Mo sensed her confusion. “I wish I could have been there,” he said. “According to witnesses it was like nothing they had ever seen. Even those used to watching Signets fight were beyond words.”
“I don’t understand . . . it feels like a dream . . . even . . .”
She gasped.
Her hands tightened in the sheets, and she heard the heart monitor’s beeping begin to accelerate. “No,” she whispered. “It couldn’t be real . . . Mo . . . tell me . . .”
His face softened, and he smiled at her gently. “Look to your right, my Lady. I warn you: It may be something of a shock.”
Miranda couldn’t do it. She was seized with such fear, she was paralyzed, unable to even acknowledge the hope that . . . It couldn’t have happened . . . it had to have been a hallucination brought on by exhaustion or the fight . . . Things like that simply didn’t happen, not in this world. If she looked, she would see nothing, and even that tiny thread of possibility would be lost to her.
But gradually, a quarter inch at a time, she forced her head to turn, forced herself to confront reality.
The heart monitor shrieked out an alarm. She heard Mo fussing with it.
She was shaking, she knew she was shaking, so hard she could hear her teeth chattering. Disbelief dug its teeth into her like a wolf snapping its head back and forth to break a rabbit’s spine. Her mind, her heart, everything . . . stopped.
A man lay asleep in the bed next to hers. He, too, was hooked up to a variety of monitors but slept peacefully, hands folded over his stomach, breath slow and even. Black hair fell into his face, and though his features were drawn and he was dangerously thin, that face was unmistakable.
She heard Mo murmuring to a nurse about sedatives and heard him say, “My Lady, please, you must calm down. Your poor heart is going to explode at this rate.”
She couldn’t answer. She couldn’t even move. All she could do was stare.
She took a breath and pushed words out one by one, each taking a herculean effort to speak: “But . . . you’re sure it’s him.”
He smiled. “You would know that better than I, my Lady.”
Miranda struggled to sit up and scooted toward the edge of the hospital bed. “Help me up,” she gasped. “Mo, help me—”
The medic looked like he wanted to push her back down, but, obviously realizing it would be pointless, he sighed, nodded, and lowered the rail on the side of the bed. “Slowly, please,” he said. “Wait—”
He quickly clipped off the tube from her IV and plugged it, freeing her from its tether; she slid onto her feet but nearly collapsed, her legs buckling beneath her. Mo caught her and steadied her patiently, then stepped away to let her stand.
Miranda, heart racing, took one step and then another, forcing strength into her limbs, the four feet from one bed to the other feeling like a mile. At last, her hands wrapped around the rail, and she leaned on it heavily, pulling herself closer, holding her breath.
Mo came to stand beside her.
She couldn’t stop shaking, and her voice trembled as she asked, “Mo . . . in your professional opinion, as a doctor . . . have I gone mad?”
She looked over at the medic to see his expression lose its usual genial professionalism; for a second it looked like he wanted nothing more than to hug her, put her back to bed, and tuck her in safe and sound. “No, my Lady,” he said. “Nor are you dreaming, or delusional. This is very real.”
“But it’s not . . . possible . . .”
As she spoke, she remembered the last thing she had heard before the world went black:
And of shadow I was reborn.
“We don’t know what happened,” Mo said quietly. “He and his companion brought you here, but before anyone could interrogate her she disappeared, and our attention was diverted to the two of you. As soon as we got you on a gurney he passed out cold.”
She reached out, letting her palm rest for a moment on his chest, feeling it rise and fall, feeling the thrum beneath her hand. A good, strong heartbeat; a slow, even breath. Just in the few moments since she’d woken his face had softened, the blood pumped into his veins reinvigorating the flesh, giving it back its warmth and life. She stood there, watching, feeling his heartbeat, still so afraid . . . so afraid she would wake up, despite Mo’s words, or that this dream would dissolve into the nightmare she had faced over and over. Her heart could not accept this, not yet.
“If you need anything,” Mo said, “press the call button.”
She nodded, and the medic left; deprived of his reassuring presence, Miranda felt even more terrified, smaller and more vulnerable. She kept her free hand wrapped around the bed rail, gripping it tightly, lest her knees give out again.
