Queen of Shadows (23 page)

Drew paid for dinner and insisted on walking Miranda home when Kat begged off—Kat’s old heap of a car was in the shop again and she had to hurry to catch the bus or she’d be stranded on South Lamar.

Drew, it turned out, rode a bike everywhere, but in the ghastly late-winter weather he’d taken the bus. She added that to the approval list: no gas-guzzling car, but he was a licensed driver, which was always handy.

“Look, I’m sorry Kat’s been trying to throw me at you,” Drew said, walking alongside her.

“It’s okay,” Miranda replied. “She just wants me to be happy, and she’s really fond of you. She’s played match-maker as long as I’ve known her. She loves seeing people fall in love.”

“Well, that’s just it. I mean, I just got out of a long-term relationship with April, my last girlfriend, and I’m not . . . I mean, I think you’re beautiful, and you seem like a really fascinating person, but I don’t know if I want to go there yet, you know? And Kat said you’d had some stuff a long time ago and you aren’t much into guys, so I thought it might be safe to get to know each other, be friends. Then someday maybe more, but no pressure.”

Miranda looked at him, marveling. “Are you sure you’re straight?”

“One hundred percent.”

She nodded. “Okay, Drew, I’ll tell you this, then. What Kat’s talking about . . . it wasn’t that long ago. I got hurt, and it left scars.”

“Literally or figuratively?”

“Both.” She paused in her walking and lifted the hair off her forehead, showing him the white line.

“You’re shivering,” Drew said. “Here, take my scarf.”

She started to protest, but he seemed genuinely concerned with no ulterior motive, so she took the proffered garment. It was hand-knitted and warm, and even one of her favorite colors, dark red. “Thanks. This is nice—where’d you get it?”

“My grandmother made it for me. She lives in Florida and she’s always worried about me being cold.”

Miranda smiled. “Must be nice.”

Drew grinned. “Yeah, it is. I miss her a lot.”

They reached Miranda’s complex, which was conveniently close to Kerbey, and she said, rather than inviting him in, “So . . . in the spirit of being friends, how about you come to my show tomorrow night? I’ll get them to comp both you and Kat at the door.”

Drew smiled and nodded, suddenly clumsy in his excitement. “That would be great. Mel’s, right? Eight o’clock? I’ll see you then.”

Miranda let herself into her apartment, sighing out of her outerwear, hanging Drew’s scarf on the hook under her coat. She’d have to return it to him tomorrow. It was best not to lead him on, even subtly. Friends was fine . . . friends was, in fact, very nice. It had been years since she’d had someone to talk music with, and even longer than that since the friend had been male. She needed to relearn how to relate to the opposite sex even on a purely social level instead of arguing with herself whether to cower in fear.

Drew was sweet, charming, and touchingly human. Totally harmless to her inner senses, and easy on her eyes.

He was also safe. She would never get that close to him, never be afraid of his groping hands, because she would never let him get that far with her. She wouldn’t have to worry about him hurting her, as long as she was honest and forthright. She wouldn’t lure him into a false paradise with promises of apples. If he wanted to admire the trees, that was fine.

She also knew just from sizing him up tonight that if push came to shove, she could kill him bare-handed.

It was a disturbingly comforting thought.

Yes, Drew was safe. Drew was safe because he was human, and because she had already decided no human man would ever touch her again. The doors to her body and her heart were already closed and locked, and she would give the key to only one man, perhaps someday . . . perhaps never . . . but all the same, she didn’t care about falling in love, or getting married, or any of that, anymore. It was too late for mortal men to stake any sort of claim to her affections. If she grew old and died alone, it would be in full possession of her heart.

And if she ever gave it, she would give it eternally, and without regret.

Thirteen

Faith sprinted along the street, weaving in and out of the crowds that barely noticed her except for the wind of her wake. Her coat and hair flew out behind her, and her feet hit the pavement with the rhythm of a drumroll.

“Suspect is approaching Lavaca Street,”
the network monitor said at her wrist.

