Shadowstorm (The Shadow World Book 6) (8 page)

“You can use me,” Kai said, new determination in his voice. “We are already linked—widen that link and he can have all I can give him.”

Miranda smiled. “It’s really amazing how much you love your brother. I’ve never had a twin, but I had a sister, and…well, we definitely weren’t like you two.”

He looked a bit baffled. “How can you not be close? Blood binds to blood.”

“Yeah, not so much here. Maybe things were different back before people were so spread out, and they had to stay closer to each other to survive and thrive—we prize our individuality to a fault. Most families are pretty disconnected.”

“Your people are not,” Kai pointed out. “There is a deep and still growing connection among all eight of you, binding you more and more tightly.”

Miranda froze. “Eight? You can See eight?”

A blink. “Well, I do not have the level of Sight that Nico has, but empathically I can sense all eight of you, yes. Can you not?”

“No. I mean, I don’t think so…” Miranda turned her attention inward, seeking out along her bond to David, and from there slowly around the Circle: Deven, Nico, Cora, Jacob, Olivia, and…

“There’s someone there,” she said softly. “I mean, the bond hasn’t formed yet, but there’s definitely a person in that spot. That’s not how it was a year ago—it was a blank space then. He must be getting closer…I wonder if knowing that would make Olivia feel better or worse.”

She shook herself out of it and gave him an encouraging smile. “We’re going to save your brother. You have my word.”

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then smiled back. “I believe you.”

“Good. Let’s think about something else for now, then.”

She sat down on the piano bench, and a moment later he joined her, waiting expectantly for her to either play or talk about the song she wanted him to hear. She looked up at the sheet music. It was, all of a sudden, the last thing in the world she wanted to play.

“Is something wrong?” Kai asked, concerned. “You have a very odd look on your face.”

“Well…” Time to be an adult, she supposed. She shifted on the bench to face him. “I have to ask you something. I know you guys are pretty forward when it comes to…interpersonal relationships.”

“You mean sex.”

“Yes. See? We’re repressed, even when we’re not. But the thing is, I’m even worse at it than most people. I don’t know what to do when I’m attracted to someone. So I guess the best thing to do is just flat out—”

Kai sighed, and sounded somewhat weary as he asked, “Do you intend to take me to bed, Miranda?”

There she went again—her face became scalding hot. “Um…no. Not that I…in theory, I would, and could, but…no.”

He nodded. “That’s all I need to know.”

“You’re not going to try and change my mind?”

An eyebrow shot up. “Why would I do that? You said you’re not interested. Perhaps one day you will be, perhaps not. If you do, you will say so. I am your friend regardless, as long as that is amenable to you.”

She blinked for a second. “You know, you’re not like any man I’ve ever met.”

“That’s because, thank the Goddess, I am not a man,” he pointed out. “Now, the question I do have is this: We have in our friendship been affectionate with each other. That can change if it would make you more comfortable.”

“No, no—I don’t want anything to change, I just wanted to be honest.”

“I appreciate that honesty. Shall we then return to our musical pursuits?”

“Wait, there’s one more thing I want to know…how do you feel about this? What were you hoping for?”

“In our relationship?” He took a deep breath, which she could have interpreted a number of ways. “I find you deeply alluring, funny, kind…and of course beautiful in ways I had quite literally never seen. If you were ever to desire more than friendship I would be more than happy to oblige. Am I going to pine away for you, celibate and miserable? No. I am not a youngling given to fits of swooning. You need not worry, as I am sure you will, about hurting my feelings.”

Miranda sat blinking at him again for a minute. “Okay.”

When he saw her face, he started laughing—another thing she rarely saw. “You do realize you are not obligated to keep up with your husband, don’t you? Unless of course you have a scoreboard over your bed, in which case I must know how many points an Elf is worth.”

She punched his arm. “Shut up!”

Another laugh. Then, something in his expression changed, sobered; he stared down at the piano keys, and after a moment he said quietly, “He really does love Nico, doesn’t he.”

