Shadow Rising (The Shadow World Book 7)

by Dianne Sylvan

  Deven sighed. “Rise,” he said. “And from now on, no kneeling, not to me or anyone else. You’re the children of the Goddess—you kneel to no one but Her.” By way of demonstration, he bowed to them the way the Signets bowed to each other.

  They echoed the motion in silence.

  Another deep breath—it was still hard to think, but he managed to frame a request. “Ashera, if you would, gather the Hallowed diaries for me—I have studying to catch up on.”

  “Of course, Hallowed One.”

  He saw Nico smile to himself, and asked, “What?”

  The Elf chuckled. “I was all set to feel guilty about being the reason you wanted to stay, but…that wasn’t the only reason. I can see it now, as I should have all along.”

  Deven took his hands and kissed him. Then he looked over at where Stella lay; the others were waiting, and he knew what they were waiting for.

  “Go to the others,” he said to Nico. “Get some rest—tell Miranda I’ll be there soon. Right now, though…” He took a step back, kissing Nico’s hands, then brushed himself off, standing up straight.

  “Tell the Queen I have work to do,” he said.

  *****

  “I know,” said a hoarse voice over the phone. “I already know.”

  Miranda fought not to break down weeping again, even though she had steeled herself for the rage she knew was coming…only to have it not come, to have this instead. “What?”

  David was already holding her, the two on the couch, his arms around her solid and real in the real world, not some dreamtime forest where those they loved just…walked away…into the dark. This was the world where everyone was left behind, and it was the world she had to live in, fight in, and somehow find the words to apologize.

  Maguire could barely speak, but she heard him say, “She came to see me. My baby girl. She came to see me in my sleep and told me she had to go away.”

  She lost the fight. Tears spilled from her eyes and she gasped around the sharp pain in her chest. “I’m sorry, Mike…I didn’t know she was going to do this. I would never have let her. I should have…I’m sorry.”

  “She said…she said if I blamed you she’d never forgive me,” Maguire managed. “But I can’t help it. My girl is gone, and if it weren’t for you—”

  “She’d still be here,” Miranda nodded. “I know. I know. It is our fault. She never should have set foot in our world. But she did, and she saved us—you’ll never even know how many times or in how many ways.”

  Across the room, Nico came in the door bearing a small crate of books including the Codex; the others looked like handmade diaries of some sort. He saw what the Pair was doing and closed his eyes a moment, took a deep breath, and set the crate down on David’s desk for the time being. Then he came to join them on the couch, leaning sideways into David’s shoulder, one hand resting comfortingly on Miranda’s leg.

  “I don’t know what to do,” Miranda said into the phone. “It’s too late for us to leave the house—you’re welcome to come here now if you want, or wait until sunset. She’s…she’s safe, Mo’s taking care of her. Whatever you need, just…”

  They were both crying again, too hard to talk for a moment. Eventually David took the phone from her and—with surprising gentleness, given his usually professional demeanor with the Detective—arranged for Maguire to come for Stella at nightfall, when he could also take any of her possessions he wanted to have right away. Packing up the rest of her things could be done later.

  “Nonsense,” David was saying. She watched him pace the room slowly. “You make whatever arrangements made you need, Mike, but you’re not paying a penny. I owe you that much at the very, very least.”

  Miranda took a slow, shaky breath. She had done as much as she had promised—she’d told Maguire what happened, without spin, without sugar coating anything—and it was a relief to let David do what he did best, handle the logistics. Even death was something he could manage if there was a plan, steps, a to-do list.

  Nico pulled her close. She felt wrung out, her tears at least momentarily spent, and nestled into his shoulder.

  “Is Deven okay?” she asked.

  He chuckled, a bemused sort of sound. “Yes, I think so.”

  “What is it?”

  A long pause, while both of them watched David for a moment. Then Nico said, “In the Forest of Spirits…She offered him death. She said he could go, without hurting any of us, or losing us the war. He could find peace, forget all the pain.”

