Of Shadow Born

by Dianne Sylvan

  It was a lovely virus. Jeremy had paid the programmer handsomely for it.

  He was listening to the chaos, though he didn’t derive any real pleasure from it; he had access to several of the Elites’ phone logs and listened in on their voice mail—those few that went to the right phone—to find out just how well the virus was working.

  Hart was, to put it mildly, in a bit of a temper these days . . . but it had very little to do with the computer virus, and not much to do with the lack of a Second.

  On his way back from Austin, Hart stopped off in several cities, taking care of various forms of business, mostly illegal. The day he was set to return to New York, he got a frantic phone call from his Haven Steward . . . and it was really too bad Jeremy hadn’t been able to listen in to that conversation. That, he thought, would have been quite satisfying.

  As it was, he had quite a vivid mental image built up of what came next: Hart stormed into the Haven, threw open the doors to the harem, and found . . . an empty room.

  Lydia had kept her word.

  The harem guards were found dead, and every single girl in the harem had been kidnapped—or, rather, freed. Given how tight security on the harem was—Hart kept all his collections under guard—Jeremy had no idea how Lydia’s people had managed it, but without even stirring the wind, the girls had vanished, and not a single person in the Haven saw or heard anything.

  Hart and McMannis no longer had any leverage over Jeremy Hayes. Jeremy had never returned to work after completing his mission in Austin. He had simply gone to the apartment he had set up months before and waited.

  He stood in the doorway of the dark bedroom for hours, just watching her sleep, wondering when the feeling of triumph would come, when he would feel some sort of relief.

  Perhaps when she spoke.

  If she spoke.

  For three weeks she had lain there, barely moving. She hadn’t acknowledged her freedom, or her father. She hadn’t said a word. He had fed her, tipping a cup of blood into her mouth a little at a time, and she had swallowed, but she’d given no sign she knew where she was, or who he was.

  He had wept when he saw her. She was so thin, so weak, a wraith in a slip of a dress, old bruises that couldn’t heal mottling her body in patterns that left his chest clenched with impotent rage. The smudges of purple and black had faded once she fed, but her eyes were still sunken and stared sightlessly off at nothing, no matter what he said to her. He could count all of her ribs. Her clavicles stood out in sharp relief against her sallow skin.

  She had been such a beautiful girl.

  They had all been human once; he remembered the night she was born, her first steps . . . seeing her run in the sunlight, ribbons undone, in gales of laughter . . . It wasn’t until she was a teenager that the sickness came on her, stealing her life away little by little. They had tried everything, spent a fortune on doctors and cures from all over the world, but in the end, there was only one thing that could save her.

  He and Melissa had chosen to come across with her, so she wouldn’t have to be alone in her eternal youth. She was sixteen.

  He remembered her dancing outside in the moonlight. She always loved to dance.

  For seventy years they had lived as a family, happy, while he worked his way up the ranks of the Australian Elite; he only got as high as lieutenant because Olivia had been so outstanding at her job, but that was fine by him . . . unlike McMannis, he had no problem answering to a woman. Unlike McMannis, after Bartlett’s murder, the Signet had chosen him.

  He thought of how things could have been, if he had kept his Signet, if Melissa had been his Queen, the three of them living in the Haven, a royal family—Amelia had expressed interest in learning to fight, but he had never let her because he feared she would want to join the Elite and put herself in danger. If he had taught her, would she have been able to escape the men who came to kill her mother and drag her into the hell of Hart’s lusts? Was there anything he could have done to stop all of this?

  It no longer mattered. He had her back. It might take years, but he would nurse her back to health, help her find herself again. She was still in there somewhere, her sweet smile hiding underneath months of torment. There was only so much violation one person could take without shutting down, but she was free now. Everything would be all right.

  She would heal, and one day they would go home to Australia, and Jeremy would take his Signet back from the usurper whose filthy hands were all over it. Jeremy would expose McMannis and Hart to the Council.

  He sighed. It was a lovely thought. There was just one problem:

  If he ever showed his face, Miranda Solomon was going to kill him.

  He deserved it. He knew the kind of death he had dealt David; he knew the kind of future he had left the Queen. David had said she would come for Jeremy, but even without that assertion, Jeremy was well aware of the fate waiting for him if he let anyone in the Council find out where he was. Between her and Prime Deven there would be no escape—especially if Jeremy’s suspicions were true and Deven was the Alpha of the Red Shadow. A great many Signets underestimated the South, but deep down everyone—even Hart—feared Deven. Their combined wrath would be Jeremy’s doom if they found him.

  He couldn’t risk that. He couldn’t leave Amelia alone. So they would disappear and create a new life somewhere . . . somewhere quiet, far away from this madness, where Amelia could dance in the moonlight again, and he could learn to breathe without the sharp pain in his heart that was both grief over Melissa and fear for Amelia. Someday they would both learn to smile again.

  Someday he would learn to live with what he had done to Faith.

  Someday, perhaps in a hundred years . . . but not today.

  * * *

  The surest way to hide was in plain sight.

