“You know, I get that you love Miranda and all, but . . . it’s an awfully big thing for you to do just out of fangirl loyalty. Let’s not forget you almost died for this chick once already.”
Stella set a pair of thick candles on the altar and added the incense burner. “It’s more than that. I know you don’t remember much of it, but that night we were attacked, it was Miranda’s Elite that saved us. If another Pair had been in charge, we would probably be dead. In most parts of the world, the rules about feeding on humans are lax, if not nonexistent. Miranda and David are working to change all of that. If they can’t do their jobs, they’re vulnerable, and someone could take them out—for real this time.”
“Stella Maguire, indirect savior of the human race,” Lark laughed. “I like it. Maybe they’ll make you their official Haven Witch. Like a mascot.”
Stella shot her the finger. “I’m not wearing a big animal head for anybody, I don’t care how awesome they are. Now get changed.”
Lark grabbed the robe Stella held out to her, sticking out her tongue in the process. “You, too. Persephone isn’t going to hang out in your skin if you’re wearing that ratty-ass tank top.”
Once they both had their robes on, they sat down in the middle of the floor with Stella’s notebook to go over the details of the ritual. They had about an hour before it was time to begin—astronomically the Earth’s axis was tilted just right at 10:34.
It wasn’t that Drawing Down was so difficult—every High Priestess was trained to do it, and disaster was rare. But Lark was right; there was always a possibility of something going wrong. The darker deities tended to be a little less gentle with their followers and could be almost cruelly demanding. The rewards, however, were equally great: They could confer amazing strength and new abilities, and if you wanted justice or vengeance, they were the way to go. Stella couldn’t imagine vampires having been created by a soft-and-fluffy goddess.
At precisely ten o’clock, they both rose from meditation and got to work.
Stella drew a line of salt over the circle she’d painted to contain all of the glyphs, marking the outermost boundary of the space they were creating; Lark got the incense charcoal burning and sprinkled powdered frankincense on it, sending up a fragrant billow of smoke that filled the air in the room and almost instantly changed how it felt. That smell was so familiar, it put them both in a ritual frame of mind without even trying.
“You cast,” Stella said. “You’ll need to hold on to the boundary if anything goes kaput.”
Lark made her way around the boundary, pausing at each compass direction to invoke the powers of its associated element. She spoke aloud, using invocations they’d used before but adding an extra request for protection.
Stella could See the Circle taking shape, a sphere of energy that reminded her of a soap bubble, shimmering in the candlelight. It was far stronger than a soap bubble, though, and once it was up, it would keep unwanted energies as well as unwanted people from entering. The way they’d set it up it was like a magical electrified fence, and only Persephone herself could walk through.
Finally the two Witches met in front of the altar.
“Okay,” Lark said. “You ready?”
Stella met her eyes and nodded. “Let’s go.”
Lark took the incense and mixed the oil into it, then dropped a spoonful onto the glowing charcoal. This time the smoke wasn’t a comforting, familiar scent. It was thick and acrid, and Stella felt her lungs rebelling against breathing it in; she calmed herself, though, and inhaled.
Her senses spun off axis. She blinked, trying to make sense of it, watching as Lark’s aura doubled in intensity and everything around them began to glow. She could feel her shields opening up—without any effort on her part—and could, at a great distance, hear Lark intoning the words they had agreed on for the invocation.
Lady of the darkened moon,
Queen of the endless underworld,
We ask for your presence here in this Circle.
Descend into the body of your priestess . . .
Stella didn’t know how much time passed. It could have been seconds or minutes. The smoke had clouded her mind so much she couldn’t form a coherent thought, and realizing how helpless she was, she felt herself hyperventilating out of panic. Fear overcame her—what was she doing? Who did she think she was, calling on a deity whose children were predators of the human race? Was she expecting hearts and flowers? She’d been such a—
Just as the terror began to buckle her knees, time seemed to slow down. She could see Lark in front of her, but the Witch was barely moving, her lips forming words but no sound coming out. The candle flames froze midflicker. Stella saw the ladders of smoke climbing toward the ceiling stop halfway there and hang, suspended, waiting.
For a moment the only sound was Stella’s labored breathing. Cold crept up over her skin.
The room fell away, smoke obscuring her view and then clearing, without anything actually moving.
She heard the rush of wings.
She stood in a woodland clearing, feet rooted to the spot, staring all around her with her heart in her throat. It was deep night, the sky overhead heavy with starlight, a soft breeze lifting the leaves of the forest that surrounded her.
The voice that filled her ears was made of that breeze, of wings, of stars . . . of shadows.
“You are brave, child.”
Stella took a deep breath and said, “I come seeking knowledge to help my friends.”
She felt something sort of like eyes on her, as if holding her up to a jeweler’s lamp to look for flaws. A presence circled her slowly: weighing, measuring.
“You are strong,” the voice observed, “but not strong enough to contain that knowledge. Should I speak through you, your own voice may be lost.”
“You know why I’m here?”
