Shadowstorm (The Shadow World Book 6) (32 page)

He nodded. “As You will it…wait,
four?
What do you mean four?”

Too late.

David jolted awake to see worried green eyes peering down at him.

“I said, it’s after four,” Miranda said, stepping back out of flailing range. “It’s been a long night—you should come to bed.”

He was breathing hard, momentarily confused. Where—the Suite, the couch. He’d fallen asleep. The sound of wind in trees was fading from his mind…but what he’d learned was not.

“Are you okay?” the Queen asked, sitting down next to him and taking his hands, drawing him upright. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Not exactly, but…” He met her eyes, a spark of hope kindling in his chest. He squeezed her hands, leaned forward and kissed her firmly; she was giving him a dubious look as he leaned back, like she wasn’t entirely sure about his sanity.

“It’s okay, beloved,” he said. “I think I have an idea.”

Chapter Thirteen

For a couple of days Miranda walked around fairly sure her husband had lost his mind.

Soon enough, however, she began to realize he might have stumbled on their only viable option at this point.

At first she’d flat-out refused to try the magic again. The first time she’d used it had been awful…but it had worked. She’d blundered through it, but she’d been able to un-bind the Pair and bind Deven to her and David. Compared to the magnitude of reworking Signet bonds, the idea of breaking through a barrier wasn’t nearly as intimidating.

She didn’t even have to bring it down all the way—just push it open wide enough that its own energy would break it like a dam. After that it was a matter of standing between Prime and Consort and helping dampen the wave to keep it from killing either of them. With her on one side of it and David on the other, their strength combined with whatever Weaving knowledge she could recall could do it. She knew, in her bones, that they could.

Honestly it was less the idea and more the execution that left her speechless.

Still, at this point it was just an idea. They didn’t have a whole lot of time to waste before Nico did something disastrous and unrecoverable, but she couldn’t just jump into it without at least
trying
to remember what she’d learned in her dreams two years ago.

She could hammer at the barrier with sheer force of will and probably knock it over, assuming she could get in past Deven’s shields…but she didn’t want to traumatize either of the Pair any further. She had to believe that magic as ancient as the Signets would find its way to balance once that initial surge had passed. Everyone just had to survive that long.

Miranda leaned her head on her piano and shut her eyes, groping after the vision. How had she found it before? She remembered little of how she’d done it; that night had been so catastrophic it was hard to hold onto any part of it willingly.

Nothing came to mind. She might as well have been trying to remember someone else’s life.

On the other hand…she did remember another time that the Web had shown up in her mind. She’d been high as a kite, thanks to Deven’s Better Living Through Illegal Pharmaceuticals program, but it was still before the explosion. The night of the wedding had been a good one…she’d felt happy enough to burst for her friends. She remembered the club, and its noise and teeming crowds; she remembered being surprised, and yet not really, when Deven kissed her, giving her the E-21 he had on his tongue. She wondered now…had that been an excuse? She was pretty sure the list of women he’d made out with was list-able on one hand.

Don’t get distracted. Keep going. What happened then?

The drug had kicked in quickly, and she’d seen it…the curtain of reality parting, as Deven had said, letting her see behind it.

There it was. The memory glimmered in her mind’s eye: thousands of threads of light, informing everything around her, herself included. She had been terrified at first, but he’d reassured her:
Find out what it wants.
It had just wanted to dance with her.

And if it could dance, could she play it?

Miranda didn’t move her head, but reached down and lifted the lid off the keyboard, fingers finding their places out of years of practice. She knew the chords didn’t really matter: it was the motion, the undulation of matter and space making love to itself. That’s all any of it was, really. The universe in love.

She kept her eyes closed and started playing, improvising a slow and rolling melody. She held the image of the Web in her mind, not trying to do anything with it, just letting it be there; even though it was just a memory, before long, it started to move.

She didn’t dare touch it. Not yet. And just playing wasn’t going to be enough. But for now it was enough to watch from a place beyond fear. Before she could become too drained, she wound the music down, giving herself time to withdraw. It had been little more than a meditation but she had to be careful.

