Shadowflame (31 page)

“Yes. We ran the number 4.19 through our database trying to match it to known organizations, codes, and significant dates, but got nothing. I would assume that
scarlet
refers to the Red Shadow.”

“What about the other side?”

“That was a lot harder, but we did the same to it, and came up with this.”

Novotny spun the image around and flipped it, showing what amounted to half of a symbol on the screen.

David sat forward, his mouth falling open.

Beside him, Faith asked, “Is that what I think it is?”

“Show me the other side again,” David commanded.

Novotny shrugged and complied.

“Oh, God.”

Faith stared at the Prime. “What?”

David put his hand over his mouth, his heart frozen in his chest. It was a moment before he could speak. “I know that handwriting.”

Just then, his phone tolled out a network alarm, as both his and Faith’s coms burst to life and her phone began to ring.

Miranda let her instincts guide her around the side of the building to an unlit entrance that had obviously been jimmied open. Her mind still swimming from the Mist, she slid in the door, all her senses going into predator mode. Her vision morphed into blues and purples in the darkness, showing her details no mortal could see from tiny cracks in the plaster to the footprints of mice on the tile.

It was ten o’clock at night, and the building should have been empty. It was a small charter school that specialized in fine arts and languages, and Drew taught music both during the day and for free in the evenings to underprivileged kids. There were only three classrooms and a few offices. She’d been there twice before when she was still human.

She listened intently, extending her energy along the hallway to look for life signs. She might be wrong . . . Drew might already have left . . .

She heard a scream.

Miranda broke into a run, following the tortured sound to the last classroom branching off the hallway. There was faint light coming from the door; she remembered that the classrooms had windows along one wall.

She burst into the room snarling.

Desks had been shoved in all directions; in the center of the chaos a figure crouched over another, and the smell of blood hit Miranda’s nostrils with the force of a gale wind.

The figure turned and rose, and Miranda heard the sound of a sword being drawn.

“You,” Miranda hissed.

The assassin smiled nastily but didn’t speak. It was, without doubt, the same woman who had shot Miranda—even without her wig or the librarian glasses, Miranda knew her face.

Behind the woman, a phone began to ring—Miranda’s eyes darted to the cell phone on the floor, then to Drew’s outstretched hand, and the blood flowing from the wrist that the woman had only partially managed to slice before being interrupted. From the amount of blood he had to have other wounds, and Miranda could tell he’d been beaten—he had tried to put up a fight, but against a vampire with a sword, there was no chance. She saw Drew’s agonized face, felt him about to scream again.

Miranda spared a thread of power to take hold of Drew’s mind and calm him, to let him know it would be all right, that help was coming—but she didn’t have time to speak before the assassin took advantage of her distraction and dove in for the attack.

The Queen threw herself into the fight, dodging the woman’s sword by a scant half inch and spinning around to counter the stroke.

Miranda knew from the beginning that she was outmatched, but she didn’t care. All she had to do was keep the woman here until the others arrived, and the building would be surrounded with Elite. David would be there any moment, too, and although Miranda might not be able to take the woman down, he sure as hell could.

They fought from one end of the classroom to the other, the assassin shoving desks at her, Miranda jumping over them and meeting her sword slash for slash.

She could feel Drew weakening. She urged him to take his jacket off and press the fabric against his wrist—he was too far in shock to think of it on his own, but under her influence he did as she commanded, holding the jacket with a shaking hand. Miranda could hear someone speaking . . . the phone? Yes, it was Kat’s voice—Drew must have answered it.

The woman made for the door, and Miranda flung herself toward it, reaching out with her mind to try to grab the nearest desk and pull it in the way; she saw it scoot a few inches, but that was all the concentration she could manage in the middle of a fight, and she ran for the doorway on the woman’s heels.

The shadows inside the door frame seemed to shift and coalesce.

The Prime walked into the room, sword already drawn, and the woman changed course at the last second to avoid slamming into him; she skidded on the concrete floor and nearly lost her footing but got control back in time to parry the Prime’s attack and double back toward Miranda.

