Shadowstorm (The Shadow World Book 6) (21 page)

Miranda felt her teeth press into her lip. She allowed just the barest edge of her true identity to seep out from behind her shields, touching each human she passed. One by one they fell silent and shrank from the bars. They wouldn’t know why, they would not even be able to articulate it, but they would spend days jumping at noises after dark and feeling watched. The weaker among them would have dreams about black wings and dark water.

She smiled thinly and, just for fun, met one of their gazes and held it so long the man started sweating. When she looked away she could hear him panting and falling back onto the bench in his cell. She wondered what color her eyes were right then.

Maguire steered her into an empty cell and moved back so the bars could shut. The lock engaged, and Maguire gave her a parting look of mixed emotions—if he’d seen the evidence, whatever it was, had it changed how he felt about her? Or did he maintain her innocence no matter what?

She’d find out soon enough, she supposed. For now all she could do was sit and wait for the cavalry to arrive.

*****

“Miss Maguire, if you’ll all come with me,” the uniformed woman said, holding the stage door open. “I’ve been instructed to escort you back to the car.”

“But what happened?” Stella asked. “I heard the police took Miranda away — why would they do that?”

“I honestly don’t know, ma’am. I just have my orders.”

Stella gave Nico a helpless look. “I don’t know what’s going on.”

“Then we should do as the Pair have requested, and return home,” Nico told her, squeezing her hand. “I am sure an explanation is forthcoming.”

Kai, who emerged last from the venue, was smiling wryly as he said, “Besides, do you honestly think human authority could bring the two of them to harm? Inconvenience, perhaps. Consternation, undoubtedly. But genuine harm—I should like to see them try.”

Stella couldn’t help but think about Deven, wherever he was right now, and remember seeing him unconscious after his Consort was crushed by a building. That explosion had killed dozens of people and destroyed lives…it had led to Nico, one of the most powerful beings she’d ever met, suicidally depressed while Deven took massive doses of heroin in a desperate attempt not to feel.

Humans had done that.

A chill of foreboding ran through her. She didn’t have precog like Miranda did, but she wished she could knock on some wood.

Downtown Austin was practically boiling over with people that night. Nico’s hand in hers tightened every few minutes as he fought down panic over the crowds and the noise. It had been the chaos as much as the darkness that had freaked him out so badly back when David had tried to get him to hunt; this was one of only three times she could think of that he’d been in town since. They should have had the Pair and their bodyguards with them—they were all supposed to depart at the same time, and both vehicles had been parked together. Miranda would have had no trouble parting the sea of humans without even saying a word. Anyone who got too close to Nico would get the patented David Solomon Death Glare. And Stella would feel infinitely safer—funny, that she would worry way less in the care of vampire warriors than her own species.

The woman who’d taken charge of them had a backup guard, so at least they weren’t totally on their own. After a few minutes they finally broke through the crowd and angled off toward 11th. She remembered they’d parked there not far from the fortress-like Travis County Courthouse. Ironic considering where Miranda was now.

“Are we going all the way to the garage?” she asked their guard. “Usually Chris comes and meets us.”

“He is,” the guard replied absently. “Just up the block here.”

Stella stopped walking so abruptly that Nico ran into her back, but luckily Kai’s arm shot out and caught his brother, steadying them both.

The guard gave her a look of impatience with a touch of condescension. “What’s the problem?”

Stella looked her over head to foot — no anomalies, but… “You’re a lieutenant,” she said warily. “A lieutenant on public guard duty…which means you should know Chris is a woman. So either you’re a jerk playing pronoun roulette, or you’re an impostor. Which is it?”

The woman rolled her eyes and reached up to her ear. “Now,” she said.

Stella heard several tiny somethings whistling through the air, and felt one impact with the side of her neck. She slapped it like a mosquito, and her hand came away with a small wooden dart with a needle. The wood had been marked with symbols only a few millimeters tall, and even from her hand the dart smelled like…

“Magic,” she said hoarsely as the world began to swim around her. “Run—call—”

She heard the others sinking to the ground, but stayed on her feet desperately, dragging words out of her body as fast as she could and speaking into her com: “Star-One, Star-Two, this is Stella Maguire—we’ve been attacked, I think it’s Morningstar, we’ve been drugged and…”

She caught movement on a sort of time delay—she felt the fist hit her face before she saw it.

