Shadow Redeemed

by Megan Blackwood

  Lucien's scent lingered near the banks of the Thames, and so I followed that sinuous twist of water, imagining him walking the shores at night alone, letting the silver glow of the moon against the river and the scents and sounds of the night fill his senses so that the hunger would not.

  For he had not fed. Not since Ragnar's death. And though I could not be certain how I knew such a thing—a listlessness in the scent of his blood, a melancholy thread of death that had nothing to do with the undead state of his flesh—the certainty filled me with dread.

  It was a hard thing for a vampire of any kind to destroy itself. We are creatures meant to last, to mount the heavens above the mortal wheel of time and protect those fragile things which passed us by. To stake oneself is nigh impossible. Our musculature freezes, our minds reject the very idea. But to starve? It is possible, if one is strong enough of mind. The late stages can drive us to a frenzy, but there are methods of restraint. Chains that can kill just by binding.

  And Lucien, bereft of the control of his master, had chosen to die.

  It would be an easy thing, in theory, to leave England. To seek some decrepit tomb in the backwoods of the old world. He could wall himself in stone, or let weights drag him to the crushing depths of the sea where the forces of nature would destroy his heart. But his nature would not let him commit to self-destruction. He could no more drive a spear of oak through his heart than he could leave this city, for here I searched for him. Here, my jaw clenched and heart stinging, I would save him.

  For I could—couldn't I? Before the mote in my eye such a thought would have been so impossible as to be laughable, my blood and mind leashed only to his destruction. But now... Now I could choose. And I chose him living, even if only beneath the night's long shadow.

  A prickling ran across my skin, a sense of familiarity I could not quite place. Though I'd been alone before, moving like wind and light between the mortal throng, I felt a presence near me now. Not Lucien, I could not be so lucky, but something else as fast and bright as I was.

  I slowed, curious, letting my singular focus on Lucien's dying scent drift away, though setting him aside wrenched at me. Shadows congealed across the walls of the buildings which faced the road, crowding and rushing as if pushed aside or... No. Running, fleeing. For something hunted the night.

  Sunstrider. The familiarity slammed into me. Two of them. They were young, not Roisin, not anyone of my generation. The co-mingled scent of the estate hung about them, obscuring their individual markers until I turned my head, focusing, letting the throttle of the bike ease just a touch as I shifted all focus.

  Julian flanked my left. Hanna, my right.

  I grinned behind the mirrored visor of my helmet. If the young pups wanted to see what I was up to during the night, they'd have to keep up.

  I opened the throttle and burst forth, transitioning back into speeds that only those of supernatural perception could comprehend. I tore away from the river, angling for the knotted chaos of narrower streets. Snarls and growls erupted behind me, their previous stealth forgotten now that I'd spotted them.

  Hanna launched forward, tightening my lead, slinking up on my rear as Julian struggled to match her pace through the labyrinth of mortal vehicles. I snorted. If Roisin and I were hunting as they were, we would have split up. Roisin would have looped around to cut off our quarry as I dogged their heels, running them in the direction we wanted so hard and fast they'd scarcely have time to worry about where Roisin had gone. But these young sunstriders were too brash, eager for personal glory. They worked not as a team.

  I would show them their error.

  Tires screeched against the damp street as I squeezed my thighs tight and leaned hard, cutting across the road and onto a pedestrian only pathway that spat me back out onto another street. So close together on my tail, Hanna swore, shouting at Julian to get out of her way, for she couldn't slice after me without running into him.

  I laughed, looking over my shoulder to see the chaos I'd left behind. They'd lost me. The game was over.

  Hanna's hand came up, a thick-barreled weapon—like a flare gun—clutched between her gloved fingers. Her bike wobbled as she braced the weapon against her hip, back tire beginning to slide, her whole bike beginning the slow whip of a fishtail. I opened my mouth to shout a warning.

  Through the grey haze of her visor her eyes, sharp golden pinpoints, narrowed. She squeezed the trigger, throwing her weight to correct the wobble of her bike.

  Something slammed into my chest.

