Bless his heart.
The main reason Deven had bothered keeping the Red Shadow running was that he felt an odd sense of obligation to his agents. He kept those on assignment in place, and as agents finished their work he put them on paid leave, the understanding being that they might be called back out again at any moment…though he hadn’t taken on any new contracts in several months. He didn’t know yet what he wanted to do with the Shadow, but he knew he couldn’t leave his agents hanging mid-mission with no further contact or instruction.
He pushed himself up to his feet and grabbed the door for a second when the vertigo returned, but waved Chris away when she started toward him. She was used to his tendency to come home stoned or drunk out of his mind, and undoubtedly thought that’s what this was.
Unfortunately it was nothing so enjoyable—it was burnout. Every night that he felt the power start to scorch his hands he had no choice but to use it…or, rather, let it use him. He had to scatter his visits around town so that nobody would notice a sudden rash of miraculous healings; he also held back as much as he could with each person, only taking care of the worst problems—he’d erase a child’s leukemia but leave the side effects of chemotherapy alone, letting them resolve themselves.
If only he could use it up, and stay burnt out, but tomorrow night he’d wake up with just as much power as he’d had the night before, dragging him to the city, to sickbed after sickbed. There was no end to it. No relief.
Unless he were to try to balance it, and to do that…
He pushed the thought away and forced himself to walk. The hallways were a blur, but he knew the way so well he didn’t need to think about it, and was back at his room and in the shower before he really had time to choose a destination.
It was a testament to how wasted he was that he didn’t sense an intruder.
He walked out of the bathroom and froze.
The most logical question was irrelevant. He knew exactly who it was.
“You must be Kai,” he said, walking past the Elf to fetch a shirt from the bureau. He felt dark eyes on him, narrowed, evaluating, and as he turned to face the Elf, those eyes didn’t waver, but stayed fixed on him, still examining.
Deven pulled the shirt on and sank into a chair, grateful that the servant he’d been assigned had built a fire while he was gone. He had always been cold-natured, but now it was a constant.
He regarded his visitor without much enthusiasm either for or against his presence. “What do you want?”
The Elf sat down in the other chair without invitation, and they stared at each other in silence another moment before Kai said, in careful but clear English, “I thought it was time you and I met.”
Deven raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been coming here for nearly two years and it just now occurred to you?”
“No.” Kai rested his elbows on the chair’s arms and interlaced his fingers. He was as coldly regal as any Prime, all the more impressive because of the insane length of his raven-black hair and the finely-woven clothes he wore, including a velvet cloak that should have looked ridiculous in this day and age but was the only thing that would look appropriate on such a creature.
“I decided from the very beginning to hate you,” Kai went on, mincing no words, which Deven had to appreciate. “I love my brother very much and what you have done to him is unforgivable. Yet he and all the others have defended you to me time and again. And then, two nights ago, the Prime himself admitted that you might not be salvageable…and I could sense how much it cost him to say so. In spite of my best efforts I have come to value his wisdom, and for him to have held out hope for so long suggests there might be more to you than I believed.”
“Well, trust your first instinct,” Deven told him. “You were absolutely right.”
Kai smiled slightly. “Perhaps I should have come months ago. I might have spoken more kindly of you all this while.”
“Why? What evidence of my worth have you uncovered in five minutes?”
Still smiling, the Elf said, “I am an empath, my Lord. I uncovered what I needed within twenty seconds.”
“Great,” Deven muttered, looking over at the fire and avoiding that dark stare. “Now there’s two of you running around.”
“The Queen, too, is deeply grieved by your loss, but she has a much gentler heart than her mate’s.”
“If by gentler you mean deeper in denial of reality, I agree.”
Another silence. Deven tried to think of a way to make the Elf leave, but he had a sense that nothing he could say would elicit much of a reaction. In fact, he had the distinct feeling his behavior was being tolerated by the Elf, as one might tolerate a child’s.
Finally, Kai asked a surprising question: “Does this make you happy?”
“What?”
“The distorted vision of time and pain has made you believe you are worthless—if you can make everyone who loves you come to hate you, will you finally be satisfied?”
Deven had no answer for that.
Unfortunately that seemed to be all the answer Kai needed. “It will not work, you know. I cannot speak for the Pair, but I know my brother. His love is endless and eternally forgiving. It is his most remarkable and infuriating quality. You can torment him with this wall you have built, and drain him until he is nothing but skin and bone—as he is now—but you cannot shake his heart from yours.”
“Then he’s even more of a fool than I thought he was.”
Kai didn’t rise to the bait. Instead he rose physically, the movement graceful and silent except for the swish of whatever material his clothes were made from.
The Bard paused, eyes lighting on the fireplace mantel, where Ghostlight gathered dust in her sheath. “I am told you were a warrior once,” he said.
“I was a lot of things once.”
“A warrior, and a healer…a leader, friend, lover…one of the strongest of your kind…you must have saved so many lives back in those days. A pity.” Kai looked down at him, and this time there was actually something kind in his eyes, as if he’d seen something in Deven in the last few minutes that Deven hadn’t seen in 766 years. “Imagine what joy you might have found, and what miracles you could have worked in the world, had you not chosen to waste your time hating yourself.”