  In Austin it was not possible for a vampire to go off the grid, because there actually was a grid—the Signet sensor network tracked them, one and all. Those among them who lived for the kill had to find somewhere else to live. In Austin, vampires fed discreetly, kept their heads down, and got used to the feeling of being watched, because it meant they were safe from the violence of their own kind and the humans who hunted them.

  It took nearly eight years for her to start to relax, to stop jumping at shadows and looking over her shoulder.

  Eight years to feel safe . . . and one night to destroy everything.

  She was having a drink at the Plague Rat when she heard the name. It froze her entire body, her mind; she could hear her heart racing in her chest, but around her time stopped. Seconds later she slipped out of the bar and ran.

  She locked herself in her apartment and didn’t leave for nearly a week. That fear she had fought for so long came roaring back, and she barely slept, couldn’t feed, couldn’t work; her supervisor left a message on her voice mail that she had been let go, and she didn’t even spare a moment to worry about the rent. It was a part-time thing anyway. It sure as hell wasn’t worth her life.

  By the time she emerged from hiding, the Prime was dead, and that name she’d heard was no longer invoked around the District. As far as anyone knew, Jeremy Hayes had returned to New York and was no longer recruiting. Almost everyone he’d hired to go up against the Signet was dead, and those who weren’t had fled Austin fearing reprisal. Once the Signet’s dark gaze fixed on you, you were dead, and that was all there was to it; Hayes must have been offering obscene amounts of money to persuade anyone to join his cause.

  But he was gone now. And there was no way he or anyone else would know she was here.

  She was dead, after all.

  The nights passed without anything calamitous happening. Life went on both in the Shadow World and outside it. She had to make a choice: either give up her life in Austin and run again, or find a new job and stick it out.

  She decided to stay.

  For once, luck favored her—she called George at Madre Luna to see if he had a chair open, and wonder of wonders, one of his artists had been fool enough
to moonlight as a thug for Hayes and was now deceased. After months of waitressing she finally got to reclaim a little of her dignity, trading in the sound of clattering dishes and irritable humans asking if they could get their dressing on the side for the warm, familiar hum of a tattoo gun.

  Tattooing vampires took a lot of skill, but it also took patience; a lot of vamps who wanted ink didn’t understand that they had to be actively involved in the process and couldn’t just sit there and bliss out from the endorphins. If they didn’t consciously slow down the healing process, the skin would reject the ink and heal over before she even finished the outline, wasting her time and theirs.

  She’d had more than one customer scream and yell at her for what was essentially their fault, and she’d had to resort to violence at her last job, which was how she ended up waitressing. Old instincts had flooded through her, and she’d nearly killed the dumb bastard who was yelling in her face. She’d scared herself as much as she’d scared him and had steered clear of the District for weeks afterward just in case anyone had gossiped, even idly, about the dreadlocked tattoo artist who seemed unusually skilled in martial arts.

  That was the best thing about working for George—he was big and scary and nobody fucked with his artists. He was also upscale enough that she could be more selective with her clientele, so she mostly picked vampires who had experience with getting tattooed. When it was right, when the client knew what he was doing and so did the artist, the experience was amazing, even borderline tantric.

  “How long have you been a tattoo artist?” the woman asked, sounding a little nervous. It was her first time, but they’d discussed the process and she had signed the waivers.

  Olivia, hands encased in latex, looked at her over the needle she was preparing. “Fifty years, give or take—off and on.”

  “That’s longer than I’ve been alive.” The woman laughed. “I only came across four years ago.”

  Olivia didn’t say what she was thinking—that wearing a butterfly on her shoulder for all eternity was the sort of thing only a baby vampire would go for—but the woman was nice enough, and it would be an easy hour’s work assuming she could handle herself.

  “So why do you have to wear gloves?” the girl asked. “It’s not like you can give me HIV or anything.”

  Olivia smiled. “Health department regulations—as far as the state of Texas knows this is a regular tattoo parlor. We follow the rules and nobody sticks their nose in our business.”

  The woman seemed to accept that and went into the deep-breathing exercise Olivia had shown her in the consultation, and she had obviously been practicing; Olivia could feel her energy slowing down, and even after the initial shock of the needle scraping into her skin, she’d maintained her calm, holding off the healing like a seasoned professional. Olivia knew from experience that the girl would be sitting there with her silvered eyes closed, her canines out as if she’d just fed.

  After a few minutes their breathing fell into sync, and Olivia guided the girl’s energy with her own, siphoning off the sparks of heat and electricity that shot from the skin of every person she’d ever tattooed and grounding them to help the girl last longer. She didn’t have much of a pain tolerance, but with Olivia’s help she’d be fine.

  She was the last client of the night. Olivia cleaned up her station feeling closer to happy than she had in months—she’d missed this. The ritual of setting up, working, cleaning up . . . she liked every part of it when it went well.

  She left work about two hours before the sky began to lighten. She was hungry—funny how quickly she’d forgotten what a drain the work was—but she didn’t stop to feed until she was well out of the Shadow District. The less time she spent there, the better.

