Shadowbound (17 page)

The sun was well up outside by now; the main part of the barn was run through with shafts of light that kept the hayloft from being as dark as she might have liked, but still, it was safe and warm.

Her phone rang. It took a moment of groping with the ache in her arms, but she found it in her pocket. “Hello?”

“Thank God you’re safe.” David’s voice crackled and skipped from the poor signal.

“Hey, baby. Where are you?”

“. . . motel about an hour outside Rio Verde . . . be there as soon as I can. Have you fed?”

“No. Not a whole lot of people wandering around the barn. But I’m okay for now.”

“I’ll have some with me when . . . get there. You only have to last until sunset.”

“I’ll be fine.”

Most people wouldn’t be able to hear the rough edge of worry in his voice, but she certainly could as he said, “Tell Deven he’d better take good care of you or I’ll yank his piercings out . . . and I won’t start with his face.”

“Understood,” Deven said, leaning toward the phone. “Now stop pacing around your room and go to sleep.”

“Fine . . . both of you get some rest. We’ll all be home soon.”

“How are you really feeling?” Deven asked after they hung up. “You don’t sound fine.”

She drew a shaky breath. “I’m hungry. It’s getting harder to ignore. I’ll make it until sunset, but I’m probably going to get good and bitchy pretty soon. Distract me . . . tell me more about this Nico of yours.”

“He’s not mine,” he said a little too quickly. She peered at him curiously, taking a moment to read the surface emotions she could sense; he was unusually open at the moment, and what she saw surprised her. At the look on her face, he added, “It’s not like that.”

“Are you sure?” she asked. “It feels like that to me.”

He toyed with one of her curls for a while, then said, “He told me he loves me.”

“And what did you say?”

“That it’s not going to happen. I care about Nico . . . God knows I do . . . there’s a connection between us that runs deep. He understands something about me no one else ever could. But the fact is, I can count the actual relationships I’ve had in my life on the fingers of one hand. Of those, the only one that didn’t end in misery was Jonathan. I know that no matter what, he’ll never leave me. He’s my North Star, my constant. I don’t care what he says—he might honestly be okay with it, but I’m not. And Nico says he loves me now, but he’ll be gone in a few days, and if I indulge in what seems like a harmless dalliance, I’ll have to live with the damage I cause to the one heart that truly matters. I don’t think I’m that powerful a healer.”

She nodded slowly. “I agree and I disagree,” she said. “I agree that Jonathan feels more than he claims to about the whole thing, even though I don’t think he’s aware of it. I think he would go to his grave defending your right to be with whomever you wanted. But I disagree that anything with you and this guy would be a dalliance. I can sense it . . . if you ever let yourself feel for him, he’d have you for good. So it’s best, I guess, that you don’t . . . of course, emotions aren’t really subject to choice. Only actions are.”

Deven didn’t say anything to that, just shook his head.

Miranda began to feel sleepy; exhaustion pulled at all her limbs, the strain of the night’s events finally overriding her hunger—or, perhaps, she was being helped along in that direction by the subtle yet noticeable current of energy that was still flowing through her.

Well, that was one way to change the subject.

With a sigh, she turned her face into Deven’s shoulder and closed her eyes.

 • • • 

Deven looked down from the stacked hay bales where he perched, trying to get enough of a signal on his phone to check in with David. How did people in this backwater plan a battle?

Down in the barn the light was beginning to turn watery and blue. Another hour and the sun would be far enough down that it was safe outside. Best guess, David was about an hour away. The timing was a bit troublesome.

They were in the safest possible place in the event of an attack; the only way up, assuming one couldn’t climb the walls or jump fifteen feet, was the single rickety ladder. Easy enough to defend. He had a full complement of weapons, and though Miranda hadn’t brought Shadowflame she had at least two blades on her that he’d seen.

Miranda stirred and woke. “Everything okay?” she asked with a yawn.

“Looks like we may have company,” he replied. “David got his Morningstar-sensing scanner thing up and limping; he’s pretty sure there’s a fuckload of them headed out here. They’ll probably arrive right before he does, so we might have to fend them off for a few minutes.”

