Shadowbound (20 page)

The sound of babbling water drowned out any lingering noise of civilization, and in the middle of the night, the only mortal nearby was the park ranger, who stood guard at the entrance and therefore didn’t see two dark figures materialize just past the first bend in the trail.

Nico looked down at their joined hands. “That was inter- esting,” he said, keeping his voice low. “Quite different from passing through a portal. What is the maximum distance you can reach?”

“If I’m at full strength and alone, and the destination is one I’m familiar with, I can Mist up to ten miles. Adding another person cuts that in half.”

Nico’s eyebrows lifted. “Amazing.”

“You didn’t seem as impressed with the car,” Deven said with a smile.

“I do not think anyone was meant to hurtle over land at such speeds, especially along a winding road. It seems terribly dangerous compared to using magic.”

“Snob.” Deven gestured toward the path. “Come on.”

The first time Deven had come to Muir Woods had been just after David left California; he’d had a Consort for only a few months, been Prime for only six more than that . . . back then he had believed, mistakenly, that if he showed weakness, Jonathan would reject him. He was desperate for someplace to be alone, someplace no one expected him to have any idea what he was doing. Here, the trees seemed to be saying, “Don’t worry . . . you’re not really in charge. We’ve got it all under control.”

Leaning back against one of the trees, staring straight up at its faraway branches, he’d finally been able to untwist his thoughts. Here, alone among the redwoods, he had felt free for the first time in centuries.

After that he’d come here at least once every few months. The only person who knew exactly where he was was Wu, who drove him within Misting distance of the woods themselves. Jonathan said he didn’t want or need to know the location—in an emergency, that was what cell phones were for. They respected each other’s space.

Elf and Prime walked in silence for a while. Deven had debated with himself over whether to bring Nico here. He wanted the Weaver to see the beauty of the earth, but being alone with him in the middle of the woods made Deven deeply nervous. He wasn’t entirely secure in his convictions about all of this . . . and if Nico were to kiss him again, he was afraid of what might happen. Here they were, in the most beautiful place Deven knew, and he with a legendary lack of impulse control.

He needn’t have worried. Nico apparently could be an adult even if Deven couldn’t. The Elf kept his distance without any hint of awkwardness, neither ignoring what had passed between them nor pressing the issue. If he was feeling any longing, he covered it well, and he seemed to have truly meant it when he said he would value Deven’s friendship.

He could feel Nico reaching out to the trees with his energy, touching theirs, greeting them in whatever unspoken language Elves shared with the natural world. Periodically the Elf let his free hand trail along the bark of one of the giants and a smile played on his lips.

“You said you could hear them talk,” Nico said. “What do they say to you?”

Deven chuckled. “Oh, they’re not talking to me. I’m far beneath their notice. And it’s not words so much as impressions they leave in my mind. I don’t think I can think slowly enough to understand them.”

The Elf only smiled and nodded in reply. As Deven had expected, Nico understood perfectly.

“What do you think?” Deven asked, gesturing at the woods around them.

Nico took in their surroundings with appreciative eyes. “This is a holy place.”

A moment later, Deven asked, “This goddess of yours . . . what would she think of you being here, helping a godless murdering vampire?”

Nico looked at him sharply. “I wish you would not say such things about yourself.”

“Why not? It’s true.” Though the words were harsh, his tone was matter-of-fact, which he could tell bothered the Elf. “It’s funny . . . I tell my friends I’m an atheist, but that isn’t really accurate . . . I’m an apostate, no longer welcome in either the house or the heart of God.”

It was those same thoughts that had shoved him into the despair that Nico had healed him from, but now, it seemed things were back to normal; instead of wanting to curl up and wail, he could summon the distance he needed to keep walking.

Nico didn’t like it. He was frowning, eyes on the path and hands clasped behind him. “You began to feel cast out by the Divine as a young human, when you realized that according to the texts of your faith you were damned to an eternity of torment—both because you had supernatural power and because you love other men.”

“A great many people made it very clear to me.”

