“Oh? Where?”
He smiled and spoke to Harlan: “Take us to Amy’s on Sixth, please.”
Faith wasn’t surprised to get the call; to be honest she would have been more surprised not to.
She stood in the elevator with her arms crossed, watching the floor numbers tick upward. A knot of guilt—small but still significant—had already formed in her stomach the second she left the Pair … but she wasn’t really doing anything wrong. She was entitled to a hunting break every shift, which she rarely took. Everyone else took breaks, and who knew what they did on them?
Why was it that she spent so much time lately justifying her own behavior to herself?
The elevator dinged and the doors slid open, revealing a hallway with three sets of double doors; she didn’t have to wonder which one she wanted, as it was the only one with two uniformed guards standing at attention outside.
She nodded to them, and they returned the gesture. They had been expecting her, but aside from that, she knew them both from the tournament. They were top-tier lieutenants who had both faced her team in the finals.
“Glad to see the femur’s healed,” Faith said to one of them, who spared her a smile before opening the doors for her.
Faith sighed resignedly and walked into the suite to face the two vampires waiting for her there.
“You summoned me, my Lords?” she asked.
Jonathan, who had a book open in his lap, smiled. “I’m sorry about the timing, Faith. I didn’t think you’d be busy this time of night. Can I get you a drink?”
She shook her head. “I wasn’t busy exactly, but I am on duty. It’d be best if I wasn’t out of contact long.”
Deven was sitting at the table changing out the wood shafts on several throwing stakes. “We’ll keep this brief.”
“What can I do for you?”
The Prime picked up one of the stakes and looked down its length, checking the angle. “You don’t seem surprised that we’re still here.”
Faith smiled mirthlessly. “That’s because I know you, Sire. And, if I may speak freely …”
“You may.”
“The thought that you could stay out of all of this is, frankly, laughable. In fact, the only thing that would surprise me is if you didn’t have something to do with Lydia being here in the first place.”
He put the stake down and lifted his eyes to her. “As a matter of fact, I didn’t. I was fairly sure she was working with Hart, but at the very least she attempted to collude with him.”
“Wait—she was working with Hart? How? Why?”
The Pair exchanged a look, and Faith could tell there was a certain degree of tension, and disagreement, between them … not exactly a novel situation where they were concerned. “We’re not sure,” Jonathan said. “We found several notations in Monroe’s files indicating Lydia met with Hart at least twice, but we don’t know what for. I was of the opinion that we could learn a lot more from her, but someone apparently disagreed.”
Faith didn’t even try to hide her dismay. “You killed her?”
Deven shrugged. “She was a threat. She has resources, and if she was in collusion with Hart, she was a liability. And trust me, I’ve dealt with enough zealots to know she wasn’t going to tell us anything useful. We’re just lucky we found her before she completed her mission.”
“I don’t know about that,” Faith said. “She gave Miranda some kind of metal talisman thing tonight before she disappeared.”
“That much we knew already. I’m assuming David took the thing to one of his labs as soon as he could.”
“Yes. Do you know what it is? Lydia said it was a power amplifier.”
Another look passed between them before Deven said, “What you need to know, Faith, is that Lydia was a member
of a powerful, and very old, vampire cult. They are true believers, and they believe a war is coming.”
“A war between whom?”
“Good and evil, perhaps. Vampires and humans. Some vampires and other vampires. It doesn’t really matter—the important thing is that they believe this war has to happen … and they are willing to
make
it happen.”
Jonathan said, “Deven thinks Lydia wanted to win Hart to the Order’s side, possibly with the goal of inciting war between Hart and David. I’m not so sure—at least, I don’t think the entire Order is involved, just a fringe group that got tired of waiting for their apocalypse and decided to speed up the timeline. Up until Lydia arrived, we weren’t aware they had any intention of acting; as far as we knew, the Order was not an immediate threat to anyone, just a bunch of monastics off chanting in the forest.”
“What does that have to do with the talisman?”
Deven leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms. “Have you ever heard of the Goddess Persephone?”
