Queen of Shadows (12 page)

Twenty-first-century Austin was both far more monstrous and infinitely kinder in comparison.

David stood in the warm night wind, staring down at his city from the roof of one of its tallest buildings, watching traffic move along the streets below. From here, there was the illusion of order; things moved in straight lines, according to signals. Horns blared, and the wind carried to him snatches of music from the bars and clubs that lined Sixth Street, all of them filled to capacity on a Saturday night in late summer.

Kinder, yes . . . and yet the same ignorant hatred that had ended Lizzie’s life had dogged his steps all the way to the twenty-first century. Either humankind had learned depressingly little in the last few centuries, or he was singularly cursed.

Somewhere out there was the gang he intended to find and eliminate. They were, he was sure, planning their next assault as he stood there.

For months the California Blackthorn had been phantoms. They appeared, killed, and dissolved before they could be identified. The Elite had been unable to track them until luck finally fell their way: One of the members dropped a matchbook at the crime scene. That matchbook led to a vampire bar, which led to David exercising his interrogation skills, which led to the rest of the syndicate. Blood had flowed on the streets of Sacramento until the night was silent again.

There had been nineteen human deaths and four vampires so far this time . . . five, if he counted Helen. The only good thing to come of it was that now the com network was so secure God himself would need a password to log on.

Again he thought of Lizzie’s face. He thought of her often, but rarely in any depth. It had been over three centuries, and he had loved since then. Hundreds of people had tumbled in and out of his bed, and though he’d given his heart rarely, it had happened. He had known Lizzie for less than a decade total. Why had she returned to haunt his dreams now?

More important . . . how had Miranda seen her?

He’d shielded others before, and this had never happened. The only explanation he could think of was that Miranda was a good three times more powerful than anyone he had ever trained before. Psychically she was already as strong as half his Elite. It was also possible that she had some mostly untapped power as a medium, just as it was possible she could see and hear parts of him that no one else he had ever trained could . . . possible, and extremely unnerving.

His phone rang.

He reached for it absently, stepping back out of the wind. “Yes?”

“Let me guess,” came a familiar, deep voice with a cheerful British accent. “You’re standing on top of a building in a long black coat, brooding.”

David smiled into the darkness. “Not at all, my Lord,” he replied. “As it happens I’m at a topless bar with my face between a brunette’s thighs.”

“Liar,” was the laughing reply. “Your voice isn’t muffled.”

“To what do I owe this honor?” David asked.

Jonathan Burke, Consort of the Prime of the Western United States, had spent most of his immortal life as a bodyguard for royals, and in his spare time he was rumored to bite trees in half with his teeth. A tall, broad blond whose nose had been broken a few times, he looked far more like a linebacker than like a vampire. He was a good ten inches taller than his Prime, his polar opposite in more ways than one; Deven was quiet and serious and had fooled many people into thinking he was fragile.

David imagined Jonathan sitting with his feet propped up on his desk at the Haven outside Sacramento, drinking a beer with his free hand.

“I e-mailed you the files you asked for,” Jonathan said. “I don’t know how much help they’ll be. Your intel is probably vastly superior to ours.”

“Thank you. I want to look over them regardless to see if there’s anything I missed.”

“You’re looking for a matchbook,” Jonathan surmised. “I hope you find one. I hate to think any of those cockroaches slipped through our fingers, but it’s possible.”

“That’s not why you called,” David pointed out.

“No, not really.” The Consort seemed to be looking for words, which was a bit unusual for him, but David waited until he said, “I saw something.”

Shit.
Consorts were almost all gifted with precognition, and Jonathan’s gift was very strong. He’d foreseen Arrabicci’s death, but he was on the other side of the world when it happened and didn’t even know what he was seeing. He’d foreseen David taking the Signet—in fact, that vision had been what convinced David that the waiting was over and it was time to take Auren down.

“What did you see?”

“It was vague,” was the reply, amended with, “but it felt urgent. I don’t even know if it will make any sense to you. I wasn’t going to call, but Dev said I had better, and you know he’s always right.”

“Go on.”

“There was a woman,” said the Consort. “I couldn’t see her very clearly, but I could hear music.”

David’s hand clenched the phone so tightly he was amazed it didn’t break. “And?”