Even with all the machines beeping and whirring, her breath on the air seemed loud, her words strangely young and childish. “David? Can you hear me?”
After an endless moment, she saw a flicker of movement and his eyes slit open, blinking against the room’s relatively bright light. Miranda reached over and snapped off the examination lamp; the clinic had lighting options for both sectors of its clientele and staff.
Eyes opened, first unseeing, then gradually focusing on her face.
She nearly sobbed. Oh, God, how she had missed that blue . . .
. . . but . . .
Despair choked her. He was blinking at her, confused . . . without recognition.
“Please,” she whispered. Tears were already falling, and she didn’t try to stop them. “Please tell me you know who I am.”
He stared at her, and she could see the pain in his face—he was trying, reaching for the memory, and it was so close . . . his history, their life together, everything, it was so close . . .
Miranda took a deep, slow breath, closed her eyes, and sang softly,
You’re in my blood like holy wine
You taste so bitter and so sweet . . .
There was a choking, gasping noise, and she opened her eyes to see that he was pushing himself up, struggling against the wires and IV, blue eyes full of tears—and memory—trying to reach her.
She flung her arms around him, not caring if the monitors got dislodged and the whole staff came running; she was weeping again, and so was he, murmuring her name over and over, his hands moving over her body, pressing against her shoulders and back, proving to himself she was there—and she did the same, touching him everywhere she could, kissing any place she could find with her lips, her sobs giving way to first a gasp, then another, and then laughter.
They clung to each other, neither able to speak at first through the overwhelming relief, the joy that was so immense it hurt, the creeping hell of the last three weeks finally, finally over with, her heart almost unable to contain it all.
“Where were you?” she finally sobbed into his shoulder. “Where have you been? Why didn’t you come home?”
“I don’t know,” he whispered. “I don’t know . . . Please forgive me, beloved . . . please forgive me . . .”
She shook her head, though what she was denying she couldn’t say for certain, and put her lips to his at last.
They held on to each other until the flood of emotion had moved through them both, and Miranda could pull away far enough to look in his face. Their eyes locked, his still murky from the struggle to remember everything, hers anguished and confused.
“I remember dying,” he said hoarsely. “I remember the darkness. And I remember waking up and feeling the daylight coming . . . I must . . . I must have crawled to the stairwell before the sun hit me. After that it was black again . . . I was so weak . . . I didn’t know where I was, or who I was, but everything hurt, and I knew I had to find . . .” He looked up, around at the room. “Olivia . . . where is she?”
“Olivia?”
“The woman who brought me here. Who saved my life. Where is she?”
Bewildered at his desperation to find this woman, Miranda said, “Mo said she vanished before they could question her.”
“She took me in the other night and kept me safe while . . .”
“While what?”
“I don’t know,” he said helplessly, putting his head in his hands. “I don’t understand what this means, what it’s done to me. My back . . . my back hurts . . . it itches so badly I want to claw the skin off.”
The second he said it, she was pulling the gown off his shoulders, sudden knowledge gripping her heart. When she saw the tattoo . . . the remains of the red-tailed hawk that were now . . . something else entirely . . . her dream, and Deven’s, made sense.
“I think I may be sick,” David said softly.
Miranda slammed her hand against the call button, and a cadre of nurses and Mo swept into the room, taking over with no little relief of their own. They eased David back down onto the bed, checking his vitals, adjusting the fluids they had dripping into his body; she heard Mo ordering Valium, and something called Phenergan, for the nausea.
“You must relax, Sire. Please. You are safe, and your Lady Queen is here with you. There will be time for understanding all of this later once you are strong again, but for now you both are in desperate need of quality sleep. In fact, I shall have your people return you to the Haven tonight—once this batch of sera is in, you should be fine on your own as long as you keep feeding regularly. You will be more at ease in your own bed.”
The nurses tried to usher Miranda into a chair when she refused to leave David’s side; finally they compromised and wheeled her bed closer so that she and David could at least hold hands while Mo pushed another bag of fluids and blood into Miranda’s IV, just to make sure she was stable.
