“Oh,” Miranda said. “That kind of visitor. Thanks for the warning. What do you have left tonight?”
“I’m meeting with my contact at the DOD. She has some satellite images of the Morningstar compound that will give me a better idea of their external security. Once I have that, we can raid the place without going in blind. I should be back in a couple of hours.”
“Be careful. Love you.”
“Love you back.”
He hung up just as Harlan arrived but had to tell the driver to wait a minute; Novotny probably wouldn’t be happy to give up the book in the middle of his analyses, but if by some chance Deven did have a way into the box, David imagined the good doctor would be overjoyed. He headed back into the building the way he’d come, wondering idly what the next important magical object would be—an enchanted sword? A pair of ruby slippers? The Ocarina of Time?
Once, he’d been absolutely sure he understood how his world worked. Primes, Consorts, Elite, Court, human allies: Everyone had a place, and everyone’s role made sense. Everything ran like the gears in a clock, almost Cartesian in its utility, and Signet history backed up his beliefs. Primes died all the time and were replaced by new ones; vampire populations grew until an opposing force, either human Hunters or vampire authority, stemmed the tide. Then human populations grew until vampire numbers began to rise again—even with no-kill laws, the Shadow World provided a global check on mortal numbers, though it was no longer an efficient one. But still, everything fit together. Everything made sense. Life had order.
Or at least it had until he met Miranda Grey. She had brought more to his life than love, more than music, more than strength and the flash of red hair. Miranda was the flame that had set the world, not just his life, on fire . . . and however long it burned, whatever the endgame, he would walk into it thankful to have stood in her light.
In the space of a few short years, here he was, an entirely different kind of vampire, dealing with amulets that could bring back long-forgotten gods and turn humans into supernatural warriors . . . Witches who could speak with said gods face-to-face . . . and he himself had been resurrected from the dead. Now there was a magic book to contend with. What next?
“Just so you know,” he said to the empty air in the elevator, “that was a rhetorical question.”
• • •
There were times that Miranda could almost forget there was anything missing, but the minute she took up her sword to spar with one of the lieutenants, she had to do so around a sharp, almost incapacitating pain in her heart.
The Southern Elite was the best in the world. She had her pick of incredibly talented warriors to practice with and learn from.
But none of them were Faith.
There were a few who were actually better in battle than the Second had been, but they lacked her leadership ability, her teaching skill. A Second had to be more than just a fighter. He or she had to be someone the Signet could trust—someone in whose hands they could place the entire Elite. Right now, the South had no one like that, and no possibilities within the next five years at least.
Miranda finished her hand-to-hand session with Bax, re-trieved Shadowflame, and called out one of the lieutenants for a quick match; Miranda was good, and knew she was good, but she was well aware most of the lieutenants could take her down pretty handily. She had greater strength, speed, and endurance, but none of that was an adequate substitute for skill and experience. All it meant was that she fell on her ass harder, faster, and more often.
She’d only been training for four years, after all. She hadn’t just sprung up from the floor as a vampire suddenly able to win a war singlehandedly. She worked for it every night. Sophie, and later Faith, had both said the same thing: There would always be someone better out there.
As much as she hated working without Faith, she knew she had a lot to learn, and she couldn’t stop training—even if she were willing to take to the streets of Austin without her skills honed as sharply as possible, she knew Faith would never allow it.
She hadn’t been able to save her Second. Faith had died for her. There was nothing Miranda could do for her now except be the absolute best she could be in her friend’s honor.
“You know it wasn’t your fault,” came a voice nearby.
Miranda, fresh from a shower in the locker room and busy pulling a comb through her hair with the aid of a powerful detangler, stopped what she was doing and turned toward the door. “You read minds now, too?”
Deven leaned sideways against the door frame. “Every time we work together using that Persephone connection, for the next few days I can read a lot more than usual, even through your shields. I got to listen to Cora and Jacob fooling around the other night. That was interesting.”
He looked tired, she noticed—way better than he had after Rio Verde, but still, the light in his eyes was dimmer. Before she could stop herself, she reached out to him with her empathy, and without even dipping into the surface of his shields she had a pretty good idea what was wrong.
