Shadowbound

by Dianne Sylvan

  “But we can’t go on like this,” David said. “He’s sucking both of us dry.”

  “That’s mostly because of the shattered matrix—it’s still drawing power, but since it’s busted that power is leaking out all over the place. I think the first priority would be to plug those leaks; from there we can figure out your options.”

  “Can you do that?” Miranda asked. “Plug them, I mean.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never done anything like this before. But I have to try, otherwise this is going to kill all three of you.” Stella stood up and stretched. “Let me do a little research—as soon as I have a useful idea I’ll let you know.”

  “Stella . . .” Miranda looked reluctant to say anything but went ahead anyway. “Do you know anything about Speaking Stones?”

  “I know that they’re used for a kind of benign blood magic, where the person doing the calling anoints the stone with blood, and it calls out to anyone with similar blood. Witches mostly use them for finding family members. It’s nearly impossible to do if you don’t know the person you’re calling. Why? Oh . . . right. You want to call Nico.”

  “We know you can help,” the Queen told her. “But when it comes to actually fixing the bonds themselves . . .”

  “You want to bring out the big gun. I totally agree. I’m not going to claim I can do more than I can do—like I said, I can probably stop the two of you from energetically bleeding to death, but you’re going to need a lot more firepower to fix the real problem.” Stella gave them a reassuring smile. “We’re going to figure this out,” she said. “I’m not giving up on you guys.”

  She left, and he and Miranda just sat for a while. David kept searching Deven’s face, looking for any hopeful sign; he looked like he was in such pain, even unconscious.

  Finally, she unfolded herself from her cross-legged position, groaning at how stiff she was. “I’ve got to get some sleep,” she said. “Would you take over for a while?”

  “Of course.”

  She kissed David gently and headed back into the suite for a shower and what he hoped would be a long nap. He was worn out, too, and if he was going to stay in here, he might as well try to rest.

  He stretched out on the bed next to Deven and closed his eyes, laying one hand on Deven’s chest to feel his heartbeat. Once, long ago, they had slept that way every day—without intending to, each had sought out the other’s pulse, and they slept with palms against chests, hands curved around wrists or throats. An outsider would likely have thought they were trying to strangle each other. The irony hadn’t been lost on David.

  He didn’t realize he’d drifted off until he felt something against him shift; his eyes snapped open, and he propped himself up on his elbow, looking down, watching for something, anything.

  He hadn’t imagined it. One of Deven’s hands twitched. A moment later, his eyelashes fluttered and very slowly opened partway.

  David’s heart clenched. Deven’s eyes were lifeless, lightless. He didn’t seem to know where he was at first, but eventually he turned toward David, who offered a tentative smile.

  After what felt like an eternity, Deven managed to speak in a harsh whisper.

  “Kill me.”

  David looked away, eyes burning.

  “If . . . if you really love me . . . don’t make me live like this. I’m done . . . I want to die. Please just let me die.”

  David met his eyes again. “I can’t.”

  “Please . . .”

  “I can’t, Deven. You’re bound to us now. If you die, we die. We’re trying to find a way to fix it, but for now, at least . . . you’re ours.”

  “But how . . . how could you do this to me? How could she . . . after what happened to you . . .”

  “It wasn’t her idea,” David replied as gently as he could. “But how could either of us deny a last request, especially if it meant saving you?”

  “Last request . . .” His eyes closed, tears starting to fall. “Oh God.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  David thought he was about to break down again, but after a moment he said, “Go away. Leave me alone . . . please just go away.”

  “Dev—”

  “Go!” Lightning seemed to flash in Deven’s eyes, and David knew what was coming before he saw the extended hand—a massive shove of power slammed into him and threw him off the bed, across the three or four feet of open space and hitting the wall hard enough to crack vertebrae.

  “I’m not asking,” Deven snarled. “Get out.”

  David pushed himself up off the floor, barely able to move through the pain in his back, but it was already healing as he got to his feet, retreating toward the suite door. He paused, wanting to say something—wanting to say so many things—but there was nothing he could say to make any of this better.

  David left the room, leaning back against the door and breathing in the warm, comforting air of his own suite. He drew in what strength he could and forced himself to move, undressing and crawling into bed beside Miranda, who stirred and woke when she felt him near.

  “It was all for nothing,” he said softly. “All of it . . . even if we find a way to stabilize the bond, the Circle can never be completed now. We’ll keep fighting, and they’ll keep picking us off one by one . . . and once all the Signets are gone there will be nothing to stop the entire Shadow World from tearing itself apart.”

  He met her gaze and saw the truth there; Miranda, too, had all but given up. “Maybe we should just let it all go, then,” she said, though he knew she didn’t really mean it. “Maybe we should kill him. Then we could all go . . . and be free of this.”

  David took a deep breath. “No. We can’t. Not if there’s even the slightest chance we can find a way to destroy Morningstar. We can’t leave our people to fend for themselves against those bastards. Not yet.”

  She didn’t argue. He knew she agreed, and that one way or another they would find the strength to go on. For now she got as close to him as she could, and they held on to each other tightly, both so tired they couldn’t think, but neither able to sleep.