For a few seconds the woman was caught between Prime and Queen, but Faith’s voice erupted from the coms:
“Incoming!”

David grabbed Miranda’s arm and hauled her to the floor. They both dropped flat just in time with the sounds of shattering glass from the wall of windows, the click and whistle of a half-dozen crossbows, and the singing of wood through the air.

Miranda craned her neck to see two of the stakes hit the woman—one in her shoulder, one in her chest to the left of her heart. She flew backward, her sword clattering to the ground, the light catching off something shiny at her neck that also fell as she stumbled.

Miranda was sure she would fall, but by some twisted miracle, the woman stayed on her feet, blood streaming down her torso. She looked over and met Miranda’s eyes.

“Give my regards to the Alpha,” she hissed.

Then she ran forward, throwing herself into the glass wall and tackling one of the Elite who had fired at her. The two hit the ground hard, but the woman used the Elite’s body as a springboard and sprinted past the others, who were immediately after her.

“Tracking!”
Faith said.
“We’ve got her on the network, Sire! Four units in pursuit.”

Miranda pushed herself up to her hands and knees and got across the floor to Drew. She was about to com out for an ambulance, but she could already hear sirens in the distance; Faith, or David, must have called already.

“Drew,” Miranda said. “Drew, can you hear me?”

She knelt next to him, tears already coming to her eyes. There was so much blood. Miranda quickly cataloged the visible injuries: hand severed, stab wounds in his stomach and shoulder . . . there was at least one penetrating wound to his lower back, maybe his kidney, but she didn’t want to risk turning him over.

David joined her. His face had that blank expressionless look that Miranda recognized, and her heart sank.

“Keep pressure on the wound,” he said quietly.

Their eyes met over Drew’s battered body. Miranda knew what he was thinking. There was too much blood, and they had no healer. He’d been lying there bleeding for nearly ten minutes and it would take an ambulance another two to reach them.

“Miranda . . .” Drew whispered raggedly. “Give . . . give me the phone . . . please.”

Miranda grabbed the cell and said into it, “Kat? Kat, honey, are you still there?”

Kat practically screamed,
“What’s happening? Miranda, where is he?”

“Here.” Miranda choked on a sob, lowering the phone to Drew’s face.

“Hey, baby,” he said, coughing. His breath came in shallow gasps.

Miranda could hear Kat talking to him, could hear her crying.

“It’s okay,” Drew said. “Kat . . . just listen to me.”

Miranda could hear the paramedics coming down the hall.

“I love you,” Drew told Kat. “Very much. The baby, too. I think . . . you’re going to make a great mom. I love you.”

Softly, Miranda heard Kat say the same to him.

“Thanks,” Drew managed weakly, looking up at Miranda. “Take care of her, okay?”

Miranda nodded. “I promise.”

“Good . . . that’s good . . .” His fingers barely returned the pressure of Miranda’s, then slowly relaxed . . .

. . . and it was over.

The paramedics and two additional units of Elite entered the classroom to find the Queen weeping into the Prime’s arms, as both knelt in a broad pool of blood, and a woman sobbed quietly over the phone that lay on the floor.

Miranda stared dumbly at the printout David had given her, trying to understand what she was seeing. Her wornout, bewildered mind simply refused to accept it.

“What do we do?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” the Prime replied. He looked as exhausted and heartsick as she felt. “I honestly don’t know.”

Outside the car windows’ heavy tint, the countryside scrolled by. Miranda wanted nothing more than to fall asleep and not wake up until the world made sense again. She was completely drained, both from the fight with the assassin and from her first real Mist—it was remarkable she hadn’t ended up scattered across Austin. Between that and the weight of sorrow and guilt from Drew’s death, she was perilously close to losing it.

It was only an hour before sunrise, and Harlan was breaking several traffic laws to get them home before it began to get light out. Dealing with the police had taken a lot longer than Miranda expected—the first responders had not been the people the Haven normally dealt with, and they wanted to take a lot of pictures and ask a lot of questions that were unnecessary and tedious. Finally David had simply called the chief of police and cut through all the red tape.

