Shadow Redeemed

by Megan Blackwood

  "Shouldn't you be preparing for your trial?" Julian asked, then turned his golden gaze upon Padhi—he did not wear sunglasses as I had grown accustomed to—and stared hard enough to make the doctor shift his weight. "Magdalene is in trouble, you see."

  "My business is my own, and Emeline's." I shrugged off his hand with all the liquid grace I could muster. He staggered, surprised by my movement, and narrowed his eyes in challenge.

  Not worth my time. Nor Padhi's.

  "This way please, doctor." I extended my arm in such a way that Julian would have to push through it to reach Padhi. The doctor didn't need to be told twice. He jogged lightly up the steps to the top landing.

  Julian dropped his voice so that only I could hear him. "You're under probation. You can't bring whoever you like to the estate."

  "And you," I said dryly, "are in no position to give me orders."

  A door to one of the sunstrider bedrooms opened, and Eleanor popped her head out, golden eyes narrowed.

  "Back off, Julian. She's not banned from here."

  "Mind your own business," Julian snapped.

  "Time you do likewise," I said.

  He hissed softly, but I strode up the steps anyway, ignoring the implicit challenge. Just because we were predators didn't mean we had to behave like a squabbling pack of lions. Eleanor rolled her eyes at Julian and slammed her door.

  "Nice guy," Padhi said with a straight face. I cracked a smile.

  "He is young and takes our order very seriously."

  I lead him down the hallway and knocked, lightly, on the door to Emeline's office.

  "Enter," she called out without hesitation.

  Emeline sat behind her mother's desk like a captain at a ship's wheel, her body braced as if she expected the heaps of paperwork and research surrounding her to whisk away at the slightest gust. Someone—probably Talia—had gotten her to stop wearing the charcoal grey suits her mother had favored and gotten her into a navy blazer over an ice-blue silk blouse that made her grey eyes appear sharp as steel.

  Something had hardened in Emeline while I'd been at DeShawn's, her resolve had mineralized and her posture echoed that change. The moment she recognized me, her fingers softened on the pen she'd been clutching.

  "Miss Shelley. A sight for sore eyes. Who is your friend?" She stood, the consummate professional, and swept around the desk, placing a second chair beside the first that always faced her.

  Padhi took her hand and shook it. "My name is Doctor Arun Padhi, miss...?"

  "Lady Emeline, or Miss Durfort-Civrac."

  He swallowed. Hard. "Lady Emeline. An honor to meet you."

  "Likewise." She shuffled him into a chair with an expert flick of the wrist and settled back into her own seat. "Pardon my lack of pleasantries, but things are complicated at the moment. Why are you here, doctor?"

  "I can answer that," I cut in as I sat alongside the doctor. "Padhi was the unfortunate doctor who 'treated' me when Seamus and I, ah, visited the London Bridge Hospital."

  Emeline's right brow arched. Always the right side, with her. "I see."

  "He had been working on the ghoul outbreak and was suspicious of my medical state. Earlier this evening, he saw me on the street and followed me to confront me about the outbreak."

  The left eyebrow joined the right. "He confronted you?"

  "I wasn't trying to frighten her, my Lady." Padhi said.

  Emeline and I shared a smile, but it was Emeline who said, "Certainly not. I don't believe either of us could, doctor."

  He shifted uncomfortably. "She seemed unsettled when that man disappeared."

  "Disappeared?" Emeline's gaze cut to me.

  I shrugged, lifting my shackled wrists in the air. The thick, golden bangles carved with sigils would look like mere jewelry to Padhi's eyes. "I don't know what it was. Maeve will want to investigate the spot, I'm sure, but a man vanished. Dissolved into a patch of shadow."

  Her voice turned icy. "Was the feel of this shadow familiar to you, Magdalene?"

  "I'm afraid so."

  She sighed and picked up her pen, clutching it like a sword. "I see. Dr. Padhi, I expect you have a great deal of questions."

  "So many I don't know where to begin," he said, leaning forward with his hands on the arms of the chair, gripping tightly. "First of all, who are you, Lady Emeline? I have not heard of you, nor your family and—forgive me—but most of the Royal Order aren't keen on keeping to themselves."

