Queen of Shadows (15 page)

That was still a pretty big
if
at this point, but she had decided not to rule anything out just yet. The future was too big and terrifying to contemplate, so she focused on here and now, and the twin tasks of learning to shield and trying not to smack her teacher.

She finished off her water and capped it, staring at her hands. They didn’t seem quite as useless as they had Before.

To her surprise, David asked her, “What are you thinking about?”

She raised her eyes. “Do you think I’ll ever have a real life?”

“Define
real
.”

“You know . . . a job, a family, a house, stuff like that.”

He laced his fingers together. “Is that what you want?”

“I don’t know. I used to think the idea of normal was awful, but maybe that was just because I never thought I could have it. If I can really do this, and I go back to the world and can live like other people . . . I don’t know.”

“Well . . . I don’t want to disappoint or frighten you, but it’s been my experience that powerful people are rarely left alone.” There was something odd in his eyes as he said, “You’re a bright flame, Miranda. Flames attract others to their warmth and light. You can hide it all you want, but even a blind man could see you.”

“I always wished I could just disappear.” She picked at a loose thread in the arm of her chair for a minute before asking, “Have you ever wished you could be human again? Live a normal life?”

“No,” he replied. “I accepted what I am a long time ago. This life is where I belong. But there have been times when I’ve wished for . . . things that could never be. It does nothing but hurt to dream of the impossible.”

“How do you know what’s impossible? Can’t things always change?”

“Some can. Some can’t. For all that humans are limited in life span, you have more choices than we do . . . and you don’t have to live with those choices, or your mistakes, nearly as long. You can take a risk and fall on your face, but if I hurt someone, or lose someone, I have to live with it forever.”

She could hear that loss in his voice, and it made her chest hurt; on those rare occasions when he showed genuine emotion, it always affected her. It was a consequence of being so close to his energy, she was sure. “Are you thinking about Lizzie?”

He met her eyes. “No.”

She broke contact first, feeling a bit disarmed and not sure why. “I think you’re probably right. I don’t really see myself in the suburbs with a husband and two point three kids. I think I’m probably too damaged for that.”

“I don’t think
damaged
is the word,” David said.

“Then what is?”

He was smiling at her; she could tell even without looking.
“Extraordinary.”

Damn it, her face grew hot, and she smiled at him, her heart squeezing a little at the affection in that single word. “Thanks.”

They held each other’s gazes until David abruptly looked away, saying, “We should head back. I’m expecting an update from Faith and this room screws with the com reception.”

As usual they walked back down the East Wing hall together, but Miranda paused after a few minutes and said, “Did you say there was a piano around here?”

He gestured at one of the doors and unlocked it for her.

Miranda took one look inside the music room and nearly fainted. All her exhaustion vanished into thin air.

It was even more wonderful than the library had been. A full-sized grand piano occupied its center, and chairs and benches were arranged around for small performances, but there were also shelves and shelves of sheet music, both bound and loose in folders. There were reams of staff paper ready to write compositions on. Everything was meticulously organized and kept scrupulously clean, even though she knew no one had used this room in years and only the servants had been inside.

The acoustics of the room were so perfect she couldn’t wait to bring her guitar in here. Her fingers positively itched for that piano.

“I could spend every night here,” she breathed, her neck craning up to see the carved ceiling. It reminded her of the salons where great composers previewed their newest works of genius for select arts patrons.

“Let me see your com,” David said.

She held up her wrist, and he took it in one hand, the sudden contact of his fingers on her skin doing something weird to her stomach. With his free hand, he took something out of his coat.

“How many pockets do you have in that thing?” she asked.

“Why do you think I wear it?” He attached the small device to her com, then ran a short cable from it to his iPhone. “Give me twenty seconds.”

She was used to him doing random geeky things by now and just stood still while he used the phone to perform some sort of technomancy on her com. His mind continually fascinated her; she never knew, when he was staring off into the fireplace, if he was thinking about patrol reports, an upcoming conference call with the Signet outposts in other cities, how to increase the efficiency of the solar panels that provided the Haven’s electricity, the 400th digit of pi, or the new flavor of Häagen Dazs.

“There.” He unplugged and stowed both phone and device. “Now you have access to all the doors in this wing instead of just ours and the library. That way you can come here whenever you like.”

She practically beamed at him. “Thank you!” Before she could stop herself, she flung her arms around him in a hug.

