Of Shadow Born

by Dianne Sylvan

  “I’m not afraid of the Council,” Hart said. “In fact, the one really good thing about Morningstar’s holy war is that they plan to destroy the Council, down to the last Prime. I’m hoping to hold out till the end, just so I can see the others go.”

  Olivia said softly, “I can distract them, draw their fire. You can run.”

  David smiled grimly. “Don’t worry, Olivia. Just stay where you are.”

  “All right, enough chatter,” Hart said. He glanced over at one of the Elite. “Fire at will.”

  Miranda braced herself.

  Almost in perfect unison, the crossbows fired, sixteen stakes whistling through the air at the Prime, Queen, and somewhat-Second in the center of the room.

  Miranda and David each lifted a hand. Miranda grounded herself hard, pulled power from that deep and endless connection, and pushed . . .

  . . . sixteen stakes froze in midair.

  She saw the fear register on the faces of the Elite about a split second before the stakes spun and flew back the way they had come.

  She held on to eight of them as David took the rest, and shoved them with her mind, burying each one in a guard’s chest as deep as it would go, the force breaking through the sternum, nearly passing through the back.

  One by one, the guards fell to the ground.

  Hart had the decency to look shocked.

  Miranda smiled at him, letting her teeth slide out where he could see the new pair behind her canines.

  All the color drained from Hart’s face. It wasn’t the fear, however, that surprised Miranda; it was the recognition.

  “You,” he gasped, pushing his chair back as if trying to put as much room between himself and these strange creatures as he could. “It’s you . . . just like they said . . .”

  Miranda clicked her mouth shut and frowned. He wasn’t staring at her, or at David.

  He was staring at Olivia.

  Miranda moved over so the woman was in plain view, and the minute he could see her, Hart practically came unglued. He was on his feet, one hand reaching beneath the desk for something. As he stood, the fear in his face became anger, loathing, losing all pretense of rationality and sophistication. He looked rabid.

  Hart held up his hand: a throwing stake. “Stay the hell away from me! I swore you would never set foot here!”

  He threw the stake at Olivia, and it would have been an excellent shot, but before either Miranda or David could catch it, Olivia twisted to the side in a blur of motion and the stake hit only the wall behind them.

  Hart opened his mouth to hurl more rage at them . . . but he never got the chance.

  As soon as the stake hit the wall, Miranda reached into herself and Misted.

  She re-formed not twenty feet from where she’d stood, and Shadowflame sang through the air, catching the light and turning it to silver fire.

  A thin spray of blood erupted from Hart’s throat, and a heartbeat later, his head fell from his neck, his Signet falling on its own, his head striking the floor with a sickening sound as his body collapsed at Miranda’s feet.

  She stood over the body, satisfaction burning through her, and lowered her sword.

  “That was for Cora, you bastard,” Miranda said.

  “And for you,” David added with a smile.

  “And for Amelia Hayes,” said Olivia quietly.

  It took a moment for anyone to notice that Jeremy was gone.

  * * *

  Bleeding, half-dead . . . no, more like two-thirds dead . . . he made his way down the stairs, leaving a smear of blood on the wall and bloody handprints on the rail.

  On the last flight, Jeremy closed his eyes, breathing out slowly. Hart was dead. As soon as he had seen the Pair with Olivia, he had known Hart would die. As soon as he’d seen Miranda draw her sword, relief had washed over him . . . He hadn’t delivered the killing stroke himself, but it didn’t matter. Hart was dead.

  It was over.

  Right on cue, the ground began to shake, the walls pitching and heaving. He held on to the rail until it passed, listening to the shouts of the Elite still alive throughout the building.

  He was so glad that Olivia hadn’t died . . . he wanted her to live . . . he had killed Faith, but Olivia should at least get to survive, even if she had betrayed him. He couldn’t blame her. Olivia had seen him for what he really was . . . and now so did he.

