“Shamira, are you awake? Please say something.” Clara didn’t hear words, but she heard the bed next to her creak. Her hand was shaking as she reached across the thin dark divide that separated them.
Shamira cringed away. She did not want to be touched. Broken things should never be touched, because you cut your fingers on them when you try. In her efforts to get away from Clara’s encroaching hand, she unbalanced the gurney, sending it and herself toppling to the ground.
“Shamira?!” Clara shouted, unable to see in the total darkness that had been created for her friend to heal. She slowly slid out of her own bed, her feet gingerly touching the floor while she struggled to lower herself safely. Her pain and her hurts were more a matter of memory than physicality, but her memory was good enough. For a while, she had experienced a fraction of what Shamira had, and she could not imagine what the other woman was feeling now. “Shamira, I’m here.” She caught herself before asking if Shamira was “okay.” No question could be less appropriate considering the circumstances.
The door opened and Shane bolted inside. He looked disheveled and altogether exhausted. Tabitha was close on his heels, and she threw on the light switch. Shamira was cowering in a corner of the room, her gurney on its side. The poor woman was peeking out from behind her unkempt mass of hair with feral, angry, hurting eyes. But the scariest part were the long, dark claws that seemed to have been born of and formed by absolute, impenetrable darkness. Shamira was holding those claws out, trying futilely to cover her face and body.
Shane knelt down, trying hard to control his expression. Someone was going to pay dearly for this. He just had not figured out who yet. “Shamira, I need you to put the claws away or . . . retract them. Please, we need to have a look at you and –” He was forced to retreat a bit as Shamira hissed angrily at him, pushing herself harder against the wall in an attempt to escape.
Clara ignored the claws and the desperate glances and crawled painfully forward. The wounds that Shamira had suffered still echoed faintly on Clara’s skin, but even then that remnant was harsher than anything Clara had ever experienced. That elf had tried to systematically and methodically destroy someone, which was something Clara had never even truly understood before.
“Just let me touch you,” she whispered, her voice expressing a different kind of pain. She reached out and touched her friend’s leg, but Shamira just stared at that point of contact. Her leg didn’t move. ‘She doesn’t feel it. Please no, don’t let her be –‘ Her thoughts were interrupted when Shamira’s primal face broke, leaving behind . . . nothing. Hopelessness was setting in, tinged with a sorrow so profound she had no word for it.
The claws faded from Shamira’s hands, reverting to whatever primordial blackness that bore them as she collapsed entirely against the wall. She knew that Clara was coming closer, but she barely saw her.
“You’re going to be okay,” Shane said, kneeling nearby while Clara pressed herself against Shamira’s body. But the wounded vampire wasn’t responding, but rather just lay there staring at a spot she could not feel.
Tabitha looked around and found a mirror. “Shamira, look. See?”
Clara had to move Shamira’s unresponsive face towards the mirror. To the naked eye, all of Shamira’s scars were either gone or reduced to thin white lines. There was a metal apparatus that was keeping her jaw from moving. But Shamira saw past the mirage. She still saw the shadow of every wound as if it were freshly made. She saw her jaw barely hanging on, and her chest mangled. She didn’t see what Tabitha had fixed.
And she saw shame . . . something she could never let them see . . . never let them know. She wanted to lose the memories she had, but how? She smashed her head against the wall, pain billowing around her skull. What was surprising was that Clara gasped in pain, gripping her head and looking confused.
“What’s wrong?” Clara asked. “Please –”
“What . . . happened?” Shamira muttered, her voice dry and cracked as she touched Clara’s head.
“She cast a spell of balance,” Shane said, hoping the knowledge he was about to impart might keep Shamira from doing something rash. “Until the next full moon, any harm done to you will be shared by her.”
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Shamira hissed through clenched teeth. “Not for me.” She closed her eyes, blocking out the picture in the mirror, though not the one in her mind. “You shouldn’t suffer for my sins.”
“Sins? What sins? Dammit Shamira, this wasn’t your –” Clara wanted to complain, but she could see that Shamira wasn’t paying attention anymore. Due to stress and exhaustion, she had fallen asleep, looking anything but peaceful. So she picked her friend up and placed her back on the bed, and she could not help but wonder how deep those wounds still ran.
————— ———
A week later . . .
————— ———
Shane stood on his balcony, staring down at where Shamira sat in her wheelchair, overlooking . . . nothing. This is what she had been doing since she had agreed not to kill herself, at least not as long as she was linked to Clara anyway. She barely spoke to anyone, though there was always at least one or two members of the house nearby in case she needed to. Even his field agents had taken turns coming back up to Atlanta for a few hours to check in on her, though none had any luck getting through to her.
Banshee’s return had been particularly painful to watch. Shane knew that his eldest child held herself responsible for Shamira’s injuries, and it hurt her to feel that she had failed. Banshee and Shamira had sat next to each other, not saying a word. The assassin had wrung her hands so hard that she had broken one of her own fingers, a sure sign that she was distressed. They had parted company without communicating at all, and then Banshee had traveled back down to Savannah and had unleashed a massive, dark, and all-encompassing fury.