“Black water. Cold. It felt like drowning—well, I think it did. I’ve never actually drowned, but still, if I could . . . anyway, I also saw a Signet Seal, not one I knew. I think it may have been Auren’s, which makes sense given the situation. The stone drawn in the center was red like yours. It was painted on something, and it was burning.”

The Prime nodded to nobody. “What else?”

“The woman . . . she was sad. She made me think of honey and rain.”

“What happened to her?”

“She died, David. That much was certain. I saw her blood on your hands. My advice is, if you meet this woman, get her away from you as fast as you can.”

David was dimly aware that he’d stopped breathing. “Is that all?” he managed.

“No. There’s one other thing.” Jonathan delivered the rest hurriedly, as if he were trying to exorcise the knowledge from his mind by saying the words aloud. “At the end, I saw you, turning the pages of an old book. Between two pages you found a drawing of a woman, so old it was falling apart. I didn’t recognize her, but she felt . . . wrong. Then you turned the page again, and there was a note someone had written you, still folded.”

“Did you see what book it was?”

“No. It may not even have been a real book—you know how these things are. Sometimes they’re literal, sometimes they’re metaphoric, sometimes they’re rubbish. I wish I knew more.”

“Thank you,” David said, “I think.”

“Don’t thank me,” Jonathan told him, and he could hear the weight of too much knowledge in the Consort’s voice. “Never thank me for seeing things, Lord Prime. I don’t want this, I never have.”

“I know.” David smiled into the phone despite the way his heart was lumbering around in his chest. “But just think of what you’d be missing if you didn’t have it.”

“There is always that.” Jonathan’s voice perked up a little. “Speaking of which, I must go. My presence has been humbly requested in the bedroom.”

David rolled his eyes, chuckling. “Humbly requested, my ass. Give the Prime my best before you give him yours.”

“As you will it, my Lord. Good hunting.”

“Good hunting.”

Jonathan’s words replayed over and over through David’s mind as he left the bank tower and directed Harlan to return him to the Haven. He grunted noncommittally when Harlan asked if he’d had a good hunt; he was too preoccupied for conversation. The whole trip back, as the city’s bustling nightlife gave way to the scrolling central Texas hills, he thought about it, unable to banish the knowledge that arose from his very bones as much as it had from the Consort’s gift.

He was going to get Miranda killed. The longer she stayed at the Haven, the more danger she was in. One way or another she had to learn to shield, and fast. He already had the lives of enough innocents burned into his soul; he wouldn’t have hers, too.

The problem with visions was that they were born from a single instant in time. As soon as they were seen, the universe began to change around them. They showed what was most probable if the course of events went unaltered, but they weren’t set in stone. Jonathan had told him, and because of that, he would make one choice or another, veering closer to or further away from the vision itself. Right now, the deck was stacked against Miranda’s life. He had to do everything in his power to change those odds.

That meant getting her back to Austin. It also meant stopping the war before it escalated further.

Of course, Miranda being back in the city might be what got her killed; there was no way to know. So he would make sure she was safe in her mortal world until he was confident that she didn’t need a guardian. That would be easy enough.

It might be better if she left his territory entirely. He could arrange that, and it wasn’t as if she had a full life here to miss. The Blackthorn wouldn’t lower themselves to chase after a mere human, assuming they even knew she existed.

That thought did something strange to him, though. The idea of Miranda leaving Austin set off a dull ache, and a kind of wild desperate clawing in his throat, as if he were holding back a cry of pain.

He shut his eyes and rapped his forehead lightly against the car window, feeling like a fool.

By the time he was back at the Haven and had taken the usual patrol reports and updates from Faith, it was nearly dawn, and he had a splitting headache. Every time he exerted a tendril of energy to ease it, it returned moments later; if he left it alone it would be gone in an hour, but in the meantime he had to put up with it, and that left him snapping at Faith and acting generally bitchy toward everyone else.

“Sire?” Faith said at the end of the patrol meeting. “Permission to speak freely?”

“Since when do you ask for permission?” he scoffed, forehead planted firmly in his hands.

She ignored the statement and said, “Sire, go the fuck to bed before I have to kill you.”

For once, he did as she said without protest and tried not to look at anyone he passed lest he scare the servants.

