A moment later, Deven asked, “This goddess of yours . . . what would she think of you being here, helping a godless murdering vampire?”
Nico looked at him sharply. “I wish you would not say such things about yourself.”
“Why not? It’s true.” Though the words were harsh, his tone was matter-of-fact, which he could tell bothered the Elf. “It’s funny . . . I tell my friends I’m an atheist, but that isn’t really accurate . . . I’m an apostate, no longer welcome in either the house or the heart of God.”
It was those same thoughts that had shoved him into the despair that Nico had healed him from, but now, it seemed things were back to normal; instead of wanting to curl up and wail, he could summon the distance he needed to keep walking.
Nico didn’t like it. He was frowning, eyes on the path and hands clasped behind him. “You began to feel cast out by the Divine as a young human, when you realized that according to the texts of your faith you were damned to an eternity of torment—both because you had supernatural power and because you love other men.”
“A great many people made it very clear to me.”
“And after all this time you have not seen anything that would lead you to try to reclaim your belief—even though those who led your church were prone to human frailty and fallibility like anyone else? Can you not look past them to the God whose love informs the entire universe and is, more than likely, far wiser than the little children running the show here?”
“I didn’t say I don’t believe,” Deven told him. “Belief and faith are two different things. I believe, sometimes at least, that God exists, but I have no faith that God has ever loved me.”
Surprisingly, Nico didn’t try to argue with him but said, “I am sorry you feel that way.”
“I can tell you disapprove.”
“Not to speak ill of your God, but . . . a Father who would cast his child into perdition for healing, or for loving someone, is a poor Father indeed. I cannot believe divine love is anything less than unconditional. I do not think you will ever be whole until you have found solace for your spirit . . . if you cannot reach out to your Father, perhaps you should seek another Parent.”
“Oh, like who? Yours?” Deven paused and narrowed his eyes. “You’re not on some mission to convert me to Elven religion, are you?”
Nico blinked, surprised . . . and then laughed. “Of all the gods to vie for your soul, I think Persephone will prove a much stronger contender than Theia. You are very much like us, whether you want to admit it or not, but somehow I do not think you would be content passively communing with the forest for all time.”
“Smiling at squirrels and singing to flowers? Probably not.” Deven smiled again, deciding now was a good time to change the subject. “But you approve of our forest, even if it’s not as splendid as yours?”
“It is beautiful. They are so young.”
“They’re older than me.”
Nico tilted his chin back and admired the distant view of the treetops. “The trees in Avilon are easily three times older, but there is something here that ours are lacking. We have seasons there, yet our world is essentially unchanging, static. Much like the Elentheia themselves, they do not evolve. Strangely, that tranquillity has always made me restless. This place feels more alive somehow, more vital, and in that way, more serene.”
He lowered his gaze to meet Deven’s, and the sudden emotion in his violet eyes made Deven shake inside. “It is wonderful . . . as are you, a creature of leather and steel, standing there in the starlight in a place where you actually feel at peace.”
Deven felt himself flushing, and he held Nico’s gaze until the heat became unbearable and he had to lower his eyes. “Nico . . .”
“I know,” the Elf said, chagrined. “I apologize. I honestly am trying . . . but being here with you in this place is both paradise and purgatory. Here without the burden of all your cares, you are brighter than the sun.”
“I haven’t seen the sun in a very long time,” Deven said softly. “I’ll have to take your word for it.”
Nico gave him a look of faint frustration. He moved closer and took Deven’s hand, kissing the back of it before retreating again. “If I know you a thousand years, i’lyren, I will find a way to make you see what the rest of us see in you.”
“Wait . . . what did you call me?”
He grinned a little mischievously. “It means ‘my ghost,’” he replied. “Or, to be more precise, ‘the spirit whose light is haunting me.’”
“So . . . Ghostlight.”
“As I said, it suits you. Now . . . let us walk on, before morning steals the night away.”
Deven shook his head, smiling wryly at the whole situation. “As you will it,” he said, and followed the Elf deeper into the forest.
• • •
Dawn had cast its gauzy veil over the sky, and the Haven shut down—shutters on timers, metal walls clattering into place over breezeways, leaving the whole building in silence and a comfortable darkness.
Nico sat on the chaise he had come to think of as his own. He had been granted an override code to open the terrace door from his room, and he was careful to shut it behind him just in case one of the guards needed to come in. It would be the height of bad manners to accidentally immolate the staff.
His heart weighed heavily in his chest as he looked down at the two packs on the tiled floor at his feet.
It was time to go. He knew it was time. But to leave so much unfinished . . .
It would never be finished. He had offered his heart to Deven knowing that it would be rejected, but it still hurt more than he had believed possible.
The Prime was right, of course. Theirs was not meant to be a long-term romance, if it got even that far . . . at least, not as they were now. There would come a day, he knew, when he and Deven both would look at each other across a very different divide, and that time they might be able to cross it.
They would have to. Too much depended on this.
But for now, his work was done. He could go home.
Home. The thought filled him with longing, and he got to his feet, already drawing power up around him to build the portal. He would go home, and he would live in the safety and solace of his own world . . . until this one called him back again . . . for the last time.
