Shadowflame (16 page)

“Wow,” Drew said, sounding reluctantly impressed. “You did all of that in less than two minutes?”

David smiled. “Didn’t Miranda tell you? I’m a genius.”

“You didn’t tell her the whole truth,” Miranda pointed out as they left Kat’s house and walked up the street to where the car was waiting.

“She doesn’t need to know the whole truth.” David looked at her sharply. “She already knows way more than she should about us.”

“But her life is in danger.”

“Irrelevant.” He put his hands in his coat pockets as he walked, and added, “The whole truth isn’t always the best truth.”

“What about Jake?” she asked. “We still haven’t found his body. I find it hard to believe that it’s not connected—what are the chances of someone kidnapping my bodyguard right after someone tries to kill me, and then someone else making fang-eyes at my best friend?”

“Remote,” he admitted. “I’m almost certain the same person or people are behind it . . . and, if what Deven said holds true, it may in fact be connected to the Red Shadow, and possibly even to Hart. But we don’t
know
, Miranda. We have no real evidence to bind it all together yet. And the more Kat and Drew know, the more danger they’re in.”

Just then, his phone rang. Miranda stopped, her first worry that it was Kat’s panic button, but David didn’t look concerned; he merely said, “Yes?”

Miranda could hear the murmur of a male voice.

“Chief Brady, it’s good to hear from you,” David said. “To what do I owe this honor?”

She watched his face go from neutral to ever so slightly confused, then angry, then back to neutral again. Her heart sank.

“We’ll be right there,” he said, and hung up.

“What is it?” she asked, but David was already speaking into his com.

“Star-three.”

“Yes, Sire?”
Faith piped up.

“We have an Alpha Seven at 4109 North Grafton, apartment 28. The Queen and I are en route; send a team.”

“As you will it, Sire.”

Alpha Seven . . . a human murdered by a vampire. She hadn’t heard that code since the war . . . but usually APD contacted Faith for suspected Shadow World crime, and for the chief himself to call . . . it had to be serious. “What’s going on?” she demanded.

David met her eyes. “Denise.”

The sun was well up, the Haven was silent, and Miranda was still sitting in her chair staring into the fire.

David had tried to ease her guilt and coax her into bed, but she refused; she just needed time to sit with what she was feeling. He had nodded, kissed her cheek, and let her be.

Denise MacNeil had been missing for about twenty-four hours; she hadn’t shown up at the office, and by midafternoon her secretary was worried. Calls had gone out and Denise’s landlady had finally agreed to check on her. The door was locked from the inside. The police had to break it down.

Dried blood was splattered all over the immaculate kitchen counters, soaked into the living room carpet and the sofa. Assuming it all came from Denise, it added up to fatal blood loss.

There had been a struggle: lamps knocked over, several things broken. The stereo was still playing, the same three CDs repeating over and over. There was a glass of wine undisturbed on the side table and a folder of redlined contracts still lying open on the couch.

All that remained of Denise was her left hand.

The police had called David because they knew Denise was Miranda’s agent and there might be a connection. So far the police had no leads.

The Haven had one.

The Elite team had taken samples from the scene, and they would be sent to Dr. Novotny for further testing. It was still too soon for the results on Jake, but Miranda hoped fervently there would be something, any clue, no matter how tiny, to link the two to the assassin who had called herself Stacey. That woman was the only possible suspect they had.

Miranda sat by the fire until almost nine in the morning, her heart heavy. First Jake, now Denise . . . was Kat next? It looked like she was already staked out as a possible target. Yes, she was under guard, but Miranda had been under Haven guard once, too, and Ariana Blackthorn had killed her in the middle of the city and dumped her body in the lake. Were they going to find Kat’s left hand next? And whose after that?

Leaving the hand, Deven had said, was the Red Shadow’s way of leaving a message. But if it was the Shadow, for whom were they working? Who could possibly hate Miranda enough to go to this much trouble?

