“Are you sure you’re comfortable with this?” Miranda asked before she left. “You were pretty freaked the other night—I won’t leave you alone with him if you’re even a little bit worried.”
Stella laughed. “You said he’s back to normal, whatever that is. If he tries to eat me I’ll call you.”
Despite her bravado she was still nervous and busied herself rearranging things on the altar even though she’d arranged them four times already.
She heard a soft knock and turned to see Nico waiting outside in the hall. “May I enter?” he asked.
She nodded.
He was wearing flowy Elf clothes, which she guessed were ritual wear; the whole outfit was dark blue, making his ivory skin stand out even more. Again, the change in him was obvious, though what exactly had changed wasn’t; there were shadows in his eyes that hadn’t been there before, and his features seemed to have sharpened slightly. His voice had also altered, becoming just a little softer, like being caressed by the feathers of a bird’s wing.
Good Goddess almighty, he was hot.
Stella frowned at herself. None of that now. She could fantasize later when it was just her and her . . . personal appliances. Right now there were more important things to do.
Nico closed the door behind him and leaned back against it, staring at the floor before he lifted his gaze to her.
“Forgive me,” he said.
His eyes lit on the two pink marks on her neck. They were almost gone already, but their ghost remained. His expression became anguished, and he looked away again.
“It’s really okay,” Stella told him, licking lips that had gone dry when he walked in. “I gave you permission, remember? Besides, you weren’t exactly in your right mind.”
He closed his eyes. “I fear I do not have a right mind anymore, Stella. Everyone said that when I woke I would feel like myself . . . but how can I? I can feel it in my veins, in my skin. Part of me is terrified of myself, of losing control . . . of being this thing I have become. But part of me . . .”
She knew what he was saying. “Part of you likes it. Wants it. And that scares you, too.”
Nico pushed himself off the door and came to the altar, looking down at it with eyes cloaked in sorrow. “I knew I would die. I did not know I would wake again. I know that I was born for this, but . . . how can I be an Elf, and a . . .” He took a deep breath. “An Elf and a vampire, too?”
She couldn’t help it; she had to help, even if she couldn’t. She put her hand on his arm. “It’ll take time,” she said. “It’s a lot to deal with—there’s not exactly a handbook for this kind of thing.”
He smiled. “I am sorry to whine at you, Stella. You have already borne enough of this situation. I admit I find you easier to talk to than anyone else here . . . perhaps because as a Witch you understand at least a part of what my life means. Or perhaps because we are both alone here of our kind.”
“I’m honored,” she said, and she meant it. Before she could second-guess herself, she hugged him tightly, and after a second or two he hugged her back. To her surprise, his hands started to slide around her waist, to pull her closer . . . then released her, suddenly self-conscious. Was it possible he was attracted to her, too? She would never have believed it from anyone else. Men had looked right past her her entire life, and yet here was this Elf . . .
“We should get started,” Nico told her when they drew apart. “This will likely take most of the night.”
“What do you need me to do?”
“I do not need anything, actually. I was hoping you might want to observe—you already have considerable talent at Weaving, and there is much more you could do with the right knowledge. I . . . I could teach you, if you wish to learn.”
She could tell her surprise was evident on her face—he looked worried, probably that he had crossed another line. “You would do that?” she asked. “Really?”
He nodded, finally looking amused. “It is a time-honored tradition. Long ago, Witches were essentially human Elves—they worshipped our Goddess, practiced our magic. Most of that knowledge is long lost. We have an opportunity to bring it back.”
Stella was already grinning. “Hell yes!”
“Good. Join me, then, in the center of the Circle.”
They sat down facing each other on the floor, and though she was expecting some sort of complicated protection spell like a Witch’s Circle Casting, he simply bade her to close her eyes and awaken her Sight. She did, and watched in rapt fascination as he touched the floor, and row by row, radiating out from where they sat, the symbols she had painted began to glow white in her mind’s eye.
