Shadow's Fall (25 page)

Now he said, “I’m flattered that you’ve taken such an interest in me.”

Lydia regarded him in silence for a moment. “Do you believe in fate, David?”

“No.”

She smiled. “I knew you would say that.”

“Why have you come, Lydia?”

Another pause, then: “May I sit?”

Wordlessly he held out his hand toward the booth. Lydia bowed again and took the side opposite Miranda. David, in turn, slid back in next to his Queen.

Lydia looked around the bar, eyes lighting on each of the Elite who were stationed around the room. “I am not your enemy,” she said. “In fact, I have something for you that I believe you will find … intriguing.”

She reached into her coat and produced a small, carved wooden box … very much like the box the Queen’s Signet had once been kept in, which was still locked in the cabinet in their suite. She placed it on the table and pushed it toward him.

“Have you ever wondered where you came from?” Lydia asked.

He looked from the box to her face. “You turned me,” he replied. “I was an average blacksmith in an average village until you had me arrested—and my wife executed—for the murders you committed.”

She smiled slightly when he said
average
. “I was referring to where the Signets came from,” she said. “Don’t you question, sitting at the Council table, if there was ever a meaning behind the shadow-puppet theater it has become? If once … long ago, in a time lost to the mists of history, something … or someone … united you?”

She touched the lid of the box. “I represent a group of our kind who still remember, my Lord. And we want you to remember as well.”

“Why?” Miranda asked, speaking up for the first time. “Why David? And why now?”

Lydia turned her gaze to the Queen. “Because it is time. Because things are now in motion that cannot be stopped, and because … the fate of all our kind is at stake.”

Miranda looked dubious. “Seriously? You’re giving us ‘grand and glorious destiny’ here? How about some real answers, Lydia? What exactly do you want?”

An edge of faint impatience entered Lydia’s voice. “I am a servant of a greater power,” she said. “Those whom I serve sent me to a backward village in England to find the one they had searched for throughout the centuries. Now, they have sent me to find him again—to give him this.”

David considered the box, and the vampire, and said,
“Before I take anything from you, I want to know who you’re working for.”

“I believe the saying is, ‘Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’”

The Prime smiled. “I have a saying of my own. It goes like this:” Instantly, he had a knife in his hand, the blade held to her throat. “Tell me what the fuck is going on, or I cut your throat.”

Lydia was neither surprised nor frightened; instead she looked almost bored. “Open the box.”

David heard Miranda sigh, and the Queen flipped up the box’s lid. “What is it?”

He lowered his eyes, then frowned. The velvet-lined box contained a flat silver oval carved with a ring of symbols. Around its edge were five prongs, like the setting on a pendant.

There was something familiar about the craftsmanship, but it was Miranda who figured it out: “It looks kind of like a Signet,” she said. “Only without a stone or a chain.”

Lydia nodded. “It was forged by the same hands that created the Signets themselves, thousands of years ago.”

“And what hands were those?” David asked.

Lydia’s answer was to open the box further and tap on the inside of the lid.

The wood had been carved with a symbol … something else he recognized.

Infinity and the moon.

This symbol was different from the insignia Deven had used, though; his bore only a single moon, a waning crescent; this one had the waxing, full, and waning moons, with the infinity symbol beneath it. The symbol was worked into a complicated design similar to a Signet seal.

“I’ve seen a version of this,” David said. “I was under the impression it was connected to the Order of Eleusis.”

“Elysium,” Lydia corrected. “Named after the lands of the righteous dead, as ruled over by the Dark Goddess Persephone. The Order was founded by one of the original Signets … the Secondborn.”

“If the original Signets were the Secondborn, then what’s a Firstborn?” David asked.

“The sleeping darkness,” Lydia replied. “They are said to slumber far beneath the earth. Even I know little else about them—they were gone long before I was made. But the Secondborn, the sons and daughters of Persephone … from them came all other vampires, and the Signets were given the power to rule over and guide them. But as the centuries passed, the old gods were forgotten, and eventually the Signets were sundered from one another, loving power more than they loved their Creatrix.”