Kat had been taken to the Hausmann for observation in case the trauma had affected the baby, but so far all she’d done was sit and stare off into space, barely rousing enough to answer when the paramedics asked her for details that she hadn’t been able to give. She had, as Miranda had asked, stayed in the car until the Queen came to her and led her over to the gurney to provide a positive ID on Drew’s body. She had nodded at the police and then gone essentially unresponsive.

Miranda had directed the Elite to make sure Kat was brought to the Haven as soon as the doctors deemed her fit, probably the next evening.

Finally, the Pair had headed home. They had changed into the spare set of clothes that they kept in the trunk, so at least Miranda didn’t have to spend the whole drive back to the Haven soaked in Drew’s blood, but she could still smell it, though she’d washed her hands and face and everything she could in the school’s restroom.

“This is how it goes, isn’t it?” Miranda said softly, staring out the car window. “One by one we lose everyone we knew.”

David looked at her, and she could tell he wanted to be reassuring but couldn’t lie to her. “That’s what we are, beloved. We stand outside time and watch it slowly consume everything. My son died, his children died, their children died . . . the line continues, spread throughout the gene pool, but everything that made me human has long since faded.”

She half smiled. “You’re still more human than most of the men I’ve ever known.”

“Thank you.”

“I don’t know if I can do this,” she said.

“You can. You are Queen, Miranda. The strength you need is part of who you are.”

“Sophie told me once that this life was a gift, and that I had to think long and hard about whether I was worthy, because there was no giving it back.”

She looked down at the sword that lay across her lap, and the one lying on the floorboard wrapped in fabric—the assassin’s blade. “I wasn’t fast enough to kill her,” Miranda lamented. “I wish I could have. I wish I had seen her bleed to death instead of Drew.”

“So do I.”

“What did Faith say?”

David sighed. “They lost her trail. She dropped off the network again about two miles into the pursuit, then detoured and disappeared into the city. After that it was so close to dawn I had to call them back. By dusk whatever trail is left will be cold.”

“But she showed up on the sensors for a few minutes . . . why?”

“I think this has something to do with it.” He held up the thing that had fallen from the woman’s neck: a silver disk on a chain with some kind of script carved into it. “Whatever it is, I think it disrupts the network signal. After she dropped it, we could track her, but somehow she got her hands on another one, or had a spare she activated. I sent images of it to Novotny, and I’m going to run the symbols through my database before I hand it over to him.”

“Why bother?” she asked. “We already know who’s behind it, David.”

He met her eyes. “We might be wrong.”

The car slowed, then stopped, and a moment later the door opened. Lali stood by while they disembarked, then shut the doors and went ahead of them into the Haven with Aaron to clock off duty for the night.

“I thought you said you were sure,” Miranda said, falling into step beside David as they walked down the hall to their suite.

David’s face and voice both were bleak. “I’m sure. God help us, but I’m sure. The symbol, the handwriting . . . I’ve seen both a thousand times.”

As David nodded to their door guards and opened the door into their suite, Miranda looked down at the page still in her hand, an image of the back side of Janousek’s scrap of paper, which had been digitally restored by Novotny’s people. She had never seen the symbol before, but she had heard of it:

A waning crescent moon and the Greek symbol of infinity.

David froze midstride and made a feline hissing noise. “Son of a bitch.”

Miranda nearly ran into him but stopped in time to look over his shoulder into their suite.

There, sitting calmly in one of the chairs by the fire, sipping a glass of whiskey, was the Alpha.

“Hello, darling,” Deven said.

Sixteen

Miranda stayed behind David as he edged slowly into the room, his eyes riveted on Deven, his hand on the hilt of his sword.

“I see by your faces you’ve found me out,” Deven said calmly over the rim of his glass. “May I ask how?”

Wordlessly Miranda held up the scan.

Deven made an exasperated noise. “Goddamn Horak. If I’d known that woman was going to cause all of this, I never would have taken his recommendation.” He gestured at the other chairs. “Care to sit?”

