Shadowbound (35 page)

“We found this and thought it best to bring it to you.”

He held out his hands, offering her a sword. She took it gingerly and nodded her thanks, then slid the blade out of the sheath to confirm its identity—by some miracle, like its owner, Ghostlight had survived.

It had to have been in the Signet suite, but those rooms had been demolished, not even leaving a wall to mark where the Pair had lived. All of their possessions, everything they’d collected or treasured over the long decades, gone in an instant.

Miranda couldn’t help but think about Faith . . . they had found the hilt of her sword, but it had blown apart, while Faith herself was essentially vaporized.

Too many bombs . . . too much fire, too many lives blown into dust. Why did it always have to be an explosion? Why couldn’t any of them die in peace, held by the people they loved as they sighed their last breaths? Why did it have to end in blood and fire?

She knew the answer, of course. This was what they had signed up for—a violent death with only one comfort . . . and that comfort was far more fragile than any of them had ever known. For centuries Pairs had died together, but it seemed that era was ending—just in time for her to have become Queen. Such bitter luck.

She laid the sword down on the adjacent cot, alongside its bearer, who had yet to regain consciousness. She hoped he wouldn’t until they were away from here; this was not where he needed to wake up.

A moment later David returned, dusty and subdued. He took a bottle of water from a nearby cooler and came to sit down next to her.

Wordlessly, he held up what he had brought back from the ruins: a cracked, soot-smudged Signet.

“What do we do with it?” she asked softly, taking it from him and wiping the stone with a clean spot on her shirt. There was blood on the chain, the blood of one of her dearest friends. Her hands began to tremble.

“I don’t know.” David sounded defeated. “We . . . we found him. They’re trying to get him out, but a concrete pillar had fallen and crushed him, and the walls of the garage fell on top of that. No one in there survived. It was . . .” He looked away, and she saw the impossibility of tears in his eyes again. “There was no way we could have saved him. He wouldn’t have survived a Mist. There wasn’t much left down past the abdomen . . . he couldn’t feel anything because his spinal cord had been severed, thank God. I don’t even know how he lived long enough to make the call. When I think that . . . he was alone in there, Miranda, in a concrete tomb with no light but the phone and twenty feet of rubble between his dying breaths and freedom. He died down there alone.” He put his head in his hands.

She threaded her arm around him, and he around her, and they held on to each other. “Not alone,” she said. “He heard our voices right until the end. He knew Deven was safe. That had to count for something.”

He didn’t reply, just shook his head. She had never seen him like this—he’d taken charge without hesitation, but out of the eye of the surviving Elite he looked like an orphan wandering around a war zone.

“What about the bombs?” she asked. “Is there any evidence?”

If anything, the question seemed to make him feel worse. “It’s my fault.”

“How can it possibly be your fault?”

“They got the idea from us. The only nonvampire staff allowed past the gates are the groundskeepers—they come once a week during daylight, in a truck. It’s always the same team—they have to scan their IDs and fingerprints and there’s a camera watched by a day guard inside the house. The humans had all been background checked and vetted. Morningstar must have brainwashed them and sent them in with the explosives, knowing that since they were regular visitors they’d be let through. There’s no telling how long they had control . . . or how long those bombs were there waiting. They wanted revenge for their soldiers and their Shepherd . . . and they got it.”

“We thought we were so clever,” she murmured. “Decoy limos, wild-goose chases . . . the thought never occurred to any of us that they might already have found the Haven.”

She reached down to touch Deven’s face and was relieved to see he’d warmed up a little. Her eyes fell on his left hand.

“Jonathan’s ring,” she said. “We can’t leave it here.”

“I have it,” David replied quickly before she could start to worry. “It was lying near him. The left hand was . . . mostly gone.”

Miranda resisted the urge to cry again. She was so tired, every time she cried it felt like her head was about to split open. “What are we going to do?”

“Go home,” he said. “We’ll go back to Austin . . . after that, I don’t know. Let’s just take it one step at a time.”

“When can we leave? We need to get out of here before he wakes up. He’ll want to see the body.”