After that, darkness.

*****

Miranda Grey had a reputation, in the media, for being rather weird. Most of it was blamed on her “illness” and the rest usually chalked up to the strangeness of celebrities.

Her husband, on the other hand, was hardly ever seen, and a wide variety of rumors circulated about why—the most popular was that he was the leader of a drug cartel, or possibly the Mafia, and stayed out of the public eye to avoid being targeted by rivals. That one had always given Miranda the giggles:
Watch out for that ex-British ice cream addicted nerd Mafia. He made a fortune on the black market in World of Warcraft and will leave your avatar to swim with the fishes.

Overall they were considered an odd couple. Any married people who wore matching necklaces had to be a little bit batty. But for the most part David was an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a black leather coat…which made his arrival at the police station that much more hilarious, in her mind.

She sat in the cell with her eyes closed, listening to the natural ebb and flow of noise outside Holding, and when she sensed that glowering storm cloud of energy approaching, she smiled.

Apparently he’d decided to hell with anonymity. He walked into the station with four guards, not even attempting to look human or blend in. Much of the conversation in the foyer went silent, so it was even easier to hear his low, dangerous voice directed at the front desk clerk:

“Take. Me. To. My. Wife.”

“Sir, if you’ll—”

“Now.”

“…yes sir. Just, um…Johnson, would you lead Mr…um…to Interview 3? I’ll page Maguire and Myers.”

Someone, Johnson apparently, coughed and said, “I’m afraid you’ll need to leave your…escort? Outside, sir.”

“Fine.”

She knew that he’d have gestured at the guards to take up position on either side of the interrogation room door, and no doubt their obedience would make the whole situation that much stranger to the humans.

A moment later a harried-looking Detective Myers appeared and unlocked the cell.

Wordlessly, Miranda rose and walked past him, following the call of her Prime’s anger to room 3, giving a nod to the guards as she did.

It was a relief to notice that the room didn’t have the two-way mirror one often saw on TV. It was just as bleak, though, with that industrial green paint that seemed to coat the walls of every government building in Austin, one ancient office table, four chairs…and a laptop.

David stood when he saw her. “Are you all right?”

She smiled. It wasn’t something she’d admit often, but she loved it when he was angry. That killing light in his eyes was better than porn. “Yeah, I’m fine. Confused, pissed off, and I smell like a urinal, but fine.”

Maguire and Myers came into the room and closed the door; all four sat down, but Maguire said, “We should wait for the lawyer.”

“She’ll be here in 20 minutes,” David told them coldly. “But don’t worry — I have a law degree. Get on with it.”

Maguire shot him a look of surprise. “You do?”

He shrugged. “I got bored in the 90s.”

Miranda had actually forgotten about that—he had six or seven degrees, though just the one doctorate from MIT. That was the important one, in his mind. In fact the motto inscribed on his version of the Signet Seal was
Mens et Manus,
the same as the school’s.

“All right,” Myers said. He slid the laptop over and clicked a few things. “This will take a minute to load.”

She held back a giggle as David glanced at the logo on the laptop and made a faint, probably involuntary derisive sound.

Miranda knew she shouldn’t find this whole thing hysterically funny, but she did—a defense mechanism, she supposed. Like her mother had been wont to say, it was either laugh or never stop crying.

It was just so surreal…she’d been arrested. Like a human. For murder. There were paparazzi waiting for her outside the police station, probably already branding her the next crack-addled falling star. They wouldn’t know why she was here yet, and speculation would probably turn first to drugs or a disgruntled ex-employee.

Maguire was fiddling with the recording device, which looked pretty ancient. She knew that APD had some sophisticated tech at its disposal for forensics, but they had to cut corners somewhere.