Again, Deven had no idea how to respond. Kai merely nodded, bestowing another measured smile upon him, and left the room, closing the door behind him without the slightest noise.
Deven tried to focus on the fire and push the Elf’s visit out of his mind, but to his horror, he felt his eyes starting to burn…not even because of Kai’s words, but…
He looks so much like Nico.
Oh, Nico…oh, God…would you really forgive me? Even now? Why would you do that?
It would be so easy just to…
NO.
His knees nearly gave out twice between the chair and the bed, but he managed to get there, collapse onto the bed, and grope desperately in the bedside table for what he knew was there: a vial and a syringe.
That’s right…disappear into a needle again. Show everyone how pathetic you are.
Except no one is listening anymore, are they. They’re giving up on you. That’s what you wanted, right?
He stared at the needle hovering over his arm for one minute, then two…and then a brief moment of sudden anger seized him, and with what little strength he had he threw it at the fireplace, followed by the bottle.
A faint pop, glass breaking.
And as much as he wanted to forget, to turn away from the memory, that tiny bit of affection in Kai’s gaze took hands with the memory of Miranda’s face outside the hospital, telling him she missed him…and before he could fall asleep, he had to roll over, away from a pillow damp with tears.
*****
Miranda and her entourage left Thursday night, and that Friday afternoon for the first time in a long time, David woke alone.
He lay listening to the eerie silence of the suite for a while, marveling at how different everyth
ing felt. There was something vital missing from the air, as if a light he hadn’t known was lit had been abruptly switched off. It even felt colder, but that was mostly because she wasn’t wrapped around him.
Miranda wasn’t a noisy person, wasn’t terribly messy…but she took up so much space here, and when she was gone, nothing felt right.
He knew if he dwelt on it that would only make the separation worse; if they were both in a good space they could stay apart a little longer. They were going to try and make her runs back home as infrequent as possible—laying here pining for her would not help matters at all.
Funny how once upon a time he’d been so used to solitude that having her in the Mistress Suite kept him awake—all her human noises, the scent of her reaching him at odd times. He’d shagged his way through a lot of redheads to avoid owning up to his feelings for her. As frustrating as those months had been, it was worth it in the long run. She had come to him when she was ready, and they had fit into each other’s lives with a seamlessness that he wouldn’t have believed possible.
She’d be in Dallas by now getting ready for the first show of her tour. A truck had carried her performance piano and other instruments, and she’d been driven, but after Dallas she’d take the jet over the larger distances to save time and fuel. Next was California. She was traveling clockwise around America, to all four of their territories and points between, and would end the tour with a show in Austin. There were a lot of places she wanted to stop and visit if she had time…including the bare, silent cliff where a year ago had stood a beautiful Mediterranean-inspired villa with a breathtaking view of the forest.
David had wanted to begin rebuilding the Haven right away, but Miranda had stopped him—how could he presume to know whether Deven would want the same design? He might, or he might want something totally different to keep from wandering around in the memories. It didn’t seem right, she’d said, to build anything on that ground without its owner’s permission.
Which meant it might never be built. But that might not be such a bad thing.
Again, as had happened a dozen times since Jonathan’s death, David found himself praying, silently, to Whomever might be listening:
Bring Deven back to us. Back to Nico. Back to Miranda.
Back to me.
Tell me the price and I’ll pay it. Lay down your conditions and I’ll fulfill them. Please.
Jonathan, if you’re out there, thump him in the head for me. He might listen to you.
There was never an answer, but it still gave him small comfort to think the words—maybe that was why humans prayed even when their prayers met only the echoing silence of an indifferent universe.
Finally, before he could get even more mired in his own thoughts, David got out of bed, He had work to do before meeting the others at the ritual room, and since he wasn’t sure how he’d be feeling after Stella was done doing whatever she planned to do, he wanted to check as many items off his endless to-do list as possible.
First a check on the new coms. He’d implanted four Elite with them, including Avi, who had agreed quite gamely to be part of the experiment. There should be reports from each; Avi was with Miranda, but it was a good opportunity to test the coms out in a closed sub-network that then connected back to the Haven.
He got dressed and headed for the office. Situation normal; no surprise there. All four Elite guinea pigs had dutifully dropped their reports on the server, answering the questions he’d sent with as much detail as possible.
No itching, swelling, or redness at injection site. Implant does not appear to have moved. Good. It looked like they couldn’t feel the thing at all except from the outside, pushing on it with a finger. The transmitter was smaller than Miranda’s pinkie nail, resembling a flat watch battery; they were injected under the skin just behind the ear. Each had to be individually calibrated, though, so it took a while to fully initialize them. The transmitters were tuned to a frequency only the individual could hear—the main purpose was to keep communication from being as obvious out in public. They could blend in completely by wearing a phone earpiece so it seemed they were just regular people talking to themselves as they walked around town armed and all in black, but in urgent situations they could simply speak aloud and be heard from afar. It was far less conspicuous than talking into a bracelet.
