“Which is?”
Sorrow rose in her throat, threatening her voice. “A hammer,” she replied. “You will need a hammer.”
Jeremy looked at the scroll in his hand with something like fear. She would have feared it, too, if she were him; it was death, written out in ancient script, and his instinct would be to destroy it. It wasn’t even a danger to her, and she wanted to stomp it into dust.
“Remember your promise,” he said. “Once this is done—”
“I swear on my life I will fulfill my end of the bargain.”
He nodded and melted back into the shadows.
A tear made its way from her eye as she continued her walk … a long walk, going nowhere. Her time was nearly come. She had played her part. She had pledged her life to the Goddess, and now the Goddess would collect; and though Lydia should have felt satisfied that things were at last falling into place, instead she simply felt weary, and sad.
The voice came just when she expected it to. “Miss Lydia?”
This time she stopped and turned toward the Elite who were standing there, waiting to escort her to her last meeting on this journey. “Yes.”
“Come with us, please.”
They surrounded her, and even had she not been willing,
it would have been easy for them to overpower her and drag her bodily into the huge, luxurious hotel across the street. She was strong, but they were many. They passed through the lobby unnoticed at this late hour; even the concierge kept his eyes on his ledgers as they walked by.
She was escorted into a beautiful, elegant suite of rooms, where her … host … was waiting, seated at the end of a table.
“Lydia,” he said.
“Lord Prime.”
He was such a young-looking vampire, born from the frail body of a boy who would in all likelihood have been murdered at the hands of the Inquisition if he hadn’t vanished into the darkness of a Dublin night and emerged reborn … a healer turned into a killer. Did he feel the dissonance between one calling and the other?
He regarded her through those lavender-blue eyes—eyes whose rare color she knew the origins of, even if he didn’t, and whose age betrayed the apparent youth of his body—as he toyed with a wooden throwing stake with an expertly crafted steel hilt. “I’m glad we found you before you had a chance to do what the Order called you here to do.”
She chose her words carefully. “And what is it you think the Order called me to do, my Lord?”
“I don’t know,” he replied, just as carefully. “But I would advise you to tell me, Lydia, and persuade me not to do what
I’ve
been asked to do.”
She sat down opposite him. “Someone has hired the Red Shadow to kill me?”
“I did receive an offer on your life.” He turned the stake over and over in his hand. “But before I take it, I want to know why anyone would want you dead.”
“I imagine there are a great many people who would like to kill me,” she mused. “Anyone who wants to see the Order fail in our quest. Anyone who wants the current Signet system to remain unchallenged. That would include most of the Council.”
“Tell me, Lydia … you are, essentially, the agent of the Order, yes? You do whatever dirty work is necessary to ensure that the future unfolds as they see fit?”
“It is not as
they
see fit,” she insisted. “It has been foreordained that the Awakening will come and with it the war. I am burdened with the work of making sure that happens, by any means necessary. Certain events must take place. They cannot be stopped. Ask your Consort—ask him what happens when we try to circumvent fate. I am only an instrument of the Order, Lord Alpha. We have been trying to Awaken Her for centuries … and only now has there come a power that could do it.”
“And in order to bring this about, you’ll hurt or kill or destroy anyone you have to.”
“You of all people must understand that.”
The Alpha nodded, smiling a little. “You’re right. I do.”
There was something almost like sympathy in his face just then, if indeed he was capable of such a thing. They were kindred spirits in a way—each manipulating the entwined strands of probability to ensure an outcome … yet, though he would not admit it, his motivations were far kinder, born out of love. It was that love that would prove his undoing, ultimately. Unless, of course, he was the one who succeeded in saving them all.
He took a sip from the glass of blood on the table. “For most of my life I’ve wondered, do we truly have free will, or is it all an illusion? Having a Consort who sees snatches of the future complicates things even further. How much of what he sees is incontrovertible, and how much can be changed? I’ve done my best to make sure that God or no God, fate or no fate, those I care for will be taken care of and that anyone who tries to hurt them will pay a terrible price.”