  So much blood. He looked down at his hands. Such a waste. His life, Amelia’s, Melissa’s, Faith’s . . . and nothing he could do, no vengeance he could ever exact, would bring them back again. Olivia was right about that, too.

  He wondered why they weren’t chasing him. Perhaps the deal Olivia had made with Solomon still held. He’d read all of her texts to the Prime, all of her fears, the plans they’d made—Miranda and David would wait outside for Olivia to bring them the artifact, and they would take her into protective custody. If Jeremy died, he died, and if not, he could slink off under a rock somewhere.

  Jeremy nearly laughed. Solomon had well and truly outmaneuvered him this time.

  He stumbled the rest of the way down the stairs, peering out into the hall, but as he’d expected, the guards who weren’t already dead had run for their lives after the earthquake. They all knew what it meant.

  Jeremy forced himself to keep going until he reached the exterior door where they’d come in, turned the handle with slippery hands, and all but fell out into the night.

  He knelt there panting for a few minutes. He needed blood. He could find it a few blocks from here, outside the Shadow District.

  But then he heard footsteps, and his heart sank.

  “Did you succeed?”

  Jeremy lifted his head. He knew what he must look like, soaked in blood, but the uniformed human staring down at him didn’t seem to notice; nor did his ten friends.

  Reaching down to his belt, Jeremy flipped open the pouch and took out what they wanted.

  The human took it, pleased. “Well done. And Hart is dead, correct?”

  He nodded.

  “Excellent. There’s only one more thing we need, then.”

  The humans surrounded Jeremy, closing in on him, looming over him, and suddenly he understood.

  Jeremy shut his eyes, sighing, and a blow to the back of his head sent him into the dark.

  * * *

  “Son of a bitch,” David said.

  Miranda looked over his shoulder. “What?”

  He held up the black carved box. It was empty.

  Miranda shook her head in disbelief. “So not only did Jeremy get away, he took the damn Widget with him. Well, this was a rousing success.”

  David made an impatient noise. “Worth every minute just to be rid of Hart. It would have been nice to at least know what the hell that thing was, though.”

  Over at the door, Olivia, who was following the blood trail Jeremy had left, piped up, “It was a piece of metal.”

  “A piece of metal?” David repeated. “Could you be more specific?”

  “Jeremy showed me a drawing of it so that if Hart had taken it out of the box I’d still recognize it. A flat metal oval, perhaps two inches long. Antique gold. It had some kind of script etched into it that neither of us recognized, and at four points around its edge were little prongs.”

  Prime and Queen looked at each other. “Did it look like this?” Miranda asked, flipping her Signet over and holding it out toward Olivia.

  She came over to the Queen and got a closer look. “Yes, almost exactly like that,” she said. “The writing was completely different, though.”

  “What would humans want with another Stone of Awakening, or whatever it is?” Miranda wondered. “Do they have Signets to clip it to?”

  “I’ll start researching it as soon as we get home,” David said.

  Miranda returned her attention to Olivia, who was leaning on the desk heavily. She looked exhausted. “Are you okay?” Miranda asked.

  “Jeremy staked me,” Olivia reminded her. “The wound is closed, but it still hurt
s like a motherbear. I tried to come after him once I got away from the Elite who caught me, but I blundered right into the fray—thank God you two were already there, or . . . wait, why were you there? You were supposed to meet me outside! You wanted to snatch the box from Jeremy on his way out but without risking your lives, remember?”

  Miranda gave David a look, sheepish. “Why don’t you tell her, Mr. Mastermind,” Miranda told her Prime.

  “I knew Jeremy was on to you,” David said. “We planned all along to come in; we just didn’t tell you because he was spying on you, reading your texts. He might have changed his plan if he’d known ours.”

  “But why come in at all?”

  “Because we knew Hart was on to Jeremy.”

  Olivia’s mouth dropped open. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “No. We have an ally with a spy in Hart’s Elite. He got us intelligence that Hart was aware of your intentions and planned to have his crossbow guards in place when you got here. If you had walked into this room without us, you would have been turned into a porcupine.”