“How many is a fuckload?”

“More than an assload, less than a fuckton.”

She laughed and pushed herself to her feet. She still looked exhausted, even after hours of sleep. She needed to feed, soon, or her strength reserves would burn out. As it was, he wasn’t optimistic that she’d be able to fight. It was a testament to her newly won strength that she was upright at all after being staked to the ground all day.

“I don’t get it,” the Queen said. “If they had more people, why didn’t they just come get us during the day?”

“I don’t know. I know that they brought these people in from Houston, so it took a few hours to mobilize the troops and make the trip, but for some reason they still don’t seem to want to attack during daylight. I guess that’s the next mystery to solve. For now, gift horse, mouth.”

Miranda took up her knives from the hay bale where all their weapons were waiting and buckled them on, then pulled on her coat. Deven hopped down and joined her to do the same thing, but it took him a lot longer as he had fourteen weapons total—seven he’d taken off and left on the hay bale so he could curl up with Miranda without poking her somewhere unfortunate, and seven he’d kept on.

The Queen grimaced. “I might not be much good in a fight—my arms feel like they’re made of lead. I thought you healed all of that?”

He looked her up and down. “I can’t really help the fatigue because it’s hunger-based. Not even I can draw blood from nowhere. I was conservative with the energy because I was worried that too much would have you unconscious for days. But I can deal with residual pain; come here.”

She did, and he took both of her wrists in hand and concentrated on them for a moment. As she watched, his eyes darkened from lavender to deep violet, then faded back again as the pain in her arms faded. She didn’t remember ever seeing them do that before.

Miranda started to step back, but suddenly Deven froze, tightening his grip on her arms. She turned her head to look out at the barn. “What . . .”

There it was again: a car door slamming.

The sun was still half an hour up. It wasn’t David.

“They’re here,” Miranda said softly.

He listened hard and with a sinking heart counted the doors: two, four, eight, twelve. Assuming eight passengers per vehicle . . . Focusing even more, he counted the quiet sounds of boots on the dry, hard-packed ground outside.

Miranda shook her head, frowning. “How many?”

“Thirty.”

She paled. “That’s a fuckload.”

“How many can you take?”

“Last time I was in a group fight I was against a dozen, but they would have killed me if David hadn’t appeared. Right now? Not that many. You?”

“In straight combat I could take out around fifteen without much trouble. From up here, with only one way to reach us, if there are no crossbows I can deal with them all.”

“We have to assume they’ll have at least a few arrows.” The Queen crossed her arms, standing on the edge of the hayloft, narrowing her eyes. “Let me handle those. I can concentrate my strength on the most strategic targets.”

He started to say something, but a loud noise startled them both into silence.

Another vehicle had arrived outside, this one with a deafening diesel engine, and as it came to a stop there were a series of clanks, a grinding sound . . . and then another engine roaring to life, along with the shrill beep of something big backing up.

“What. The hell. Is that?”

He ignored the Queen for a moment and stared across the barn at one of the thin gaps in the slats; it only afforded an inch or two of the view, but what he saw was something truck-sized and yellow-orange being maneuvered toward the barn.

“It’s a bulldozer,” Deven said. “They’re going to bring the building down.”

Seven

Miranda just stared at him, while outside the beeping and engine grinding continued. “You can’t be serious.”

“What else do you think it could be?”

She looked out over the barn, evaluating the waning light and scent of the air. “Twenty minutes until sunset,” she said. “What happens if we’re exposed to dusk this late?”

Deven didn’t seem afraid, but then, she wasn’t sure he was capable of fear; truth be told he didn’t even look particularly worried, just irritated. “Dawn and dusk are kind of a gray area. Right now a good long exposure, say a full sixty seconds, would kill us . . . and if you thought those stakes hurt, you’re in for a much more unpleasant surprise.”

Her heart was pounding—she remembered that brief moment in Stella’s apartment when she’d been exposed. She stepped back, and again, wanting nothing more than to dive into the hay and curl up in a ball.

