Of Shadow Born

by Dianne Sylvan

  Now, though, he was no longer sure it would help. Deven had formed an attachment to Miranda now, too, and while it wasn’t exactly romantic, it was more than simple friendship—and after what had happened three years ago, there was no way Deven would ever, ever risk hurting her again.

  “So,” Jonathan ventured, keeping his eyes on his book nonchalantly, “are you planning to pursue that whole thing with Miranda, or . . .”

  “What thing?” Deven asked, frowning.

  “Well, change or no change, she did kiss you. And you did blush when we were talking about it.”

  “I don’t blush,” Deven insisted. “And by now I shouldn’t have to ask this question, but, what part of gay do you not get?”

  “Oh, please. As old as you are, you know sexuality is more fluid than that for our kind. That’s how you landed David in the first place.”

  “I landed David because he had suffered a tragic loss and I give amazing head.”

  Jonathan snorted. “Exactly my point. He could get a shag from any woman not connected to another woman or life support machinery, but he tumbled into bed with you. Anyway, aside from the deer-in-headlights thing, what did you do when she kissed you?”

  “Besides try to push her off? Well . . .” Deven crossed his arms. “I may have kissed back. Just to satisfy my curiosity.”

  Grinning, Jonathan asked, “Then what?”

  Deven’s eyes narrowed. “You’re getting off on this, aren’t you.”

  “I’ve just never seen you do anything remotely sexual with a woman. I’m sorry I missed it. What was it like?”

  “Like? It was just like kissing a man. Lips don’t really differentiate much.”

  “Maybe not, but breasts sure do.”

  Deven smiled a little at that. “That part was weird.”

  “So what if—strictly theoretically, of course—she actually wanted to sleep with you? Or better yet, what if they asked you to join in, and fooling around with her was just part of the equation? Would you try it?”

  Deven was giving him a hilariously befuddled look. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

  “I said it was theoretical.”

  “What are you fishing for, Jonathan? Are you trying to plan something?”

  Jonathan laughed. “Of course not.”

  “Good, because nothing like that is going to happen. The whole thing was an anomaly that I’d appreciate you dropping.”

  Jonathan noted the rising ire in his voice and said, “Okay, okay. I was just curious. No plans, honest. I won’t bring it up again.”

  There was a chime, and Deven took out his phone, unlocking the screen listlessly. A flicker of a smile crossed his face.

  “What is it?” Jonathan asked.

  The Prime held up the phone, letting Jonathan see the alert: An area code 312 number had called a 512 number. “Something’s going right,” Deven said.

  “Dev . . .”

  “Can we just . . . not?” Deven asked, sounding utterly exhausted, even flat. “I swear, Jonathan, I’ve had enough processing and emotional vulnerability to last me a fucking millennium. I just want to go home, go to bed, and maybe have a few nights of normalcy before the next fresh hell descends upon us. Please.”

  Jonathan smiled. “All right.”

  After a moment, though, Jonathan said, “You know, if you wanted to go to bed with them, I’d be fine with it.”

  Deven groaned. “What did I just say?”

  “I just wanted you to know,” the Consort said firmly. “I was mostly kidding—but if you wanted to shag the entire Council I’d make it happen. Whatever you want, no matter how ridiculous or impossible, I want for you. I want you to be happy, and I wish I could fix it. That’s all.”

  At last Deven smiled. “Love, how many times must I tell you . . . you can’t fix me. It’s not your job. You’re just going to make yourself crazy thinking it falls on you.”

  “Just tell me this, then. What would it take? What would it take for you to feel genuinely happy, even just for a moment? Anything. I just want to know.”

  The Prime sat quietly for a moment, then shook his head. “I don’t think it’s possible,” he said. “I told you when we met that I’m a lost cause.”

  “I don’t accept that. There must be something that would make you at least want to try.”

  They held each other’s eyes until Deven closed his, and to Jonathan’s surprise, when they opened again, they were bright with tears. “You don’t want to know,” he said.

  “Yes, I do. Is it David? You can tell me.”

  “No . . . David and I could never make each other happy, you know that. If we tried to be real partners, we’d kill each other. I’m still surprised we didn’t the first time.”

  “Then what is it?”

  Deven leaned back in his seat, staring up at the ceiling, then closed his eyes. “I want to be loved,” he said, almost too softly to hear.

  Jonathan started to protest—whatever his faults, Deven was one of the most loved people he’d ever met—but the Prime wasn’t finished. His last words, before turning his head back to the window and staring out again in silence, broke Jonathan’s heart in half:

  “I want God to love me again.”

  * * *

  Miranda woke again, and this time she meant it.

  She blinked in the firelight and sat up, a little confused for a moment, as though she’d just had an incredibly vivid dream. She was pretty sure it had been about sex but had ended in blood.

  What had happened? Wasn’t something supposed to happen?

  She held up her hands, staring at them. They looked strange, and she didn’t know why until she concentrated—and then it was like they suddenly went from two-dimensional to three-dimensional, and she could see things she had never seen before. She looked around the room, and the effect was the same: Everything was sharp and clear, even in her peripheral vision, and she registered things about the room that were so tiny . . . a minute crack in the bedpost, a delicate spiderweb in the far corner. She could focus her vision on one thing and still describe in detail something on the other side of the room.

