Shadow Redeemed

by Megan Blackwood

  He shook his head, disgusted, and pushed me away. I dropped to the ground, palms breaking the brittle crust of hoarfrost, and stared up at him, pinned to the spot with terror.

  "She may have doomed us all for her fool passions."

  "I am no mistake."

  He looked back to me, the moon looming over his shoulders, the light throwing his face into shadow so that all I could see of him was the gleam of his silver eyes.

  "So sure. So stubborn. Why don't you ask her yourself, my dear? She waits for you, or had you forgotten the summons slipped beneath your door?"

  I stood, mustering all the grace granted to me by my blood. He shook his head, stepping away and spreading an arm outward as if to invite me away from him—toward the grotto. Such a man as he would not have bid me from him unless it benefitted him. I knew that. Young though I was, I was no fool. But the lure that Claudette might be waiting for me within those moss-slick walls was too much. I tried to move with grace across the churned-up ground, but my blood was tired, weak beneath the moon, and I staggered toward that dark portal.

  Would that I had turned and gone home instead.

  I did not kill her. I did not.

  Her scent, that golden warmth that I cherished so, congealed beyond the gateway of the grotto. It was as if Ragnar had hidden her scent away from me, confined it to the hollow of rock and disallowed it from spreading on the night breeze. Impossible, even for one as old as he, but I recalled the staff which winked with the power of stars and thought—well. I suppose I did not think, so much as allow that all things were possible that night. Even my sharp senses could not be trusted.

  That scent pulled me deeper into the grotto. It seemed to go on forever, deeper and wider than it had been when I'd come across it in my mortal days. The ceiling hung low, stalactites reaching down for me from above, dripping, with gnarled bundles of wispy roots like an old woman's hair. I ducked to keep my head from touching any of these things, somehow feeling that to let them touch me would grant them some power over me. A silly affectation—superstitious and pointless—but I did it anyway.

  Muck stuck to the soles of my feet, encasing them and reaching up my ankles only to dry into cracked pottery and fleck away, back to rejoin the damp earth and start the process all over again. I trailed my fingers against the wall—that felt safe, solid—and tried not to look over my shoulder to see if Ragnar followed on silent feet.

  When I saw her, the pressure of the grotto dropped away.

  Claudette lay on a plinth of roots, her pale face turned away from me—from the moonlight seeping through the grotto's entrance. Her body arched, back lifting from the lichen-crusted wood as if under tension. As if in pain. I knelt beside her, grasping her cold hand in mine, ignoring the bite of her claws as her fingers curled around mine and bit deep, drawing blood.

  "Claudette, Claudette," I pleaded, searching her body for injury. There was none.

  "Magdalene," she whispered, body slackening against the roots, head lolling to regard me now that my body blocked the moonlight from her. "You should not have come."

  "I don't understand."

  "No. You can't possibly."

  She smiled, slow and weary, stroking the back of my hand with her clawed thumb. The corners of her hazel eyes crinkled.

  Hazel.

  She was sunstrider. We all carried irises of gold. There was no exception.

  "What..." I took a step back, dropping her hand, but her fingers coiled tight, not letting me escape. Muscles corded her arm, her lips peeled back as her jaw jutted out, the tendons of her neck gaunt and carving stark shadows against her pale throat.

  "I thought it would work," she said, her smile wry, her fangs extending and extending and extending until they bore like stakes through the bottom of her lip, pierced the thin flesh of her chin and drew small dribbles of blood that lacked, somehow, the sun-kissed nature of her usual scent.

  "So did I," Ragnar said. Beside us then, he leaned over Claudette, fingers caressing her cheek as he brushed his lips to her forehead.

  Every instinct in my body screamed at me to run.

  But I stayed. I stayed and clung onto her. And when her body wisped away into shadow, leaving me clutching nothing at all, my howl pierced the night.

  It was only in recollection that I recalled Ragnar saying, "We shall try again with you, someday." Before he vanished into the night.