  She gave him a slow, coy smile. "Very true. My family and I have stayed out of the Daily Mail by the skin of our teeth. Though such institutions come sniffing around at times, we have certain protections in place to keep us out of the papers."

  He scoffed. "If that were true, the royal family itself would never be featured."

  "A little scandal at the top is good for the populace. Allowances are made." She twisted the pen between her fingers. "But you're not asking about my place in the upper echelons of England. You're asking what I am, not who."

  He inclined his head and said nothing, waiting for her to fill the silence. After a moment she placed the pen on the table and turned her head slightly. Her fingers brushed a paper map of London and all its wards, tracing the curves of a neighborhood—the East End, I thought—that had been deemed clear of ghoul activity.

  "I am a general in an endless war, doctor." She met his eye, watching with care as his face crinkled in confusion. "A war that began before the Gauls set foot on this green land, and a war that will, no doubt, follow humanity into the stars."

  "Forgive me, Lady, but I'm going to need more than that."

  "Do you believe in the dark, doctor?"

  "Believe... in the dark?"

  She smiled her slow smile. "Not a lack of light. Not... what falls when the sun sinks low and the moon comes out to play her wiles. I speak of the primordial shadow, the endless nothing that existed before the first photon flung itself out of the universe's beginning."

  "I'm not sure how to believe in something like that."

  "No. I suppose I don't either. But it is real, for all its abstractness. Difficult for the human mind to grasp. Difficult as calculus to a fly. We are too brief of creatures to understand such forces. But there are creatures that live long enough to draw the attention of such things." Her gaze slid to me, and Padhi's gaze followed hers.

  "Are you saying Magdalene isn't human?"

  Emeline gave me a slight nod of permission.

  I said, "I was, briefly. I am immortal now. I call myself and my kin sunstriders." I pulled the sunglasses from my eyes and folded them, hooking them into the v-neck of my shirt. "You would call me a vampire."

  I let my fangs distend and went perfectly still in the way that only the undead can. No breath, no heartbeat. In my immortal stillness, not even the cells of my body betrayed any activity. I was as stone, and yet very much a living, thinking being. Padhi swallowed, eyes shining as he leaned toward me, extending a hand as if to touch my fangs. He shook himself and snapped his hand back.

  "You expect me to believe you're a vampire?"

  I shrugged and let my body move again. "Believe what you like. We've been called many things over the millennia. I know only what we call ourselves, and what we call our darker counterparts—the nightwalkers. But you don't have to rely on belief alone, doctor. Think on what you've seen in your emergency rooms, of the outbreak you've been struggling to treat."

  He gawped. "And those people are vampires, too, are they?"

  "No. Not yet. They are something less—their humanity hollowed out, but not yet destroyed—to make way for the vampiric prowess. We call them ghouls, slaves to their makers. It is an impossibly cruel thing. No one of the sunstriders would do this."

  "And your nightwalkers... They're what took that man in the alleyway?"

  I pursed my lips. "No. That was something else. Something older."

  "The primordial dark?"

  "Perhaps. I am not yet certain."

  He blew a puff of air out and slouched back in
the chair, forcing himself to look away from me—his gaze kept sticking on my neck, seeking any sign of a pulse—and looked at Emeline. "And you? Are you a sunstrider as well?"

  She chuckled and swept a wisp of hair from her forehead to clear her eyes. "No, of course not. I command the mortal order of the Sun Guard. We work with the sunstriders to keep the nightwalkers in check."

  His expression soured. "Not doing a very good job then, are you, if they're the source of the outbreak?"

  Her gaze cast down to the desk. "No. We are not doing a very good job. We are outnumbered and overrun, left on our back heels and scrambling to reclaim control."

  "Can't you just, I don't know, spray them with holy water or garlic or something?"

  I laughed. "Your legends have lead you astray, doctor. Running water, garlic, these things mean nothing to us. Holy water may dampen our abilities for a moment, if it is truly holy, but not enough to allow a mortal the chance to escape. Staking, decapitation, fire. These things will kill us, but that is all."