Faith blinked. “Of course I have. It’s Greek mythology. She was kidnapped by Hades and became Queen of the Underworld—most versions of the myth say against her will.”
Deven nodded. “Well, according to the Order, not only was she willing, she sought Hades out. She was no sweet young princess, but a huntress, and a bloodthirsty one at that. She also had a twin sister, Theia, who was a sparkles-and-bunnies healer sort of Goddess, and the two were constantly at odds. So one day all the gods were hanging out at a bar or something, and they started discussing how those pesky humans were spreading like a virus and fucking up the planet. The two sisters decided to have a competition to see who could do something about it. Theia created a race of beings to help teach humans how to be nice to each other. Persephone created vampires to eat humans.”
Faith frowned. She had absolutely no idea where this was going. “Okay.”
“Well, time wore on, and humans forgot the old gods.
The Order believes that Persephone is asleep, basically, but they have a thousand-year-old prophecy that says she’s going to wake up … or, rather, that they’re going to wake her up.”
“And this talisman has something to do with that?”
Deven nodded. “It’s known as the Stone of Awakening—a misnomer, really, since it doesn’t have a stone until it’s connected to a Signet. My sources have discovered that the theory is it functions as a key. The priests of the Order have to channel enough power through it to break the lock and release their Goddess. They need a lot of power … Signet-level power.”
“So what happens to whoever’s wearing it?”
“They die,” Deven said, leaning forward. “The Stone sucks all the power out of them—and, therefore, logic follows, whomever they happen to be bound to, say, a Queen. They’ve been waiting all these years for someone strong enough; their seers read the entrails or whatever it is they do and decided David was their chosen one. Lydia was sent to bring him across, setting the entire story in motion, and now that he has a Queen, they’re ready to push over their first domino.”
Faith shook her head slowly in disbelief. “The whole reason she made him a vampire was so she could have him killed.”
“Yes.”
“Do you believe in any of this?” she asked.
“That they can wake a Goddess from her cosmic nap? No. But whatever it really does, the Stone is definitely
not
an amplifier. It’s dangerous, and whatever spell is really on it, they’re going to activate it soon. Based on the intelligence we’ve gathered, my money’s on the next new moon, which is this Sunday … and that is why we need you.”
“To do what, exactly?”
The Prime fixed her with a hard stare. “I want you to steal it.”
Faith couldn’t stop herself; she snorted. “Are you serious?” She looked at Jonathan. “Is he serious?”
The Consort grinned tiredly. “I’m afraid he is.”
“You want me to steal a Signet artifact from my own Prime.”
“I want you to save his life,” Deven said. “Miranda’s, too.”
“Why can’t you just call him and tell him the thing is bad mojo? Why steal it at all?”
“Tell me, Faith … based on what you know about your Prime … if he knew what the Stone really was and what it does, do you think he would destroy it?”
“No. He’d keep it and study it, just like he’s doing now. In fact he’d want to see what it does on the new moon.”
“Exactly. We need to get that thing away from the Pair—if either of them are even in the same room with it when it goes off, it could kill them both. In fact, even the sources I have aren’t sure what its range is or how it knows whom to drain; if it’s anywhere near any Signet bearer, he or she is in jeopardy. That’s why I’m not going to touch the damn thing, and neither are they.”
Jonathan saw her expression and added quickly, “Faith, it doesn’t have to disappear forever. Our information is sketchy, but one thing is clear: It can be activated only once. If it’s not able to do its job, it becomes a chunk of useless metal. All we need you to do is get the thing and hide it for a few days, just to make sure David and Miranda are safe from it. It can be misplaced and then found again. But we need someone with security clearance to get into whatever lab it’s being kept in, and you’re the only one who has that. You can get in and out without anyone asking questions.”
“No,” Faith said.
They both looked at her.
“I’m not going to participate in one of your cloak-and-dagger intrigues,” Faith told Deven. “I’m not one of your agents, and I don’t work for you. If you want to get the Stone away from David, you call him and tell him the truth—keeping it from him is going to backfire, I promise you, and someone could get hurt. I won’t be part of that.”
Jonathan was holding back a smile. “See?” he told Deven, no little satisfaction in his voice.