  Seven: Hard Truths

  My words. They were mine, though I had no memory of writing them. The handwriting was the same—though younger, closer to the scrawl of my mortal fingers than how I wrote now—the choice of words all too familiar.

  I remembered none of it. None. There was no parting of the veil in my mind, no slow remembrance coming back to me in fits and starts as there had been when the Venefica had revealed to me that I had summoned her myself. Of course there wasn't. Because she had cast a spell to peel the blinders from my mind, and it had done its work. But the oubliette was an old thing, a reliable thing, and without magic to aid remembrance there was no way those memories would come back to me.

  For I had slept the oubliette, accused of the crime of Claudette's murder, in the new days of my undeath. It was why I could not remember my sire. Why the Venefica had laughed and laughed in her final choking moments. It was the only thing that made sense.

  And I hated it.

  "Mags?" DeShawn sat down beside me, seeing I had come to the end of that desperate scrawl. My hands trembled, my fingers stiff as stone as I contemplated what I might find if I turned those pages. There were more. I could feel the thickness of them, the indentations of the pen nib biting into the paper's flesh. I had more to say about my first crime, about that night. I did not know if I wanted to read it.

  "I don't believe you killed her," DeShawn said when I had been silent too long for human comfort.

  "I must have."

  "Consider your description, girl. There wasn't any ash left behind."

  "She vanished. That's not something we're capable of."

  "Into shadow, not dust. She was old for one of your kind, even then. It could be she had abilities the guard didn't know about."

  Into shadow. I thought of the man I'd seen devoured by the night in the alleyway. "If she survived that night, then why did she not return to the guard?"

  "Ragnar did something to her, one of his procedures. Remember your description of her eyes? Maybe she thought she wouldn't be welcomed by the Sun Guard anymore. Especially after you got shoved into the oubliette."

  "The sunstriders wouldn't have turned her away."

  DeShawn snorted. "You sound so sure of yourself. But who are you living with, again? It ain't them, is it? Got you crammed into my sorry excuse for a second bedroom just because you've got one eye gold and one eye silver. I understand their concern, I'm not slagging Emeline off for making you come stay with me, but it's worth thinking about in the terms of your sire. From what I can gather from all this—" He spread an arm to take in the crates of books and papers he'd squirreled away. "Claudette was an elder of the order when she turned you. She got her wrist slapped for turning you without going through the proper channels first.

  "I guess the guard has some kind of vetting process—but she was the backbone of their strength then, just like you are now. They needed her, and someone had to teach you the ways of the guard, so they didn't shove her in the oubliette for changing you. But she'd already committed one crime, and I bet having to explain why her eyes had gone back to hazel would bring up a lot of questions that could only be answered with one word: Ragnar. I think she went into hiding."

  He gathered himself with a slow breath. "And once more, I think Ragnar knew where she went."

  I slammed the journal shut and surged to my feet, tossing the weathered pages onto the couch. "The guard would not let a sunstrider be held captive by the likes of Ragnar without doing something about it. Even when diminished, they pushed back against his hive—"

  DeShawn spread his hands and stood. "Mags. Listen to me
, and put your damn fangs away, I hate it when those things flop out at me."

  I snapped my mouth shut and made a conscious effort to retract my fangs. "Sorry."

  "It's fine. You gotta remember, the Sun Guard you know now is very different from what it was in the past. They stuck to the rules then, real hard. If you keep reading that—not that you have to, don't give me that look—you'll find out you were ordered into the oubliette. Just for a month—there was some explanation about your existence being short enough and your blood new enough that your memories were malleable."

  I scoffed. "Impossible. That's not nearly long enough to do any good. The oubliette is a forgetting sleep, it's meant not only for the sleeper but for those left alive who bore witness to the crimes of the sleeping. A month is not long enough for those who were alive to forget I had been convicted of murdering my sire."

  "No. But it's long enough for a bit of magic to do that work."