“Shift into your vision of the Web,” Nico instructed.
A moment later, her mind lurched and turned—suddenly the Web in front of her doubled, tripled, quadrupled in size, and she could see a hundred times farther than before. The threads of light appeared in subtle shades of moonlit white and silver, but now she could see pale blue ones as well, and the ones she had already known about were brighter.
She would have been afraid—that much power, spread all around her, was overwhelming—but she could feel Nico’s presence as if he were standing behind her with his arms around her. She understood, then, that she was now looking through his eyes, seeing the Web as a true Weaver saw it. How in the hell did he get anything done with all of this before him? It must have taken years to learn which threads were what, and how they interacted.
“Centuries,” Nico said aloud. “I first apprenticed when I came of age at sixteen. That was about five hundred years ago.”
She gaped at him—or, gaped toward him. “You’re
five hundred
years old? Do Elves go crazy when they get old, too, or is that just vampires?”
She heard him laugh. “No. We are made differently. And our lives, for the most part, are far more tranquil. Now . . . just relax, and watch; ask whatever questions you need to.”
Stella returned her attention to the task at hand. Nico was already spinning the vision around to find the Circle of Signets within it. The eight places were still there, but now instead of one empty, there were two. The second empty place was in the middle of a bunch of twisted threads, and one of the Pair bonds was glowing a faintly sick color, its light irregular. She could see where Miranda had welded Deven into their bond; the joining was already starting to corrode.
She stared at the empty spot for a moment. Jonathan belonged there. It didn’t feel right without him—no, not right at all. “Where is he now?” she asked softly.
“I do not know,” Nico replied. “If you look where he used to be, there are faint traces of that connection—an afterimage. A soul cannot be destroyed, but it changes form. Where he is now depends entirely on where he chose to go.”
“Can you tell from here who belongs in the eighth slot?”
“In most other situations, I could. But this Circle is different. In any other potential relationship I could find the cord from one to the other and follow it to that person’s life-web, but here, it is shrouded from me, the way the true depth of the Web is normally shrouded from you.”
“Is there anyone who could see it?”
“Yes,” he said, smiling. “Persephone. But I can tell you this: It draws nearer every night. Intuition tells me that the Lady Olivia will have found her Consort before the year is out.”
He talked her through the basic makeup of the Circle’s web, much of which she had figured out on her own and was proud to hear confirmed. The theory wasn’t complicated, but knowing which threads to move and which ones to make stronger depended on maintaining the greater balance. It was a hybrid of magic and physics that demanded extensive knowledge of both.
She could see why it took centuries to learn what he’d learned. She, in her limited human Sight with only one life span, might as well not even try.
“Nonsense,” Nico told her. “You have already done remarkable things, and you will do many more.”
Seeing the intricacy of it all made the task ahead even more daunting to Stella. Right now, the Trinity was joined and David and Miranda were still fairly balanced themselves—it was Deven who was pulling everything off. Once he was disconnected from them and their bond resealed, they would be back to normal without much ado. Deven himself, on the other hand, was a mess.
“Once the bond is cut, the trick is to cauterize the end so it will not bleed out. Once that is done, and he is a whole individual again, I will begin work on our bonding. That will require an even more careful touch or we will end up in this same situation. Then I can rebuild the matrix around Deven’s mind so that when he wakes up he will be mentally fit again.”
“And you can do all of that in one night?”
“In theory, yes, but this is far more complex than most of the work I have done. I may have to put in the groundwork for the matrix and then finish it in stages as I did before. That would be a reasonably safe place to stop for the night and finish tomorrow if necessary.”
She watched him begin to gingerly pull the strands apart, laying them out so he could see what was what and start shoring up the wobbly threads in Deven’s part that had been pulled loose.
It was incredible. He made it look effortless, but she knew for a fact that just shifting a thread even an inch took an immense amount of power and control. She’d only been able to plug a few leaks because it didn’t really require much Weaving, just energy stuffed into the gap. Nico’s work was elegant, like a dance.