Deven ignored his Consort and laced his fingers together, regarding Faith for a long moment without speaking.
Finally, he said quietly, “Faith … this is not a request. Either you’ll help us avert this, or you’ll sign the death warrant of the man you love. Not only that, but the entire balance of power in the South will fall, and thousands of people, human and otherwise, will die.”
She felt ice in her veins at his words but stood firm. “If you want to keep them from getting hurt, you’ll pick up the phone right now and tell David what you know. He’s not a fool or a child—why do you keep treating him like one?”
“To be fair,” Jonathan said wryly, “he treats everyone that way.”
“And how dare you try to play on my emotions just to get your own way?” Faith went on. “This has got to stop, Deven. Either you trust your friends to make their own decisions, or you don’t, which means you’re no friend to any of us.”
She knew it was dangerous to bait him; she had seen more powerful vampires than her fall to the ground bleeding for saying less. But her anger was too strong to stuff back down—that he would try that emotional blackmail bullshit on her and expect her to commit an act of treason just so he wouldn’t have to be open with someone—the temerity of it was astounding. She had known him even longer than David had; she’d stood by and watched Deven manipulate everyone around him with a master’s touch for years, even since before he was Prime … and even though she genuinely believed in his motivations, she knew that one day he would cross the line, do something that couldn’t be forgiven, and where would that leave him? Where would that leave any of the people who had unwittingly danced to his tune?
Still, his face was expressionless as he said, “What if I said I would kill you if you don’t do it?”
Now she rolled her eyes. She held out her arms to her sides. “Then do it,” she said. “Go ahead. In fact, it would be the most logical thing for you to do, because as soon as I leave here, I’m going to tell my Pair everything you just told me, including the fact that you threatened their Second. And if you kill me, when David figures it out—and you know he will—he’ll unleash hell on you like you’ve never seen … and Lydia will have her war. So what will it be, my Lord?”
Deven lifted one of the stakes, his eyes meandering from it to Faith and back, before he said, “Very well, Faith. You’ve made your allegiance quite clear.”
“My allegiance is exactly where it should be. With my Prime and Queen. Whatever my emotional connection to him, whatever conflict I might feel … I am loyal to my friends. And that’s more than you’ve ever been.”
She bowed to him, then to Jonathan. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my shift. Unless you’re going to kill me?”
Deven made a gesture of dismissal.
“Right. Good night, my Lords.”
She stalked out of the suite to the elevator, hoping it would be waiting for her, but damn it, it was down several floors and she had to wait.
A moment later there were footsteps. She sighed. “I’m not going to—”
“Faith,” Jonathan said softly, urgently, taking her arm. “Please listen.”
He’d never been physically forward with her before; Jonathan tended to give women a wide berth and was very careful not to presume familiarity. But now he touched her, drew her to the side.
“Believe whatever you want about all of this,” Jonathan said, “But please believe me when I say that Deven is right. I’ve seen … I know that the Stone is going to cause horrible suffering to whoever is wearing it when it activates. I don’t know if any of the Order’s doctrine is true, but I know someone is going to die. I don’t know if it can be stopped,
but if it can, this may be our only chance. Please, Faith … if you don’t want to steal the Stone, just do the best you can to make sure David and Miranda aren’t in the building with it on the new moon. That wouldn’t be hard, and it wouldn’t have to involve lying. Just … think about it, all right? This is me asking, not Deven making demands. Please … just think about it.”
The elevator dinged, and he nudged her gently toward it, stepping back away from her. Faith got in reluctantly, her mind swimming with questions she knew he wouldn’t answer … and when the doors slid shut, she felt unaccountably like she was standing inside a tomb.
They didn’t speak for a while. Jonathan leaned back against the locked suite door, eyes closed, his stomach a bottomless pit of shame.
When he opened his eyes again, Deven had risen from the table and was coming over to him. The Prime laid his hands on Jonathan’s shoulders, and their eyes met.
“She’ll do it,” Jonathan said softly. “I don’t know what she’ll tell them, but she’ll do whatever she can to keep them away from the Stone.”