Shadow Redeemed

by Megan Blackwood

  "Quickly," Roisin said through gritted teeth.

  I had an obscene urge to pray, but I couldn't imagine who might be listening. Going still as the dead, I placed one hand over her heart. She grimaced and made it beat so I could feel the gentle pressure of it, fluttering in pain as the silver coursed through her.

  Placing my other hand on the grip, I met her gaze and held it. She nodded. I pulled.

  Blood gushed from the wound, a sucking sound following the metal out of her body. Roisin gasped and bent double. I threw the dagger away and grabbed her shoulders, supporting her as she heaved out a vomitous rush of poisoned blood.

  But she was whole. She was not ash beneath my feet and I shuddered with her, feeling hot tears of relief streak my cheeks.

  Despite the lingering poison, she healed the worst of the wound and looked up at me through rose-gold eyelashes, her body trembling like an autumn leaf as I braced her.

  "Get up," she breathed.

  "What?"

  I sensed them, then. Their scent had been crushed beneath the tsunami of ghouls, but Lenora had not come alone. What nightwalkers she'd made before her death had waited on the roof around the gallery while she battled, and they were not waiting now.

  Full in their strength beneath the light of the moon, Lenora's children converged on steady feet across the dew-slick solar tiles, not a misstep among them. Dozens. She'd made dozens, and I could not know how many were new to the blood, and how many she had brought with her through time, as she had those in the oak trees at the estate.

  Though their movements were restrained for now, I didn't need to get close to sense the rage washing over them. I'd known despair as Claudette died, not understanding what had happened to her. These nightwalkers, these children of Lenora, had known enough of her to love her, and the rage of their blood burned as hot as the rage of the ghouls frothing below.

  I stood, picked up my gold-chased blade, and placed myself between them and Roisin.

  Thirty-six: Lost in the Balance

  The youngest broke rank first. There was no time to look into their faces, to know them for who they were. They were just bodies now, weapons thrown against me, a never-ending tide meant to wear away the ancient stone I had become.

  I knew only that they were young because they fell easily, ash mixing with the mist on the roof until a sticky paste had formed. I lost track of time and space and myself as I pulled upon what ragged scraps of power I had left. Luna's strength, her voice no longer a tempting lure in my head but a woeful screech, came to me in stuttering trickles.

  All those promises of the night. All those songs of power sung high in my blood and heart, and when the night answered my call, I had not the blood left in my veins to channel it. I'd laugh, if I had the strength to spare.

  Gunfire cracked. I could not see her, but I sensed Roisin coiled tight behind me, taking careful and steady aim with what few golden bullets she had left. The bark of her weapon sounded again and again, a steady patter, nightwalkers taking shots that either felled them or sent them into a wheeling rage at me. But it was not enough.

  For their elders stood back, waiting.

  They let their young ones throw themselves against us, let them whittle us down so that our powers hung on by a spider's thread, waiting for the moment when we wouldn't have the strength to do any of their number real harm. We had felled their sire, and while we bled and staggered, they were not foolish enough to risk themselves until they were damn sure not another of their ancient order would die tonight.

  Lenora had wanted an alliance, wanted knowledge, and that desire had created the cracks through which I could break her defense. These people wanted only our deaths, and there was no defense against such blinding hatred.

  Bloodied fingers crested the roof, a mortal head jerked up after them, eyes bloodshot and hungry.

  I swore and side-stepped, moving away from that edge of the roof, for these creatures were still mortal, and could be saved. Though they'd tear me limb from limb given the chance, I couldn't bring myself to cut them down. Their bloodlust was my own doing, after all.

  Roisin's weapons fell silent. We huddled there, her back to my legs, my torso bent forward as every muscle in my body trembled from pure exhaustion, warning me of imminent failure.

  The elders watched on. Maybe this is what they wanted. Maybe they wanted me to fall to weakness. Wanted to watch the eldest of the sunstriders, proud and eternal, ripped to pieces by mortal hands.

  "Help me up." Roisin thrust her hand at me. "If I'm going to die, I'll do it on my feet."