  Miranda added, “With you and Jeremy setting off the alarms and distracting the Elite, it was the only chance we’d have to get the Widget and to rescue you from Jeremy. That depended on you—and us—all sticking to our supposed plans. We expected Jeremy to just ditch you, not really hurt you. I’m sorry about that.”

  Olivia shook her head, straightening. “I see now what Jeremy was talking about with you people.”

  “I want to know why Hart freaked out when he saw you,” Miranda said. “I get him wanting to keep Cora enslaved, and I get him wanting to kill us if he didn’t want the circle to form, but why would you scare him so badly? You’re not even the one who killed him.”

  “He spoke of prophets,” David mused. “He must have been told you were going to do something important. We’ll need to learn more about that, too.”

  “Beats the hell out of me,” Olivia said, bending down to where Hart’s blood-spattered Signet had fallen and picking it up.

  Before anyone could say a word, all three of them were struck utterly dumb, as Olivia lifted the Signet by its chain . . . and the stone blazed to life.

  Twenty-one

  “We’re on in five minutes,” David said. “Are you ready?”

  Olivia’s voice was tense. “Not really, no.”

  “You’ll do fine,” he reassured her. “They’re already your allies—you have nothing to prove here.”

  She took a deep breath. “It’s the rest of the Council I have to worry about.”

  “The ones worth knowing will pay state visits over the next few months. The rest you don’t have to worry about for a decade. Relax, Prime.”

  “Easy for you to say,” she said. “You’re not a living violation of thousands of years of tradition!”

  David smiled. “Yes, I am. They just don’t know it yet.”

  “So am I, for the record,” came another voice, as Deven signed on. “My advice is, if you want to get along with everyone, you should probably make other friends besides the deviants and the people who’ve shagged them.”

  He could practically hear Olivia’s eyebrows shoot up. “Wait, who shagged whom?”

  Now David laughed, and said, “Prime Olivia Daniels of the Northeastern United States, virtually meet Prime Deven O’Donnell of the Western United States.”

  “A pleasure,” Deven said. “I look forward to watching you make the Council squirm. Having done it myself, I can assure you it’s great fun.”

  David frowned listening to him—Deven sounded a little subdued. “Everything all right over there?” he asked.

  “Fine,” Deven replied shortly. “Olivia, I’m assuming before David left New York he hooked you up with all of his favorite software.”

  “Yes, Sire,” Olivia said. “He was quite thorough.”

  “None of that ‘Sire’ nonsense, Olivia. You’re one of us now. We hardly stand on ceremony.”

  “Sorry, S—um, Deven,” she said hesitantly. “This is all very weird to me.”

  “Everyone says that,” Deven told her. “By the fifth year it will all be routine. If you need any help, any at all, you need only ask.”

  “David has already been very good to me,” she said. “I haven’t really thanked him.”

  “No need . . . my Lady? Hmm . . . we’re going to have to figure out your terms of address. We’ve always considered Consorts based on their relationship to Primes, and with one exception Consorts have always been women—we had a devil of a time deciding what to call Jonathan. A female Prime . . . you’re something new, in more ways than one.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “On the plus side,” Jacob said, his icon appearing on the screen, “the two Primes most likely to raise a fuss about it are dead now.”

  “Prime Jacob Janousek of Eastern Europe, meet Prime Olivia Daniels of the Northeastern United States.”

  “Welcome aboard,” Jacob said, a smile in his voice.

  “Have you kept any of Hart’s Elite?” Deven asked Olivia. “I can’t imagine many stayed behind.”

  “Four,” Olivia said. “Luckily organizing the Elite is one thing I have plenty of experience at. With the population density here I don’t think it will take long to fill the ranks, especially if what I’m hearing about Hart’s standing with his people is true.”

  David smiled; she was already sounding like a Prime. She was going to be fine . . . he would make sure of it. “Let’s get started, shall we? First up, I believe Jacob has a report on the situation in Australia . . .”