  Miranda sat up and stared at him. “But…he’s still here.”

  Nico smiled. This time his laugh, though quiet, was genuine, born out of joy even through the sorrow of the night. “I know,” he said. “He stayed.”

  They stared at each other. “And he’s going to lead the Order,” she said.

  A nod. “It was the price of living. Not only did he stay here, with us, of his own will…he chose to take up the Darkened Star in return for that life.”

  “My God,” she whispered. “I don’t…I don’t know what to do with that.”

  Another smile. “Neither do I…except to be happy.”

  She nodded, as across the room David ended the call with Maguire and came back to them, sinking heavily into the couch.

  Miranda was about to tell Nico to relay the news to David, but then she saw her husband’s face, and forgot all about it. She scooted closer and put her arms around David, who burrowed into her shoulder and cried silently for a while, Queen on one side of him, Elf moving to the other.

  It took a while, but they all found a state of quiet, just holding onto each other. She could smell the sunrise beginning outside the windows, and she had nearly gathered the strength to ask David what the plan was with Maguire, when the suite door opened again.

  “Glad you’re here,” she said, looking up as Deven came in. “I think…”

  The words died on her lips. She blinked once, then again, and just…stared.

  “Oh,” Nico said, glancing from her to his Prime and back. “I meant to mention that.”

  David, too, was staring. “What the hell…”

  Dev’s eyebrows shot up. “What?”

  Miranda stuttered for a second, then, “Your…um, your hair.”

  “For starters,” David added.

  Deven frowned, lifted his gaze, grabbed a strand of hair with his fingers and tugged it down into view.

  It was white.

  “Oh,” he said. “Um…okay.”

  “And your arms,” she said.

  He looked down; he’d pushed up the sleeves of his shirt doing whatever he’d been doing, and apparently hadn’t noticed anything amiss.

  “Whoa!” He immediately pulled the shirt off, and now all four of them were gaping.

  Deven’s skin was flawless, unmarked, centuries of tattoos just…erased.

  Except for one.

  Inside his right wrist, wrapping around his forearm, was an entirely new tattoo, this one of a raven in the same stylized kind of design as the one on David’s back.

  Miranda had no idea how to react to any of it, but she didn’t really have time—just then the skin of her own right arm began to burn unbearably, and she half-screamed, batting at it as blood blossomed all over her wrist.

  Beside her, Nico sucked in a pained breath, and David did the same, all of them gripped by what she knew was the same pain—one David and Nico had felt before, but that was brand new to her.

  She watched in morbid fascination as lines began to appear on her arm, healing up in black almost as quickly as they showed up in blood. In less than two minutes, her wrist bore the same tattoo as Deven’s, and David’s, and Nico’s, and she suspected the other four members of the Circle’s. The lines healed instantly, the blood fading as if it had never run.

  Nico still had the Elven clan markings he’d always had, and a quick check showed David’s back was the same.

  “Well,” Deven said, “She’s certainly g
ot a literal grasp of the idea of a blank slate.”

  David gave him a look that was a combination of astonishment and the particular brand of aggravation that he only ever felt toward Deven. “You are way, way too calm about this!”

  “I hadn’t had a chance to tell David about your…arrangement with Persephone,” Nico said. “Miranda knows.”

  “Oh.” Understanding dawned, and Deven looked a little sheepish. “Well…I’m not sure quite how to…”

  Nico sighed. “Persephone offered him a choice between life and death—if he chose life he had to change. Whatever the hell he was, he wasn’t going to last much longer. She had to turn him into something new.”

  “Thank you, love,” Deven said with a wry smile. “Also apparently I’m in charge of the Order now.”

  David met Deven’s gaze. “Does that mean if you had died we would have survived?”

  “Yes,” Deven said, the smile fading. “She gave me Her word that whatever I chose, you would survive, and the war would not be lost because of me.”

  “But you stayed anyway.”

  They held each other’s eyes. “I did.”

  “Why?”

