Of Shadow Born

by Dianne Sylvan

  She nodded to the lieutenant, who gestured at the others; they shoved their captives to their knees, and seconds later, the sounds of steel swinging and the dull thud of heads severed from necks ended the last handful of Jeremy’s thugs.

  They were out in full view of the Shadow District, and Miranda knew she was being watched—she could feel eyes peering out at her from the windows of the businesses and clubs that rose up on all sides of the execution. She wanted them to see her, to know that the rumors were true: The Queen lived, and she would suffer no disobedience. Nothing had changed in Austin. They all had to understand that.

  She stood over the bodies as the Elite piled them on plastic sheeting and dragged them away, up to the roof of a nearby building to wait for the sun; another Elite opened a fire hydrant and sprayed the blood off the street, and all the while the Queen stood, impassive, watching with her arms crossed, allowing herself a moment of grim satisfaction at the sight of those who had brought such chaos to her city getting what they deserved.

  If there were any more out there, they would most likely flee now. She was fine with that. Hunting down these five had been more of a show of dominance than anything else, to make an example of them and reinforce the fact that she was still in charge.

  Dawn was coming; she could smell it, feel the fragility of the night air. Time to head home . . . to spend another morning locked in the music room, losing herself in the piano until her body gave out and she had to sleep.

  Harlan piloted the Town Car back toward the Haven, and she sat in the back trying to stay awake even though the motion of the car was hypnotic and she was constantly on the verge of falling asleep these days.

  The thought of sleeping filled her with the kind of dread that made her stomach hurt and her hands shake. She didn’t want to sleep . . . she didn’t want to dream.

  It was the same every night, over and over until she thought she would go mad: She dreamed his death, feeling him fall, the night torn by her screams . . . then the horrible, endless emptiness, the cold in her mind where his presence had been, that safety and surety ripped from her forever.

  She didn’t know how much longer she could take it. At night, when she was awake and active, it wasn’t as hard; she never stopped moving, never ran out of things to do. There were patrols to coordinate, network reviews to conduct, spats among members of the Court to mediate; the night-to-night business of the Signet didn’t stop, and she was thankful for that, as it left her with little time to think.

  She had the earpiece and knife she’d taken from the vampire at Stella’s apartment sent to Novotny and was waiting to hear back; she made rounds of the Shadow District while the Elite hunted down Jeremy’s hired hands; she took condolence calls from a wide array of Primes who didn’t seem to know how to talk to her.

  She couldn’t tell if they were afraid or simply in awe. No one had ever heard of a Queen surviving a Bondbreaking by more than a week. By now she should be raving insane and throwing herself out a window into the sunlight, but instead she was lucid, strong, as perfectly composed as her Prime had always been, managing her territory with total confidence as if she’d been doing it for years.

  Then the day broke, and she had to face the afternoon hours alone . . . at first she tried sleeping, but the bed was so empty, her mind so full of memory, that it forced her to her feet, down the hall to the music room, or the psychic training room, or through the tunnels to the Elite buildings where she could work out until she literally fell over from exhaustion. The more tired she was, the less she dreamed.

  There weren’t enough hours in the night, but there were far too many in the day.

  It was not fair of her dreams to do this to her. She wanted to keep going, to accept David’s death, not wallow in her mourning for all eternity; though the thought of curling up and dying was tempting sometimes, she had no intention of letting this defeat her.

  Her heart apparently had other ideas. She woke every evening weeping, so lost and haunted, and there was no one to hold her, no one to reassure her that she would be all right.

  She could call California if she needed to, but she was afraid of letting them become a crutch . . . she had to depend on herself now. No one else could do it for her. She had had three years of Pairhood, three years knowing what it was like to have a soul mate—those years had hardly been perfect, but she had never been happier, never been more sure of her place in the world.

  That was over now. It’s over, she told herself again and again, and you have to keep going. You can do this . . . you’re strong enough. You didn’t go through all of this for nothing; this is why you’re here.

  And as night became day and her nightmares continued, she fought like hell to believe her own words.

  * * *

  Olivia sat staring at the bed for nearly an hour, trying to figure out what to do and coming up blank.

  Whatever madness had seized her and prompted her to drag him up the steps and into her home, depositing him on his back on her bed, had passed, and though the smart thing would have been to reverse the action and drop him back on the street, she didn’t. She sat and stared at the man, who stubbornly refused to stop breathing, and waited for something to happen.

  She had no idea how he had ended up at her door, much less still alive but without his Signet, but she knew she was right about who he was; even if she’d never seen him before, she would have known what she was looking at. She could feel it, that aura, the same one they all had.

  Whatever he’d been through, he looked dreadful. His skin was drawn and ghostly pale, with dark circles around his eyes; it was obvious he hadn’t fed in days, maybe even as long as he’d been missing, and even unconscious it looked like he was in pain. His breathing was shallow but steady, and she felt for his pulse, which was weak.

  He didn’t stir when she spoke to him, shook his shoulder again, even lightly slapped his face—the sort of thing she knew in different circumstances would probably have gotten her beheaded. Nothing.