“You bastard,” Miranda said. “How dare you come into our house—”

Deven rolled his eyes. “Yes, yes, I know. How dare I, murdering monster I am, traitor, et cetera, et cetera. Now, both of you sit down.”

Neither of the Pair budged. “I should kill you right here and now,” David told him.

Deven sighed, looking down into his glass, and when he looked up there was something dark and menacing in his eyes that Miranda had never seen before. “Try,” he replied. “But then you’ll never have the answers you want, will you?”

“He came alone,” Miranda observed. “No Elite, no Jonathan.”

“Jonathan isn’t a part of this,” Deven said. “Well, he is, because I am, but I didn’t want him involved. So if you kill me, you’ll be killing him, too, and he’s as close to innocent as any of us are. I doubt you want that on your conscience. So, sit.”

“I don’t want to hear anything you have to say,” David told him coldly. “Our alliance is terminated—consider yourself at—”

“Don’t say it,” Deven interrupted, eyes flashing. “Don’t even think it. You don’t want to declare war on me, David. You couldn’t win. Don’t give me that look, either; you have your technological toys and your psychic parlor tricks, but I have my own ace up my sleeve . . . dozens of aces, all over the world, ready to kill at my command—anyone, anywhere, any time.”

“It was you all along,” David said, and Miranda could feel the sickness in his heart. “You were the Alpha. You set the assassin on Miranda.”

Deven’s eyes were unyielding, like steel. “I am the Alpha. I have always been the Alpha. Each and every Shadow was trained by my own hand. I recruited them from every Elite, every mercenary guild, every class of warriors in six hundred years of history. And I would have done the same with you, darling, except I learned a long time ago not to sleep with my agents.”

“What about Sophie?” Miranda asked, stepping forward. “Was she really one of yours?”

His eyes flicked toward her. “Sophia Castellano worked for me for almost one hundred years. She was one of my most talented agents, one of only four to earn the rank of Scarlet.”

“Then why did she teach me if all you wanted was to kill me?” the Queen demanded.

“Why would I want to kill you, Miranda? What purpose would that serve?”

“Then what do you want?”

Deven took a long, slow breath, and said, “Marja Ovaska.”

“Who?” David asked.

“Marja Ovaska is the woman who is after Miranda. She, and she alone, wants you dead, my Lady. I didn’t set her on you. She has been out of the Shadow for two years.”

“But no one leaves the Shadow,” David said. “You said so yourself.”

“No one ever had. I’ve trained hundreds of agents, and in all that time there has only been one way out—the sword. They die on mission or they die by my blade, but they never leave. It’s a lifetime contract. Or it always was.”

He set his glass down and crossed his arms, looking toward the fireplace; David and Miranda both kept their eyes on him, though he didn’t seem at all concerned about it. And why should he be? He had gotten into the Haven, into their suite, completely undetected by the Elite, the servants, and the surveillance network.

“I have in the Shadow’s entire history released exactly two agents alive,” Deven said, his voice tempered with something Miranda realized was regret. “One was Marja Ovaska. The other was her lover . . . Sophia Castellano.”

“So Sophie wasn’t working for you?”

“Yes, she was.”

“But you said—”

“Let him talk,” David said quietly.

“Agents of the Shadow do not mingle,” Deven went on. “They never see each other’s faces. If they speak, it’s over the phone. They all have code names. But once in a while a client needs more than one agent to get the job done. Agents 3.17 Scarlet and 4.19 Scarlet—Sophie and Marja—met on assignment, by accident, and as often happens in such tragedies they fell in love, in direct defiance of protocol and knowing that I would kill them both when I found out. I had them brought to me for execution.”

Miranda knew what he was going to say next; she could feel it. “You couldn’t do it.”

“No, damn it. I should have. But for once in my life I allowed their sad little story to get to me. I had let myself grow attached to Sophie, fool that I am, and so I gave them a choice. They could die right then at my feet or they could each fulfill one last mission and then disappear. If I ever heard from either of them again, in any context, both of their lives were forfeit. They were to go underground and stay gone forever.”