“And after all this time you have not seen anything that would lead you to try to reclaim your belief—even though those who led your church were prone to human frailty and fallibility like anyone else? Can you not look past them to the God whose love informs the entire universe and is, more than likely, far wiser than the little children running the show here?”

“I didn’t say I don’t believe,” Deven told him. “Belief and faith are two different things. I believe, sometimes at least, that God exists, but I have no faith that God has ever loved me.”

Surprisingly, Nico didn’t try to argue with him but said, “I am sorry you feel that way.”

“I can tell you disapprove.”

“Not to speak ill of your God, but . . . a Father who would cast his child into perdition for healing, or for loving someone, is a poor Father indeed. I cannot believe divine love is anything less than unconditional. I do not think you will ever be whole until you have found solace for your spirit . . . if you cannot reach out to your Father, perhaps you should seek another Parent.”

“Oh, like who? Yours?” Deven paused and narrowed his eyes. “You’re not on some mission to convert me to Elven religion, are you?”

Nico blinked, surprised . . . and then laughed. “Of all the gods to vie for your soul, I think Persephone will prove a much stronger contender than Theia. You are very much like us, whether you want to admit it or not, but somehow I do not think you would be content passively communing with the forest for all time.”

“Smiling at squirrels and singing to flowers? Probably not.” Deven smiled again, deciding now was a good time to change the subject. “But you approve of our forest, even if it’s not as splendid as yours?”

“It is beautiful. They are so young.”

“They’re older than me.”

Nico tilted his chin back and admired the distant view of the treetops. “The trees in Avilon are easily three times older, but there is something here that ours are lacking. We have seasons there, yet our world is essentially unchanging, static. Much like the Elentheia themselves, they do not evolve. Strangely, that tranquillity has always made me restless. This place feels more alive somehow, more vital, and in that way, more serene.”

He lowered his gaze to meet Deven’s, and the sudden emotion in his violet eyes made Deven shake inside. “It is wonderful . . . as are you, a creature of leather and steel, standing there in the starlight in a place where you actually feel at peace.”

Deven felt himself flushing, and he held Nico’s gaze until the heat became unbearable and he had to lower his eyes. “Nico . . .”

“I know,” the Elf said, chagrined. “I apologize. I honestly am trying . . . but being here with you in this place is both paradise and purgatory. Here without the burden of all your cares, you are brighter than the sun.”

“I haven’t seen the sun in a very long time,” Deven said softly. “I’ll have to take your word for it.”

Nico gave him a look of faint frustration. He moved closer and took Deven’s hand, kissing the back of it before retreating again. “If I know you a thousand years,
i’lyren
, I will find a way to make you see what the rest of us see in you.”

“Wait . . . what did you call me?”

He grinned a little mischievously. “It means ‘my ghost,’” he replied. “Or, to be more precise, ‘the spirit whose light is haunting me.’”

“So . . . Ghostlight.”

“As I said, it suits you. Now . . . let us walk on, before morning steals the night away.”

Deven shook his head, smiling wryly at the whole situation. “As you will it,” he said, and followed the Elf deeper into the forest.

 • • • 

Dawn had cast its gauzy veil over the sky, and the Haven shut down—shutters on timers, metal walls clattering into place over breezeways, leaving the whole building in silence and a comfortable darkness.

Nico sat on the chaise he had come to think of as his own. He had been granted an override code to open the terrace door from his room, and he was careful to shut it behind him just in case one of the guards needed to come in. It would be the height of bad manners to accidentally immolate the staff.

His heart weighed heavily in his chest as he looked down at the two packs on the tiled floor at his feet.

It was time to go. He knew it was time. But to leave so much unfinished . . .

It would never be finished. He had offered his heart to Deven knowing that it would be rejected, but it still hurt more than he had believed possible.

The Prime was right, of course. Theirs was not meant to be a long-term romance, if it got even that far . . . at least, not as they were now. There would come a day, he knew, when he and Deven both would look at each other across a very different divide, and that time they might be able to cross it.

They would have to. Too much depended on this.

But for now, his work was done. He could go home.