“I never wanted to hurt anyone,” she insisted softly. “I’m trying to help all of us. If events do not unfold as they are meant to …”
“Lydia,” he interrupted, just as softly, “There’s something I think you’ve forgotten in all your grand plans and
epic destiny-making … something you didn’t see on the chessboard even as you lined your pawns up one by one.”
She felt tears in her eyes again, and the quiet knowledge she had been waiting for. “And what is that?” she asked.
The Alpha held the stake flat on the palm of his hand. As she watched, it rose into the air and began to spin like the needle on a compass.
“You aren’t the only player in this game,” he said.
The stake whistled across the room, and Lydia gave a strangled cry of pain as it struck her in the chest.
Thirteen
Miranda stood with her arms crossed, watching the talisman rotate inside the imaging machine very similar to the one David had built at the Haven—but much, much larger and more powerful, capable of detecting submicroscopic traces of evidence. A matrix of lasers and other types of scanners passed back and forth over the talisman’s surface, bringing screens and screens of data up on the monitor that were already being analyzed and logged by the database.
She was still holding the box the talisman had come in. Novotny planned to scan it, too, but could do only one thing at a time, so she had managed to keep her hands on it for a little while.
“Nice blanket, Linus.” Faith came to stand next to her. “I hear you’ve lost your mind.”
The Queen looked down at the box in her hands. “Honestly, Faith, I have no idea what came over either of us. The minute I saw this thing I couldn’t take my eyes off of it. Weirder still, David didn’t want to touch it. He didn’t pick it up, didn’t examine it, didn’t express any sort of curiosity about it.”
Faith looked surprised at that. “A possible relic from Signet history shows up, and he doesn’t want anything to do with it?”
“My point exactly. You know how he is—he has to press every button and take things apart like a little kid.
Even now he’s not acting interested. He’s over there on the phone with APD about that dead guy. The only reason he even came here was to humor me.”
“That is odd.” Faith scrutinized the talisman inside the scanner. “What do you think it does?”
“I don’t know. Lydia didn’t seem to know either—she was just the messenger. But even if it’s got some kind of curse on it, I think it’s important to find out more. David was right not to want to bring it into the Haven, but I’m right, too. I know it.”
“So you couldn’t get anything off Lydia with your empathy? I thought there weren’t a lot of people who could shield against it.”
“There aren’t … but if she is who she says she is, it makes sense she’d have more than the average training.”
“Well, now, let’s have a look,” Dr. Novotny said, joining them in front of the machine. “It is a pretty little thing, isn’t it? The carving’s definitely a variant on ancient Greek—in fact it might even be an antecedent, given the shape of the vowels, as you can see.”
Miranda smiled. “If you say so.”
“Can you read it?” Faith asked.
“Hmm … apparently not. Lord Prime, would you mind having a look at this?”
David ended his call with a sigh and came over to where they were standing. “At what?”
“You read ancient Greek, correct? What do you make of this dialect?”
David frowned at the screen, eyes narrowing, and was silent for the better part of a minute. “That’s …”
“All Greek to you?” Faith quipped, earning an eye roll from the Prime and a groan from the Queen.
David shook his head. “The interesting thing is that it’s
not
all Greek. It’s more like what would happen if you took ancient Greek, Latin, and at least one form of Gaelic and made evil mutant babies from them … but there’s a fourth element to it, too, that I don’t recognize at all.”
“You can’t read it?” Miranda was baffled. She’d seen
him effortlessly plow through handwritten Russian and Deven’s half-drunk Irish.
“I can pick out a few phrases. Can I get a printout of the carvings?” he asked. “I might be able to translate it all, but I’ll have better luck if I take it home and run it through a few searches to see if I can identify that fourth language.”
Novotny nodded and hit a red button on the machine; across the room, a printer buzzed to life.
Finally, David was starting to get interested in the thing. “What else can you tell us?”
“From the initial readings, it’s definitely silver and very old—in fact …” Novotny entered something on his tablet computer, bringing up a window full of numbers, and said, “Based on those scans you had me do of your Signets back when you first became Prime, I’d say the three are nearly identical in age.”