Better still, the Elite wearing the implant could give simple yes or no answers just by thinking them. The transmitter picked up low levels of psychic energy. If this system worked, he hoped one day to have the entire system use telepathy amplified and recorded by technology.
He wouldn’t have thought it possible a few years ago. But once he’d figured out how to track spells and amulets like the ones Ovaska had used, he’d been able to create the sensor he’d used when they found the Codex; it was too complicated to be of much practical use until he’d done a lot more work on it, but it had occurred to him that they didn’t need anything that complex for the coms, at least not right away. Ultimately, though, what had made it possible wasn’t his geekery, it was magic.
Or, rather, it was Nico.
They’d been curled up in front of the fireplace one evening, just talking, and he’d mentioned the problems he was having. Nico had commented that it sounded a lot like the long-distance communication methods the Elves used. From there, they ended up with a drawing pad and David’s tablet, sketching out the way the Weavers had set things up in Avilon, comparing it to the way David ran things here. The two were remarkably similar.
That was the night he had realized that Nico was not only beautiful and powerful—he was brilliant. David had always found genius incredibly attractive, whether intellectual or artistic. Watching Miranda play still had the power to melt his spine—so did watching her compose a song, frowning, the tip of her tongue sticking out the corner of her mouth…
Damn. He needed to think about something else before thinking turned into longing—longing would quickly turn into desperation and she’d be on her way back to Austin way too early. So: distraction.
Just in time, the phone rang.
He smiled as he picked it up. “Good timing.”
Olivia’s warm voice held its usual wry edge. “Poor baby,” she said. “Twelve whole hours without Her Royal Hotness and you’re climbing the walls. However will you last the week?”
“You can’t see it, but I’m flipping you off right now.”
A laugh. “So,” she said, obviously feigning nonchalance, “Tonight you’re getting your Elf hookup, right?”
“If all goes well, yes.”
“And what’s that going to lead to?”
“Well…hopefully it’ll give him more energy, emotionally and physically, so he can at least have the strength to take better care of himself. I’m hoping that—”
“That’s not what I mean, dumbass.”
“Then what…oh.” David chuckled. “You would want to know that, wouldn’t you.”
“Hey, it’s just me and my battery operated boyfriend up here. Give me some fodder at least—the mental image of you and some pointy-eared sexy beast going at it would keep me buzzing for a while.”
Now, he laughed outright. “You’re incorrigible, woman.”
“You’re the one who passed out on my front porch and got me into this whole mess. It’s all on you.”
David leaned back in his desk chair, smiling. “True. I get such delight out of sucking innocent bystanding vampires into our collective madness.”
“Not just vampires anymore. Witches, Elves…if I happen across a werewolf I’ll send him along and you can have a complete set.” He could hear her rustling papers around, meaning she too was at her desk. “So is there anyone you aren’t planning to sleep with?”
He snorted. “I thought I’d stop once I got to Jacob.”
“If you do manage to shag the Elf, that’ll be three people in the building you’ve been involved with. Miranda has some catching up to do.”
“Honestly, I don’t really think her thing w
ith Kai is going to get that far. I just can’t see her going to bed with anyone, at least not yet. I worry about her getting hurt, but she’s a grown woman who knows her own heart and mind.”
“But you’re sure she’s okay with all of this?”
“I’m sure. We’ve talked about it at length. She comes first, obviously. And believe me, this isn’t something I plan to make a habit of. I wasn’t expecting this. I figured eventually we’d move in that sort of direction—but I thought that was decades in the future.”
Too fast…everything these days was moving too fast, even though nothing was actually happening right at this moment. Why couldn’t he and Miranda have had fifty or so years to rule in relative quiet before all of this?
“Well, just…be careful. All of you. And be careful tonight for different reasons. I know your Stella knows her stuff, but things could still go wrong. We’re all rather attached to you, you know.”
He smiled. “I know. It’ll be okay, I promise. I’ll talk to you tomorrow night, hopefully, or at least send a text.”
“You’d better.”
As soon as he hung up, David finished running through the various checks he did every night, returned his most urgent emails, and spent a moment reading through Jacob’s report on the latest Council doings. There were no new deaths, thankfully, but several of the holdouts who had insisted Morningstar wasn’t a real threat were quietly increasing security, hiring dozens more Elite and retreating to their Havens whenever possible. Morningstar might not have made a move lately, but they didn’t need to right now—fear was doing their job for them, and soon they’d have the entire Council treed like a squirrel.
He wanted to take satisfaction from it, and he had for a while, but even divorced from the Council their fate was tied in with his. They represented the last bastion of traditional order in the Shadow World, and as antiquated as they were, their loss would usher in an era of civil war and worldwide violence until someone either took things in hand or their entire society was destroyed and there were no laws, nothing to stop vampire kind from killing en masse and quickly exposing their existence to the world.
Shadowstorm (The Shadow World Book 6) Page 8