Shadow's Fall (41 page)

Jeremy picked up the hammer.

Twenty-one

Faith knew there was no time. She knew there was no hope. But she also knew she couldn’t die without trying.

Her body wanted so badly to give out. The pain and exhaustion were killing her—perhaps not literally, not yet, but close enough. It would be so easy just to let it all go, to close her eyes and surrender to her fate, and when the bomb went off, she would never know what had become of those she loved … she wouldn’t know anything, ever again, and at that moment she wanted it so badly … just to let go …

Then she heard Miranda screaming.

The men dragged the Queen into the room from the stairwell, and she was fighting with all the strength she still had in her bleeding body, so hard that one of the crossbow bolts sticking out of her back worked itself free and clattered to the floor.

The wild panic in Miranda’s cries, the fear in her face—Faith took a deep breath around the pain and set her jaw. It wasn’t going to end like this. She wouldn’t let it.

She had to pray that she would have a few seconds, just long enough before Jeremy got the signal to blow the charge, to act. One chance.

They wrestled the Queen toward the front door of the restaurant. If Faith could distract the guards, Miranda could get away. That had to be enough.

Faith drew up what strength she could and threw herself forward in her chains. She felt the canisters behind her shudder and tip slightly—the weight of them falling should be enough to jolt the explosives in her body and set off the whole bomb. She jerked again and again, pulling forward and down as hard as she could, rocking the gas cans back and forth, back and forth. Each time she felt them tip a little farther, fall back a little farther. Each time, she grew weaker and weaker, but she didn’t stop.

The ruckus of the cans rattling caught the attention of the guards as they were halfway over the threshold. She heard one of them shouting, heard Miranda snarl like a wild animal, and saw a blur of movement as the Queen fought her way out of their grasp.

In the half second before she fell, before fire consumed her, before the world exploded into light and then darkness, Faith caught the Queen’s eyes and smiled.

The building shuddered. A blast of heat and fire blew out the windows on all sides of the ground floor, and the entire structure heaved.

David lost his balance briefly, and for one mad moment thought that, just maybe, Jeremy would fall over and he could reach the Signet before—

—the hammer came down.

He heard the stone shatter, saw shards of it flying through the air, catching the candlelight.

He and Jeremy both stared as the light in the Signet flared, sputtered, and went out.

David staggered backward, hands coming to his throat—it felt as if a giant hand had wrapped around him and was crushing his entire body, but from the inside out. He couldn’t breathe—couldn’t see—

But he could feel.

He might have screamed, but he would never know. Agony like nothing he had ever experienced tore every cell
in his body apart, and he felt every last iota of energy, every ounce of power he had ever had, pulled from him, ripped from him, drained away, and flowing out—

—and down—

He could hear her screaming. He could feel her terror, her grief, as she felt him dying, felt the connection between them being torn in half, the Stone at her neck burning white-hot as his power funneled through it, through her.

“Please don’t leave me—please don’t go without me—”

He felt his knees hit the ground, then his hands. The floor was shaking. The building was shaking—but not from the fire that raged below. The earth was quaking.

I love you. I love you, Miranda. I will always l—

And as the world burned away, the Prime fell.

Cora screamed, falling to her knees, her whole body seized with a pain so intense she couldn’t even name what part of her it originated from. She reached out toward Jacob, and their hands caught, but he had been hit, too—they both tumbled to the ground, their Elite clustering around them and calling out for help, as wave after wave of … something … struck the Pair, their Signets burning so brightly anyone looking into them was blinded.

“Hurry,” Deven said. “There’s still time. I’ll head for the roof, you—”

The explosion drowned out whatever he was going to say, but he and Jonathan looked at each other, knowing what had just happened, and both started to Mist to the building, to do something, anything, before—

It hit Deven first. He sucked in a tormented breath and fell against the side of the car, face going ghostly white.

Jonathan felt it a split second later. Pain. He’d never been tortured, but in half a breath he understood why it made so many people confess to crimes they’d never committed. As if he’d been blown back by a blast wave, he
crumpled against the car door, falling down beside his Prime, who had already lost consciousness.

Hold on to me, David. Hold on to me. Don’t let go, don’t—

I can’t—no—

No … no … please, God, no …

Please don’t leave me … not now … no …

We have to go together … we were supposed to go together …

The world was burning.

In that space between life and death, between darkness and annihilation, the Queen felt her beloved lose his hold on his body, on life. She felt him slip from her grasp, the warmth of their bond shattered like a brittle stone beneath a hammer stroke, leaving only shards that cut and bled.

What flooded through her was more than her own power, more than his—she felt it flowing into her, through the amulet that hung from her neck, her heart widening, her soul expanding until it tore, until she was beyond pain, beyond grief, beyond anything.

Far away she could sense her body. It was broken. Badly burned, bones cracked from being thrown into something by the explosion … wrung out from pain, so weakened by blood loss that it seemed a pitiful little thing, best left behind. If she went back to it, she knew how much it would hurt. She would have to feel again, have to remember …

“Miranda!”

No.

Someone was calling her name.

“Miranda! We have to get out of here! Miranda!”

A young voice, filled with fear, so fragile yet touched with such power, a voice she recognized.

Pain blossomed all over her body, and she struggled weakly against the hands that had taken her arms and turned her onto her back. Suddenly there was chaos, noise everywhere: fire burning, sirens, screaming. The stench of burning flesh, burning wood, burning … burning …

Nothing … nothing … let the fire take it. Let it burn.

