Shadow Redeemed

by Megan Blackwood

  "Tell me," he said, and for a breath his voice was as full as it had ever been, and just as gentle.

  I told him all. And if he snarled at the story of the shackles on my wrists, designed to mimic ones he had worn himself, I let him. And, light help me, did not offer a word in defense of my order. When I reached the stories of the trial, his silence was complete, body falling into that unnatural stillness we of the undead can harness. When it was done, he roused himself with a slight shake of the head.

  "You should have killed me," he said at last.

  I met his eye then. I'd been avoiding it. The black of his irises, with their shifting bursts of nightwalker quicksilver, didn't unnerve me. I told myself that alone was the reason, that his change toward the dark pained me—and it did—but what hurt more was the look in his eye, seeing my own changed gaze. To Lucien, my Lucien, that silver eye of mine would forever sing his failure to save me.

  "Never," I said, and meant it, though the very thought would have driven me mad with self-loathing if the oath still held sway.

  He sucked air through his teeth. "It's true, then."

  He was beside me before I could answer. Cold fingers brushed my cheek, gritty with blood and ash and, I admit, tears, seeking up the line of my cheekbone to come to rest against my temple. Not beside the silver eye, but the gold. The one he had known and loved, always.

  "They will kill you for this," he said with strange tenderness, considering the words.

  I smiled, feeling the cruelness of my expression. "They don't know."

  "Impossible."

  "Roisin knows, and no other."

  "How?"

  "I took the leash from my master's hand."

  His forehead furrowed, and I traced the line between his brows with a fingertip. "It's not possible, Magdalene."

  "So we have been told," I said and laughed roughly, shaking my head in a spray of sticky rainwater. "Ah, Ragnar. I think he saw a sliver of the truth, through he went about things the wrong way. He told me so very many times, and I never listened. I'm not sure that I could, before the mote."

  Lucien went still. "Ragnar spoke naught but lies. He craved only the power of the light to ride twin to Luna."

  "Lucien," I said gently, "the trial is not a test of what exists, native to the blood. It is a crucible, and it forges chains."

  I told him then, what I had felt in that place. Not just the details of the trials, but the presence—its watchfulness, and its frustration with my refusal. How it felt twin to the thing that dwelled in the dark, and when he shifted at that, unsettled, I placed my hand against his, and pressed on.

  Everything. I told him everything. The crates in Ragnar's hive, the writings in my own rushed hand. I told him Claudette's eyes had been hazel, in the end.

  I told him my mother named me for the moon.

  He listened in the silence of death until the moment my mortal name passed my lips. Then he rocked back, settling onto his heels, and though I knew every line of that man by heart I could not read the expression that settled over him tight as a caul. Though his expression was a puzzle to me, his hands were not, and I knew them just as well. Knew what it meant as he traced the line of my jaw with one finger, curling languidly beneath my chin.

  "What will you do?" he asked.

  "Destroy Lenora," I said.

  "Fulfill the calling of your order?"

  I shook my head, dislodging his hand. "It's not so simple as that. Though I resent the leash and the lies, their reasoning remains true. Some other place seeps into this world, and we must cull the nightwalkers to right that scale before the world is consumed in shadow."

  The faint scowl that painted his lips I understood. "There will only be another. While Ragnar worked his trick upon your order, the number of nightwalkers swelled across the world. They've kept themselves hidden, for now, but they will claw their way to London if Lenora falls, just as she did after Ragnar's death. There's too much power here. You will spend your life cutting off the head of their order to save the mortals from the dark and never know the truth of your own words. Of what we are."

  I closed my eyes. "You did not see it. You did not see those blades of night. I must end it."

  "You think I haven't seen it?"

  I met his gaze, and ice water ran through my veins. "Magdalene, my love, some nights I think I am it."

  I traced the line of his grey vein, withered and dying, from elbow to palm. "No. I would know."

  He stood, breaking our small touches, the damp wool of his coat brushing my leg. "Neither one of us sees clearly."

  "You are not the one scattering fledgling nightwalkers and ghouls like seeds to the winds of London. Lenora and her numbers are the lodestone that draws the dark. Not you. Never you."

