Shadow Redeemed

by Megan Blackwood

Snarling, I ripped the veil and hat free from her head and the nightwalker laughed a stuttering, bloody-lipped laugh, her smile gruesome but no less triumphant even now when my claws sought her heart. This was no Lenora, only one of her make.

  "Where is your mistress?" I demanded.

  "Oh, it's too late for that," the nightwalker pushed the words out through the film of blood coating her lips.

  I reached for her heart and crushed it. Charcoal lines spider webbed her cheeks, following the path of her blood vessels as her back arched, skin turning to grey and then, finally, ash. I brushed her remains from my hands and met Roisin's eye.

  "Feed the shadows? Really?"

  She lifted a shoulder. "A distraction was needed. It sounded dramatic enough."

  I rolled my eyes, but I was smiling as I pressed my earpiece. "Emeline, Lenora isn't here. She left a double. What's the status of the exterior?"

  Talia said, her voice tight with constrained panic, "We can't get a hold of Emeline."

  "I thought she was in the car with you?"

  "She went to help the mayor evacuate," Talia said, and though her voice was tight, I could hear the click of her nails on the surface of her tablet as she worked away, trying to get a hold of Emeline anywhere, any way. "Some of DeShawn's people went with her."

  "Can't get in contact with them," DeShawn said tightly. "Going to their last known location now."

  I closed my eyes, breathing deeply of the blood-wine-and-fear-sweat stench of the high rise. They would not find her. And in the chaos of the evacuation, the screaming mortals, and the overwhelming scents on the air there was no way to track her.

  Roisin brushed her fingers against my arm. I snapped my eyes open and met her gaze, fearful, but steady. "The commander shall not give," she whispered for our ears alone.

  But the commander had given. Before that foreboding phlebotomist kit had been found, Emeline had allowed me to drink of her blood multiple times. This sensory chaos was enough to keep me from finding any other human, save those I had drank from. Lenora, even if she knew our laws better than we did, would not have accounted for that.

  "Shut up unless you've found her," I ordered.

  Blood-link or no, it would take all my focus to cut through the sensory overload of this bloodbath of a party and find one being. Roisin tipped her chin down and drew her pistols, letting me know that she guarded my back while I searched.

  I closed my eyes once more, but this time not in despair. This time, I needed to focus. Her scent was as familiar to me as my own, warm and mortal and sweet. A puff pastry of a woman, though no one would guess such a thing to look at the way she stood, with steel in her spine.

  But I remembered the younger woman, the Emeline that piled her hair up only because her mother did, and stared with hungry eyes in the mirror when she saw it down. More than sweetness and steel, then. The woman burned with passion and curiosity and there—just a feather of her scent. Nearby, but faded. Old. Emeline had gone from this place.

  Once, before I had partaken of Seamus's blood, I had told him that if he gave me even the tiniest drop, I could track him to ground anywhere in the world. He'd smiled, and said he understood, but he didn't, not truly. It is a charming thing, to believe that you could be found and rescued anywhere in the world. It is another thing entirely to be hunted.

  And that's what I am, what I was, what I shall always be. A predator. Though my search was meant to save, I felt Emeline subconsciously shrink from my supernatural attention, trying to close of the psychic link by reflex alone. She could be screaming my name to come save her—not that Emeline would ever do such a thing—and still her body would react that way.

  The commander shall not give, I thought, as I followed that shirking mind down a winding scent-trail that sparked like lighting in my mind. Emeline had not known that rule, nor had I. But I had no doubt Adelia had known it when she'd bade her daughter go to me and offer her blood, knowing full well that Emeline would inherit her title, and her leadership one day. Perhaps there were some rules that were too much even for that battle axe of a woman.

  There—sharp and glittering—the end of the trail. It's an impossible thing to describe that psychic space, that other-limb that I could see only when my eyes were closed, but through the streets of this city my mind had cut a sharp and definite path.

  "She's at the estate," I said, eyes snapping open.

  A small gasp escaped me from the effort and I swayed, but Roisin was there to catch my arm and steady me.