“So you’re saying Lydia was telling the truth,” Miranda said, giving David a pointed look.
Novotny gave an indefinite shrug. “About the item’s age, certainly. Its origins, however, will take a good deal more research to uncover. Just from the surface impressions the workmanship is also quite similar—but it could easily be a forgery from the same time period. We’ll have to match the metals; I’ll take a sample.”
He touched the tablet’s screen and something inside the imager whirred; Miranda saw a thin metal arm extend toward the talisman and scrape very lightly over its surface, then retract.
“Is it giving off any kind of energy?” David asked.
“Not so much as a quiver, Sire. It might as well be a paperweight.”
“You’re kidding,” Miranda said. “There has to be something coming from it—some kind of magnetic field or something.”
“I’m afraid not, my Lady. If you’ll recall, the amulets used by Marja Ovaska to shield her movements from the network emitted a low-level electromagnetic field even once they had been used up. The only thing coming from
this is the same kind and level of electricity you’d expect from a metal object, metal being a conductor and all. But unless there’s some sort of energy we aren’t equipped to scan for, there’s nothing.”
“Sometimes a cuff link is just a cuff link,” Faith muttered.
But the Prime was staring at the printouts he’d fetched, looking unconvinced. “No … not this time. If I’m interpreting this the right way, the carvings are phrased in the imperative; it’s a set of instructions.”
“Like an incantation?” Miranda looked over his shoulder at the pages, but aside from being able to tell it was a diagram of the talisman, she couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
“Maybe. Regardless, we need to keep that thing under lock and key until I decipher this.” He looked at Miranda. “The box, too.”
She started to protest, but rationality intruded just in time; they needed to analyze the box as much as the talisman. A lot more people had probably touched the box itself over the years; there could be all sorts of evidence in the crevices and grain of the wood. It would take several days to get a full battery of tests run, and it would certainly be safe here at Hunter Development.
She held the box out to David without looking at it. When he took it from her hands, she got a violent chill.
“Good Christ,” David said, handing off the box to Novotny and putting his arms around Miranda. “Whatever that thing was doing to you … I’m glad to get rid of it. I don’t like this at all.”
Miranda buried her face in his shoulder for a moment, drawing on his strength and calm until she felt settled again and her insides stopped shaking. “Did you feel anything when you touched it?” she asked.
“No. Apparently it likes you better.”
She looked over at the imager, at the seemingly innocuous piece of decorative jewelry that could be … anything. Was it her imagination, or did it feel like something inside
it was … not sleeping, exactly, but … waiting for something?
“Can we leave now?” she asked quietly.
David squeezed her around the middle and let her go. “Yes. You go on down to the car; I want a word with the doctor, but the sooner you’re out of here the better. Faith, accompany the Queen downstairs before you go back on patrol, please.”
“As you will it, Sire.”
It wasn’t until she was safely in the car, a dozen stories away from the lab and the talisman, that Miranda felt she could breathe again.
Faith got in next to her for a moment. “Are you all right?”
“I don’t know. Why is that thing affecting me and not David? And what exactly is it doing? What does it want?”
The Second scoffed, “Want? It’s a hunk of metal, my Lady. It’s not alive.”
Miranda shook her head and tapped her Signet. “Neither is this, but it has a will. It knows who’s meant to wear it. Ask any of us—they may not be alive, but they want things.”
“And you think this thing wants you for something?”
“We need to find Lydia. She’s the only one who can give us any answers. Divert as many units as you can to the search.”
“Already done, my Lady. We’ve been combing the city since she disappeared outside Anodyne, but so far there’s nothing.” Faith checked her phone. “If there’s nothing else, I need to get back on shift—the second I have any news, I’ll let you know.”
“Sure. Go on … I’m fine. Really.”
Faith didn’t look convinced, but she got out of the car, just as David arrived to get in. They had a brief conversation outside before David slid onto the seat beside Miranda.
He looked at her speculatively. “You know,” he said, “I think before we go home there’s somewhere we should stop.”