Shadowbound by Dianne Sylvan Read Free Book Online Page A

concentrate long enough to frame a full sentence. The Prime who walked back was the one they all knew.
    “You must have found quite a meal out there,” Harlan said. “You looked like hell, Sire, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
    David smiled at him as the driver opened the door of the limo. “I feel much better, Harlan, thank you.”
    The initial wave of energy left him giddy as it passed, and he leaned back and closed his eyes as the car pulled away to head for their second rendezvous, cataloging each difference, extrapolating a timeline based on how he felt now compared to how he had felt an hour ago.
    It was difficult to know for sure how often this would happen—there was one set of numbers if he went from his own death, another if he went from the onset of his transformation, and another if he went from Miranda’s, which was when his own had finished.
    But looking out the tinted window and up at the cloud-smudged sky, it occurred to him the math might not matter so much as the timing. The Awakening had to be performed on the new moon. Tonight was the new moon again. There had been one between those dates, but at that point Miranda hadn’t come across and his own transition hadn’t been complete.
    Miranda.
    Now, for the first time, he thought about the meaning of his actions from her perspective—he had been so desperate to make the pain stop that he had set all of that aside, telling himself he’d feel guilty later, once he didn’t want to die.
    He still didn’t feel guilty. He had removed a predator from the streets who got children hooked on a degrading, disgusting drug and fucked fifteen-year-old girls just because he could. The world would not suffer for his loss . . . and there were plenty more where that came from. Humanity always provided.
    Miranda was not going to see it that way.
    The rest of their Circle had not shown any signs of Miranda’s gift, but he had a mild case of empathy, and he knew its purpose as much as he knew why they had more fangs. Empathy, just a touch, enabled him to find evildoers and know without a doubt what he was killing. A compassionate concession on Persephone’s part, perhaps, to their modern sensibilities—vampires had been created to control the human population, but the law set down by Primes like David kept them from fulfilling that purpose, whether out of fear of exposure or a sense of morality. By and large the Shadow World lived in denial of the reason it was created.
    And thus the Thirdborn took on the sins of the entire vampire race.
    He was rehearsing what to tell her in his mind when the car pulled over and, a moment later, Harlan opened the door and Miranda practically fell inside.
    Her condition astonished him. He figured she would look tired, but in the few hours since they had gone their own ways, he to Hunter Development and she to a meeting with her management, she looked like she’d lost ten pounds and had the drawn, sallow face of a vampire who hadn’t fed in weeks. Starvation took a long time to kill them, and it was a gruesome way to die.
    “Good God, Miranda . . .” He reached over to her and pulled her close. She felt as insubstantial as an autumn leaf. Her skin was far cooler than it should be, and he took her hands and tried to rub life back into them, though he knew it was futile.
    Her eyes were red, as from crying, but also dull from overwhelming emotions that had turned into numbness. She looked from her hands up to his face.
    “That’s all you had to do?” she asked softly.
    He didn’t have to ask what she meant any more than she had to ask what he’d done. “Yes.”
    She drew her hands back and put them over her face. “I don’t think I can do it.”
    He didn’t want to make it harder, but he knew she would prefer the truth even if it was terrible: “You have to.”
    “It’s not fair.” The words could have sounded petulant, but they mostly just sounded resigned.
    “It’s perfectly fair,” he replied gently.