When she opened her eyes, she finally sensed she wasn’t alone. She turned her head to see Stella standing in the doorway, eyes huge.

“What the hell were you just doing?” the Witch asked.

Miranda considered the piano in front of her. “I don’t really know,” she answered. “Just experimenting with something. What did it look like?”

Stella hovered in the doorway and said, “It looked like Weaving.”

“It did? Good.”

The Queen had to take a moment to ground, hands on the piano lid. She made herself breathe in fours: four counts in, hold for four, four counts exhale, hold for four.

She was tempted to ask Stella for help — Stella had been learning Weaving arts, after all—but she wasn’t quite ready for the Witch to know what she and David were up to. Right now she wanted to get used to the magic on her own terms.

Finally she looked over at Stella and said, “You’re back.”

“Yeah…I didn’t check out of the hotel, I just wanted to see how things felt here. I knew if anything had changed you’d call, but…this place feels like home now. It’s hard to stay away. Funny, really.”

“Not that funny.” Miranda smiled, thinking back. “There was a time I was still human and fell in love with this place. This life gets in your blood somehow.”

Stella half-smiled. Her demeanor was unusually serious—given the situation Miranda couldn’t blame her for losing some of her sparkle. “Was it the place, or the owner?”

The Queen chuckled. “Both. I think even at the very beginning, when I was a screwed-up shell of a person scared of everything and without hope, I knew this—he—was where I belonged.”

Nodding, Stella said a little too casually, “I bet you never thought you’d end up killing people.”

At first, Miranda didn’t get it, and jumped to the wrong conclusion: “The Blackthorn were killing all over the city, and they did kill me. I didn’t think twice about defending what was mine.”

Stella’s eyebrow lifted. “But before that…the night you came here, you killed humans.”

Miranda had been through enough since that night, and had learned enough, that talking about it wasn’t as hard as it had been. “I don’t know if I’d classify them as human. Or maybe human but not people. Either way…I regretted it for a while, the fact of ending lives. I don’t anymore.”

“Because of people like Annalise Vitera?”

The Queen froze. Suddenly Stella’s behavior and tone made perfect, terrible sense. She’d been to visit her father, Miranda knew, and between whatever the Detective had said and what the Witch’s intuition must be telling her…

Miranda sat back, crossing her arms. She cared too much for Stella to keep bullshitting her; and there was no way to sugarcoat it, either. “You know that when David returned from the dead there was a price. In order to serve Persephone he had to become something new. To regain our bond I had to make that same choice. Once in the month, on the dark of the Moon, we have to kill. It wasn’t something we knew specifically going in, but it was clear there would be consequences. There’s only so much power a vampire can attain without the power of death.”

Stella didn’t react quite the way a normal human would have. She looked down at the floor for a minute and then nodded. “You don’t seem too upset about it.”

“I hate it, Stella. I love what I am, and who I am. But I hate what I have to do. Please, please remember something: Every single one of our kind
wants
to kill. Every cell in my body fights with my will, every time I hunt, not to drink until there’s nothing left. We’re born starving. A lot of us are still good people in spite of it, but the facts are the facts. We were built as predators…hell, we’re practically the ultimate predator. Not only are we bloodthirsty and fast and strong, we can pass among our prey unnoticed for years.”

“So you enjoy it?”

“Yes.” Miranda said bluntly, but added, “Not for the reason you might think. David and I use our empathy to find the evil ones so that we can live with ourselves and to make something at least marginally good out of a tough situation. But I’ll tell you the truth…it’s a
relief
to stop fighting for a night. It’s like handing over this huge burden—putting it in Persephone’s hands once a month. Is it okay? Not even remotely. For a long time I haven’t even been able to admit there was anything satisfying about it. But there is. In a twisted sort of way it’s like She’s given us a reward.”

Strange. Up until this very moment she hadn’t been able to articulate any of that. Was it telling Stella that made it easier, or was it what she’d just been doing with the Web? Those endless strands of light were the truth of the universe. Maybe touching that truth made all truth easier to speak.