“Your boy left,” she said. “When?”
“The day after we got back.”
She heard sorrow in his voice for just a second before he covered it back up. Did he have any idea how hurt he was, or was he denying it as hard as he’d denied having feelings for Nico in the first place?
“I’m sorry,” she said. She put her comb away, grabbed her sword, and walked over to give him a hug before pulling him along out of the locker room. “Whatever you say, I know you cared about him.”
Deven snorted quietly, then let out a breath. “I’ll get over it.”
She didn’t point out the obvious—that not once had she ever known him to get over anything—but said, “I know it’s not really my fault . . . Faith . . . but I just keep thinking, if I had fought harder . . . if I had . . . I don’t know. It doesn’t do any good to play the ‘if only’ game, but I can’t help it. I miss her so much.” She looked at him. “What do you do, oh ancient one, when you lose someone who’s a part of you like that?”
He grinned at the epithet. “Well, don’t hide in a blanket fort with a case of whiskey and listen to Amy Winehouse. According to Jonathan, that’s unhealthy.”
She grabbed his hand and squeezed it. “We’re just a three-ring circus of issues, aren’t we?” Something hard she wasn’t used to feeling cut into her finger, and she lifted his hand up and looked at it. “Nice ring.”
It was a large oval, moonstone, set in silver that had intricate carvings all around the band. “It’s kind of big for you,” she noticed, and then it dawned on her. “That was Nico’s?”
“Yes. He left it for me.”
Miranda raised an eyebrow. “This looks the way you described the Elysium rings. Didn’t you tell David they were sacred?”
“They symbolize the bond between the soul and deity. Why?”
Now both of her eyebrows shot up. “So he gave you his soul.”
“Hardly.”
She let the matter drop and studied the ring for a moment. “It looks an awful lot like it would fit in the lock on our magic box.”
“That’s what I’m banking on, yes.”
“You said the Order of Elysium wears labradorite, though—isn’t this a moonstone?”
“I’m hoping it won’t matter. The two are very similar—moonstone is a colorless form of labradorite. If it doesn’t work, at the very least we’re no worse off than before. I told David he could try contacting the Order, but to be honest, I don’t have much faith that they’ll answer, after . . . what happened.” He shrugged. “Nico was dedicated to a different deity, but he was sent here to help us, so it’s worth a shot.”
“Well, come on,” she said. “I’m sure David’s already waiting for us.”
She was right, as it turned out; David was in his workroom, the carved box on the table in front of him, his feet propped up on a nearby chair as he scrutinized a series of satellite images on the screens in front of him. As they came in he was dragging one of the images to a mat that covered part of the table, which functioned as a sort of horizontal monitor and was used to create three-dimensional plans like the ones that had gotten them into Hart’s Haven. David took the files his contact had given him, fed them into some kind of rendering program, and created a 3D map of the Morningstar compound that he could rotate, resize, and zoom in on. He had several spots marked that looked like guard stations.
He looked up and smiled, the light from the rendering catching in his glasses. “Good, you’re here. Let me save this and put it away.”
Miranda grabbed her usual chair and pushed another one toward Deven, who took it without comment.
Finally, David moved toward the center of the table so that they could get closer on either side. He pulled the box where they could all reach it. “Well, Dev, what do you have?”
Deven slid the moonstone ring off his finger. “Don’t ask,” he said sharply to the question David hadn’t asked yet. “Just see if it works.”
David looked the ring over for a moment but surprisingly did as Deven said and didn’t ask. He turned the box so the lock was facing them and carefully fit the stone into it, wiggling it just a little to make sure it fit.
He started to turn it . . . and couldn’t. “Damn,” he sighed. “I suppose it was—wait—”
Miranda could feel it even from her chair: The lock had begun to grow warm, and the hair on her arms stood up from some kind of charge that she could feel building in the air. “It’s not going to blow up, is it?” she asked, pushing her chair back. “Damn it, you should have put it inside a blast shield!”