He paused with his hand on the door to his suite, suddenly dreading the prospect of finding Miranda still asleep on the couch. He thought back to that ache he’d felt in the car and had half a mind just to bed down in one of the other rooms in the wing, but that smelled strongly of cowardice to him, and he was willing to have just about any vice except that one.

To his surprise, she wasn’t in the bedroom. She must have woken and returned to her own bed. Relieved, he stripped off his coat and poured himself another drink. He needed a shower; it was hot in the city, and though vampires didn’t sweat easily, he still felt coated by the humid air.

A sound reached him, and he stood with the bottle of bourbon still in his hand, listening.

It was coming from the adjacent room: music.

Hypnotized, he set down the bottle and followed the sound to the door, which stood ajar by an inch or so. Light was coming through it. He leaned to the left to see in without moving the door.

“Strange how hard it rains now . . .”

She sat on the edge of the bed, the light of the fireplace outlining her silhouette and catching her hair as it had at the window once before. Her guitar, a black acoustic he remembered from the night he’d brought her here, gleamed, and her fingers danced slowly over the strings while her bare foot tapped lightly on the side of the bed as her legs weren’t long enough to reach the floor.

Her curls were falling into her eyes, but that didn’t matter; she played with them closed, concentration on her heart-shaped face. The bruises had all faded, though there was still a cut healing on her forehead. What was truly remarkable was her expression: As she sang, the dark sweetness of her voice wrapping like a lover’s hands around the lyrics, she was smiling, completely at peace in a way he hadn’t thought she was capable of.

He wanted so badly to back away, but he couldn’t. Without even trying she had caught him in her spell.

Oh God. No, no, no.

She wasn’t working energy consciously, and a halfhearted check of the shield showed it as strong as before, but she didn’t need power for this. Perched on the bed, dressed in a threadbare Austin Celtic Festival T-shirt, she was, he suddenly realized, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

“But I’m still alive underneath this shroud. . . .”

It took more effort than he would ever have thought possible, but he pulled his eyes away and shut the door, fighting the urge to lock it.

Then he proceeded to the liquor cabinet and drank himself to sleep.

Seven

TO:
Miranda Grey ([email protected])

FROM:
Kat ([email protected])

SUBJECT:
MIA?

Hey girl,

I know you said you were out of town but when you get back can we please have lunch? I really think we should talk. I’m worried about you, Mira-Mira. You don’t have to deal with this stuff alone. Just let me know you’re okay, okay? I miss you lots, sugarbean.

Hugs,

Kat

TO:
Kat ([email protected])

FROM:
Miranda Grey ([email protected])

SUBJECT:
Re: MIA?

I’m okay. I’m staying with a friend in the country. I promise I’ll call as soon as I get back into Austin. Please don’t worry about me (even though I know you’re going to anyway). Miss you too.

~M

She clicked SEND and watched, amazed, as the message flew out of her outbox and into the digital ether a hundred times faster than it would have the last time she worked on her laptop.

“You’re pretty handy to have around,” Miranda commented.

Across the table, David looked up from the computer he was fixing and offered a smile.

She had mentioned, in passing, that her computer was a dinosaur; she’d bought it used off Craigslist, and though she’d loved it, it was slow and lumbering and almost full to the gills with music files. David had offered to have a look at it before they started their training session that night, and in approximately thirty minutes had it purring like a brand-new machine. While she tried it out, he cracked open the case of some server or another and spilled its guts all over the table, going after it with a set of tiny screwdrivers to replace some kind of . . . chip? She couldn’t even begin to name the small, rectangular piece of hardware.

As usual he felt her eyes and said, without looking up, “It’s a security device to help keep predators out of the network.”

“Has anyone else broken in?”

“No, and they won’t.”

He was being a little short with her tonight, though she sensed it wasn’t anything she had done . . . although he had been giving her some odd looks when he thought she didn’t notice . . . speculative looks, almost wary, and what in any other person’s face might have been interpreted as fear.

She hummed softly as she cleaned out her inbox until she glanced up to see him looking aggrieved. “Do you mind?” he asked.

“Sorry,” she muttered. She almost started doing it again just to piss him off, but decided that probably wasn’t a good idea.

What was left of her good mood evaporated when she saw the sender of the next e-mail.

