Shadowbound

by Dianne Sylvan

  As if the thought had been a hand stretching over continents, she abruptly stopped midprayer—she could feel him right now.

  What . . .

  An intense wave of energy washed over her, the likes of which she had never felt before; it felt nothing like a vampire’s power, although it was just as ageless and far, far stronger. It held the scent of green growing things, and it was redolent of healing, of rest.

  It was certainly not Deven’s energy, but it was twining through his like a climbing vine. She felt—or saw—it strengthening and supporting everyplace it moved. The two energies seemed to wrap around one another effortlessly, as if they had been made to join this way.

  The image of a darkened bedroom came to her mind. Next to a great bed sat Jonathan in a chair, watching the bed intently with his chin resting on his fist. On the bed itself, she saw Deven lying on his back, eyes closed, fingers twisted in the comforter and clenching in pain every few moments. And sitting with him, the Prime’s head in his lap, was . . .

  What in the name of . . . ?

  Her presence did not go unnoticed. The third figure “looked” at her, and she gasped and tried to flee back into her own body, both because the power before her was so alien and frightening . . . and because it was familiar.

  “I know you,” she whispered to herself. “How do I know you?”

  “Peace, child,” came a gentle, accented voice. “I am a friend.”

  Cora didn’t know if it would work, but she spoke back across the miles: “What are you doing to him?”

  She felt him smile. “Buying time . . . but return to your home, young one, before your mate loses his mind with worry. You and I will meet again soon enough.”

  Cora let go of the vision, suddenly desperate to do as he said, and flew back into the room with a cry to find Jacob kneeling in front of her, his hands on her shoulders as he called her name.

  “Good God, Cora, what happened?” Jacob asked, pulling her into his arms. His relief was palpable all around her. “I felt you . . . disappear.”

  She was shaking slightly. “I do not know exactly,” she said. “I was meditating, and . . . then I was in California.”

  He peered at her curiously. “Doing what?”

  She took a deep breath. “Witnessing something frightening . . . or, possibly something wonderful . . . I really have no idea which.”

  Jacob kissed the top of her head. “Try not to do that again, all right? I prefer having you here.”

  She smiled at him. “May I use your phone?”

  “Of course . . . may I ask . . . ?”

  She took the device from him and scrolled through his contacts until she found the number she was looking for. “I doubt he will answer, but . . . I need to speak with Jonathan.”

  • • •

  “Stop,” Deven panted. “That’s enough.”

  “Hold on for one more moment . . .”

  “I can’t. It’s too much. Please, Nico.” His voice nearly cracked on the last two words, so bent by the strain of what they were doing that it would have been a relief to break down completely.

  The Elf withdrew, and the sudden absence of his psychic touch left Deven shaking and weak. He pulled away from Nico physically, turning onto his side and almost curling into a ball. Despite being drenched in sweat, he was freezing.

  “Why is it hurting him?” Jonathan demanded, moving out of his chair to sit down on the side of the bed and place a comforting hand on his Prime’s shoulder. Deven threaded trembling fingers with his and held on for dear life. The Consort looked like he wanted to throttle the Elf. “I thought this was supposed to be healing.”

  Nico turned his wide, dark eyes on Jonathan, and surprisingly, the Consort looked away. “Healing is not always a matter of pleasure,” Nico said. “To return a dislocated limb to its socket requires intense pain, does it not?”

  “It’s all right,” Deven murmured, shutting his eyes for a moment. “It took me seven centuries to fuck myself up this badly. It can’t be fixed in a few days.”

  “On the contrary,” Nico said, “You are doing very well. Thankfully your Elven blood enables me to connect with you on a deeper level—otherwise this might take months. At this rate you will be back to your life in another week at most.”

  “Should I feel different?” Jonathan asked, frowning.

  “Not yet. It will take a day or so for the stronger energy flow to become established—until then, my Lord Prime, I expect you will feel weak and possibly sick, but once the energy is moving as it should, things will improve quickly.”

  “I feel all right,” Deven started to say, but as he tried to sit up, dizziness hit him full force and his arms gave out, dropping him back to the bed on his face.

  Nico moved out from under his head and turned him onto his back. “Just rest,” he said, squeezing Deven’s hand. Deven fought the urge to grab on to his hand and keep him there, like a security blanket.

  Deven saw an odd look pass over Jonathan’s face while Nico tucked the Prime in, but the Consort merely asked, “Are there a lot of Weavers where you come from?”

  “No,” Nico replied. “And even fewer with my strength. Weaving has always been a rare gift. As you can imagine, directly touching energy this way is difficult and takes many years to learn.”

  “Is your brother a Weaver?” Deven asked sleepily, burrowing into the pillows, his mind and body both completely exhausted.

  He could hear Nico smiling. “No . . . Kai is a Bard, and a powerful one.”

  Deven tried to frame another question before he lost consciousness, but he felt Nico’s hand on his face, and the Elf said kindly, “Rest, my Lord. I promise we will talk later when you are stronger.”

  That was all he heard.

  • • •

  Nicolanai rose gracefully from the bed, not at all rumpled from nearly four hours cross-legged. Whatever material Elves made their clothes out of, it was amazingly wrinkleproof. “Stay close to him,” he said. “He will have nightmares again.”

