Of Shadow Born

by Dianne Sylvan

  But then she would catch him staring off into space, his expression one of faint bewilderment, as if he’d woken from a dream to find himself in a strange land where no one spoke his language. Or she’d start a sentence, expecting him to finish it, and he wouldn’t; or she’d make some crack that he would have laughed at before, only to get a blank stare. The closest word she could come up with to describe his state was distracted, but that was inadequate.

  Sometimes she lay awake staring at his back. The tattoo seemed an outward symbol of a much deeper transformation, one that neither of them understood.

  “Are you all right?”

  She felt his arm slide around her and leaned her head on his shoulder with a sigh. The contact did nothing for her energy—there was no sense of relief, no feeling of their power balancing itself—but it did everything for her heart.

  “Just lost in thought,” she replied. “How are you? Tired? Do you need to rest?”

  “No . . . I actually feel fine.” He kissed her forehead. “What’s next?”

  “Well, you have about a thousand phone calls to return—mostly variations on ‘Holy shit, are you really alive?’ You might want to draft a mass e-mail to the Council to let them know I’m not playing some kind of trick on them.”

  He nodded. “Any further news on Hart?”

  “Not that I’ve heard. I’ll have to check in with the West on that one—Dev has an agent in Hart’s Haven somewhere who’s keeping an eye on things.”

  “What about Deven? Have you spoken to him tonight?”

  Miranda started to say she hadn’t, but she broke off at a gasp from the hallway and smiled softly. “No, but you can.”

  She would never forget the look on Deven’s face as David turned slowly toward him; she had never seen the Prime of the West so completely, totally stunned.

  She grinned and stepped away from David, giving him space. For a long time, neither Prime moved, just staring at each other.

  Finally, Deven said in a surprisingly small, young voice, “Is it really you?”

  David smiled a little. “Shall I prove it to you? You recite the Officium Divinum in your sleep. You shagged Lord Byron up against a tree one night in Genoa. When you’re depressed you drink peanut butter milk shakes, and—”

  Before he could finish, Deven had crossed the room and flung himself into David’s arms.

  Miranda couldn’t stop smiling, which might have surprised her a few months ago, but now all she could feel was gratitude. She had experienced Deven’s pain as acutely as her own, and now she could feel its relief, an echo of her own.

  David rested his chin on Deven’s head for a moment, eyes closed, and sighed. “Yes,” he said. “This I remember.”

  Deven looked up at him. “Do you remember being angry at me before?”

  Miranda saw it in David’s eyes: a conscious choice to let go. “No.”

  David kissed him lightly on the lips, and Deven smiled and moved away, taking a deep breath before turning to Miranda. “How are you, love?” he asked.

  Miranda went over and hugged him tightly. “Better now. Where’s Jonathan?”

  “At home. I’m not staying, I just . . . I had to see for myself, before I could believe it.”

  Tilting his head to one side, David smiled at the two of them standing with their arms around each other. “This is new.”

  Miranda and Deven looked at each other, then at David. “Tragedy has a way of bringing people together,” Deven pointed out. “That’s how I ended up shagging Lord Byron.” He shot Miranda a grin. “Long story. I’ll tell you about it next time we’re drunk.”

  David walked over to them and kissed first Miranda’s cheek, then Deven’s. “While you’re here, I wonder if you could do something for me,” the Prime said.

  Deven raised an eyebrow. “Anything.”

  “There’s someone I want to introduce you to . . . someone who I think can help us figure out what the hell is going on.” He gestured at them to follow, and Miranda nodded, understanding what he meant. He wanted to have Stella use her Sight on him and Miranda, and it would presumably work better if she had another Signet as a basis of comparison. Deven’s Consort might not be there, but if Stella could see their bond, she’d at least know what to look for.

  “Good idea,” she said, and then to Deven, “Just . . . promise you won’t terrify her too much. She’s seen a lot, but she might not be ready for you.”

