Of Shadow Born Read Online Free PDF Page B

her entire being sang with it.
    She drew her shields back around her like a raven settling its wings.
    The room came into focus. A small apartment, shabby but comfortable, with the smell of night in the air. In one corner a gray tabby cat poked its head out from behind a pile of books, its eyes huge and frightened as it stared at her.
    Slowly, Miranda turned to face the Witches.
    Lark had dived forward to rouse Stella, who was sitting up, the two girls holding on to each other for dear life, their eyes as wide as the cat’s. They were both pale with shock, but Stella was otherwise unharmed.
    Miranda looked down at her hands. Her flesh seemed to be glowing for a second as if it were white-hot, but it was returning to normal as the energy she had channeled finished healing her wounds and restoring her sanity. The stone in her Signet was glowing, too, as if a miniature star had woken in its depths, and as her mind began to clear from the haze of power, the light dimmed to its usual level.
    She looked down at herself and blinked.
    Hello Kitty pajamas?
    “Where am I?” she asked softly, startled by the sound of her own voice. It was hoarse, scratchy, as if it had been dragged over broken glass.
    Stella’s voice, however, was tremulous. “In . . . in my apartment.”
    “What day is this?”
    “Wednesday . . . Wednesday night.” Stella took a deep breath, and when she went on she sounded a little more steady. “You woke up on Monday for a minute . . . I’ve been trying to help you shield.”
    “She almost died,” Lark said suddenly, anger sparking in the words.
    “Lark, I’m fine,” Stella said. “I knew what I was doing.”
    “No, you didn’t! Either that or you’re suicidal. I don’t know which is worse. You’ve spent the last two days barely sleeping or eating—”
    Miranda lifted her gaze to Stella’s. “You’ve been doing this for two days?”
    Stella blushed. “I didn’t want you to die.” She fiddled with a lock of her hair, suddenly seeming to remember whom she was talking to. “I mean . . . you haven’t even done your second album.”
    Miranda smiled in spite of everything. It made her face hurt. “I take it the memory wipe didn’t work.”
    Now the Witch snorted. “Not so much. Sorry.”
    Lark, however, was not ready to back down. “So are you going to tell us what the hell we’ve gotten into here, or what?”
    Miranda looked into the girl’s eyes, and Lark turned bright red and lowered her gaze, her hand tightening on Stella’s arm.
    “How much do you know?” Miranda asked.
    Stella replied, “I know what you are, and a little about who you are, but nothing really specific.”
    “How did you find me?”
    The Witch gestured vaguely toward a small altar set up on the other side of the room. “I was doing a reading,” she said. “Trying to figure out what to do about all of this. I got this vision that told me you were in trouble, and all of a sudden I had to go find you. I can’t explain it—I just had to. I drove downtown and there was this building . . . it blew up. There was a fire, and I found you out front.”
    Miranda drew her knees up to her chest, putting her head in her hands. Flashes of memory came to her: chaos on the city streets. The Stone of Awakening. Faith bound to a drum full of explosives . . .
    “Oh, God,” she said, shutting her eyes tightly. “Oh, God . . . Faith . . .”
    The look on her Second’s face, so full of pain, her body wracked with poison and her heart torn with guilt . . . that last smile before the world burned . . .
    Her mind was slowly cycling through the events of that night, the memory returning, each moment more wrenching than the last.
    Arrows . . . the guards dragging her up the stairs, leaving a trail of her blood . . .
    An altar . . .
    “No,” Miranda moaned softly. “No . . . no . . .”
    She heard Stella speak, but the words were meaningless in the face of the horror unfolding in