Shadow Redeemed

by Megan Blackwood

  "Didn't need to see?"

  Anger flashed through me, hot and human, not the cold detachment of the predator. "This is why Emeline resisted you being involved in the Sun Guard in the first place, do you understand that? My people—her people—have been dealing with this shit for thousands upon thousands of years. We have records dating back to the earliest examples of writing, for light's sake. Every last scrap matters. Even—even—Ragnar's polluted research into extending his powers into the daylight matters. Every bit helps us understand what we are, what we're here for. How we can help the world heal and humanity flourish."

  DeShawn looked at his sneakers. "None of this is about Ragnar's attempts to claim power during the day."

  I froze. I knew that body language, though I'd never seen it in DeShawn. Shame, coupled with a little embarrassment.

  "What is? What is this stuff then?"

  "It's..." He cleared his throat. "It's you, Mags. Every item in this room has to do with you."

  My throat dried. I looked at the piles and piles of crates. The books, the papers, the... jars. In the depths of Ragnar's hive I'd discovered monstrosities in similar jars, fetuses twisted into vampiric proportions. How could any of this have to do with me? How could all of it?

  Lucien had shown me his own writings, feeble attempts to chronicle his years with Ragnar, to remember in clear detail is life as an immortal even while the memories of his humanity burned through every second of his thoughts. It was a common thing amongst nightwalkers, writing about their unlives so they could remember... So they could keep the madness of Luna at bay.

  But this?

  "Mags?"

  I sank into a crouch, letting my gaze rove over those piles of paper as if, in counting them, I could make sense of them. Ragnar was ancient when I first met him... When had I met him, again? The memory danced away. Too long ago. Too fuzzy. To me, Ragnar entered my life when he turned Lucien on that beach and bade me summon the Venefica to return Lucien—and Ragnar—to the light. To let them take strength not only from Luna, but from the sun as well.

  Those volumes told another story. One I did not know. Had the oubliette erased so much?

  A voice whispered to me, in the silken tones I associated with Luna, but the words were an echo of the Venefica's: We cannot all choose our makers, can we, Magdalene?

  "What do they say, DeShawn? What could they possibly say?"

  "Here." He scooped his hands under my armpits and hauled me up, leading me to his loveseat. It sank under my weight, the springs squealing. "Read this part. Ragnar kept it in pride of place in his collection. I'm just scraping the surface, but it might... It might help."

  He handed me the reddish, leather-bound book. The scent of tobacco clung to the pages, tickling my nose, as he flipped back to the relevant spot and jabbed a finger at the text.

  "There."

  Black ink, faded to wispy brown by time, flowed across the page from some long-lost fountain pen, each letter formed with care, not a smudge to be seen. The methodical writing of someone in their right mind. Focused.

  The handwriting was my own.

  Six: Words Once Lost

  They say I killed her and, light save me, I cannot prove otherwise. Ragnar claims I did not—that my sire yet lives, though I cannot feel the bond—and that they, the Sun Guard, are wrong to punish me for something they cannot prove that I have done.

  But what good is the word of a nightwalker in the court of the sun? I cannot trust him. Lord Durfort-Civrac insists the nightwalker lies, that though Ragnar is ancient and calm and not prone to agitating us of the light he has meddled here, now, with a fledgling. With me.

  I should listen. My Lord is correct. Ragnar's word holds no weight with the Sun Guard, and as such it should hold no weight with me. But I cannot... I cannot find fault with what he has to say.

  Why does he help me?

  Light above, I am so twisted in upon myself. So confused. Let me try, once more, to reconstruct the events of the night. Maybe in spilling out the details I might find truth.

  My violation of our law was on the second day of my rebirth into the endless light. I woke with the dawn at Somerset House, body thrumming as it adjusted to the new desires that demanded my attention. Blood, light, these things were provided without question in the house overseen by my sire. A goblet waited always by my bed, the curtains always drawn by the mortal guard in the scant few minutes before the moon fled and the sun shed its light.

  I'm stalling. Of course I am.

