He answered on the first ring. “Miranda!”
“Are you all right? Where are you?”
“I was out front. Most of the explosions blew toward the back—I’m a little banged up but okay.”
She looked over to where Deven lay unconscious on the ground. Blood was oozing out from under him. “I need you,” she said. “I need help with Deven.”
Before she even finished “I need you,” David materialized out of the air a few feet away; he toppled forward onto the leaf-strewn ground, coughing, and she saw that when he’d said “banged up,” he was putting it mildly. None of his injuries looked serious, but he must have been hit hard if he could barely manage a Mist.
They both took hold of Deven and gently turned him over. “I can’t fucking believe we got blown up again,” Miranda said, hearing the note of hysteria in her own voice and trying again to ground. “What’s it like up there?” she asked David as he took a quick inventory of Deven’s wounds. It looked like the Prime had been hit by flying glass; there were lacerations all over him, and their tumble down the cliff had been far worse for him than her. A piece of wrought iron was sticking out of his stomach, causing the bleeding. David pulled it quickly before answering her question.
“A nightmare,” David answered. He was beyond shocked, almost beyond words. She’d never seen him look quite that bewildered. “The main building is nothing but a pile of rubble and broken walls. Anyone who was still in there is either dead or trapped—that’s all the guards, most of the servants. One of the Elite buildings is fine; they weren’t rigged to blow but the other one got hit with so much debris it’s half gone.”
Deven groaned and opened his eyes. He was badly hurt, but Miranda knew he’d be fine as soon as they found—
“Jonathan,” Deven said. “Where is he? I can’t . . .”
“He was in the garage, wasn’t he?” Miranda asked. “That’s a concrete building—it might still be standing.”
She met David’s eyes. The answer was written on his face.
Before she could say anything else, she heard a phone ringing—Deven’s. David found it first. “It’s him!”
He hit talk and put it on speaker, holding the phone close to Deven.
“Where are you?” Deven asked, trying to sit up and failing. David moved behind him, helping him upright. “Are you hurt? I can barely feel you.”
The answer came slowly, in hoarse and ragged breaths. “Baby . . . it’s okay.”
Suddenly a memory struck Miranda—kneeling next to Drew in the empty classroom while he bled out onto the floor and said a whispered good-bye to a sobbing Kat. Oh no. Oh God. No . . .
“Tell me where you are,” Deven said again.
“. . . trapped.”
“Where? David and Miranda can Mist you out, we just have to know where to look—”
“It’s too late.”
They all stared at the phone. “Jonathan, don’t be ridiculous,” David said in a very calm voice. “We can Mist you—but only if we know where you are.”
“. . . don’t understand . . . I’m not . . . I can’t feel anything . . . pinned . . . I got my hand to the phone, but that’s all I’ve got . . . I think . . . something’s gone . . . I can’t feel it . . .” His voice started to fade.
Panic had entered Deven’s voice. “Where are you? Damn it, Jonathan—”
“Miranda.”
She had her hands pressed to her heart, so far past fear that she could barely force her mouth to move. “I’m here.”
“Promise me . . .”
She waited, but there was nothing else for a few seconds, and she cried, “Jonathan!”
“Promise me you’ll save him.”
Deven was staring at the phone, shaking his head slowly back and forth, and he whispered, “That’s not how it works . . . we go together.”
“No.”
Again, they all stared.
Miranda could feel Jonathan dragging scraps of strength into his body with all that remained of his will. “You know what to do, Miranda. Promise me.”
She started to deny having any idea what he meant . . .
“Oh, God . . .” she said softly. “Oh God.”
A matrix of light appeared in her mind, millions of connections beckoning to her . . . but this was no dream.
It was real.
“That’s what it was?” she all but screamed. “All this time, that’s what I was learning?”
“I want . . . your word.”
“You can’t ask me to do this!” she exclaimed. “Don’t you know what this will do to him? To us? I can’t, Jonathan—don’t make me promise!”
“It’s the only way . . . has to survive . . . everything depends on this.”
Heart and mind frozen, she looked down at Deven. As Jonathan weakened, so did he, and he had his eyes closed, breathing labored . . . waiting.
She tried to reach Jonathan with her energy, to give him . . . something, anything. Life support. Anything—even just to let him know he wasn’t dying alone there in the dark, far from any comfort. She managed to find him with her mind and began to cry when she realized he was right. There was no healing strong enough to save him. They could still try to Mist him out, but he was so weak that he would die in the attempt and they would lose both of them . . . or . . .
“Please,” he said. She could barely hear him. “Please.”
Tears were running down her face as she leaned toward the phone and whispered, “I promise.”
“Good . . . that’s good . . . th . . . thank you . . . Deven, baby, if you can hear me . . . I love you. You were my always . . . too.”
“I’ll be right behind you,” Deven told him with a soft smile through tears, touching the screen of the phone as if he could touch Jonathan through it. “Just wait for me.”
On the other end of the line she heard a clattering sound that she realized was the phone falling to the ground.
The rest was silence.