  She supposed she should call . . . someone. But who? It wasn’t as if there was a Haven hotline, and he didn’t have a phone on him so she had no access to his emergency contacts. The sun was up now, but after dusk she could venture out and try to find a patrol team; there was one that passed through her neighborhood. For now, though, they were stuck with each other.

  Olivia tried to busy herself straightening up the apartment; she was way too wired to sleep, and somehow the idea of the Prime waking up to a room with dirty laundry in the corners was more than she could take. Her bed was in the loft, with her studio space taking up most of the main floor, and she ran around nervously rearranging stacks of canvases and wiping the rarely used kitchen counter for a while before giving up and returning to her vigil. She thought about trying to paint, but she didn’t think she could concentrate with him there.

  A couple of hours after dawn, something changed.

  She had just sat back down by the bed when she saw his eyelids flutter. She sat very still, waiting, watching.

  Slowly, his eyes opened, staring up at the ceiling.

  She said quietly, “You’re safe, my Lord. It’s all right.”

  At the sound of her voice, he turned his head toward her, and she sucked in an astonished breath.

  The eyes that lit on her were black as damnation, without even the narrowest ring of iris showing; they seemed to glow, lit from within, like a night sky full of stars. She couldn’t look away . . . it felt like falling, or flying, or dying . . .

  Now he gasped, shutting his eyes tightly against some sudden pain, and she flinched as he cried out, curling up on himself, hands clenching the comforter so hard they shook.

  Olivia watched, horrified, as agony gripped the Prime’s body, and he writhed against the torment with strangled moans—one minute he was trembling like a leaf, the next drenched in sweat, struggling weakly to get his coat off.

  Again she acted before she could think better of it. She dove to his side and helped remove the coat, th
en unbuckled the sword and pushed it off on the floor. She could feel heat radiating from his skin. She got the shirt off him, which seemed to be enough—he twisted onto his stomach, giving her a look at the black-line tattoo of a hawk that covered his entire upper back.

  It was, she thought crazily, beautiful work—she would place it at around sixty years old, given the technique, and had been done by a master of the art. She couldn’t help but touch the lines, out of curiosity; most vampire tattoos were raised a little more than a human’s would be.

  The line beneath her fingers shifted.

  She gasped yet again and jerked her hand back, then shoved herself back from the bed, eyes going huge with shock. Her heart was in her throat—what she was seeing couldn’t be real, couldn’t be happening—

  The tattoo was changing.

  Mesmerized, she watched some of the lines fade, others darken . . . The bird’s head, which was in profile, changed shape, the skin erupting in blood as if a needle were digging into it. The wings altered, their edges seeming to sharpen. Blood ran down the Prime’s back onto the bed, but within seconds the flow had stopped, the lines healing themselves.

  Another spasm of pain hit him, and he turned his face into the pillow and screamed.

  Olivia wanted to run, to hide; she had never felt fear like this, never seen anything like what she was seeing . . .

  . . . except something about it was oddly familiar . . .

  Her hand flew to her mouth as she made the connection. Aside from the tattoo, she had seen something like this before . . . when a human became a vampire. She had been one of the lucky ones whose transition occurred peacefully in her sleep, because she was prepared for it and it was done with care; she’d woken up wanting to shag everyone in sight, but with rest and feeding she was fine, no screaming required. But many of them went violently, awake and able to feel every second of their bodies changing, and the way it hurt . . . it looked just like this.

  But he was already a vampire . . .

  It seemed to go on forever, but later she would check the clock and see that the whole thing lasted about two hours, with the pain coming on him in waves, periods of intense fever alternating with screaming torment, and there was nothing she could do but stand watch.

  Finally, the fever broke one last time, sweat soaking the bed. He began to shiver, and she could sense it was almost over; she grabbed a blanket and started to cover him. He whimpered softly and curled up again, as if the touch of the fabric were painful, and she got another view of his back.

  The tattoo had finished its transformation. Once a raptor, it had redrawn itself line by line into a raven.

  * * *

  “David!”

  In the middle of the afternoon, Deven woke with a start, sitting bolt upright in bed trying desperately to catch his breath.

  Jonathan jolted awake, too, but not quite so violently; he stared at his Prime, blinking confusion from his eyes. “What the hell was that?”

  Deven could only shake his head; his heart was hammering wildly, and before he could even frame a sentence, it felt like a giant invisible hook had dug into the skin of his back and was dragging itself through the flesh.

  Jonathan saw his facial expression and was clearly alarmed. “Are you all right? What’s happening?”

  “My back,” Deven hissed. “Is it bleeding?”

  Wide-eyed, Jonathan looked, then said, quizzically, “No . . . it’s fine. Does it hurt?”

  The pain was already starting to fade, but it left him dizzy, nauseated. He fell back onto the pillows, hands over his eyes to try to block the faint light of midday that had seeped into the room. His head began to pound, and suddenly the room felt like it was a hundred degrees. He kicked the covers off with a grunt.

  “Talk to me,” Jonathan said.

  Deven let out a long breath, pushing his pulse lower with his will. “I’m fine.”

  “You said David’s name,” the Consort told him. “Were you dreaming about him?”

  “No . . . I don’t know. I don’t remember. Are you sure that’s what I said?”