  With one hand on my blade I reached the other to her, wrapped her trembling claws in mine and heaved, amazed at the effort it took to drag her upright.

  Roisin staggered, caught herself against the wall of the dome, and brought her sword to bear. Some of the shakiness had left her, and although I dared not take my gaze from the nightwalkers for long, I marveled at her calm, steady stance, chin up as if this were any other battle, not a dooming tide.

  "Always knew it would come down to just the two of us," she said through chattering teeth as she caught my look. Her wan face split with a fierce grin. "Let's make it hurt."

  I grinned back at her, dizzy with the impossibility of it all. Extending one hand toward the nightwalkers, I curled my claws in a come-hither motion.

  "Come on then, you great fucking cowards!"

  Their cold impassivity broke. Snarls echoed my own, and many bore fangs at us. I mirrored their fang-bearing and hissed, lifting my chin high. Roisin flashed her own fangs in defiance.

  Their restraint broke at last. The wall of nightwalker rushed us, too-thick shadows clipping at their heels. Strange elation bubbled up within me, effervescent, as we roared battle cries at one another. Roisin and I may not have had the strength to rush to meet their charge, but we stood our ground. When the first clash of steel rang out, we gave not an inch beneath the blows.

  Chaos swirled in shadow and blood and flesh. Bits of me went missing, numb, my vision fogged with red rage, my body hanging on by pure anger as I sucked down every last drop of strength Luna found fit to grant my thin blood.

  A sensation like a million spiders scrambling across my skin took my breath away. I staggered beneath a blow, knowing not where it came from, and wondered if this was what it was like before the skin started peeling, before the fissures took hold and rent me from the inside out.

  The onslaught receded. I stumbled, catching myself against the dome. Roisin took the head of a nightwalker with an expert swipe of her claws before she fell, her strength spent, to her knees.

  The nightwalker's ash showered her in a faint dusting of false snow, caught in her hair. I pushed away from the dome, slipped in an inky spill of blood—so dark, so terribly black those last droplets of our lives—and reached for her. Roisin Quinn would not die kneeling. I would drag her to her feet before the end, light take us all.

  The blood on the ground writhed, shivered. I grasped her shoulder and pulled with everything I had left, swaying from her weight, and could no longer tell which one of us leaned more heavily on the other.

  The world went black. But it did not stop.

  A silver brightness seared my eyes, then was chased away by shadow. The snarls of the nightwalkers turned from hatred to fear. Through the red haze of my vision I saw only their impressions as they scrambled back, fleeing some pool of blood on the ground that was not blood at all.

  Too many of us in one place. We'd drawn the dark.

  The puddle lurched upward, shuddered and twisted, bubbling at the seams as twisting tendrils lashed out, then drew back into itself, forcing through some brutality I could not name to shape the splotch of void into a man.

  A man I loved.

  Lucien Dubois stood between us and the nightwalker horde. That same old coat hung from his shoulders, blending with the shadow so that I could not tell, through my failing vision, where the man ended and the night began.

  He was very still, my Lucien, and though my sense
s struggled to make sense of the world around me I knew his scent for his own, and was warmed to know that the taint of starvation had gone from his blood. Lucien had fed from me, and that, it seemed, had been enough to save him and doom myself. So be it. It only ached that I had taken Roisin with me.

  The howling of the ghouls ceased. The nightwalkers resumed their sentinel wall, frozen in place under the steady gaze of this ancient creature who had ripped himself from the dark.

  His scent was hale, but imperfect. Tainted with something else, something I could not name. That other-place that only he could travel unscathed, that he had been leashed to in the moment of Ragnar's twisted ritual.

  Roisin lost consciousness. I sagged under her weight, almost screaming from the simple effort of standing. Her claws stayed out, her fangs extended even in unconsciousness. The signs of a vampire with no drop left to give.

  Lucien turned to me. His eyes were as dark as the void, edge to edge, not a hint of Luna's silver light in them. It would have chilled me, it should have chilled me, but that hay-warm scent clung ever on to him, and I knew whatever face he wore he was my Lucien. Always.