Beneath them the ground began to tremble. It wasn’t severe and lasted only a few seconds, but it was enough to erase any doubt.
Deven gave a cry of pure, agonizing desolation that tore Miranda’s heart in half, then lay still against David, surrendering, knowing what was coming. He was ready to go. She could feel it. There was nothing left . . . only one last bridge to cross.
Miranda lifted her eyes to David. “Do it,” he said. “Whatever it is, do it.”
“Anchor me—”
She closed her eyes, and immediately the vision of the Web appeared as it had in her dreams for weeks. And just as in the dreams, she could see it—the Circle, as it existed now. That strand she had been staring at for hours in her sleep shone in her mind’s eye . . . but its light was fading, slipping away. She knew what it was now . . . and she knew what to do.
Miranda braced herself against David’s power and reached into the matrix.
She took hold of the fading strand and pulled, dragging it closer, drawing one end of it back away from the edge of death.
“No!”
She heard the desperation in Deven’s voice, heard him struggling; she couldn’t open her eyes, but she shook her head, tightening her grip on the bond. “David, hold him down.”
Deven was fighting her with his energy, too—what power he had left he tried to use to wrest control back from her and follow his Consort into death. But he was weak, and growing weaker; and she had her strength and David’s. Even a grief and shock-stricken Prime had no chance against the will of the Thirdborn.
Iron determination took hold of Miranda—from where, she didn’t know—and she took a deep breath and snapped the bond in half.
She didn’t stop to find out how he reacted. She wasn’t finished.
Purely by instinct, she felt her way around the Circle until she found what she needed. She had no talent for this, only what she had learned in her dreams, but it turned out a delicate touch wasn’t required when one had brute strength.
She heard David’s voice, almost crac
king with fear. “Hurry.I’m losing him.”
Miranda couldn’t stop to think about what she was doing. She knew the consequences would be dire, and she might destroy everything right now with her novice’s hands . . . but she had promised. And she knew, even without that promise, that this was what had to happen.
She took the end of the broken strand . . .
. . . and joined it to their own.
She started pulling energy from David to pry their bond apart just enough to slip that strand in, then close it and seal it. It was messy and wouldn’t hold forever, but it would hold for now. She pushed the energy back into a flow, and though it shook and wobbled, it moved along the bond, from one, to two, to three.
As soon as she let go, she fell back out of the vision and into her body, breathing hard and drenched in sweat. Her head was already pounding, and she knew she was going to pass out, but first she had to be sure . . .
David had Deven’s head in his lap and was staring down at the fallen Prime, whose Signet was dark. They waited, neither able to speak, as the minute stretched out . . .
A faint light kindled in the Signet’s depths. As she watched, heart in her throat, it began to pulse gently as it brightened before growing steady again. All of the wounds on his face and arms began to close, and then to fade away; she could feel her own doing the same.
At first she didn’t understand what was different, but a shudder ran through Deven’s body, and she realized what it was.
His Signet was an emerald.
Or, it had been.
Now it shone red.
He drew a gasping breath, eyes opening, and struggled backward in fear—he might not have been dead, but it had been close, and suddenly being dragged back into his body had to be terrifying. He stared around at them, uncomprehending, until his eyes fell on the phone that lay beside him.
One hand reached over to the screen, fingers touching it lightly, shaking. Miranda saw the screen light up, saw Call Ended.
There was only one way to describe what happened then.
Deven shattered.
He sank back onto the ground, body racked with sobs, curling up in a ball with his hand still on the phone, gripping it so hard the screen cracked. Miranda remembered what he was feeling. She recognized the sound as those sobs broke into a thousand pieces and became screams of despair, of abandonment. When it had been her voice, Deven had been the one to bring her solace.
David was crying, too, but managed to pull off his coat and lay it over Deven, adding his own arms to try to offer comfort to what could not be comforted. He lifted anguished eyes to Miranda’s. “What have we done?”
She fell over onto the ground, suddenly too weak to move. She could feel energy being pulled from her—when it was just David she was connected to, she didn’t feel it at all, but now the circuit was precariously off balance, trying to stabilize itself. She didn’t fully understand the implications until she shut her eyes and, briefly before she passed out, saw the Web . . . saw what she had done to it. Their bond, and the Circle, had been remade.
The Pair was now a Trinity.
• • •
The still-intact Elite building had become triage for the wounded, while those Elite who were unharmed or already healed combed through the wreckage of the Haven, looking for survivors or any belongings they recognized.
Miranda sat quietly on a cot—one of two dozen that had been set up hastily in the main training room—and watched the activity around her, numb, and glad to be numb.
Exactly one survivor was pulled from the ruins. A cheer went up when they found her, and another when they got her free; they brought her in and laid her out on one of the cots, giving her blood and encouragement. She was a servant, by the look of her torn and dirt-encrusted clothes; she found herself hugged by everyone around her and was soon healed and asking to go back out and help.
Miranda found herself thankful for sheer dumb luck: David had already sent their Elite home, so none of them were in the bombing; and their luggage was already in the car out front and thus had survived. The car’s windows on the passenger side had been broken by shrapnel, but everything in it was intact.