David didn’t answer. He waited just a moment longer, then applied pressure to the ring again, trying to turn it . . .
. . . and Miranda heard a click.
David took the ring out of the lock and handed it back to Deven. The second the stone was removed, the side of the box fell open. He tilted the box and shook it gently to coax out whatever was in it.
With a soft slip of leather over wood, the book fell out into his other hand.
It was a thick, black-bound volume about the size of a standard sheet of copy paper, and its pages were yellowed with age, though the binding still held together perfectly. David put the box on the table and let the book rest on his knees, opening the cover gingerly.
The pages were thicker than modern paper and covered gutter to margin with slightly faded but even handwriting, diagrams, symbols. Most of the pages were illuminated with intricate drawings. “The outside of the box was carved with ancient Greek,” David said, running a finger along what looked like a chapter title. “But this . . . what the hell is this? It looks like Greek, but . . . I can’t read it.”
Deven, sitting with his arms crossed, leaned an inch or two closer. “The Codex of Persephone,” he read. “Being an account of the founding of our sacred Order, its laws and practices, and its symbols, as first set down by Priestess Caerna of Crete, in the year of the Great War; copied by hand in the year 1773 by the High Priestess Eladra.”
David raised an eyebrow at him. “You can read this?”
Deven looked like he had a headache. “Of course I can, David. I’m magic. And that isn’t ancient Greek—at least not the garden variety. It’s Elysian Greek, the sacred language of the Order. The Order uses several dialects, but this one is only taught to the Acolytes, and only after initiation. Every High Priest or Priestess has to hand-copy the Codex before starting his or her own cloister . . . It would seem Eladra made two of them, and somehow this one ended up in your Haven. That’s definitely her handwriting.”
“Acolytes—is that what they call the people in the warrior class like you were?”
“No . . . an Acolyte is specifically someone training to be what Eladra was, to lead a branch of the Order.”
Miranda and David both stared at him, but he didn’t seem to notice and went on. “Still, it’s not earthshaking, at least not for us. Nothing in the original Codex would really help us all that much—it’s the Order’s liturgy, not . . . hold on.” Deven plucked the book from David’s hands. He flipped through some of the pages for a moment, his expression becoming perplexed. “Once upon a time I knew the Codex inside and out . . . and this isn’t it. Or, it is, but there’s way more information in here than there should be. Some of these symbols . . . I’ve never seen them before. There are whole pages of them. I have no idea what we’re looking at here . . .”
He looked up. “I need to take this with me and translate the whole thing. There’s no telling what might be in here, but it’s definitely more than just the Codex of Persephone, or at least it’s not the Order’s standard version.”
There was a moment of silence before David said, “Deven . . . I’m going to ask you this question, and for once, I just want a straightforward, honest answer. You told me that your involvement with the Order was with the Swords . . . and you told Miranda that Eladra was your friend, as were the others you killed. But what was your real connection to the Order?”
Deven looked from one of them to the other, sighed, and said, “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“That’s not an answer,” David snapped.
“Well, that’s all you’re getting,” Deven snapped right back. “It has no bearing on what’s happening now except that I know how to read this book and you don’t. Since I’m stuck here until dusk, you can either let me take it and figure out which parts are relevant to us, or you can deal with it yourself and waste time.”
Every time Miranda watched this particular death-stare match between the two Primes—which was often—she was convinced they were going to either start fighting or make out. In fact, it was neither; David just waved his hand dismissively, and Deven pushed himself up out of the chair, took the book, and left the workroom.
“Do you want me to go after him and find out the truth?” Miranda asked.
David shook his head and turned back to the satellite diagrams, setting the Codex box aside. “I suppose it doesn’t really matter. I don’t know why I keep thinking it’s possible for the two of us to have a real friendship—honesty, trust, all of that madness.”
“It’s not,” she replied, standing up and moving behind him to rub his shoulders for a moment. “I’m sorry, baby, but . . . you’ll never just be friends. Not in the way you think you should be. Maybe you should focus on what you have, try to turn it into the best possible version of itself, instead of trying to be something you’re not.”