  Now, the smile returned, just a little. This time it wasn’t wry or edged with anything but sincerity. “Because I love you,” Deven said. “I love Nico. And I love Miranda. And I love the life we’re building here, whatever it leads to. For the first time in centuries I want to know what’s next. I want to be here for the world we create. So I chose to stay.”

  David’s eyes were bright again, and Miranda’s were burning, but this time not from grief. “As an Elf,” David said, laughing a little.

  Now Dev’s expression turned quizzical. “I’m not an Elf.”

  “Oh?” David tilted his head to the side. “Tell that to your ears.”

  Eyes widening, Deven reached up and touched his ears, which immediately turned scarlet.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said.

  Miranda couldn’t help it—he was so dumbstruck she burst out laughing through her tears. “Come on,” she said, pushing herself up off the couch and dragging the boys with her. “Let’s go to bed—we all need a long sleep, to begin with. The world will make more sense when we’re not all exhausted.”

  The Tetrad began its usual rituals of settling in for the morning: showers, dress or undress, climbing into the bed to claim a spot in the tangle. Miranda was first in, and listened with her eyes closed to the others getting ready for bed, letting the familiar warmth and affection of their voices and activities soothe her battered heart.

  “I don’t get it,” Deven muttered, and she had the sense he was still poking at his ears as he said it. “Why this?”

  Nico had sat down on the edge of the bed, and she heard the love in his voice, as well as the gratitude. “You belong now,” he said. “Your whole life you never felt like you were one thing or another. Not enough Elf to be an Elf, not human either. But now you belong.”

  “How can you say that? The Elves don’t accept you, why would they accept me?”

  “I didn’t mean you belong with them,” Nico replied softly. “I meant with me. What I am…I was the only one. I was something new, and alone. I’m not anymore. There are two of us now. Our own clan.”

  Miranda opened her eyes to see Deven put his arms around Nico, who leaned his cheek against the Prime’s chest, smiling, eyes closed.

  David returned from his shower and climbed in beside Miranda; he was still staring at Deven, and there was doubt in his eyes. Even with everything they’d seen and everything that had happened tonight, he still didn’t know how to process this—he had known Dev for decades, more intimately than any of them, and this new Deven, though he seemed the same, was…not.

  She could feel it too, more and more each moment, and even stronger once Dev got close enough to get in bed. She’d always sensed that otherness about him, but this wasn’t that; it was at once deeply familiar and totally alien. It was as if he smelled differently, but didn’t; as if his voice had changed, but hadn’t; there was a quality to his energy now that had been there before but had been drawn out, put down roots, and unfurled its branches all around.

  Dev pulled the covers up around him, but when he moved closer to David, David stiffened.

  Alarmed, Deven looked from one of them to the other, seeing their confusion. “I’m still me,” he said. “I promise…some parts are new, but…I’m still me. Like you said, David, I can be who I am and this too.”

  “But what exactly is ‘this’?” David asked. “Nico says you’re sort of part vampire, part divine energy…what do we call that? Are you some kind of angel, a demigod, or an actual ghost?”

  “He’s Deven,” Nico told him. “That’s what matters.”

  But David shook his head. Miranda understood—Dev might still be Dev, but David was also still David, and he needed to make sense of things, to find the logic in an utterly illogical situation.

  Nico looked at David for a moment, but then his face cleared as he understood it too. “I think perhaps we need a new word,” he said, placing a hand on David’s arm. “Hold on a moment.” He got up, went over to the box of books on the desk, and fetched the Codex and one of the oldest-looking diaries. “This one’s the one that has your name in it, right?”

  Deven frowned. “Yes, why?”

  Nico sat cross-legged on the bed. “Can you find the page? I’d like to see exactly how they refer to you, and maybe we can combine that with something from the Codex, maybe a descriptor or title for members of the old Circle. If you’re something new, well, we should call you something new. Right, David?”

  The Prime already looked less panicky and nodded, peering down at the Codex with Nico. “Good idea.”

