She flicked her tongue at his navel, and he made an involuntary snorting sort of sound and tried to push her off. “No fair tickling,” he said, laughing. In reply she repeated the motion off to the side, midway between his rib cage and hip bone, and he yelped.
She was giggling as he flipped her onto her back. “That’s it, woman, you’re in for it now,” he informed her.
He wanted so badly to get lost in her, to feel their joined being merging and dissolving as their skin met and joined, but even through hours of renewing their love for each other, there was something . . . something not wrong, exactly, but not the same. They were both trying to find it, trying to return to what had been there before, but the reality was there, and incontrovertible: They were two people, separate, able to connect to each other only as closely as flesh would allow.
When, hours later, they lay entwined, sweaty and out of breath, he heard her sigh, her fingertips tracing the new lines on his back.
“I love you,” she whispered into his ear. “So much.”
He smiled. “I love you, too.”
She kissed the back of his neck and rested her cheek against his shoulder. “What happens now?” she asked.
“Now we sleep,” he replied.
He knew, without any sort of mystical bond, that she still had a thousand questions and was no more satisfied than he was—but she especially needed rest, and whatever answers there were to find would have to wait until they were both functional enough to face them.
But bond or no bond, they would face them together . . . and he gave in to sleep gratefully, knowing—not hoping, knowing—that if death couldn’t keep them apart, nothing could.
Nine
To: Lark ([email protected])
From: Stella ([email protected])
Subject: Shit gets weirder.
YOU’RE NOT GOING TO BELIEVE THIS . . .
Stella stared at the monitor of her laptop for several minutes, then sighed and closed it.
She had absolutely no idea how to finish the sentence.
It would help if she knew more about what the hell was going on. All she had been able to glean from eavesdropping on her guards was that somehow, some way, the Prime had come back from the dead. It didn’t sound like anyone had seen him, just that he was home and he and the Queen had been in bed for most of the last two days, recovering from . . . it, whatever it was.
She was dying to know more, but the only person she knew she could ask was Miranda herself, and she hadn’t seen Miranda in days. Stella didn’t blame her for not having time to come entertain her human guest, but still, Stella was getting bored and impatient, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it.
Sighing again, she slid down off the bed and stretched. Her legs were kinked up from sitting too much. Maybe she should go outside. She wasn’t much on working out, but she was used to walking everywhere to save gas. That was one of the nice things about living where she did. In her part of town, everything she needed was within walking distance.
At this point she was starting to consider Austin itself within walking distance . . . it would just be a really long walk. It would be worth it, though, to get back to her actual life and stop grumping around her gilded cage.
Pywacket, who was much more lackadaisical about their predicament, looked up from his butt-licking cat yoga and gave her a wide-eyed look.
“I know, I know,” she said. “Bad vampires, going to kill me, et cetera.”
She left her room, giving the door guard a nod: “Just going for ice cream,” she said.
Nobody minded if she wandered around, as long as she told her guard where she was going; if it was daytime, limited personnel were available to watch her, but it was unlikely anyone would try to hurt her during the day. This far from town, anyone with deadly intentions would be stuck at the Haven until the sun went down, and there weren’t a lot of places to hide with all the sensors and so forth. The Haven was like Fort Knox. She also had one of their band-bracelet things now, set specifically to call Miranda.
She’d been to the library and the gardens, seen the big damn horses, walked around most of the Haven itself without poking her nose into too many rooms, and found the study where Miranda kept the ice cream stash; she could get almost anything she wanted brought to her, but there was something vaguely mischievous about hanging out in the study where Big Important Vampire Things probably happened. She’d spent several hours there poring over the bookshelves and the liquor cabinet, both of which boasted wares from all over the world.
She had in fact spent an evening embarrassingly drunk on a bottle of tequila that later Internet research revealed cost $200; she kind of doubted they would care, but still, it was a good thing that it had been such high-quality booze that three shots had her on her face.
Her footsteps were quiet on the cold tile floor; everything echoed in this place during daytime, and there was something in the air that brought to mind a museum . . . or a mausoleum. Even though a handful of day guards watched the corridors, the whole building was basically asleep; the metal shutters kept all but the faintest pale light out, and aside from the distant sound of lawn and garden equipment coming and going, the Haven was dead until sunset.
Stella had been keeping odd hours since she’d arrived—she wasn’t entirely nocturnal but tended to sleep from the wee hours of the morning to early afternoon. Just now it was around four, not quite true evening. In another three hours the Haven would rumble to life around her.
She had to admit she got a kick out of walking around the place alone. She doubted many people had the chance to do so.
She reached the study and opened the door . . .
. . . only to find herself in the company of the Prime of the Southern United States, tousled and sleepy, bare feet propped up on the coffee table, working his way through a pint of ice cream.
Stella squealed and jumped back. “Oh shit!”
He looked as surprised to see her as she was to see him but said, “Don’t run off.”
Stella, heart pounding, tried to think of an excuse for her being in what was, after all, one of his private rooms, and stammered a few seconds, flustered.
Amused, he said, “I’m sorry . . . I seem to have appropriated your Chunky Monkey.”
