Shadowflame (34 page)

“She could have been anywhere—”

“No, not anywhere. She was within range to shoot all three of us within four seconds of each other, meaning she had to be somewhere
here
.” He highlighted an area on the grid. “Given that the nearest building has no windows facing the street . . . she was either to one side of it or on the roof. With this type of dart, the gun she had to have used has a range of thirty feet, maximum. That building is three stories, but if she shot downward, the darts had to hit each of us at an angle, which they didn’t. Mine was sticking straight out of my neck when I pulled it out. That means she was on the ground.”

He focused the search on the area of the street where she could have reasonably been, given the wind’s direction and speed and the locations of the three Signets at the time they were all shot.

A spot on the screen lit up and flashed with the temperature: 43.8 degrees, where at least the next five feet in every direction read 43.9. The air pressure showed a corresponding change.

He locked the search on those readings and ran a trace that would follow that same anomaly as it moved over the grid, allowing for a slight variation in temperature as Ovaska’s body temp rose because of her physical exertion.

A few pixels at a time, agonizingly slowly, the computer began to draw a line across the screen, starting at the point where Ovaska must have been standing out of sight to fire the dart gun, closing on Miranda and Deven’s location, then moving along the street as she dragged them both away from the scene.

He suspected that if he were to go back and run the data right next to Ovaska, he’d find corresponding tracks for Deven and Miranda, but there was no time for that . . . and he had what he needed.

The computer churned through immense amounts of data to provide the readings, and it was slow going, but the green line continued to snake its way through the streets of Austin . . . until it dead-ended deep in the warehouse district.

David looked up at Jonathan and Faith and gave them a feral smile. “Got her.”

She woke shivering, her body wrung out and exhausted by pain, the smell of blood still filling her nostrils and a nauseating metallic taste in the back of her throat. Her head still ached dully, but the writhing agony had faded so that instead of wailing she wanted to curl up and whimper.

She could barely feel her fingers as she tried to move her hands, touching the ground beneath her, trying to learn anything she could about where she was.

Grimy concrete floor. Damp. Slowly, she extended her arm and kept feeling around until her hand hit something hard.

Bars.

She pried one eye open, groaning softly as light intruded and sent sparks through her head. Everything was blurry at first, but she blinked until her vision started to clear.

The only light came from a single incandescent bulb, leaving everything an otherworldly orange. She could make out the bars to her side, and turning her head a little she got a sense of the size of her prison: It was a cell about as big as a walk-in apartment closet.

She heard metal clank and tensed all over, waiting for a door to open or something to change, but nothing did. A moment later she heard a faint indrawn breath that hitched as if around a sudden stabbing pain.

She lifted her head. “Deven?”

Pale eyes still glazed with the aftereffects of the toxin met hers. “Aye.”

“What are you doing up there?”

The Prime almost smiled. He had been chained by his wrists about a foot off the ground up against the back wall of a cell adjacent to hers. “You . . . don’t remember?” he asked, panting slightly.

“No.”

“You fought her,” he replied, sounding about as well as she felt. “She was going to chain us both, but you woke up and started struggling like a wildcat. She couldn’t hold you still enough, so she just dumped you on the floor and locked the cell. She was bleeding when she left.”

Miranda heaved herself onto her side, wincing—her shoulder was still killing her and it felt like she’d been kicked in the kidneys. “Sounds pretty badass.”

Deven chuckled weakly. “It was.”

She ran her hands down over her body, patting herself for other injuries. “She took our weapons and phones . . . but I still have my hand, so I still have my com. Why?”

“Don’t know. I didn’t get a dramatic villain monologue out of her.”

Miranda shut her eyes again, trying to concentrate. If she could summon enough strength, she could call for help—surely David would be able to sense her, even if they were really far away. She reached out with her senses . . .

. . . and found them blocked. She couldn’t feel anything beyond the cell. That meant that David couldn’t feel her either.

