She wasn’t helpless. She was doing her job.
But which job?
Miranda sat back a moment, eyes still glued to the array of colored dots representing her people and the enemy all over downtown Austin.
She should be there. She could fight, and the Shadow World knew she was fearless; she and David together were terrifying. They could clamp down on the whole city and have this mess dealt with by morning, no problem … but she couldn’t risk being recognized by one of the humans they’d saved. Even after a memory wipe it was too risky.
For all their planning and contrivances, she had stumbled into exactly what she’d dreaded the most: Her two worlds were at odds, and no matter what she did, one of the two would suffer for it. She could go into the city and fight and possibly cause a media firestorm, even risking the exposure of the Shadow World; or she could sit here and protect her musical career while people died.
The worst part was that unless something miraculous happened, none of it was going to matter. The new moon was tomorrow night, and so far no one had been able to find a solution to the problem of the Stone of Awakening. It was still stuck firmly to Miranda’s Signet, and as far as anyone knew, it was still going to kill her.
Janousek had an operative who, he said, had information that might help, but they wouldn’t hear from him until this afternoon, which was evening in Europe. Laveau was questioning a small branch of the Order of Elysium that operated out of Baton Rouge, but so far, she’d found no evidence that anything out of the ordinary was going on. If the Order was planning to do the Awakening ritual, it was being kept hush-hush; the priest that Laveau had spoken to said that for something so important, only the highest
echelons of the Order, the High Priestess and her Acolytes, would be allowed to know anything about it. If the Pairs wanted to learn the truth, they had to find the High Priestess, and the only person who might have known where she was, Lydia, was dead.
As the night waned, the city quieted somewhat. Come dawn the entire mess would be forced to a halt—the question was, would it begin again at sundown? They would have about twelve hours to figure out a more cohesive strategy than simply putting out fires.
To that end, Miranda had been taking advantage of what she’d gleaned from the user manual and was compiling readings on the attacks so far to see if they had originated at a common point. That point would most likely be Jeremy’s headquarters. It was looking pretty random so far—as much as she hated to admit it, it might take another night like tonight to get enough data points.
“Star-two, this is Elite Forty in the underground garage, reporting that the Prime’s vehicle has just pulled in.”
Miranda sighed. “Thank you, Elite Forty.”
She issued the command to reroute authorization to David’s laptop and locked down the server room before taking the stairs up to the ground level. She was just in time; the Prime was making his way down the hall toward their suite, and she ran to him, catching him as he wobbled from sheer exhaustion.
“Jesus, baby …” Miranda put her arm around him and held him up the rest of the way to the suite. “Are you hurt? I didn’t feel any serious injuries.”
“I’m fine,” he insisted. “Just wrung out. I had a few cuts but they’re all healed. I’m just kind of disgusting—I called ahead to have Esther run a bath for both of us.”
“Smart move,” she replied. “No way you’re standing on your feet much longer. Come on … let’s get you cleaned up and you can rest.”
He shook his head. “Can’t. I need to review the data and go over reports from the team leaders, then coordinate with APD for tonight’s response—”
“And you can do all of that after a bath and a nap,” she said firmly. “We can’t do a damn thing about this for a good twelve hours, and you have got to rest or you’ll do something stupid and get us killed.”
“Oh, you mean like stealing a talisman with a hex on it?” he muttered.
She punched him in the shoulder a little harder than she really intended to.
David grunted in pain. “It was a joke.”
“A bad joke.”
“I know, love. I’m sorry. Here, can you help me get my shirt off? My shoulder’s gone all fucked.”
“Here …” Miranda placed her hands on either side of his neck and closed her eyes, breathing out slowly, letting energy pass from her to him. The power shored up his waning strength and helped ease the various aches and pains he hadn’t had the time or concentration to heal while out in the field. Still, she helped him undress slowly in deference to his weariness. She’d never seen him so worn out.
