Fall to Grace Read online

  A

  Variation

  By

  Mark Wooden

  © 2017 Mark Wooden. All Rights Reserved.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

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  “SHADOWDANCE” SAGA CHRONOLOGY

  “A Reason to Live: A Shadowdance Variation”

  “By Virtue Fall: Shadowdance Saga Song One”

  “For Her Sins: Shadowdance Saga Song Two”

  “Order into Chaos: A Shadowdance Variation”

  “Fall to Grace: A Shadowdance Variation”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: The following story takes place in the missing six months of For Her Sins: Shadowdance Saga Song 2. As such, there are spoilers here. I recommend reading that book first.

  If you do read this first, it’ll take away some surprise, like watching the “Star Wars” prequels before “The Empire Strikes Back.”

  If you’re a hardcore purist and want the full story, read this story between Measures 23 and 24 of For Her Sins. Also read the short story “Order Into Chaos” before this story.

  Either way, you’ve been warned.

  You’ll also find several hyperlinks within this text. Follow these links to the “Shadowdance” saga website for more information about the Initiated of the Shadowdance.

  Enjoy your dance.

  NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA

  1799

  Adriana Dupré stood before the main house of a Louisiana plantation. The structure had several Greco-Roman columns along its front, enhanced by dual staircases that led up to the main entrance. Adriana imagined the interior: austere furniture, commissioned paintings, a room made especially for entertaining, complete with the best grand piano one could find in the colonies.

  In its day, the house offered the opportunity for luxury — but the house had seen better days.

  Moss and vines crawled from the ground, wrapping the columns and threatening to overtake them. As she walked up the stairs, Adriana avoided sections of rotting planks barely protecting her from a drop to the muddy ground below. The front doors, once strong and a warm brown, were now falling from their hinges, swinging open in the moist summer breeze.

  The interior shared the entrance’s decay.

  A carpet once plush and probably angelic to the bare foot was as rotten as the wooden stairs outside. Adriana was careful to avoid spots of mold as she moved from the foyer and deeper into the house.

  She eventually found the entertainment room. A sofa and several couches were set with their focus a grand piano near the window. The sofa cushions were discolored and worn from use. The window’s curtains were torn, stained by sunlight and dirt.

  Adriana moved to the piano, hoping it had survived the lack of attention. A layer of dust had turned its white keys to gray — what keys remained, anyway. Someone had smashed them, probably with a hammer. Touching one of the few undamaged keys, Adriana heard a chord so far out of tune, one would doubt it would ever sound proper again.

  Looking to her finger, Adriana saw a layer of filth from the key obscuring the tip. She wiped it on the hem of her dress.

  Turning back to the sofa, Adriana saw a young girl lying there. One leg hung over the sofa’s back; the other dangled off the bottom. The girl wore a soiled, blood red chemise that barely covered her inner thighs. If the lewdness of her display bothered the girl, she didn’t show it. She was so relaxed, it was as if she had always been there, but Adriana knew this was not the case.

  Her head rested on the sofa’s arm. She absently held a few strands of her unkempt hair before her eyes, studying it as if it held some arcane secret.

  That’s when Adriana noticed the girl’s eyes; or rather, the total lack of any life behind them.

  She approached the girl slowly, as not to frighten her. The effort was for naught; the girl remained oblivious to Adriana’s presence.

  “Dominique!” came a female voice from the hallway. The voice sounded like that of a child.

  Adriana looked at the girl.

  The name rattled something in Adriana’s memory. She knew the name, associated it with the girl on the sofa. But from when? And why here? Why now?

  A shadow crept over the girl. It looked like the shape of another girl. Adriana looked to the window, then back at the shadow. The way the sunlight played the room, the shadow should not come from the direction it did.

  It passed over Dominique like a shroud.

  A moment later, a teenaged girl entered. This startled Adriana, as she was incongruous with the voice she’d heard. Unlike Dominique, this newcomer maintained the demeanor of someone worthy of the plantation’s former splendor. Her radiant, blonde hair fell just past her shoulders. Her dress, well pressed and vibrant, was the height of the era’s fashion, contrasting sharply with the dilapidated state of the mansion. She wore little makeup, as per the era trend, enhancing the paleness of her skin.

  “We are to meet with the bank in less than an hour,” the newcomer with the child-like voice said. “I’ve already had the slaves hitch the horses —”

  “You go,” Dominique said in a voice implying she agreed by necessity, rather than desire. “You run everything anyway.”

  Both women spoke French, Adriana’s native tongue. She did not know if they did so for her benefit or if the language was native to them as well.

  The newcomer moved into Dominique’s line of sight. “We also have to discuss the painting.”

  Suddenly, Dominique’s dead eyes lit with fire. She sat up in an instant.