After a second’s hesitation, he returned the embrace, holding on to her as long as she let him, releasing her as soon as she moved. Again . . . she felt nervous when he touched her, though there was no intent toward anything more sinister; it was just a hug. Touch had been such a loaded subject for her for so long, and now it was far worse. She didn’t know how to be touched without panicking, but somehow, David got in under her radar.

She decided, then, to do something she hadn’t ever expected to do. “Do you have a few minutes?” she asked. “I could play something for you.”

David had been about to make some sort of excuse, but at those last words, his protestations died on his lips. “I . . . I would be honored.”

She sat down at the piano, exposing the keys and running her fingers over them reverently, pressing a few and finding that David had been as good as his word: The instrument was perfectly in tune.

“God,” she murmured. “Is this what I think it is?”

“It’s a piano.”

“Not just a piano,” she said, smiling. “This is a Bösendorfer Imperial Grand, model two-ninety. She has ninety-seven keys, not eighty-eight—here on the left, see the black keys? They’re sub-bass notes that extend her range. Look at her . . . she’s beautiful. And she’s probably worth a quarter of a million dollars at least.”

His eyebrows shot up. “I had no idea it . . . she . . . was that valuable.”

“Whoever this Queen was, she knew her instruments. One of my favorite artists plays one of these. They have a darker and more complex voice than the other major makers. I read somewhere that these are built out of wood from the same forest as the Stradivari violins. I’ve always wanted to see one in person, but I didn’t want to torture myself.”

He was smiling at her enthusiasm, but unlike every boyfriend she’d ever had, he didn’t seem to be tuning her out when she got to babbling about music. Mike, for example, had only been to see her play a couple of times, and he’d done the nod-and-smile but never paid much attention.

“Any requests?” she asked.

“Whatever you like.” One of the chairs, at the front left of the room, seemed to have been placed specifically for the Prime; it was much more comfortable looking than the others. David took it and leaned back, elegant as always.

Miranda wondered what the seventh Queen had been like, and how often she had been in this very spot with her Prime and other members of the Court listening to her performances. Perhaps she had played for him alone sometimes, saving a romantic piece for her lover. Perhaps she could feel his eyes on her, enraptured by her beauty and talent, as she played.

Classical or Baroque seemed most appropriate for this room, but Miranda didn’t care much about tradition; what the piano needed was attention and energy. It was a crime for such a fine instrument to have been left unloved for so long.

Miranda reached up and yanked the elastic from her ponytail. For some reason she’d never been comfortable playing with her hair up.

She laid her hands on the keys and began to play, feeling something she hadn’t in a long time. There was a trancelike element to music for her, even before she started using it to siphon and spin emotion from the audience. Back when playing was something she did because she loved it, not a last bastion of sound between her and insanity, she had let it take her deeper, to a place beyond the world where the movement of her hands and the sound from the instrument fused with some part of her heart that amplified even the shallowest pop into something worthy of a backup choir.

She leaned into the music, and it was almost as though the piano were alive and elated to be played again; it responded to the pressure of her fingers almost before she reached the notes. A moment later, she lifted her voice into the room’s still air.

Faith heard the singing as she entered the hallway toward the Prime’s suite, and though she was on an urgent errand, she found herself drawn to the threshold of a room that, as far as she knew, hadn’t been opened in twenty years or more except by the servants who kept it clean.

Several other Elite were hovering at the door, hanging back so they wouldn’t be seen; Samuel and Terrence were there as well as the East Wing guard, Saylor. They all looked up guiltily when they saw the Second, but she was too curious to reprimand any of them for leaving their posts, and besides, their job was to guard the Prime and his guest, and clearly they were all doing just that.

Faith leaned her head around the door frame to see what was going on.

First, she saw Miranda, the source of the unbelievable singing. She looked almost dwarfed by the instrument she played on, which had to be twice as long as she was tall. Still, it seemed like the aura of the human had expanded to include the piano as if they were one creature merged in common purpose.

Miranda’s voice was both sweeter and darker than she would have guessed by hearing her speak, and she was so wrapped up in the music that she played with her eyes shut tight, swaying forward and back as her fingers hit the keys harder or softer. As she finished the song she was playing she went into what Faith assumed was an improvisation on its theme, a complicated line of melody and harmony that seemed to move in slow spirals around the piano. Faith had never heard anything like it.

Years go by, will I still be waiting for somebody else to understand . . .