“And you believed they would?” Miranda asked.

“Of course I did. My agents are trained to go into certain death without hesitation. There’s only one thing they are taught to fear: me.”

“But Sophie didn’t,” David concluded. “She broke her end of the deal by telling Faith she was ex-Shadow.”

Again, Deven rolled his eyes. “Please. Sophie was no fool. And she was no drunk. She was stone cold sober when she met Faith.”

“Then why . . .”

“Why do you think?” Deven snapped. “Put it together, Prime. My Consort has the strongest precognitive gift in the Council. He knew you were going to take the South. Don’t you think he knew you would eventually find a Queen?”

“I don’t understand,” David said.

But Miranda did. “You assigned her to me,” she said softly. “Sophie’s last work for you was to train me. War was coming . . . Jonathan saw it. And he knew that I had to be ready. If it weren’t for Sophie—for you—I wouldn’t be here.”

Deven met her eyes, and his gaze finally seemed to lose some of its hardness. “Her job was to make sure you were strong enough and had the skills you needed to help put you in the right place at the right time to become Queen. As soon as that happened she could vanish.”

“But she died in the battle . . .”

“She should never have been there. She was under orders not to go anywhere near the Haven itself, but to train you, then show you the way home and get the hell out.” The Prime held her eyes. “She believed in you enough to go off mission . . . and then she died before she and Marja could be free.”

“What was Marja’s last mission?” Miranda asked, holding back tears.

“Irrelevant. But if Sophie had done as I told her and left you to fight your own way into the Haven that night, Ovaska would never have been heard from again.”

Finally, Miranda sat down, head in her hands. “Sophie died . . . and now Marja wants me dead . . . to avenge her lover.”

David asked, “How long have you known?”

Miranda looked up to see Deven shrug. “Not as long as I should have. I suspected Marja might be involved as soon as you mentioned a connection to Finland, but I wasn’t sure until I hauled in Volundr, interrogated him myself, and then sent him to you.”

“You let me torture Volundr even though you knew who we were looking for?”

Deven made an impatient noise. “I didn’t think you’d have to torture the old toad. I paid him a ridiculous sum to tell you the truth—both Ovaska’s identity and what he knew about her location—but apparently his loyalties have shifted. Your people took him back to California and he vanished—along with an entire order of blades I had already paid for, incidentally. You’ve cost me a fuckton of money.”

Miranda was shaking her head, not sure whether to laugh at the absurdity of it all or scream herself sick. “All those people . . . Jake, Denise, Drew . . . they all died . . . Kat almost died . . . because I got Sophie killed.”

“You did nothing of the kind,” Deven contradicted her, though his tone wasn’t attempting anything like comfort. “Sophie died in battle the way warriors have throughout history, and by her own choice. Ovaska wants someone to blame. She knows she can’t kill me, but you are still vulnerable because you’re young and rash and have human friends who are easily killed. She sized up your defenses in that first attack and planned out how to destroy you piece by piece. My agents are dangerous sociopaths who will do anything, kill anyone, torture or maim anybody if it means reaching the objective. Even Sophie was willing to paint a giant target on her head by telling Faith who she had worked for—she knew it was the only way Faith would believe that she had the skills necessary for your training.”

“Oh, God,” Miranda said, her memory suddenly intruding. She looked up at David helplessly. “The night of the battle, when we were watching you fight, she said she’d only ever seen one other vampire with your combat style. She was talking about Deven.”

“That’s right,” Deven said. “The one who trained both David and Sophie.”

David sat down beside Miranda, seeking her hand, but spoke to Deven. “What I don’t understand here is
why
, Deven. Why would you intervene in Miranda’s future? Why give Sophie that assignment?”

Deven sighed. “Miranda, if you wouldn’t mind?”

Miranda wiped her eyes and said, “Because he loves you, David. And the only way to pay you back for how badly he treated you years ago was to make sure you found your own Consort . . . to make sure you were happy.”