He got it working, however, and said, “Please state your name for the record.”

“Miranda Grey-Solomon.”

He went through a quick list of mundane questions: birthdate, birthplace, a few basic facts. Then, he produced a photograph and slid it over to her. “Do you recognize this woman?”

She looked down at the picture—a laughing, bright-eyed Hispanic woman in a UT shirt. “No.”

“You might recognize her better here.”

The second picture was dramatically different. It was clearly the same woman, but she was emaciated and had huge dark circles under her dull eyes. She was pretty clearly strung out on something.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know her.”

Maguire nodded. “How about here?”

The third picture made her stomach twist on itself with dread. In this one the woman was dead, lying on top of a body bag, filthy. She had clearly been dead for a while, though Miranda didn’t know enough about decomposition to say how long.

What made her insides lurch, however, was the pair of neat puncture wounds in her throat.

“Annalise Vitera, aged 34, found in a dumpster behind a Korean restaurant downtown. Cause of death was exsanguination, most likely through those two punctures you see in the picture.”

“How exactly is that possible?” she asked. “There’s no blood on the body.”

“We were hoping you could tell us,” Myers said. He turned the laptop around to face her.

Miranda stared at the screen, schooling her expression to a careful neutral, but behind the mask she was shaking. A grainy video, apparently shot from a security camera, showed a woman in black with curly red hair leading the woman from the pictures into the alley, then pinning her against a wall and very obviously biting her throat. About three minutes later the woman slumped down to the ground.

The camera wasn’t stationary, however—it switched to a different angle after a minute, then to another, then two others before returning to the original frame…and by then both redhead and dead woman had vanished.

“You think that’s me, in the video,” she said. “Because there aren’t any other redheads around?”

“Watch it again,” Myers said. “Pay special attention to the 2:52 mark.”

This time, he put that section of the recording in slow motion. Miranda watched, holding her breath, as the killer in the video turned her face toward the camera for just a second—long enough, though, to capture the image in several frames of the recording. It still wasn’t 100% clear, but it would be hard to argue with anyone who said it was Miranda…especially since when she looked toward the camera, something red could be seen glowing at her neck.

Shit. Shit shit shit.

David spoke up suddenly, and as often happened, he startled both detectives; he’d been playing invisible, basically, so they wouldn’t pay any attention to him. “What led you to this woman’s body, exactly? Was she reported missing?”

“No,” Maguire said. “We received this video anonymously several days ago.”

“If this is all you have, Detective, you’re wasting our time,” David told them.

“As it happens, we were able to get a saliva sample from the wound.” Myers placed a piece of paper in front of her. “This is a court order for your DNA sample.”

She looked at David, close to panicking, but he gave an almost imperceptible nod; he knew way more about the strange quirks of vampire anatomy, and he thought she should go along with it. Fine.

“All right,” she said. “Whatever it takes for you to figure out this is ridiculous — I mean, what’s my motive? I don’t have any connection with this woman. Do you really think I’m walking around the city killing random people by biting them?”

“As a matter of fact I do,” Myers said. “Let’s add it up: you can’t produce a solid alibi for the time of death. You’re famous for people thinking you’re a vampire, and that disease you supposedly have is known to affect people’s mental state. Fame does things to people—everyone knows you have some strange habits. It’s not that hard to imagine you might read all these stories about yourself, go over the edge due to your condition, and start believing it’s all true.”

She couldn’t help it. She laughed.

Both detectives looked at her with alarm. She fell silent immediately; so, laughing at a murder accusation wasn’t a good thing. Good to know.

Maguire wouldn’t meet her eyes. She made sure to address Myers — the fewer lies Maguire got caught up in the better. “I’m sorry, I just…you are honestly telling me that I think I’m a vampire, and I’m going around sucking people to death. Do you hear yourselves?”

“We have you on video, Mrs. Solomon. We’re currently combing it, the alley, and Ms. Vitera’s body for any and all trace evidence, and if we get so much as a speck of DNA that looks like yours, you’re done.”