Faith looked over to the chairs and saw the Prime, and she couldn’t help it: she grinned.

She’d known him a long time and had never, ever seen the expression on his face before. It was beyond captivated, somewhere in the wild land between rapture and dissolution, underlined with a longing that was as painful for Faith to watch as it was satisfying to finally see him lose himself to.

She could have told him he was doomed the minute he brought Miranda to the Haven.

No, now that she thought about it, she knew he was doomed when she saw how he reacted to the idea of cutting off Miranda’s hair. He had spent an hour working through it strand by strand with the focused attention he brought to debugging network code, and with the singular devotion of a monk praying the Rosary. He would never have done such a thing for anyone else.

Yet he was still fighting it. Faith wanted to shake him sometimes.

Luckily, one thing vampires had was time to wait.

Faith moved out of the doorway and leaned back against the wall. She needed to talk to David, but a few minutes wouldn’t be the end of the world. Let them have this moment while they could.

Faith knew with the certainty of two hundred years that the worst was yet to come.

Nine

The following Wednesday night, Faith asked quizzically, “You want me to do what, again?”

David gestured at Miranda, who stood in the center of the training room. The furniture had been pushed to the perimeter, where he sat now in his usual chair. “I want you to poke her.”

“That’s not really my thing, Sire. If you want, I could ask Lindsay when she gets back from patrol—”

“Psychically poke her, idiot,” the Prime said.

Miranda spoke up a little nervously. “I can hold my shield myself pretty well now—”

“—but she has to be able to do it under duress,” David said.

“Which means, under attack,” Miranda finished. “We need someone I’m not used to working with to push at my boundaries and see if I can push back.”

Faith still looked dubious, but she wasn’t the type to contradict an order. She went where the Prime had indicated, a space a few feet in front of Miranda.

“All right,” David said. “Go ahead.”

He shifted his vision into the sideways sight that allowed him to “see” energy; the sight was different for everyone with psychic powers, but to him it registered like waves of heat, sometimes in color, sometimes merely temperature and texture. Faith’s energy was cool, watery; Miranda’s had the shimmer of autumn fire.

Miranda grounded flawlessly, and he watched with a critical eye as she slowly raised the barrier he had shown her how to create. She had finally caught the trick of keeping it all the way around her and not just in front, and this week they had worked on her keeping it up for longer and longer periods. Soon she would shield herself automatically and not have to constantly remind herself to keep the energy flowing, but she needed experience with the pressure of other minds, and he wasn’t about to let her work outside the training room until he was sure she could at least defend herself against Faith.

“Okay,” she said. “I’m ready.”

David directed Faith to start simply by aiming her telepathy at Miranda and seeing if the human could block it out. Miranda’s primary gift was empathy, which dealt in emotions while telepathy dealt in words; the two were otherwise difficult to distinguish from one another, and often having one gift meant having both in some measure. Emotions were by far the harder to filter out, but the shield was meant to do both.

He watched, trying not to speak up, as Faith framed a thought and sent it strongly toward Miranda.

The first time, her shield buckled, the front sagging under the pressure but not quite vanishing; Miranda hauled it back up again, breathing hard, her nails digging into her palms. At David’s signal, Faith tried again.

This time, it held, though the effort showed in the sweat running down Miranda’s face. After several more attempts her T-shirt was soaked, clinging to her breasts.

David did his best not to stare. Now wasn’t really the time to act like a horny teenager.

He asked Faith to pause and took a moment to point out where Miranda was leaking energy. “On your left,” he said. “You need to divert from the front to the sides.”

“But then how will I deflect the hit?”

“Balance,” he replied. “Remember how my shield rippled the night you attacked me?”

“You attacked him?” Faith asked, incredulous.

Miranda shrugged. “It didn’t work.”

“Exactly,” he said. “If the entire shield is equally strong, the back and sides can take pressure off the front. Then the entire sphere supports itself, absorbing the impact and grounding it out instead of shattering. That’s why we visualize it as curved instead of angular; curves follow the design of nature, and nature knows how to bend without breaking. Now try again, but this time, Faith, use emotion instead of thought.”

“I’m not exactly an empath. You’re going to have to explain that one a little more.”

“Think of something really sad,” Miranda told her. “So sad it makes you want to curl up in a ball and weep. Then throw it at me like you’re trying to force me to feel it, too.”

Faith was at a loss, but after a moment she thought of something and gave it a try, to no avail.