  "I thought daylight..."

  "The sunstrider's source of strength. My kin are at our strongest in the day, the nightwalkers under the light of the moon. Neither of us is destroyed by contact with the other, only weakened. Severely, sometimes, depending on the circumstances and the age of the vampire. We grow dependent on our source as we age, you see."

  Doctor Padhi was quiet for a while. We let him think, Emeline and I, meeting one another's gazes in quiet communion while the physician danced around believing us. He was a man of science, and while in other circumstances that may have swayed him toward denial he could not, as was the way of true scientists, deny the evidence of his own eyes.

  The emergency rooms of London swelled with a plague he could not name. He had seen a man vanish into shadow. He'd seen fangs grow between both my lips and Julian's, and no doubt he'd harbored suspicions of my state of being from that first time we met. Evidence, more so than suspicion and doubt, was the lifeblood of the scientific mind.

  "Then what can I do?" he asked at long last.

  Emeline nodded to herself. "You were right to bring him here," she said to me, then pressed the speaker button on her desk.

  "Maeve?"

  "Yes, Lady?"

  "Prepare a ghoul for examination. We have a doctor."

  "Yes'm."

  Emeline stood and pulled her blazer taut. "Well then, Doctor Padhi. Come with me to see what you're up against."

  Three: Sampling the Night

  Emeline didn't tell me to leave, so I followed her and Padhi into the small bedroom that had once been used to imprison me. It didn't occur to me that being in that room should unsettle me until Maeve, who sat at the single window, cut me a worried look, her expressive face pinching together in concern.

  I parted my lips to tell her not to worry, that confinement rarely chafed at sunstriders as there were few real enclosures we couldn't escape but, considering the shackles she'd fashioned for my wrists, I thought better of the comment and smiled at her instead.

  Work had been done to transform the room into something more than the makeshift cell it had been for me. Sunny yellow curtains covered the single, narrow window, letting in scant winter light through the thin weave. The single washbasin had been replaced with an armchair that had an open book laying face down upon the arm, a rumpled blanket on the cushions. Whoever occupied this room now could leave and use the washroom down the hall, then. Such freedom.

  It'd be quite cozy, if it wasn't for the groaning woman soaking the bedding with fear-sweat.

  "Who is that?" Maeve said, springing to her feet with a jangle of her many trinkets and charms as Padhi slipped in behind Emeline.

  "The doctor," Emeline said, stepping aside as Padhi rushed to the writhing woman's side.

  I didn't want to look. Human suffering... unsettled me. The sight found some deep instinct in my bones and scraped the wrong way against them. But I had chosen to come. And this was what my night-kin made. I had tuned to the sea rather than face Lucien transforming into a nightwalker on the beach, and that injustice haunted me. I would not turn away from the monsters my darker kin created, no matter how much it hurt. Never again.

  "This woman is gravely ill," Padhi said as he dragged a stool over and sat at the woman's side. His expert fingers found her pulse and discovered what I could already hear. It raced like a doped-up greyhound.

  "Yes, she is, but your hospitals cannot help." Maeve treated him to a sneer to which he was oblivious.

  "And you can?" he demanded.

  Maeve's sneer vanished and she pressed her palms together in front of the jingling mess of charms and trinkets that hung around her neck down to her belly. "Maybe. If I'm lucky and the sun's with me."

  The woman's eyes rolled, her back arched, long white fingers tangling in the sheets.

  "Shh," Maeve murmured, rushing to her side. From a basin of water alongside the bed she dabbed the woman's forehead, wiping away the sticky sweat. Such a human thing, that basin and cloth. I'd seen variations on the same throughout all the centuries I'd stalked the earth. I suspected it had more to do with giving the caregiver something to do than actually providing comfort to the ill.

  "I told you," Emeline said, watching with an impassive mask that made me shiver. "That I was going to show you what you were up against. This woman's soul has been brutalized in the worst way. She is a ghoul, a puppet of the nightwalkers. One of them..."

  Emeline looked a question at me, then, and I shrugged. I didn't recognize the scent of the nightwalker riding the woman's veins. Thank the light she was not a get of Lucien.