“I’m closing in!” Faith shouted back, running even harder. Less than a block ahead she could see the thin figure darting from one side to the other, deftly avoiding the humans as Faith did. “Where’s my cover from the west?”

“Closing from Eighth Street,”
came the breathless answer.
“You’ll catch her first.”

Faith pounded around the corner with her arms and legs pumping, adrenaline and wrath fueling her pursuit, her senses in overdrive. The hot, dark drive of the predator coursed through her until the universe reduced to her and her prey. Half a block. Closing in.

Out of either desperation or stupidity, the suspect veered suddenly off to the right, out into traffic. Horns blared all around, but it was just after dark on a Thursday and traffic was so heavy that they weren’t moving very fast to begin with. A skinny black-haired girl running between the cars was irritating but not especially noteworthy.

“Goddamn it, Sire, where are you?” Faith demanded into her com. “Now would be a great time for that tele-porting thing you do!”

Before the sentence was even out of her mouth, one of the SUVs on Lavaca screeched to a halt as something heavy landed on its roof.

The Prime straightened, his eyes flashing silver in the streetlamps, and jumped down from the car right into the suspect’s path. She hissed and threw herself to the left, bouncing off the door of a Jaguar and rolling underneath it.

“I want eyes on every corner!” Faith snapped. “Twentyeight, Twelve, Nine, fan out!”

David strode among the cars, lithe and purposeful, and the humans in their vehicles either stared openly at him or turned their faces away in instinctive fear of the one creature designed perfectly to kill them. He paused, breathing in the chilly damp air of an early-spring night. His mouth opened slightly, revealing the curved ivory of his teeth, and the woman driving the SUV in front of him shrieked and covered her child’s face.

The light in the Signet flared, and he pushed out with one hand, seeming to move only air. The Jag slid sideways with the screech of rubber on pavement.

The suspect, suddenly losing her hiding place behind its tire, dove for another, getting her feet up underneath her to bolt. She made it about three steps.

David lifted one hand and made a tugging motion, and the vampire fell to her knees with a scream, dragged back toward him, her fingers clawing desperately at the dirty concrete until the nails broke and bled.

“Please!” she was screaming at the humans. “He’s going to kill me! Please! Call the police!”

David smiled. “We are the police,” he said, loudly enough that everyone could hear—and practically everyone had cracked their windows at least a few inches by now. David turned slowly in a circle, and Faith felt him grabbing every last mind on the scene and twisting it hard. Faces all around them bent easily to his will, and his words implanted on their weak mortal minds: “We are apprehending a fugitive. There is nothing more for you to see here.”

Then he seized the vampire around her collar and hauled her along with him off the street, leaving the Elite to restore the flow of traffic.

He threw the girl into the wall and waited for her to stop sniveling. Around him, the rest of the patrol unit had gathered, and Faith was waiting, too. They were inside an empty storefront with boarded-up windows; there would be no interference from the local cowboys.

“Ariana Blackthorn,” David said, staring down at her. He gestured and the Elite produced shackles. Considering the helpless-damsel number she’d been going for, she fought like a tiger until she was securely chained.

Finally, she seemed to understand she wasn’t going anywhere and slowly forced herself to stand up straight and face him head on.

Disgust and hatred were all over her otherwise pretty face. She spat at him, but he’d been expecting it and moved out of the way. They always liked to spit, for some reason. Next came the insults: demon, devil, accusations of bestiality for his known appetite for humans, and on and on.

The Blackthorn had created of him the perfect Antichrist. They had him set up to enslave and destroy all of vampire kind. He had to admit it was flattering.

Faith joined him, panting and sweaty, and muttered, “You couldn’t have just teleported and caught her before we’d all run ourselves into a coma chasing her?”

“I told you,” he said mildly, eyes still on the girl. “I don’t teleport. It’s a quantum-level shift that involves loosening the bond among all my molecules, and it requires so much energy that it’s advisable only in emergencies.”

“Like tonight?”