  "It's chaos out here," DeShawn said, "I can't get my people through. I'll make some calls but—"

  "I can't get into the camera system." Seamus cursed and thumped something.

  Their chatter rose high with panicked declarations of all their systems failing. Seamus couldn't get calls through, couldn't access his own network. Maeve could no longer sense her wards, though she'd never felt them break. DeShawn and his squad were adrift in a terrified tide of streaming humanity.

  Roisin and I shared a short look, though the understanding that passed between us was voluminous. We had been lured here, as surely as the mortal fodder. Lured as we were to the park and then stymied, stuck in place. Lenora had already demonstrated once she could break our wards at will.

  I scented blood but not the insane miasma of the atrium. This blood was older, pulled out of a memory granted by the Crucible of Flame, and stank of the sea and the steel of my blade, as I'd sliced the head from the commander of the Sun Guard rather than give him to the night.

  "They shall not have her," I said.

  Roisin nodded, and while the arguing went on in our ears, we drew upon our powers, and ran to our waiting motorcycles with all our strength.

  Twenty-eight: The Commander Shall Not

  Our bikes cut a neater path through the crowd than DeShawn's people could manage, and he was promising me he'd be there soon as we approached the gates to our home. A steady rain beat staccato fear into my heart, my back and arms, sluicing away what blood and wine and ash had soaked into my dress and replacing it with a clinging fabric that I longed to rip free just to get the stickiness off of me.

  Lighting, true and molten-bright, sliced across the sky, reaching tendril fingers down to the trees that dotted the moor. Secretly, I hoped they'd dash the oaks of the rose garden to ash. Nothing good had ever been portended from between those thick and ancient boughs.

  The iron gates of the estate had been thrown wide, mocking our sense of security. Though the rain muddied my senses, the unmistakable scent of violets and grave dirt marred the entryway to our home. Roisin and I came in fast, kicking up gravel as we swung the bikes into the drive. We hadn't bothered with the helmets—the police had better things to do than bother us tonight—and while the rain was thick enough to nearly blind us, we had other senses to rely upon.

  "Rose garden," I said, and though I was certain because of Emeline's scent, the truth was that it was always going to be the rose garden. Lenora had made her mark—a bull's-eye more than a heart—and we had only to play our parts in her game, now.

  Helplessness threatened to choke me but I pushed it into rage. Lenora may have set the board, but she didn't understand the pieces she was playing with. Couldn't understand the defensive fire burning through me. For, in being a nightwalker, she did not know what it was to love a mortal.

  I did, to my neverending sorrow.

  Lenora was not the only nightwalker there. While she had crammed her party with neophytes and Ragnar's leftovers, older blood hung in the air as Roisin and I sprinted around the estate to the garden. None of them I recognized, but then, she very well might have brought them with her from whatever hell-hole she had crawled out of to find her way to London.

  "That's far enough," Lenora said.

  Roisin and I stopped at the entrance to the garden. The towering oaks framed us, their once inviting branches providing scant shelter from the storm. Though the drawing had been washed away, a bench had been moved to what had been the center of Lenora's bloody h
eart, Emeline's thin frame lying lank and dripping across the cold marble. Her arms had been arranged so that her hands crossed over her stomach, her blonde curls allowed to drizzle over the sides of the bench, their tips swirling in small eddies of mud. She was as pale as the stone on which she lay, and the scent of her blood was fresh in the air, though I could see no wound.

  Everything in me screamed to run to her, but Lenora hovered over Emeline's right shoulder, and I could not see the other nightwalkers I smelled. Though Lenora was as drenched as the rest of us, her posture betrayed her composure. She had a plan, and us being here was a part of it.

  "Leave now," I said stiffly, "and I will let you take your older children with you back to wherever you came from."

  "So generous," she said with mock sincerity. "You killed them all, didn't you? The ones I left to play hostess."

  "All ash," I said.

  "Good." She nodded to herself. "Those were causing me trouble. Ragnar's hive thought they were owed something special, can you believe it? Just because their sire was older than me." She sniffed. "Foolish things, but they served their purpose, if poorly. I must confess, you arrived much earlier than expected."