Thirty-eight bodies had been found, primarily in the Haven itself but a few in the second Elite building who had been near to the blast. Those bodies were being shrouded and laid out in rows for the sunrise.
“My Lady.”
She looked up at the Elite standing solemnly in front of her. She hadn’t heard him approach. “Yes?”
“We found this and thought it best to bring it to you.”
He held out his hands, offering her a sword. She took it gingerly and nodded her thanks, then slid the blade out of the sheath to confirm its identity—by some miracle, like its owner, Ghostlight had survived.
It had to have been in the Signet suite, but those rooms had been demolished, not even leaving a wall to mark where the Pair had lived. All of their possessions, everything they’d collected or treasured over the long decades, gone in an instant.
Miranda couldn’t help but think about Faith . . . they had found the hilt of her sword, but it had blown apart, while Faith herself was essentially vaporized.
Too many bombs . . . too much fire, too many lives blown into dust. Why did it always have to be an explosion? Why couldn’t any of them die in peace, held by the people they loved as they sighed their last breaths? Why did it have to end in blood and fire?
She knew the answer, of course. This was what they had signed up for—a violent death with only one comfort . . . and that comfort was far more fragile than any of them had ever known. For centuries Pairs had died together, but it seemed that era was ending—just in time for her to have become Queen. Such bitter luck.
She laid the sword down on the adjacent cot, alongside its bearer, who had yet to regain consciousness. She hoped he wouldn’t until they were away from here; this was not where he needed to wake up.
A moment later David returned, dusty and subdued. He took a bottle of water from a nearby cooler and came to sit down next to her.
Wordlessly, he held up what he had brought back from the ruins: a cracked, soot-smudged Signet.
“What do we do with it?” she asked softly, taking it from him and wiping the stone with a clean spot on her shirt. There was blood on the chain, the blood of one of her dearest friends. Her hands began to tremble.
“I don’t know.” David sounded defeated. “We . . . we found him. They’re trying to get him out, but a concrete pillar had fallen and crushed him, and the walls of the garage fell on top of that. No one in there survived. It was . . .” He looked away, and she saw the impossibility of tears in his eyes again. “There was no way we could have saved him. He wouldn’t have survived a Mist. There wasn’t much left down past the abdomen . . . he couldn’t feel anything because his spinal cord had been severed, thank God. I don’t even know how he lived long enough to make the call. When I think that . . . he was alone in there, Miranda, in a concrete tomb with no light but the phone and twenty feet of rubble between his dying breaths and freedom. He died down there alone.” He put his head in his hands.
She threaded her arm around him, and he around her, and they held on to each other. “Not alone,” she said. “He heard our voices right until the end. He knew Deven was safe. That had to count for something.”
He didn’t reply, just shook his head. She had never seen him like this—he’d taken charge without hesitation, but out of the eye of the surviving Elite he looked like an orphan wandering around a war zone.
“What about the bombs?” she asked. “Is there any evidence?”
If anything, the question seemed to make him feel worse. “It’s my fault.”
“How can it possibly be your fault?”
“They got the idea from us. The only nonvampire staff allowed past the gates are the groundskeepers—they come once a week during daylight, in a truck. It’s always the same team—they have to scan their IDs and fingerprints and there’s a camera watched
by a day guard inside the house. The humans had all been background checked and vetted. Morningstar must have brainwashed them and sent them in with the explosives, knowing that since they were regular visitors they’d be let through. There’s no telling how long they had control . . . or how long those bombs were there waiting. They wanted revenge for their soldiers and their Shepherd . . . and they got it.”
“We thought we were so clever,” she murmured. “Decoy limos, wild-goose chases . . . the thought never occurred to any of us that they might already have found the Haven.”
She reached down to touch Deven’s face and was relieved to see he’d warmed up a little. Her eyes fell on his left hand.
“Jonathan’s ring,” she said. “We can’t leave it here.”
“I have it,” David replied quickly before she could start to worry. “It was lying near him. The left hand was . . . mostly gone.”
Miranda resisted the urge to cry again. She was so tired, every time she cried it felt like her head was about to split open. “What are we going to do?”
“Go home,” he said. “We’ll go back to Austin . . . after that, I don’t know. Let’s just take it one step at a time.”
“When can we leave? We need to get out of here before he wakes up. He’ll want to see the body.”
“What makes you so sure?”
She met his eyes. “I did. Even Bondbroken I couldn’t really believe you were dead until I heard Deven say he’d seen you—but I still wished I could, to make it real to my mind. And you were in one piece, not . . .”
“You’re right. We can’t let him see that. I just want to do one more round of the Elite and make sure they’re organized. The Second is dead, but there are several high-ranking lieutenants who can run things for a while. Let me check in with them, and then we’ll go.”
There were too many questions they had no way to answer. There was no precedent for this. Should they leave Jonathan’s Signet here? With whom? Would whoever came along to take over the West have another one made?
She couldn’t think about it. One step at a time, she told herself. First, get home.
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