  Deven laughed. “I have no idea what you mean,” he said with feigned innocence. “I am the very model of an average everyday vampire.”

  Miranda snorted. “Right. And I’m Mother Teresa.”

  David was still looking at them with bemusement, as if seeing the two of them genuinely getting along were the oddest thing he’d seen since coming back from the dead with a magically altered tattoo and partial amnesia. But he seemed to decide that if they had lost their minds, it was a pleasant enough insanity, and he shook his head with a smile before leading them toward the young Witch’s room.

  * * *

  Whatever Stella was expecting . . . he was not it.

  She felt the Signets’ energy out in the hall; she was used to Miranda’s, and she recognized David’s, but the third she had felt only at a distance, and only once or twice. Still, she was pretty sure she knew who it was: Deven, the Prime of the West, and from Miranda’s vague description Stella knew he was dangerous, powerful, and very old.

  “Come in,” Stella called at the knock.

  The door opened, and she blinked.

  The three vampires crossed the threshold, through the wards Stella had set up; Miranda had already felt them and didn’t react, but David flinched as if he’d been poked in the ribs, and Deven stopped, looked around, and shrugged.

  Miranda smiled. “Stella, I’d like you to meet our ally, Deven O’Donnell, Prime of the Western United States. Lord Prime, this is Stella Maguire, our friend and guest.”

  “You’re Deven?” Stella blurted. “But you’re so . . . cute!”

  Miranda snorted, and David had to turn his head to hide his laughter.

  Deven looked at her, and for just a second she wanted the earth to open up and swallow her. Then he smiled.

  “So are raccoons,” he pointed out, “but they’ll fuck you up.” His voice was a quiet tenor, the cadence of his words almost suggesting an accent but not quite. He looked like the kind of “vampire” she and Lark might have run into at the fetish club . . . yet something in the way he stood, the coolness in his eyes, told her there was no pretense or artifice here. Cute he might be, but he was every inch the real thing.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, blushing deeply. “I just . . . After feeling your energy around the place, I was expecting . . . like a huge scary dude of some kind. I should bow, or something, right?”

  “You’re not a vampire,” he pointed out. “Therefore you aren’t subject to our rule, so usually we let it slide.”

  David, still holding back laughter, said, “I thought perhaps if you had another Signet to Look over, it would be easier for you to make something out of our situation.”

  Stella nodded. “Good idea. Um . . . would you mind sitting on the bed with me? I need to concentrate, and it works best if we’re facing each other.”

  Miranda and David waited on the love seat while Stella and Deven got comfortable, both sitting cross-legged. Meanwhile Pywacket came barreling out of his hiding place under the bed and leapt up into David’s lap, immediately setting to kneading his thigh. Stella had never seen the cat do that before—he usually took weeks to learn to like new people.

  She didn’t know what to make of it, but she’d have her chance to get a good Look into David’s weirdness soon enough.

  Stella faced Deven. “Okay . . . I’m going to go into a light trance and shift into the Sight so I can get a feel for your energy and that bond thing you guys have. Any questions?”

  One eyebrow lifted. “Is that a ColorWheel shade? Their reds are always so vibrant.”

  Stella co
uldn’t help it; she giggled, reaching up to tug on a strand of her hair. “Yeah. It’s A27-1, Price Above Rubies.”

  “Duly noted. Do you have any questions?”

  She laughed. “Like a million. Such as, what happens if you take out a piercing?”

  “It heals in about four seconds and I have to repierce it if I want it back. I had nine yesterday.”

  She counted: He had only four at the moment. Eyebrow, nose, one in each ear. “Yikes. Okay, so, do you know anything about energy work? If you don’t, this might feel a little weird.”

  Deven gave her a slight smile. “I do indeed.”

  “And you’re sure you’re okay with me poking around in your aura?”

  He smiled again. “I won’t let you in any deeper than you need to go, Stella. This isn’t my first rodeo.”