David snapped the lid of the box shut and put his head in his hands. “Religion? That’s all? You expect me to believe any of this?”

“Believe what you will about the past, Lord Prime. What matters here is the future. Change is coming; that much your Queen could tell you. The Council has lost its way. A grave threat looms against all our kind … and when it comes, we will need more than a group of power-hungry egomaniacs to defeat it. We will need a Prime … a true Prime.”

He looked at her, feeling a surge of strange sorrow. “That’s why you sired me, then? To further some kind of ridiculous prophetic agenda on behalf of your cult?”

She smiled. “There is a little more to it than that.”

“Such as? What is this thing supposed to be, anyway?”

“I am not sure. It can be activated only by the Signet chosen to wear it, so we have never been able to learn much; perhaps you will have better luck. The closest guess is that it functions as a power amplifier.”

Miranda asked suddenly, “Why would someone use this symbol with just one moon on it as opposed to all three?”

Lydia said, “There are three branches of the Order, and each has its own version of the symbol. The Triple Moon is used by the priesthood itself.”

“And the waning Moon alone?”

If Lydia thought it an odd question, she didn’t comment.
“The warrior class,” she replied. “The Swords of Elysium are known for their weaponcraft as well as their prowess in battle. Only those who have been initiated into the Order may use the symbol, and it carries a great deal of weight … in some circles.” She was looking back at David as she said that. “You expect me to prove myself to you, to offer you some sort of empirical evidence to back up my beliefs and my words. I would expect nothing less … but alas, I cannot give you any proof.”

“So you want me to take a strange object that may or may not have some kind of voodoo hex on it … on faith. You’ve come to the wrong Signet.”

Miranda put her hand on his arm and said, “I’m afraid David isn’t exactly the religious type, Lydia. And he has a hard time believing in magic.”

Lydia looked the Queen in the eye. “And you?”

Miranda shrugged. “I believe the world is way bigger and weirder than I can possibly know. I don’t know if I believe in any sort of gods, ancient or otherwise … but maybe I’m just not old enough to see my error.”

Lydia’s expression became speculative once again, and she reached over and pushed the box toward the Queen. “Then I give this to you,” she said. “Do with it what you will … my task is done.”

“What makes you think she’ll take it either?” David asked, but Miranda had already done so, drawing the little box toward her. “Miranda—”

“Thank you, Lydia,” Miranda said over his protest.

Lydia nodded; there was new respect, and appreciation, in her eyes. She stood smoothly. “You are welcome. I take my leave of you, then … and may the Dark Goddess bless and guide you both.”

“Wait …” Miranda called after her. “This Goddess of yours … what does She look like?”

The blonde paused. “Everyone sees Her a little differently,” she said. “Most often She is pictured as a warrior, with black hair and black eyes, accompanied by a hound at Her feet and a serpent coiled around Her shoulders.”

David felt Miranda’s energy change completely as Lydia spoke, from bemused to frightened; he turned to her, saw how pale she had become, and started to tell Lydia to wait right where she was—

But Lydia was already gone.

“Faith, track her,” David said into his com.

“Sire … we don’t have a signal. She’s not showing up on the sensor network at all.”

“Recalibrate based on Ovaska’s amulets, then.”

“Already done, Sire. Whatever she’s got on her to block the signal, it’s different from what Ovaska used. We could see her when she came in, but the minute she stepped outside … shit … Sire, I don’t think she blocked the signal. I think she Misted.”

“Well, then, search the area. I want her back here—she hasn’t even begun to answer my questions.”

“Yes, Sire. Right away.”

David took Miranda’s hands and peered into her face. “Beloved … what did she say? What’s got you so spooked?”

Miranda was clutching the box to her chest with one forearm, as if to keep him from taking it away from her. “Nothing,” she ventured, but the look of disbelief on his face made her half smile and amend her statement. “It’s just … Cora said something to me the other night, and … it had to be a coincidence. I mean we’re talking about mythology here. Vampire mythology. It’s all just folklore, there’s no truth in it … is there?”

“Well, you already know how I feel about it.”