“Oh, God,” she said. “I can’t project. We’re cut off.”

“I know that.”

“There’s a room like this at the Haven . . . it’s where I learned to shield myself. No matter what goes on inside, it can’t get outside. Psychic signals, even cell phones and the coms . . . they won’t be able to find us.”

“It takes an incredible amount of power to create a shielded chamber,” Deven noted, eyes wandering around the room. “Either she’s got resources beyond a few amulets from Volundr or this place existed before she got here.”

“What do we do?” she asked, starting to panic. “What do we do?”

“First . . . calm down. They might not be able to find us via the Signet bond, but there are other ways. You’re married to a genius, remember?”

“He hasn’t been able to find Ovaska so far. What if—”

“Things are different now. By kidnapping us, she changed her MO. That throws in more variables. They’ll find us, Miranda. We just have to survive until they do.”

“Can you Mist?”

Deven shook his head. “I’m way too scattered already.”

“Why hasn’t she killed us yet?”

Deven snorted quietly. “Clearly you’ve never been vengeful. Killing someone who can’t see your face isn’t nearly as satisfying . . . and killing us while we were in pain would have been merciful.”

“So she could be here any minute to finish us off,” Miranda concluded. “We have to be ready for her—I just need to get up—”

She didn’t have a chance to finish the thought, much less formulate a plan. There was the sound of a metal bolt shooting home, and a door across from the cells swung open.

Marja Ovaska walked into the room, giving them both a nasty, self-satisfied smile. She was wearing a metal disc on a chain identical to the one she’d lost at Drew’s school . . . and she was holding a hand-carved stake.

She stood in front of the cell doors for a minute, not speaking, just watching Miranda. She was, Miranda noticed, a strikingly beautiful woman with cropped blond hair and large blue eyes; Miranda pictured her standing next to Sophie’s dark pixie looks, and the image made a wistful sort of sense. It also helped explain why Deven had developed a soft spot for the couple; physically they reminded Miranda of the Pair, with one small and dark, the other tall and blond.

Miranda started to speak, but Ovaska cut her off. “Don’t bother,” she said, and yes, she had an accent now that Miranda hadn’t heard the night of Drew’s death. “I don’t care if you’re sorry.”

“Well, good,” Deven said caustically. “Miranda may have sympathy for your sob story—poor you, your lover died, now you have to strike back. Cue the violins. I couldn’t care less.”

Ovaska looked at him with loathing . . . but also, Miranda sensed, with the slightest undercurrent of fear. Deven had been right . . . even though she had the power here, and even though she was no longer part of the Shadow, an agent was always an agent, and even chained to the wall at her mercy, the Alpha was still the Alpha.

“We both know this isn’t about Miranda getting Sophie killed,” Deven went on. “Sophie made her own choices—that’s what’s eating you alive. Because when it came down to it, she chose Miranda, and the Signets, over you.”

“Shut up,” Ovaska said softly.

“If you’re going to kill us, kill us,” the Prime told her. “If you stall, you’ll be caught. I taught you better than that . . . unless . . .”

“Deven,” Miranda interrupted, “don’t taunt the crazy person with the stake!”

But Deven was staring at Ovaska hard, eyes narrowed. “She’s not crazy. Are you, Marja? Did you really bring us here to kill us? This whole setup . . . the bomb, the cells, the poison . . . it’s more than simple vengeance. I know you.”

Now Ovaska smiled. “Do you think so?”

“You’re not this sentimental. Sophie was the one who begged me not to kill you both. Even in love, even facing execution at my hands, you didn’t betray a scrap of emotion. If all you wanted was revenge, you would have found a way to kill Miranda by now . . . you wouldn’t have missed the first time.”

“You said she was sizing me up,” Miranda said. “And that killing the others was to hurt me.”