  Jonathan nodded. “Call the guards at your door if you need anything. Don’t hesitate.”

  “I will not.”

  The Consort started to speak, then stopped, but the Elf paused and turned his head back toward the bed, waiting, and Jonathan finally said, “Thank you.”

  Nico turned back and stared at him, his eyes penetrating. “You should not thank me yet. I gave you my word that he would survive, and he will, but there may be consequences to this we cannot anticipate.”

  “But at least he’s acting like he wants to try to get better,” Jonathan told him. “Now perhaps he’ll fight for his own life instead of just giving up.”

  Nico stared down at Deven for a long moment. “There is little enough left of my people, so few traces of our time here . . . to think that someone with such a high calling, such power, could be cast down and condemned and learn to value himself so little . . . perhaps my kinsmen are right that we should have sealed off the Veil forever and not set foot here again.”

  “Oh? What do your kin think about you being here, then?”

  A faint smile. “Only two of them even knew I left.”

  “You sneaked away? Why?”

  “Why did I have to sneak, or why was I willing to?”

  “Both. Either.”

  Nico sighed. “A great many prophecies pointed toward a day when we would have to return to the mortal world to aid in saving it. I believe that day has come. Others disagree. Vehemently.” He allowed himself another small smile, this one wry. “I expect to be in a fair amount of trouble when I get home.”

  Jonathan’s eyebrows shot up. “What, you mean they’ll punish you?”

  Something surprisingly dark and fierce crossed the Elf’s face as he glanced down at the sleeping Prime. “They can try.”

  With that, he left the bedroom, closing the door silently behind him.

  Jonathan stared after him for a moment before he was able to shake himself out of the spell the Elf seemed to cast over everyo
ne he laid eyes on. The guards at the guest suite were utterly terrified of the Weaver, though they didn’t say so; no one had any idea what to make of him, but they all knew he was incredibly powerful, ethereally beautiful, and very, very weird.

  He told himself it was the Elf’s strangeness that bothered him, not the way Deven reacted to him . . . like all of a sudden the Prime really was a seventeen-year-old, tumbling headlong into a new romance, all tongue-tied and nervous whenever the Elf was near. In all their history together Jonathan had never seen his Prime genuinely attracted to anyone besides David, and that had been going on long before Prime and Consort met. As far as he knew Deven and David’s courtship had involved less blushing and stammering and more writhing and screaming.

  And while Jonathan was perfectly willing to step back and let Deven have an outside lover, that didn’t mean he wanted a front-row seat to the proceedings . . . but Nico could be good for him, if they didn’t let their fears get in the way, which was probably what would happen, knowing Deven. Jonathan hadn’t been lying when he said he would give anything to see his Prime happy.

  The Consort fished his phone out of his pocket to leave on the bedside table with Dev’s and noticed that Cora had called; he smiled. He had a feeling he knew exactly what she wanted. It would have to wait, though—by now it was midmorning in Prague, and besides, at the moment Jonathan had only one goal in mind.

  Placing the phone down carefully to avoid making noise, he kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the bed at Deven’s side. He drew the inert Prime into their favorite sleeping position—Jonathan forming a solid wall against Deven’s back, giving him the feeling of safety he craved—and kissed him on the ear, sighing . . . so much was changing. He knew the Elf would succeed; that much was easy to predict. But for how long?

  And at what cost?

  “Stay with me,” he said softly into Deven’s ear. “You stay with me, and I’ll stay with you, and . . .” He could hear the catch in his own voice, and fell silent for a while, just listening to Dev breathe.

  Holding his Prime tightly, as if he could hold on hard enough to keep the world from tearing everything apart, he closed his eyes and lay waiting for Deven to scream himself awake.

  Two

  On the night of the new moon, the newborn son of the Goddess of Death killed a mortal without a single pang of remorse.

  The new moon before that, he had been wandering around a stranger in his own life, with only partial memory of his own transformation from an ordinary vampire into something more. He had been home, restored to his Queen, but only partway, until the night she joined him across the divide.

  The new moon before that, he had been murdered.

  The human wasn’t exactly what he’d been hoping to find, but the hunger that had been growing for the last two days had at last overridden sense and reason and he was grateful he’d maintained enough control to find a drug dealer—one who sold to high school children and extorted sex for meth from the girls.

  He would do.

  For two nights David had fought it, had denied it. Until waking up tonight he had held on to a slim and fading hope that it would go away. But deep down, he had known what was really happening. Just in the last twenty-four hours his new senses had all dulled, which seemed counterintuitive given that those senses were supposed to make them better hunters . . . but it wasn’t about that, this time. It was a warning.

  An order.

  Do what you were made to do. All of these gifts, all of your power, is meaningless unless you surrender to your nature. Do it . . . and everything will come back. The pain will fade. Do it.

  It wasn’t the first time he had heard that voice whispering in his mind—that voice like feathers across a moonlit sky. He couldn’t say for certain if the voice was his own subconscious or that of Someone Else, but really, even if there was a difference, it didn’t matter. Once he would have doubted it was real, but in the last few months he had lost the luxury of doubt.

