Queen of Shadows (25 page)

“I’m fine.” She mustered a smile. “Just kind of distracted. I’m used to being onstage on Fridays.”

Kat blew her straw wrapper at Miranda. “Sorry we’re not a huge adoring crowd cheering your name,” the blonde said. “If you want, Drew will throw his underwear at you.”

Drew’s ears went bright pink. “Jesus, Kat.”

Miranda laughed. “It’s okay. I’m just in a weird mood. Have you ever had a feeling like something was about to happen?”

“Of course,” Kat replied. “It’s called PMS.”

“No, I mean . . . never mind.”

“Do you want dessert?” Drew asked. “I’m buying.”

Miranda shook her head. He and Kat exchanged a look. It was unlike Miranda not to have cake—she only ever ate sweets when they went out, and she looked forward to them all week. But tonight she wasn’t hungry; she couldn’t shake the feeling of dread in her stomach that was taking up all the space. Even the few bites of pasta she’d had were sitting there like a rock.

Kat drove them all back to Miranda’s apartment; the weather in March was unpredictable, and the forecast called for rain, but with a cold front coming it might end up snowing; one could never tell. In a way, she was grateful that her show had been postponed. She’d had to slog home in sleet and mud before, and she’d nearly broken her leg slipping on icy patches on the sidewalk. The winter had been so cold and wet this year that she had been itching for spring since January.

“What’s on your mind?” Drew asked from the front seat.

Miranda’s gaze was fixed on the city out the window, but she said, “I can’t believe how fast time goes by. It seems like it was just summer.”

“Yep,” Kat said. “Before you know it people will be bitching about the heat again instead of the cold. I love Texas.”

Miranda let them into the apartment gratefully, feeling the blast of heat from inside with a smile. Speaking of bitching, they complained every time they came over about how warm she kept her house, but since she’d come back to the city she had lost a lot of her cold tolerance and had the heater running full blast almost all the time. Kat and Drew both stripped off their outerwear as soon as they crossed the threshold.

Just as she was about to follow them in, she felt . . . something. She turned, peering into the darkness, eyes narrowed, and swept the view with her senses. Nothing was amiss.

Shrugging, she went inside.

Kat had excused herself to the bathroom, leaving her alone with Drew. He sat on the couch, smiling a little awkwardly. Miranda had made a point not to spend much time with him without Kat to run interference; she knew very well how he felt about her and didn’t want to encourage him. It didn’t seem to help. But he was a great guy and fun to be around when he wasn’t making moon eyes at her.

“So, Miranda . . .”

She held back a sigh. “Do you want a beer or something?”

“No, I . . . I was kind of hoping we could talk.”

She tried to joke off his earnest tone. “Well, talk fast—Kat pees like a speeding bullet.”

“I’m serious,” Drew said, standing up. “I mean, I know we agreed just to be friends, but . . . Miranda . . .” He reached down and took her hand, not noticing how stiff she was at the contact. “I really, really like you. I think we’d be great together. Could you just please think it over? Last night was a lot of fun, and it was nice to spend time with just you. I’d really like to do it again.”

Miranda sighed aloud this time. She knew last night had been a mistake. Kat had dropped out of their movie plans last minute due to some sort of emergency with her at-risk kids, but she’d insisted Miranda and Drew go on without her. Miranda had a sneaking suspicion that Kat had planned the whole thing.

“Drew, I told you. I’m not ready for a relationship right now. You’re a sweet guy, and very attractive, but—”

Three things happened at once:

One, Drew took hold of her arms and kissed her on the mouth, causing her entire body to go rigid.

Two, Kat emerged from the bathroom and said, “Oh! Sorry, guys!” and started to duck into the kitchen.

Three, there was a knock at the door.

Miranda twisted out of Drew’s grasp and barely, just barely, kept from punching him in the face. She stumbled backward, torn between terror and rage, and snarled, “Don’t
ever
do that again.”

Drew was blushing crimson, and she almost relented at the obvious shame on his face as he stammered his apology. Instead of replying, she turned away and, so rattled she didn’t even remember to look out the peephole, flung open the door.

She froze. The earth and time itself abruptly stopped turning.