Deven shook his head. “That may be true, but it’s not the whole story. The more complicated this whole thing became, the less sense it made. It’s cliché, Marja. Scorned woman out for blood—bullshit. Volundr introduced you to someone, didn’t he? Someone with a lot of money and a very particular purpose.”

Still smiling, Ovaska took a key from her pocket and opened Deven’s cell door. She walked up to him so that they were inches apart and said to him very calmly, “Now you’re the one who’s stalling.”

She rested the point of the stake against Deven’s cheek, then drew it slowly down his neck, over his chest. “What do you suppose would happen to the Red Shadow if I killed the Alpha?” she asked.

“Well,” Deven replied, “given that I issued a kill order on you, even if you walk out of this building alive, you’ll find out pretty quickly.”

“I fooled you once,” Marja told him. “You walked right into the trap I set for you. I evaded the Southern Elite for weeks. If I can do that, I can outfox your agents.”

“Why did you set a trap, again?” Deven asked. “Why are we here?”

Miranda focused her will on her limbs, and slowly, very slowly, she got her hands underneath her to try and push herself up. She didn’t know what she was going to do, but she wasn’t going to lie there on the floor and wait for Ovaska to make a move. One way or another she was going to go down fighting.

Ovaska’s head jerked toward her. “Don’t try it,” she snapped. “There’s nowhere for you to go.”

Deven seized her lapsed attention, pulled his knees up to his chest, and kicked Ovaska hard in the midsection. She staggered backward, hitting the bars with a loud clank, and flailed sideways to grab the bars and stay upright. The stake, knocked out of her hand, clattered to the floor inches from the wall of bars between the cells.

Miranda shoved herself up and dove for it, sticking her arm through the bars and getting her hand around the stake.

As she jerked backward Ovaska regained her footing, and pain exploded through Miranda’s hand as Ovaska stomped on her fingers. Miranda cried out and dropped the stake, which Ovaska bent and retrieved. Miranda pulled her arm back just in time to avoid another stomp.

Miranda held her arm against her chest, the pain of her broken fingers nearly making her sick.

Ovaska glared down at her. “Bitch,” she snarled.

She returned her attention to Deven, who didn’t look particularly disappointed that the gamble hadn’t worked. “Worth a try,” he said.

Ovaska straightened her clothes, rotating her neck as if to work out a kink, then considered the stake in her hand and the Prime bound before her. “You’re right,” she said finally. “Yes, I wanted revenge. Killing all her little friends did make me feel better . . . although if one of them had talked, told me how to find the Haven, that would have made things much easier for me. Your people are nothing if not loyal. It’s annoying. But it turns out there are greater powers out there than the Signets . . . and bigger paychecks than the Shadow.”

Deven met her eyes. “Who are you working for, Marja?”

She smiled. “Not you.”

She glanced over at Miranda. “The contract stipulates: one live Signet, physically intact, to be delivered tonight. As they say, I can kill two birds with one stone. I can destroy the woman who destroyed my life, and I can make myself obscenely rich and finally get out of the game. This is what I learned from you, Sire. Cold, calculating efficiency. This woman is important to my client, and to my desire for justice . . . and you . . .”

She ran her fingers down the shaft of the stake, pondering a moment longer, before she finished, “You, Sire, are expendable.”

She smiled. Then she drove the stake into Deven’s stomach.

Eighteen

Deven held back his scream, just barely, but his head fell back and hit the wall, eliciting a strangled sound of pain that Miranda herself could feel throughout her body. Blood erupted from the wound, running in coppery dark rivers down over his legs, pooling on the floor.

Marja stepped back to avoid the blood and said, “There, now. That’s the first problem dealt with. Now I just have to keep you quiet until my client arrives in an hour.” She turned to Miranda. “Either you can stay where you are and not make trouble, and watch your friend bleed to death, or I can give you another shot of poison, and you can scream and writhe on the floor in your own blood while he bleeds to death. Up to you.”

