Shadow Redeemed

by Megan Blackwood

  This man smelled like a ghoul, and nothing else.

  "I'm sorry," I said to him, or to me, or to the world at large. "I wish it could have been different."

  "Different isn't always better," Padhi said.

  His tread down the steps had blended with the scuffle of the glass-breaking above, and I flinched, marveling at having been surprised for once in my unlife.

  "No. But it always seems that way, doesn't it?"

  He shut the door behind him and checked that the lock clicked over. I hadn't bothered. Maybe old age was making me sloppy. No. I just found it hard to care about my personal safety.

  "Grass is always greener," he agreed in that distracted way mortals had of talking when their minds were very much Somewhere Else. I didn't care for small talk, anyway.

  "How is he?" I asked, peeling my palm away. The fence left a red print, I rubbed it against my thigh.

  "Dying," Padhi said, squinting at his patient as if a sullen glare alone would jerk him back into health and have him tap-dancing across the boards. "And I don't understand why."

  "He smells like a ghoul."

  "Ah. Well." He tugged on the stethoscope dangling around his neck. "That just confirms it, then. I've looked at the blood, over and over again, and nothing changes. My medicines just... float in there, like oil that can't mix with the water of the blood. If it wasn't for whatever supernatural element keeps your people suspended, I'd have killed him by now, I'm sure. Accidentally, I mean."

  "I understand." The reassurance was rote, meaningless. It did nothing but grease social gears. Worry kept on pinching his face. "The medical angle has been tried before, as we told you. It never works."

  "But the detox does, sometimes, according to your archives and my own experiences at the hospital. He should at least be rallying or—well—fighting against the detox, if you take my meaning."

  "You mean you've not sedated him? He hasn't tried to fight his way free? No sweating or screaming?"

  Padhi shook his head. "No, none of that. Ever since you strapped him down he's just laid there. I've taken all the proper safety precautions, thinking the torpidity might be a feigned state intended to let my guard down."

  "But you don't believe it is."

  "No, I don't."

  "Then what?"

  Padhi threw his arms out. "I wish I knew. I've been treating him like a coma patient. Artificial respiration, intravenous feeding and fluids. Nothing changes. At least, if he got worse, then I might understand what not to do. There's value in that. I can correct from there."

  "What does your microscope tell you?"

  He gave me a wry half-smile, and even under the sickening power of the fluorescent lights I realized he was a handsome man, when worry wasn't dragging every aspect of his being down into the mud. "It's a little more complicated than a microscope."

  "Syringes were cutting-edge medical equipment in my day."

  He shook his head, eyeing me with that same spark he had the first time we'd met and I'd failed to fake my heartbeat appropriately during his examination.

  "I wish I could understand your biology. If I could do that, then maybe... Well. I don't know. It'd be a place to start, anyway."

  "I'm not going to volunteer for a vivisection, if that's what you're asking."

  "God, no." He shook his head. "A blood sample, maybe? Or a skin biopsy? You'll only feel a little pressure."

  "Didn't Roisin give you some samples?"

  "Maeve wouldn't allow it. Alec volunteered, though, and I'm grateful for that."

  "Then why do you need me?"

  He met my eyes with his. "My mother taught me never to comment on a lady's appearance."

  I touched my temple alongside my silver eye. "You're a doctor."

  "And you're not my patient."

  "Not yet."

  He was doing his damnedest not to look hopeful, but human body language wasn't a cipher to me. For whatever reason, he believed answers to his ghoul cure might hide in my blood. I did not like the implication that my blood was different from my kin.

  The machines beeped, the respirator hissed to shame me.

  "Very well. Take what you need. But if you find..."

  He held up both hands, palms out. "You don't even need to ask. Doctor patient confidentiality is a thing for a reason, and I believe that applies here. Your blood cells could do back flips and I wouldn't tell Lady Emeline, or anyone else."

  I sat in a chair by his work table and obliged as he scraped skin from my arms and swabbed the inside of my cheek. He handed me an orange ball to squeeze and tied a strip of blue plastic around my arm.