  A sliver of doubt wedged itself in my mind. "What are you talking about?"

  "Ragnar..." DeShawn strolled to a crate of books and picked up a folio, flipping through it without really seeing the content. He just needed something to do with his hands.

  "He put a lot of effort into figuring out how you sunstriders work. Not half so much into how the nightwalkers work. He was irritatingly self-assured that his kind were the independent side of your vampire coin and that any further reflection on the point wasn't necessary. Blindness of the blood, I suppose. But you all... He teased out every detail he could get his claws into. From his notes, it seems the oubliette isn't just a spell set in the sleeper's mind. It changes the memories of all living sunstriders. The mortals of the guard, though, they keep on remembering. They just die out eventually."

  "Why? Why would they do that? The sunstriders who did not commit the crime don't deserve that kind of... violation."

  The sensation of the Venefica's restoration spell washed through me, a sense-memory all unbidden. I shivered even though DeShawn kept a small space heater humming warmth into the room and wrapped my arms around myself. It was one thing to manipulate the mind of someone who had transgressed. It was another to toy with the memories of the innocent.

  "To control you all. There's really no other answer. I don't know why they did it to start, but remember, Mags, these were mortals in the most dire of times, fighting against a world overrun by monsters by using monsters themselves. There must have been some kind of safeguard put in place for the Sun Guard to even consider the alliance viable. The oath, and the oubliette, we know they use to keep you all leashed. Maybe there are other methods. Ragnar thought there might be."

  "Ragnar was a vile miasma of the night," I snapped.

  "Yeah, I know, but even evil bastards are right occasionally, and it looks more and more like he was right about this. You can't remember your sire, can you? Even now, can you remember Claudette?"

  I stretched my mind back, pawing through memories that spanned centuries, trying to find some spark left behind by the woman described by my own hand in those pages. Nothing came to me. No early days as the sunstrider oath and blood took hold, transforming my once mortal body. No instruction save that which I received at the hands of Sun Guard tutors. Just nothingness—a void like the one left regarding my summoning of the Venefica.

  "No. There's nothing," I admitted.

  "And Sebastian, Roisin's sire. Was he around then?"

  Roisin had not been turned until many years after my undeath began, but Sebastian had been around. He must have been a contemporary of Claudette's generation. I recalled him vividly. His deep, rumbling laugh, and his exuberant sense of fashion.

  "Yes. He was there."

  "Did he ever ask you about what happened to Claudette? Did you ever discuss her, or her death?"

  I frowned. "No, we did not. If I was meant to sleep the oubliette for that crime, then such a thing would be taboo."

  "But he did ask you, Mags, if you keep reading. He asked you a great deal about that night. It was at his insistence that you wrote your account before the sleep. And after the oubliette... Nothing. No mention."

  "He wouldn't speak to me of a crime for which I'd been absolved."

  "Ragnar asked him about Claudette, after. He wrote about the experience and seemed convinced that Sebastian had no recollection of that woman."

  "Impossible, a mind as old as his could not forget a contemporary."

  "Unless the Sun Guard uses magic in conjunction with the oubliette."

  I pressed my lips together, holding back an outburst that we would both know was senseless justification of a crime long since committed. DeShawn was right. It made such obvious sense that I wondered how I had never considered the possibility before—but that was the loyalty talking. My oath, tightening around my thoughts like a choke-chain leash, cutting off doubt and suspicion. Now that it was merely a drumbeat of guidance, I could think around it. Through it.

  It would never have occurred to me that they would do anything to me—to us—outside the bounds of what I understood to be our agreement, that oath.

  "Why would you keep this to yourself?" I asked after a while, forcing myself to accept the truth of those texts, as uncomfortable as they made me. I had written that report for a reason—prodded by Sebastian—and it would be foolish to ignore it.

  "Mostly because I didn't know what was in them all yet."

  "You believe you are positioned to decide what information is important to the Sun Guard and what is not?"