Miranda glared at her, wanting nothing more than to fling herself at the bars and tear them down to get her hands around Ovaska’s throat, but she was still too injured and unfocused to Mist, and not strong enough to tear down walls.

Ovaska watched all those thoughts cross Miranda’s face, her own expression deeply satisfied with Miranda’s impotence. “Enjoy your last few moments together,” Ovaska said to Miranda. “I’ll be back soon.”

She slammed the outer door shut and locked it.

Miranda’s hand was still in agony, but she forced energy into it to at least partially mend the broken fingers, and got up on her knees. “Deven!”

His head was hanging down, eyes closed, but she could hear him breathing, a shallow rattling in his chest. The blood was still flowing from his abdomen.

Miranda dragged herself to her feet and held on to the bars. “Can you heal it?” she asked.

Deven could barely focus on her enough to reply, but he said, “Can’t . . . stake’s still . . . in there. Can’t pull it.”

Miranda tried reaching through the bars, but he was chained at least two feet beyond her reach. Her heart was thundering around her rib cage as she tried to assess the situation for a solution: Deven’s cell was still open, but hers was locked.

Miranda pushed herself over to the door of her cell and pulled on it as hard as she could, shaking it, trying to make it budge. If she could get it open, she could get into Deven’s cell and pull the stake, and he could heal the wound before he bled to death . . . but she had to get the door open . . .

“Miranda . . .”

She stopped midshake and turned to Deven. “Just hold on,” she said. “Just stop the bleeding as much as you can. I’ll get that thing out of you, I just have to—”

“Miranda . . . I’m done for. Unless I can draw power from Jonathan, even if the stake comes out, I won’t last long.” He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall. “You have to save yourself. Whatever that woman wants with you, it can’t be good.”

“Let me think,” Miranda said. “I’ll get us out of this.”

“Miranda . . .”

“I’ll think of something!” she said, and she turned to him, tears in her eyes. “I’m not going to let you die.”

Deven smiled. “Why not?”

Miranda shook her head around her tears. “I’m not going to be the one who has to tell David you’re dead. It would kill him to lose you. Jonathan, too. Literally.”

Their eyes met, and to her astonishment Deven’s were shining, too. “I’m sorry,” Deven said softly. “I’m sorry about David.”

Miranda hung her head against the bars. “I forgive you,” she whispered. “Thank you . . . for Sophie. She was . . .”

“She was a good friend,” Deven finished, his own voice fading. “That’s all you need to remember about her. She was your friend.”

“I don’t want you to die,” she said, crying through the words. “Tell me what to do to save you.”

“You’re too weak from the poison to Mist,” Deven said. “There’s nothing else you can do.”

Miranda watched Deven’s blood falling, drop by drop, onto the cold floor, drop by drop his life draining out of his body, the light in his Signet beginning to dim.

“Jonathan,” Deven whispered, his eyes slowly closing. “Oh, love . . . don’t keep me waiting long . . .”

“No,” Miranda whispered. “No . . .” She took a deep breath, planting her feet solidly on the ground and holding on to the bars hard.

She lifted her eyes from the blood trail to the stake jutting out of Deven’s body, right through his solar plexus, making his breath labored, his healing ability unable to stay on top of the damage as it tore through his flesh over and over again each time he inhaled. If she could just get her arm far enough through the bars, she could get her hand . . . around it . . .

Miranda gasped.

She slid her hand through the bars again, extending her palm toward the stake, and drew up all the energy she could, trying to remember how she’d done it before . . . with Hart . . . she had acted without thinking, acted from emotion, from anger . . . and one thing Miranda knew how to do was manipulate emotion.

She reached down into herself and dragged out all the anger she could find: anger at Marja Ovaska for killing Drew, for attacking Kat, for poisoning David, for killing Jake and Denise . . . for bringing fear and violence to the streets of her city . . .

Miranda pushed that anger out along her arm, then focused her mind on the stake as if she were mentally wrapping her fingers around its hilt, feeling the wood grain against her fingers, the slickness of Deven’s blood around the wood, as she grasped it, and with the force of her anger,
pulled
.