  “No!” Dominique said. “That painting is not part of any deal. It stays with me!”

  The other girl’s shoulders sagged. She took on a less confrontational tone. “That painting is the only thing of value you still possess.” Seeing this did not erode Dominique’s anger, the newcomer continued, “The profits from selling it are the only thing that will keep you alive.”

  “Then I will have death!”

  The newcomer remained silent. Dominique stood, getting into the other girl’s face. “You will not sell that painting!”

  Dominique walked away, pressing through Adriana as if she were a ghost. Adriana blinked in surprise. She grabbed her own arms, making sure she still had substance. To her touch, she did. Adriana looked after Dominique.

  The angered girl stood before the weathered piano, staring down at its keys. When she spoke next, her words dripped of remorse. “I will have nothing but what my sister left me.” Dominique reached out to one of the piano’s keys, gently pressing through the grime to elicit a sorrowfully out of tune note.

  “Your sister left you with nothing,” the newcomer said in a tone containing a coldness that chilled even Adriana’s incorporeal form.

  Dominque struck another off-tone key.
She hit another. Another.

  Adriana realized the blunt instrument that had destroyed the keys was not a hammer.

  Moments later, Dominique’s rage subsided. Her head hung low, her long, disheveled hair obscuring her face. Adriana wanted to reach out to the disappointed girl, console her, but knew she could not even touch her.

  “This is where it all went to shit, isn’t it?” the newcomer said.

  Adriana turned. The newcomer’s pale green eyes locked with Adriana’s; the girl wore a sinister smile that exposed teeth.

  Were those fangs?

  “You can see me?” Adriana asked.

  The blonde-haired newcomer laughed a mirthless laugh. “I’m always watching you, my little nightingale. One day you’ll remember that.”

  Adriana stared at the girl, fighting to place her in her own forgotten history. “Who are you?” she demanded. “Who is Dominique?”

  “Best figure out who you are first,” the girl replied, pointing her index finger at Adriana.

  Adriana’s eyes narrowed, her arms crossing her chest.

  The girl put a finger to her own lips, contemplating something. After a moment, she snapped her fingers, as if having conceived a brilliant idea.

  “Okay. I don’t normally do this, but I’ll give you a hint,” she said. The girl held up her hand with her palm facing Adriana. She then pointed at Adriana’s hands.

  Adriana followed the girl’s direction and looked down.

  Blood and fur covered her hands.

  SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA

  JANUARY 2014

  A month ago, Adriana had returned from a spirit quest in Africa. The quest had stripped her of the demon bound to her soul that made her a vampire. The separation restored her mortality.

  A sorcerer named Dwyer Strathan murdered Adriana minutes later.

  Then a curious thing happened.

  The demon returned to Adriana, restoring her unlife as a vampire.

  The trauma of the demon bonding with her departing soul shattered Adriana’s psyche. She retained motor skills like talking, walking, fighting, but her memories were a jumble of visions.

  Usually, the visions were simple, passive displays. Adriana had seen lush forests with European-style cottages. She’d been on a mountainside looking down at a village whose triangular roofs were decidedly not a European design. Adriana later researched the architecture and realized she’d seen a village in Japan circa the late Edo period.

  In other visions, she saw the ravages of modern warfare, as men in uniforms defended a prison or concentration camp from other men in uniforms. Beasts that looked like wolves moved through the carnage and fire, striking down those in gray as if on a mission of vengeance.

  Other visions showed what she believed to be a younger version of herself sitting in a grand parlor. Later research exposed the parlor’s design as the height of fashion in Paris circa the 1780s. Her younger self-played flawlessly upon a grand piano while people she presumed to be her parents and others of French royalty looked on approvingly.

  As vivid as the visions were, she felt no emotional attachment to these memories.

  Then the vision tonight — the nightmare.

  The memory of Dominique.

  Adriana brought her legs up and rested her head against her knees, wrapping her arms around her shins. She sat like this for a long while, ruminating on the nightmare of her un-life. Was this better or worse than her life before her original death that had led to becoming a vampire?

  She’d never answer that from the mock safety of her bed.

  Adriana looked at the nearby digital clock. It was well into the night, a time when normal people in Sydney were snug in bed. She swung her feet over the edge of the bed in preparation for standing but noticed small drops of red on her bare knees. Moving a hand to her eyes, Adriana realized she had cried tears of blood. She wiped her eyes, then wiped the blood onto the bottom of the camisole she wore to bed with a matching set of spandex shorts.

  Adriana crossed from the bed to the closed door in just three strides. Along the way, she pulled her dark brown hair away from her face, tying it in a ponytail that fell just beyond her shoulders and down her back.