“No. Tonight I jumped down off a building and onto a car. Can we focus, please?”

He returned his attention to Ariana Blackthorn, who regarded him with utmost loathing. “I’m going to
kill you
!” she screamed, flinging herself forward to the end of her chains, then falling back against the wall. “I’m going to kill all of you! And that little Happy Meal bitch of yours in the city!”

David felt his blood run cold, but he clamped down on the reaction that he knew she’d want to see. “Keep ranting,” he said. “We have all night.”

He held his hand out to the left, and one of the lieutenants handed him a sheaf of papers. “Ariana Blackthorn,” he read. “Youngest of the Blackthorn women, not deemed suitable for an arranged marriage until lo and behold, an unattached Prime came into power here in the South. Your father made a deal to sell you to Auren, if not as a Queen then at least as a whore, in exchange for hunting grounds in his territory and safe harbor if the California war went badly, which of course it did. So your loving patriarch sent you to the bed of a psychopathic killer, and you weren’t heard from again.”

Ariana strained against her chains again. “I loved my Prime,” she spat, “and he loved me. We were a Pair, even if his stupid Signet didn’t understand. All I had to do was get stronger. My father didn’t like his women strong. So I waited. And I grew.”

“And when I killed your one true love, you ran and hid,” David finished for her callously. “For fifteen years you’ve scuttled around the underworld like a cockroach instead of facing your Prime’s killer. Then you were contacted by James Wallace, formerly of Auren’s Elite, and he helped you build your syndicate and then, quite conveniently, met his end.”

“I wanted justice,” she said. “I wanted to watch you suffer as you made my Lord suffer. I wanted to see everything you care for bleed and die and then bleed you myself.”

“I appreciate the honesty.” David replied. “Now perhaps you’ll favor me with a little more, Ariana. My Elite have the location of your headquarters, and as we speak they are infiltrating it and subduing your guards. We’ll have possession inside ten minutes. Now, unless you can give me a compelling reason not to kill every last soul I find inside, the whole building will burn. If you make sure I know where all your splinter factions are, I can promise you not to kill certain individuals, perhaps family, who might be dear to you.”

Ariana laughed, a high, eerie sound that was in no way sane. “Kill them all, I don’t care,” she answered. “And make sure you get my sister, too. She’s a race traitor just like you are,
Sire
, and since I swore to my father I wouldn’t kill her, you can do it for me. You owe me that much after you murdered my lover.”

“Here’s what I owe you, Ariana.” David took a step back and drew his sword. Two of the Elite took hold of her arms and forced her to her knees as he said, “I am sorry for your broken heart, or at least your thwarted ambitions. Ariana Blackthorn, you are hereby under an order of execution for conspiracy to murder thirty-two humans within my territory as well as seven of my Elite.”

“Do I get a last request?” Ariana asked with false sweetness.

He lifted his chin.

Her voice came out as a feline hiss. “I want to see the look on your face when they drag your precious little princess dead from the lake. I want you to hurt like I hurt when I held Auren’s lifeless body in my arms. I want to see your world come to an end.”

He stared into her eyes for a moment, then said flatly, “Request denied.”

Then he cut off her head.

An hour later Harlan pulled the car into an affluent suburb of West Austin, down a long street lined with the homes of the well-to-do. None of them approached the grandeur of the Haven, of course, but then, they weren’t built to house a hundred vampires. There was new growth in many of the front flower beds that would probably die in the last freeze that usually hit just before Easter. For now, though, the exultant breath of spring was in the air, even while the nights were still cold.

They stopped at the end of the street in front of an ordinary-looking two-story house where Faith and half the Elite were already waiting for him. Any human family could have lived there, but the lawn didn’t look like it had been mowed recently, and the curtains in the front windows were flat—they had been nailed up with boards behind them to block out the sun while still appearing mostly normal from the street. Considering their hatred for humans, the Blackthorn had been living very close to them, but it was a sound strategy for staying off his radar.

Or, it had been, until the sensor network was up and running long enough for his analytical eyes to discern a pattern among the movements of the vampires that lived here. They covered their tracks well, but not well enough.