There, on her front porch, looking exactly as she remembered him down to the buttons of his long black coat, stood Prime David Solomon.

Before she could speak, he leaned slightly to the left to look over her shoulder. His deep blue eyes fastened on Drew. Miranda heard Drew swallow hard.

David looked back at Miranda, and there was a ring of silver around his irises as he asked calmly, “Do you need me to kill him?”

Fourteen

“Oh my God,” Miranda breathed. Then she came back to herself long enough to say, “No, it’s okay. He’s okay.”

Behind her, Kat cleared her throat loudly.

She half turned, looking from Kat to David and back again, her heart and mind going in a thousand directions at once and her insides threatening to explode from her skin. “Oh . . . um . . . guys . . . here, come in.”

Her legs felt like Jell-O, but she moved back out of the way to let the Prime in. He stepped through the doorway and all the air went out of the room; God, she’d forgotten that he did that. His energy overwhelmed the apartment even as tightly shielded as he always was. She might have been the only one who felt it, but still, everything from the way he stood to the unnatural brightness of his eyes set him apart from her friends.

Kat’s eyes were wide and speculative, looking David up and down with obvious appreciation for his hand-tailored attire, and no doubt also for his magnificent build. “Hi there.”

He took his gaze off Miranda long enough to size up Kat. Miranda could see the calculation in his face: human, female, harmless. “Hello.”

He gave Drew a disdainful glance and, after that, barely allotted him the notice he would give a troublesome insect. Miranda found that weirdly hilarious.

“This is David,” she said. “He’s the friend I mentioned from when I was away last summer. David, these are my friends Kat and Drew.”

He nodded to them. Miranda’s addled mind found it a little offensive that they didn’t bow.

“So you’re Rehab Guy,” Kat was saying, having recovered her aplomb. She strode forward to shake David’s hand; for a second he stared at it like an alien object, then took her hand and kissed it, causing Kat to turn pink at the ears and stammer just a tiny bit.

In another time, when her worlds weren’t colliding quite so violently, Miranda would have laughed at that, too. Kat was never shaken up by attractive men. Her apparent lack of interest in the male gender was what got her so much sex.

David looked over at Miranda. “Rehab Guy?”

Miranda shrugged. She felt behind her for something to lean on and came to rest on the couch.

“Were you a counselor at the clinic or something?” Kat asked. “Mira says you helped get her back on her feet.”

Now David smiled, turning again to Miranda. “Mira,” he said. “I like that.”

She nodded, unable to meet his eyes just yet, though she could feel every inch of his gaze traveling over every inch of her. “My mom used to call me that. Snow White was my favorite fairy tale when I was little—she’d say ‘Mira, Mira, on the wall . . .’ you know how it goes.”

“This was before Shakespeare, I assume.”

She smiled. “Yeah.”

Kat looked from him to her and back, then over at Drew, then back at Miranda. Kat wasn’t psychic, but she was no fool either. “I think we should get going,” she announced. “Drew, honey, grab your coat. Miranda, maybe we’ll see you later this weekend? I’ll e-mail you.”

She grabbed Drew by the arm and practically dragged him to the door, despite his protestations. As they passed by the couch, Kat said in a loud whisper, “I want details.”

Miranda rose to lock the door behind them and paused a minute with her hands on the deadbolt, trying to steady her breath. When she turned back, David was standing by the hook where her coat was, his hand touching the scarf that Drew had left that she kept forgetting to give back.

There was a moment of tense silence before David said, “He seems nice.”

She snorted. “Sure.”

He let go of the scarf. “What?”

“Nice. He seems nice. You said it like you’d say ‘nice’ to a light blue tuxedo or a case of genital warts.”

He frowned. “Are you angry at me?”

She put her hands on her hips. “Well, what do you think? You haven’t called or e-mailed or acted like I exist for six months; now you show up on my doorstep and, what, want to go out for coffee?”

“Something like that,” he replied.

She stared at him. He stared at her.

“Fine,” she said.

His eyebrows shot up. “Really?”

She yanked her coat from its hook. “Yes, really. Come on.”

“I don’t . . . actually drink coffee,” he said, sounding a little thrown by her behavior. “Caffeine makes me jittery .”

