Shadowstorm (The Shadow World Book 6) (25 page)

Nico looked up at the ceiling. There were sprinkler heads there—he’d been staring at them for hours. He snapped the heads off of several with his mind, and water poured down on the burning men, putting them out, though the stench of burning flesh and clothing still hung in the air.

They’d burned him, too. If he were human, and had survived, he would have burn marks over most of his body from their experiments.

He stepped over the dead and out into the hallway.

There were men on either side, all aiming at him, many looking scared out of their wits.

Poor, stupid children. There were so many ways they could die. It was so difficult to pick just one.

He stood there, drawing in more of that delicious rage as if it were food, and he starving. The power he was still pulling into himself had the touch of kindness, of love; he ignored it, twisted it on itself. Such things were meaningless in this world. He had tried to love, and been spurned. He had tried to heal, and been excommunicated. And he had tried to belong...to find beauty in this place, in the stink and decay of humanity. And for
what?

Very slowly and deliberately, he lifted a hand to each side, palm out toward the humans…and with a single hard jerk, tore the hearts from all of their chests, leaving nothing but empty shells clad in military gear, innocent lives taken over by evil and now spent, in pools of blood, at his feet.

*****

“Okay, talk me in.”

“Around the west side of the building there’s a security panel. Head there.”

Miranda slipped through the shadows surrounding the building; there were no cars parked in front of it, no lights on, nothing to suggest people had been near it in a long time. Weeds had grown up around the foundation and through cracks in the sidewalk.

She stayed low, reaching back to gesture silently at the Elite who were back a safe distance and out of sight.
Stay.

“Do you have the entrance code?” she asked quietly.

“Hold on,”
David said. He still sounded worn, but he was in his element.
“I’m decrypting their system now.”

“How good is it?”

“Not terribly. They’re either incredibly stupid and don’t think anyone would look here, or they have much better security inside. My money’s on the latter.”

“Seconded.”

She hopped over the stair rail that surrounded the west side of the building, dropping down to the concrete and landing right in front of the panel. It was awfully unsophisticated-looking. “A Staedtler T-950? What is this, 1986?” She paused, blinked. “God, how do I even know that?”

“For better or worse,”
came the wry answer over her comm.
“Code: 666539.”

“666, like Satan?”

“I don’t know. But it does spell ‘monkey.’”

“I’m just going to assume that was the previous owner’s idea.” Miranda hit the code carefully, nodding in satisfaction when she heard the lock chunk open and the light went green. “I’m going in—”

Suddenly she heard a gasp, and a groan of pain, followed by a disturbingly loud thump. “David? You okay?”

There were several noises like someone fumbling with a phone, and to her surprise Stella said breathlessly,
“He passed out, Miranda—he sounded like someone stabbed him, and then just toppled over. He’s breathing okay but he looks like he’s having a nightmare. Something’s really wrong.”

She could feel the pull of the bond, drawing energy from her to compensate for what must be a significant drain on him. She fought against a wave of dizziness, but once it passed there was no sense of emergency, just urgency. “Call Mo,” she said. “I’ve got to go in—I can’t wait or they’re going to know I’m here. I’ll check back once I’m out.”

She didn’t wait for a reply, but grabbed the push bar on the door and edged it open.

At first there was nothing to see but a staircase that went down into the darkness without a single light fixture. It was the only way forward, and she didn’t like it—too much possibility of being boxed in. “Elite team 1,” she said, “converge on my location and defend the door and stairwell behind me. Maintain distance until called. I don’t want to spook them.”

“As you will it, my Lady. Team 1 on the move.”

She slipped inside and let the door close behind her; the lock clanked shut, so loud in the metal-walled room it nearly made her jump.

Advantage of being a vampire: her feet were soundless on the stairs. She stayed against the wall, hand on Shadowflame’s hilt, not wanting to draw in such close quarters unless she had to—hand to hand would work just fine in here.

She really should have expected booby traps.