  He pressed his lips together and looked away, out of the narrow window in the living room, to the rain-drowned night.

  "I used to wonder if your surety came from you, or your oath. Strange, to know the answer now."

  I bristled all over, too tired by half to walk the winding paths of Lucien's suspicions. "Better for me to decide and take action, than linger in indecision while the world dissolves around us all. You could stop her, Lucien. You alone could wrest the minds from her claws and restore some order. Stop the senseless... Senseless breeding she seems determined to orchestrate."

  "Do not ask such a thing of me."

  I stood, and though my limbs trembled from exhaustion, anger kept me on my feet. "And why not? We are what we are, it cannot be undone, but we can still do some good in this world. There is no such thing as being neutral. Withdrawing is a choice. It makes you complicit. In doing nothing, you absolve Lenora."

  "Neutral? Is that what you think me?"

  He looked down into my face—I had forgotten how tall he was—and pain flickered at the corners of his eyes. "I stay my hand because I cannot know what I might become should I attempt the strike."

  "You are stronger than us all," I said, hating the pleading in my voice. "If you fear taking their reins will make you like Ragnar, remember that he was already old with the blood before he turned you on that beach. What you carry..." I touched his temple, light as a whisper, to indicate the darkness in his eyes. He shivered. "... is yours. It cannot control you. I should know. I see no reason you should not act."

  He grasped my hand and pulled it away from him, but did not release it. Nor did he look at me.

  "Would you believe that, after all this time, I have still not had my fill?"

  "Of immortality?" I laughed bitterly. "I would have guessed you were done with that by now. You are starving yourself, Lucien. Did you think I wouldn't know?"

  "Magdalene, I have not yet had my fill of you."

  "Then do not leave me." I grasped his forearm and traced the grey veins lurking beneath pale skin. "You must feed."

  Lucien's gaze fell to the caress of my fingers, his sluggish heart thumping heavily beneath my touch. The outline of his fangs pushed against his lips. "You would preserve me, despite what I've become?"

  "I would preserve you even if it brought the world to its knees."

  He kissed me, fangs grazing my lips with two kinds of hunger, and we spoke no more that night.

  Thirty-one: Everything

  The Durfort-Civrac estate passed the night unscathed. I arrived with the dawn, a bag of cat food stuffed under my jacket, and found a tight cordon of sunstriders on the perimeter, keeping vigil. Inside, everyone seemed to be running and shouting all at once.

  Fear gripped me at first, but the chaos wasn't born of panic. The mortals running here and there were focused, but grinning like idiots, their sleepless faces split by wide smiles. Baffled, I made my way into the library and dropped the cat food on a table. Mr. Pips wound between my ankles, and I gave him a pat before finding Seamus and Talia hard at work scanning in the library's many tomes.

  "What's happened?" I asked.

  The both jumped. Talia almost dropped a book on Seamus's head from the top of her library ladder.

>   "Jesus," Seamus said, scraping a hand across his face. "We have to put a bell on you." He blinked at me, and a genuinely pleased smile curled up his lips. "It's Emeline. Padhi thinks he's worked it out. He tried it on another ghoul and they came around. We let them go just a few hours ago. He's about to try it on the Lady."

  "And you two are fussing with books?"

  Talia flushed. "We didn't want her thinking we were avoiding work while she was gone. I didn't get to all of them while I was recovering. There's just too much."

  "It's only been one night," I said, baffled. "And even you two have to sleep."

  I sensed Roisin enter the library before I heard her.

  "Good, you're here. He's going to wake Emeline now," she said.

  We left the library in disarray and followed Rosin down to Padhi's lab. He looked askance at the number of people in his lab, but said nothing. All of us, save those few sunstriders who guarded our borders, crowded as close as we dared.

  If Padhi had been sleepless before, he was a walking zombie now. It worried me, but his hands were steady and his eyes sharp and clear, so I said nothing. He'd cured one ghoul. He wouldn't risk this if he believed there was a chance of failure.

  Despite his sure, deft movements, Roisin and I could still scent the taint of nightwalker in the air.