She almost heard a smile. “Of course. I have been waiting for you.”
“Then you know I have to try.”
The voice became sympathetic, gentle. “To step into this world is to accept a life unlike any other of your kind . . . a life that may bring you to grief. If you do this, there is no turning back . . . and it will not be only your life that changes.”
Stella asked, almost in a whisper, “Is there any other way?”
“No. To speak to my children I must speak through one with your abilities. It is not yet time for them to come to me directly—only in dreams. With your help they will find me soon, but without your help, it may never be, and when war comes, my children will be unable to win.”
“I take it that would be bad.”
“Do you consider the loss of many thousands of human lives bad?”
She nodded, understanding. The vampires couldn’t come here yet. They weren’t ready. Without the knowledge she would bring them, they might never be.
“What do I have to do?” she asked.
She could sense approval, even pride. “Only open yourself to me, child, and I will do the rest.”
Stella closed her eyes.
* * *
A scream split the air.
Miranda was on her feet before she could even register where it was coming from. She hit the music room door at a run, and emerging into the hallway she saw the suite door guards as well as several other Elite running toward the sound.
She knew, with a sinking heart, where it had originated: the room where Stella and Lark were doing their ritual. And even in that single scream, the Queen knew it wasn’t Stella’s voice.
She also knew it was a bad idea to burst in on them—but there was no other choice, if they needed help. She flung her arm up to unlock the door, not even waiting for the lock to beep before she turned the knob.
The scene inside was surreal. The air was hazy with smoke that smelled like burning dog hair and church; the floor was, as she anticipated, covered with white symbols in concentric circles around an altar. On the floor in front of the altar, one black-robed young woman lay in a heap, and another knelt besid
e her, sobbing incoherently.
“Stay back!” Miranda yelled at the Elite, remembering the dizzying sensation of walking into Stella’s room. She braced herself for something even worse.
It seemed, however, that whatever had happened had blown the Circle to smithereens. There was no barrier at all when she ran into the room, though the entire place was crackling with energy. Miranda dove to the girls’ side and dropped to her knees next to Lark, who was cradling Stella’s head in her lap, begging her friend to stay with her.
“She’s not breathing,” Lark moaned. “Please, do something, please—”
Miranda spared a second to call out to the others: “Get Mo down here now!”
She felt Stella’s chest for a heartbeat. It was there, but faint. She wasn’t exactly CPR certified, but she had to do something—she blew hard into Stella’s mouth, hoping against hope that something would happen, that she hadn’t sent a friend into this room to die. At the same time, she reached, willing Stella’s lungs to work, her heart to keep beating.
Footsteps thundered outside the room, and Mo appeared, just as Stella drew a ragged, gasping breath.
Relief made the Queen feel weak; she sagged backward, letting Mo get to the Witch. Lark was still sobbing, clinging to Stella’s hand.
“We must get her to my clinical room,” Mo said urgently. “She needs oxygen and an EKG.” He stood up, taking the Witch with him, and carried her out the door, Lark running to keep up behind him.
Miranda rose, intent on following.
Before she could take a step, thunder seemed to roll through her head; the room pitched and spun, and she collapsed where Stella had lain.
* * *
Austin was quiet that solstice night.
A summer storm was rolling steadily across the Hill Country and would reach the city in an hour at most, but for the moment the air was calm, even as high up as the roof of the Winchester Bank building.
He stood watching the city’s heart pulse with the rhythm of hundreds of stoplights. People were trying to get home before the rain started. The blare of horns punctuated the relative quiet, but from up here, the sound was just part of the symphony.
Waiting. Too much waiting. The Prime had no choice but to be patient, and it was maddening.
They were waiting on the Witches. Waiting to find out more about Morningstar. Waiting for intelligence about Jeremy Hayes.
In the meantime, Miranda was talking to her agent about going back onstage, and the Prime was standing on a roof, so all was right with the world again.
He hadn’t slept that day; between the stress of all this waiting and the fear that he might lose himself in his sleep and hurt Miranda, there was simply no rest for him, not yet.
He was afraid of himself. His entire life he had been reasonably self-aware, able to think his way through any problem. The only thing that had ever caught him off guard was love—and who could blame him for that? Love caught everyone off guard, after all. But this new thing, this darkness that had taken root inside him . . . he feared it . . . and he was not used to fear.
There was nowhere to turn, no one who would understand. He had no Second to turn to, and even if he had, he couldn’t imagine confiding in anyone the way he had Faith. The closest, he supposed, would be Olivia, since she had been there to witness some of what had happened, but he had no way to reach her.
There was something he trusted about her implicitly; he couldn’t put his finger on what, but he knew, once again somewhere deeper than logic, that he hadn’t seen the last of her. There was some kind of strength in her, some kind of power that his own power seemed to recognize. Olivia’s part in this was not yet over . . . and if he could find her, he would tell her so.
The first few drops of rain fell on his coat, and he sighed. Time to head home.