  "My Magdalene," he said, voice heavy with grief. "When you remember me, remember that I am sorry."

  I had no strength for words. Whatever he saw in my face, it was enough. He turned to the nightwalkers and extended one pale hand. His veins were no longer grey. If not for the scent of his blood I could have believed him carved of purest marble.

  One by one, they knelt. Electric frisson tingled me from scalp to toes, breaking through the fog of agony. The power washing over us bore me to my knees.

  He should not be so strong. I was his elder, and even I could not channel such force of will. Nightwalker heads bowed, shoulders hunching over, backs rounding, until they were all but groveling.

  And yet Lucien did not relent. I wasn't certain he could. The strength pouring from within him was a font without a nozzle, a rushing tide of darkness that had nothing at all to do with Luna and her gifts.

  Shadows pooled like molten metal at the feet of the nightwalkers, slid up their arms and feet, caressed the foreheads they'd pressed to the ground, poured into them from every angle—eye and mouth and pore, the darkness forced its way in. Questing. Childlike in its curiosity. Their preponderance had been what had drawn that darkness to this world. Lucien was giving them to the shadow, body and soul.

  One by one, the nightwalkers blinked out of existence.

  Through the haze of my injuries I felt the very back of the Earth shudder. Roisin twitched in my grasp and I held her tighter, as if I could anchor her to the world. My ears popped. Everything grew still and silent. The ghouls ceased their howling. Those who had climbed their way onto the roof stared around them in docile confusion, bodies beginning to shake as shock set in. My body no longer had the capacity for shock.

  The darkness fled. I had not realized how much of London's nights had been infected by that being from beyond this world. The very air felt thinner, the light of Luna—even through the fog—bright as if full noon had come suddenly in the middle of the night. I had thought always of the nightwalkers as my darker kin, but until that shadow-being had come, I had never really known the dark at all. How long? How long had we walked, wary, beneath the taint of that ancient thing, all unknowing?

  Lucien had given it the nightwalkers. A balance had been struck, and the being of the void cared for this world no longer.

  And yet, in using that terrible power, he'd fused himself to that being irrevocably. And as it retreated, so did he.

  The edges of Lucien frayed. The long shadows melded with this body slipped away, back into that other place, dragging pieces of the man with them. His hay scent clung on, a golden lance through the emptiness that he became. He did not turn to look back. He had said what he wanted, and done what he must. All the rest was academic.

  My heart ached, a breath-taking agony that chased the fugue of pain away. Hay. He still smelled of sun-warmed hay, but there was more in that touch of warmth, wasn't there? My blood flowed in Lucien's veins. My blood powered his strength, and though I had no power left to grant him, I felt that thin tether between us, and moved.

  My vision hazed from the strain, a hot and heady power, sweet like honey, like sunshine, poured into me—impossible, there was no sunlight in the night—and so the strength must have been coming from within me. The balance in my blood had brought Emeline back from the brink. Maybe it could claw back Lucien. I may have no magic, but Padhi's experiments had shown me a key. I had only to twist it in the lock.

  Lucien turned. His body was little more than a sooty smudge against the moonlit night. That marble-pale hand had dissolved or been shoved in a pocket, or maybe I was losing my mind in the end, for all I saw of Lucien was his face, gentle but pained, and the black waves of his hair framing those impossible eyes. My eyes were impossible too.

  A warm glow washed over him, bringing gentle light to his sharp cheeks, and as his brow knit in confusion I grasped his face in both of my hands and saw that the faint yellow light was coming from within me.

  "What... What have you become?" His lips did not move, he had no breath to stir against my skin, but I heard the words in his voice, wondering and worried, all the same. My mother had named me for the moon. My sire had made my veins run with the sun's gold.

  "Balance," I said, and kissed him.

  Thirty-seven: The Question Unasked

  The next thing I knew was the taste of Seamus's blood upon my lips. My throat spasmed, seizing upon this precious gift, and every muscle in my body cramped from the desperate need to claim that sustenance for healing.

  "Easy," he said.

