Queen of Shadows (9 page)

She didn’t. Running from fear only made it chase you.

The Prime took a deep breath, withdrawing his aura to its normal level. She’d always admired his control, but she also knew it wasn’t infallible . . . and neither, apparently, was what he had built.

“Report,” he said.

She nodded briskly. “The rescue team arrived to find four bodies, all shot full of wooden-shafted crossbow bolts. It appears they were fired on from the building across the street. There was no immediate evidence of who killed them, but we’re running a check on the arrows to see if we can nail down the manufacturer and go from there.”

“All right.” David looked to each patrol leader in turn. “I’ll be making an upgrade later tonight but not until I’ve found out where the leak is and we’ve dealt with him appropriately. I want all of you on high alert the minute you set foot in the city now. Obviously the situation is escalating. You’ll be advised of further developments as they come. Dismissed.”

A chorus of “Yes, Sires,” and everyone but Faith left.

She leaned forward and put her hands on the table. “There was nothing we could do. By the time Malia called in, it was too late. The nearest team we had was ten minutes away.”

He looked like he wanted to break things, but there wasn’t anything in the conference room that would do unless he wanted to fling furniture, and she knew he wasn’t given to that kind of dramatic display. The going rumor was that he was incapable of emotion, and though she knew better, she could see where the story had come from.

“Come,” he said, rising.

She followed him down the stairs to the server room, the nerve center of the network he had created from the ground up. That network was his baby, and the idea that someone had broken into it probably made him angrier than the loss of four Elite. Every Signet in the world knew that the Southern network was the pinnacle of communications technology. If word got out that it had been hacked . . .

“Have a seat.”

She slid into a chair beside him while he took out his laptop and logged on to the main server. She wished she’d remembered how cold it was down here—he kept a sweater slung over his chair, and she really ought to squirrel one away in the cabinet.

Every single transmission sent over the coms, over e-mail, and over their phone lines was routed through this room, recorded and documented down to the word. Everyone who worked for the Haven knew there was no such thing as private communication except for between Faith and the Prime himself.

She smiled to herself.
You can’t stop the signal.

“How in the hell could someone hack us?” she asked, disbelieving. “As many layers of authentication as we have, and with the voice recognition built into the system, what kind of crazy genius could out-crazy-genius you?”

“That’s the problem,” he muttered, his eyes on the screen. “The more complicated a system is, the more likely it is that a complete moron can bring it down. The simplest route is usually the one that’s overlooked. Here . . . the logs for Malia’s patrol. Everything routine . . .” He sighed as he read, and she moved closer to see what had been going on.

Everything was so normal it hurt. The patrol unit talked and joked with each other as they made their usual sweep of Austin’s west side. It was the most affluent section of town, so there was rarely anything to do. That was why she’d assigned the youngest, least experienced Elite to the unit. That was probably why the attackers had chosen them, too.

Malia was a bright, cheerful woman, and while she wasn’t the best warrior, what she lacked in fighting skill she made up for in leadership ability. Everyone liked her. She would have risen through the ranks eventually once she matured a little.

That would never happen now. She and Mickey and Jones and Parvati were all gone, all erased from the night in a few short minutes of vengeance and blood.

“We have to stop them,” Faith said, surprising herself with the emotion in her words.

David looked up at her. “We will.” There was a burning intensity in his eyes, and she believed him. His word was law.

“Here . . . right here is where the distress call came in, at 22:34. There was no verbal message, just coordinates sent via the emergency protocol. Well, that’s not going to happen again. From now on all emergency calls will require voice recognition—I don’t care if it slows the response time.”

He was mostly talking to himself, which had always amused her to hear, and as he spoke his fingers were flying over the keyboard. At least four windows were up on the screen, and another two or three on the second monitor to the left, and he was working in all of them at once, tabbing between them with lightning rapidity. One was the network log, another the code for the emergency system, another some sort of logarithm he was actually working out in his head while he did everything else.

And people thought telekinesis was the scariest thing he could do.

Another window appeared. “I’m tracking the distress call,” he said for Faith’s benefit. “Location, frequency, duration . . . everything is normal. The encoding . . . son of a bitch.”

He sat back hard.

“What?”

“Do you see that?” he pointed at the screen.

“That squiggly line with all the gibberish? You’re going to have to translate it into Normal People-ese.”

“This is the carrier signal of the false distress call. It’s in-network. Passwords, voice recognition, everything passed security when they logged on, because the network wasn’t hacked from outside.”

“It came from one of us,” Faith said, shocked. “One of the Elite sent the call.”

“I designed this to be nearly impossible to break into from the outside, but apparently there’s a flaw in our personnel screening methods. Somehow a mole slipped by the background checks, the applications, the evaluations . . . or, they changed allegiance after joining.”

“How do we find them?”

“If this were a normal system, we couldn’t. He or she is a skilled enough programmer that when I try to trace the signal to its location of origin, it reroutes itself and gets caught in a loop. But this system has a few fail-safes that our spy didn’t count on.”

“Such as?”

“This,” David replied, unlocking one of the cabinets to his left and removing a small metal box. It, too, was locked, but with a fingerprint recognition system, which he opened, revealing what looked like an ordinary USB drive.

He plugged the drive into his laptop and closed out most of the windows on the screen. A new program started running.

Faith tried to interpret what she was seeing, eyes narrowed. “What the hell is that?”

He smiled grimly. “Have you ever looked at the underside of your com?”