Miranda nodded. “Yes. Very much. Your brother completely blindsided him. Even I didn’t see it coming—I thought if anyone ever caught his heart it would be Deven again. I mean, of course he thought Nico was attractive, and they had a connection from the beginning. Nico needed to feel safe, and there’s nobody better for the job. Then one day I finally realized it was way more than that. Despite appearances David doesn’t open his heart to just anybody.”

“He would have to be made of sterner stuff than stone to avoid it, surrounded by such remarkable creatures,” Kai observed. “And clearly the feeling is mutual. Even with his sorrow and weakness, when Nico speaks of him, a light returns to his eyes I had feared would never spark again.”

Miranda smiled. “That’s pretty much what happened to me.”

Their eyes met for a moment, and thank God, the awkwardness Miranda had been feeling was gone; they could get back to what they both needed, friendship, without her being in a twist every time their hands touched.

“Shall we, then?” Kai asked.

The Queen nodded. “We shall.” She hiked her leg back over the bench to face the piano, and picked up the sheet music she’d had waiting there. “I wanted you to see this piece—it’s a duet I did with another musician a while back, but we did some interesting things with the harmonies…”

Chapter Three

By the time dawn arrived, Nico had fought his way through five more pages of the Codex, and his head hurt so badly he wanted to scream.

He barely heard the knock, but what few people ever came to see him were always welcome, so it opened and closed without his having to look up from the book’s swiftly-blurring pages.

There were the usual sounds of someone taking off a jacket. Nico looked up and offered a smile. “Back safely, I see.”

Stella grinned. She tossed her hooded sweater on a chair then paused on the side of the bed to pull off her rather enormous black boots, revealing striped knee-high socks that matched her fingernails. Then she slid around behind him and rubbed his shoulders, eliciting a sigh. “Glad to be back, actually. I love my dad, but all the questions are getting old. When are you moving back to Austin? What about college? A job? A boyfriend?”

“Did you tell him you’re sleeping with a vampire Elf who’s been teaching you magic?”

A giggle. “Maybe I should—he’d probably stop asking then.”

Nico closed his eyes. “Even though it isn’t really true.”

“It is true! We are, literally, sleeping together, and you were teaching me magic. You will again soon.”

He tried to agree with her, but all he could get out was, “I hope so.” Hoping to change the subject, he asked, “How is Lark?”

“She’s doing great, actually. Foxglove promoted her to manager of the store, and she met a girl at the last Full Moon potluck—a geology teaching assistant at the university. Lark’s even writing again. She says hi, by the way.”

Nico smiled. He quite liked Lark, whom he had met several times on her visits to the Haven. The two young women had made a concerted effort to spend more time together, so Stella was often in the city for a few days at a time—a relief, he imagined, from playing nursemaid to a languishing Elf.

“Anything good tonight?” she asked, indicating the Codex with one foot.

“Actually, yes…I seem to have finally reached the part of the book that is relevant to our current situation. This, for example, is the beginning of the story of the original Circle. There appear to be three separate accounts, but I could only read one of them. That first coven was led by two of what we would call Thirdborn, though they weren’t named as such. It’s hard to say exactly what made them different besides being stronger—the text alludes to other qualities that set them apart, but it’s not specific, at least not yet. They aren’t named, but the author of the story, Galatea, was one of the Circle’s Primes, and her Consort was named Cybele.”

“Galatea…you mean they were both women?”

“They were.”

“I’ll be damned,” Stella said, a smile in her voice. “So it’s not as novel as we thought. You should tell…”

She trailed off, and he had to smile a little himself at that despite the ache it caused in his chest. “You can say his name, you know,” Nico told her. “David does the same thing—like it’s a secret invocation.”

Stella laughed and kissed his ear. “It’s more like Voldemort at this point.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. Anything else interesting?”

“There’s a ritual…” He held the Codex at an angle so she could see it and turned to a page covered in a complicated diagram of circles and spirals. Like everything in the Codex it had an Elvish feel to it, but was still distinctly its own creature. “When the entire Circle is complete, they can then dedicate a room—one in each Haven if they like—to communicating with Persephone. All eight together have to consecrate it, but after that any can use it alone or in groups. I just got to the instructions tonight, but I was too tired to continue.”