  She could hear the guards outside the door breathing. She could smell whatever the servants used to clean the bathroom. She could smell the residue of blood somewhere, too.

  It might have frightened her had it not been so fascinating. She sat for nearly half an hour just listening, looking, smelling . . . and that wasn’t all.

  She didn’t know what to call it, but it felt like another sense had heightened, one she didn’t even know she had. It felt something like her empathy in the way it responded to her will, but instead of emotion, it told her how things were moving—she could sense a tiny fly’s path as it flew into the spiderweb, even though she wasn’t watching it. She could sense the flames in the fireplace dancing, down to each individual lick of flame.

  Beside her, David stirred and woke, blinking as she had. “What the hell . . .”

  His voice sounded different. It had layers and layers of vibration.

  He sat up, too, and stared around him the same way she had. “Do you hear that?” he asked.

  “The electricity? Yes.” She raised an eyebrow. “Wait, weren’t you like this before?”

  “No. This is new.” He held up one hand, stretched his arm out, moved it farther and farther back. “Whoa . . . my proprioception has intensified by a factor of three at least.”

  “Um . . . sure, mine, too.”

  “This is fascinating.”

  She smiled. “Thank you, Spock.”

  He swatted her lightly on the arm. “Aren’t you freaked out?”

  “No . . . I would be freaked out if this didn’t feel completely normal, just new.”

  David nodded. “Yes . . . it feels right.” He paused, staring at her, and she waited a minute before giving him a questioning look. “Your hair,” he said. “It’s so many colors.”

  She giggled. “We sound like we’re both stoned.”

  Miranda too
k his hand and squeezed it; he lifted hers to his lips and kissed the palm. They held each other’s eyes, and she felt his love for her, as well as his surprise at—

  Her mouth fell open.

  He seemed to get it at the same exact moment and put his hand to her face, swallowing hard. “I can feel you,” he said shakily. “It’s back.”

  “I know,” she replied, tears already flooding her eyes. “I can feel you, too. It worked . . . it really worked . . .”

  She flung her arms around him, laughing and crying at the same time, and they held on to each other, overcome with breathless joy.

  She had almost forgotten how it felt, that warm touch in the back of her mind. She had tried to push the memory away so it wouldn’t hurt so much, but now, as she put her mouth to his, it all came back: the comfort, the surety, the beauty of it. Suddenly, after walking around for weeks in someone else’s skin, she had her own back, and any fear she might have had, any doubt about her choice, dissolved.

  Just like the moment at the clinic when they had both realized he was alive, they kissed each other everywhere they could, this time just for the wonder of feeling each other’s love radiating along the bond.

  “Touch me,” she whispered, pulling him down into the pillows.

  Joy curled up around itself and became desire. She felt the echo of whatever dream she’d had earlier set her body burning, and Miranda slid her hands up under his shirt, letting her new senses learn the lay of his muscles. Even the slightest pressure felt a hundred times more intense; his lips on her throat, against her ear, made her shiver. She scratched lightly down his back with her fingernails, and he sucked in a delightfully tormented breath.

  They found their way into each other’s clothes with hands that felt so much more than before. His hand moved down over her belly, and she gasped, arching her back; it felt like he was touching her everywhere at once, and every inch of her was so sensitive she wanted to scream, to demand that he hurry. She wanted him joined with her in every conceivable way and couldn’t wait another minute—she had been waiting long enough.

  Luckily he seemed to agree. They barely had the last of their clothes off before he had her on her back and took her, drawing a sound that was part moan, part sob, and part laughter from her throat.

  This time there was no sadness, no sense of loss. This time body and mind united at the same time, with no separation, no distance. She opened herself to him fully, and he to her, their senses and thoughts merging so thoroughly there was no her, no him, not anymore.

  Finally she could say she loved him without words—and with her entire being.

  * * *

  It was late in the afternoon when David woke; he’d been out for only about twenty minutes, and some noise had startled him.

  He looked at Miranda, but she was fine, sprawled out carelessly across most of the mattress. She had fallen asleep in the same position she’d landed in, and he’d barely managed to push himself off to the side so he wouldn’t knock the breath out of her. They were both utterly, deliciously spent.

  What, then, had woken him?

  The sound came again: his phone.

  Sighing, he lifted it from the desk with his mind and drew it to his hand; the ring tone wasn’t one designated for a particular person. When he saw the number, his eyes narrowed.

  312 . . . Chicago?

  Some impulse he couldn’t really name made him hit Talk.

  “Yes?” he asked, keeping his voice down.

  There was a moment of shuffling noises, and then a woman’s anxious whisper: “Is this Prime Solomon?”

  The accent was a dead giveaway. “Olivia,” he said. “How did you get this number?”

  “I need your help,” she said. “I don’t have much time.”

  “Are you in Chicago?”

  “No. New Jersey. I’m with Jeremy.”

  She had his full attention now. “What’s going on, Olivia?”