  Only the second day, and I woke to a letter slipped under my door. Somerset House was full, then. We crowded together in the secret places of the building to keep away from wary mortals. Each room bunked with two mortal guards, or two sunstriders. My sire—my Claudette—took her rest in the larger bed, further from the window.

  Well, that was the official arrangement. She found herself curled against me more often than not.

  That day, Claudette had gone before my waking. Her absence ached, but her scent lingered on the envelope lying before the door. I took my victual of blood to slow the desperate ache in my breast and tore the envelope open with a claw. We neophytes are prone to pointless shows of power.

  Her handwriting spilled across the page.

  Magdalene—

  The Moon Lake, midnight.

  x

  I folded the letter and slipped it into my pocket, heart hammering. Where we had met. Where she had found me, months ago that felt like years now. She'd discovered me dancing for coin on a stage bedecked in silver alongside that slick of water, and though those metals pained her to touch she had reached, shuddering, for my beaded veil after the performance and asked in such a rich voice it had made me shiver: if I loved the light so, would I be willing to serve it?

  I had thought she meant only the way I moved, the way I toyed with light and mirrors on the stage. I had thought wrong.

  But that place, special only to us, was out of bounds. From the day of my turning I was confined to Somerset House for the full cycle of the moon, to be certain that the liquid light fusing to my blood was not tempted away by the silver of the moon.

  Yet, Claudette was my sire. My world. I could no more deny her summons than I could my thirst for blood. She did not return to the house that day. The question danced on the tip of my tongue as I worked through the training given all new makes, working myself into a bloody froth of sweat over and over again under the tight-eyed tutelage of the house's eldest, Ælfwig. But I could not bring myself to ask.

  I was Claudette's. I should know where she is at all times, shouldn't I? But each time I cast my senses out, feeling along the ephemeral line that bound us together, nothing echoed back. I assumed she was too far, my powers too new and weak.

  I was too young to sense the danger.

  We were not watched at night. The blood-oath was enough to bind us to the house while our bodies and minds were fortified to walk under the night. And so it was no difficult thing to pry my window open and slip out into the darkness with nothing but my nightgown on my back.

  Moonlight itched at my uncovered skin. London did her duty to shield me by throwing clouds across the sky, but still Luna's touch irritated, raising goosebumps across my arms and neck, filling me with a slight sense of... not dread, not exactly, but unease. As if I were being watched by malevolent eyes.

  Yes, I walked under a full moon when only two days turned. That crime is mine. But I did not kill her. I did not.

  Moon Lake nestled in a slow roll of hills, hemmed in on all sides by woodland and a rich, mossy grotto. When I had danced here months ago, my troupe and I had strung the trees up with lanterns shielded in silhouettes, throwing strange figures through the twisted branches of the woods. Though I had only been turned two days hence, I had been missing from my troupe well over a month. The stage had been packed up, the decor rolled out.

  It would have wounded me, were I still mortal, to think they had moved on and stopped the search for me so quickly. But I knew now the powers of m
ind Claudette commanded, and that she would have soothed their fears, turned them away to seek their fortunes elsewhere.

  I missed... Hmm, not the people. Even as I stood on that rocky shore, bare toes touching the edges of the frigid waters, I could not summon to mind the faces of my friends. I had traveled with them, danced with them, but all this place meant to me now was that it was the special, sacred place in which Claudette had reached out to me from between the branches, though the touch of my silver hurt.

  The sunstrider blessing. I would not be tormented through the centuries by bitter, long-lost memories of loved mortals and mortality as the nightwalkers were. I was free to embrace my strength under the light of the sun, to dip fully into this new life and emerge a new woman. A baptism in gold.

  Sensitive as my newborn senses were, I should have caught a residue of their scent. Their blood upon the air. But even the memory of their faces had left me.

  I skirted the lake toward the grotto, keeping always the side of one foot in the lake, marveling that I should be freezing—shaking myself apart—in the winter night and icy waters. Instead, my bare feet sensed only the pressure of the stones below, not an unpleasant sensation, the winds rustling my loose hair and soft gown.

