Shadowflame (9 page)

Elite 18 was kneeling by the bodies and pointed to one of their bare stomachs, where it looked like Hart had slashed her with a knife. “Look,” he said.

Faith came closer and squinted. The slashes weren’t random. They were letters.

“Clean it off,” she said. Elite 18 nodded and grabbed a discarded pillowcase, wiping gently at the dead girl’s midsection; a servant brought a cup of water, and they scrubbed at the dried blood until the letters were visible.

Faith’s chest tightened as she read it.

SOON, BITCH.

“All right,” Faith said quietly. “That’s enough. Let’s take care of these poor girls.”

She ordered them separated, cleaned, shrouded, and burned, and everything in both rooms stripped and replaced from the handful of bedrooms toward the back of the Haven that hadn’t been used in decades.

Then she shook her head with heavyhearted resignation and went to call the Pair.

Before she could even say “Star-one,” however, she heard footsteps behind her and a shakily drawn breath.

Faith turned to the Queen. “My Lady—”

Miranda darted into the bathroom without speaking, and Faith heard her retching.

Several of the sturdier-stomached servants had converged on the bodies and were gently coaxing the girls apart, laying them out on plastic sheeting. Esther, who normally saw to the Pair’s wing, had arrived with cleaning supplies and grim determination and was overseeing the whole operation; the little woman had been on staff longer than Faith had been in Texas, and, having worked for Auren, surely she had seen worse.

By the time Miranda emerged from the bathroom, her composure regained though she was still pale and a little green, David had arrived, and he drew the Queen into his arms and held her, silently, while the bodies were tended to.

“We should never have left him alone with them,” Miranda said softly. “We should have had guards on the suite as soon as he walked out . . . why didn’t we send guards?”

“It’s my fault,” David said, sounding as disturbed as Faith had ever heard him. “I was so rattled by you throwing him that I didn’t think . . . I just didn’t think.”

Faith could see the anger in David’s silver eyes, and the shock and guilt in Miranda’s, and after a few minutes, Miranda visibly steeled herself and stepped away from him to kneel next to the girls.

She gestured to one of the servants, who handed her a wet washcloth, and joined in on the nearest victim, helping to draw the bloody stake from her chest and then swab her cold skin clean.

Faith sighed and looked over at David, who through his carefully lidded rage was obviously unsurprised by the violence of Hart’s reaction . . . sickened, yes, but not surprised. The Prime took a deep breath, then turned to Elite 18, who couldn’t seem to bear looking at the girls but had devoted herself to righting the pieces of furniture that weren’t hopelessly damaged. David touched her shoulder and said something to her quietly.

Elite 18, clearly relieved, nodded, bowed, and disappeared.

David took over for the warrior, examining a chair and then moving it to the side of the room where the usable items were being stacked.

Faith nodded to herself and joined the others on the floor, where she lent her hands to help Esther wrap the first girl in a clean white sheet.

They all worked in silence until there was motion at the door, and Elite 18 said in a low voice, “I’ve brought her, Sire.”

Faith looked at David, who inclined his head toward the door; she rose and followed him into the hallway.

Elite 18 had in her company the refugee woman, Cora, who looked positively petrified at being led back to Hart’s suite. Seeing her fear, David and Faith both placed themselves between her and the door so she couldn’t see inside.

David spoke to Cora in Italian, but Faith knew what he was asking. He wanted to know the names of the other women.

Cora stammered a little, but answered him. He thanked her, then told her, gently, what had happened.

Cora didn’t seem to react at first. She looked over Faith’s shoulder at the doorway, then down at the floor, and said something; her voice was wooden, but her eyes were full of tears.

“Of course,” David said in English. Then to Elite 18: “You can take her back to her room now. Make sure she’s comfortable and has fed before you leave her. Then see to the pyre, please.”

“As you will it, Sire.”

After she left, Faith raised an eyebrow at David. “She didn’t seem too upset.”

He crossed his arms. “The women in the harem don’t interact much. The black girl’s name is Naomi, the blonde is Marie, and the Chinese girl is Mei. Cora wasn’t sure about the last one—Mei was new and no one else spoke her language.”

“At least we know what to call them now . . . they won’t have to be burned without identities, such as they are.”

