Miranda stood up as well and put her hand on Deven’s arm, stepping out in front of him.
“Um…all of you, stand up, please,” she said. “We’ll worry about who’s going to lead you and what Xara’s wishes mean once everyone is safe. For now…”
For now they needed someone to take charge, and clearly things weren’t going to go the way they traditionally did, so:
Miranda stood tall, hand on Shadowflame’s hilt, breathing power into her aura until she knew they could feel it.
“I am your Queen,” she said firmly. “Hear me. This place is no longer safe. You have an hour to gather what belongings you can, and then return to this spot to be delivered safely to my Haven. No harm will come to you there. We will work together to find you a safe new home and to restore the Order, but tonight, you will come with us and rest.”
She gestured for them to get moving; as one they bowed to her, and ducked away in groups, looking back at the garden with emotions ranging from fear to paralyzing fear.
David appeared from the shadows; he’d made a quick round of the Cloister to make sure the fires were out and the humans were either dead or gone. He took in the scene and asked calmly, “What did I miss?”
“We need to find someone named Laila,” Miranda said. “Xara said she has the Star, and apparently some of the humans made off with her and probably a few others. We’ll have to track them somehow—can you…”
But Miranda felt someone drawing energy from her, and looked over in time to see Nico’s eyes go black, his Signet beginning to glow more brightly.
“West,” he murmured. “They went west…”
Miranda felt the Web in her mind’s eye, like an itch trying to get her attention, and she found that when she closed her eyes, it was there. She could see Nico in front of her, and moreover could see what he was doing…he was tracking the humans through the Web.
She, David, and a still-shaky Deven watched the Elf as he dove through the strands of light, sorting through afterimages of the battle, back in time, until he caught sight of the truck—there were ghostly figures of humans, hauling a half-dozen vampires into the back. They were well out of sight of the garden or where the Elite had emerged from the portal; they took advantage of the chaos to drive away under cover of the trees, along the only established road to or from the Cloister.
Damn…they were well ahead, and within ten minutes would be clear of the forest and back on paved roads. It would be hard to catch up to them, assuming they could keep track of the truck; Nico needed to know the location to teleport them there, or at least—
At her side, she heard David chuckle, and a second later felt him reach into the vision—he couldn’t see the Web at all, but he could follow Nico’s mind, and through the Elf could see the truck as it bounced and rattled all over the uneven, perilous road at far too great a speed for safety.
David pulled power from her and Deven, and she sensed him extending through Nico, taking solid hold of the truck and jerking hard—
There was no noise where she was standing, but she still flinched at the “sound” of one of the truck’s axles getting stuck on an exposed tree root just at the right angle to rip it from the vehicle.
“We have to hurry,” Miranda said. “We might be able to catch up on foot—”
“No need,” Nico said, smiling slightly around the massive amount of power he was using. “Allow me.”
She stared openmouthed as the Elf sent a thread of energy sideways, drawing the Web open while still holding on to the vision of the truck itself. He fed the portal off of that vision, instead of off a location he’d physically visited, and to her amazement, it worked: with all of their power fueling it that vision was strong enough to act as a homing beacon as if Nico had set foot there a thousand times before.
“Take Dev and go get them,” David said. “I’ll hold down the Cloister.”
Miranda seized Deven’s arm and dragged him to the portal, drawing her sword as she stepped through into the darkness.
*****
They slipped through the woods in silence, feet barely making a sound on the exposed dirt of the road, coming up behind the truck unseen.
Miranda bent her mind toward Nico, impressing upon him that he should get the girls out of the back while she and Deven handled the humans.
The Elf nodded and dropped back while she and Deven ducked into the brush to come around the side.
The humans—she counted five, and could sense three more in the truck guarding the girls—were gathered around in the pool of the headlights, trying to get a signal to call for backup. They were arguing; apparently without a Shepherd to give them orders they had no idea what to do, and there was no Morningstar contingency plan for “car trouble.”
Next to her in the dark, she felt Deven returning to himself a bit—Xara’s announcement had been an enormous shock, but this, at least, he could do without thinking.
She caught his gaze, raised an eyebrow. You okay?
He nodded vaguely, tilted his head toward the men. She knew what he was thinking: He could have all five of them down in less than a minute.
She shook her head. There were three more in the truck, and they needed to draw them out, which meant making noise. If they tried to storm the truck the humans might start killing their prisoners. She knew Nico wouldn’t go in until he knew it was clear.
As the men continued to argue, she moved out of the underbrush and walked out onto the road, right into the lights.
“Excuse me,” she said loudly, “but do you fine gentlemen have a moment to talk about our Lady Persephone and Her plan for you?”
The silence that fell, along with the color draining from the men’s faces, was so absolute and so hilarious she burst out laughing.
The best any of them could come up with was, “Get her!”
Morningstar trained its soldiers well—the Elite had made short work of them mostly due to the element of surprise, but the few who had managed to get blades in their hands had acquitted themselves nicely. These men weren’t as quick on the uptake, but at least two of them were armed and came at her while the other three tried to shoot her with their crossbows.