  * * *

  As the chat program shut down, Deven finally let himself breathe, putting his forehead in his hands, eyes closed.

  “I thought you would stay on with David after and tell him what’s going on,” Jonathan said from where he sat on the bed. He was still in his pajamas and needed a shave, but he had to look a hundred times better than Deven did at the moment.

  “Now isn’t the time,” Deven murmured without looking up. “We needed to present a calm and united front for Olivia. She’s under enough stress without thinking one of her new allies is going batshit insane.”

  Jonathan chuckled; that was a phrase Miranda often used, especially when describing herself as a human. But the concern was still in his voice as he said, “Maybe you should go back to bed, love. You still look exhausted.”

  “I am exhausted.”

  “Even after sleeping for fourteen hours straight? You practically passed out and fell on the bed without even saying a word to me. I had to undress you and tuck you in, and then you didn’t so much as twitch all day.”

  Deven turned sideways in his chair and leaned his head on the back. “I don’t remember. I don’t even remember how I got home.”

  “All I know is, I could feel how upset you were . . . and then it was like you were having some sort of breakdown. Then out of nowhere you went from breaking down to just sleepy, and a little while later you were home. What’s the last thing you remember?”

  He shut his eyes again and tried to think. “I was up on the Tower Bridge . . . I started to walk home . . . I remember . . . I remember seeing St. Anthony’s, but . . . after that everything fades away.”

  Jonathan sounded reluctant to ask, but did anyway: “Were you drinking?”

  “No. That’s just it—if I had been, it would make sense.”

  “Had you taken anything else? You do keep a wide variety of substances around the house.”

  “Nothing, Jonathan,” he said, exasperated. “I swear. Besides, you can tell when I’m on something—did it feel like anything I’ve done before?”

  Jonathan shook his head.

  Deven felt an extremely uncharacteristic urge to curl up in a ball and weep, but resisted . . . barely. “Then I’m going crazy, aren’t I,” he said. “Just as I thought.”

  He knew the answer to that. Whatever divine plans David had gotten them into, there was one thing none of them could escape whether mortal or not: time.

 
Deven, it appeared, was running out. He should have had another fifty years or so, but given the life he’d had, it made sense that he would start to fall apart earlier. It was only a matter of time before he shut down completely—either that or he would pass into a psychotic state and have to be put down like a rabid animal.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “I wish I knew a way to unbind us so you wouldn’t be chained to me for this. You’ve already dealt with enough because of me.”

  He felt a hand on his head, moving around to his face, and looked up; Jonathan’s eyes were bright, anguished. “Do you really think I would want to live? And would you make me, after what Miranda went through?”

  “I just want it over,” Deven said. His own eyes were burning, and before he could stop it, a tear ran down his face, onto Jonathan’s hand. “If I asked, would you—”

  His phone chimed; he didn’t even have to look to know it was one of the Elite on Haven duty. “Yes?” he asked, wiping his eyes and sniffing.

  “Sire, there’s a . . . person . . . here to see you.”

  Deven and Jonathan exchanged a quizzical look. “Can you be a little more specific, Elite Twelve?”

  “I think you’d better see for yourself.”

  “All right . . . I’m on my way.” Deven shook his head, completely nonplussed. “What the hell was that about?”

  Jonathan frowned. “We should both go. Give me two minutes to put clothes on.”

  Moments later they left the suite, headed for the front doors of the Haven. The novelty of the situation momentarily banished the despair from Deven’s mind, and about a dozen possible scenarios occurred to him, each one less likely than the last. Very few people in the Shadow World would know how to find the Haven, and even fewer would have the temerity to just show up on the doorstep unannounced.

  Elite 12 was waiting for them near the doors. “I showed him into the reception room just over here, my Lords. He’s unarmed, as far as I can tell.”

  “As far as you can tell?” Jonathan asked. “What does that mean?”

  Deven reached the door first and pushed it open, readying a firm and commanding interrogation as to what exactly was . . .