Queen of Shadows (2 page)

Slowly, as the months went by, she noticed her control was slipping. More and more emotion seemed to flow through her head whether she wanted it to or not. She kept picking up on people’s feelings at random, and sometimes they were so horrible it left her weeping—despair, fear, hatred, violence, rage, all tore through her when she least expected them. She started to know things about people she didn’t want to know, and she couldn’t stop it.

It was worst when she looked people in the eye. People held all their secrets in their eyes. They could smile and laugh like they hadn’t a care in the world, but one look into their eyes and she knew . . . she knew. She could feel their guilt, their longing, their loss—emotions were clearer than speech if you knew how to listen. The weight of their heart’s memories bore down on her own.

She knew the preacher on the corner had fucked his nephew. She knew the homeless man on the bus was a Vietnam vet who’d saved ten men and had his leg blown off for his trouble. She knew the crazy cat lady three doors down still talked to her dead husband’s photo as if he were there. She knew the gangbanger passing her on the street had nightmares about his childhood dog.

All those secrets were in her head. Emotions, and memories bound up in emotions, filled up all the space inside her. If she touched someone, she learned more than whether they had sweaty palms. She learned of the deepest darkness inside them, and it made her want to scream and hide.

The only time she could control it was when she played. Then she could moderate the flow of emotions and work with them. Otherwise it was just her and the creeping madness that was eating her alive.

The one perk, she supposed, was that going batshit insane paid well. She had her two nights a week at Mel’s, and a Monday night at a local café, and among them the shows netted her enough to live on, especially since she was hardly eating and had no social life. She’d been able to quit the endless round of clerical jobs filing in windowless rooms—no more pantyhose, no more burnt coffee smell and paper cuts. There had been a time when the prospect of leaving the nine-to-five world would have thrilled her.

The problem with feeling everyone else’s emotions was that there was no longer any room for her own. As the ability had gotten stronger, she had become less and less of a presence in her own mind, unable to separate herself completely from other people without drinking herself unconscious. She felt like a thin candy shell over nothing at all, run through with cracks and ready to splinter at any second.

On nights like tonight, when the moon was heavy and full and all of Austin seemed ready to collapse under the weight of the hundred-degree summer air, as she stood in the wings waiting for her cue, she knew that time was coming closer and closer.

She folded her arms across her body tightly. Cold. Always cold. Her stage clothes, black and tight and made of shiny patent and Lycra, were starting to feel loose—if she didn’t start eating she was going to look like a bag of antlers. She had always been proud of her body; she wasn’t a supermodel by any means, but had a curvaceous figure that filled out a V-neck perfectly and hips that swung when she walked. Men had never been a problem, back when they mattered. Even when she’d been a little chubby in college she’d been lively and popular, known for her razor wit and gorgeous breasts. Now she was starting to look like she’d wandered off the set of
Schindler’s List
.

Mel introduced her, and though she couldn’t see the crowd she could feel them. Packed to capacity, the bar held about eighty people, and that was the biggest crowd she could hold at once. Any more than that and the emotions were simply too much, and she fell screaming to the ground with her fists jammed uselessly in her ears.

She was a talented musician but not much of a performer. She didn’t banter with the audience, didn’t show off or try to look sexy. She didn’t really need to. When she walked out onstage, people stared at her—she could feel their eyes on her skin like a sheen of sweat—but as soon as she started the first song, she caught them all, and any doubts they had dissolved into dust motes.

She hated how easy it was. She hated that she’d let this happen.

She just wanted to go home.

But there was nothing else, not anymore. She couldn’t go back to a normal job, not like this. There was nowhere she could go if she couldn’t pay the rent, except back to her father’s house or maybe to her sister’s in Dallas, and madness seemed a small price to pay to avoid either of those places. Any hope of a real life with friends and aspirations beyond making it through another gig had long ago faded from her worldview. There was only this crowd, this song, this room full of oppressive heat and oppressive emotions.