One by one the crossbows misfired; one of the men saw movement to his right, and turned his head just in time for Deven to cut it off.
Miranda had the first one down immediately, but the second was more of a challenge. He fought back hard, and if she hadn’t been expecting him to move so fast she might have hesitated, but this wasn’t her first encounter with their mindless soldier-bots, and she already knew their moves.
“You guys need to update your training protocol,” she told the man as she spun out of his way. He was getting out of breath; she was not. “You’re becoming predictable.”
Just as she said that, she heard a gun go off, and felt something impact with her stomach.
Pain coursed through her body—she grunted and stepped back, almost losing pace but holding on by inches, long enough to get her sword through the human’s defenses and open his chest. Blood sprayed out, and she was in enough pain that she didn’t get out of its way fast enough.
What the hell—
She looked down at the wound, which was bleeding far more profusely than it should have been. Something was wrong with the bullet—what had they done to it? Why wasn’t the wound closing?
There were more shots, but she heard them ricochet off the trees and the truck—panic shots, by someone who’d been attacked from behind. She heard more feet pounding up the road. The other three men had emerged from the truck; they were the ones with the guns.
She fought to stay upright, but her vision was swimming. A wooden bullet? Couldn’t be—David had said that regular human guns would destroy a wooden projectile as it passed through the barrel…but then the last time he’d seen anyone try it had been during World War II. Had they come up with a new kind of gun?
There was only one thing to do—she took a deep breath and du
g her fingers into the wound, crying out in pain but pushing all her will into the movement. Her index finger hit the bullet, and she pushed harder, a wail escaping her lips.
She tried to get her fingers around the thing, but it seemed to squirm out of her reach every time she touched it, and the pain was growing worse with every second—it felt like her blood was on fire, boiling out of her body.
She heard screaming—no, wait, she was screaming. The pain engulfed her, and she fell to the ground, trying desperately to dig the bullet out of her body—almost, she almost had it—it was so slippery, she kept missing it—
“Miranda! Stop!”
Someone took hold of her arms and yanked them back, pulling her hands out of her wound. She couldn’t understand what she was seeing—was that her? Were those her fingers dripping, was that…oh God…
She couldn’t stop screaming. Deven and Nico both had her, holding her down on her back while they went for the bullet themselves, but it kept moving, and she writhed against it, get it out get it out get it out—
Power flared nearby, and a second later she heard, “Move!”
A hand pressed flat to her wound, and she shrieked in agony as something took hold of the bullet and dragged it out of her, the force of its will undeniable. The little hunk of lead seemed to send spikes into her flesh as it fought against the power that held it, but one by one those spikes ripped away, and after what seemed like an eternity, she felt it burst out of her wound, hit the ground in a splatter of her blood, and explode.
Miranda flailed, mad with pain and fear, but hands had her again and held her more gently this time while Deven’s power took the place of David’s, and with the rest of the Tetrad’s help he poured healing into her ravaged body and closed the wound.
She was sobbing—it still hurt, it still hurt so badly, but at least the thing was out of her. She’d been shot before, it was nothing like this, that thing was alive—
“Shhh,” David said in her ear. “Sleep, beloved. Just sleep.”
The three of them pushed her with loving, careful energy into unconsciousness, and she was more than willing to let go, close her eyes, and leave the aftermath to her boys.
*****
A long, high-pitched shriek of terror and pain—not unlike those the Queen had made only moments ago—split the night air, and Nico winced. The inherited empathy he had to bear from the others told him far more than he wanted to know about the human’s final seconds alive.
Another part of him, however, was pleased.
Every few minutes he had to stop and re-ground himself, but he managed to keep the rage at bay this time…mostly. He stood over the bodies of the vampires they had carried out of the truck, his arms crossed, his thoughts dark and poisonous.
Each body had a stake through its chest. They had all been dead when he opened the truck’s rear doors.
As soon as Miranda was out David had slowly stood, then walked without speaking to the truck, seizing the one remaining human by the throat and dragging him inside. The doors slammed shut, and a moment later the screaming began. It went on for several minutes. Between screams Nico could hear begging, could hear the stammered answers to questions too quiet to hear.
Now, silence.
The doors flew open. David stood there silhouetted in the doorway, calmly wiping blood from his fingers with what looked like the human’s jacket.
The Prime glanced up to his left, and Nico saw a small object detach itself from the top corner of the truck and fly over to his outstretched palm. David stared at it hard…then he said, very quietly, “You are next,” and crushed the object with his hand.
Deven looked up from where he still knelt beside Miranda. “Was that a camera?”
David let the pieces of the device fall to the ground. “Yes,” he said. He gestured at the truck, the bodies, and them. “This was all a setup—not the attack itself, but them making off with some of the girls. They knew we would come after them. They wanted a chance to try out their new toy.”
He stepped down from the truck bed and went on, “Apparently whatever Codex the Prophet has in his possession—assuming it’s a real book and not just something he does from memory—includes spells to use against us. They weren’t told specifically what the bullet did, just that they were to shoot it into one of us and film what happened.”