“Well, I . . . it’s . . . um . . . technically it’s your Chunky Monkey.”
A shrug. He gestured at the freezer. “After everything you’ve done for Miranda, the least I can give you is ice cream, Mistress Witch.”
She had to smile at that. Funny . . . she’d met him only once, at the clinic, when she’d been high on painkillers and shock; she remembered him being . . . different. He was still ridiculously gorgeous, but now he looked tired, thinner, like someone who had seen way too much and not had time to process any of it.
Still, the power-aura around him was insane. It, too, was different, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on how without shifting into Sight and analyzing him . . . and that might be a little awkward.
She went over to the freezer and retrieved another pint of ice cream, this one a mocha something-or-other. There was a stash of spoons in one of the nearby drawers; always prepared, these vampires.
Not exactly sure what else to do with herself, Stella sat down in one of the other armchairs, crossing her legs, and dug into the ice cream.
“So you’re not dead,” she said, trying to sound nonchalant or at least non-freaked-out. “How’d you manage that?”
His mouth quirked in a half-smile. “I have no idea.”
“I thought they said you burned up in the sunlight.”
The Prime pondered the spoonful of ice cream in front of him for a moment before saying, “No one actually saw that happen. They just assumed it did because I wasn’t there the next night.”
“Where were you?”
“I don’t remember.”
Stella swallowed. “Amnesia? Kind of a cliché, don’t you think?”
“It’s not amnesia exactly. Everyth
ing’s there, it just . . . I feel like my brain needs a defrag.”
She snorted. “I forgot Miranda said you’re a geek.”
He looked down at himself; he was wearing faded jeans and a worn T-shirt with the slogan Han Shot First. “I’ve heard that about me.”
“You haven’t forgotten all of the techno stuff, have you? That would be really awful.”
“No. It’s there. I think once I actually sit down and use the knowledge, it will come back fully. Whenever I concentrate on something in the past it takes a moment to access the first time, but then it’s more solid.” He stared down into the nearly empty pint as if trying to divine the future—or the past—from the fudge chips. “Except for the last few weeks . . . none of that has come back.”
“I’m sure it will,” she said, trying to sound reassuring, though the absurdity of the moment was not lost on her. Here she was, eating ice cream with the most powerful vampire in the region, trying to make him feel better about the aftereffects of being dead. It was nearly as surreal as having the Queen in Hello Kitty pajamas asleep on her couch.
He watched her keenly for a moment before adding, “You seem to be handling all of this vampire business pretty well.”
“I’m a Witch. Strange stuff happens to us all the time. But I’ll give you this: If I had even the slightest sense that you guys weren’t the good guys, there would be a Stella-shaped hole in that door and my ass would be on a plane to Bermuda.”
He smiled. “You are smarter than a lot of humans who find out about us.”
“Don’t most of them end up dead?”
“Precisely.”
Stella frowned; she wished she could put into words what had changed about him, but she couldn’t make sense of it any more than he could. “What exactly are you now?” she asked.
He raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I don’t know much about vampires, but I’ve felt quite a few of them—their energy, I mean—while I’ve been here. There’s normal vampires, and then there’s Miranda, and there’s the other Signets that were here . . . and then there’s you.”
The Prime narrowed his eyes, and for a moment she was afraid she’d crossed a line. He might sit here eating ice cream like a human, and might be dressed like one, but he wasn’t human . . . she was the only human in this entire building . . . and for miles around. The thought made a ripple of fear run up her backbone.
His reply, though, wasn’t what she expected. “Tell me about your gift.”
“My Sight? Okay . . . when I look at things a certain way I can see energy. Auras, I guess, though it’s not always literally visual. And I can see connections between people, even old karmic ones, in a sort of spiderweb of energy. Plus, with my training as a Witch, I can sense other sorts of energy from people, sometimes places. I can learn a lot about someone that way. It’s how I figured out Miranda isn’t human.”
“If you were to use this Sight on two people, you could see how they were connected—and if they weren’t, could you tell why not?”
“I guess so. I’ve never tried anything like that . . . but then I’m a lot stronger than I was before I met you guys. Why?”
Seeming to lose his appetite, the Prime set aside the pint and leaned back in his chair, hands folded. “Miranda and I have been severed. It is, essentially, what killed me . . . and I thought it would come back, but it hasn’t. Nothing like this has ever happened among our kind. None of us have ever really explored the nature of our bonds—it never seemed necessary, since if one of us dies, we both do . . . or that’s how it’s supposed to happen.”
“She should have died when you did?”
“Normally. But if you shatter one Signet, you break the bond itself and kill whoever bears that Signet, leaving the other alive. The power between us rebounds, basically, and the imbalance is deadly—the survivor usually goes insane and dies anyway; it just takes longer . . . and is far more painful.”
“What good does that do, then? Why would anyone want to break you apart if whoever lives ends up crazy and dead?”
“The point of a Bondbreaking isn’t divorce. The point is to make us suffer as much as possible before we die. It’s the cruelest way to kill a Pair, destroying the one thing that makes our eternity bearable. In all our history it’s been done perhaps a half-dozen times, and then never by another Signet; the thought of it horrifies most of us to the point that we won’t even think of doing it to our worst enemies.”