TO:
Miranda Grey ([email protected])

FROM:
Marianne Grey-Weston (marianne.weston@comtex .dallas.com)

SUBJECT:
Dad’s birthday

Miranda,

If you’re planning to attend Dad’s 60th birthday party next month, please let me know so I can send an accurate count to the caterer.

I hope you’re doing well.

Sincerely,

Marianne Grey-Weston

She stared at the monitor for a long moment, biting her lip, before she shut the computer and pushed it away from her.

“What’s wrong?” David asked, finally looking up from his work.

“Oh . . . nothing. Just my sister.” At his surprised expression she added, “Older sister. She still lives in Dallas where we moved after our mother died. We don’t talk much.”

“Why not?”

She ran her finger around the Apple logo in the center of the laptop, trying to talk around the heavy feeling that always formed in her stomach when she heard from Marianne.

“We’ve never been close.” She knew he could hear the lie in her voice, but he didn’t comment. A moment later she said, almost unwillingly, “There was this thing, when we were younger . . . our mother, she . . . went crazy, sort of.”

“Crazy,” he repeated, the coolness of the tone he’d used all night warming just a tad. “Crazy like you went crazy?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. It happened when we were kids. Nobody would ever tell me what was really wrong with her. She was always so normal—she packed lunches, she went to school plays, all of that. Marianne was involved in everything. She was the good daughter.”

Miranda let her eyes drift around the room as she talked, staring at the servers, the monitors, anything but him. “Then one day Mama just sort of . . . stopped. She stared off into space and didn’t recognize any of us. They did every medical test they could think of and found nothing. Dad put her in the county hospital, and she died there when I was fourteen.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “That must have been hard for you, so young.”

“The worst part was Marianne and Dad. They both wanted to pretend nothing ever happened and act like she was dead even when she wasn’t. They were embarrassed. I think she caused some sort of scene in public once. They were both more concerned with what people thought than with what happened to Mama. I went to visit her once, but I couldn’t go back there. It was . . . it was hell. It was hell and she was locked up there forever.”

Miranda swallowed her tears, forcing her voice to stay steady. “Marianne and I had a lot of fights about it. Dad refused to talk about it at all. He still won’t. So I moved back here to Austin as soon as I graduated high school. I only see them once a year or so, and it’s always miserable. When I see her, all she wants to know is if I’m getting married and how much money I make, even though for years it’s been the same answer. She just has to lord over me the fact that she’s a rich pediatrician with a lawyer husband.”

“Then why do you talk to her at all?”

She smiled helplessly. “I have no idea. They’re like . . . they’re like Hero and Claudio. The Blandersons of Blandville.”

“Then don’t answer,” David said reasonably, snapping the case back on the computer, then zipping the tools into their own case. “We don’t get to choose how we’re born, Miranda, and very rarely how we die; but we get to choose how we live. Life is too short to spend in dread and guilt.”

She cocked her head to one side and gave him a look. “You do realize that you lack any sort of credibility in the ‘life is too short’ cliché department.”

“Conceded,” he replied, rising. “But I’m still right. Shall we?”

Miranda sighed. “Now that we’re one for one on sharing our life stories, I guess we should get to the fun part of the evening.”

She slipped her laptop back into its bag and slung it over her shoulder, following him out of his workroom and down the hallway. She expected him to take her back to the suite, but he headed in the opposite direction, stopping in front of a locked door that was almost hidden in a corridor.

Like most doors in the Haven, it had an electronic lock. She had watched the Elite hold their coms up to the locks to open them; apparently the locks were programmed to check security clearance before admitting someone. David did the same, and the red light on the lock changed to green.

Whatever she was expecting from the room, what she found wasn’t it. Peering in she saw nothing but two armchairs, just like the ones near the fireplace in his room, but there was no hearth here; in fact aside from the chairs there was no furniture at all, and the floor was bare of rugs. There were no windows and only the one door, no decoration of any kind.

When she crossed the threshold, her knees almost buckled. It felt like walking through a wall of water; for a second she couldn’t breathe as power engulfed her, pushing at her nonexistent boundaries like a living thing trying to learn her shape.

She started to fight against it, but something dragged her forward—David’s hand.

On the other side of the threshold, the air felt normal, if a little too clear. Looking back at the doorway it almost seemed there was a veil of . . . not light, but diffusion, again like water.