  "She's coming 'round now," Padhi said, narrating his motions—what drugs he was pushing, and in what amounts. To my ear, the names and doses might have well been one of Maeve's more archaic spells.

  When Emeline's eyelids fluttered, Padhi picked up a vial of slick red fluid and pressed a syringe into the top, drawing up a careful amount. As he tapped the needle, my nose twitched. Some of what had gone into that mix was my blood, stale and diluted, but known to me anywhere. Roisin shot me a sideways glance, and I shrugged. If it worked, it worked.

  It was no pretty thing, watching Emeline rouse herself. She came to in fits and starts, her limbs jerking and contorting in odd angles beneath the gentle, but firm, hold of her leather restraints. Padhi had kept those tucked beneath the tight pull of her bed sheets, and I was grateful for that. Even in this risky, torturous task, he would give our leader a quantum of dignity. If Padhi's diligence had not already won me over, that alone would have made me his loyal servant for life.

  "She has not woken up since the garden," Padhi said, tracking her vitals on a screen hovering over the bed.

  DeShawn's expression soured, eyes narrowing. "She hasn't consented to this experiment?"

  Padhi said nothing.

  Maeve said, "Lad, if she came around, she wouldn't have been herself. It's a kindness."

  DeShawn pressed his lips together hard enough to drain the blood from them, fists clenching. Either she woke whole and healing here, this moment, or she died without ever knowing what she'd been forced to become. A kindness, indeed.

  At last a low, quiet breath left her and with it the agony that had twisted up her muscles. If the death rattle had been next to pass her lips, I wouldn't have been surprised, for in that moment she looked as limp as the dead. And yet, somehow, her eyelids drifted open. Only halfway, and the eyes behind them were cloudy and vague, but she was there. Emeline. Not the ghoul-thing riding her blood.

  No one dared to move, save Padhi, who had seen this process once before. He pricked her finger swiftly with the tip of a lancet, and as the droplet swelled against her finger he looked at me, brows raised, because though he monitored her heart and breath he could not tell me the nature of her essence without the aid of an instrument.

  "The taint is lessening," I said honestly. What before had been a thick miasma of taint was now only a thin thread.

  "What happened?" Emeline asked in a weakened but clear voice.

  "I'll make some tea," Maeve said and bustled out of the room. She didn't want to see Emeline's face when she learned the wards had failed.

  "Lenora took you," I said, as no one else was willing to put the fact to words.

  Emeline blinked slowly and turned her head toward me. Dirty golden hair framed her narrow, pale face. "And then?"

  "Attempted to turn you." There were sharp intakes of breath all around, but I wouldn't dissemble with my leader, not now, when the world's fate hung on a knife's edge of shadow. "It was Lucien who saved you, Dr. Padhi who made you well."

  "Lucien..." A wry smile twisted her cracked lips, and if she had had the energy to laugh, I was sure she would have. "What has been done?"

  "We've been very busy!" Talia chirped out.

  Padhi tsked and, reacting to some invisible response in Emeline's state, glared around at all of us. "She's awake. She's well. If we want to keep her that way, you must let her rest now."

  Emeline met my eye with a hard, heavy stare. For a second I feared her eyes would swirl with silver, but she merely blinked, jaw stiffening, then nodded to herself. "Go. Make plans. Use everything before it's too late."

  We filed out of the room, each of us ruminating on our own thoughts until we reached the sanctum of the library. I cannot say for certain what the others thought of, but I thought of only one thing: Padhi's cure for ghouls worked.

  Not only on the fresh turn Roisin had brought him the night before, but on Emeline. I hadn't dared to say the words, not even to myself, but the scent of her blood had been more nightwalker than mortal in those moments after Lucien fled and Padhi took her into his care. Though Lenora hadn't given her much, it might have been enough for a full turn. Just one more drop, and our Emeline would stare at us through silver eyes, cheeks rouged not with fever but with bloodlust.

  I met Roisin's eye as we filtered into the library, last of the group, and she tipped her chin to me in silent acknowledgement. I hadn't been alone, then. Padhi had performed the impossible. That he had done it by using my own blood as the base of his cure raised more questions than I could comprehend.