  The road tore at my jacket, the bike wrenched away, the world above me a maelstrom of color as I skidded across the road and slammed into a building. My whole body jerked, the thick plastic of the helmet cracked thunderously, deadening my cranked-up sense of hearing.

  Pain burst through my hips, ran like lava across my back where my jacket had hiked up, exposing my flesh to the bite of the road. Blood—mine—hung heavy on the air but all that mattered was the weight, the impossible weight, pushing me down until I could sink to the core of the earth and finally be devoured.

  Hanna appeared above me. She'd taken her helmet off, and though the edges of my vision strained against crackling white bursts, a gleam like the sun shone in her copper hair. Her eyes were bright as noon.

  "Gotcha, bitch," she said, and the world went black.

  Nine: Trial of Night

  I woke on black stone flecked with gold. My body, curled against itself like a swatted and dying insect, shuddered once. An urge to heave bile rocked through me, contorting me into an even tighter spiral. A miasma of wrongness enclosed me, every sense crying out a complaint until it all—aches, nausea, sharp shocks of pain—blurred together. Get up, something inside me screamed. Get up.

  I pressed my palms to the cold stone and pushed it away, easing into a table-top position. My head swam, my body screamed, but a fleck of copper against the darkness brought the world into sharp focus: Hanna.

  Snarling, I rolled into a crouch, my shackle bracelets scraping against the stone floor as my palms dragged the ground. Fiery pain pushed through the miasma as the road rash scabs on my lower back stretched and cracked, weeping blood.

  "We weren't sure what would work on you," Hanna said as casually as if we were chatting over tea, "so we went with both. Good call, I think."

  The pain that wasn't from the crash sharpened into focus. I lifted my arms in the faint light—the sleeves of my jacket had torn—and examined thick weals of redness hashing my forearms. The psychic sting of opposing metal—silver, and possibly gold—lingered against my flesh. Hesitantly, I touched my face, feeling similar troughs of pain along my chin, cheek, and forehead. Metal. They'd netted me in sacred metals. No wonder I'd gone down so quickly.

  "Where did you get such a thing?" I asked, making her talk as I took stock of my condition. Every sinew trembled and ached, my mind fogged and slowed by the cuts left by sacred metals, but what blood I had left after the crash did its work. My body knitted. Strength seeped back into me. My mouth thickened with the urge to feed, but I resisted licking my lips. I would not let her see me hungry.

  "Maeve's workshop," she said, smirking as my brow arched. "Oh, she doesn't know about this, and will be pissed as rain when she realizes we've taken her toy, but she's been working on various ways to contain nightwalkers—and you—since you moved to into DeShawn's place. You didn't think she'd trust you to manage yourself?"

  I stood, meeting her smug glare. "I suppose this is the moment I should be hurt, isn't it? Show some shock that my mortal friend would devise weapons with the thought of using them against me?"

  Hanna's lips drew back, showing her fangs. "Even your nearest know you're an abomination."

  I laughed, long and slow, unable to help myself. My own scrawled words came back to me. The fear I'd destroyed my sire, my record of Ragnar's cryptic claims upon my blood and lineage. These things seared my soul. Hanna's words were nothing more than a gnat to swat in comparison.

  "Oh, Hanna. You are so young a
nd so... passionate. It blinds you. I have been called worse by people I've held dearer. And, perhaps, Maeve is right. Perhaps I am a monster."

  Though my legs ached and my hip burned where it'd been knocked out of the socket and shoved back in, I stepped forward, looming, letting my shoulders roll forward and my chin tilt down. The arched and ready stance of a predator, of a hunting cat. One of the very first stances Ælfwig had taught me. It was nice to remember his name.

  Hanna's smirk vanished, her breath caught. We are, in our darkest moments, merely animals, after all. The primordial instincts which guide us know when we are hunted by a stronger creature.

  "Not another step," Julian said behind me.

  Damn him. Hanna's shoulders relaxed, but her smirk did not come back and her hands lingered near her hips where she had some weapon or another secreted beneath the shelter of her jacket.

