under his grasp. My body shuddered with the effort.
"Don't strain," he said.
Footsteps, not his, shuffled toward the foot of the bed. Memories of the hunting-things from that other-space rose in me and I tensed, reaching for power, and was relieved to find I had it. My blood answered me once more, sunlight lay smooth and warm across my body, slanting in from a nearby window.
Emeline said, "We thought the fire might help."
The candles, she meant, their natural light more comfortable to me than the false-lights that dotted the modern world. They gave me no power, but comfort could do a great deal to heal one's soul. Did my soul need healing?
"Here." Seamus slipped a hand behind my back and helped me sit up, propping pillows behind me. My rib cage ached from Lucien's claws, and my shoulder burned where he had bitten me. That wound was too fresh, the surrounding voices too young, for me to have slept for any extended period.
My vision cleared. I didn't know this room of the estate, though judging by the decor it was definitely a part of the Durfort-Civrac household. The iron bars across the windows, however, were not a feature I recognized.
"How are you?" Emeline had been pacing the narrow space in front of the window. This must be the smallest room in the place, a closet converted over to this use. She dragged a chair to my bedside and sat stiff as an oak, her hands folded primly in her lap, leaning forward with attentive eyes as Seamus got me settled. Only her forehead betrayed her, the heavy line between her brows, the slight wrinkling across her temples as she struggled to keep her eyes wide with interest. She was afraid, and angry, and had not slept in far too long.
"I don't know," I said, honestly, feeling within myself for the shadowy ink that had swirled through my veins. I think, in that moment, I had thought I would not find it. That looking was safe, because I'd find myself purified by sunlight and be able to set that terrible place aside in my mind as a poor dream.
But the darkness was there, waiting, and as my mind brushed over it an otherworldly attention focused upon me. Weakened in the light of day, diminished almost to nothing, but Luna and I knew each other now, and so I did not need to wonder at the presence.
"What happened?" I asked.
Emeline cleared her throat. "DeShawn found you at a church on the edge of a park in Kensington."
"Lucien," I said, quietly. She nodded.
"Yes. He escaped, but you were so grievously wounded that DeShawn and, later Roisin when she arrived, did not think it prudent to chase after him."
Anger clutched my chest. "He was wounded. They should have pursued him. We may not get a better chance."
"Mags," Seamus cut in, "you were dying. Raving. I could hear it over the comm, your earpiece got stuck engaged and... the things you said..."
"You were seeing beyond this world, Magdalene. It would drive anyone mad."
The unasked question: Had it driven me mad? I believed not, but then, I would be the last to know. And there were the black veins, always waiting, wanting, hungry for me to call upon them. Maybe I was mad, to hear their siren song at all.
As I did not answer, Emeline pressed on. "Lucien had bitten you on the shoulder." She nodded to the spot, and I glanced down, not wanting to see, but needing to. The silver-poisoned wound had closed, but barely, the edges puckered and bruise-purple. Hesitantly, I explored the perimeter of the wound with my fingertips. Just brushing the flesh was an agony that raced down into my toes and made me hiss.
"DeShawn thought you had been poisoned," Emeline said these words carefully, as if prodding a toe into a too-hot bath. "The wound was festering when he reached you, and a blackness seemed to travel through your veins. Like an infection."
The image jolted me. Real. Parts of it all had been real, in this world, and those mortals I was sworn to protect had seen it. Seen my weakness.
"Silver," I lied, "his mouth..." I closed my eyes, knowing they would not press me on this. The details didn't matter, they needed only to know that Lucien's bite held hidden, painful secrets. Seamus squeezed my hand in reassurance. A boil of guilt burst within me, but I said nothing.
"There is another thing," she said, and at the carefully neutral tone in her voice my heart clenched. "Here. Allow me to show you."
She pulled an enameled compact from her pocket and flicked it open, the mirror glittering in the bar-broken sunlight. She glanced at it a moment herself, as if checking to be sure her face betrayed nothing, then held it up to me.
The mote in my eye had grown. Hands trembling, I dropped Seamus's grasp and reached for the mirror. Emeline let me take it without comment. Holding that surface up, I peered into my own eyes, bringing it as close as I could without getting double vision.
Little more than a freckle before, the mote had grown into a mole. Cancerous and malignant. The size of my little finger's nail, the silvery pool appeared to pulse as if it had a heartbeat of its own. Its edges were indistinct, the color bleeding out into the normal golden hue of my eyes, a visual reminder that the nightwalker power within me was not contained, and could spill forth at any moment. I swallowed hard and snapped the mirror shut. Emeline took
it back and slipped it into her pocket.
"I don't know what happened in that church. But I know you were fighting for your life, and whatever you did in desperation to survive I cannot—I will not—hold against you, or any of your kin."
As if that were even an option. As if any of my kin were half so tainted as me.
"But I cannot shield you from what DeShawn saw."
Ah, there it was. The small, hastily prepared room with the bars on the windows. Had Maeve been pressed into placing confining wards on this room, too? I hadn't checked. I was too tired to care.
"And what did he see?" I asked, knowing the answer, but wanting the words pulled out into the light of day.
"He saw you form shadows where there were none, wrap them around Lucien, and throw him free of you."
As woodenly as she spoke those words, she looked at me with eyes that begged to be refuted, wanted nothing more than for me to say that no, he was wrong, that was not what happened.
"He couldn't have seen anything," Seamus snapped. "That church was torn to shreds and DeShawn himself said that Lucien was wearing half-shadows in the brief moment he actually saw him."
"No," I said, holding up a hand to stop Seamus's denial. "It's true. I did that. I didn't mean to, and I would take it back if I could, but I was desperate. That was the only power that came to me when I called."
"I see," Emeline said slowly. Her spine straightened, her chin lifted, and I knew that what she would say next was going to hurt. "In that case, I have no choice but to fulfill DeShawn's request and place you under house arrest until we can prove you will not become a threat to humanity."
"My oath remains."
"Maeve will have to judge that."
"This is insane," Seamus said. "We're hamstringing ourselves. Mags is the best agent we've got, and we all know damned well she won't turn into some garbage-licking nightwalker. This is a ploy of DeShawn's to take control from you, Emeline. The second he can prove that we don't have the firepower to handle the ghoul problem, that's it, it's his guard."
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