  "Lenora. If you do not step away from Lady Emeline right this moment, I will rip your arms from your body and stake you with your own claws."

  "Oh my," she said, and pressed one hand to her breast. "Such vulgar threats. You've been too long with the cattle, my darling. You're starting to sound like them. I've had a little think about our conversation. It's occurred to me, that for us to work together, some lines must be blurred, hmm?"

  I stepped forward. She extended one delicate claw and poised it above Emeline's heart. I stopped.

  "I think not," she said. "Can't you hear it? The poor thing's little heart, stuttering away, hardly a drop left to keep her from dear old death's door. But I am not a greedy woman, Magdalene." She drew the claw of her thumb across her forefinger, exposing a thin line of blood. "I mean to share."

  I lunged, Roisin my shadow, and while we angled ourselves for Emeline and Lenora, we struck a wall of nightwalker flesh instead. Four of them dropped from the oak branches above, making a fence of their bodies and claws and teeth and all I could hear, as I tore through Lenora's older makes, was the trill of Lenora's laughter and the wet tearing of my claws.

  But these creatures would not go down so easily as the neophytes. The rain and the dark made everything a mess, blurred shape and line and sense until we were nothing more than a tearing, snarling, mass of limbs. In my heart every second ticked away, knowing that thin line of blood beaded upon Lenora's claw, knowing it was only seconds until the rain hastened that blood's fall and it dripped into Emeline's mouth.

  Ash mixed with mud and rain. My body screamed from dozens of wounds as the first fell and then the other, and the other, and then Roisin and I were both upon the last man standing and over his shoulder, it was too late—that drop fell.

  A wave of shadow rammed into the laughing Lenora. She shattered into a burst of silver mist, the motes of light that made up her being twinkling as tiny stars, mocking us, saying she was not dead, not yet, and as she fled the last of her elder children dissolved into ash my hands.

  "Emeline!" Roisin shouted and lunged for the prone woman, but I grabbed the back of her dress and held tight. The wall of shadow that'd slammed into Lenora was no fluke. Prickles crawled across my skin at that presence. Roisin took a step back, seeing that coalescing dark, and snarled under her breath as it wriggled and flickered into something like a man-shape.

  And then the scent: hay, sunlight, and tombstone.

  "Lucien?" I asked the darkness.

  He turned to me. Something like a face, a hint of his angularity, appeared out of the dark. Silver-limned eyes that were an endless, impossible void. It was not right. Ragnar had taken back his strength, Lucien's eyes should be nothing but nightwalker silver and now I knew... Knew why he had not looked at me. He blinked, struggling, forcing himself back into this world. A wisp of black smoke coiled into a red scarf, mingled with the rain and poured down his broad back into a coat.

  Roisin swore and ran to Emeline's side. I was rooted to the spot, speared under that solemn stare.

  "I felt Lenora here," he said, softly, but somehow I could still hear him above the thrash of rain and thunder. "Where she should not be."

  "Christ," Roisin said, scooping Emeline's head up with one hand. She gave her a little shake, then looked up at me, golden eyes wide. "She's alive."

  It was not merely shock widening Roisin's eyes. How foolish I was, to misplace that predatory glint, for her chin jutted forward and her head twisted as if on a swivel, eyes like molten gold turning upon Lucien. Lenora was gone, but the oath still sang to Roisin.

  "Go," she hissed the word, her body a taut coil, and in that echo I understood him, as he had been on the river bank. My oath was broken. Theirs was not. And it was, I thought, only the fact that Roisin had known him as a mortal that kept her from springing for him now.

  The sorrow in his gaze as he looked upon our sad tableau was an apology, and in all honesty I knew not what for. Maybe for being too late. Perhaps for being at all. But it was enough, and we bowed our heads to him in silent thanks, and then that hay-warm scent stung my nostrils and he was gone to shadow.

  Roisin breathed out shakily and withdrew her claws and fangs. "I don't know how you stand it."

  "I think you do."