  "Now, you're going to feel a little pinch," he said.

  I swallowed a laugh. The needle went in. Nothing happened.

  "Uh," he said.

  I handed him back his ball, snipped the plastic with the flick of a claw, and increased my heart beat at a steady rate. Blood flowed into the attached vial. Padhi let out a sigh of relief.

  "Julian's pumped right away."

  "Julian is young and lacks control."

  "Maybe don't tell him that."

  I smiled. "Might be too late."

  "Ouch, poor guy. How much do you think I can take?"

  He'd already pulled six vials, and I felt well enough. "As much as you'd like. I'll warn you when I'm getting too low. I will feed after this, then rest."

  "Thank you. You have no idea how valuable this is. Your current state of being may answer questions I didn't even think to ask."

  "You mean my ability to harness the powers of the nightwalker."

  He winced and made himself busy arranging vials. "Yes, I do, though I am sorry if that opens any wounds for you."

  "It doesn't," I lied. "It is too bad we don't have a third specimen for you to compare against."

  He paused. "A nightwalker, you mean?"

  "No, a blank slate."

  His brow furrowed. "I don't understand your meaning."

  "I'm not certain, but I suspect that we vampires were all of one breed, once."

  "A tabula rasa."

  "Something of the sort. Pure speculation on my part. I have no proof."

  "That... that's fine. No, that's great. Thank you, Miss Shelley. You've given me a lot to think about."

  "Call me Mags. It's not my real name, anyway."

  "What?"

  I stood. "That's enough for tonight. Goodnight, doctor."

  He scurried to get the needle out of my arm, muttering a hasty and confused goodnight as I cut a straight path to the door and left without so much as a glance over my shoulder. It was easy enough to navigate the servant's stairs to my old room without running into anyone. I'd need blood soon, but for now I craved only rest and solitude.

  My room was as I'd left it, the closet door ajar to reveal a few extra sets of clothes Talia must have provided at the last minute. Kind of her. I never thought ahead to those kinds of things. If Ragnar could be believed, I never thought ahead at all.

  I stripped. I showered. I found pajamas Talia had left for me and slid beneath the covers. Normal.

  And yet that thorn in my mind. Not Ragnar's words—he'd been a hell of a force in my life, once, but he was dead now and the next steps were mine alone. No, not him. It was Selene. Who had she been? If Padhi compared a sample of my blood to that mortal woman's, what would he see? Did it matter?

  Below, the Sun Guard celebrated on into the night.

  Twenty-four: You Are Cordially Invited

  No one slept in the house of Durfort-Civrac that night. Not really. One by one the sunstriders trickled off to their rest, drifting like motes through the mansion, all unknowing I was aware of every presence—every tired and blurred mind. The mortals went next—booze kept DeShawn and the remaining members of his squad up later than their counterparts—and fell into a fitful sleep.

  Roisin was the last. I took the spear point, she the rear guard, even in something as simple and pointless as going to sleep. We were coordinated, she and I, right down to our bones. It was why
I had not allowed her to kneel. I needed a right-hand. I needed balance.

  Everyone tossed and turned, mortal and undead alike. We did not all of us need sleep—Roisin and I, we waited in a kind of stasis, aware but not conscious, ready to rise to action at a moment's notice. The younger sunstriders slept, for the most part. Some were even young enough to dream.

  They weren't pleasant dreams.

  An hour before the sun broke the horizon, Seamus left his room. I roused myself, feeling the tug of his blood—so familiar to me, as I had fed from him often enough—move through the somnolent house. The scuff-thump of his slippers across the cool hardwood drew near my door and paused. Before I could think what that might mean he drew away again, drifting down the hall toward the stairs.

  He opened the door to the rose garden. His heart rate skyrocketed. I was out of my bed in a breath, drawing what little power I'd restored during my torpor to speed my steps to his side.

  Seamus stood in the middle of the double doors, the brass-framed glass spread like Icarus's wings to either side of him. He wore pajamas much like mine—some inoffensive blue flannel arrangement Talia must have gotten in bulk. Blood pooled at his feet, seeped up the hem of his pants. It was not his.