Nico reached into one of his bags and pulled out a strip of paper, along which he had written out Deven’s name; he slid the ring of Theia off his finger and tied the slip of paper to it, clearly labeling who it was meant for. The moonstone gleamed in the early light. He left it on the chair. Anyone who found it would know to deliver it . . . but he knew no one else would. The first hand to touch the ring would be that of its new owner.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out another object, this one a marked contrast to his ring: a black leather wrist cuff embossed with Celtic knotwork. Deven had left it during one of their healing sessions and never asked for it back. Nico had a feeling he owned quite a few. It was not a priest’s ring, perhaps, but it was strangely far more appropriate to Nico, who snapped it on his own wrist with a smile.
“Ile amast amori est i’lyren,” he told the empty air, pushing a touch of energy through the words so that if he were dreaming, Deven might hear Nico’s voice and, perhaps, smile a little in his sleep.
In the fantasy Nico had built for himself, that was exactly what happened: The sleeping Prime heard his declaration and whispered back into the darkness, “I love you, too.”
But the reality dictated he raise the portal and go, and so he did, drawing power up from the earth and the forest all around, letting it fill his body and expand outward. He closed his eyes and brought up his vision of the Web, laying over it an image of where he was going: home. The solitary little house he dwelt in on the edge of Avilon, deep among the trees where whispers and stares couldn’t follow . . . he held on to that vision, drawing it toward him, wrapping it in his consciousness as the warp and weft of reality parted to let him through . . . and with a
blast of light and heat, Nico took up his bags and stepped out of the world of mortals, back home, where he dreamed of belonging.
• • •
In the first picture, Marilyn Grey was laughing, one of the girls on her knee; they both wore shorts in the summer sun, in the backyard of the house in Rio Verde. It was pretty obvious which sister was in the picture; her bright green eyes matched her mother’s, and an enormous poof of red hair had fought its way out of a headband and stuck out in all directions.
The next page was a photo of the girls, playing in the sandbox. Marianne had used a set of plastic molds to very carefully construct an amazingly detailed sand castle, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth as she concentrated on getting it just right. Meanwhile Miranda had dug a hole and was sitting in it with her bucket on her head, throwing sand in the air.
That about summed it up.
Most of the pictures were from that same era. Marilyn wore a wide variety of printed bandannas over her hair; the girls ran around barefoot with skinned knees. Her father wasn’t in any of them.
Looking through the album, Miranda wondered if the voices had already come to her mother by then. Had she started to feel the first scrape of other people’s emotions against her mind? Was she still able to dismiss it somehow? Her face didn’t betray any sort of fear or preoccupation. Here, at least, she was still 100 percent present, at least on the outside. They made cookies, pulled weeds in the flower beds, ran through the sprinklers. Everything was achingly normal.
When the Blackthorn had burned down Miranda’s apartment, she’d lost her only happy picture of her mother; David had tried to find another, but since Miranda’s had come from the only extant copy of Marilyn’s psych file, and a variety of spectacular clerical errors had misplaced the photo on record at the DMV, both knew the only way to get more pictures of her was to go through the family. Miranda hadn’t been ready for that before, so she’d gone without, but now she had an entire album full of her mother’s face.
She had avoided looking through it for a few days after they got home from Rio Verde; for the moment she had just wanted to pretend none of it had happened and not think about her family at all. But the thought of seeing Marilyn again occupied her thoughts more and more until finally she took the album to her chair by the fire, sipped a glass of blood, and turned the pages slowly, smiling through tears at how adorable the sisters had been . . . how innocent and full of promise . . . how happy they had all seemed.
Miranda had grown quieter and more introverted over the years, a vague and unnamable sadness taking up permanent residence in her eyes. Marianne had gradually distanced herself from her depressive, weird sister. Miranda knew that things between her parents were never that great and behind the smiles was something far less than idyllic, but in a handful of moments frozen by the camera she could believe in the fairy tale of a happy family.
Miranda laid her hand on Marilyn’s face. What would she think about her daughters’ lives now? Marianne, ever the overachiever, was a drug addict; and Miranda . . . well, she wasn’t exactly the poster child for suburban America either.
She heard the suite door open and shut, David shaking out his coat and hanging up The Oncoming Storm, and yawning. “Three more attacks,” he said. “All in Europe. I managed not to say ‘I told you so’ to any of them, in the interest of diplomacy, but I thought it extra hard. Jacob actually called Western Europe a . . . what phrase did he use? A ‘barmy old codger.’ I don’t think Napolitano knew quite how to react.”
“What about your tracker guy?” Miranda asked, raising her head. “Are you planning to send a team to their headquarters, or what?”
“Not yet. Right now he’s giving me excellent insight into their daily movements. The tracker records eighteen different kinds of data, and the more I know the happier I’ll be. I want to learn as much as I can about how they operate and let it record as long as possible before I send in a strike team to fetch the Shepherd—not just for our own edification, but to make sure the team stays safe.”