“Am I supposed to think of something that makes me sad, or something that would make
her
sad?”

“Your emotion, your experience. She has to hold firm where she stops and you begin.”

Faith frowned, and then something seemed to occur to her. She looked over at David, and he could tell exactly what she was thinking, and also what a horrible idea she thought it was.

He agreed, but though his heart practically screamed in protest, he gave his Second an almost imperceptible nod.

She swallowed and turned back to Miranda.

“Okay,” she said. “Here goes.”

David took a deep breath and held on to the arms of the chair. He saw Faith reaching into herself and digging up a memory from the distant past; it wasn’t one he had ever heard her speak of in detail, but he still knew it existed, and he knew exactly what it was going to do.

Faith gathered the energy of that memory for a minute, steeling herself, before releasing it, letting the despair of that moment in her life hit Miranda full force.

The echoes reached David seconds later: cries for mercy, laughter, the sound of cloth tearing, the terror of knowing her life was in the hands of those who thought she was less than dirt. A young girl on the streets of Edo, hurrying home alone at night, was nothing more than fresh meat . . . and afterward, her body bruised inside and out, she endured her father’s shame knowing he couldn’t give her to any man who wanted a virgin bride. That shame had turned to rage, and she had nowhere to go but the streets. There were plenty of brothels specializing in girls dolled up as geishas.

All of this hit David in a heartbeat, and a heartbeat later, Miranda was sobbing.

As she fell to her knees, he was on his feet, but Faith grabbed his arm and held him back.

“No,” Miranda wept over and over. “No, no, no . . .”

He nearly shoved Faith aside, but the Second refused to budge. Miranda doubled over beneath the force of shared pain, and Faith’s eyes were full of tears, but still, Faith wouldn’t let him go to her.

Miranda’s hands on the floor curled slowly into fists.

“No,” she murmured. “No.”

David watched, heart in his throat, as she breathed in . . . and out . . . and
pushed
.

The collapsing shield around her began to expand. Every time she exhaled, she fed more and more energy into it, until Faith’s memories and the grief they brought with them started to lose their hold over her. Her whole body shook with the strain, but the shield held.

It
held
.

Miranda lifted her head. There was fire in her eyes.

With one last breath, the onslaught of emotion exploded into nothingness, and it felt like the air in the room had been scoured bare, as if a storm had swept through and lightning had struck.

Faith broke the silence. She whooped and punched the air, diving to Miranda’s side and hugging her with the kind of outward affection he’d never seen her display toward anyone.

“I’m . . . going . . . to fucking . . . kill you,” Miranda panted. “Both of you.”

“You did it!” Faith exclaimed. “I knew you could!”

“I did it,” Miranda said to herself, staring down at her hands on the tile. “I really did it.”

“You’re still doing it,” Faith pointed out. “You’re still shielded.”

Miranda’s laughter was bright and joyful, and it tore him inside even as it brought an upwelling of joy to his own heart. She looked up at him expectantly, her green eyes sparkling, sunlit.

Without speaking, he crossed the floor and knelt in front of her, opening his arms; she threw herself into them, still laughing. He held her as tightly as he dared and kissed the top of her head, inhaling the scent of her humanity, shampoo, and the unmistakable whisper of warmth and spice he knew was hers and hers alone.

“What did I tell you?” he said into her hair. “Extraordinary.”

When he looked up at Faith, she was giving him that mischievous little grin he’d come to recognize, and he pulled one hand away from Miranda’s waist to give his Second the finger.

“I think we should celebrate,” Faith said. “Break out the good Scotch and let’s get fucked up.”

“I have a better idea,” David replied.

It started with margaritas but devolved quickly into tequila shots.

“So how old were you?” Miranda asked, plucking a slice of lime from her mouth and tossing it in the bowl on the coffee table.

“Nineteen,” Faith replied fuzzily around her margarita glass. “Already a decrepit old spinster.”

“God, can you imagine getting married at nineteen?” Miranda asked. “When I was nineteen, I didn’t even know how to do my own laundry.” She added, for David’s benefit, “You know, laundry? Washing your own clothes? There are people who do that.”

He rolled his eyes. “I know how to do laundry. I watched my wife do it dozens of times.”

Miranda snorted and poured herself another shot. The room was spinning quite happily around her, and she intended for it to keep doing so as long as possible. “How did you turn into a vampire?” she asked Faith. “I mean, how does it work?”

