Shadowbound (21 page)

Miranda laid her hand on Marilyn’s face. What would she think about her daughters’ lives now? Marianne, ever the overachiever, was a drug addict; and Miranda . . . well, she wasn’t exactly the poster child for suburban America either.

She heard the suite door open and shut, David shaking out his coat and hanging up The Oncoming Storm, and yawning. “Three more attacks,” he said. “All in Europe. I managed not to say ‘I told you so’ to any of them, in the interest of diplomacy, but I thought it extra hard. Jacob actually called Western Europe a . . . what phrase did he use? A ‘barmy old codger.’ I don’t think Napolitano knew quite how to react.”

“What about your tracker guy?” Miranda asked, raising her head. “Are you planning to send a team to their headquarters, or what?”

“Not yet. Right now he’s giving me excellent insight into their daily movements. The tracker records eighteen different kinds of data, and the more I know the happier I’ll be. I want to learn as much as I can about how they operate and let it record as long as possible before I send in a strike team to fetch the Shepherd—not just for our own edification, but to make sure the team stays safe.”

He walked to the couch and leaned over her, kissing the top of her head, one hand on her shoulder sliding up to touch her face. “What are you doing?”

“Look,” she said, holding the album up, open to the picture of Marilyn with Miranda on her knee. “That’s my mom.”

He didn’t reply at first, so she turned her head and looked up at him. To her amazement, he had gone pale and was staring at the picture like it was a ghost.

“I know,” she said. “She looks just like me. She’s actually younger than me here.”

Involuntarily, the Prime took a step back, still staring at the picture.

“What is it?” she asked. “David?”

Finally, he shook himself out of the trance, blinked, and looked down into her worried face. “I . . .”

His confusion scared her. “What? Tell me what’s wrong.”

David took a deep breath. “I don’t know how, but . . . I could swear I had met her before. Not as someone who resembles you, but . . . I don’t know how that could have happened. I would have remembered that when I met you later. But still . . . maybe the part of me that has always known you for my Queen sees that potential in her bloodline.”

“Bloodline—” Miranda grabbed the book back and started turning pages, heart pounding. “The Morningstar soldiers that had me staked to the ground . . . they were saying something about killing Marianne and Jenny to wipe out the bloodline. Did you get a good look at Jenny when you spoke to Marianne?”

“No. We talked at the door, then I left.”

“Okay, then. Here.” She held up the book—a five-by-seven of Jenny from second grade that had been stuck in the back of the album, her bucktoothed little-girl grin infectious, her red hair in a Hermione Granger situation just as Miranda’s . . . and Marilyn’s . . . had been from time to time.

David stared at the picture for a long moment.

“What do you feel?” Miranda asked, afraid to hear the answer.

He frowned, tilted his head. “I feel the same thing I felt when I saw your mother,” he said. “Recognition . . . as if we met at a party hundreds of years ago and were in the middle of a conversation when one of us had to leave. But I can’t tell how much of that is the same thing, or how much is that she looks like you and you look like your mother. What do you think it means?”

“You don’t happen to have a painting or anything of your son, do you?”

He shook his head. “Where are you going with this?”

“Bloodlines,” Miranda said. “In the Persephone myth there was something about us being the descendants of the original Signets, the Secondborn. What if it wasn’t speaking metaphorically? She made them out of humans like any other vampire, right? Those humans had families. Some probably had children.”

“But that was two thousand years ago,” he said. “By now that blood would be so genetically diluted it would be completely meaningless . . . well, perhaps except for yours.” His eyebrows lifted. “You’re the only one of us who still has family alive within a generation or two. Scientifically it’s preposterous, but this is magic we’re talking about, so who the hell knows? Maybe it’s a mystical bloodline, not a genetic one, and can pass along far more distant family connections.”

“They wanted to wipe my bloodline out.” Miranda shook her head. “But it’s not like if they killed me, Marianne or Jenny could just step into my place. Marianne’s about as intuitive as a bag of wet flannel, and Jenny’s in second grade. I don’t know how all of this is going to go down, but I really doubt we have time to wait for her to grow up.”