“The property is secured,” Faith said as he got out of the car. Her voice was oddly strained. “We found twenty-six inside along with . . . Well, see for yourself.”

He could smell it before he entered the house. The insurgents had done their killing in the city, but they had done much of their feeding here. Not two days before, almost as an afterthought, he had run a search on missing persons in the Austin area and confirmed his suspicions about how a gang as indiscreet as theirs could stay fed. They left only select bodies in obvious places for him to find—where were the rest?

Now he knew.

There were shallow graves in the backyard. Inside the house were cages.

The entire gang had been taken into the backyard to await execution, and all that was left inside was the amassed garbage of beer bottles and three corpses, each covered with bite marks and left to rot in the closets.

By his count, there should be ten more buried out back. Three were children. Managed with even minimal food and water, a dozen humans could keep the gang fed for weeks as long as they were given a few days to recover in between feedings. Eventually they would weaken and their bodies would give out, but in the meantime all the insurgents had to do was pluck the homeless off the streets and they had an unlimited supply of human blood that no one would miss.

“What did that bitch promise her followers?” Faith asked, walking with him from room to room to survey the damage to the house.

“Freedom,” David replied. “Can’t you tell? They were free to live in filth among the dying. I’m sure she promised that after the revolution they would all be counted high in her own Elite and have license to feed on every throat they could reach.”

“We found the sister. She’s alive, but . . . not well. They had her in one of the cages—she’s marked, too. I think Ariana was feeding on her exclusively.”

“Blood is still thicker than water,” he said. “Show me.”

She led him to the back of the house and the one bedroom that seemed to show signs of only a single inhabitant. The rest of the building had the cramped energy of a barracks, and beds had been created on every available flat surface, but still, they had to have slept in shifts.

Inside the room several Elite stood guard over a blond woman dressed in rags, her neck and shoulders covered in puncture wounds in various stages of healing. She was barefoot and filthy, skeletally thin, her clavicles standing out sharply.

“Here,” one of the guards was saying, handing her a bag of hospital blood. The girl took it and began to suck greedily at the tube, whimpering with hunger.

David went to her and knelt, placing his hand on the bag. “Slowly,” he said. “Sip. You’ll make yourself sick.”

She looked up at him, shaking, and he was struck by the intense blue of her eyes. She saw the Signet and stared but didn’t shy away; she was simply too weak to react.

“Have you got anything out of the others about her?” he asked Faith.

“No. They were under orders not to talk about her. In fact, we can’t get a damn thing out of any of them about what went on here—she trained them well, Sire. They’re all as insane as she was.”

He returned his attention to the girl. “What’s your name?”

She paused in her drinking long enough to whisper, “Bethany.”

“Well, Bethany Blackthorn, my name is David. We’re going to take care of you.”

She nodded, still shaking, still sucking on the tube. The bag was already half empty.

He stood up. Faith caught his arm and drew him away, saying, “Sire . . . you aren’t thinking of taking her back to the Haven with us, are you?”

“That’s exactly what I’m thinking, Faith. Where else is she going to go?”

“We don’t know anything about her. We have no record of her in the Blackthorn case files. These people are out for your blood and you want her in our house?”

“Look at her,” he said. “She’s too weak to be a threat, and if there are more of them out there in hiding in the city, we’ll need information from her. We take her back, we put her under guard and find out who she really is.”

“Doesn’t this seem a little suspicious to you? They could be playing on your sympathies—face it, Sire, you are a little softhearted when it comes to crazy girls.”

“Duly noted, Second.”

“Wait . . . you’re not thinking of putting her in Miranda’s room, are you?”

He rounded on Faith. “It isn’t Miranda’s room anymore,” he snapped. “And no, I don’t want her anywhere near me. Put her in one of the visiting-dignitary suites and make sure she doesn’t so much as take a piss without it going on record. Now if you don’t mind, Faith, I’m going to go watch twenty-six people die.”