He walked to the couch and leaned over her, kissing the top of her head, one hand on her shoulder sliding up to touch her face. “What are you doing?”
“Look,” she said, holding the album up, open to the picture of Marilyn with Miranda on her knee. “That’s my mom.”
He didn’t reply at first, so she turned her head and looked up at him. To her amazement, he had gone pale and was staring at the picture like it was a ghost.
“I know,” she said. “She looks just like me. She’s actually younger than me here.”
Involuntarily, the Prime took a step back, still staring at the picture.
“What is it?” she asked. “David?”
Finally, he shook himself out of the trance, blinked, and looked down into her worried face. “I . . .”
His confusion scared her. “What? Tell me what’s wrong.”
David took a deep breath. “I don’t know how, but . . . I could swear I had met her before. Not as someone who resembles you, but . . . I don’t know how that could have happened. I would have remembered that when I met you later. But still . . . maybe the part of me that has always known you for my Queen sees that potential in her bloodline.”
“Bloodline—” Miranda grabbed the book back and started turning pages, heart pounding. “The Morningstar soldiers that had me staked to the ground . . . they were saying something about killing Marianne and Jenny to wipe out the bloodline. Did you get a good look at Jenny when you spoke to Marianne?”
“No. We talked at the door, then I left.”
“Okay, then. Here.” She held up the book—a five-by-seven of Jenny from second grade that had been stuck in the back of the album, her bucktoothed little-girl grin infectious, her red hair in a Hermione Granger situation just as Miranda’s . . . and Marilyn’s . . . had been from time to time.
David stared at the picture for a long moment.
“What do you feel?” Miranda asked, afraid to hear the answer.
He frowned, tilted his head. “I feel the same thing I felt when I saw your mother,” he said. “Recognition . . . as if we met at a party hundreds of years ago and were in the middle of a conversation when one of us had to leave. But I can’t tell how much of that is the same thing, or how much is that she looks like you and you look like your mother. What do you think it means?”
“You don’t happen to have a painting or anything of your son, do you?”
He shook his head. “Where are you going with this?”
“Bloodlines,” Miranda said. “In the Persephone myth there was something about us being the descendants of the original Signets, the Secondborn. What if it wasn’t speaking metaphorically? She made them out of humans like any other vampire, right? Those humans had families. Some probably had children.”
“But that was two thousand years ago,” he said. “By now that blood would be so genetically diluted it would be completely meaningless . . . well, perhaps except for yours.” His eyebrows lifted. “You’re the only one of us who still has family alive within a generation or two. Scientifically it’s preposterous, but this is magic we’re talking about, so who the hell knows? Maybe it’s a mystical bloodline, not a genetic one, and can pass along far more distant family connections.”
“They wanted to wipe my bloodline out.” Miranda shook her head. “But it’s not like if they killed me, Marianne or Jenny could just step into my place. Marianne’s about as intuitive as a bag of wet flannel, and Jenny’s in second grade. I don’t know how all of this is going to go down, but I really doubt we have time to wait for her to grow up.”
“Our blood may recognize each other, but that doesn’t make us all interchangeable.”
“Still, it has to mean something.”
David looked thoughtful, closing the photo album and handing it back to her. “We have no way to know,” he told her. “And even if we did, it wouldn’t really change anything.”
“I need to talk to Stella,” Miranda said. “We have
to find a way to get answers. If she’s supposed to be our intermediary, there has to be a safer way for her to do it than Drawing Down. If she has to go into a coma every time they talk, we’re never going to get anywhere.”
She was almost expecting it when the knock came at the door a few seconds later.
She sighed. Of course.
The door guard poked his head in. “My Lady, young Miss Stella is here to see you—Elite Sixty-seven found her wandering in a daze around the corridor from here and thought it best just to bring her to you.”
She and David looked at each other. “Sure,” she told the guard. “Let her in.”
The young Witch peered uncertainly around the door frame. She was disheveled . . . and still in her pajamas. Miranda had to smile; they were the same Hello Kitty pajamas she’d worn herself while in Stella’s care.
“Sorry,” Stella said. “I don’t mean to interrupt, I just . . . something really freaky happened.”
Miranda stood up and went to her, guiding her toward the couch. “Are you hurt? You’re so pale.”
Stella sank down gratefully and took a couple of deep breaths. “No, I’m okay.” She seemed to remember where she was and looked around with interest. Miranda imagined it from her perspective. The bedroom of the two most powerful vampires in the South: What must it look like to her? Miranda tried to remember how she’d felt when she first saw it, but her own first impression was before she really had any idea who, or what, she was dealing with. The only memory that came to mind was calling David a “ninja computer programmer doctor,” which turned out to be pretty damn close to the truth.
“So this is the inner sanctum,” Stella said. Her eyes fell on Miranda’s guitar, not three feet away, and she took another deep breath and swallowed. “This is too weird.”
David had risen when Miranda did, but the Queen didn’t see what he was doing until he returned to the fireplace with a can of Dr Pepper, popped the top, and handed it to the Witch.
“Wow, how did you know?”
He smiled. “I know that look. It’s the ‘I just had some kind of psychic episode’ look.”
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