“What makes you so sure?”

She met his eyes. “I did. Even Bondbroken I couldn’t really believe you were dead until I heard Deven say he’d seen you—but I still wished I could, to make it real to my mind. And you were in one piece, not . . .”

“You’re right. We can’t let him see that. I just want to do one more round of the Elite and make sure they’re organized. The Second is dead, but there are several high-ranking lieutenants who can run things for a while. Let me check in with them, and then we’ll go.”

There were too many questions they had no way to answer. There was no precedent for this. Should they leave Jonathan’s Signet here? With whom? Would whoever came along to take over the West have another one made?

She couldn’t think about it. One step at a time, she told herself. First, get home.

Maybe then they would figure out the second step.

David’s phone rang, and he groped after it halfheartedly. “Solomon.”

Miranda didn’t want to listen. She wasn’t sure she could take anything else falling apart.

“Oh, God.”

Damn it.
She shut her eyes. When he hung up, she said wearily, “Jacob calling with another assassination?”

“No.” Something in his tone made her open her eyes. “Jacob and Cora never made it to the airport,” he said. “They’re gone.”

Sixteen

Cora fought her way out of oblivion, forcing herself to open her eyes even though her eyelids felt like they each weighed a ton.

At first her surroundings made no sense. She lay on a tile floor, freezing cold; directly in front of her was a metal door. The chamber she was in was empty of furniture and had no windows.

She didn’t understand. The last thing she remembered was being in the car, on her way to the airport with Jacob and Vràna. They’d gotten stuck in traffic because of an accident ahead, and the driver took an alternate route. Had they stopped? Had someone attacked the car?

“Jacob,” she said, her quiet voice echoing off the tiles. “Jacob!”

Very, very softly, she heard to her left, “Cora?”

She crawled over to the wall and pressed her ear to it. “I am here.”

“Are you hurt?”

“No, are you?”

“No. Do you remember what happened? We were in traffic so long we missed our flight, so we stopped to have a quick hunt and they got the drop on us. I think we were sedated.”

“But where are we?” she asked.

“My guess is Morningstar headquarters.”

“Can you Mist?”

“I tried,” Jacob said. “These cells are shielded. Clearly they know their audience.”

Cora swallowed hard, the reality of their situation beginning to sink in. They had been captured, were now imprisoned . . . and everyone knew what Morningstar did with Signets.

She struggled against paralyzing fear. “What should we do?”

“Wait,” he answered. “That’s all we can do for now. That and pray.”

“Did you see where they took Vràna?” she asked.

“No. She’s a smart dog—she probably pulled a Lassie and ran all the way back to the Haven for help.”

Cora didn’t really understand the reference, but she was too shaken to say so. She pulled her knees up to her chin, trying to get warm and trying not to cry. In addition to her present fear, she could feel something . . . a great, gaping chasm of sorrow in her heart. She knew it wasn’t hers, but if the room was shielded . . . either the shields weren’t as strong as they thought, or whatever was happening in the outside world was terrible enough to reach her even here.

Distantly, she heard men’s voices, growing closer. They were coming.

She heard the cell door next to hers open, heard a struggle. “Get the other one!” one of the men yelled.

Keys rattled outside and the door swung open. There were four men outside, each one holding a crossbow loaded with a wooden stake, all of them pointed right at her.

“Try to fight and we’ll turn you into a fucking pincushion,” one of them said.

They dragged her out into the corridor and pushed her down the hall. She couldn’t see Jacob anywhere. She couldn’t try to escape if she didn’t know where he was; if she left him behind they would surely kill him and end her anyway.

The hallway opened up into a large room full of people. Row after row of black-clad soldiers sat on wooden pews lined up in front of a broad stone altar.

The men hauled her up to the front of the room and grabbed her by both arms to hold her still. She pulled in her energy and tried to Mist, but this room, too, was shielded—whatever went on inside was protected and hidden from the outside. That suggested to her addled mind that this place was still in the city; if they were out in the country like the Haven, they wouldn’t be so keen on keeping their activities concealed. In fact, each area she’d been dragged through reminded her of the courthouse they had been to—shabby, decades old. This might be an abandoned school or something similar.