  We looked at one another then, over the scarcely breathing body of our commander, and the assessment that was made was not pretty from either side, but at least, I felt, it was honest. Her oath was intact, and mine was so much ash. As with Lucien, as in those moments when my eye first turned silver and her claws sought my heart, she should be overcome with the urge to destroy me. And yet... and yet she smiled at me with kind eyes, and normal, human teeth.

  We had found a loophole, she and I. Though I did not know the reason, I suspected it had something to do with passing the first two trials of the crucible, despite my rejection of the third.

  The garden became a riot of light, stinging our eyes. Cars screamed into the drive, engines growling as they slid through the gravel and muck, their headlamps pointed at us both. DeShawn was first out, flying towards us in a headlong sprint. Roisin had the presence of mind to lift Emeline up in her arms, the movement smooth with sunstrider grace, so the humans couldn't jostle her.

  I'd seen DeShawn through a lot of painful moments. That night, as we stood beneath the driving rain and peals of lightning ripped the sky asunder, he gave up. Only for a moment, I do not believe that that man could ever be well and truly broken, but as the lashing rain pounded through us all, pulling Emeline's gravity-defying curls toward the earth in shuddering rivers, I saw something vital in him break.

  He stopped a good yard away from us, as if in delaying his approach he could delay knowing the truth of what lay in Roisin's arms. His hands hung open at his sides, fingers limp, mountainous shoulders sliding down as the tension of the chase gave way to the stark impotent truth of what had already been done. He was too late. We were, all of us, too late, and there was no weapon nor tactic in all the world that could undo the thready beat of Emeline's heart.

  The others hit the ground running and the spell broke, snapping DeShawn back into himself. He lifted a hesitant hand toward Emeline then pulled it back.

  "Is she...?" he asked.

  "She is not dead," Roisin said, as if the words were enough. As if the simple fact of living saved through the night. Roisin always left the hard words to me, damn her.

  The others gathered, a hesitant half circle, feet sticking in the mud as the skies of London did everything they could to grind us back into the dirt. Even Maeve, always moving Maeve, had gone still as stone, the only sound from her the soft whispering of her trinkets as the wind nudged them to and fro.

  "But she is a ghoul," I said, and lighting tore across the sky.

  Twenty-nine: For Want of a Drop

  Terror hit them in w
aves. I had already sat with the truth, though only a moment, my failure at its most exquisite bite the second blood dripped from Lenora's claw between Emeline's lips. That she had meant to turn her fully, I had no doubt. The only thing standing between Emeline and eyes of silver had been Lucien, for we had been too slow.

  I thought of blood, mortal and hot, soaking the sands of some ancient beach and grew irritated at the weeping terror that rocked the mortals around me. It could be worse. It could be so much worse.

  "DeShawn," I said in a voice meant to carry. "Get Padhi. Now. We'll take her to the infirmary." A quick improvisation, calling it an infirmary. I did not think these friends of Emeline—my friends—could stand to hear it be called anything else.

  "On it," he said, and bolted for the garden doors.

  The rest looked at me, wide-eyed, seeking something to do. The young sunstriders, having arrived shortly after the mortals, stirred impatiently.

  "Maeve, Seamus," I said, "examine the wards. I want to know how they got in. We must secure this place."

  They nodded and scrambled off, heads together.

  "Brethren," I addressed the gold-glowing eyes in the night. "I know you hunger for vengeance, but not yet. Lenora brought elders with her. Not ancient, but older than any we encountered at the high rise. They may come again. I need you here, securing and patrolling the perimeter. The storm does not dull us as it does the mortal guard."

  "Understood," Julian said tightly and snapped a salute before fading back into the night.

  Talia clutched the collar of her coat close to her throat and stared at me behind rain-slicked glasses. "What can I do?"

  Light, but this was Emeline's job. I scarcely knew the things Talia got up to when helping me plan my own missions, let alone this back-footed scrambling. The flashing blue light on top of DeShawn's car caught my attention.

  "Coordinate with Roland, and later DeShawn when he's available. What happened at the high rise is not over. We have terrified mortals on the streets, some drunk with too much blood, fleeing from flesh-rending shadows. Use whatever mortal strength we have to lock that building down and for light's sake, keep people out of it."