“You were never supposed to have any idea I was involved. I had hoped to hunt down Marja and have her eliminated before anything else happened,” Deven said, and for a wonder he sounded sincere. “I am sorry for the loss of your friends.”

“How exactly were you going to track her down from California?” David demanded coldly. “You don’t have that kind of technology.”

Deven smiled. “What do you think we did before computers? Good old-fashioned detective work. I happen to have many highly trained detectives at my disposal.”

“You have an agent here in Austin?”

The smile turned wicked. “I have an agent in your house.”

David blinked. “Bullshit.”

Deven removed his cell phone from his coat pocket, giving Miranda a glimpse of the array of weaponry he wore. He touched the phone’s screen several times, saying, “Before you ask—Hart’s troubles have nothing to do with me. My people don’t use earpieces; like I said, they’re impractical. I would like to know who’s harassing him, though. It tickles me.”

A moment later there was a knock at the door. “Come in,” David called without his eyes leaving Deven’s face. Miranda could feel the tumble of anger, shock, and pain from her Prime, making her own confusion that much worse. She wanted to put her arms around him, but she was frozen in place, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And drop it did.

Deven spoke again. “Allow me to introduce 5.23 Claret,” he said.

The door opened.

“Oh my God,” Miranda said. “Lali?”

The bodyguard bowed to the Pair, then again to Deven.

“Don’t be angry at her,” Deven said, gesturing for Lali to come stand beside his chair. “Everything about her, as your bodyguard, is true. She would die to defend you. She is in fact very fond of you. You seem to inspire that kind of devotion, my Lady.”

“You’ve been working for me for ten years,” David said to the Elite, completely thunderstruck by the revelation.

Lalita nodded. “Yes, Sire. But I have been working for the Alpha for two hundred. My loyalty to you is superseded only by my loyalty to him.”

“There’s no way you could have known,” Deven told David. “Her history, her qualifications, all of it was authentic . . . just incomplete.”

“How in hell do you communicate?”

Lali smiled. “Mostly via encoded pictures of cute animals.”

“Now, then,” Deven said, “enough chatter. Let’s get to why I’m here.”

“Not to tell us the truth?” David asked.

“Of course not. If I had been successful in taking out Ovaska myself, I would never have let on I was involved. In six centuries exactly three people besides the agents themselves have known who I was—Jonathan, and now you two.”

“I could expose you,” David said in a low voice, the anger making its way out past his defenses.

Deven sat forward, hands clasped, and glared into David’s eyes. “Again . . . try it.”

Miranda looked from one Prime to the other, took a deep breath, and asked, “How is Ovaska getting past our sensor network?”

Deven didn’t avert his eyes from David’s until David lowered his. “Magic,” he replied. “Volundr made something for her. He wouldn’t tell me how it worked, but he said he’d given her a set of seven amulets that would shield her from any form of detection except plain sight. The spell had a limited life span; each disc would last only a few days once activated.”

David and Miranda exchanged a look. “She’s used up most of them already,” Miranda said, “unless she has another supplier.”

“That is ridiculous,” David responded. “Amulets, spells—there’s no such thing.”

Deven chuckled. “Darling, sometimes I think it’s a good thing you’re so pretty.”

David looked like he was about to leap up and throttle Deven, but he didn’t. “Tell us what you came to tell us, then, and get the hell out of my house.”

Deven sat back, retrieving his whiskey. “You’re angry.”

“Damn right I am! I’ve known you almost a hundred years, and you never told me you were running the most notorious network of assassins in the world. You had a spy in my Haven all this time, and you’ve had your dirty little hands in every aspect of our lives. For all I know everything you’re telling me now is a lie. You even broke into this house and got past my guards—”

“I Misted,” Deven said simply. “This isn’t exactly Hogwarts, you know. You might want to adjust your sensors in some way to account for the abilities of a Prime, although I doubt you have to worry about anyone else sneaking in here solo.”

Then he rose, taking out his phone. “As to why I’m here . . . I brought you this.”

He held up the phone so the Pair could see the screen: a map with a single red dot in its center.