  She opened the door and peered into a short hallway. There was a bathroom at one end and another bedroom across from Adriana’s. The door was open, but the light off inside.

  A living room twice the size of the bedrooms combined lay at the other end of the hall. Adriana didn’t need her preternaturally heightened senses to hear two voices coming from that room.

  “And the Knights have confirmed that Thorne is dead?”

  That was Makeda Arsi, her voice authoritative even at this late hour.

  “So says some low-level Order of Haroth mage named Voetberg,” said the other voice. It sounded clipped, far away. Adriana still recognized the voice as that of Michael Freeman, a companion to Makeda. Realizing this, Adriana realized the distortion was caused by communicating with Freeman over a computer.

  Both Freeman and Makeda were warrior sorcerers, Knights of Vyntari. Makeda had led Adriana to the spirit quest that cost her her psyche. The quest was part of a mission to retrieve three lost relics known as the Vyntari shards.

  After the demon had revived Adriana and she’d regained control of its murderous tendencies, Makeda insisted she could help Adriana find herself again. They’d been traveling companions ever since.

  Makeda contacted Freeman weekly. He provided them with files from the Knights’ database that pertained to Adriana and her memories. He also kept the women up to date on the happenings of something called the Shadowdance.

  From Makeda and Freeman’s stories, Adriana knew this Shadowdance was a struggle between the Knights and other supernatural creatures for control of the Vyntari shards. What the shards could do, Adriana had no idea. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know, considering her pursuit of them had led to her death.

  Freeman said, “As the story goes, two other high-up Los Angeles Order sorcerers also perished the same night. Now Thorne was, like, the second most powerful sorcerer in the Order next to its founder, but even he couldn’t survive getting his head hacked in two and severed from his body. Can he?”

  He asked that question with more concern than curiosity.

  “Let’s take advantage of his removal,” Makeda said. “It makes my maneuvers with the Vyntari shards seem effective.”

  “True,” Freeman replied. “But try using that on the Concilium. Doubt they’d buy it, seeing as the three shards we tangled with are still at large.”

  “You’ve been following Strathan, haven’t you?”

  “As best I can, considering I’m also under new management.”

  “Your new praetor, Al-Sadat. I hear he’s a good man, very efficient.”

  “Too efficient. He’s as by the book as you were fast and loose. Looked him up. Did you know he tangled with our girl Adriana a few months after the Millennium Massacre?”

  Hearing the reference to her, Adriana decided to make her presence known. She moved down the hall and into the living room.

  Makeda sat on the sofa, her back to Adriana. Though she was lounging, Adriana could sense the tension in the woman. Now in her middle years, Makeda was every bit as fit as a woman half her age.

  Makeda’s laptop was open on the coffee table in front of her, Freeman’s image prominent on the screen. She remembered his boyish features, which lay under an unwieldy mat of dark brown hair. He wore his sunglasses to hide, she knew, his lack of eyeballs.

  Freeman had lost them to the Order of Haroth. Magic replaced his vision.

  As Adriana walked around the sofa, Makeda looked up at her approach. “Another vision?” she asked.

  “A nightmare,” Adriana replied in accented English.

  Recognizing the voice, Freeman said, “And speak of the vampire! Sorry to wake you.” He tilted his head to one side. “What’s a vampire doing sleeping at night, anyway?”

  “Barely sleeping,” Adriana corrected.

  Make
da drew her legs underneath her to make room for Adriana, who took a seat. She looked to Makeda. The woman carried herself with a regal air, but her compassionate expression belayed any thoughts of her thinking herself above anyone else. Adriana figured she had developed this ability in her years growing up as a wielder of magic in an African tribe.

  “What made this vision so harrowing?” Makeda asked.

  Adriana rubbed her eyes with the bases of her palms. “There was a girl on a plantation.”

  On the screen, Freeman cracked his knuckles. “Details! I can look it up, figure out who she was.”

  “Her name is Dominique,” Adriana said.

  Makeda looked away from both Adriana and the computer screen. Freeman leaned back in his chair.

  “Heh. No need looking for that,” Freeman said. “That, my dear sorcerer slayer, is—”

  “Not important,” Makeda cut in. Off Adriana’s dead stare, she added, “Not yet.”

  Makeda’s expression was not a challenge, but her pursed lips would not part to discuss Dominique. Adriana turned to Freeman.

  “If you know who she is —”

  Freeman threw up his hands. “If the boss doesn’t want to tell you…”

  Adriana issued an expectant glare as she looked back to Makeda.

  “We’re here in Sydney to get away from the Shadowdance,” Makeda began, her resolve unwavering. “To give you time to—”

  “All you have told me so far is how to control this demon within me,” Adriana said. “I am thankful for that, but you have told me little of my life, who these women in my dreams are, why I even became a vampire.”