  "... has fed her their blood. It is a cruel thing to do. The woman craves the blood of her master, now. No other succor will provide her relief from the pain wracking her body until every drop of her master's blood is purged from her, or she is turned.

  "And for all that, she receives little benefit. Maybe a few more years of life, maybe a bit stronger of a constitution—we've yet to find a ghoul with the plague, or even a flu. But she is a slave to her maker, mind and body, and cannot resist that creature's orders no matter her desire. She'd stab her own child, should her master ask. Those we find who haven't been on the leash too long we bring here to attempt detoxification. Sometimes it works. Most of the time the shock kills them."

  Padhi licked his lips. "We've seen that, in the hospital. Their hearts race until they give out. This woman is close to that."

  "She was very far along," I said. "I can smell the nightwalker blood in her. She's partaken more than once or twice."

  "Hells," Maeve hissed.

  "And what does that mean, exactly?" Padhi asked, slouching though he kept one hand on the woman's wrist, feeling out the race of her heart.

  "The longer they're on the leash, the stronger the bond. Recently, the Sun Guard was successful in destroying the strongest nightwalker in London," Emeline said with pride.

  Ragnar's death, put so plainly, twisted something in me. Ultimately, when I was long since gone to ash, that's all this period in time would be. Another footnote buried somewhere in Emeline's library, a puzzle of the past for future generations of the guard to wonder at and, hopefully, learn from. For if they did not learn... This war may never end.

  "Losing their leader has created a power vacuum in the area. Nightwalkers are scrambling to consolidate ghouls and weaker nightwalkers under their command to pick up where Ragnar left off."

  A sickness rose within me, but I pressed on. "Before Ragnar's death, he found the... tactic... of creating many ghouls and discarding them to the streets a successful way to keep us busy while he built up his base of power. I'm afraid the younger generation is employing the same tactic. The guard is scrambling. This woman... This woman is a sign of our failure."

  Maeve arched a brow at Emeline. "We need all the sunstriders we can get."

  Emeline cleared her throat, pointedly looking anywhere but at me. I wondered how often Maeve poked at her for putting me on the bench, as Seamus was wont to say.
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br />   "Despite our low numbers, we have been successful in collecting many of the ghouls in the city." Again Emeline spoke with a streak of pride.

  Padhi snorted. "I'm taking a wild guess here, but I'd bet we have way more of your ghouls in my intensive care unit." He tapped at the blanket alongside the woman, thinking. "So this is... a blood borne disease. Okay. We've seen that before, though we didn't detect any pathogen, just some unusual cell mutation. If it's a matter of waiting for the body to replace the contaminated blood, then maybe we can speed things up. Has a transfusion been attempted? Or dialysis?"

  "Transfusions result in death, always. Dialysis... Older versions have been tried. It was fifty-fifty whether the patient died."

  "You say this woman is at death's door."

  "No," Maeve snapped. "That risk is unacceptable."

  "With respect, dialysis has advanced. I have access to the best machines. If her racing heart is a sign of imminent failure, then I believe the risk is worth it."

  "He has a point," Emeline said to Maeve.

  "This is what your annals are for." Maeve jabbed a finger at Emeline. "Your extensive record keeping and your library. We have reports of attempting things like dialysis. I've read them—I've read all the ghoul research while I've sat with them—and your fifty-fifty odds are a generous overstatement. Interrupting the body's natural processes shocks the system. This isn't something science can solve, Lady. Just time, and care."

  Emeline glanced at me from the corner of her eye, asking a silent question. I knelt beside the woman and placed my fingertips against the inside of her wrist. Her pulse beat frantically, her skin was ice cold to the touch despite the sweat soaking through the blankets.

  "In my experience, she has a day. Maybe less. It's hard to say. So much depends upon the victim's constitution."

  "I understand your reticence." Padhi faced Maeve, not flinching from her craggy scowl. "If this were a normal situation, there are systems in place. Waivers to sign, families to inform, ethics boards to address... But if I go to my superiors and tell them what Lady Emeline has told me, I'll be locked up in our already overburdened mental ward." He sighed raggedly.