Home.
The thought filled him with longing, and he got to his feet, already drawing power up around him to build the portal. He would go home, and he would live in the safety and solace of his own world . . . until this one called him back again . . . for the last time.

Nico reached into one of his bags and pulled out a strip of paper, along which he had written out Deven’s name; he slid the ring of Theia off his finger and tied the slip of paper to it, clearly labeling who it was meant for. The moonstone gleamed in the early light. He left it on the chair. Anyone who found it would know to deliver it . . . but he knew no one else would. The first hand to touch the ring would be that of its new owner.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out another object, this one a marked contrast to his ring: a black leather wrist cuff embossed with Celtic knotwork. Deven had left it during one of their healing sessions and never asked for it back. Nico had a feeling he owned quite a few. It was not a priest’s ring, perhaps, but it was strangely far more appropriate to Nico, who snapped it on his own wrist with a smile.

“Ile amast amori est i’lyren,”
he told the empty air, pushing a touch of energy through the words so that if he were dreaming, Deven might hear Nico’s voice and, perhaps, smile a little in his sleep.

In the fantasy Nico had built for himself, that was exactly what happened: The sleeping Prime heard his declaration and whispered back into the darkness, “I love you, too.”

But the reality dictated he raise the portal and go, and so he did, drawing power up from the earth and the forest all around, letting it fill his body and expand outward. He closed his eyes and brought up his vision of the Web, laying over it an image of where he was going: home. The solitary little house he dwelt in on the edge of Avilon, deep among the trees where whispers and stares couldn’t follow . . . he held on to that vision, drawing it toward him, wrapping it in his consciousness as the warp and weft of reality parted to let him through . . . and with a blast of light and heat, Nico took up his bags and stepped out of the world of mortals, back home, where he dreamed of belonging.

 • • • 

In the first picture, Marilyn Grey was laughing, one of the girls on her knee; they both wore shorts in the summer sun, in the backyard of the house in Rio Verde. It was pretty obvious which sister was in the picture; her bright green eyes matched her mother’s, and an enormous poof of red hair had fought its way out of a headband and stuck out in all directions.

The next page was a photo of the girls, playing in the sandbox. Marianne had used a set of plastic molds to very carefully construct an amazingly detailed sand castle, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth as she concentrated on getting it just right. Meanwhile Miranda had dug a hole and was sitting in it with her bucket on her head, throwing sand in the air.

That about summed it up.

Most of the pictures were from that same era. Marilyn wore a wide variety of printed bandannas over her hair; the girls ran around barefoot with skinned knees. Her father wasn’t in any of them.

Looking through the album, Miranda wondered if the voices had already come to her mother by then. Had she started to feel the first scrape of other people’s emotions against her mind? Was she still able to dismiss it somehow? Her face didn’t betray any sort of fear or preoccupation. Here, at least, she was still 100 percent present, at least on the outside. They made cookies, pulled weeds in the flower beds, ran through the sprinklers. Everything was achingly normal.

When the Blackthorn had burned down Miranda’s apartment, she’d lost her only happy picture of her mother; David had tried to find another, but since Miranda’s had come from the only extant copy of Marilyn’s psych file, and a variety of spectacular clerical errors had misplaced the photo on record at the DMV, both knew the only way to get more pictures of her was to go through the family. Miranda hadn’t been ready for that before, so she’d gone without, but now she had an entire album full of her mother’s face.

She had avoided looking through it for a few days after they got home from Rio Verde; for the moment she had just wanted to pretend none of it had happened and not think about her family at all. But the thought of seeing Marilyn again occupied her thoughts more and more until finally she took the album to her chair by the fire, sipped a glass of blood, and turned the pages slowly, smiling through tears at how adorable the sisters had been . . . how innocent and full of promise . . . how happy they had all seemed.

Miranda had grown quieter and more introverted over the years, a vague and unnamable sadness taking up permanent residence in her eyes. Marianne had gradually distanced herself from her depressive, weird sister. Miranda knew that things between her parents were never that great and behind the smiles was something far less than idyllic, but in a handful of moments frozen by the camera she could believe in the fairy tale of a happy family.