“True.”

They returned to the room, and David joined Faith and the Queen next to the bodies. He lightly touched each of the girls’ heads in turn and told everyone their names.

Miranda was helping Esther wrap Mei, whose skin had been carved with Hart’s scathing, vicious message to her, in the sheet that would be her burial shroud. “I’m sorry, Mei,” the Queen whispered as she covered the dead girl’s face. “I wish we had helped you sooner. This is the best we can do for you now . . . be at peace.”

David knew better than to think he’d be able to sleep that morning.

After he was sure that Miranda was out, he carefully untangled himself from her arms and legs and put clothes on, then left their suite for his workroom.

He was not happy. He was grateful that Hart was gone, but the whole situation had left him fighting mad, and the downside was that Hart wasn’t there to punch in the face. Now he was left to figure out what steps to take next in the wake of Hart’s dramatic exit.

The Council had to be informed, of course. He would notify all his allies that he and Hart had officially severed all relations, and the news would be all over the world inside an hour. Though Hart had friends, nobody really
liked
him; those who sided with him shared his beliefs but would be more than happy to throw him under the bus if it served their interests.

David sank into his chair, leaning forward to put his head in his hands for a moment; he had a mighty headache but he wasn’t about to wake Miranda up to heal it. She was going to have trouble sleeping today as it was.

Despite the horror of Hart’s aftermath, one question kept returning to David’s mind:

How had Miranda done it?

David had felt her drawing on their combined strength, but that happened all the time. That was what their connection was for, to make them more powerful as a whole. But he had never heard of anything like one member of a Pair inheriting the psychic abilities of the other. He hadn’t developed empathy . . . not yet, anyway, thank God.

It frustrated him how little was known about the history of the Signets, and how little the others seemed to care. He had proposed a research project more than once and been sneered at. As long as they had power and money, it made no difference to them where it came from. It wasn’t as if they could do anything with the knowledge anyway.

Fools. Old, blind fools with their heads planted firmly up their asses and their hands planted firmly in their pocket-books. Now here David was, with a burning question he had no way to answer.

It was possible that Deven might know—he was one of the oldest Primes in the Council and had been all over the world before settling in California to rule over his territory. He’d never shown any interest in Signet lore, but that didn’t mean he had no knowledge of it.

It was, however, the middle of the day, and a quick look at his computer told David that the Prime was not online. It was the pinnacle of bad manners to wake a Prime during daylight. His questions and vague nameless fears would just have to wait until sunset.

To distract himself he decided to try to crack open Hart’s little toy. He retrieved it from the locked cabinet where he’d stashed it, as well as a number of tools, a scanning module he’d built, a vise, and a handheld laser-cutting torch.

He placed the earpiece in the vise and hooked up the scanner to his computer, then spent a while running preliminary tests to see if he could learn anything from the piece without breaking into it. There wasn’t much to learn; it didn’t put out any sort of signal, and even if it had, that signal wouldn’t have made it past the Haven without being hopelessly scrambled. Whatever network it had been connected to, it was dead now.

David paused here and there to type up a few quick notes.
Casing appears to be a similar titanium-aluminum alloy to the fourth-generation wrist coms. Seamless except for a single hole approx. 1 mm in diameter. No obvious signs of manufacturer, not recognizable as belonging to any well-known designers in the communications industry. Possible DOD origin?

Unlikely. The Defense Department could scarcely make a move without his knowing it.

He changed the scanner’s setup to tell him more about the internal makeup of the piece so at least he’d know how thick the shell was and could calibrate the cutting laser appropriately.

It was unusually thin, barely an eggshell over an interior tightly packed with wiring and what looked like a single tiny chip.

Before he tried opening the thing, he had the scanner take surface images and put all the technical scans into a folder, then moved his laptop away from the table in case of any accidents. He turned the vise and raised it slightly, then switched on the laser, a compact handheld model he’d won in a poker game from the head of research and development at one of the other defense contractors. It was a thing of beauty, precise and lightweight, and could cut through anything at any thickness without damaging whatever was inside.

He could only imagine the mischief it would cause if the outside world got hold of it, which was why, like all his toys, it was locked in this room.

David calibrated the beam and got to work.

