Queen of Shadows

by Dianne Sylvan

She thought of the pen she’d seen earlier and resisted the urge to ask what kind of degree he had, and where from. Best not to admit she’d been poking around in his bedroom. A safer route was, “How does a vampire end up a computer geek?”

  He stopped working and swiveled the chair to face her. “When I first became involved with the Signets, most Primes were still relying on outdated radio technology for intra-Elite communication. Our security system was obsolete, and there was no network among the Signets to share information. We tend to be . . . slow in evolving. I decided that in order to survive as a society we had to adapt.”

  “Why not hire someone to do all the technical stuff, then? Clearly money’s not a problem around here.”

  “I don’t trust anyone else. It only takes one slipped password to bring a network down. I’m the only person with full access.”

  “Where did you get these thingies?” she asked, holding up her arm, where she’d snapped the wristband on earlier.

  “I developed the first version five years ago. This is the third. The original design was more like a wristwatch with a keypad. I reverse-engineered the touch screen technology of the iPhone and combined it with voice recognition software. The fabrication is subcontracted to a private firm via the Department of Defense, which was happy to make the coms in exchange for limited access to my designs.”

  “Um . . . did you go to school for this sort of thing?”

  He inclined his head toward the wall, where she saw for the first time a framed diploma: a doctorate in engineering . . . from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

  “MIT? Are you serious?”

  Her amazement amused him. “Of course. My dissertation was on voice recognition technology and its applications in security and defense. That was twenty years ago, though—the research is Paleolithic now.”

  Twenty years ago, she’d been seven years old. He didn’t look any older than she was. “When were you born?”

  His smile faded. “1643. I was born and raised in northern England.”

  After everything she’d been through and heard in the last forty-eight hours, finding out he was over 350 years old barely even fazed her. She just nodded, and commented, “You don’t sound British. Or Jewish. Isn’t Solomon Hebrew?”

  He nodded. “When you live for more than one human lifetime, it pays to reinvent yourself from time to time. When I left England behind, I also left behind my birth name.”

  “What was it?”

  This time the smile was faint and held a bit of an admonishment, and she realized she had no business asking, and that he’d intimated he wouldn’t tell her anyway. “Sorry,” she muttered, trying to think of something less personal to ask. “Where did you go after that?”

  “Valencia, for a while. Then Lyons, Rome, and Edinburgh. In 1920 I moved to the States and lived in California until 1989. I finished my postgraduate studies and then moved here.”

  Her stomach was getting full, and combined with the narcotics it was making her drowsy. She replaced the cover on the tray and sat back, appreciating how comfortable the couch was—not as comfortable as his bed, but still, it was soft enough not to hurt, and felt like reclining on a cloud. She rested her hands on her belly and asked a bit sleepily, “What did you do in California?”

  “I was the Prime’s second in command.”

  “Why didn’t you stay there and be Prime, then?”

  She heard him rise, and a moment later a lightweight blanket was placed over her, possibly the same one he’d wrapped her in before. His voice was as soothing as the couch was comfortable, although what he said was hardly comforting. “The Prime of California is a friend of mine,” he told her, moving her about like a rag doll, bending her knees and putting a pillow beneath them to ease the strain on her back and pelvis.

  “So?”

  “The only way a Prime can lose his Signet is if he dies.”

  Her eyes shot open. “Does that mean you killed the old Prime here?”

  He nodded. There was no triumph in his face, really, just resignation. “You and I are not so different. We both dealt death in the name of justice.”

  She made a sound that was almost a laugh. “Justice had nothing to do with it. I just wanted to live.”

  “Liar,” he chided gently.

  “They’re going to lock me up,” she murmured as she began to drift off again. “They’ll put me in the crazy house . . . I’m not just crazy now, I’m a killer.”

  Her eyes were already shut, but she heard him say, “Like I said . . . we’re two of a kind.”

  Four

  Rain, rain, go away . . . no, don’t . . .

  Summer storms returned to Austin the next day, and Miranda slept to rolling thunder and the patter of rain on the metal shutters.

  She spent most of the next few days asleep, in fact, sometimes crying her way out of nightmares and sometimes drifting in wistful memories of a time when the world made sense. She dreamed of college, of lying in bed with Mike on a Sunday morning sharing sections of the Austin American-Statesman. She dreamed of the early days with her guitar and the rush of applause.

  Life reduced to its simplest factors: She slept, she woke, she ate, she showered, she slept again. Sometimes she saw Faith, and she spoke to the two guards who watched her door and brought her food, but for the most part she was alone, and glad of it. Safe beneath a pile of linens, she could forget where she was and what had happened . . . for a while, from time to time.