Lacroix had already been completely cut off from his resources. When Jonas’s compliance in the morning star trade had become confirmed, all the local lords took action. Lords from Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana had sent enforcers to the region, shutting down Lacroix’s businesses, seizing his assets, and pushing what few allies he had back to his compound.
But while they applied pressure, Banshee was applying steel. She killed anyone she could find that still held loyalty to her enemy. She did not torture them, beat them, or even question them. She sought them out and cut them down, and it was the only thing that could bring a smile to her heart. Even the other two assassins knew enough to stay out of her way until her wave of death had run its course.
The warehouse with the dragon eggs had been ransacked by Lacroix’s people and the contents moved back to his property during the early days of the assault. Lacroix’s compound was still formidable, and the remaining members of his house were desperate. In their world, desperate meant exceedingly dangerous.
Shane had sent a message, written in blood and shoved into the mouth of an enforcer that Banshee had decapitated before delivering it to Lacroix’s doorstep. The only choice that Lord Stapleton’s enemy had was how quickly he was going to die . . . slowly or very slowly. “Slowly” meant turning over Jonas, as Shane meant him to pay for his complicity in Shamira’s torture.
And yet despite having a veritable ton of things to do, Shane found himself spending most of his time worrying about his damaged vampire child. He sensed Clara one floor below him, staring out the window of one of the reading rooms at a woman she had suffered for . . . who seemed to resent her for doing so. Then Shane felt a presence in the room with him, and there was no mistaking who it was.
“I know that it is not wise for a lord to show weakness,” he said as his visitor approached, “but I am simply at a loss for what to do.”
Alessandra put a hand on her favorite child’s shoulder in a gesture of comfort. “You will find a way to help her. It is what you do. While I hate to be the . . . as you Americans say, the ‘bad guy,” but Shamira is not your only priority. Lacroix must be put down once and for all.”
“Lacroix is surrounded. We have cut off his funds, his supply of blood, and any reinforcement he might have been able to call in. Without open and obvious warfare in Savannah, the best thing we can do is starve him out. I will not let Lacroix get away.” He and the Representative watched as Clara once again approached Shamira.
The shaman knelt down next to Shamira’s chair, her head bowed. It was an uncomfortable pose for her . . . submissive. Shamira was just staring off into space, her unbelievable eyes focused on nothing. Clara took some comfort in that her friend looked good, barring the hollow expression. Tabitha had managed to reset everything that was broken, remove all the scars, put her jaw back on, and had even replaced the breast implants. But Shamira’s hair was unkempt and her cheeks sunken. She refused to eat, but barely put up a fuss when she was given blood intravenously. Shamira was waiting to die.
“Please,” the Native American woman said for the hundredth time that week, her voice tired and full of fear, “talk to me. Shamira, you survived so much. I just felt a small part of it, but I couldn’t have . . . I don’t know how you did it but you did. You survived, you killed that fucking elf . . . you beat them. Lacroix and Jonas and all of them are going down because you. Don’t you want to see that?”
Shamira turned her head away. “What does it matter?” she asked with a raspy voice.
Clara was startled for a moment, as this was the first time Shamira had said anything, but she was not going to let that horrible, vast silence that had existed between them to return. “It matters because you can show them they didn’t beat you.”
“Didn’t beat me?” Shamira laughed, but it was as empty as her gaze. “They DID beat me! Don’t you fucking get it?” Her voice broke back to a whisper. “There’s nothing left in here,” she added, tapping her chest.
Clara placed her hand on the spot that her lover had been jabbing at. “YOU are still in here. The woman I fell in love with is still in here.”
Shamira’s face broke from its stoic resolve a little bit, but it was only to let more pain seep through. “Don’t say that. You can’t love me. Look at me,” she continued, still seeing every wound that was inflicted on her. “I’m going to be a fucking paperweight for all eternity. You can’t love something like that. You don’t love monsters without souls or . . . or whatever the hell I am.”
“What are you talking about? You’re exactly who you were before –”
“You don’t know what I am,” Shamira growled. “You weren’t there. You think you felt it? You didn’t feel yourself cut in half. He took half of me away. I gave the rest of me up. You didn’t feel your soul die, so you can’t possibly know what I am.”
“You didn’t lose your soul,” Clara said, wiping a bloody tear from her eye. “They can’t take that away –”
“They didn’t take it! I gave it up, or aren’t you listening?!”
“I don’t understand,” Clara said, wanting badly to calm an increasingly frantic Shamira. “How did you give up your soul?”
“I . . . I wished it weren’t me,” Shamira whispered, so angry with herself that her own words tasted vile to her. “I wished I’d just let that family be taken so that they could suffer instead of me.” Shamira hung her head. “I wanted it to be over so badly that I would have sacrificed an entire family just so that I wouldn’t have to hurt anymore. They had two kids. Only a monster would think of something like that.”