Lord of Shadows

The silver-black moon shone down on Brocelind Forest as Jia Penhallow stepped out of the blighted circle of ashy trees and burned grass. As she did, the seraph blade in her hand blazed with light, as if a switch had been flipped.

She stepped back into the circle. The seraph blade went dark.

“I sent photos to Kieran,” said Diana, looking at the Consul’s grim face. “They—Kieran said these were the same kind of circles of blight he has seen in the Unseelie Lands.” Most of what Kieran had recently seen in the Unseelie Lands had been the inside of a cage.

Jia shuddered. “It is awful to stand inside this circle,” she said. “It feels as if the ground is made of ice and despair is in the very air.”

“These circles,” Diana said. “They are in the places that Helen and Aline said were dark on their map, aren’t they?”

Jia didn’t have to look. She nodded. “I had not wanted to bring my daughter into this.”

“If she and Helen can be present during the Council meeting, they can speak up as candidates for the Institute.”

Jia said nothing.

“It is what Helen desperately wants,” said Diana. “What they both want. The best place to be is not always the safest. No one is content in a prison.”

Jia cleared her throat. “The time it would take to have the Council clear the request—Portals to Wrangel Island are tightly regulated—the meeting would be over—”

“You leave that to me,” Diana said. “In fact, the less you know, the better.”

Diana couldn’t believe she had just said the less you know, the better to the Consul. Deciding she was unlikely to come up with a better exit line, she turned and strode from the clearing.

*

Dru dreamed of underground tunnels split by roots like the bulging knuckles of a giant. She dreamed of a room of glittering weapons and a boy with green eyes.

She woke to find the dim light of dawn illuminating her mantel, where a gold hunting dagger inscribed with roses pinned a note to the wood.

For Drusilla: Thank you for all your help. Jaime.

*

Sometime in the night Kit woke, the iratze softly burning on his arm. The infirmary was lit with warm yellow light, and outside the window he could see the rooftops of London, sturdy and Victorian under a waning moon.

And he could hear music. Rolling onto his side, he saw that Ty was asleep on the bed next to Kit’s, his headphones on, the faint sound of a symphony coming from them.

A memory teased the edge of Kit’s consciousness. Being very young, sick with the flu, feverish in the night, and someone sleeping by the side of his bed. His father? It must have been. Who else could it have been but his father, but certainty eluded him.

No. He wouldn’t think about it. It had been a part of his earlier life; he was someone now who had friends who would sleep by his bed if he was sick. For however long that lasted, he would appreciate it.

*

The high doors of the Sanctuary were made of iron and carved with a symbol Cristina had known since birth, the four interconnected Cs of Clave, Council, Covenant, and Consul.

The doors opened noiselessly at a push onto a large room. Her spine tightened as she stepped inside, remembering the Sanctuary in the Mexico City Institute. She had played there sometimes as a child, enjoying the vastness of the space, the silence, the smooth cold tiles. Every Institute had a Sanctuary.

“Kieran?” she whispered, stepping inside. “Kieran, are you here?”

The London Sanctuary dwarfed the Mexico City and Los Angeles ones in size and impressiveness. Like a vast treasure box of marble and stone, every surface seemed to gleam. There were no windows, for the protection of vampire guests: Light came from a number of witchlight torches. In the center of the room rose a fountain; in it stood a stone angel. Its eyes were open holes from which rivers of water poured like tears and spilled into the basin below. Words were inscribed around the base: A fonte puro pura defluit aqua.

A pure fountain gives pure water.

Silvery tapestries hung from the walls, though their designs had faded with age. Between two large pillars a circle of tall, straight-backed chairs were tumbled on their sides, as if someone had knocked them down in a rage. Cushions were strewn across the floor.

Kieran stepped noiselessly out from behind the fountain. His chin was raised defiantly, his hair the darkest black Cristina had ever seen it. Even the glare of the witchlight torches seemed to sink into it and vanish without reflecting off the strands.

“How did you get the doors open?” Cristina asked, glancing over her shoulder at the massive iron wedges. When she turned back, Kieran had raised his hands, open-palmed: They were scored all over with dark red marks, as if he had picked up red-hot pokers and held them tightly.

Iron burns.

“Does it please you?” Kieran said. He was breathing hard. “Here I am, in your Nephilim iron prison.”

“Of course it doesn’t please me.” She frowned at him. She couldn’t help the small voice inside that asked her why she’d come. She hadn’t been able to stop herself—she’d kept thinking of Kieran alone, betrayed and lost. Perhaps it was the bond between them, the one he’d spoken of in her room. But she’d felt his presence and his unhappiness like a whisper at the back of her mind until she’d gone to look for him.

“What are you to Mark?” he demanded.

“Kieran,” she said. “Sit down. Let’s sit down and talk.”

He only stared at her, watchful and tense. Like an animal in the woods, ready to break away if she moved.

Cristina sat down slowly on the scattered cushions. She smoothed her skirt down, tucking her legs under her.

“Please,” she said, holding out her hand to indicate the cushion across from hers, as if she were inviting him to tea. He lowered himself onto it like a cat settling, fur ruffled with tension. “The answer is,” she said, “that I don’t know. I don’t know what I am to Mark, or he to me.”

“How can that be?” Kieran said. “We feel what we feel.” He gazed down at his hands. They were faerie hands, long-jointed, scarred with many small nicks. “In the Hunt,” he said, “it was real. We loved each other. We slept by each other’s sides, and we breathed each other’s breath and we were never apart. It was always real. It was never false.” He looked at Cristina challengingly.

“I never thought that. I always knew it was real,” she said. “I saw the way Mark looked at you.” She looped her hands together to keep them from shaking. “You know Diego?”

“The very handsome stupid one,” Kieran said.

“He’s not stupid. Not that it matters,” Cristina added hastily. “I loved him when I was younger, and he loved me. There was a time when we were always together, like you and Mark. Later he betrayed me.”

“Mark spoke of it. In Faerie he would have been killed for such disrespect of a lady of your rank.”

Cristina wasn’t entirely sure what Kieran thought her rank was. “Well, the result was that I thought that what we’d had was never real. It hurt more to think that than it did to think that he’d simply stopped loving me—for I had stopped loving him that way too. We had grown out of what we had. But that is a natural thing and happens often. It is much more painful to believe that your love was always a lie.”

“What else am I meant to believe?” Kieran demanded. “When Mark is willing to lie to me for the Clave he despises—”

“He didn’t do it for the Clave,” said Cristina. “Have you been listening to anything the Blackthorns have been saying? This is for his family. His sister is in exile because she is part faerie—this is to bring her back.”

Kieran’s expression was opaque. She knew family meant little to him in the abstract; it was hard to blame him for that. But the Blackthorns, in all their concrete realness, their messy and honest and total love for each other . . . did he see it?

“So do you no longer believe your love with the Rosales boy was a lie?” he said.