There was definitely something more than blood in the bag—Miranda felt woozy almost immediately, and the nurses had a much easier time guiding her back to bed after that.
She kept her face turned toward him, though, waiting for herself to wake up and all of this to end, but it didn’t. The drugs coursed through her, relaxing her gently away from the room, carrying her in their safe, somnambulant arms into the darkness that welcomed her, but she kept watching his face, as long as she could, just in case when she woke it had been the last time . . .
But gradually the room faded, the sounds faded, and she began to drift in a silent sea of shadows that buoyed her up, cradling her softly. She relaxed, feeling safer than she had in weeks, and listened to the movement of the shadows, so much like water, with tides and breakers as the darkness lapped over her, warming her, soothing away the horror she had been living in.
She looked up at one point to a starlit sky—or was it the reflection of the ocean of stars she now floated through, shining back down at her from overhead? The stars turned in their own endless waltz, through time and space and nothingness.
She felt a hand on her face and looked up.
There was a woman kneeling above where she lay in the dark water-shadows, thin black robes like wisps of smoke flowing down over her moon white skin. She stared down at the Queen through fathomless black eyes—black, without pupil or iris, simply the night sky caught in their depths. Hair the color of old wine, or perhaps blood, flowed down over her shoulders much like Miranda’s own, but it seemed to move of its own accord, almost serpentine around her shoulders.
When the woman spoke, her voice was the wind through a cold winter thicket, the
slip-slip-slip
of sleet, the whisper of snow.
“You have done well, my daughter, and I thank you.”
Miranda stared up at her. “Who are you?”
“Now your work truly begins.”
“What work?”
“First you have to make a choice . . .”
Miranda tried to grab her arm, to hold her there until she gave a straight answer, but her hands wouldn’t cooperate; they seemed to be made of mist, and the room was mist, and mist flowed forward and into every corner of her vision, and gently lathed the room away until it was just her, drifting in the shadows, resting, cocooned in that diaphanous mist that was so like a raven’s wings wrapped around her, feathers holding her safe, safe . . . safe.
* * *
There was little comfort to be found, even in the hunt.
His teeth broke through the woman’s skin, sliding through muscle and into vein, before withdrawing to allow the hot rush to spill forth. She was too far under his thrall to struggle, but she tensed at the pain and moaned softly, the sound lost in the neverending noise of the New York streets.
Jeremy found the city barbaric and disgusting. Humans died here every night and no one took any notice; it wasn’t so much that he cared about their lives as the idea that fifty feet away pedestrians kept walking, oblivious to the violence a stone’s throw away, and even if the woman were screaming, they would in all likelihood simply walk faster, not wanting to get involved. When a murder was reported it didn’t generate the kind of scene they portrayed on television; there would be perhaps two police officers, neither particularly invested in the crime, stretched thin as they were.
For that reason the Northeast had always been ruled by vampires who turned a blind eye to killing. There was really nothing to stop them here. London was just as bad, and as he understood it Los Angeles had once been even worse. And even with no-kill laws in place in the South, only the advent of the sensor network had put an end to the fun in New Orleans . . . and still, if one was discreet, there were ways around it. Vampires would always, always find a way to kill.
He didn’t kill her. There was no point, really. The momentary high of her death would do nothing to assuage his true hunger.
Drunk as she was, he didn’t have to bother with altering her memory. It would be a minor miracle if she remembered the night at all once her head was in the toilet in a few hours.
The alcohol in her bloodstream hit him a moment later; he’d chosen her for that very reason. For a few minutes the world spun and swam, and he felt himself relax, worry . . . everything . . . blurring until nothing mattered. For just a moment, he was free.
It passed, leaving faint nausea in its wake that also faded quickly. Jeremy left the alley as sober as he’d entered it, and also just as heavy-hearted.
He was only a couple of blocks from the apartment. He had a blood supply there, but after the last few nights he’d needed to get out . . . just for a little while. Even the most devoted parent needed a moment away. He had given Amelia a phone, promised he’d be back soon and wouldn’t go far.