Hours passed while he realigned the sections and created new threads that were simply there to wire others together. Becoming a vampire didn’t seem to have harmed his abilities at all; in fact, she could feel a lot more of his emotions and thoughts being this close to his energy, and right now as he worked, he was completely himself, happy in the way that people were only when doing what they were born to do.
Finally, it was time to break the bond; it lay bare with plenty of space around it so that cutting it wouldn’t damage anything else.
“Are they going to feel it?” she asked.
“Certainly. When it is first broken it will probably hurt.”
Stella fell silent. She didn’t want to distract him. He was running his mental hands along the bond, looking for the right place to break it.
She saw him look over to Deven’s life-web, felt his regret. Then, as she held her breath, Nico took hold of the bond and fed power into it until it burned so brightly she was blinded—
—she heard it snap—
Instantly energy was bleeding all around them, shooting out of the three severed places. Nico didn’t miss a beat; he grabbed the two ends of the Pair bond and fused them together, then spun around and seized the end of Deven’s. She could See him pouring energy into the cord, pulling it around until it caught itself like a serpent biting its own tail and soldering it shut. He Wove a thinner thread out of himself and wrapped it around the welded spot to keep it together while the energy flow reestablished.
Stella’s heart skipped; she could feel him weakening. The toll of the past few days hadn’t completely healed, and even with all the strength he had regained, he was burning so much of it there definitely wouldn’t be enough left to finish all the work he had to do.
Nico understood that, but he was far more concerned with his three Signets than his own welfare. Deven’s thread was taking a lot out of him—the Prime was an abyss of damage, and though Nico didn’t intend to fix it all at once, he couldn’t leave all of those frayed ends to leak even more energy into the ether.
The whole thing played out in mere minutes. Stella felt Nico falter—he was almost at a safe stopping place, but not quite—and without hesitation she said, “Here! Take this!”
She threw him a line of energy, and he snatched it up gratefully to make one last pass over the two bonds, feeling for weak spots and potential leaks. Then he used what she gave him to close up his own energy, and simultaneously they both fell back out of the vision and into the ritual room.
Stella came back to herself with the cool wood of the floor against her face and Nico lying in front of her, unconscious.
She wrestled herself upright and spoke into her com: “Star-two.”
Miranda was breathing hard, and she sounded shaken. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah—Nico’s out, though. He should probably be put to bed.”
“I’ll send in the guards to help.”
“What about you, are you all right?”
Miranda paused. When she spoke again Stella could hear tears, as well as awe, in her voice. “Yes,” she said. “Yes . . . we’re okay.”
• • •
The second the power hit, Deven sat bolt upright in bed, gasping awake.
He could feel it—something was different. Something felt . . .
Another shock wave of energy ran through him, and another; his mind tumbled around itself, trying to find any solid ground, but for a while it felt like he was spiraling through the night sky with nothing to hold on to.
Finally, he hit dry land and sat panting, hands clenched in the sheets, not understanding what was happening.
It took a moment for him to realize what he was feeling.
Nothing.
Those two presences that had been rubbing him raw with their concern and affection for days now were gone from his mind. He no longer felt them dragging him closer, trying to reach him. He finally had what he wanted.
He was alone.
It’s gone. They’re gone.
I’m free.
For the first time in weeks he could feel his own mind again. He could reach into himself and find . . .
He froze, and memory came rushing back.
“Baby . . . it’s okay.”
Deven covered his face with his hands . . . the stark horror of it, feeling the immense crushing pain in his lower body and realizing what it meant . . . those last few halting words, extorting a promise from the Queen and then . . . then . . .
“. . . if you can hear me . . . I love you . . . you were my always . . . too.”
“No,” he whispered, pleading for mercy the way he had so many times. “No, no . . . God, please . . .”
But he was long past God’s help. And Jonathan was gone.
Gone.