  A subtle surge of primordial power roiled through me, whispering of a balance the Sun Guard no longer acknowledged—the blank slate vampire, a creature that existed before chains bound us to serve either the sun or the moon. Perhaps that origin state lurked within all of us vampires, only waiting to be tipped back to the beginning. Claudette's eyes had been hazel, after all, when they had been as gold as mine before her final moments. Something to dwell upon later. Now, we needed to deal with what this meant for the ghouls.

  "This changes a great deal," I said, and felt my words fall like stones into a still lake. Without Emeline, they looked to me. "If we can cure the ghouls, then there is no more need for slaughter."

  "We can't be sure it'll work on all of 'em," Seamus said. "Emeline and the other were fresh turns."

  "Ghouls, not turns. There is a difference. And the truth of the matter is..."

  Roisin said, "Emeline was barely mortal."

  Talia let out a small sound and pressed her hand to her throat. "I don't understand," she said.

  "Lucien intervened before it was too late, that's true, but most ghouls merely drink their master's blood. Emeline had been drained, and that single drop of Lenora's blood was the only thing keeping her going until the infusion. The magic of that was so strong..."

  "You thought she'd turn," Seamus said. He'd plunked himself down in front of his computer, but he pushed away from the desk now, palms flat on the top, and glared at me and Roisin. "Both of you. You thought she was lost and didn't tell us."

  "We didn't know," Roisin said.

  "How fucking dare—" DeShawn took a step toward me. I merely met his gaze. If he wanted to hit me for keeping that from him, well, it wouldn't pain me. He caught himself and grimaced. "We had a right to know."

  "I'm not sure Emeline would agree with that," I said. "She's a private woman. Dr. Padhi knew. That was all that was necessary."

  "We... we spent the night organizing," Seamus said, aghast. "We should have been with her."

  "She would not have wanted it, and she was in a coma regardless."

  "Enough," Julian, of all people, ground out the word. "Lady Emeline can tell us herself wh
at she would have wanted, when she's well. She gave us an order, and every minute we bicker Lenora floods the streets with more of her fledgling turns and ghouls. We can stop it now."

  "Can we?" Talia asked, hesitant. "I'm sorry, I don't mean to be the downer here, but logistics are what I do and... And even if we found a crèche of them, you'd have to subdue them all while we administer the cure. We don't have the numbers."

  Julian said, "Again it comes down to the balance. If we turned more—"

  "That has been forbidden us," I said harshly. "Just because Emeline's not here doesn't mean we can go against her will, and neither Roisin nor I want more fledglings of the blood to keep an eye on."

  "Fine," Julian said, "then we take the ghouls in small numbers. Pick them off a few at a time and bring them back here where they can be controlled. Inspector Culver, you have vans that could help us gather them, do you not? With appropriate restraints?"

  "We do." He scratched his chin. "And my people are itching to do something. Could requisition use of the extra Paddy wagons—"

  "I'd rather you didn't call them that," Maeve said coolly.

  DeShawn turned crimson. "Shit. Sorry. The answer is yes, Julian. I can get you all the vans and restraints you need—riot gear, mostly."

  "A war of attrition," Maeve mused, pacing a small circle as was her wont when thinking. Something had kicked loose in her mind. "Slow and painful and easily overrun if Lenora figures out what you're doing and decides to up her flood. We still don't know what the fallout of her blood wine was. Those people might not even know they're ghouls for days. Not until they start sweating and hungering for something they can't quite name..."

  "What would you have us do?" Julian's voice was tight with frustration. "If you have aught to offer, witch, then do it."

  "Let her think." Roisin's voice was soft, but carried with such weight that Julian bowed his head.

  Maeve paced her tight circle, fiddling with her charms, muttering a low chant that had nothing to do with magic, but everything with focus. Her feet shuffled along, and I realized her circle wasn't a nervous tic—she was stepping out a circle of protection. A clever habit to have, it one were prone to throwing oneself into danger as Maeve was.