It could be a remnant of the Blackthorn . . . or it could be Hart . . . but the Shadow didn’t work for vampires, and they commanded huge sums for their services. Hart could pull it off, but none of the Blackthorn or their cronies had been very wealthy. Then again, what human would want to hurt her this way? She barely knew any other humans
before
she had come to the Haven; who would be after her now? It made no sense.

Too restless and anxious to sit still anymore, she got up off the chair and left the suite.

She glanced over at the bed to see David deep in slumber, and she smiled in spite of herself. He was sleeping in the same position they tended to end up in, except that his arm was stretched over an empty expanse of blankets when it should have been around her body. For the first couple of weeks she’d had trouble sleeping with anyone so close to her, but she had already come to depend on his presence at her back.

Emergency tunnels connected the main house to the other buildings, so if she really wanted to, she could go work out; she could also go to the library, or pound her stress into the piano or her guitar strings. None of those options sounded appealing, for once, but there was something that did.

There was a study right between their wing and the guest wing, where David and Tanaka had held informal chats; it wasn’t her favorite room, being far more masculine in décor than she preferred, but she happened to know it had the most well-stocked liquor cabinet in the Haven as well as a fridge that hopefully still housed some of David’s ice cream stash.

She nodded to the hallway guard as she passed, then opened the study door.

To her dismay she found she wasn’t alone.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said.

Prime Deven sat with his feet up on a dark leather chair, one hand around a half-empty bottle of whiskey. He looked about as thrilled to see her as she was to see him.

He said something in what she guessed was Gaelic.

“Come again?”

With a slightly lazy smile, he translated, “The flame enters and casts all the world ’round her into shade.”

“Are you drunk?”

He shrugged. “I’m Irish,” he said. “I’ve spent most of the last millennium drunk.”

“You have an accent when you’re drunk,” she observed.

“I have an accent all the time,” he replied. “It hides its head in shame when I’m sober.”

Miranda had to smile at that, as well as at the marked contrast in his appearance and demeanor to all their other meetings. He was dressed casually in old jeans and a T-shirt advertising the Vatican gift shop; barefoot, his hair damp from a recent washing and therefore not glamorously spiked, without any makeup on, he looked . . . almost normal.

She found she was fascinated by the tattoos, though, and tried not to stare as she entered the room, closed the door, and headed over to the cabinet to fetch a bottle of her own, this one of rum. She also grabbed a bottle of Coke and a glass of ice.

“Are you religious?” she asked as she set her wares on the coffee table and flopped down on the couch opposite his.

Deven rolled his eyes. “I’m far too old to believe in fairy tales.”

She indicated his arms with the neck of the bottle. “What are those about, then?”

He laid one hand on his shoulder and absently ran his fingers along the line of the angel’s wing. She noticed, looking more closely, that the feathers had been designed to run parallel to a series of long scars in his upper arm; the scars were almost invisible with the angel carved over them.

“It’s a giant Catholic yin-yang,” Deven replied, closing his eyes blearily. He seemed so tired; was it a function of being seven hundred years old, or something else? What kept one of the world’s oldest vampires awake all morning?

Miranda poured rum halfway up her glass, then topped it off with a splash of Coke and took a long swallow, making a face at the taste. “And the scars? Are they from a giant Catholic lion attack?”

He took another hit off the whiskey but didn’t seem affected by the bite of the alcohol. She suspected the bottle had been full when he started. “A whip,” he answered. “You should see my back.”

“Who whipped you?”

“The abbot.”

“Why?”

He opened his eyes and fixed her with a stare. “He caught me in bed with one of the other novices.”

Miranda wasn’t sure how to respond to that. “So you were a monk?”

“Until the day I died.” He drank again, then again, before saying, “I was the fourth son of a farmer in southern Ireland. I was a weak little thing, far too frail to work the fields. So when I was eleven years old my father sent me to my uncle, who ran a monastery. I was basically a tithe to bribe the Almighty for a better harvest.”

“That must have been hard for you, to leave home so young,” she said.