“I suppose the question is whether
you
can live with it,” Miranda told her. “You don’t have to. You can go back to the hotel and then leave town—we can take care of it for you. You can even take your father if he’ll go.”

Stella smiled sadly. “No, I can’t. I’m bound up in this too, remember? There’s work for me to do. Knowing that you have no choice doesn’t exactly make it better, but it does make it easier. Look what I’d be giving up if I walked away—you’re my friend. And if we ever get Nico back…I want to be there for that. And I want to help you burn Morningstar to the ground if I can.” She shrugged. “Just don’t ask me to kill anyone.”

“I would never do that.”

“I know. That’s a big reason I’m staying. I just had to hear the truth from you—I had to know you’d tell me the truth.”

Miranda regarded her quietly for a while before saying, “Your father knows I’m guilty, doesn’t he—he just knows he can’t win.”

“Yeah.” Stella leaned against the doorframe; normally she would have come in and flopped into one of the music room chairs, but her emotional aura was more troubled than she was letting on in her words, and Miranda didn’t comment on it. She’d need time to process it even if she thought she already had. Some people never could deal with the reality of what Miranda was…like Kat.

Miranda looked down and pretended to fiddle with the piano lid to hide the way her eyes started burning. She tried not to think about Kat, had stopped having her watched once it was clear the human was not a target of any kind. She had to let her friend go, had to let everything in her life that was human go, eventually.

Even if Stella was genuinely okay with what Miranda did, their friendship had an expiration date, and the longer Stella was involved with the Shadow World the sooner that date could come. Detective Maguire probably understood that and wanted to warn his daughter away in whatever way he could.

And worse yet…Miranda’s always-helpful precog gift was buzzing in the back of her mind, telling her that soon Stella’s loyalty would be tested by more than dead drug dealers and rapists…that along with the storms outside something was building in this house.

“What did David do, exactly, to fix the case?” Stella asked. “I mean I assume it was him, since Dad said the DNA wasn’t a match and that seems like David’s area.”

Miranda finally summoned a smile. “I can’t tell you that.”

“You think I’d blab to my dad?”

“I would, if I were you. But what I meant was I don’t really know how to explain it to you. I could just say the samples were switched, but that doesn’t cover it. Ask David—he might tell you. Or he might just fire off a bunch of science-y technobabble.”

Stella actually grinned at that. “Yeah I guess he would. And he’d think he was explaining it perfectly.”

“Then he’d look at you like you were an idiot when you told him he was babbling, yes. It’s one of his more infuriating qualities.”

“Can I ask you something about you guys—all of you, I mean? Are there a lot of vampire computer geniuses?”

Miranda slid off the bench and picked up her coat, slinging it over her shoulders as she left the music room. Stella fell into step beside her without hesitation.

“No,” Miranda began, heading toward the study where the ice cream stash lived. “Vampires are actually kind of hostile toward progress. You should have seen when all the Signets were here for the Council Summit—a bunch of sexist, racist, privileged assholes, with a few glowing exceptions. Jacob and Deven have always been David’s allies, so he shared his tech with them, and also with a few others, like Prime Tanaka of Japan. The rest are basically old men sitting on the front porch waving rifles, yelling ‘you danged kids get off my lawn!’”

Stella laughed, starting to lose some of her seriousness, which was Miranda’s goal. For now, the less Stella thought about the fact that she was surrounded by killers, the better. “Best mental image ever.”

“Then there was Prime Hart—that’s the jackass Olivia replaced. I almost wish you could have met him so you could know the worst of what’s possible for vampires of our caliber.”

“I think I’ll pass on getting to know the worst. He’s the one that kept Cora as a slave, right?”

“Her and dozens of others over the years. Imagine how many amazing women and how much potential he killed with his tiny little dick and his massive ego.”

“How do you know he had a tiny dick?”

“Well, for a long time I had no proof. I just figured a guy with masculinity issues like that, terrified of gays and women, had to have been compensating for something. But Cora confirmed it—blushed so hard I thought her face might explode, but she did, once she had something to compare it to. And Deven said something about the way he walked it was almost 100% sure he had, as Dev put it, a ‘third pinkie.’”