  "Seamus?" I asked, approaching slowly. He kept his arms out, hands on the doors as if they were the only thing holding him upright. Slowly, as if waking from a dream, he turned his head to look over his shoulder and blinked once. Twice.

  "Mags. I ... I think this was meant for you."

  His voice shook. His heart rate had not gone down. Metallic fear made his sweat smell sour, sharp. I licked my lips and approached him as if he were a horse getting ready to bolt. I rested one hand on his shoulder—gentle, no claws—and turned him, carefully, aside so I could pass him by.

  He stood at the pointed tip of a cartoon-shaped heart drawn in blood. Every rose had been pruned from the bushes with precision, leaving not a single petal behind in a sea of green leaves. The heart wrapped the whole garden in two halves barely failing to touch at the top peak. It had been painted by a bare hand, and fingerprints left thin areas here and there in the line. I didn't recognize the scent of the blood. Mortal, yes. But not anyone I had fed from.

  In the center of the heart, where the gravel path lead away from the door into the garden, rose petals had been pinned down in careful lines, stuck with blood for glue against the ground. Words. The petals spelled words, and though I wasn't sure I wanted to read them, my mind was one step ahead of me.

  Will you come to dance?

  At the end of the line, where the period at the end of the question mark should be, a stack of papers stabbed through with a wooden stake ruffled sweetly in the breeze. I moved toward them. Seamus grabbed my arm, digging his fingers into the flesh. I removed his grasp, peeling each finger away with care. Moved forward again.

  The stake was rosewood, fine and dark, polished to a deep and lustrous shine that was uneven, darker in some spots, as if it had been handled over many years, the owners leaving behind their mark in oils and the pressure of palms.

  "Mags," Seamus said, almost rasped, as I lowered myself to a crouch and reached, tentatively, for the stake. I held up a hand to him: quiet. There was no more danger here. Whoever had done this was long since gone.

  Whoever. As if I didn't know. As if a breath of violets did not still toy in the air. I got better at lying to myself every day.

  I grasped the stake and pulled, pressing the stack of papers down with my other hand so they wouldn't fly away. Nightwalker blood stained the tip of that stake, not so old as I would have liked. I didn't investigate too deeply, there was no need. The blood was Reynolds's. The last of DeShawn's missing Freak Squad was dead. Someone would have to tell him. I didn't want that someone to be me.

  I tossed the stake aside into the shorn rose bushes and picked up the stack of papers. Thick, off white paper with a slight texture. Each one the same. Each one a perfectly printed invitation to a party, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

  Do you have questions?

  Are you afraid?

  All will be answered, humanity.

  Come. You will be welcome. You will be safe.

  Tonight as the sun falls.

  You will know the place.

  It will be impossible to miss.

  Formal dress required.

  And then, in a flowing calligraphy, the signature: Lenora Faviola.

  I had no doubt that there were enough invitations for everyone inside the Durfort-Civrac household clutched in my fist.

  "What are they?" Seamus asked. His heart had slowed, his voice was back to full, but he did not budge from the place I'd nudged him into.

  "Invitations to a party."

  He licked his lips. "Whose blood is it?"

  I shook my head. "I do not know."

  He cleared his throat and shook himself, as if breaking through the surface of a lake, or awakening from a deep and terrible dream. I had admitted to not knowing something, and I think that's what shook him out of his trance. His job was to assist me.

  "Is this location secure?" he asked, firm.

  "As far as I know. The wards must have been breached for this to happen, though the interlopers are gone now. And neither myself nor Roisin alerted to the presence." But you did. I kept the thought to myself. He'd pulled himself together. There was no point in shaking him to pieces again.

  "Stay here. I'll get Maeve to check the wards."

  "Rouse Emeline and Roisin, too." I glanced toward the sky, turning a bruised purple as the sun began its hike above the horizon. "Get Talia to wake the whole household. We're going to need them."