“No . . . it’s blank, just like the front, right?”

“There’s a sensor built into it that tracks the wearer’s personal energy signature. It’s a combination of psychic aura, body temperature, and a tiny sample of DNA from the skin cells that rub onto the band. This database holds the records of everyone who’s ever worked for me and cross-references them with the data from the coms themselves. That’s why the coms are issued to only one person and destroyed upon death. They send in new DNA info every time that person logs on for duty—not a full scan but enough markers to match it to the issued wearer.”

He made a few clicks and the computer ran a search comparing the night’s DNA readings with the database of everyone who had ever worn a com. “The person who made the distress call could get around the voice recognition system and the password database, but this fail-safe is completely unknown to everyone outside this room. In a moment we’ll have the identity of whoever was wearing the com the distress call came from.”

Faith gaped at him. “How in the hell did you do this?”

He looked at her as if she’d asked the dumbest question in history. “I’m brilliant.”

She knew she wasn’t going to get any more of an answer. She mentally added biochemistry and genetics to the list of things he had learned at MIT.

A beep, and the search completed, much faster than Faith would have expected. A name popped up.

“No,” Faith said. “It must be wrong.”

“It’s a perfect match.” David’s eyes were growing pale again. “Have a team ready in five minutes. I’ll meet you there.”

Miranda woke to a feeling of cold anger coupled with dread in the pit of her stomach.

She looked around, trying to figure out what was going on that felt so wrong, but realized it wasn’t coming from her—the dread was, but it was in reaction to the wrath, which emanated from someone else, someone she hadn’t expected to ever see angry.

She got up, pleased that her body felt a lot less weak after her nap, and made her way over to the door, cautiously turning the knob to peek out.

Everything seemed normal.

“Do you need something, Miss Grey?” Helen asked. She and Samuel were at their usual posts, keeping watch.

“No . . . I don’t think so, thanks.”

As she started to shut the door again, Miranda froze.

A group of four Elite walked around the corner into the hallway, deadly purpose in their steps. Faith was leading them, and the Second’s face was set with a gravity that made Miranda’s stomach lurch. Something was very, very wrong.

To her left, Helen tensed.

A few seconds later, the Prime entered the hallway, and again Miranda’s insides flipped around in fear. This Prime was not the same man who had walked with her in the garden. He wasn’t even the same man who had sat opposite her and drilled her in energy work only an hour ago.

This was the most powerful vampire in the southern United States.

Seeing him surrounded by others made it even more obvious, but she would never have mistaken him for any other in a crowd with his aura showing in her mind as a burnished silver, shot through with black and bloody red. His eyes were strange—they looked paler, grayer, as if they’d gone from deep azure to silver. When he was halfway down the hall, she realized that was exactly what had happened.

This was a creature with blood on his mind.

“Elite Twenty-three,” Faith said, coming to stand in front of the door, “stand down.”

Miranda wanted to retreat into the bedroom and hide until it was over, but she couldn’t move.

Helen, on the other hand, could.

The guard threw herself backward, into the doorway, knocking door and Miranda both back into the room. Miranda was so stunned she couldn’t react until Helen had her arm around Miranda’s throat and hauled her upright, using her as a human shield.

“Stay back!” Helen cried.

The rest of the Elite, including Samuel, who had been about to jump at Helen, paused, turning back to their leader.

In a different situation Miranda might have thought the look on David’s face was funny.

“Let her go,” he said very, very calmly. There was a light in his eyes, a killing light, and the stone of his Signet was glowing noticeably brighter. “Don’t make this worse for yourself than it already is.”

“Why not?” Helen hissed. Her voice sounded odd, and Miranda realized her fangs were out. Icy fear gripped Miranda’s entire body.

Not again. Not again. Oh God please . . .

“You’re going to torture and kill me, right? I might as well take out this pretty little meat puppet while I’m at it.”

A guttural male voice echoed in Miranda’s head.
“. . . pretty little thing’s awake . . .”

She could hear a zipper sliding down, feel sweaty hands on her breasts. The warm, firelit bedroom and the chaotic scene melted away, and she was back in the alley again, her bare back grinding into the cold concrete.

Not again.

She couldn’t breathe. Helen was choking her.

It didn’t matter.

Miranda reached into herself for the rage that had given her the power to kill the men in the alley, their faces and voices playing over and over again in her mind, amplified by her own screams, until the voices drowned out everything, and all that she could hold on to was
feeling
.

She struck.

David had had shields standing between him and the wrath of a violated woman; Helen had no such thing. The power that the Prime had deflected so easily roared into the guard before she could even attempt to protect herself.

Helen made a choking, gurgling sound, and her arm fell slack. She threw up both hands to scrabble at her forehead as if she were trying to claw something out and whimpered in childlike terror with her eyes huge and rolling. Helen fisted her hands in her hair, clamping her eyes shut, the whimpers building toward screams until David stepped forward, seized her, and broke her neck with an audible crack.

Miranda toppled forward, coughing, gulping air in great lungfuls, her vision swimming. She landed on her hands and knees and let her forehead touch the cool floor, still trying to catch her breath as behind her she heard the Elite coming into the room and surrounding Helen’s body.

“Let’s move,” Faith said. “She’ll be conscious again in an hour. Get her up and to the interrogation room.”

Miranda looked up. How could she not be dead?

“She’s a vampire,” David said from the doorway. “We’re hard to kill.”