“Mira?” Tristan’s worried voice demanded an answer, but I simply didn’t have the energy to reply. “Sadira! Where is she? We’re losing Mira.”
The young nightwalker’s question was answered with a horrible sound, a mix of scream and snarl. It was Sadira. I knew her voice, its every tone, pitch, and nuance. For years it had echoed through my brain, a singsong chant I could never escape.
Soft hands touched my face, turning my head. “Mira! Open your eyes and look at me now!” Sadira commanded.
My eyelids fluttered for a brief moment before I finally gave up the attempt. Licking my lips, I drew in a slow breath. “We had…problems,” I whispered.
A snarl of low curses escaped Sadira in a rough voice, but she was very gentle when she pressed a kiss to my temple before resting my head against Tristan’s chest again. “I need somewhere to work undisturbed. There. In there.”
My thoughts drifted away for a while. I was vaguely aware of Tristan carrying me somewhere followed by a flurry of angry voices and some slamming doors. A soft whimper escaped me as Tristan set me down on a hard surface that I could only guess was a long tabletop. The bright lights were banked at last and I was able to force my eyes open a crack. Tall bookshelves lined the wall to my right, broken only by portraits of grim-faced men with gray and white hair.
“They found us…” I forced out as my eyes fell shut again. There was no more time. I had to tell Sadira what happened so she could tell Jabari. The Elder would fix it; he’d be able to stop the naturi. “They killed Thorne. N-Need another.”
“I know,” Sadira whispered. I could only guess that Tristan had caught her up on the evening’s events while I drifted in and out of consciousness. She was standing beside me. Her small hand swept over my forehead, pushed hair away from my face. “But we need to heal you now.”
“Triad—”
“None of that matters. None of that matters without you.” Sadira pressed a kiss to my cheek and then my forehead. “I need you to relax your mind.”
“Tired. So…tired.” I was exhausted. Tired of fighting, tired of the pain.
And then something stirred. Swamped within the pain, I felt something faint shift in my thoughts, but as I tried to focus on it, it slipped away, pulling back into the swirling mist that consumed my thoughts. I reached out again, searching for the movement, and then the pain was gone.
My eyes flew open and I screamed. My thoughts came to a screeching halt as I looked around me. The wall of books and stern-looking men was completely gone. The gleaming hardwood streaked with my blood was gone. Around me were cold stone walls and wooden torches held in wrought-iron sconces guttering with firelight in the large room. It was a dungeon. It was the dungeon below Sadira’s castle in Spain. It was the room where I’d been reborn.
Another scream of panic rose up in my throat as I sat up and twisted around to thoroughly scan the room. It couldn’t be the same place. When I closed my eyes, I’d been dying on a boardroom table in England. Sadira didn’t have the ability to instantly flit from place to place like Jabari. It couldn’t be real.
“It’s not real.” Her disembodied voice floated through the air for a moment before she came through the stone wall to my right and stood beside where I sat on the long stone slab. “The pain was taking you away from me. I needed to take you away from the pain so I could heal you. The damage is…extensive. Organs have been shredded and your heart has been punctured. You’re dying.”
“I guessed as much,” I sighed. Anxiety crawled up my spine, digging claws into my back. I could tell my brain that it wasn’t real, but rising panic wasn’t buying it. It looked real, it felt real, it smelled real. “But why here?”
“I need you to trust me,” Sadira said with a soft smile, tilting her head to one side. “This is the one time in your life you trusted me completely.”
A snort escaped me as I swung my legs over the side of the stone table and dropped to my feet, putting the table between us. “I have never trusted you.”
“That is an interesting lie,” she chided. “You lay helpless night after night for ten years, completely dependent upon me to keep you alive. I was in your mind; you never doubted that I would return each night to you.”
I stood with my left hip pressed against the stone slab, my arms crossed over my chest. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Sadira watching me, waiting for my response. I knew she was right. I had trusted her to bring me into her world, not to abandon me. But at that point my only other option was death.
For a moment Sadira’s image wavered, and I turned to face her, automatically reaching for her, but my hand passed through her. “So much damage…” Her voice whispered through the air, but her lips never moved. She was having troubling repairing the damage and maintaining the fantasy world. Pain cut through my chest, doubling me over, my forehead pressed against the stone table before me. I felt nothing but the pain for several seconds before it faded again like a wave pulling back out to sea.
When I stood again, Sadira was before me. Her face was strained and pale, but she was with me again. “There is so much damage. I wish I could reach Jabari,” she absently said. She wasn’t looking at me, but down at the table that stood between us. “But then he may use that as an excuse to take you back.”
Something twisted in my stomach that had nothing to do with the wound she was fighting to close. Jabari couldn’t help her. Only Sadira could heal me. She was the one that made me a nightwalker, and only her blood could repair the wounded flesh she’d helped to create. I hesitated to ask. Sadira was very careful with knowledge, well-aware that controlling the flow of information was the easiest way to control her children. Despite her distracted demeanor, she didn’t drop that information without a very good reason.
“Only you can save me.” Even if it was all an illusion, the words tasted bad on my tongue as I said them.
Laughter danced in Sadira’s eyes as she looked up at me. “How I wish that were true.” She chuckled even as the light seemed to die from her expression. “Jabari has watched you from the moment I found you in Greece. I was allowed to keep you only if I promised to bring you before him whenever he commanded. And when the time came to bring you into the darkness, it was agreed that you would be a First Blood.”
“What do you mean ‘agreed’?” The statement implied that others were involved in the discussion about my fate, but there was never anyone but Sadira and her children around. As a human, I was occasionally brought before the Coven and other Ancients as a form of amusement, but Jabari had never been around then.
“Jabari and Tabor discussed it.” Sadira reached across the table and took my right hand in both of her hands. Turning my arm over, she ran the fingers of her left hand down the inside of my arm. “My blood runs in your veins—shaped your organs and gave you an immortal life—but so does Jabari’s and Tabor’s.”
“No!” I jerked my arm out of her grasp and took a step back. “I don’t remember either of them.”
“You were barely alive. It was easier to manipulate your memories then.”
“I don’t understand,” I said, pacing away from the table. There was no sound in the room, not even my footsteps on the stone floor. There were only our voices, because that was the point of bringing me here, not helping me to escape the pain. There was something she needed to tell me regardless of whether I wanted to hear it. “Why?”
“You were different, Mira.” Sadira walked to the end of the table and started to come around it but stopped when I backpedaled, trying to keep some distance between us. “There was no human like you. It was more than your ability to control fire. We could sense an energy in your soul that we had never felt before. So, we decided to make you into a nightwalker, but we knew you would have to be a First Blood if we were to have any chance to preserve this energy.”