“Our blood may recognize each other, but that doesn’t make us all interchangeable.”

“Still, it has to mean something.”

David looked thoughtful, closing the photo album and handing it back to her. “We have no way to know,” he told her. “And even if we did, it wouldn’t really change anything.”

“I need to talk to Stella,” Miranda said. “We have to find a way to get answers. If she’s supposed to be our intermediary, there has to be a safer way for her to do it than Drawing Down. If she has to go into a coma every time they talk, we’re never going to get anywhere.”

She was almost expecting it when the knock came at the door a few seconds later.

She sighed. Of course.

The door guard poked his head in. “My Lady, young Miss Stella is here to see you—Elite Sixty-seven found her wandering in a daze around the corridor from here and thought it best just to bring her to you.”

She and David looked at each other. “Sure,” she told the guard. “Let her in.”

The young Witch peered uncertainly around the door frame. She was disheveled . . . and still in her pajamas. Miranda had to smile; they were the same Hello Kitty pajamas she’d worn herself while in Stella’s care.

“Sorry,” Stella said. “I don’t mean to interrupt, I just . . . something really freaky happened.”

Miranda stood up and went to her, guiding her toward the couch. “Are you hurt? You’re so pale.”

Stella sank down gratefully and took a couple of deep breaths. “No, I’m okay.” She seemed to remember where she was and looked around with interest. Miranda imagined it from her perspective. The bedroom of the two most powerful vampires in the South: What must it look like to her? Miranda tried to remember how she’d felt when she first saw it, but her own first impression was before she really had any idea who, or what, she was dealing with. The only memory that came to mind was calling David a “ninja computer programmer doctor,” which turned out to be pretty damn close to the truth.

“So this is the inner sanctum,” Stella said. Her eyes fell on Miranda’s guitar, not three feet away, and she took another deep breath and swallowed. “This is too weird.”

David had risen when Miranda did, but the Queen didn’t see what he was doing until he returned to the fireplace with a can of Dr Pepper, popped the top, and handed it to the Witch.

“Wow, how did you know?”

He smiled. “I know that look. It’s the ‘I just had some kind of psychic episode’ look.”

Stella guzzled about half the can, then looked embarrassed and held it in her hands for a while, fiddling with the tab with her thumb. “It wasn’t exactly an episode . . . I guess it was sort of a dream? I don’t remember any of it. I woke up on the floor in this totally random room around the corner. I thought I might be near the library, but this place is such a rabbit warren, who knows? But one of your guys walked by and saw me, and I guess I looked lost and whacked-out enough that he came to help.”

“Which room was it?” Miranda asked. “What was in it?”

“It was just an office. I don’t think it’s even one you guys use. There was this huge leather chair, and the walls were lined with those bookcases, you know, the ones with the glass doors that open up and down?”

“Barrister bookcases,” David supplied.

“Yes. Those. There was also a desk with nothing on it but a couple of knickknacks.”

Miranda turned to her husband. “The empty study down from the music room?”

“Sounds like it. Most of my college textbooks are in there, but that’s about it.”

“The thing is . . .” Stella took another swig of her soda before continuing. “That was the third time this has happened . . . this week.”

The Pair both stared at her.

“The first was the day after you were all out of town. I thought, okay, I’m sleepwalking. Weird, but not scary. Then two days later it happened again. It started to freak me out but I thought, maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe I went sleepwalking again and that was the only place my brain could come up with since it had just been there. But then tonight . . . three times isn’t a coincidence. Three times is a very special episode of ‘what the fuck?’”

“And you saw nothing that seemed out of place or odd in the room?” David asked.

She shook her head. “The room was freakishly tidy. If there had been even a book out of alignment, it would have stuck out like a sore thumb. It was just a room. I didn’t get any impressions from it like I might if something bad had happened there—there was nothing.”

“I think we need to check out this room,” Miranda said.

They all stood, but David said, “Let me meet you there—I want to stop and grab something that might help.”