  • • •

  For days Deven lay unmoving, even when there were others in the room. They fed him, and he swallowed obediently but gave no hint he heard them speaking.

  The Witch was there as well, discussing the situation with failing hope: even if all the energy leaks were repaired, even if the three of them could be balanced, the reality was that two Thirdborn could not be bound to a regular vampire. They simply were not compatible. The place where Miranda had fused them together would soon start to crack; when that happened, without a way to reseal the bond, they were all dead. They could try bringing him across, but he was weak, and the chances of his surviving the transition were slim.

  He stopped listening after that.

  Everything had gone numb, which was a nice change of pace. It gave him enough clarity to understand that it didn’t matter what the others did; dying wouldn’t solve anything any more than living would. There was no reason to go on, because there was nothing to go to. There would be no one there on the other side to walk with him into eternity.

  It didn’t matter who had “saved” him or what their motivations were. What it came down to was a cold, bitter truth.

  Jonathan hadn’t wanted him.

  He was gone, and he had refused to let Deven follow even though he knew what he was leaving behind—he knew what kind of pain he was forcing his Prime to endure. They had watched Miranda try to gather the scattered pieces of a broken life when David died, but even knowing what she had suffered, Jonathan had not only forced his Prime into that same black lake of desolation, he had held Deven’s head beneath the water until he drowned.

  The reasons were irrelevant. The truth was still the same. Jonathan had left him—the one person who was never supposed to, the one constant, the only promise that mattered . . . gone.

  If they wanted to keep his body alive so they could continue to fight a war they were going to lose, that was fine. If t
hey gave up and killed him and they all ceased to exist, with nothing after but eternal oblivion, that was fine, too. It made no difference to him. Everything he was, everything that mattered, had died in that explosion. There was no coming back this time.

  It was already over.

  • • •

  Miranda stared at her hands on the keys for a long time before she stopped trying to make herself play.

  After everything they had survived, their lives came down to this: waiting to die.

  Each passing night dragged them further and further into the dark—they both tried to hold the balance, but no matter how they shielded or how much they fed, Deven was killing them, and there was nothing anyone could do. As strong as Stella was, she wasn’t strong enough; she’d said it herself back when David and Miranda had been split . . . no Witch could remake a soul bond.

  She shut the piano and pushed herself away, leaving the music room. The entire Haven felt like a tomb; the oppressive, leaden atmosphere was straining the limits of her shielding. She had to get away, even if she couldn’t go far.

  Autumn had arrived with a vengeance in central Texas. The nights were already chilly, and wave after wave of storms had blown over them since they’d made it home. She had on a jacket, but the air still hit her like a punch in the lungs; uncaring, she broke into a run, getting away from the Haven and stumbling into the gardens.

  She dropped onto a bench. She knew this spot quite well; she and David had walked here back when she was still human.

  She had lived through so much. She had changed so much. And unless Persephone decided they were worth another miracle, none of it made any difference.

  Stella had attempted some kind of summoning spell, but she had no idea what she was trying to summon; that kind of magic required either knowing where the intended target was or at least knowing the target well enough to have some kind of connection. Still, she tried.

  The Witch had tried to help with the energy leakage as well and had made some progress—she’d figured out how to patch several of the biggest holes, which at least gave Miranda and David some of their strength back. It helped Miranda to figure out that half of what she was feeling wasn’t hers; she was absorbing emotional information from two people now, multiplying what she had to control. That didn’t stop it from being awful, but it did make her feel less despairing; the impulse to give up wasn’t hers, and knowing that helped her fight it . . . to a point. They were still being dragged toward the abyss, but Stella had bought them time.

  Now Miranda closed her eyes and imagined she could reach out far enough to find Nico, wherever and whoever he was. “Please,” she murmured, tears coming to her eyes for the thousandth time in two weeks. “Help us. Help him.”

  She sat in silence for a while listening to the wind and the night birds, looking across the grounds, toward the only place she had ever really felt was home. Within those walls was everything that mattered to her—her family, her music, her people. After everything she had survived to get here . . . Miranda’s eyes narrowed, and she sat up straighter, her hands gripping the arms of the bench so hard they shook.

  “No,” she said softly, this time addressing Persephone. “I’m not giving up. To hell with your war—I won’t just lie down and die after everything I’ve been through. Maybe this will kill all three of us . . . but I’ll go down fighting and come out swinging on the other side. You can help us or not, but if you want us to fight for you, we need more than dreams and feathers. So put up or shut up.”

  The night’s continued silence swallowed her words, offering silence back as her answer. She shook her head, anger burning hot in her chest—it was almost a good feeling, knowing she was still capable of something besides mourning.

  Wait—

  Miranda grew still, sure she’d felt something—a change in the wind, perhaps. She looked around with her heart pounding, the stubborn little part of her that refused to accept the inevitable straining for hope, for the possibility that just maybe . . .