“So as soon as we find Olivia’s Consort, you guys can finally get the rest of the way across the bridge and find out what the hell Persephone wants from you.”

“The ritual does something else, too. Apparently after it’s performed, we’ll be able to translate dialect number three. What we see here is
supposed
to look like nonsense. It’s not encoded, it’s bespelled. That’s how the Order ensured that only the next Circle would be able to read their secrets. The book will only allow those who have stood in that dedicated room to know what it says.”

“But they are assuming we can figure out dialect number two.”

“So it would seem. And I will—it’s just taking forever.”

Nico leaned back against the Witch, giving up on the need to be vertical for a while. Her arms wound around him, along with her legs. He thought back to the night he’d first met her out walking the grounds of the Haven—she, like all of them, had changed so much in these months. The power in her had put down roots and was growing upward; she was still brightly colored and refreshingly young, but a certain sophistication had begun to creep into both her wardrobe and her demeanor—influenced, he suspected, by the Queen. As her power rapidly matured, so did Stella.

He shut his eyes against a sudden tide of sorrow. “I miss how things were at the beginning,” he said softly. “When I still had the strength to teach you Weaving…when I could still Weave. I miss those first few weeks when you and I were all over each other. That time was so painful, in so many ways—I never thought I would look back on it fondly.”

“Me too.” Stella nuzzled his neck, breathing in slowly. “But it’s okay, you know. Things will get better.”

“They’ve only gotten worse so far.” Nico laced his fingers with hers. “I don’t know how much longer I can go on,
caraia
…the other night I actually began to wonder how much it would hurt to walk out into the sunlight…I made the mistake of telling Kai, and he nearly had a panic attack.”

“Oh, sweetie…” Stella squeezed his hands. He tilted his head back and saw tears in her eyes. “You deserve so much better than all of this. I just want to kick little Voldemort in the junk sometimes.”

Nico blinked—he had gained fluency in English rather quickly, but some of their idioms were far over his head. Still, her meaning was easy enough to deduce. He had to smile. “I appreciate the solidarity…but I don’t think there’s anything you could do to him worse than what he does to himself every waking minute.”

There was another knock, and a second later a red head poked in the room. “Nico, are you up and decent?”

“I am, my Lady, come in.”

Miranda and David both stood in the hallway. It was rare enough for both to come see him together that he was immediately put on guard, but he couldn’t sense anything new had gone wrong with either of the Pair…not that his senses were good for much these days.

“We need to have a family meeting,” the Queen said. She sat down in one of the armchairs, resplendent in what David called their “work clothes”—mostly black, made to look elegant and powerful but still able to fight. Nico could see the hilt of the Queen’s sword, Shadowflame. It was odd…before coming here the idea of being around so much weaponry had made him deeply uneasy, but now, seeing either of them in their Signet regalia of leather and steel was comforting. His own life might be fading into utter uselessness, but there was someone in charge, someone taking care of things. He imagined that was why the vampires of the world were willing to put their faith in their leaders; when a Signet was in their corner, they were safe from all comers.

David remained on his feet for the moment but shot Nico a warm smile touched with a hint of promise that hatched a dozen or so butterflies in Nico’s stomach. At least that much he could still achieve; he might fall asleep mid-kiss, but he did still feel that desire.

In truth, Nico had never wanted someone so much in his life, but for the first time in his life he was unable to do more than touch and flirt like a youngling. He had been relatively solitary in Avilon, but he’d always had lovers aplenty when he wished. It was nearly impossible to live celibate in Avilon except deliberately. Now, he was craving that sweat-bathed dissolution, that joining, a gasp in the darkness of a cool Autumn night…and his body had declared what Stella had dubbed a shag embargo. It would have been amusing if it had not been so face-clawingly frustrating.

Stella moved out from behind Nico and sat cross-legged on the bed beside him where she could see everyone. She and Miranda grinned at each other.