Given how small the thing was, it didn’t take long to neatly bisect the casing. He set the torch aside and pulled on a pair of gloves to make sure he didn’t damage the components or get anything toxic on his skin. He unscrewed the vise and transferred the piece to a tray sized to fit under the microscope.

With a pair of long tweezers and a probe, he peeled one side back from the other, gingerly exposing the perfect twist of wires within. He slid the probe into the wires and teased it apart, exposing the chip like a pearl inside an oyster.

The explosion sent Miranda screaming out of sleep.

Five

“Mother
fuck
!”

Miranda had known David for a little over a year, and she had never heard him curse quite so much.

Faith slapped his hand. “Lie still,” she said. “Do you want this out or not?”

Elite 12, who was known to his peers simply as Mo, was the official medic for the entire Haven; for the most part a vampire’s healing abilities made short work of any injuries, but if something was embedded in a limb, something was torn off, or the victim was weakened to the point that his or her abilities were compromised, Mo took care of things, even sewing on a few fingers now and then until a warrior’s natural defenses kicked back in. Infection and the presence of foreign substances slowed the process down, too, so in cases of serious wounds, antiseptics and hygiene were as important to vampires as they were to humans. It was even possible to poison a vampire given the right ingredients, though it couldn’t kill one, and Mo had been called upon more than once to administer antidotes to painful and debilitating toxins.

Mo leaned over the Prime, who was laid out on his worktable with a shard of metal buried in his left eye.

“You know, Sire,” Mo said, his cheerful Iranian accent unusually stern, “I have said many times that you must wear eye protection when you play with sharp things.”

“Yes, and I’ve said many times you can stuff it where Allah don’t shine,” David said irritably. “Son of a bitch! What are you using, a fucking jackhammer?”

Miranda snorted.

Mo was unperturbed. “Sire, if you do not stay still, I may do more damage to your eye or perhaps the nerves around it. It would be rather painful and I think perhaps your Queen would kill us both.”

She had sprinted into the workroom to find David on the floor bleeding from several small wounds where Hart’s mystery earpiece had shattered and flown everywhere. Nothing else in the room appeared to be damaged, although David had urgently commanded her to hit the override on the fire alarm so that the smoke—scant though it was—wouldn’t trip the system.

Mo had already removed shrapnel from David’s face, neck, and left arm, all of which had closed and healed as soon as the bits were taken out. If they had been wood splinters, it would have taken twice as long, if not longer. Apparently a titanium-aluminum alloy was no big deal unless it was stuck in your cornea.

Miranda couldn’t watch. She’d nearly been sick when she saw his blood; the thought of seeing a scalpel in her husband’s eye made her queasy. She had already sent up a dozen thank-yous to whatever god watched over vampires who were too pigheaded to wear safety glasses.

It amused her that, even three and a half centuries old and so far removed from human notions of masculinity, David was as much a drama queen about pain as every man she’d ever met.

“Stop being a baby,” Faith admonished the Prime. “You’re lucky that thing didn’t blow your head off.”

David grunted but lay still, letting Mo hold his eyelid open so he could dig in and retrieve the shard. Even Faith looked a little nauseated at the sight and pointedly turned her gaze up toward the ceiling.

“It wasn’t meant to kill anyone,” David muttered, trying not to move his jaw too much and disturb Mo’s arm. “From what little I saw it was basically just a nanotransmitter.”

“Could you make something like it?” Faith asked.

The Prime made a noise that might have been a sardonic laugh, but it ended up being a pained growl as Mo pulled his hand back, revealing a centimeter-long arrowhead of silver metal held in his tweezers. Unfortunately Miranda looked just in time to see a scarlet tear of blood oozing from the corner of David’s eye. She turned away, groaning, nauseated, determined not to be sick a second time in twenty-four hours.

“All right, Sire, go ahead,” Mo told him.

David clamped his eyes shut and in a few seconds opened them again, blinked, and sat up. “Good work, Mo. Thank you.”

The medic shrugged. “All in a day’s—and I do mean day, Sire, it’s ten in the morning—work.”

David looked chagrined as he wiped the blood away. “Sorry to get you out of bed. You’re dismissed.”

Mo smiled, gathered his supplies, and left. “Let me know if you notice any other stray poking things poking you.”