  Suddenly the hair on the back of her neck stood up, and she felt something like an electrical charge building in the air. She was on her feet in seconds, sword drawn by reflex, turning in a slow circle and scanning the treeline for any movement.

  And there, only about ten feet from her bench, she saw something. A patch of the night seemed to grow denser, contracting into a single point that then expanded again, this time in a watery circle of glowing violet-white light.

  Miranda’s heart lurched to a halt. She remembered that feeling . . . she had seen this before, as she lay staked to the ground in an empty farm building waiting for the sun to scorch the flesh from her bones. She remembered it . . . remembered what had happened next . . .

  The light inside the circle grew brighter, and she felt a kiss of wind—wind scented with evergreen, not yet touched by autumn’s chill.

  There was one final blast of light, blinding her so she had to shield her eyes with her forearm . . . and then the energy evaporated, the night just as it was before.

  Slowly, she lowered her arm.

  Green eyes met darkened violet.

  Miranda gaped at the young man who had appeared in the middle of the garden, her mind finding it impossible to make sense of him. He had dark auburn hair that fell down almost to his waist; he wore a midnight blue cloak over a sort-of-medieval-looking outfit. A strange tattoo of spirals and swirls ran down along one side of his face. He was incredibly beautiful, even otherworldly, and stared at her calmly, kindness in his eyes.

  That was when she noticed his ears.

  “I am Nicolanai Araceith,” he said in a gentle voice.

  “Nico,” she said, still not quite able to process what she was seeing. “But . . . you’re an Elf!”

  He lifted one eyebrow. “I know that.”

  “You’re supposed to be extinct!”

  He smiled. “I am supposed to be a lot of things.” He stepped forward, moving closer to her, and though she wanted to back away, she couldn’t. “You are Miranda Grey, Queen of this territory, are you not?”

  She nodded.

  “It is a pleasure to meet you. Now, please . . .” He turned his head to look at the Haven, then looked back at her, urgency in his expression. “Take me to him.”

  Seventeen

  Though he had stayed away for days, keeping busy and trying not to think too much about the future, David found himself returning to the mistress suite and sitting on the side of the bed again, unable to look away.

  The gold band on Deven’s finger was loose; he was growing thinner. None of them could seem to feed enough—David had mentioned to Miranda, just broaching the subject, that they might have to kill again before the new moon if they wanted to maintain even enough strength to function at minimal levels. She had been so upset by the idea that he hadn’t brought it up again . . . yet.

  “I brought you blood,” he said into the heavy silence. “Flowers seemed so cliché.”

  He wasn’t expecting an answer and didn’t receive one, so he went on. “The West is still quiet. Eventually I’m sure someone will challenge my authority, but for now it’s calm. And . . . the crew out at the site got the ground cleared enough to reach the underground vaults. They’re bringing everything up and packing it for storage. There are also a few other things they found intact, or mostly. There was . . .” He had to take a deep breath before continuing. “They found a signed first edition of Les Misérables where your suite used to be. The edges are charred, but it’s still in one piece. I don’t know if you’ll want it, but . . .”

  David trailed off, bowing his head.

  He was working hard to keep himself together for the sake of his Elite, and to help maintain calm among the Circle—not to mention that he refused to give the Council the satisfaction of watching him fall apart. But the emotional distance he had prided himself on for so long had crashed down around him like the walls of a collapsing building, and for the most part he saved his energy for dealing with the outside world and spent th
e rest of the nights in a daze. He felt like he had come home a different person . . . an older, sadder person who no longer cared about the things he had once devoted himself to.

  He’d been trying to comprehend why, if she cared about them at all, Persephone had let this happen—he knew there was still something preventing her from intervening directly, but she had spoken to several of them in their dreams, given premonitions . . . why, he wondered over and over, hadn’t she warned them?

  It took him a while to get it, but when he did, he had nearly broken every glass object within a twenty-foot radius before he reined his mind back in.

  She had warned them. Or, more specifically, she had warned Jonathan.

  Everything he had said while he lay buried in the wreckage made sense once David understood that Jonathan knew he was going to die.

  David couldn’t guess how long he had known, but he had a feeling it was quite a while. He might not have known exactly how it would happen, or where, but he must have had a firm idea of when—why else would he propose to Deven out of the blue? That proposal had brought them all together and provided an opportunity Morningstar couldn’t resist—was that the plan all along, that Jonathan would set the whole thing in motion himself?

  And whether she was trying to help them or simply shoving them toward the fate she had planned, Persephone had given Miranda the knowledge she needed to save Deven’s life. The dreams had since stopped, and Miranda claimed she could no longer reach the vision of the Web where she had worked that night; but David had a feeling that if she were ever to reach for it again it would be there. She had blocked it out, not lost it.

  On top of everything else, Stella had told him about her tarot reading. The Ten of Swords . . . a man in torment, bleeding to death in the dark. A sacrifice. Miranda had interpreted it as the humans they had to kill on the new moon . . . but she’d been wrong. Stella thought the Two of Swords represented Deven, and the Queen of Swords was Miranda; Deven, a sacrifice, Miranda . . . and the Eight of Pentacles, the spider.