She tried to turn away from the voice, tried to go back into the dark, but something stopped her. Something at once blazing hot and sweetly cooling … a kiss of moonlight on her forehead, softness enveloping her, lifting her up, filling her with light … with peace.

The Queen stared up into the light, but it wasn’t light, not really: it was shadow. She felt a hand take hers … guiding her back to her body, promising her everything would be all right, but she still had work to do and had to be strong. She remembered that feeling, that presence, from a night when she had fought her way free of dark water, of death. Whether it was her own strength, or Someone Else’s, she had believed in it then … she had to believe in it now.

As Miranda came to, Stella Maguire’s pretty young face came into focus, and the Witch dragged the fallen Queen away from the fire, into the night.

The fire had reached the second floor before emergency crews arrived, but it was easily contained; the fuel that had fed it had already burned away, and aside from the remains of the restaurant on the first floor, there was little left inside to burn. The structure itself was mostly built of concrete and steel, and though it would have to be torn down and demolished, at least it was still standing as the Austin Fire Department finished putting out the blaze.

If there had been any bodies on the first floor, they were completely pulverized by the blast. There was nothing left. Ladder crews had done a quick check of the second floor but had to vacate the structure quickly when the whole thing lurched hazardously to the side. The building was abandoned, and unless there were vagrants living in it at the time of the fire, there were no bodies to find …

… except one.

As the night waned, sunrise only two hours away, the Prime of the Southern United States lay where he had hit the ground, his body waiting for daylight to set one last fire
and leave only a scattering of ashes where once had been the most powerful vampire in the South. A casual onlooker unaware of the state of the building might think he was simply asleep, lying on one side, face turned into his shoulder, one hand stretched out on the sooty roof.

A shadow fell.

Hands shaking, Deven turned David onto his back and checked for a pulse, even though he knew … he had felt it. So had Jonathan.

David’s eyes were closed, their deep blue lost to the world forever. He didn’t look as if he’d died in agony, though they knew better.

They knelt on either side of the Prime. It was a while before either could speak.

“Did you know this was going to happen?” Deven finally asked, lifting his eyes to his Consort.

Jonathan was in tears. “No … not this. I was sure that we’d fixed it. I was so sure everything was going to be all right …”

Deven touched David’s face, willing him silently to wake, as he once had with the body of someone else he had loved and lost just as suddenly. That time it had worked … he reached, desperate to find even the faintest trace of life remaining, and if found, draw it back into David’s body … he reached until exhaustion overcame him, until Deven could feel himself trembling violently, and he had to let go.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen,” Jonathan went on hoarsely. “I swear I didn’t know.”

Dev lifted his hand from David and wiped the tears from Jonathan’s eyes. “I believe you, love. This wasn’t your fault.”

“Wasn’t it? Didn’t we both do this, in the end?”

The Prime looked over to what was apparently the wreck of an altar; there were puddles of spent wax, and on the ground, discarded like trash, a shattered Signet.

“We did what we thought was right,” Deven said softly. “I did what I thought was right. I just wanted to keep them safe. But you were right all along … none of it made any difference.”

“What do we do now?” Jonathan asked, trying not to break down completely and sob.

Deven touched David’s face one last time: eyes that had looked on him with both love and rage, lips that had touched his a thousand times, and those hands … how much of the world had they changed? What would become of the South now?

He forced himself to stand, to step away from the body. “Now we find Miranda,” he said.

Jonathan swallowed hard. “She’s dead. She must be. That’s how it works.”

Deven bent and picked up the broken Signet, holding it up where Jonathan could see the stone. “Maybe not.”

The Consort frowned. “He broke it? But isn’t that how you—”

“—break a Signet bond,” Deven finished with a nod. “Break one stone, kill one half of a Pair. The other half goes mad from the shock and power imbalance and rarely lives more than a week. If that’s what Hayes did, she could still be alive.”

“Alive and in pain,” Jonathan said. “Wandering around the city alone … We can’t leave her out there, Deven. We have to find her. If she’s going to die, it should be among friends, not alone.”

“We will,” Deven said, looking out from the roof into the city. “But for now we have to get indoors and hope to God Miranda is somewhere safe.”

“We can’t just leave him here like this …”

Deven took a shaky breath. “It’s just a body, Jonathan. David is … he’s …”

He couldn’t say it. The tremor in his bones seemed to spread outward until he could barely even stand. He felt Jonathan’s arms around him, and with the broken Signet in one hand, Deven clutched his Consort’s shirt with the other, fighting desperately not to weep.

All around them, he could feel the Shadow World mourning.

“Come on,” Jonathan said. “Let’s go.”

“Wait …” Deven bent over the body one last time and picked up David’s hand, sliding the wedding ring off his finger. “Miranda will want this. And we shouldn’t leave his phone here for some random human to find.” He fished in David’s pocket until he found the phone and stuck it inside his own coat.

Then he returned to his Consort’s side.

The Pair disappeared from the roof, leaving the body behind to meet the dawn for the first time in 350 years. The night began to fade, the sounds of the city shifting subtly from late night to early morning, with the fire department personnel still working to make sure the building was roped off and there were no hot spots to put out. It was too risky to send anyone up to the third floor or the roof just yet—they were waiting for a structural engineer with blueprints of the building to tell them how best to proceed.

And just half an hour before sunrise, with no one to bear witness except the slowly lightening sky …

… David breathed.