  My eyes flung open, blinking hard against the sharp light of a noon sun. Seamus pressed his hands against my arm, anchoring me to the present, and a soft shudder ran through my body.

  "How?" I asked.

  "We tracked Roisin through the city, but Maeve's spell was only enough to keep her concealed from the ghouls. DeShawn went for air support, but was too late to do any good."

  The taste of Seamus's blood spurred a hot, golden memory. I glanced down at my hands, lying flat against the sheets, and though they were thin and scarred they, at least, weren't glowing from within now. Maybe I had imagined those final moments.

  "Roisin?"

  "Right here, or is your nose broken too?"

  I turned my head to the sound and found her sitting in an armchair, one leg thrown over the armrest, and though everything about her posture said she was calm and well the thinness of her body said otherwise. Pink scars peppered her skin like freckles—all the little leftovers of tooth and claw—and the fact that she had not healed them said everything I needed to know about her physical state.

  "You were on your feet," I said, and laughed roughly at the thought, and how very important it had seemed. "I did that much."

  She inclined her head, golden eyes lowering, and for a moment I saw something I didn't believe I'd ever seen in my friend before—contrition. Maybe even a little awe.

  "You saved us all," she said softly.

  "All?"

  It was all I could bring myself to ask, for if I said his name and Roisin shook her head in sadness I might very well shatter into a million pieces.

  "He fled," she said. Two words that would have driven a stake through my heart any other time, but now I almost wept with relief. "At least that's what Maeve tells me. I was having a nap at the time."

  Seamus cleared his throat. "When we showed up, he was standing watch over you both. As soon as he realized DeShawn's helicopter was the Sun Guard, he fled. We tracked him for a while, but he caught wind of us soon enough and used evasion tactics we couldn't follow. Mags... there are things you should know. The Guard is meeting now, they asked me to come rouse you if I could. Can you stand?"

  A hollowness lived inside me, and my bones felt turned to jelly, but I tested my muscles, contracting them each in sequence, and nodded.

  Roisin was at my side before I
even got a foot over the edge. Another time I would have protested, but I'd seen her drag herself to her feet from death's door. Shouldering a little of my weight, even if she trembled when she first took my arm across her shoulder, was nothing.

  Seamus hesitated, clearly debating telling Roisin to back off and let the healthy one do the hauling, but swallowed the protest down, reasonable though it was. Sometimes I think he understood us better than we did ourselves.

  "The library," he said, and made a point to beating us to all the doors.

  Someone, probably Roisin, had cleaned up my blood-soaked clothes, but hadn't changed me. She'd found herself a fresh outfit, though it hung a little looser on her frame now, but I walked into that library in the rags I'd nearly died in, tattered strips of leather and denim painting my body like streamers, the scars angry pink across my grave-pale flesh.

  The gasps told me more than a mirror ever could.

  "Oh, Mags," Talia said and covered her mouth with both hands, stifling a small sob. Emeline put a hand on Talia's shoulder and squeezed.

  "She heals. That is all a vampire needs."

  I met her gaze, and though every muscle in me wanted to sag I wasn't so exhausted to miss what she had called me. Vampire. Not sunstrider.

  "Sit, you two great idiots," DeShawn said. He shoved a double-chair at us, tufted velvet, and we sank gratefully onto its thin cushion. Mr. Pips jumped up onto my lap, curled into a tight ball, and got down to the important business of purring. I scratched his back gratefully.

  Everyone was here. What was left of the mortal Sun Guard, Dr. Padhi, DeShawn and his threadbare squadron, the sunstriders recovered from Ragnar's hive. They watched me with the same reverence Roisin had shown, only in the others the emotion was naked. Even Emeline had a touch of it, though her mood was tempered by wariness.

  "The ghouls," Emeline said, all business, "that flooded London have been corralled by local police under DeShawn's direction and brought to Dr. Padhi's hospital. They've been identified as the source of the outbreak that shook the city, and Padhi's cure is being produced as quickly as possible to set them all to rights. The nightwalkers have gone. London wakes from its fever dream, and the shadows no longer threaten us."