David blinked a few more times, focusing his gaze on Miranda, and smiled at her. “I’m fine,” he insisted. “It wasn’t a disaster.”

She glared at him, unwilling to concede the point. “It could have been. Hart could have easily made that thing as a bomb and conveniently let you have it knowing you couldn’t resist taking it apart.”

“It wasn’t a bomb,” he said, which wasn’t in the least bit reassuring. “It was a pressure-sensitive trigger designed to destroy the tech if someone got it open. It wasn’t intended to do any real harm to the person unless they happened to be staring right into it at the time. Hart is a technophobe—and as much of a psychopath as he is, I honestly believe him that this came from somewhere else. And in answer to your question”—he turned to Faith—“of course I could make something like it. What little data I got suggested it’s not nearly as complex as the coms. It was a lovely little thing, though. Beautifully crafted. I wish I could have studied it more.”

“You’re hopeless,” Miranda said. “I’m going back to bed.”

She pushed herself out of the chair and left the workroom, pausing to let the guards know everything was all right and commend them on their quick response. They looked as frightened as she had been. It still surprised her how loyal they were to him—and now, her—and how invested they were in the Pair’s welfare. It was unsettling to know that her fate governed the lives of so many people . . . Faith had said so to her a dozen times, but it had yet to fully sink in.

Miranda knew better than to think she could really sleep until David joined her and she could run her hands over his body to convince herself he was really okay. But she also knew his fastidious nature and knew he would clean up the workroom before coming to bed. There was no point in even trying to rest until then.

She picked up her guitar from where she’d left it earlier, leaning next to her chair by the fireplace. Then she sat down cross-legged on the sofa with her guitar and picked at it mindlessly for a few minutes, letting whatever needed to be played arise.

Esther had been in, kind soul, and added another log to the fire at some point; the woman was a born nurturer and no doubt had been at a loss as to how to help David after the accident, so she did what she could do: She made the room comfortable. She’d straightened up the room, built up the fire, and hung a bundle of some kind of herb from the mantel, probably one of her Mexican folk charms. Esther knew all kinds of arcane things for protection from the Evil Eye, to bring money, to lure in a lover . . . she had trained with a
curandera
when she was human and would have been one herself if she hadn’t been brought across. Miranda loved everything about her, especially the way she still called Miranda
reinita
, “little Queen.”

The Queen closed her eyes and started humming, then let music and voice both evolve into an actual song, one she’d covered onstage a dozen times.

Like you’re trying to fight gravity on a planet that insists that love is like falling and falling is like this . . .

When she finished the song, she looked up at the Prime, who was watching and listening while he leaned against the bedpost, smiling softly as if nothing in the world existed but her. He had taken off his shirt, and the firelight bathed his bare skin in flickering gold.

Was it stranger that the Elite cared so much about him or that she did?

“Come to bed, beloved,” he said.

She set her guitar aside and rose, holding his gaze until she was close enough to fold herself gratefully into his embrace.

Faith went into the city with David, Miranda, and her bodyguards Thursday night, but they split up as soon as they reached Austin. Miranda, Jake, and Lali disembarked and headed toward the Bat Cave studio, where Miranda would have her first recording session; Faith and David stayed in the car, bound for a high-rise in the heart of downtown Austin, with everyone set to rendezvous in front of the Bat Cave at three A.M.

David was understandably tense. Word had gone out about the drama with Hart, and now he was waiting to see how the other Signets reacted. He anticipated that twelve total would side with him without any argument, and seven with Hart; that left six wild cards who could be swayed either way. Some would be easy enough, like Tanaka, who always maintained his neutrality but considered David one of his oldest friends and, given the evidence presented by Cora, would throw in his lot with David. He required only good reasons and good evidence before making a move, which was understandable, given that he was the parliamentary leader of the Council and was expected to stay as fair as possible.

In the end, however, Hart would make the next move. If he never spoke of the incident again and never returned to Texas, there might not be a fight. If assassins started showing up in Austin, it would be obvious to whom they belonged. If Hart was smart, and Faith doubted he was, he would let the matter drop and keep his distance from now on.