“It’s a shield,” she realized. “I’ve never seen anything so powerful.”

He nodded and gestured for her to take a chair. “This is a protected room devoted to psychic training. There are several in the Haven, but this one belongs only to me. Primes have used it for centuries, so the walls are imbued with energy that keeps out unwanted influences and keeps in whatever we do here. That way if you lose control, no one outside this room will be hurt, and no one can attack you while you’re vulnerable.”

“Why are we working in here this time instead of in the suite?”

“Last time was all groundwork. This time, I’m going to lower your shield, and you’re going to rebuild it. If we tried that in the suite, you would have every mind in the Haven running through yours.”

“A hundred vampires in my head,” Miranda said, feeling cold. “Bad idea.”

“Precisely.”

They settled into their chairs. David looked to his left, and the lights dimmed slightly, mimicking the soft ambience of candlelight. There were no candles—no open flames, no lamps that could be knocked over, nothing to break or explode. She wondered if he had learned to work his telekinesis in a room like this.

She still hadn’t decided whether it was weirder that he was a vampire or that he could move things with his mind.

Actually the weird thing was that she now had a relativity scale for weirdness, and that just being a vampire wasn’t automatically at the upper limit of that scale.

“Let’s begin,” he said. “Ground.”

She did so, first slowing her breath, then connecting her energy to the earth beneath her, following the movement of inhalation and exhalation with her awareness. The world slowed down, and the agitation she was starting to feel about facing another lesson grew still, not disappearing, but no longer grasping at the limelight.

“Very good,” David told her, warm approval in his voice.

She smiled in spite of herself. “I’ve been practicing.”

“All right. Now, keep your breathing steady, and try not to clench your energy. Act as though you’re still totally shielded and remember, in this space you’re safe.”

She nodded and did her best to stay calm. She was familiar enough with energy now that she could essentially see what he was doing: He parted the barrier around her mind like a curtain and drew it back, leaving her completely unshielded for the first time since she’d come here.

Panic seized her. There were no voices, no marauding emotions from outside, but it felt so . . . exposed. She tried to keep her ground, but she was a rodent in the middle of an open field with hawks circling overhead; the vastness of the sky and the need to hide were overwhelming.

“Put it back,” she moaned, clapping her hands over her ears. “I can’t. I can’t.”

“Breathe, Miranda. In and out. Come back to your breath. There’s nothing here that will harm you. I won’t allow it. You know that.”

“No, no . . . please . . . it’s too much. Put it back!”

A note of hysteria entered her voice. For two weeks she’d had the comfort of his power standing between her and the madness, but now it was just her will, and she knew it wasn’t strong enough. She’d never been strong enough. Just like her mother . . .

“You can do it. Listen to me, Miranda. You can.”

“I can’t . . . I can’t . . .”

The protected room wasn’t enough. Any second now the walls would fall and the voices would pour into her, and that would be the end of it—she’d go mad, she’d die, and never have that precious silence again—

Heart racing, gasping for breath as if she were drowning, she flailed in her chair, panic so thick and black around her that she could no longer hear anything, or see, and there was nothing left but screaming.

She came back to herself slowly, barely even aware that she was once again shielded and no longer cold.

For a moment she kept her eyes shut, listening. There was a drum beating against her ear, and everything else was so quiet . . . she clung to the tentative peace jealously for as long as it lasted before awareness crept back in.

She blinked and tried to make sense of her surroundings. She was still in the training room, but everything seemed very tall all of a sudden, and the chair was hard beneath her butt.

Floor. Not chair.

Miranda moved her hand over smooth fabric, squeezing slightly, feeling muscle beneath. There was an arm around her. She was leaning into someone’s shoulder.

She drew back and looked into his stormy blue eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said hoarsely.

One of his hands was in her hair, toying with a few strands. “You have to do this,” he said to her softly. “You can’t stay here forever.”

“Are you sure?” she kidded wearily.

Something passed through his eyes, and he sighed. “I’m sure.” The hand moved down to her arm, then lifted to brush a stray lock of hair from her eyes. “No one can save you except you, Miranda.”

“You saved me once.”

He smiled briefly. “No, I didn’t. I only brought you in out of the rain.”