She had to be careful or she was going to depress the audience so much they wouldn’t come back. She deliberately shifted the mood for the next song, picking a cover of an old Sheryl Crow screecher that her voice could smooth out and lift up; soon, the crowd was swaying, and in a moment they’d be dancing, smiling. Happy.

It was small comfort to know that for at least this one night their troubles would be forgotten and they’d go home to their families and lives in a great mood, ready to take on the world. She didn’t want to hurt anyone. She never had.

Hard to concentrate tonight. She kept the tone light and airy, feeding energy into the crowd to stoke it without making it burn too hotly; she’d made that mistake once and the happiness had spilled over into restlessness and then into anger. Bar fights weren’t good for business, Mel said with a frown after the police had left. She should remember that.

About halfway through the set she managed to get enough control back that she could pick out individual energies in the crowd, and she didn’t know whether to be pleased or chagrined—she recognized at least one.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. Kat was here. Miranda had forgotten all about her.

She shifted her focus, pulling back from Kat to avoid tampering with her emotions, and swept it around the room, reading everyone else, getting a bead on how the night was going. So far, so good. They were upbeat because she made them that way . . .

. . . except for one.

She tried to hone in on the individual presence, but couldn’t; every time she got close it felt like her attention slipped on an icy patch and slid off him—or her—onto someone else. Frowning, she kept playing, trying to ignore it, but her mind kept coming back to that spot, a scab she couldn’t stop picking. All she could say for sure was that whoever it was, they were . . . dark. Not depressed, not angry, but dark, with a frightening potential for violence. And whoever they were, they were staring right at her.

She didn’t look. She was afraid to look. She dragged her attention away and finished the set.

By the time she came off the stage to another standing ovation, the presence was gone, and she felt like she could let out a breath she hadn’t been holding. She left the stage with her guitar in her hands and clomped down the stairs in her platform boots, headed for the tiny space behind the stage that served as a dressing room.

Kat was there, waiting for her.

“Hey,” she said, smiling. “That was awesome.”

“Hey.” It was an effort to speak, but she did her best. Kat hadn’t seen her in weeks and was the closest thing to a friend Miranda still had after gradually cutting herself off from her once-broad social circle. They kept up mostly via e-mail—e-mail was safe. It was a lot harder to feel emotions over e-mail . . . but not impossible.

Kat leaned back casually against the table where Miranda did her makeup, looking every inch the Austinite in her faded jeans, sandals, and Indian print halter top. She fit the image of a musician far better than Miranda herself did; she had tattoos on her arms, a stud in her nose, and purple streaks in her blond dreadlocks. Kat did yoga and ate things like burdock and wheat-grass. She was also one of the most well-adjusted people Miranda had ever met. How they’d stayed friends was a mystery to her.

“You look like crap, though,” Kat was saying as Miranda laid her guitar in its case and snapped it shut, then turned her attention to her clothes. She yanked the curtain across the “dressing room” entrance and bent to unzip her boots.

“Do I?” Miranda asked absently. A rubber band of pressure was starting to squeeze around her head. She’d overdone it tonight.

“When was the last time you ate? We should go grab a bite or something. Pancakes?”

Miranda’s hands trembled. A restaurant full of people . . . God, there was no way. “I can’t,” she said. “I have to be somewhere.”

“Come on, Mira, I haven’t seen you in forever. What’s going on with you? You never come out anymore, except here. You look like a cancer patient. You’re shaky.” Kat folded her arms. “Is it drugs?”

That was Kat, always to the point. Miranda missed her blunt humor and her sharp eye. Beneath her hippie exterior Kat was tough as nails, spending her days working with kids on the East Side, tutoring and mentoring and trying to keep them out of gangs.

“No, Kat, it’s not drugs,” she replied, peeling the Lycra off her body and replacing it with jeans. God, if only it were drugs! “I’m fine. Really.”

“We all miss you, you know.”

“I know. I miss you, too.”