Dev sighed heavily. “Well, we knew that just making their soldiers stronger and faster couldn’t be the whole of their plan.”
David nodded. “Fortunately these spells take an enormous amount of power—they could make weapons against ordinary vampires pretty easily, but to fight Signets they needed heavier artillery. That was why they Bondbroke Tanaka—they used that power, somehow. Siphoned it off into whatever ritual created that bullet…and there wasn’t just one, more like a couple dozen. This particular fellow wasn’t at a high enough pay grade to know all the details, but he told me everything he saw when they were given the gun.”
“Would it have killed her?” Nico asked, suddenly feeling cold. If Morningstar could make a bullet that could kill a Signet…if any one of them died…
“I don’t know. My guess is that the pain would have made her kill herself—you saw how close she came to disemboweling herself with her bare hands to get the thing out.”
They had all felt the Queen’s agony reverberating along the bond—Nico and Deven had barely been able to hold any sort of distance from it and nearly got lost, but thankfully David had been far enough away that he could think clearly and react decisively.
“Well, at least we know they didn’t get the Moriastelethia…wherever it is,” Nico said tiredly. He was doing his best to hang onto enough energy to send them all back to Austin, but that wasn’t going to last a lot longer. “None of them lived to get it to the Prophet even if one of these women had it, and obviously they didn’t. Dev, you said this one was Laila?”
Nico pointed at one of the women, and Deven nodded, frowning slightly.
“We need to get moving,” David echoed Nico’s worry. “I don’t like leaving all of them alone this long, and we still have to get everyone back to the Haven before you collapse, Nico. Let me Mist us back to the Cloister…there’s no sense in dragging all of the bodies back too when the sun will be up in a few hours.”
But Deven had crouched down beside Laila’s body, and was staring at her, his gaze losing its usual sharpness…almost as if he were going into a trance. “Nico,” he said softly, “bring me a knife.”
The Elf caught David’s eye; David clearly didn’t know what was going on either, but pulled a pocketknife from his coat and tossed it to Nico.
“Here,” Nico said. “What are you—wait, what—”
Deven flipped the knife open and used it to slit the girl’s lightweight gown, revealing the smooth, dark expanse of her belly. He held his palm over her, moving it slowly from one side to the other, then paused…and cut into her flesh.
The girl had been dead long enough that the wound did not bleed; he cut a curved line that, Nico realized, followed the faint pale trace of a scar that had not had a chance to fade. Something gleamed in the darkness…and when Deven pressed lightly on her body, that something’s edge became visible.
David shook his head in wonder. “She did have it. Xara must have put it in her body for safekeeping…the humans had it and had no idea.”
Deven pulled the amulet from the girl’s body gingerly, and the second it touched his skin, the dark stone in its setting lit up.
Neither Nico nor David could seem to move, or even breathe…but Deven shook his head and cut a piece of one of the girls’ robes to wrap around the amulet and shoved it in his pocket as if he couldn’t stand the sight of it.
But then, his gaze returned to Laila, and his expression softened. With reverent hands, he closed her garment, placing her hands on her chest as he had Xara’s. He touched her face and murmured something, eyes closing for a moment.
At first Nico wasn’t sure wh
at to call what happened, but…something did. Some change in the air, the softest fluttering like a butterfly’s wing passing, as if the night itself sighed.
One by one, Deven touched each of the vampires’ faces and repeated the words, and Nico felt that same gentle release after each.
That was when he realized what he was sensing: A benediction. How many times had he felt that same kind of whisper-soft energy after one of the Temple priests or priestesses led the evening prayers to Theia? It had been a long time since he’d been anywhere near such a thing—that sense of the sacred had left him when he became a vampire. His whole life he had felt it in Kai’s music as well, but not once since Avilon had rejected him.
And now…his heart wanted to cling to the feeling, even for a moment. Every cell in his body longed for that connection to the Goddess…he had forced himself to forget it for so long. If only…
The feeling dissipated. He sighed, eyes burning.
But he didn’t have time to dwell on it; he would weaken very soon, and it was time to go. He shoved the memory out of mind again, determined to keep himself together.
Deven wouldn’t look him in the face when he was done with his task; he was pale, almost seeming embarrassed at what he had done.
David was staring at Deven as if he’d never seen him before, but he said nothing either; instead he picked Miranda up from the ground. Nico and Deven each lay a hand on his arms, and David had them all back at the Cloister before anything else could happen.
*****
The next couple of days were a blur of pain giving way to exhaustion, and if she’d had the energy Miranda might have been very, very worried about herself.
She remembered waking long enough to feed—repeatedly, a few sips at a time every few hours—and little else.
Any other injury would have been easy work for the Signet bond, and they knew that wood couldn’t kill a Thirdborn, but this was something that had been designed to kill Signets…or more specifically the first vampires who had been the Circle’s first incarnation. The bond healed physical wounds, but apparently it wasn’t created to deal with curses.
Shadow Rising (The Shadow World Book 7) Page 11