  By the time he got into town that night his entire body felt like it was on fire from the inside—it was a vampire’s hunger times ten, coalescing into physical agony that nearly had him clawing at his skin.

  It would only get worse. He knew it would only get worse.

  He’d expected the human’s death to soothe the pain and calm the shaking, but he was unprepared for the blast wave of satisfaction, pleasure, and purpose that hit him as soon as the body hit the ground. Every cell burned, but now with power.

  In that moment nothing else mattered. The world fell away. He wanted to kneel down and kiss the dead man’s slack mouth to thank him for being such a reprehensible sack of shit . . . finally the man’s oily, poisoned life had shown the world its meaning.

  He didn’t kneel. Since taking the Signet he had knelt to no one . . . except to the being who had brought him back from death . . . which was how he’d ended up in this situation in the first place.

  He held his hand out over the body and made it disappear.

  No fuss, no muss.

  When he returned to the car, Harlan immediately noticed the complete 180-degree shift in his behavior—the Prime who had gone into the city to hunt was short-tempered and exhausted, with dark circles under his eyes, and couldn’t concentrate long enough to frame a full sentence. The Prime who walked back was the one they all knew.

  “You must have found quite a meal out there,” Harlan said. “You looked like hell, Sire, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  David smiled at him as the driver opened the door of the limo. “I feel much better, Harlan, thank you.”

  The initial wave of energy left him giddy as it passed, and he leaned back and closed his eyes as the car pulled away to head for their second rendezvous, cataloging each difference, extrapolating a timeline based on how he felt now compared to how he had felt an hour ago.

  It was difficult to know for sure how often this would happen—there was one set of numbers if he went from his own death, another if he went from the onset of his transformation, and another if he went from Miranda’s, which was when his own had finished.

  But looking out the tinted window and up at the cloud-smudged sky, it occurred to him the math might not matter so much as the timing. The Awakening had to be performed on the new moon. Tonight was the new moon again. There had been one between those dates, but at that point Miranda hadn’t come across and his own transition hadn’t been complete.

  Miranda.

  Now, for the first time, he thought about the meaning of his actions from her perspective—he had been so desperate to make the pain stop that he had set all of that aside, telling himself he’d feel guilty later, once he didn’t want to die.

  He still didn’t feel guilty. He had removed a predator from the streets who got children hooked on a degrading, disgusting drug and fucked fifteen-year-old girls just because he could. The world would not suffer for his loss . . . and there were plenty more where that came from. Humanity always provided.

  Miranda was not going to see it that way.

  The rest of their Circle had not shown any signs of Miranda’s gift, but he had a mild case of empathy, and he knew its purpose as much as he knew why they had more fangs. Empathy, just a touch, enabled him to find evildoers and know without a doubt what he was killing. A compassionate concession on Persephone’s part, perhaps, to their modern sensibilities—vampires had been created to control the human population, but the law set down by Primes like David kept them from fulfilling that purpose, whether out of fear of exposure or a sense of morality. By and large the Shadow World lived in denial of the reason it was created.

  And thus the Thirdborn took on the sins of the entire vampire race.

  He was rehearsing what to tell her in his mind when the car pulled over and, a moment later, Harlan opened the door and Miranda practically fell inside.

  Her condition astonished him. He figured she would look tired, but in the few hours since they had gone their own ways, he to Hunter Development and she to a meeting
with her management, she looked like she’d lost ten pounds and had the drawn, sallow face of a vampire who hadn’t fed in weeks. Starvation took a long time to kill them, and it was a gruesome way to die.

  “Good God, Miranda . . .” He reached over to her and pulled her close. She felt as insubstantial as an autumn leaf. Her skin was far cooler than it should be, and he took her hands and tried to rub life back into them, though he knew it was futile.

  Her eyes were red, as from crying, but also dull from overwhelming emotions that had turned into numbness. She looked from her hands up to his face.

  “That’s all you had to do?” she asked softly.

  He didn’t have to ask what she meant any more than she had to ask what he’d done. “Yes.”

  She drew her hands back and put them over her face. “I don’t think I can do it.”

  He didn’t want to make it harder, but he knew she would prefer the truth even if it was terrible: “You have to.”

  “It’s not fair.” The words could have sounded petulant, but they mostly just sounded resigned.

  “It’s perfectly fair,” he replied gently. “We knew there would be consequences. We both accepted them to regain our life together.”

  She sat with her face in her hands for another minute, and he could feel her trying to balance two impossible lives, asking herself if the heavier one was worth its weight.

  Finally she lifted her head. Her face held sadness, but also the beginnings of determination—she was Queen. She would do what had to be done to fulfill her role in their world. Death had never stopped her before and it wouldn’t now. “Will you come with me? I don’t want to be alone.”

  “Of course I will.” He put his hands on her face and looked into her eyes, letting her see how much better he felt, how much better she would feel. They had work to do—work that might save far more lives than the two of them could end—and they couldn’t do it if they starved themselves into rabid animals. If it got to that point she would no longer know herself, or him; she would lose everything that made her Miranda and become a twisted thing with only one goal: to kill, over and over, until someone put her down.