She’d barely placed her toe on the second fight of steps when it disappeared out from under her. Two treads folded back, leaving a huge gap, and at the bottom of it, God only knew. Miranda tried to jerk her foot back, but she’d lost her balance, and the dumbfounded surprise of being caught by such low-tech Indiana Jones bullshit cost her her hold on the rail. She braced herself for whatever was down there, praying it wasn’t giant wooden stakes waiting to pierce her entire body and leave her hanging, blood draining down their shafts to the floor—

Her whole body jerked upward as a hand closed around her wrist and lifted her up out of the hole.

Her feet found the next step, and she stared up at her rescuer.

Their eyes met, but neither spoke; there would be time for surprise later. Deven moved past her and jumped, landing gracefully at the bottom of the stairs and turning back to her with a nod.

She followed, trying not to stare—she’d hoped her harsh words would jolt something loose in his brain, but she hadn’t been entirely ready to see him look like himself again; he hadn’t reclaimed his Goth wardrobe so quickly, of course, or stopped mid-crisis to dye his hair, but he was wearing the black-ops clothes his agents wore, and was armed to the teeth, though most people would see one sword and perhaps a knife. She could count probably about half his complement of weapons. The sight of Ghostlight nearly brought her to tears of relief.

She dragged her focus back to the matter at hand.

There was another security panel waiting at the interior door. This one looked way more modern…and with David passed out, she had no idea how to—

Deven took her arm and pulled her away, then spun and kicked the panel hard. Sparks flew, and it fell off the wall. Beyond the door, alarms started blaring all over the place.

Well that was one way to go about it.

So much for stealth.

A cadre of humans met them in the hallway. Miranda seized the closest man, who had a crossbow, and turned him, hitting the trigger and firing the bolt into another soldier.

Nearby, she heard the most wonderful sound possible: Ghostlight, drawn.

After two years without picking up a sword she kind of expected Deven to be rusty, but seven centuries way more than balanced such a brief span, and he didn’t miss a step. As another group of men surrounded them, they fell into the fight together, just like that night in Rio Verde; she hadn’t wanted to admit it but fighting with both him and David had been so enjoyable it was practically a turn-on.

It wasn’t that hard to disarm the archers; their weapons were impractical in this much space, and their bulk got in the way. The soldiers were skilled both with weapons and without, and a few were very good; but Queen and Prime pushed them back, and back, into a junction of two hallways where there was more room, and once she had Shadowflame in her hand, the humans were done for.

It had been a while since she’d been in an actual fight, too. She wasn’t a centuries-old assassin; still, she felt herself slipping into that trance space again, and her energy and Deven’s connected with an ease that still surprised her. Without even speaking they were able to team up, the way she and David did—one of the men, a burly guy easily 6’8”, apparently had it in his head to pummel them into submission with only his fists, and in response, Dev grabbed Miranda’s arm and swung her around, giving her momentum and leverage to wrap her ankles around the man’s neck and slam him to the floor. She hit the ground in time to see Ghostlight run through the human’s throat.

They were down to three opponents when she noticed the smoke. It rolled into the hallway from another corridor, and with it came a totally different alarm and flashing lights up near the ceiling.

She put down two more humans roughly within seconds of Deven breaking the last one’s neck, and they halted at the same time. With a shared glance, they took off toward the smoke.

The screaming started when they were halfway down the hall—very clearly human screaming. She could hear water pouring down like Niagara Falls, and orders being barked, but the sounds made no more sense the closer she got. The building itself was not on fire, and the smoke had stopped billowing but still filled the air with a choking haze.

Miranda stopped, coughing. What the hell was that smell? It was acrid and disturbingly familiar, and she had a flash of a 4th of July barbecue—

Burning flesh. It was burning flesh.

She gestured for Deven to go on, and was only a step behind, trying to clear her watering eyes. What was going on here? Some kind of accident? How close had it been to wherever they were keeping Nico?

As they rounded the corner, she found out, and skidded to a halt, unable to process what she was looking at.

She looked over at Deven. He was staring and had gone pale, eyes losing most of their color.