“But someone did it to you.” Stella couldn’t eat anymore, either, imagining what it must have been like . . . She remembered the shape Miranda had been in, how close she’d come to dying. “That’s . . . God, I’m sorry.”
“The interesting thing is, that wasn’t all he did. There was more to it. The Bondbreaking was part of a greater ritual—the power it supplied was channeled somewhere, through Miranda’s Signet and another amulet, supposedly to open a door.”
“A door to what?”
He lifted his eyes heavenward, not quite an eye roll but definitely born of exasperation. “There’s a vampire cult that is trying to bring back their goddess from some sort of astral exile.”
“Vampires have religions?”
“Some do. This group is one of the oldest out there, and the nuttiest. They worship Persephone, the—”
“Greek goddess of the Underworld,” Stella finished for him. “Queen of the Dead.” She felt a chill of creeping recognition . . . It couldn’t be a coincidence. She remembered looking at the image of Persephone on her altar as she turned the cards . . . the Tower burning . . .
“Are you all right?”
She shook her head. “I don’t . . . I’m a Pagan, you know . . . basically a Goddess worshipper. I’ve had Persephone on my altar for years. I was doing a tarot reading when I had this vision that . . . It’s how I found Miranda. She . . . Persephone . . . led me to her.”
He was silent for the better part of a minute, then shook his head and said, smiling faintly, “They might make a believer out of me yet.”
* * *
The second David stepped out onto the balcony, the Elite went absolutely wild with applause and cheers and didn’t stop for more than a minute. When Miranda came over to stand beside him and they joined hands, the tumult was deafening.
Finally, smiling, Miranda held up her hand, calling for silence. A hundred twenty-nine faces stared up at their leaders, smiling, eyes bright with jubilation.
“Honored Elite, Haven staff,” David said, “I want to thank each of you for continuing your work in my absence. Your devotion means everything to us.” He looked at Miranda, smiling, and added, “I’d also like to thank my beloved, our Queen, for refusing to be defeated even in the face of death. I am honored to have her at my side, and you are all honored to have her as your Queen.”
Another cheer went up. Miranda smiled down at them and picked up where David left off. “For now, we’ll stay with the chain of command we established while the Prime was . . . away. While he is definitely one hundred percent alive, he’ll be taking a few days to get back in the swing of things, so lieutenants, please continue making your reports on my server. Again, thank you all so much. I couldn’t have kept this place going without each and every one of you. Oh, and one more thing—check your deposits for this month; you’ll each be receiving hazard pay for the time during the lockdown, and a bonus for all your hard work since then.”
More cheers. David, who had made sure to wear black to set off the color and glow of his Signet and looked, at last, like himself, gave them one more smile, and said, “Dismissed.”
Miranda breathed in, letting the Elites’ joy sink into her body; there was plenty of it to go around, and she needed all the energy she could get.
She watched her Prime as he spoke to a couple of the lieutenants, wondering if they saw it, too, or if the Elite down below had noticed something different about their leader. Perhaps they dismissed it as mere tiredness, after whatever ordeal had taken him from them and then miracu
lously restored him. And perhaps that was all it was.
No. It was far, far more than that.
A hundred tiny things gave it away. He was still very much David, and yet . . .
This was the first time the Elite had really seen him. Rumors had flown for several days while he and Miranda rested, and finally David had decided he was recovered enough to at least address his people—they deserved to see him, to know that yes, he was back. He wanted the news to spread from the Haven throughout the city, the territory, and the world: David Solomon had returned.
Miranda knew it was true, but . . .
She told herself that it was the distance between them that was causing her to feel ill at ease; indeed, not feeling his presence in her mind, that warm touch throughout her being that reminded her she wasn’t, could never be, alone, was painful, a part of her grief that had yet to be healed . . . if it ever could be.
She shook her head slightly. It could be healed. They would find a way. There had to be something . . . perhaps it would return in time. He hadn’t even been back a week, and the Bondbreaking had been catastrophic for them both; something like that didn’t just up and get better. It was a process.
The thought that it might never return . . . that they might forever be two separate beings, that soul-deep connection that had made them more than just a couple gone forever . . . she couldn’t stand it. Despite her brave words to him, she couldn’t imagine living a hundred, two hundred years without it.
But if it never returned . . . they would adjust. They would find a way to deal. There was no other alternative. If she could live without him, she could certainly live with him as a normal husband.
Miranda concentrated on the happiness. Having him back was a blessing beyond anything she had ever hoped for. Just waking up next to him again, knowing that when she opened her eyes his side of the bed would no longer be empty, made up for so much of the loss.
Every day he was regaining more of his memory and had even logged into the Haven systems to look around earlier, refamiliarizing himself with their layout and operations. Within a few minutes his fingers had been flying over the keyboard as always, and she had stood in the doorway watching him, tears running from her eyes. She had thought she would never see him sitting there, reading glasses catching the monitor’s light, again; but there he was.
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