  "On it." He took off at a jog, tracking a stranger's blood across Emeline's floor. Adelia would have had a fit. Under the circumstances, I hardly expected Emeline to notice.

  I stood and tilted my head back, scanning the trees that circled the garden, the estate. Looking for some crack in a magical veneer that I didn't have the aptitude to see in the first place. Lenora should not have been able to get in, it was a simple as that.

  After the rebuild, this place was warded against nightwalkers, full stop. Maeve had brought the wards down long enough for us to bring the ghoul inside, but that was days ago. And the rose garden, of all places, which was enchanted to always show daylight, even under the heaviest cloud cover? Lenora must have known about it, somehow. It was an old place, maybe it was in the nightwalker histories she spoke of but, I doubted that.

  I'd have to check on the ghoul. Be sure his mind was as dormant as Padhi believed. Claws had sprouted from my fingers, crunching the invitations in my fist. A sharp urge to toss them into the wind came over me.

  The silence of the garden broke. I turned toward the open doors as Emeline approached, Seamus at her side, gesticulating as he explained his discovery. I'd expected the same pajamas Talia seemed determined to thrust on everyone else, but Emeline wore a long, pink, satin nightgown with a matching robe pulled over the top and cinched tight about her waist. Her blonde curls flooded down almost to her elbows. If I hadn't scented her blood before I'd seen her, I wouldn't have recognized her.

  "Miss Shelley," she said upon spotting me, her gaze snapping back and forth as she took in the scene in the garden. "What happened?"

  "We've been invited to a party."

  She took the stack of invitations from my outstretched hand, her nose wrinkling as she read them. "Are we certain this is from Lenora?"

  It took me a beat to realize what she meant. The house was warded right down to the bedrock. A nightwalker should not be able to slip through those wards, no matter how talented, so, that meant that the most obvious solution was that someone in the house had done this little staging. One of our number was a traitor.

  But I'd caught that scent of violet, thin though it was. "I scented her. She's been gone a while, but her presence is stronger than most."

  Emeline's chest heaved as she sighed. "Good. Seamus, get on the security cameras. I want to review everything
as soon as possible."

  "Yes ma'am," he said, relieved to have a task handed to him that he knew what to do with.

  "Maeve?" Emeline barked over her shoulder. The witch was almost to the door, her body hidden beneath the fluffiest robe I'd ever seen, and a cat-face sleep mask pulled up around her head like a hair band.

  "Coming, coming," she slurred as if still half-asleep.

  "Your wards have been broken."

  Maeve stopped hard on the threshold to the rose garden and held her hands out as if feeling for an invisible wall. "No. Impossible. They're still functional, and I would have noticed. The bloody things aren't designed to be subtle."

  Emeline pointed a finger at the heart. "Really. Care to explain?"

  She sniffed. "Inside job."

  "Smells of Lenora," I said apologetically. She shot me a glare.

  "Poppycock."

  "It's true."

  "Oh..." She squinted at the sky somewhere above my head. "I see. Interesting. Maybe..." She started muttering to herself and shuffled out into the garden with bare feet, feeling her way around with her palms out. "I might need Seamus for this."

  "You can have him once he's gotten my footage."

  "What the hell's going on down here? Talia's knocking on doors like the damn house is burning down." DeShawn thumped down the steps two at a time, wearing his usual sleeping sweatpants that he insisted were only for bed, but I could have sworn I'd seen him wear to the gym once or twice. They hung around his hips and he had to pause to pull the ratty drawstring tight. He saw Emeline. She saw him. For the space of a breath it was like they were seeing each other for the first time. The air tensed up so thick Maeve squinted and pushed a little at whatever magical ley line she was investigating. The moment passed, and things went back to normal.

  "It appears we had a visitor," Emeline deadpanned, gesturing to the garden.

  "How is that possible? This place is supposed to be secure. That's why I dragged all my people over here."

  "Maeve and Seamus have begun investigations." I could practically hear Emeline's teeth grinding together in frustration. "I've only just discovered this myself, DeShawn."