Miranda clamped down on the tears that threatened at the words. She never let herself think about where else she could be right now, the life she could be having. She was twenty-seven and felt like she was ninety. She should be lining up her career and looking for Mr. Right. Kat was her age—they’d met in a psych class—and had everything Miranda wished she could, except for Mr. Right, but only because Kat favored Mr. Right This Minute.

For just a second Miranda thought about telling her. Everything. Kat had resources, and she was hard to shock. She might be able to help.

“Come on, Mira . . . talk to me. I can help.”

Miranda started, shrinking back from her friend’s sympathetic hand. Had Kat come up with the thought herself, or had Miranda pushed it into her? The thought of doing to Kat what she did to the audience made her feel sick.

She pulled a T-shirt over her head and yanked her hair back into a ponytail. “I’m okay, Kat. I am. I’ll e-mail you—we’ll have lunch next week or something. I just . . . I have to go now.”

With that she grabbed her guitar and her bag and all but ran out the back door, not looking at her friend’s troubled face but knowing what she was thinking. Kat’s desire to help was sincere, above and beyond any musical influence, but what could she really do? Even if Kat believed her, who else would? Who in the world would understand what was happening without thinking she was crazy?

You are crazy. They’re not wrong.

They’d commit her. They’d lock her away just like her mama, and poke and prod her and drug her until she was a drooling mass of atrophied muscle and brain.

No. Never. She’d die first.

Probably
.

Kat’s concern stayed with her, rubbing around the edges of her mind, as she hurried along the four blocks from the club to the bus stop. It was almost one A.M., and for a Friday night downtown Austin was unusually quiet; she didn’t realize why until she heard a crash of thunder that shook her out of herself long enough to look up at the billowing dark clouds that had blotted out the moon.

“Fantastic,” she muttered, and picked up the pace. Her keys and a few loose coins jingled in her purse and her guitar case bumped her butt as she trotted along the sidewalk. A couple of people moved out of her way, avoiding a collision with the instrument by inches.

The first few fat drops of rain left dark circles on the still-hot pavement, and she felt them on her hair. The pressure in the atmosphere echoed the pressure building in her mind. She had to hurry, had to get home before every heart in Austin bled into hers and she got lost in their pain and petty grievances.

If only positive emotions were as strong as negative ones. They were, in their way, but they were so quiet that the bad stuff drowned them out. Sometimes she felt love, sometimes she felt joy, but they were quickly bogged down in the surrounding fear and anger of everyone around them. The few scraps of beauty she dug out of the dung heap had once been enough to keep her going—the potential in people for good was what she drew out when she played—but as time went on those small, sweet voices were lost, and the weeping of the world was all she knew.

It was starting.

Another day in paradise. Wasn’t that a song? She started humming, trying desperately to concentrate on something, anything else:
Hallelujah
. . . Leonard Cohen understood her tonight. Her own thoughts had already started to submerge under the emotions of the rest of the city.
Someone was beating a child tonight . . . someone wanted steak for dinner and got meat loaf . . . someone was faking it . . . someone had “Angel of the Morning” stuck in his head . . . someone hated her mother . . . someone was going to pay . . . someone liked to be tied up . . . someone forgot to set the DVR to tape
Ghost Whisperer
. . . someone—

—someone was following her.

Darkness. She could feel darkness. The same as in the club? Probably. A sane woman would have run, but she was so tired . . . so tired. Her legs suddenly felt like lead. It was as if she could see herself from a distance, and see what was going to happen, and there was nothing she could do but get out of the way of her fate.

Hallelujah . . . hallelujah . . .

There were four of them. One followed her from the club, the others emerged from an alley. Their minds were like oily black snakes, slithering toward her with the dull glow of lust and repressed rage. One of them liked her hair; another one was thinking about her breasts. A third figured she had money in her purse.

The hand that clamped on her shoulder was thick and meaty, and it yanked her backward off her feet. She cried out, but the noise was muffled as a second hand clapped over her mouth, and she was hauled back against a sweaty T-shirt with a pounding heartbeat beneath. None of them spoke until they had dragged her off the street, into the alley.