It was getting harder. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could face his Queen, seeing the way she looked at him when she thought he wasn’t aware of it. Now that they were separate, there was a very real possibility that she could turn away from him, even leave. She didn’t need him anymore. He didn’t truly believe she would give up on them, but it was still possible and never had been before. Who could blame her, after all she’d suffered because of him? It seemed that whether living or dead, he brought her nothing but pain.
Self-pity, Prime? Very nice.
Things would be clearer once he got some sleep. Before, he’d been able to push through entire weeks with only a couple of hours snatched here and there, but for some reason since he’d come back from the dead, he found it incredibly difficult to function without enough sleep. Whatever he was dreaming about, it was obviously very attractive to his subconscious.
Having done the math, he estimated that he had regained 98 percent of his memory; the things that had always been fuzzy, like his human life, were still fuzzy, and parts of his life that had been a blur were still a blur, but almost everything else was back where it belonged.
Unfortunately that 2 percent was the part he needed right now. He needed to know where he had been, how he had come back. He needed to know how to make things right again. There had to be something. Things couldn’t just . . . be like this now. How were they supposed to work as a Pair this way? How could he rule his territory if he couldn’t even control himself?
His thoughts were not helping.
He needed to focus on something normal for a while to stave off the creeping madness. Programming, perhaps. He’d been digging through the sensor data to figure out how Hayes had confused the network; he had come up with a couple of algorithms that might make detecting Signets more accurate even without the presence of a Signet itself. Knowing how powerful a vampire was would be very useful, but he had to figure out what kind of data to collect to calculate it.
There was also the camera project he’d left unfinished. He’d made a lot of progress before everything had gone to hell, but it needed more than a few refinements to be genuinely useful. If Miranda was going back onstage, she would probably need the camera/mirror illusion again, so he needed to get back on it.
David shook himself a little, then stretched, rolling his head from one side to the other to unkink his neck. He’d been standing there staring far too long; it was beginning to rain in earnest, and if it weren’t for his coat he would be soaked. As it was, his hair was already dripping.
He couldn’t help but laugh at himself. Brooding in the rain in a long coat—all he needed was a British moor to wander around and he could be a reject from any Brontë novel.
“All right,” he muttered, stepping down from the stone surround and turning toward the stairwell, “enough gargoyling for one night, Prime.”
As he walked across the roof, though, he felt something strange; his mind got suddenly blurry, as if he were drunk. It almost seemed that time was slowing down—he was afraid for a moment he would pass out, but everything was moving so slowly . . . or was it moving backward?
He pushed himself over to the door and leaned against it, trying to center himself and figure out what was going on, but the strangeness only grew. It wasn’t painful, really, it was . . . wrong.
What the hell . . .
He could hear something—someone speaking, or rather reciting something that had a rhythm, but the sound was far away, and it wasn’t possible; he wasn’t anywhere near another person, and neither his com nor his phone had alerted him to a message. The longer the voice went on, the harder it was to think. He could feel something . . . something coming closer . . . reaching for him . . .
David slid down the door to the ground, weak all over. It felt like the inside of his entire body was shaking, poised on a knife’s edge between nausea and pain, and something was reaching into him—
He gasped. Thunder seemed to split his skull, wave after wave of tremors starting in his mind and rolling outward. Was the thunder outside, or inside? He could barely feel the rain; there was nothing but that horrible shaking, and something trying to force him open, trying desperately to get in befo
re it was too late—
Lightning struck the Prime’s mind . . .
. . . and with it, memory.
Fourteen
“Hello, David.”
He stared at her, uncomprehending. “Who . . .”
Her eyes, black and full of stars, lit on him with kindness. “I think you know.”
One moment, she seemed to be just a woman, as Faith had been, a little colorless but still real. Her hair trailed around her shoulders, dark and bloodred, its tendrils moving almost like snakes; she was robed in mist, in shadows, in the suggestion of iridescent black feathers. Her feet dissolved into the ground beneath them, as if she had arisen from the night itself . . . or was the night itself.
He took a step back. “Persephone.”
She inclined her chin in confirmation.
“It was true,” he said. “The Stone, the Awakening . . . my death freed you.”
“Yes. Thank you.”
“Who was holding you captive, then?”
She smiled. It was a familiar smile . . . a predator’s smile. “You will find out soon enough.”
Suddenly he remembered—“Miranda,” he said. “She’s alone, and hurt—”
“She is safe for now. Worry not, child . . . you will be reunited soon. But first you must listen to me; there is not much time before dawn . . .”
Dawn . . . he could smell it in the air . . . he was so weak, and so afraid . . . ten feet to the stairwell might as well be a thousand miles . . .
It would be so easy just to give up and let it happen.
No.
Miranda.
The name brought strength from somewhere too deep to understand, and with agonizing slowness, he moved one hand . . .
Cold. So cold.
First one abandoned building, then another; the second had recently been a squat and still had the remains of a vagrant’s camp inside. There was a blanket, filthy but warm, and nearby a closet that would block out light. He collapsed inside, pulling the door shut, and hit the ground already unconscious.
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