“Well, there’s blood involved.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

Faith waved her hands vaguely, and if there had been anything left in her glass, it probably would have sloshed over the edge. “It’s not like in the movies. It’s a process. The main thing is you have to die with vampire blood in your veins. Right, Sire?”

“Right.” David didn’t seem to be as far gone as she and Faith were. He was remarkably relaxed for him but managed to stay sober enough to mix drinks without getting the proportions horribly awry.

“You exchange blood,” Faith went on. “Sometimes we do that for sexy reasons. It, ah . . . what am I trying to say?”

“Gets you off really hard,” David concluded for her. “And it creates a psychic connection. But in a few days, if you just let it go, it fades and everything is back to normal. There are basically two ways to get it to stick. Either your sire drinks you to death the first time, then feeds you her own blood, and you die and wake changed in about a day; or you swap once, then you start drinking human blood to strengthen you, then die some other way to complete the transformation.”

“The second way sounds like it sucks.”

David made a face at the pun, unintentional though it was. “It takes longer and hurts a lot more. The best way is the first way. You sleep through most of it. That’s usually how it’s done—about three quarters of the time the human dies permanently in the second method.”

“Yeah? How did you do it?”

Faith said, “First.” David said, “Second.”

“But you survived,” Miranda noted unnecessarily.

David nodded. “Only because I wanted vengeance. I forced myself through the change by killing the men who sentenced Lizzie to death. They were my first blood—they tasted like moldy sacramental wine.”

She could see him starting to brood; she refused to let him slide into melancholy tonight. “How did you two meet?” she asked, pointing from the Prime to Faith and back again.

Faith chuckled. “I kicked his ass in the Elite trials. I would have ended up Arrabicci’s lieutenant if the old bastard hadn’t been such a sexist pig.”

“He was not a sexist pig,” David insisted. “He was a racist pig. You’re lucky he didn’t fire you during World War II.”

“He wouldn’t have, with Deven vouching for me. If Dev had told him pigeons fucked monkeys, he’d have looked outside for little hairy birds.”

“This Deven guy sounds like an interesting piece of work,” Miranda observed, downing her shot of tequila and stuffing another lime wedge in her mouth.

“Definitely,” affirmed the Prime. “You’ll have to meet him someday. His Consort, too. They’re the kind of people you want to have on your side.”

Suddenly, Miranda’s mind brought itself back to clarity long enough to realize that in all likelihood she never would meet Deven. She could shield now. She wasn’t perfect, but in a matter of days she’d be able to leave the Haven and return to Austin.

Back to Austin . . . back to the world. Her time at the Haven was almost over.

“You okay?” Faith asked. “You look like you’re choking.”

Miranda blinked back the burning in her eyes and said, “No, I’m fine. I think I’ve had one too many, is all. Everything’s fine.”

Even as she said the words, and smiled heartily to back them up, something inside her was crying.

A few nights later, under a sky that was heavy and threatening with more rain, Miranda walked outside in the garden, alone.

Terrence had gotten used to the paths she took, so he maintained a greater distance and kept an eye on her from farther away than he had the first week he’d been on guard duty. She was grateful for the consideration. Being followed, even by someone who wanted her safe, made her uneasy, especially now that there was no external shield around her that would warn the Prime if she was in trouble.

He had taken it down the night before, just as an experiment, and she had left the training room completely under her own power for the first time. So far things were going well, though she hadn’t dealt with more than two people at a time. She was anxious at the idea of going outside, but she still had her com, and if anything went wrong, Terrence would be at her side in seconds.

September was doing its best to cling to summer as long as it could. The days had been scorching—according to the weather report—and the nights were humid and thick. Everyone was looking forward to the approaching front and its resulting storms to give some relief from the heat. It was the first tumultuous moment of autumn, and Miranda, like anyone who had lived in Texas for years, knew it would be another month before things genuinely cooled off.

She had been at the Haven for a month now, though it felt like years. Her little room had come to bear the stamp of her personality and habits, and she was a familiar sight to the Elite as she took the halls to and from the garden, library, and music room.

She felt a pang of loss at the thought of leaving the Bösendorfer. She had only been playing it for a week, but it felt like a part of her . . . like so many things here. Somehow the Haven had crept into her brick by brick, and the Stephen King-esque strangeness of life here had become normal. Austin, with its thousands of humans and daytime schedule, seemed alien in comparison.