Deven cried out in pain as the stake flew out of his body, yanked so hard that it was flung back into Miranda’s cell and hit the wall.

Breathing hard, barely able to stay conscious from the effort, Miranda held on to the bars. “Deven!”

He was icy white and not moving; she couldn’t even hear him breathe. He hung limp in his chains . . . but the blood had stopped flowing.

“Deven? Are you still there?” she asked.

Several interminable seconds later, she heard, “Nice . . . work . . .”

Miranda slid down the bars onto her knees. She couldn’t keep herself up anymore. “How long can you hold out?”

“Maybe . . . half an hour.”

“Okay. That’s a start.” She turned and crawled over to the stake where it had landed on the floor. The point had been blunted when it hit the wall, but with enough force it could go through flesh. So they had a weapon; that was step one.

If she could get Ovaska into her cell, she could attack, and with the door open she could get out and call for help, find the keys to the shackles, and get them out of here. The only thing she could think to do was feign unconsciousness.

“How can we get her in here?”

Deven sighed. “Make a lot of noise.”

Miranda nodded, leaning against the bars to rest for a moment. Exhaustion was dragging her down and she just wanted to sleep . . . no, she wanted to go home and fall asleep in her own bed with David beside her . . . the longing to have him with her was suddenly overwhelming. She just wanted to hear his voice, feel the reassuring strength of his presence, anything . . .

“Your husband is really amazing in bed,” Deven said suddenly. “I love that thing he does with his tongue—”

“Shut up!” Miranda snapped, her attention whipping back to center, and with it, the realization that she was on the verge of cracking. Now was no time to pine herself to death—she had to act. “You’re such a bastard,” she said, though she was almost grinning as she spoke.

Deven managed a smile. “Better. Now get up . . . or I’ll give you the play-by-play of the night with the handcuffs—”

“Like you’re really into bondage,” she muttered halfheartedly, focusing her energy on moving back to the corner of her cell. The farther she could get Ovaska in, the more room she’d have to take her down. Miranda fought hard to ignore the pain in her hand and shoulder, the slow creeping madness of being cut off from David, the burning in veins that needed blood, badly, to help her recover from her injuries and the poison . . . soon she’d have time to rest, and she could feed and sleep. But now she had to focus.

“Okay,” she said. “Try to look dead.”

“No . . . problem . . .”

Miranda tucked the stake out of sight under her arm, took a deep breath . . . and screamed at the top of her lungs.

“This way!”

Faith held her phone out in front of her, gesturing with her free arm for the rest of the team to follow her around the corner and up the street. The green line that marked Ovaska’s trail glowed in the moonless night, leading them miles from where they had originally thought Ovaska was hiding, back to the industrial warehouse neighborhood where Sophie had once lived.

Fifteen Southern Elite and twelve from the West converged on the trail’s end, Faith in the lead, all of them out for blood and under orders to take Ovaska down by any means necessary. Jonathan and David were right behind them, but David was still woozy from the aftereffects of the poison, and he had sent the Elite ahead instead of making them waste precious minutes waiting for their Prime.

“Here!” Faith announced, looking up from her phone.

They were in the middle of the street.

“Goddamn it!” Faith exclaimed. “What went wrong?”

“Something is degrading the trail,”
David said over the coms.
“Fan out and search every building on the intersection from sub-basement to roof.”

“You have your orders, Elite!” Faith called. “Go!”

Faith turned in a circle, watching the Elite disperse in teams to kick down doors, her heart sinking—there had to be a dozen buildings surrounding the intersection, some of them huge. They didn’t have time to canvass the whole neighborhood. The Queen and Prime might have only minutes to live.

David and Jonathan appeared by her side. “Whatever she’s using to shield them must be interfering with the readings,” David told her, panting just a little from exertion. “I don’t think I can narrow it down any further without taking more time than we have.”