  "I'd wondered if you'd lost your nerve and scampered off,'" I said, light as I could manage through the dryness in my throat.

  I turned to face him, even though it meant putting my back to Hanna. Where the fuck was I? These two children may not have been a problem for me otherwise, but weakened and trapped down in the dark... No. I could not follow that thought. Confidence was the only trick that would magic me out of this. I had to make them believe I was not threatened. Make them believe I was more dangerous than they had ever expected.

  A silvery voice I had not heard since the shackles went on whispered: yes.

  I gritted my teeth.

  Julian's hair lay lank against his skull, his dark waves smashed flat by his helmet. A gash ran along his narrow chest, knitting slowly, that made his shirt hang like a blood-soaked flag against his abdomen. Had I done that, before the blackness took me? If so, good.

  "You don't frighten us," Julian said, bringing up the weapon Hanna had held earlier to point at my chest.

  "That sounds very much like something someone who was frightened would say."

  "We're not here to talk," Hanna snapped before Julian could recover.

  "So what's the plan, then?" I asked, turning my head to regard her over one shoulder. "If you mean to kill me, children, you should have done so when you had me unconscious. I can respect a sporting instinct, but I will not let you take my life. And this..." I flicked my hands to the sides and extended my claws, curling them in a beckoning motion. "... Is not a fight you can win while I yet stand."

  "You see?" Hanna said, facing Julian, her apple-shaped face scrunching up as she jabbed a finger at me. "Her oath is gone. She should not be able to threaten us."

  "She's right," Julian said slowly, never once taking his gaze from me. He'd survive this unlife of ours much longer than Hanna.

  "We're not here to kill you, Magdalene. I don't even think we could. Just getting you here, under the control of the net..." He picked at the dripping corner of his shirt and grimaced. "It wasn't easy. But more importantly, we can't. I look at you, and think... And think you're wrong, that the silver eye in your head should drive me to erase you from this world. But I can't. The gold stops me. I could no more dig my claws into your heart than I could an innocent mortal's. I have the oath, Magdalene Shelley. The question we're here to answer is: do you?"

  All predatory tension fled me, my body slackening. How easy it had been to imagine battling those two to their deaths—how could I? How could I even feel an urge to destroy them, never mind that they had captured me here? They were my colleagues. My fellow soldiers against the night, and they had done nothing against our laws.

  "I don't know." The oath had faded from my blood. No chains of silver and gold would bring it back, would force me to bend to the laws of our kind. And by those laws, I should die. No sunstrider existed without the oath.

  Claudette's eyes—hazel and frightened—filled my mind, my heart.

  I did not want to die.

  "Then we shall find out," Hanna said, all the cocky surety gone from her voice. She gestured, and a tension thickened the air, then snapped. A glyph lit the ground beneath her feet, burning with the vermillion fierceness of the sun, then winked out.

  I lifted my hand to shield my eyes, stepping away from that fire. Lights erupted throughout the cavern—brilliant motes of red and orange and yellow and blue, all the colors of a flame, sparkling against gold flecks in the black stone.

  "Let the trial begin," Hanna said.

  "What is this place?" My eyes strained against the lights gleaming down the black-and-gold pathways.

  "We found a record of it in the library," Julian said, pacing around me in stunted half-arcs, his finger on the trigger of the net-gun, even though the nozzle pointed at the ground. DeShawn would have been appalled by his trigger discipline. "Not even a dust-nose like Emeline had dug so deep into the old records, the old ways."

  "Why?" I asked, stalling. Those lights—something about them made my skin crawl, my single silver eye stinging as if it had acid thrown into it. Tears slicked down one cheek.

  "I thought," Julian said, warming to the more comfortable subject of history, "that there must be some way to prove if an oath is intact or broken. Just because it hasn't been done in recent memory, doesn't mean that it had never been done at all."