  Deven smiled slightly. “Yes, of course.” He paged through the diary for a moment. “Here it is,” he said. “This entry…trials, tribulations, and right there, is my…um…”

  Miranda followed his finger as he read along the page, and she stared at where he stopped. “Deven Burke,” she read. “This priestess from centuries ago knew your married name?”

  Deven nodded, but that wasn’t what he was staring at. Just under his name was a title, which he’d said was ancient Elvish for “The Ghostlight.”

  She didn’t know the language as well as he or Nico, but she knew very well that’s not what it said now.

  “What is that?” she asked.

  Nico leaned over the Codex, his mouth dropping open as he stared at the diary.

  “It says Deven Burke…Morianaela…ile’Kaiatala.” He swallowed hard and said, “Morianaela is basically Dark Elf…like we both are, now. And ile’Kaiatala…”

  He lifted his eyes to meet Deven’s. “The Kaiatala,” he repeated. “The Raven’s Blade.”

  *****

  * It was a lovely face, even if it wasn’t the one he really wanted.

  He stared into the mirror, admiring its bone structure, its immortal youth. Certainly an upgrade from the one he’d been born with—that one, he’d been all too glad to rip from his skull in anticipation of something a bit more…refined.

  “You made us ugly,” he murmured. “I will make us beautiful, as we are meant to be.”

  “My Lord,” came a timid voice, “Everything is in place.”

  “Good,” he said, catching a glimpse of the groveling, stinking human in the doorway over his shoulder in the mirror. “I am coming.”

  The first human scurried away, but a moment later there was a knock. This time, at least, he wasn’t annoyed. “Collier.”

  “Yes, my Lord, I believe I have found a suitable vampire for your purposes, if…if you are certain this is still the course you wish to take.”

  “Of course it is.” He turned from the mirror to look at the Shepherd who served, at the moment, as his second-in-command. The last one had survived a week; Collier had served him for over a month without earning a messy screaming death. Promising.

  “This is a useful
enough body,” he said, “And God knows I’ve enjoyed myself in it, but it won’t do for the long term unless it can tolerate blood. Elves…simpering creatures…I have enjoyed ruining this one, but I’m not quite done. It won’t truly be comfortable until It has fangs.”

  Collier bowed. “Of course, my Lord. I will arrange for my candidate to arrive whenever you desire.”

  “It will be a few days,” he said. “Tonight there’s enough work to do…let’s get on with things, shall we?”

  He swung a cloak around his shoulders and followed Collier out of the room, down the hall toward the temple where he knew a slender, ivory-skinned figure was bound naked to the altar, gagged for the moment until he was ready to hear her screams. She, too, was tall and lithe like this body, dark haired…but pale eyed…just like he wanted…just like she would want.

  Yes, my beloved, my beautiful creature…you will enjoy this flesh I have found you. What fun we will have together, using these once-pure bodies, turning these idiot light-bearers into rutting, murdering monsters. Just imagine.

  He had taken such pleasure in using this body to torture, to destroy. He had made sport of the Elves they’d captured from Avilon until little of them remained but viscera and demented shrieking. He had defiled every age and gender of human he could find, both for the sheer hedonistic revelry and the spite of it, knowing how Elvenkind would recoil knowing the pretty, magical sack of meat he had stolen had raped and killed and eaten flesh. Those fools who had banded together with Persephone’s children to bury his kind in the Earth forever…he had spent long centuries dreaming of ways to make them pay.

  The best part was seeing those who knew the Elf he was wearing…seeing their faces, having to stare up at someone they had loved now tearing them apart or debasing them so utterly they might as well be dead.

  It was unbearably arousing, their fear.

  After tonight you will feel it too, my beloved. Let us join hands now and make this world our plaything once more.

  Smiling, he stepped out into the temple. The she-Elf he’d chosen—fourth in a line of attempts, but this one he knew would be strong enough—was spread-eagled on the altar, her humiliation as wondrous as her terror.