  She felt her own eyebrows go up. “Are you a Witch, too?”

  “Not exactly.”

  Stella glanced over at Miranda, who chuckled. “Don’t worry—he won’t bite.”

  Deven grinned and made a slight snapping motion with his teeth; Stella laughed before she could stop herself and tried not to think about how his canines were more pointed than a normal person’s. “Okay . . . just relax, then . . . try not to think about anything specific.”

  She took a few long breaths to ground herself, then reached for the Prime’s hands; she could feel the strength in them—the kind of strength usually reserved for people who wrung necks in the dark, like her dad’s Special Forces buddies. She wondered, wildly, if Deven had ever killed anyone.

  “Stella,” he said softly, “you are far too bright to ask such stupid questions.”

  She nodded . . . but then her eyes snapped open. He’d heard the thought—without even trying.

  This was going to be interesting.

  “Now,” she said, “if you can thin out your outermost layer of shields for me, just enough that I can see the Signet bond—”

  “It goes deeper than that,” he replied. “It starts at the very core of our being.”

  She smiled. “Not your first rodeo,” she repeated. “Okay, lead the way.”

  She shifted into her Sight, and for a moment, the man sitting in front of her seemed almost normal; like a strong Witch, perhaps. She had seen from Miranda’s shielding that vampires structured their barriers kind of like onions—layer upon layer, each one with a slightly different function, some to deflect unwanted energy, some to keep others from Seeing in. Miranda’s had been extremely complex to control her empathic talent—she had to be able to use it without it using her, and learning to do that must have taken her years and a lot of pain.

  Once he’d let her in, Stella paused to learn the lay of the land. The way she Saw energy was in colors, but also in threads of light; each person’s choices and interactions with other people created a spiderweb, and that web made up the individual’s life, connected at its edges with everyone they loved, hated, knew, and eventually, everyone on earth, if you were powerful enough to See that far. Stella couldn’t venture too far past the person she was Looking at—at least not for very long without burning out—but that was usually knowledge enough for her.

  It was hard to explain to anyone who couldn’t See it—the best comparison was watching a 3D movie first without the glasses, then with them, so that all those different versions of a person came together to form the solid, fully dimensional life before her.

  He was only the second vampire she’d ever gotten this close to, and it was hard not to get caught up in her fascination—they were so different from humans, and so different from each other. The basic structure of the web was the same as a mortal’s, but everything from the color of the energy to how it flowed made it obvious, unnervingly so, that the person before her was not human, and hadn’t been human for a very long time.

  She could feel every year of his age—the burden of all those years, of watching the world change while remaining essentially an eternal teenager, like one of the Lost Boys of Neverland without the fairy dust.

  Except . . .

  There was something . . . as she was learning how he worked, she happened across the thread of Deven’s family line, buried deep among a lot of painful memories she couldn’t access. That one line had a certain color to it, a silvery violet shade she felt like she had seen before somewhere a long time ago . . .

  “Don’t,” Deven whispered into her mind, practically slamming a barrier down in front of the line. “Please.”

  “But . . . are you?”

  He met her eyes. She felt him deciding whether to tell her. “Yes.”

  “But that’s . . . that’s amazing! You’re so lucky . . .”

  “Lucky?” His mental voice went sharp and bitter. “Would you like to see how lucky I am?”

  Before she could say no, several flashes of memory exploded in her mind, and she gasped: a child lifting chubby hands to heal a puppy’s broken leg, then dragged before a priest . . . an exorcism, to force demons out of the child’s body, when there were none . . . the sting of a whip, each crack punctuating the drone of holy liturgy.

  Stella could feel her eyes filling with tears. “Stop,” she whispered. “That’s enough.”

  He sighed. “I’m sorry, Stella. You didn’t deserve that.”

  “Neither did you!” She squeezed his hands, lifting her eyes to his. He looked surprised at the sorrow on her face, as if compassion was something he didn’t entirely understand when it was directed toward him.