“But what if …”

“What if what? What if there really are old gods and sleeping Firstborn and the Signets were created by some moldy old deity?”

“David … you told me, years ago, that some power had created the Signets, and that meant some power could destroy them. What if that power is this Order of Elysium? What if they really are that old, and even if the myth is just a myth, aren’t you dying to know what that thing really is?
How it was made? The David I know would be champing at the bit to get this box to the lab.”

The urgency in her voice, the absolute need to make him understand, was as disquieting as anything else he’d heard that night. Miranda wasn’t gullible, nor was she easily impressed; something in Lydia’s words had struck her, had reached the precognitive part of the Queen that knew things it didn’t want to know.

She was right … there was more to this than fairy tales.

“All right,” he said. “We’ll take it to the lab and check it out. But I’m not letting it into the Haven until we know it’s not a bomb or a transmitter. We’ll go by Hunter when we leave here and see what Novotny makes of it.”

He started to take the box, but she flinched, her arm tightening around it. “No,” she said plaintively. “Let me keep it … she gave it to me.”

He stared at her for a while, then relented. “Okay, beloved … if it’s that important to you, you can keep it on you … but you’ll have to let it go for the lab to analyze it. Can you do that?”

She nodded. “I can.”

He waited a moment for her to relax before asking, “Can you tell me why it feels so important to you?”

“I can’t,” she said in a half whisper. “I know it’s irrational, and I know it’s probably just a piece of random jewelry, but … the minute I touched it I was scared of what would happen if I let it go.” She looked up at him. “Can Novotny analyze that? That could be part of the spell that’s on it, to make me want to keep it.”

Relieved that she was thinking at least a little logically, he nodded. “Come on, beloved … let’s get to Hunter, then.” He found he wanted to wrap his arms around his Queen to reassure her. The edge of panic he could feel from her worried him intensely, and he wanted only to make it better. If that meant keeping the damn box, so be it. The sooner they got it to Novotny—and away from the Queen—the better.

*   *   *

Deep in the night, Austin was quiet, for a city, its constant rattle and hum almost like the sound of the ocean.

Oh, how she missed the ocean … the peace and solitude of the Cloister, nestled in the coastal forests where once, the legend insisted, Elves had lived. And now a myth occupied the land once occupied by a myth, and who was to say what was real anymore? Lydia certainly didn’t know.

She had been to Austin once, three years ago, to see for herself if the prophecy had proven true and the Prime she had sired was, indeed, the one they were waiting for. The minute she laid eyes on Miranda, and later David, she had known it was all true. She could feel it. And so she left Austin to set the next part of the plan in motion, to find someone who could do what must be done.

She walked the long road through Austin alone, her steps feeling hollow even on the concrete. How long had she been walking to this very destination, with single-minded focus on one goal: to deliver the Stone of Awakening to its chosen vessel and then … nothing? Her task fulfilled, her mission completed, she could now go home to the Cloister and find peace … but only if she stopped now, Misted away, and was not seen in Austin again.

“Did you do it?”

Lydia stopped walking and sighed without turning toward the voice. “I did, my Lord.”

The man who came to face her was all too familiar, for he, too, had had a part to play in all of this. She had spent centuries carefully moving the pieces into place. The cause she worked for was not one the Signets shared, power-hungry as they were. The first she had found had agreed to help, only to be killed and replaced with one far less sympathetic to the Order. She had tried to win Hart to her side, thinking that his hatred of the South would make him want to help her, but he was smarter than she had realized. Just when she began to fear her plan would fall apart, she found someone who could do it.

That bastard Hart had nearly destroyed everything, but now, in Jeremy, there was hope.

Jeremy Hayes faced her with his arms crossed. “Good. Then I can do what I must, and all will not be lost.”

“Let us hope not.”

He had old, old eyes, aged by sorrow and agony. She knew the weight of what he had lost and the weight of what he was still forced to carry. “Did you bring it?” he asked.

Lydia nodded and held out what he wanted: a scroll, yellowed and crumbling from age, but still legible under the right light. “Here you will find everything you need, save a single item.”