“You said this was Sophie’s old neighborhood?” Jonathan asked. “Which building was she in?”

Faith shook her head. “I don’t remember—hang on—” She accessed her e-mail and searched for the message Sophie had sent her with her address, months and months ago when Faith had asked her to train Miranda. She doublechecked the street names again. “That one over there, the red one on the corner. But Ovaska wouldn’t use her building, would she? That would be too obvious.”

“Yes,” Jonathan agreed, “and that’s exactly why she’d use it. It would be the last place you’d look, especially if you’d already searched it before.”

David turned to Jonathan. “Do you know if Ovaska was strongly gifted?”

“No,” Jonathan replied. “She wasn’t—she had some telepathy, but nothing outstanding.”

David nodded once and took off for Sophie’s building.

Faith ran to catch up with him. “What is it?”

“She has to be keeping Miranda and Deven in a shielded room like the one where I taught Miranda to use her empathy. Proximity to a room like the one at the Haven could disrupt the readings that led us here—that would explain why the trail ended. It takes time and power to create a room like that. Ovaska had neither—but Sophie might have, and Ovaska would have known about it.”

“What if she’s got some other kind of magic, or more amulets, and not a shielded room?”

David reached the building and angled left, looking for an entrance. “Then Ovaska just happened to choose another building in the exact same block as Sophie’s. Which do you think is more likely?”

Faith nodded and lifted her wrist. “Report!”

“No luck so far,”
one of the team leaders answered.
“We’ve only been through three buildings. They could be anywhere.”

“No they couldn’t,” Faith said. “I need all Elite to 2421 Buckland.”

“I can’t Mist inside,” David told Jonathan. “I’m still too scattered. Can you?”

Jonathan closed his eyes briefly, then shook his head and opened them. “Whatever’s interfering with the signal is making it impossible to Mist—it’s like I can’t see clearly enough to get a lock on the destination. We’re going to need a good old-fashioned door like normal people.”

Faith stepped back to look at the building’s walls, trying to figure out where the entrance was. “I’ll call Mitchell with the city planning office and get a schematic. It’ll take two minutes—”

No sooner were the words out of her mouth than she heard David say, “Oh, God . . .”

The Prime had gone pale, and a second later Faith knew why; faintly, somewhere inside the building, a woman was screaming.

Miranda heard the door opening, heard Ovaska demand, “What in hell is going on in here?”

She kept screaming, doubled over in the cell corner, until she heard the jingle of keys and the clank of the cell door opening.

“Shut up!” Ovaska yelled. “Shut up or I’ll dose you again!”

Miranda let her get one foot closer, gathering all the strength she could into her body, then clamped her mouth shut and twisted around toward Ovaska, ramming the stake as hard as she could into the woman’s thigh.

Now it was Ovaska’s turn to scream.

Miranda threw herself at the assassin, knocking her into the side of the cell, but Ovaska was hardly amateur enough to let a stake wound stop her. She grabbed Miranda’s arms and flung her aside, firing off a string of curses at the Queen.

Miranda wasn’t an amateur either. Adrenaline surged through her, hot and bloody. She caught herself and used the back wall as leverage, flying into Ovaska and tackling her, and they rolled across the floor, both snarling like animals, trying to pin each other, too well matched in strength to do so.

Miranda reached down and pushed on the stake that was still in Ovaska’s leg, driving it deeper and eliciting a cry of pain. Unyielding, Ovaska shoved her and struggled to her feet, running for the cell door, no doubt intending to lock her in again.

This time Miranda was fast enough; she wedged her body in the doorway as Ovaska tried to slam it shut, knocking the breath out of Miranda but not trapping her. Ovaska ran for the outer door, and Miranda ignored the pain in her chest and followed.

The cells were in a basement room—the outer door led to a stairwell. Miranda sprinted up after Ovaska’s retreating form.