She was trying to distract herself from what was coming. It was working until a second group of men entered the room, this group bearing Jacob.

They held him at stakepoint, forcing him up onto the altar and onto his back, where they shackled him down and roughly took his Signet, laying it on a nearby table.

She knew they must have threatened to harm her to get him to cooperate. He was not a man of rash action—he would wait for an opportune moment, taking his time to assess the situation before acting. She hoped he had a plan.

Seeing him chained there, Cora nearly fainted from the intensity of her fear but held herself up by inches—she wasn’t going to embarrass Jacob or herself by swooning like a Victorian lady.

Jacob turned his head and caught her eyes. She could feel his love for her reverberating from one end of their bond to the other. She refused to look away. If they were going to die, the last thing either would see was the other’s eyes.

A man in cleric’s clothes came forward. The Shepherd. Her English wasn’t quite good enough to follow everything he said, but he was delivering some kind of sermon, and she caught words like “demon” and “lake of fire.” The next part, though, she did understand, and suddenly the sadness she had felt earlier made terrible sense.

“As you all know, brothers, tonight we celebrate our victory over the Archdemons. The judgment of God has rained down upon them, turning their fortress to ash, and when silence fell, two of them lay dead. This war is won, my brothers—but now comes the most important part. We must lay to waste all of the remaining demons who walk the earth, starting with their leaders and finishing with every last vile beast of their kind. Tonight we will begin our new chapter by taking the power of these two remaining Archdemons, and with it we shall bring in more to our cause . . . hundreds more. Let us pray.”

Cora wanted to wrestle her way out of their grasp and shake the Shepherd, demanding to know whom they had killed. If a Pair was dead . . . there were only two possibilities.

The Shepherd shifted from prayer into intonation, reading something from a large leather-bound book with symbols all over it. She felt a crawling, slimy energy from the book, whether part of some spell or due to the kind of people who had used it.

He took up a large bowl and set it down on the floor next to the altar, then said quietly to Jacob, “Fight me, and before we kill her we’ll pass her around and make sure she’s begging for death.”

The Shepherd seized Jacob’s arm and yanked it out to the side where it hung over the bowl. She saw the knife in his hand a second before he sliced it across Jacob’s wrist, and blood began to drip down from the cut, splashing into the bowl.

Cora thought she understood—they would use the blood to create their warriors, but to activate the spell they needed a Signet’s death, and they intended to use a Bondbreaking. That way she would be alive a little longer, and they could repeat the blood ritual with her death as a catalyst.

She watched, helpless, as the Shepherd laid the Signet at the head of the altar six inches or so from Jacob’s head. She saw the hammer nearby, and sheer panic swept her up in its fist; she began to struggle in their grasp, harder and harder. The Shepherd barked something about holding her still, then yelled to Cora, “Make one more move and I gut him!”

He took the knife and held it over Jacob’s midsection. They were going to die regardless—she had to try. She jerked sideways one more time and very nearly wrested herself free.

The Shepherd’s mouth tightened into a severe line, and he plunged the knife down all the way through Jacob’s stomach. The Prime didn’t scream, but he let out a strangled cry. Blood flowed out of the wound and over his side, coating the white stone with red.

Cora stared at the blood, and suddenly something inside her . . . snapped.

All the noise in the room faded away, and her fear evaporated beneath the fire of something else entirely: anger.

How dare you? How dare you hurt my friends, even kill them, and then try to take our power? How dare you lay a hand on him? Or on me? How dare you . . . human!

She felt her body temperature rising. She breathed hard, glaring at the Shepherd through a red haze of growing rage, imagining she could take her strength and hit him with it, make him hurt the way her friends had hurt.

The Shepherd saw the look on her face and went pale, grabbing the Signet and the hammer and backing away from the altar. He darted over to the wall and held the Signet up against it—the hammer swung toward the stone—