Miranda was still worried, watching Stella, that the girl might fall over; she might not remember what had happened, but the whole thing had definitely left her unsteady. She led Miranda down the hall and around the corner fairly confidently, and they wound up at the room the Pair had expected. Since it was in their wing, it was locked, and Miranda held her com up to it—

“Wait,” Miranda said, frowning. “This room is locked.”

“So?”

“So your com isn’t authorized to get in here. How did you open the door?”

Stella shook her head. She had no answer to give.

It was just as the Witch had described: empty, silent. Miranda flipped the lights on for the human’s benefit, but there was really nothing to see. “Where did you wake up?”

“Over here . . .” Stella walked over to stand away from all the furniture, slightly off center. “Same exact spot every time. I remember seeing this little splotch in the tile.”

“Which way were you facing when you woke?”

A frown. “Well, now that you mention it . . . every time I was facing this way.” She turned away from Miranda toward one of the bookcases. “And . . . okay, that’s weird.”

“What is?”

“The sequence of events was always the same. I woke up struggling, saw the bookcase, then started looking around trying to orient myself. But when I looked over here . . . every time, I noticed this book.” Stella bent to one of the lower shelves and lifted its door, her finger falling on the spine of a thick, aged hardcover. “Maybe it was just because the cover’s this funky shade of orange. I don’t see what theoretical calculus would have to do with anything.”

Miranda joined her and pulled the book from the shelf. It was absurdly heavy. She opened it and flipped through, but all she saw were pages and pages of marginalia in a neat, slightly slanted hand she knew quite well. Nothing fell out of the book, there were no hidden messages—unless they were written in math, which David would have to judge. “Was there anything behind it on the shelf?”

Stella had knelt and was shifting the other books around. “Whoa.”

“What do you see?”

“A mirror,” Stella replied. “A tiny little mirror about two inches square, stuck to the back wall of the bookcase. What do you suppose it’s for?”

Before Miranda could answer that she had no idea, David appeared; he had a small handheld device about the size of his phone that she recognized as a scanner of some sort.

She raised an eyebrow at him, and he said, “Ever since Ovaska, I’ve been working on a way to scan for psychic or magical energy to detect amulets and such and hopefully one day tell me what kind they are. Our regular technology—the kind we use in the sensor network, the kind in the tracker I stuck in the soldier—can’t pick it up. I’ve tried dozens of methods and had no luck whatsoever. I couldn’t find the logic.”

“Magic isn’t logical,” Miranda said.

Stella laughed. “Of course it is. It’s very logical. It’s all cause and effect. If something seems to appear and disappear, that just means it went somewhere you haven’t found yet. But there’s an underlying order.”

“Exactly,” David said. “After you started telling us about the whole Web thing, and I started observing our abilities and incidents from that perspective, it started to make more sense.” He held up the scanner. “This is the first version that has given me anything useful. I figure if there’s something you’re being led to see, this will either help us find it, or at least tell us if it’s supernatural before we pick it up and play with it and get turned into frogs.”

“Show him the mirror,” Miranda told Stella.

The Prime bent and followed the Witch’s gesture. “Well, now.”

“Is there anything magical about the mirror?” Miranda wanted to know.

David held the scanner up to it and shook his head. “Assuming my readings are correct, no. It’s just a mirror.”

“Why would anyone slap a mirror in a bookcase?”

He examined it for a minute. “Odd . . . it’s glued to the back wall of the bookcase, but it’s not glued flat. There’s something very thin underneath the bottom edge that’s tilting the bottom out at a slight angle . . .” Something dawned on his face, and he straightened, looking around the room.

His expression became what she called his “in the Matrix” look; she could see him running through something as his eyes traveled over the walls. A moment later, though, he dug in his coat and pulled out a small flashlight.

She had long ago learned not to be surprised at anything he had in his pockets.

He glanced over at the light switch, and it flipped. The room spun back into darkness, and Miranda’s eyes adjusted instantly, but she had to reach out and grab the Witch’s arm to keep her from tripping as they got out of David’s way.

David asked Stella where she’d woken up, and she showed him; he knelt there, turned on the flashlight, and aimed it directly at the mirror.