“That’s not where we’re going.”

To his credit, he didn’t protest, but let her haul him along behind her out the front door and into the night.

Perhaps no one else in the city would get the novelty of a psychic musician and the most powerful vampire in Texas sitting together in an ice cream parlor, but Miranda’s creeping sense of the absurd had plenty to take in tonight.

Amy’s Ice Cream was the foremost chain of its kind in Austin, staffed by the young and hip—smaller versions of Kat, for the most part, and teenage boys with floppy hair and sleeve tattoos. It was decorated with cartoon cows and piped punk and metal over the loudspeakers, a study in contrasts that was typical of their fair city.

It was the only ice cream chain open past midnight, and also the only one in town that had a rotating selection of alcoholic flavors as well as the standard, mashed up with your choice of toppings from chocolate-covered Gummi Bears to granola.

Miranda took the waffle cone full of Mexican vanilla and fresh raspberries that she’d asked for, and licked the dripping edges off while David paid. She found an empty table and grabbed a handful of napkins before sitting down.

It always surprised her how many people craved ice cream when the weather was cold. Amy’s was never without a crowd even in the nastiest part of winter, and here at the leading edge of spring with a northern front about to hit, there were still half a dozen people occupying the tables in the middle of a Friday night.

David sat down across from her, resplendent in his black leather with his Signet glowing from his throat, holding a polka-dotted cup full of chocolate ice cream smothered in caramel praline sauce and hot fudge.

With sprinkles.

“I guess you’re not worried about diabetes.”

He ignored her and took a bite; the look on his face, one of unexpected bliss, made her forget how cold it was.

“I can’t believe you’ve lived here fifteen years and never been to Amy’s,” she said.

“God, neither can I.”

She smothered a giggle; she’d never heard him talk with his mouth full before. It made her think of the night she’d seen him sleeping—he probably would have been mortified at the idea of being adorable, but there were moments that he was almost human, and rather than lessening his allure, they intensified it.

They ate without talking for a while, but this time the silence was companionable, not strained. She pretended not to notice how his eyes lingered on her when she licked a stray dribble of ice cream from her cone, and he paid no heed to the way she kept catching herself staring at his mouth.

Finally, he couldn’t seem to stand it anymore. “So this Drew . . .”

She nearly inhaled her ice cream, recognizing the tone as one she’d never thought she would hear from him of all people. “Are you
jealous
?”

He met her eyes. “Insanely.”

Now it was her turn to blush. She suddenly found her napkin intensely fascinating. “It’s not what you think,” she said. “Kat was trying to fix us up, but I didn’t want that. When you got here, he’d just tried to . . . push the issue.”

Outrage bloomed in his eyes, and there was a hard edge in his voice. “Are you sure you don’t want me to kill him for you?”

“I can take care of myself,” she replied with a little flare of anger of her own. “I’m not your damsel in distress, David.”

He stared down into his ice cream. “I am aware of that.”

“Tell me why you’re here. After all this time, why now?”

David sat back and folded his hands in that molecular-level noble way he had, choosing his words with care. “Last night we destroyed the insurgents’ base.”

She nearly dropped her ice cream. “That house fire. That was you?”

“Yes. I tracked them over the citywide sensor network, and we killed them.”

“God . . . you mean it’s over?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know if it will ever be over, Miranda. There are still more of them out there in hiding. We’ve found a few, but evidence suggests we got two thirds of the total membership in the raid. Their leadership is gone, but they may still regroup and start again, this time even more aggressively out of the desire for revenge. There may also be other factions outside Austin waiting to be called in.”

“What you’re saying is that I’m going to be in danger for the rest of my life.”

“Probably.”

She shrugged and bit off one side of her ice cream cone. “So?”

He stared at her in open disbelief. “Aren’t you at least a little concerned for your own safety?”

She looked around the room, gesturing at the other people eating their ice cream in peace. “Look at all of them,” she said quietly. “They’re in as much danger as I am, but they don’t even know it. They don’t even know what’s sitting right next to them. Worry about them, David. I do. I see all these people living their lives, and I wonder which of them is next. But I don’t worry about me, not anymore. I’m strong and I can fight for my life. I know what’s out there. And I’ve lived in fear—I spent months jumping at shadows and crying myself to sleep. I’m not doing that again. Let them come and kill me—no, let them try. I think they’ll be surprised how hard it is.”