But Hart had been bested by a woman, and that would rankle him to the point of madness. He hated women pathologically, with religious fervor that rivaled the Blackthorn gang’s hatred of gays. It was Miranda’s act of defiance that would drive any plans he had for revenge. His bloody message left on the corpse of an innocent woman had made the point quite succinctly.

David was quiet on the drive. He brooded far less now that Miranda had come into his life, but he was still prone to long periods of stewing, and Faith could guess at least a dozen of the subjects that might be on his mind tonight.

“Is it Hart, the Council, the attack on the Queen, her sudden bout of telekinesis, what to do with your new houseguest, your Queen’s security tonight, the Red Shadow’s involvement with Hart, its involvement with Sophie, or the exploding hearing aid that’s got you all knotted up?” she asked.

David leaned back in his seat and groaned. “It wasn’t any of those things until you brought them up. Thank you, Second.”

“Then what were you mulling over?”

“Signet history. Why we threw away our own past. How much there is out there to learn and what it could do for us. Imagine if there are powers we don’t even know we can access—things even more miraculous than Misting. Pairs can combine their power and boost one or the other’s abilities, but I’ve never heard of a case where one took on the other’s abilities and used them without any training or prior talent. What if we can all do that?”

Faith smiled. “Then Jonathan could borrow Deven’s fighting ability and Deven wouldn’t constantly bitch about what a horrible warrior he Paired with.”

“There has to be a way to find out more. Archives somewhere. Journals. Something. I can’t believe that nobody in our entire history has agreed with me on this. We can’t all have been that stupid.”

Harlan pulled up to the front entrance of the building, and Faith and David got out; the Prime leaned in to tell Harlan something, probably a reminder of their rendezvous plans, then straightened, adjusting his coat. It was another cold night; since the hard freeze the night of Hart’s arrival, the weather had been insanely frigid with the constant threat of ice on bridges.

They took the concrete steps up to the glass front of the building, where a security guard met them and asked for ID.

David smiled and opened the neck of his coat, revealing the Signet.

The guard nodded and unlocked the door.

Near the elevators, a gray-haired man in a white lab coat was waiting for them. Their steps echoed in the empty atrium, only a few lights on at this hour.

“Sire, Faith,” the man said. “A pleasure to see you again.”

“Doctor Novotny.” David shook his hand and the doctor turned to lead them to the elevator. “You said you have made progress.”

Faith watched the human as they took the elevator up to the twelfth floor; he was reasonably comfortable in their presence, but he still seemed a bit twitchy once the doors slid shut and he was trapped in the small chamber with two vampires. Novotny was hardly psychic, but a human in a coma would have been able to sense something strange about David. Usually it wasn’t anything they would be able to pinpoint, but it was instinct for mortals to edge away, to keep one eye on the door. If there had been ten people in the elevator, by the time they got to their floor, it would have been Faith and the Prime in one corner and all ten humans clustered on the other side. Those who knew what they were, or were gifted enough to know what they were sensing, tended to be much more relaxed around them.

Novotny’s research lab took up the entire twelfth floor and was accessible only by a special elevator code. The company, Hunter Development, was one of several that David worked with when he needed something done he couldn’t design, fabricate, or investigate himself. Naturally he owned about 80 percent of it.

The doctor led them to a locked room that scanned his retinas, fingerprints, and voice before allowing them access. Inside were two long tables and a variety of machines whose purpose Faith could only guess.

“So you say the thing exploded?” Novotny was asking with interest.

David smiled. So did Faith, to herself, at the idea that David had associates as geeky as he was. “I’ve brought you what was left.” He retrieved a flat metal case about the size of a pack of cigarettes from his coat and handed it to the doctor. “There’s not much, but if you get anything off it, let me know. All of my preliminary findings are on the drive inside.”

“Excellent, excellent. It sounds like pretty standard stuff, but you never know. Now, over here . . .”

Opening a small door in the far wall—also encoded—Novotny retrieved another case, this one larger, and laid it on the steel table in front of them. “We ran it through the full battery of parameters.”

Novotny opened the case to reveal a sharpened wood cylinder inside a plastic evidence bag, resting in a nest of gray foam. It didn’t look much different from when Faith had taken it from the crime scene, except that Miranda’s blood had been cleaned off and a few splinters seemed to have been picked out of it for testing.