  Once upon a time she’d spent nearly every waking hour in a District very similar to the one in Austin, stalking around the city with a sword at her hip. Now she slunk home with her tail between her legs, living not in a Haven, but in a crappy warehouse loft on the East Side, surrounded by humans.

  If Jeremy could see her now, he’d laugh . . . right before he killed her.

  It was possible he didn’t hate her. It was possible he understood she wasn’t to blame, and that what happened after that night was punishment enough . . . but she wasn’t going to call him up and ask, show him the scars, swear she had tried to protect them . . .

  She shook her head with a sigh. There was no use thinking about it. What was done could not be undone. She had failed, broken her promise to him, and the best she could hope for now was to live out her life here, where no one had the slightest idea what she had once been.

  Still, when she heard the Second was dead as well as the Prime, part of her had the idea, for just a minute, that she could go back to her old life, this time working for a new Prime—

  Oh, hell no.

  She had built something of a life here, and as long as the Queen still lived and the regime didn’t change, she could keep living it. The kind of people she had worked for, who would know her, didn’t live in this territory. Now that Jeremy was gone, as long as she kept her head down, she would be safe.

  She was no fool. Not anymore. Maybe once in a while she missed having a purpose larger than etching butterflies into skin, but that part of her life was over. She was just a vampire now, just a tattoo artist and painter, and she had no intention of getting within ten miles of a Signet ever again.

  Really, she should have known better.

  The walk home was long, way longer than from the café where she’d been working, but the buses didn’t run again until way too close to dawn for her comfort. If she had been human, she might have been nervous as a woman alone in East Austin at night, but muggers and gangbangers were pretty laughable as a threat to even the weakest vampire, let alone one who had once been trained to kill. She didn’t travel with a sword—that would draw more attention than she wanted if she happened across any Elite—but she had a stake in her bag and a knife in her boot. Outside the Shadow District, she had little to fear other than the sun.

  She came around the corner of her building and froze.

  Her unit was up a short flight of rickety wooden steps; it was the only one that had its own entrance, which was part of why she had chosen it. Everyone else who lived in the converted warehouse had to go in through the front of the building.

  The streetlight was dim and tended to flicker, but it shone brightly enough to warn her: There was something on the ground in front of the stairs . . . no . . . someone.

  Olivia’s hand snaked into her bag and pulled the stake, and she moved sideways out of view, approaching silently. Her body automatically slipped back into guard mode, senses on alert; it was probably just a homeless guy, passed out drunk, but she hadn’t survived this long without being paranoid.

  She got close enough to see that yes, it was a person, face down on the ground, unmoving. He or she was clearly unconscious, but Olivia wasn’t going to let her guard down until she was safely inside with the door bolted. She approached in a wide circle, sniffing the air; if it was a homeless person she’d be able to tell pretty easily by scent.

  Strange. No smell of alcohol or accumulated filth. In fact . . .

  Oh shit. Oh shit oh shit.

  Vampire.

  There was no way a vampire showing up outside her home was a coincidence. There simply weren’t that many of them in this part of town.

  Closer still, and she saw something else that made her stomach twist with dread. He wore a long black coat, but something metallic that caught the light stuck out from under it.

  A sword.

  Elite. Goddamn it.

  Most likely he’d been on patrol and gotten injured, which meant there would be others arriving any second now. She had to get inside, and quickly, before they saw her.

  She didn’t stop to look any closer. She jumped over the unconscious vampire, her boots thudding dully on the steps, and started to run for the door.

  “Olivia.”

  Terror, instant
and overwhelming, short-circuited her brain, and she spun around toward the voice, stake at the ready.

  There was no one there . . . except the body. And while the vampire on the ground was male, the voice had been unmistakably female.

  Breathing hard, she looked around the street, just barely stopping herself from calling out.

  No one in Austin knew her name was Olivia.

  Since arriving in the States after her flight from Australia, she had gone by her mother’s name.

  The street was silent; even the wind had fallen still. She saw movement in a tree across the street and clamped down on a horror-movie scream as she realized it was just a bird—a raven, sitting in the branches, watching her. Well, it certainly hadn’t called her name.

  She stared down at the man on the ground, heart in her throat, and before she could make herself run and hide, she descended the steps to the body and, with her free hand, took him by the shoulder and shook lightly.

  “Hey. Hey, mister . . .”

  The only answer was a soft groan. Cursing herself inwardly, she cast one more hunted look around the scene and then turned him over.

  “Oh my God,” she gasped.

  Ten years ago, she had flown to London in service of the Signet; she had taken part in the Elite tournament . . . and she had seen the face before her once, standing among the others of his kind, watching the fights through deep blue eyes that held the quiet power and nobility reflected in the red stone at his throat.

  It was impossible. Completely impossible. But she knew, even as she wanted to deny it and escape while she still could, that this was no lost Elite.

  Prime David Solomon lay on her doorstep . . .

  . . . and he was alive.

  Six

  “What are your orders, my Lady?”

  Miranda walked from one end of the line to the other, examining each of the five vampires her Elite held captive. They all looked petrified, and with good reason.