He was still staring, but now with wonder, and something like pride.

“Maybe you have the time to spend your life afraid,” she concluded. “I don’t.”

She went back to her ice cream, letting him take in what she’d said in stunned silence for a minute. “I guess I’ve changed,” she observed between bites.

Now he smiled. “No,” he said. “I always knew this was who you are. Now you know it, too. And now you know why I refused to give up on you.”

“Thank you,” she replied with a smile.

Another ice-cream-filled moment passed, and then he noted casually, “You look like you’ve been working out.”

“I have been. You look like you haven’t been sleeping.”

“I haven’t been.”

She took the last bite of her ice cream and wiped her mouth, then reached over and squeezed his hand lightly. “I’m sorry it’s been so hard,” she said. “How many Elite did you lose altogether?”

“Seven total. Eight, counting Helen. And forty-five humans. There was even . . .” He set down his spoon, pushing the cup away, saying, “There was a little boy. He and his mother were killed together. There were at least three other children as well, but I never saw their faces. This one . . .”

She held on to his fingers more tightly. “He reminded you of your son.”

“Yes. Not physically, really, just that innocence. They lose it so young, even without monsters in the night coming to rip their throats out. There’s no reason for it. We don’t have to end lives to survive, let alone the little ones. Despite what I am, I’ve never understood destruction for its own sake.”

She knew, hearing him speak, that he hadn’t told anyone what he was telling her. “But you stopped them,” she said. “At least for now. And if they know what’s good for them, they’ll leave town and not look back.”

He smiled with sad irony. “They never know what’s good for them.” He toyed with the spoon again, letting the mostly melted ice cream drip from it into the cup. “I failed them, Miranda. Fifty-three people died under my watch.”

“There could have been so many more,” she told him, trying to reassure him with both her words and her energy. “Not even a Prime can be everywhere at once. There’s only one of you to watch over all of us. Not even you can be perfect.”

He sighed. She had heard that sigh before. “I think I’m finished,” he said. “Do you want a bite before I throw the rest away?”

“Sure,” she said.

She started to reach for the spoon, but he lifted it first and held it out with a small mouthful captured in its bowl. She leaned forward and opened her mouth, lips closing around the spoon, but she barely tasted the ice cream; all she could feel were his eyes, and something in them made her shiver inside, a dark liquid heat spreading from her belly all the way down to her toes.

“Let’s go,” he said softly.

They walked back to her apartment close enough to touch, but not touching; Miranda tried not to let that make her insane. It felt so good just to talk to him again; she put that moment of heat between them out of her mind and fell into the rhythm of conversation.

He asked about her music and listened attentively as she recounted the crippling anxiety of her first few performances and how she had learned to use her gift to enhance, but not violate, the audience’s experience. She could gather up surface emotions and shift them little by little. It had taken a lot of practice.

They talked about the new Elite trials and Faith’s frustration with the new recruits, who weren’t nearly good enough to truly replace the dead. Miranda told him that Faith came to see her every week or two, and he didn’t seem surprised.

He told her more about the sensor network and the raid on the insurgents’ headquarters.

“Wait . . . you have one of them staying at the Haven?”

He nodded, and she had the sense that it was a subject he’d defended a hundred times already, most likely to Faith. “She’s under lock and key. As soon as she’s well enough to survive, I’m going to find out what she knows and then release her.”

Miranda smiled at that. “You do like to take in strays, don’t you?”

They stopped at a traffic light just as a blast of icy wind made its way down from the sky to the street, and she shivered a little in her coat, wishing she’d worn something heavier.

David reached over and took her hand. “Here,” he said.

She felt a surge of warmth travel from his body to hers, the way he had done the night he had found her in the alley, but this time it wasn’t just energy. When the WALK sign lit up and they crossed the road, he didn’t let go of her hand, and she didn’t pull away.

“It isn’t the same,” he told her, returning to the subject. “I don’t trust this woman. All we know about her is that Ariana hated her. That’s not a ringing endorsement. So far she’s done nothing but feed and sleep.”