  “Very sure.” Jonathan watched him, eyes slightly narrowed now, appraising. “You know, I’ve seen you have a lot of nightmares, but nothing like that has ever happened—most of the time you just mutter for a while and that’s it.”

  Deven absently bent his arm back around to touch his back, reassuring himself that there weren’t any welts or jagged gashes. Nothing.

  “Do you need a Coke?” Jonathan asked with a smile.

  Deven smiled back in spite of himself. “No . . . I think I’m all right, love. As far as I know it wasn’t a precog episode . . . unless you’ve ever had one that felt like being tattooed by a chainsaw.”

  “You didn’t flail like that when you were actually tattooed, did you? If you did, I hope you tipped your artist extra.”

  “No . . .” He put his head in his hands, and Jonathan tugged the blankets back up around him, adding his arms for good measure. Deven let himself relax back against Jonathan’s chest. “I remember . . . I remember the night David got his back done . . .”

  He didn’t go any further. He suspected Jonathan wouldn’t want to hear how unspeakably sensual it had been watching the needles dig into David’s skin, blood welling up ruby-bright in the wake of black ink . . . It had taken all of Deven’s will to wait until they left the studio before he tore the shirt from David’s back and baptized the barely healed black lines with his tongue.

  “Do I really talk in my sleep?” he asked, hoping to change the subject.

  He could hear Jonathan smiling. “Mostly in Gaelic, so I can only pick out the curse words. Sometimes you pray in Latin.”

  Deven was glad, in that moment, that Jonathan didn’t speak Gaelic.

  He tried to think back and remember what he’d been dreaming this time, but his mind felt like it was full of mist; the most he could summon was a feeling, the slightest pale whisper of . . .

  “I was dreaming about him,” Deven said softly. “I don’t know what, but . . . it was like, just for a second, he was here.”

  Jonathan sighed into his hair and held him close. “Where do you think he is now?”

  “Nowhere. Gone.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  Deven didn’t answer right away. He knew what he wanted to say: that death was just the end of the story, fade to black and that was all. But the thought hurt, now more than it ever had. He had never wanted so much to believe in an afterlife as he did now.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said, winding his fingers through Jonathan’s.

  Jonathan didn’t contradict him, but he knew what the Consort was thinking: that it did matter, very much, and while the thought of either heaven or hell for a vampire seemed ridiculous, they were both thinking . . . hoping . . . that wherever David was now, he had found some measure of peace.

  * * *

  After the pain, there was only darkness.

  Then there was turpentine.

  The ceiling came into slow focus: exposed ductwork, industrial lighting. Metal creaked, rattled. Beyond that, the faint sound of something rasping . . . no, brushing. A brush hitting a flat surface that gave slightly with each stroke.

  Painting. Someone was painting.

  The room smelled like turpentine, acetone, toluene. Paints and solvents. Underneath that was the old, faded smell of automotive exhaust, as if the building had once been used as a garage.

  There was another sound, too, that took a moment to understand: a whooshing in and out, expansion and contraction . . .

  Breathing.

  Breathing.

  Alive.

  A shift, creaking bedsprings. The scent of laundry detergent, sweat, blood . . . dried blood . . . not human.

  The brushstrokes stopped. Feet on stairs.

  A face came into view.

  Compassionate gray eyes ringed with blue-green, a lovely olive-mocha skin tone that suggested mixed race; long, dark dreadlocks that fell down around her shoulders.
Black tank top spattered with paint. Her neck, chest, and all the way down her arms were covered in complicated tattoos of vines, roots, and snakes that seemed to almost move in the dim light of a nearby candle.

  Her voice was a soothing contralto. “Awake at last.” She stared down for several minutes, seeming to search for something, before asking, “Do you know who you are?”

  Silence. Her words seemed to translate through several languages, inflection and vocabulary so alien at first, twisting around themselves—English. American English, touched with a faint accent. Do you know who you are?

  Do you know who you are?

  A breath in, a breath out. Words. There had to be words there somewhere. “No.”

  She nodded, unsurprised. “Let’s take it slow, then. Can you sit up?”

  Her hands were warm and strong, capable. An artist’s hands, perhaps—but also a warrior’s. Muscle, tendon, bone engaged, inch by inch, lifting, the room spinning for a moment. A breath in, a breath out.

  The bed was in a loft overlooking a room full of easels. Paintings in various stages of completion leaned everywhere: strange landscapes that morphed into the garments of shadowy figures, a woman’s hair becoming the ocean. All of them seemed to move like her tattoos did, undulating, waves cresting, tides going in and out . . .

  . . . like the moon, cycling, waxing to fullness, waning to darkness . . . like life falling into death, clawing its way back to life, like black wings against a starlit sky . . .

  “Whoa,” she said gently. “Calm down . . . there’s nothing to be scared of. Just breathe . . . in and out . . . there you go.”

  . . . black wings . . .

  . . . enfolded in wings, rising . . .

  “I think we need to feed you,” she said. “You look like you might pass out again.”

  Panic. Where was this place? What was this? Who was she? Where . . .

  . . . Where was the forest? Why was there no sound of wind rustling through leaves? Where was this?