  The stage had left a divot in the earth, a crater where my mortal life had reached its peak, and ended. I traced my toes along the fragile edge of soil, watching frost-limned dirt crumble into the bare patch with mild fascination.

  The weeds and the grasses and the brambles—they would all come back, once the winter relented, and reclaim this place that had been mine. Then, I felt in my marrow, it would be as if I'd never existed. As if the mortal woman who had been Magdalene... What had been my name, then? (did it matter?)... had been consumed by a single change of season.

  A thrill passed through me and I laughed and stepped into the place where my stage had been, pressing the balls of my feet into the earth as if I could push the whole planet away from me with the force of my springing steps. I twirled, arms wide like a child, face raised in defiance to the silver of the moon. I had worn her color once, but I was not hers, and never would be.

  Soil mingled with hoarfrost and blood clung to my toes.

  I froze, dropping into the ready crouch Ælfwig had taught me that morning, claws springing from my fingertips. I did not need to get closer to scent the nature of that blood. It was mortal, and fresh, the dregs of its heat licking my feet.

  "Claudette?" I whispered to the gentle breeze, cocking my head as I struggled to focus my senses through the glowing, thundering sharpness of everything to just the information I needed: who was here? Who, who, who?

  Claudette, yes, but faint, her tawdry jasmine perfume lingering longer than the nutmeg scent of her blood. Mortal blood, so much I couldn't pick out the numbers, and something else... Something wrong. Moss and stone and sea, yes, but rot too. The decay that clings beneath stagnant piers. They had told me of such scents in my training. Nightwalkers always carried a memory of the grave about them, forever mourning their mortal deaths. They did not even take new names upon turning.

  "I did not believe she would be so foolish as to take you," a silken voice smoked to me from between the trees.

  I turned, willing my eyes to adjust to a blackness that had nothing at all to do with a lack of light. Offset from the mouth of the grotto, shrouded in bare branches, a man stood. My breath caught—such a silly mortal affectation—at the predatory grace radiating from his every muscle. Though he slouched, hands folded behind the back of his waistcoat, there was something coiled about him—something forever ready to spring.

  "Who are you?" I demanded, forcing myself to drop the defensive stance and stand as tall and sure as this man, this nightwalker, did.

  He smiled a slow, fanged smile. "Rude of me, not to introduce myself. I am Ragnar Varangot, an old friend of your sire."

  "We do not consort with the nightwalkers."

  He laughed, a sound so warm and rich it belonged alongside a cozy fire. When he tossed his head back, long blonde waves of hair escaped from the black ribbon holding them back. "So young. So... malleable. You'll find soon enough that the lines are not so clear." His head tilted, mercurial eyes flicking toward the grotto. "Perhaps that education will begin tonight."

  He wanted me to look in the grotto, to be drawn toward it, and though my senses itched at me that something awaited me within those dripping, moss-slick walls, I stood firm, planting my feet in the earth as if I could brace by body against the musical lure of his words. He noted my defiance, and smiled.

  "There is so little of the sun in you."

  "My veins run gold," I snapped.

  "Do they?" He strolled forward, tapping his long ivory cane against the dirt. Some clear stone—quartz, I thought—was tangled in the top of the staff, catching the faint moonlight and throwing it back out in rainbow flashes. My experience with magical objects was thin. I'd seen the odd cantrip-infused trinket around Somerset House. Yet even I, with my lack of knowledge and experience, could sense some deep river of power in that gleaming stone. That nightwalkers could work no magic themselves wasn't a comfort.

  "I see no evidence of that, outside of your gaudy eyes," he said.

  I curled my lips back, revealing fangs, but he only stretched his smile to show me his own—as if to say we were the same. We weren't. The silver of his eyes aside, the fledgling oath running through my blood was already urging me to extend claws and leap, to destroy this perversion of the night and cleanse the world of him. My head throbbed, already over-sharp senses ratcheting up until I thought his near proximity might drive me to frenzy.