  “I helped him,” she said. “We killed Kelley and McMannis. I thought he’d stop there and stay in Brisbane, but he’s determined to kill Hart . . . and I don’t think he’s going to stop.”

  “You need to get away from him,” David told her. “Come back to Austin and—”

  “I can’t, not yet. There are people . . . humans. They offered him help with Hart, and I think he’s going to take their bargain . . . I can’t change his mind.”

  “What bargain?”

  “They want something in Hart’s Haven. Some kind of amulet. But they can’t get it—their people wouldn’t last one round with a vampire. So they want him to get it, and in exchange they’ll give us plans for Hart’s entire security system, blueprints of the building . . . anything we need.”

  “And you don’t trust them.”

  “Of course not! Anything a bunch of humans could want from vampires isn’t going to be good. Whatever that amulet really is, it’s probably just as bad as the thing that killed you. I never trust religious nuts—”

  “Religious nuts? Who are these people, Olivia?”

  “I don’t know for sure, but they’re some kind of Order and they sound like zealots.”

  “Do you have their leader’s name, the group’s name, anything I can go on?”

  “Morningstar,” she said. “That’s all I know.”

  David’s heart did a somersault before freezing in his chest. “Olivia . . . you’re right, you can’t trust them. Listen to me—however you can, I need you to send me the plans they give Jeremy.”

  “I’ll try. Shit . . . I have to go. I’ll send what I can.”

  “Olivia, wait—”

  She was gone. David stared at the phone, not sure he believed what he’d just heard.

  Miranda had woken just as the conversation ended, as he had forgotten to keep his voice down. “What’s going on?”

  He shook his head, still thunderstruck. “I think we just had a break in the Morningstar case.”

  Eighteen

  There was a sense of peace in the clinic room, a feeling of rest. It was very different from the way hospital rooms usually felt.

  It certainly smelled better.

  Perhaps because of her mother’s fate, or perhaps because of the pain and grief she felt every time she entered such places, she had always had a morbid inner conviction that hospitals weren’t places of healing, but were where humans went to die.

  Miranda sat down in the chair beside Stella’s bed, her eyes on the girl’s still features, wondering what was going on in her mind—was she dreaming? Were they happy dreams? She didn’t look like she was having nightmares.

  The Queen reached over and straightened the girl’s blanket, brushed her hair out of her face. Stella’s hair had grown out a fraction of an inch from its red dye, but other than that, she looked exactly the same as she had when Miranda found her on the floor. “I’m sorry I haven’t been to visit you until now,” she said. “Things have been even weirder than they were before. You’d probably be overjoyed to dig into our energy now.”

  She felt her phone vibrate against her hip and took it out. She had a text from an agent at the firm that handled her money: the address and bank account information of Frank Hedelman, an insurance salesman whose mentally deranged wife had killed their newborn and then vanished—she would most likely never be found, as she was currently at the bottom of the lake. Mr. Hedelman’s credit card and legal bills were piling up. According to the text he owed close to $122,000.

  Miranda texted back quickly: Pay it.

  As you will it, my Lady.

  Sighing, she put the phone away and opened her guitar case. “I just wanted to thank you,” she said softly to the sleeping Witch in the bed. “I’ll tell you again when you wake up, but . . . what you did for us . . . there’s no way to repay you.”

  Miranda wasn’t expecting a reply, of course. She set aside the case and scooted the chair a little closer to the bed.

  “I’ve got guards on Lark,” the Queen added. “She seems okay. Your father is pretty angry about the
whole thing—but you probably know that since he was here yesterday. He probably had a few choice words about us.”

  She searched the girl’s face for another long minute—she wasn’t sure what she was looking for, really. Her condition was essentially unchanged; she didn’t seem to be wasting away, just on pause. Mo had her on some kind of glucose IV and had said he was ready to start a feeding tube . . . but so far Stella hadn’t needed one.

  “Anyway . . . I can’t really do anything for you right now except this, so . . . if you can hear me in there, try to follow me back.”

  Miranda played quietly, starting with songs she knew Stella loved off the first album and then moving into a couple of covers and the two mostly finished new songs. She remembered how Stella’s eyes had lit up when they were sitting on the bed talking and Miranda mentioned she was working on the new album; at the very, very least she deserved a sneak preview.

  The strings felt different under her fingertips; her skin had become a lot more sensitive to pressure in the last few days, and her hearing was both more powerful and more precise, picking up nuances of tone and timbre that she’d never been able to hear before. She’d already made slight adjustments to her voice in a few places while she practiced, and the difference was amazing.

  She was trying not to think about the implications. She couldn’t focus on what it meant long term, only on the night-to-night changes and how to get used to them. Her teeth, her senses, the way people seemed to do a double take when they saw her, as if they thought she was someone else . . . She hadn’t been into the city yet, as she was concerned about the sensory overload this soon—she remembered that night on the bus in Austin when she was changing the first time, and how close she’d come to a panic attack just from close proximity to humans. She was trying to give herself time.

  Now that the transition was finished—and to distract him from worrying about Olivia—David had Mo helping him run a few dozen diagnostic tests to see what else had changed, and if there was any way to measure those changes. Miranda just laughed and left them to it.