“It definitely won’t take them twenty minutes to knock down the walls,” she said.

“Probably not. Hitting a few load-bearing beams would make short work of a shack like this.”

She made a helpless gesture. “Why the hell aren’t you worried? How can you be so calm?”

The Prime raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know if you knew this, but the Queen I’m trapped in here with is a telekinetic empath.”

“But I can’t move something I can’t see!”

“And your empathic gift can’t penetrate a barn door?” He gave her a somewhat weary smile. “How disappointing.”

Miranda shot him a look of annoyance but grounded herself and reached out toward the world outside. She tried to ignore the continuing sounds of the humans outside revving up the bulldozer and turning it so it faced the barn door; she extended her senses slowly, touching each mind she felt to give her an idea of the size of the crowd.

Deven’s count had been right: thirty.

“Weird,” she murmured without losing the vision. “Their minds are . . . I don’t know, it’s like they’re all copies of the same mind. They aren’t exactly a hive, but they all have the same emotions . . . the same programming.”

She followed the sounds of the engine and looked for the person closest to it, the driver. Pushing a surge of power toward the man, she loaded it with the most disruptive thing she could think of: panic.

Run. They’re going to kill you. Run. Run!

She heard a scream, and a commotion; the driver all but fell off his seat and bolted. To her shock, she heard a familiar click and whistle—they shot him.

Another human was already climbing into the driver’s seat. Miranda pulled her energy back from the first man and threw it hard at the second. He, too, leapt from the seat and ran, and he, too, fell with a crossbow bolt in his back.

A third human started to replace him, but before Miranda could ready another hit, she heard someone bark,
“Forget the walls! They’ve got an empath! Move in!”

Miranda looked at Deven. “That leaves twenty-eight.”

Before she even got the sentence out, a wave of nausea and exhaustion hit her—already weakened, she’d overextended her gift. She didn’t have the energy to take down all of them that way—she had to pace herself.

The barn door shuddered, then splintered, falling off its hinges to the ground. The light that flooded in was bright enough to make her head pound, but she’d managed to stall them just enough that it was no longer genuinely dangerous.

From here on out, it was a fight to the death.

What seemed like a hundred uniformed humans poured into the door, some armed with crossbows, others with swords. The first arrows were already flying before the whole unit had even crossed the threshold.

Miranda ducked one that came at her head. Beside her, she heard Deven draw his sword.

“Stay up here as long as you can,” he said. “They can only come up the ladder single file—you can knock them down from there.”

“But where are you—”

Without another word, he jumped off the edge of the hayloft; her heart crawled up into her throat as he spun in midair, slicing open the throat of the closest human before he’d even landed.

A group of soldiers rushed him, and two were down in mere seconds. Meanwhile others kept firing up at her, and four more humans ran for the ladder, trying to scale it as quickly as possible. They were, she noticed, remarkably fast, just as she’d heard; she had never seen humans move like that. Up until that moment she hadn’t entirely believed it was possible.

Miranda made for the ladder. The first man reached the top, and she seized him by the shirt collar and hauled him up with her, letting the slowly mounting hunger she’d been fighting off all day have its way with him. The second soldier made it to the top, but without lifting her mouth from her prey’s throat, she wrenched herself around and kicked the ladder hard, sending it, and the three humans attempting to climb it, to the ground in a heap.

His blood hit her system like dynamite—and, with only a split second’s thought that she was going to kill him one way or another, she kept drinking until he stopped fighting her, until that rush of death flowed into her body and renewed every single tired, aching cell. She didn’t have time to truly enjoy it, though.

She shoved him off onto the fight below and, smiling, wiped the blood from her mouth. She felt awake again . . . awake, alive . . . and spoiling for a fight.

The Queen backflipped, pushing herself off the hayloft’s edge with her hands, and hit the ground rolling sideways until she was upright; the knives were in her hands, and the one in her left had already slammed into a human’s chest.

She looked over at Deven, who seemed to be enjoying himself. He had another five dead, strewn about the ground like fallen leaves.