“On the contrary, that journey was the first time I ever remember looking forward to anything. I loved God. I was born to be a monk. I had no desire for a wife or family or land of my own. I longed only for silence around me and the light of God within. I spent hours in prayer, on my knees at my bedside. I hated the farm, my rough rowdy brothers, and the drudgery of our lives. I wanted to devote my life to Christ and to the written word—monks back then were some of the only scholars.”

“But when you got there . . .”

“It didn’t take long for my uncle to suspect there was something abnormal about me,” Deven said. There was strangely little emotion in his words; even for something so long ago she would have expected a little anger, or sorrow, but it almost sounded as though he were telling someone else’s story. “I know now that he started the monastery after being driven out of his old one for accusations of pedophilia. He was obsessed with purity and chastity, and to sublimate his own sexual urges he tried to beat mine out of me. He decided it was his mission to make me fit to stand before God. He forced me to pray for twelve to twenty hours at a time, on my knees, even after I had lost my voice; I was only allowed to eat every few days; I had to recite Leviticus while he tore open my back with the whip. Between broken bones, infection, and starvation I came close to dying more times than I can count . . . but I was so afraid of the damnation I faced that I dragged myself back to life every time.”

“I’m sorry,” Miranda said softly.

“I don’t want your pity, Queen,” he snapped. “Don’t think that we have some common bond because men treated us both like trash.”

“I don’t think that,” Miranda said, her own anger flashing at him. “We’re nothing alike. What happened to me didn’t turn me into a drunken prick who tries to get in his old boyfriend’s pants after fucking him over. Trust me, I don’t want to claim any common ground with you.”

“If I wanted David, I’d take him,” Deven informed her venomously.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she demanded. “You have a fantastic Consort who for some reason I can’t figure out loves the hell out of you, and you’re fixated on a married ex who doesn’t want you anymore? Who are you trying to hurt—me? David? Or yourself?” Miranda sat up straight and leveled a look of loathing on the Prime. “You missed your chance, Deven,” she snarled. “You blew it. It’s over now. You drove him away, now he’s with me, and I’m not going anywhere. So get the fuck over it.”

The ire seemed to drain out of Deven as quickly as it had come.

Silence sat awkwardly, and drunkenly, between them while she finished her drink and poured another. The Prime didn’t react to her outburst at all for a while.

Finally he said, “You can hate me all you want, but I’m not going anywhere either.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“I suppose for David’s sake we should try to get along.”

“Probably.” Another pause. Then she asked, “What do you think is happening to David and me?”

“What makes you think I would know?”

Now it was her turn to roll her eyes. “Oh, come on. Even David thinks you know everything. You can’t tell me that in all the years you’ve been around, you’ve never heard of psychic gifts being contagious.”

“As a matter of fact, I haven’t,” he said.

“I picked up on his telekinesis, and he picked up on your fighting mojo. How could that happen?”

Deven leaned over the arm of the couch and felt around for a moment before coming up with a second bottle of whiskey, this one new. As he opened it, he corrected her. “He didn’t get it from me; he got it from you.”

“But I don’t have it.”

“You’ve got precog because you’re a Queen,” he said. “It’s still untrained, and so is his. The telekinesis you got from him was already honed and focused—it took him years to learn how to direct it enough to throw a living thing. What I have isn’t a single gift, it’s a combination of three factors: prescience, telepathy, and technique. I taught him the third, he already had the second, and from you he got the first. His work was still a little sloppy around the edges, but once he got out of his own way, it was genuinely powerful.”

“Why is it harder to throw living things?”

Deven shrugged. “They wiggle?”

“Sophie showed me how to do something similar to that,” Miranda recalled. “I wonder where she learned it from.”

“No idea. But the thing to remember is you’ve had precog y our whole life—it’s part of who you are. It just didn’t start to actively manifest until you became Queen. It’s practically unheard of for someone to just spontaneously develop a psychic talent without at least some latent ability . . . and even less heard of to start manifesting someone else’s.”

“Still, the central question isn’t answered. How did it happen?”

“I would venture to guess that the answer is somewhere in our history. Legend has it that back in the ancient days, when the Signets were new, we had abilities we can only dream of, abilities we lost somewhere along the way. We are a mere echo of what we once were.”