“It wasn’t your fault,” David was saying as she helped him into the steaming hot tub. “You didn’t know what the talisman was supposed to do. For all we knew at the time, Lydia was telling the truth. She still might have been. She was part of the Order, after all—I’d believe her story before I’d believe Deven’s.”
“Yes, well, right now you’d believe the Easter Bunny before you’d believe Deven. We don’t know where his intel came from either. But they can’t both be right.”
Miranda stripped off her own clothes and slid into the water beside him with a sigh. “God bless Esther,” she murmured, groping sideways for the washcloth and body wash she knew was on the side of the tub. As she had done a number of times before, she lathered up the cloth and began scrubbing David’s skin, revealing its pristine ivory beneath the dried smears of blood and grime. He was in better shape than he’d been in after that first battle at the Haven, but this time he was way more tired; the Elite had been all over the city all night long, and he had spent profligate
amounts of his energy Misting from place to place to try to stop attackers from killing humans or other vampires.
“Jacob said to expect a call just before sunset,” she told the Prime. “He sounded fairly optimistic.”
“What else did he say?” David asked, eyes closed, body relaxing gradually under her care.
“He said they have a suspect in custody for the car bomb—one of the servants, a recent hire. They’re pretty sure he was working for someone, but he won’t talk, even under interrogation.”
David snorted quietly. “Jacob is not an interrogator. They should send the bastard to me.”
“Don’t underestimate him,” Miranda admonished gently, taking a moment to rub some of the tension out of his shoulders. “Jacob can be fierce when he needs to be.”
“Well, there’s not much need for it anyway,” David said, his voice growing more and more drowsy the longer she worked on him, her hands moving in slow circles down his arms, then over his back, under the water. She leaned him back to wet his hair and set to massaging his scalp, and finally she caught a ghost of a contented smile on his face. “I think our mysterious bomber’s been identified.”
“Jeremy Hayes,” Miranda agreed. “If Faith really saw him Mist, it explains a lot … except who the hell he is. For that we need more information … we need …”
“Don’t say it,” David said suddenly, eyes opening, gaze hard. “Even if we can find them, I’m not asking for their help. We’ll figure this out on our own.”
“I know,” she replied soothingly, nudging him back into the water. “I know how you feel. I wasn’t suggesting otherwise. We’ve got resources of our own, and we’ll find out who Hayes really is … just rest for now, baby. Just rest for a little while, and then we’ll go back to work.”
He sighed and let her go back to her ministrations without further comment. Before long, he was sound asleep.
Miranda rested him back against the side of the tub while she bathed herself, watching her husband sleep, wondering
in the back of her mind where the hell Deven and Jonathan had disappeared to right when they were truly needed … and hoping against hope that whatever they were doing, they weren’t out there making things even worse.
The Cloister had stood for hundreds of years, hidden among the forests of northern California, surrounded by mist and the scent of the sea. Within its hallowed walls were kept the secrets of the Order of Elysium—their history, their laws. About two dozen vampires made up the priesthood of Persephone, and they were among the few immortals left on earth who kept Her religion safe from the vagaries of time.
The Order had traveled to these shores back in the days of the earliest human settlers, hoping to escape a period of vampire-hunting hysteria that swept through Europe in the Age of Inquisition. Since then it had mostly been left behind by the Shadow World, a relic of an age long forgotten, drifting through the years until their time would come again to step forward and lead their people back to their Goddess. They were patient. They watched the stars for omens, and they waited.
The High Priestess, Eladra, was more than a thousand years old. Her disciples, known as the Acolytes, had not left the confines of the Cloister for centuries. They, and only they, had access to the ancient rituals that had once defined vampire civilization—rituals that, it was said, had helped create the Signets themselves. Legend had it that the Acolytes were each as powerful as a Prime, if not more so.
But for all their power, they died like every other vampire.
Eladra sank to her knees at the foot of the altar, her hands at her chest, groping for the wooden shaft that jutted from her sternum. Her eyes were wide with agony, but there was no real surprise on her pale, lined face as she stared up at her killer. She knew the omens, she watched
the stars, she knew that death was coming for her … and death stood over her, impassive, and watched her die.