  He raised both brows at me. "What do you think Emeline would have done with that journal of yours, Mags? I understand it goes against your nature to doubt her. I get it. But if I had handed all this over, it never would have seen the light of day. Your records, in particular. I don't think she would have crammed them on the shelves to gather dust. I think she would have burned them."

  A coil of dread chilled my belly. "Burn them? The Sun Guard is chartered by the crown to research nightwalker and sunstrider alike. She wouldn't have..."

  But what else? If the guard was keeping secrets on the other side of the oath from their sunstrider counterparts, then revealing that truth—especially in a time of strife—would do them no good at all. She would have declared the history in those crates tainted by Ragnar's insane research and consigned it to the flames.

  "I see you're getting it," DeShawn said. "I'm not trying to upset you. I wasn't even sure if I was going to show you this stuff. It's your right to know, but you went into the oubliette willingly, so maybe it's your right to forget, too. I'm sorry if I made a wrong choice here."

  I licked my lips. "I would not have written that journal if I hadn't intended to reread it."

  "That's what I thought. Look, Mags, no disrespect to you or Emeline or whatever, but to my mind the guard can't be trusted with this stuff. I haven't gone through it all yet, but..." His eyes shone with startling intensity. "I think Ragnar's research—abhorrent as his methods were—might have been onto something. I'm not sure what exactly, not yet, but in examining your kind he came real close to some home truths about his own kin."

  I frowned and picked up a folio, turning the weathered leather over in my hands. Ragnar's musk clung to the pages—a hint of sea and grave dirt—and made me shiver in remembrance of his closeness in those final moments. Fear gripped me as I wondered if Lucien had known, a taste of bitter betrayal coming to my lips, but I knew that man's scent better than I knew my own, and nothing in this room had his gentle, hay-warmth about it. This had been Ragnar's research, and Ragnar's alone.

  "There was a rumor within the sunstriders—not the guard—a long time ago. A suspicion, really, that we could never confirm because we couldn't exactly invite the nightwalkers to tea and ask them. We thought that... If we took an oath to serve humanity, maybe they took the opposite oath. But to who? Or why? They value their freedom so much I never put any stock in the idea."

  "I don't think it's anything so formal as all that, but something's pulling on them."

  "Luna?" I rub
bed the temple next to my silver eye, thinking of the silken call I sometimes heard, luring me with power.

  "Could be. I don't really know how..." He waved a hand at me. "All that works."

  I chuckled. "Neither do we, it seems."

  "Maybe you all just haven't shared resources like you should."

  "What do you mean?"

  He rubbed the back of his neck, avoiding my eyes. "It seems to me you have a nightwalker you could take to tea and ask a few questions."

  My mouth went dry. "Lucien."

  Eight: To Hunt the Shadow

  The streets of London whipped past me in a blur of senses. Light smeared into lashes of color, the dampness of the rain streaking off my helmet, the scent of concrete, stale beer, and somewhere—just on the edge—nightwalker. But not any nightwalker. Lucien, his cracked-headstone and warm-hay aroma tugging on me, but always just too far to get a proper bead on.

  Come to me. I pleaded with the night, the sharp lights of the city obscuring the gentle gleam of Luna filtering through the clouds. I do not hunt. Not tonight.

  I could will my thoughts no further than my own tortured mind, and so I squeezed the brake, slid around a corner, and searched on.

  Vehicles driven by mortals blurred into white noise all around me. Even without the kiss of the sun on my shoulders, my senses sharpened, perceiving the world in a brighter, clearer relief than mortal eyes could behold. The vagaries of traffic were meaningless to me, the occasional whoop of an officer's siren a mere annoyance. I wove through them, a flash of metal and flesh forgotten as soon as I'd passed out of sight—leaving the mortals in my wake wondering what that smear of light, that whip of wind, had been.

  Roisin had been right. Motorcycles might as well have been made just for us.