  “Anyway, let’s . . .” She went back to her work, seeking out the Signet bond, and after another moment, she found it.

  Deep within the glowing energy of his heart center, reaching up to connect to the third eye as well as the solar plexus, was a black strand of energy—no, not black exactly, more like darkened quicksilver. She touched it lightly and felt it connecting all the way across the country, giving her a sense of a tall, broad man reading a book in front of a fireplace. Stella was amazed she could sense that far, but it wasn’t so much her talent as it was the nature of the bond.

  The man—Jonathan, she remembered—felt her presence, but also felt that Deven had allowed her in, and though he was surprised, he didn’t object.

  The connection flowed back from him equally, and their two energies merged and blended, radiating love and unity all the way from one end to the other. Stella kept her hands on it for a while, just getting used to what it felt like . . . a true soul-mating, something she doubted most humans ever experienced.

  It was strong—its thread was like steel compared to the gossamer threads of the rest of the web—and would be nearly impossible to break. Two people joined this way wouldn’t just love each other—they would complement each other, and that kind of connection went way beyond romance. It was beautiful, heartachingly so, but she could imagine how much pain it could cause if something went wrong.

  She followed it in both directions for a while, learning its weight and strength, before she noticed something odd.

  It split.

  No, that wasn’t right. At first glance it looked like the Pair bond split, but looking closer she saw that there was another thread, a thinner and paler bond that wrapped around the Pair bond and then split off on its own again . . . and this one flowed right back around . . . into David, and even beyond that.

  When she saw where it went, she snapped her gaze back to Deven’s. “Do you see it?” she asked.

  “See what?”

  She showed him the second bond. He looked genuinely shocked when he saw it. “I always knew there was something between us, but . . . this . . . how is this possible?”

  “I don’t know. I’m new at this kind of bond. But from what I’m Seeing here there’s more than just ex-boyfriendy stuff going on with you two—you have a secondary link of your own, just not a Signet bond. And if I follow it past David, it looks like all of you have something like it, and it weaves around your Pair bonds and to and from one another—like a half-finished braid. The Pair bonds connect you to your Consort
, but this other bond is what connects you to the others, so that explains you all sharing visions and powers.”

  “I’m not sure whether that makes me feel better or worse,” Deven noted.

  She shrugged. “It is what it is. Now, if I follow it over to David . . .” She led Deven toward the other Prime, without alerting David, just yet, that they were looking at him. “See, it should connect back into his own bond with Miranda.”

  “But there isn’t any bond with Miranda,” Deven replied. “It was broken . . . wasn’t it?”

  Stella stared, trying to make sense of what she was Seeing, then said aloud, “David . . . would you mind joining us? You, too, Miranda.”

  She waited to dig any deeper until the Pair—or not-Pair—had come over to the bed and the four of them were sitting in a circle, knees almost touching. Stella released Deven’s hands and took David’s.

  “Okay, let me in as much as you can,” she said. “Deven, could you grab that notebook and pen from next to you? Thanks.”

  David might not be able to See what he was doing, but his shields parted as elegantly as a curtain, and she followed the thread of his connection to Deven as it merged back into the thicker, silver-black thread of his Signet bond . . . that should have gone to Miranda.

  She could see now what had happened. Right where it should have connected, the bond had been burned off, the ends scorched, blasted away. The edges were sort of cauterized—that had stopped him from energetically bleeding to death, though how it had happened Stella couldn’t say. The heart connection was still there, but it was partially torn off, hanging on by only a bare handful of frayed threads.

  Did that mean that they were no longer meant to be Paired? But how could someone go from being a soul mate to nothing?

  There was something else about David as well—some of the threads of his web looked almost blurry, like they were in the process of dissolving and re-forming elsewhere. He had changed, and changed profoundly . . . and he wasn’t done. The last phase of the transition was waiting for something.