The stone walls of the Cloister had kept out the world, but now instead of a shelter, they were a tomb. One by one the Acolytes fell that night—by the sword, by the stake, slaughtered one by one, until the entire priesthood of the Dark Mother lay dead, their blood running thick over the cold floor.
In the silence that followed, he knelt in front of the altar where the collected ritual texts of the Order were kept in an enormous leather-bound book. Each branch of the Order had a copy of the common liturgy and rites, but this one was the one that held the secrets of the Awakening; only the inner circle of the priesthood had been trusted with the future of their kind. There might be others with the texts, or the arcane ability, but as far as anyone in the Shadow World knew, only the Cloister had been prepared to perform the ritual at the appointed hour. They were the only chance vampirekind had to call their Goddess back.
As the pages went up in flames, beatifying the dead in a golden halo of firelight, Deven turned to the High Priestess’s body. He stared at her for a long moment while the flames spread over the tapestries that hung behind the altar.
“Forgive me, Mother, for I have sinned,” he said softly, then closed Eladra’s vacant eyes in benediction.
Eighteen
When the Cloister caught fire, it could be seen for miles, even among the dense rain forests of the Northwest. The smell of burning wood—and burning bodies—would hang heavily in the air for days and nights. The humidity of the coastal forests and the stone walls of the Cloister itself kept the fire from spreading. The walls would still stand, but there would be nothing inside them but blackness.
Jonathan stood at the brow of the hill, watching it from far away, almost hypnotized by the beauty of the flames—pink and orange and almost white, such butterfly colors to signify the end of one of the few things about their world that was still beautiful. From this distance it looked small and insignificant … until it burned.
He waited a while longer, then gave up his vigil and went back into the cabin.
If anyplace counted as the flat-ass middle of nowhere, this was it, a private getaway owned by someone who owed the Signet a favor. No phones, no Internet, intermittent cell service. It had unreliable electricity and running water from a well for part of the year. But they had come prepared.
Jonathan set about building a fire; the first quiet drums of rain had already begun, and soon the little ramshackle room would be freezing. He banked the coals from earlier and fed them.
He cranked up the water in the ancient shower to let it
run until it grew as hot as it could get, then closed the room to hold in the steam. He fetched blood from a bag and warmed it in a plain glass tumbler, probably risking life and limb by using the tiny microwave. It was human blood, which had pleased them both; this far out in the middle of nowhere they’d been lucky not to have to make do with deer, but lumberjacks, it seemed, hurt themselves regularly, so the local clinic was well stocked.
Jonathan went about the duties of a typical housewife, preparing a comfortable home and meal for his bread-
winner, who would come home exhausted and distant, and need his helpmate to whisk away dirty boots and bring him a glass of whiskey.
Jonathan tried not to think about it in those terms. He tried instead to focus on what Deven was going to need—and better yet, what shape he would be in when he got back from tonight’s grisly errand.
David and Miranda might find fault … no, they almost certainly would. But this time the fault lay in both Prime and Consort’s hands. Jonathan had agreed with the plan. It was ugly, but it was necessary. If the ritual to activate the Stone could be performed only once, on this new moon, then it had to be stopped. The only way to be sure of that was to make sure no one was alive to perform it and that the text was destroyed. Goddess, demon, whatever the rite tried to summon … her chance was long gone now.
Finally, finally, Jonathan heard the back door to the cabin swing open and shut, and he reached back with his senses to verify the energy signature of his Prime. He waited a moment to see if Deven spoke.
Nothing.
Jonathan heard him slowly removing his weapons and laying them out on the table where a length of cloth already waited to hold them while they were cleaned. Ghostlight, its blade wiped cursorily but still smeared with dark blood; four hilted stakes, each with wood shafts that would need replacement; two long knives, bloody; two wood-tipped throwing stars, bloody.
He didn’t interrupt. This was a sacred ritual to Deven, one of the few he had left. Jonathan let him keep it in silence.