There were black-clad bodies everywhere in groups of four and five, their weapons scattered on the floor. Some of them were charred, some drenched in blood, all of them dead. She saw strange lumps of oozing, bloody meat…no, organs. Hearts. Something had ripped their hearts out.

“Oh, Jesus,” she heard Deven say softly, the first words he’d uttered to her tonight. He was so openly astonished that she could actually hear his accent.

A figure emerged from a side room. It was not human. In fact,
inhuman
was the only word she could come up with for the way it moved, with a sinister stalking grace, one hand curving around the edge of the door, blood staining the fingers as if they’d been dipped in it.

Her mind flat-out refused to recognize him at first. She couldn’t reconcile the gentle creature she knew with this…

“Nico,” she said softly, “What did they do to you?”

He didn’t acknowledge the name, or seem to recognize her, but he looked at her, replying only with an animal hiss.

Her heart went cold in her chest.

His eyes were black.

Deven’s reaction was even more frightening; he stumbled back a step, groping for something to hold onto, and she grabbed his shoulder…just in time to see his eyes go black as well.

He blinked, and they had already returned to normal, though they were anguished as he returned his attention to Nico, taking a careful step forward.

“Nico,” he said, “Do you know who we are?”

No answer.

Deven tried hesitantly, “Do you know who
you
are?”

After a moment came an answer, a harsh whisper with none of the lilt and moonlight she knew. “Yes…I believe I do.”

“His hair,” she said.

It had been shorn off, probably by a knife, almost at the scalp. She looked closer: everywhere his skin was exposed, there were scars, most already healed to an angry pink that she watched begin to fade. Some of them looked like burns, some like almost surgical cuts, perfectly straight. Some looked like the skin had been ripped.

David’s unconsciousness suddenly made sense. If Nico had been torn apart as it looked like he had, the only way to heal all at once like this would be to flood his body with an enormous amount of power. Nico was hooked up directly to that power from two directions, and though he couldn’t pull much from Deven, he could take whatever he wanted from David. If it kept up she’d start feeling the drain in less than an hour, and be unconscious shortly thereafter.

Deven took in the scene in an instant and said, “Telekinesis…pyrokinesis…what else?”

“Obviously not empathy,” she replied.

Nico made a sound that might have been a quiet laugh if it hadn’t been so cold and empty. “Oh yes,” he said. “I felt it, all of it…terror, pain…their lives ending…I made sure they knew what it felt like even as they burned. Every second, every wound…their final minutes made up of nothing but agony and fear. They deserved it.”

Miranda swallowed. She didn’t know what to do. They had all killed, at one time or another, and some regretted it forever…but this was Nico. He couldn’t even feed on a live human without getting sick because the darkness scared him so badly. To have gone from there to here in a day…how were they supposed to pull him back?

“Come home with us,” she said. “We’ll take care of you. Whatever they did, we can help.”

“Can you?” Nico gave her a look that was full of rage, hate. It wasn’t at her, exactly, more…at everything. “How exactly can you help me?” His gaze sharpened on Deven, and that time, the loathing was very, very focused. “Neuter me with your pathetic moping? Make me hate myself as much as you do?”

“We’ll think of something,” she said.

“You cannot help me,”
he snapped. “There is nothing left to help.”

Deven caught her eye, and she got a very strong sense of
Keep his attention.

“I know you don’t mean that,” Miranda told the Elf. “You’re in pain, and you’ve been through…I can’t even imagine. But you know we care about you. We just want you to come home, and be safe.”

Another short laugh. It was a terrible sound, and she realized why: his voice was hoarse, like it had been dragged over broken glass. How long must he have been screaming that it still hadn’t healed?

“Safe? There is no safe, not in this world. I threw away safety, threw away everything, and now look at me.” Something shook in Nico’s eyes — something she might be able to take hold of, if she was careful. He lifted both hands so she could see the blood that had dried on both of them. “Doing it with my mind wasn’t good enough,” he said, almost in a non sequitur. “I wanted to feel their ribs break in my hands. But they kept falling with their eyes open,
staring
at me…the only way to fix it was to burn them. Have you ever crushed a human heart with your bare hands? They make more noise than you would think.”