  Hanna gestured toward the long hallway leading away from us. The space appeared all at once insubstantial and solid, shuddering contemptuously over having been intruded upon by beings of another plane. The entrance to this place may lie in the bedrock beneath the estate, but now that it had been activated it was elsewhere. And that other-place called me into it, demanded I stand the test. I caught myself drawn forward, fingers reaching toward the first ball of flame, and halted.

  "This used to be how it was done, if the annals are correct," Hanna said.

  "If we are reading them correctly," Julian countered. "The language is old and I'm no expert."

  She shot him a cruel glance and continued. "When the creatures of the night were yet new, those beings who would be sunstriders walked this path to prove their loyalty to humanity. Now, it is only our blood that binds us to the oath. But you... You must prove yourself again. In the old way."

  I licked my lips. "This is dangerous magic." A sense of being watched crawled up my spine and I half-turned, expecting to see some thickening of shadow. Nothing but the stone stretched into infinity behind me. "Has Maeve reviewed this?"

  "Maeve? She knows nothing of this place." Julian lifted his chin. "I found it, and its purpose. The only danger here is for those who do not abide by the oath."

  "You're doing this without authorization. Emeline won't—"

  "Enough." Hanna pointed at the hallway with her chin. "Let the trial decide the nature of your loyalties."

  My heart sank. "Do you hate me so much?"

  "Hate?" Hanna cocked her head to the side, and for a moment she looked like a rag doll, once more the broken creature I'd found unconscious in Ragnar's hive.

  "We don't hate you, Magdalene," she said, her face softening. "You are our elder. We need your strength. But we must know. For a grenade is only valuable to a soldier who has control of when the pin is pulled."

  "Pass the trial," Julian said, moving his finger away from the trigger of the net gun. "We want you to."

  My throat thickened, my tongue felt too heavy for my mouth. I could take them both. I could reach Julian long before his finger reached the trigger, take him to the ground and knock him senseless before Hanna knew what had happened. The way out would not be hard to find. In one leap, one battle, I could be free.

  I turned to face the flames.

  Ten: The Life of a Flame

  Power crackled against my skin as I stepped across the threshold. To my left and right, the flames shifted, transforming from the progressive shades of fire into spheres of blue flame. The cerulean heat licked across my cheeks, my arms, threatening to singe skin and hair with its strength. I stayed to the center of the path, wary of those bright blue orbs, wondering if my failure would result in their consumption of me.

  The kiss of silv
er in my blood screamed at me to turn back, to reject this place and its trials. I would fail, and I would die, and I was not a creature meant for death. I pressed on, each heavy step of my scraped-up boots echoing against the dark and watching stone.

  For something watched me in this place, but not the burgeoning creature of that in-between place Lucien had brought me. This intelligence was just as old, just as singular in its desire. The older the being, the simpler its needs, and I could feel the weight of its purpose congeal around me like a net, like amber, threatening to harden and freeze me at the slightest sign of failure.

  The presence that watched me judged. I knew it as easily as I knew that the sky was above and the earth lay below. It had been placed here for one purpose, and it had been denied its function for ages. As the first vampire it had tested in eons of nothingness, a certain hunger laced the gaze that watched me. A desire to fulfill its imperative so strong that I feared even taking a breath the wrong way would cause my failure.

  I looked back, hoping to see Hanna and Julian—the threats I understood—making their own judgment, but the space that had inhabited the physical world had been wiped away. I was the trial's, now. What happened next would determine if I ever left this place.

  "Did you walk these halls?" I asked the empty dark, thinking of Claudette's hazel eyes and scrabbling for memories of what would come next. I walked in ignorance.

  Voices echoed from the end of the hall. A jumble of syllables that might have been an early version of English twisting and transforming, the consonants hardening, until the language spoken approximated English as it had sounded when I'd first been turned.

  I froze. Sunstriders were not meant to live in the past like our nightwalker halves. We changed with the times, absorbed new words and customs as easily as a fish swims through water. But this place, and the intelligence that guided it, had marked me for the time when I was first turned. If it meant to test new sunstriders, that made sense... And yet that familiarity clawed at me. Reminded me of all that I had left behind—and, if my memoir was to be believed—all I had been forced to forget.