  I breathed in the night air and settled, letting some of the tension out of my coiled muscles. If I were older, stronger, and better trained I would have let the oath ride my mind and sprung upon this creature. But his superior strength radiated all around me like the ripples of a stone dropped in a pond. He would swat me as easily as a fly.

  "Where is Claudette?" I ground the words out. Holding back my predatory nature took all my concentration.

  "Waiting. She is ever so polite. But I wished to speak to you first. To learn of the thing she stole from me."

  "Stole from you?"

  He cocked his head. "Did you think hers were the only eyes that watched you through the night? I know your blood, Magdalene Shelley. Though you've taken another name, you cannot hide your lineage from me."

  "My mortal lineage matters not."

  "Ah, yes, the sunstrider rejection of their mortality. When they told you your memories of mortal life would dissolve into so much ash, did they tell you too that the loss was voluntary?"

  I rocked back a step. What had Claudette said, in the moments after my rebirth? Let the past fade, darling. You're safe now. Let it free... Let go...

  My will had been clay in her hands, everything that I had been before that moment peeled away and flicked back into meaningless dirt. I knew that we had met here, in this place I stood now, for this was where my immortal eyes had first opened—in that grotto—cradled by her hands, as she whispered to me and called me her little dancer. But my life before...

  A sister. I'd had a sister. A flash of red hair and a crooked smile, eyes green as vipers and love, love in her heart as she'd hugged me... Warm... We'd lived on the coast and it had been impossibly warm and... nothing. Not even my birth name.

  "I had a sister," I told him.

  "You see? You resist the change. Resist the wrapping of your mind around their code, around their law. They killed her, your sister, on the day Claudette turned you. All the fertile blood of your line—dead or undead."

  "No. They wouldn't. We protect humanity. You destroy it."

  "I am unsurprised to be the one to tell you that great magic runs through the roots of your family tree, Magdalene. Straight down to you. So much so that there is some debate regarding the humanity of your family."

  I licked my lips. "I had no magic before the turn."

  "No, you did not. A mystery, a trick in the her
editary games. Your sister burned like a bonfire to witch-eyes, with you her shadow. A void in the line's potential. Cousins may dot the land, but they know not what they are, the lineage too diluted—"

  "My sister had no magic!" I clutched the folds of my nightgown, straining, forcing my memory back, back. Struggled to find glimpses of my family though every time I drew close the images drifted away, skittering into a grey haze my mind's eye could not penetrate.

  Red hair, green eyes, and laughter warm and tight. These were all the scraps I gathered to my heart and squeezed.

  "She was not aware of what she was. Your mother hid her nature from your father. When she died, the knowledge of power left your line. Your father knew only that his strangeling children led charmed lives."

  "You're lying. How can you know any of this?"

  He lifted the glittering staff to the moonlight and turned it over, letting the mercurial silver of his eyes reflect off the stone. "Your family and I have known each other for a very long time. When the banal child was born—that's you—I had hoped... Well. You've always had a touch of the moon about you."

  "I am a warrior of the sun."

  His fist clenched around the cane, sharp eyes spearing me to the spot.

  "Then why did you break your order's law and walk beneath the moonlight? You fight the oath, my dear. You should not have stepped beneath the stroke of Luna while your blood was still fresh. You should not be standing here now, talking to me. You should not have been compelled to dance as a mortal under the full moon."

  He was before me in a breath, the space between us smaller than a palm's width, the sea-and-casket scent of him washing over me, subduing me, thundering in great tidal waves against the weaker crash of my rising, angry oath. Corpse-cold fingers curled about my face as he stroked my cheek with the side of one claw and lifted my face to stare, hard, into my eyes.

  "You fight the oath even now, because you know to attack me in this place, as young as you are, would mean your death. You're still so new—so fresh—that you don't understand how momentous that is. How impossible it should be for you to resist the whip of your blood. Any other neophyte sunstrider would be ash beneath my boots by now. You belong to the night. This mistake of Claudette's..."