  She didn’t see David. She didn’t know what sort of business occupied the strongest vampire in Texas, but it kept him away from dusk till dawn. Faith hinted that something was going on in the city, but didn’t specify, and Miranda didn’t ask.

  At one point Faith asked for a list of things she wanted from her apartment, and later produced additional clothes and Miranda’s laptop. Miranda took a moment to e-mail Kat and Mel and let them know she was out of town indefinitely. She didn’t log back on to see if there was any reply.

  On the fourth day, or evening, she woke about half an hour before sunset from sleep that was almost restful and climbed out of bed to find that parts of her weren’t as sore as they had been.

  The rain seemed to have abated for now. She would have gone to the window to look out, but the shutters prevented it; these people were serious about their darkness. She supposed that if her skin would ignite within thirty seconds of exposure to sunlight, she’d be a bit paranoid, too.

  Any minute now I’m going to wake up in the mental hospital. Any minute now.

  She made her way to the bathroom and showered, taking things slowly. If she moved too fast, she hurt herself, or at least got dizzy. Staying focused on each tiny step of washing and drying kept her from having to think. It hurt to think.

  Everything was so big and empty in her head that she kept catching herself sitting still, listening for voices that weren’t there. The emptiness echoed within her until she had to start humming to drown it out.

  Wet hair falling around her shoulders, she took out her guitar and sat back down on the bed. She didn’t want to play, but what else was there for her to do? Her own thoughts weren’t powerful enough to fill the space, which brought to mind not the peace of meditation, but the stricken silence after a nuclear bomb, just before the sirens began.

  She tried. She lifted her fingers to the strings and tried to summon a song, any song, but nothing came.

  For a long time she sat hugging the instrument to her body, head bowed, gripping the guitar’s neck. She didn’t cry; she had cried enough already. She felt dry and gritty on the inside, like sandpaper, rubbed raw.

  She didn’t hear any noise, but she felt him approach. Somehow through the shields and the silence, she was aware of him moving toward her as he moved through the room.

  A hand touched her chin, and lifted; she looked up into the Prime’s eyes.

  “Come,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “With me,” he replied. “You need to get out of this room for a while.�
��

  She was inclined to disagree, but knew better, and set aside her guitar, standing up carefully. She grabbed her faded old blue cardigan from the chair and wrapped it around her, sliding on the beat-up pair of sneakers she’d had brought from home. “Okay.”

  He held open the door for her and allowed her to set the pace down the hall. The two guards bowed as they passed—that happened again when they left the corridor, and again when they took a left turn. Miranda noticed their deference distractedly. She was too busy taking in the grandeur that surrounded her.

  It was more like a museum than a house. Statuary, paintings, and antiques lined the hallway, and the floor was polished marble. She felt like she’d stepped into a parallel universe of rich people with too much time on their hands. The farther they got from the bedroom at the end of the hall, the more ornate things were, presumably to impress guests. The Prime’s room, and her own, were sedate in comparison. She wouldn’t call the place tacky by any stretch, but it seemed to have been designed from the ground up for one purpose: the display of affluence.

  David told her a little about the building’s history as he led her along. Primes, he said, inherited the fortunes and property of their predecessors, so most of what was here dated back before his tenure. There had been eight Primes in this Haven before him, each leaving his mark before losing his life. The primary structure’s four wings housed the Prime, the Elite, and the servants, as well as any visiting dignitaries. The other buildings were for storage and warrior training.

  “This whole wing is yours,” she said incredulously. “What do you do with all these rooms?”

  He indicated various doors as they walked by. “Conference room. Library. My workroom. Music room. That staircase is locked and leads down to the server room.”

  “Music? You play?”

  He smiled. “No, but the seventh Prime’s Queen did. I’ll have the piano tuned for you.”

  “So why don’t you have a Queen?”

  His smile faded. “Some of us don’t. It isn’t up to me.”

  “Shouldn’t it be?”

  He tilted his head to the right, and she took the right-hand hallway. “Becoming Prime isn’t merely a matter of strength and age. The Signets choose their bearers, and those bearers’ mates. None of us really understand how. The system has been in place for over two thousand years, and its origins have been lost . . . but the Signet never lies. It knows, somehow, who we are meant to rule with, even if we have never met.”

  “Wait a second . . . you’re telling me a necklace tells you who your soul mate is? And you just . . . believe it?”

  The smile returned, and he said, “As did centuries of my forebears. You can see, perhaps, why I had such a difficult time persuading the others to adopt new technology. We’re dependent on a system that relies on magic as old as history. The kind of person who is willing to abide by that isn’t the kind who wants an iPod.”

  “Then where do you fit in?”

  They turned another corner, and the hallway opened out into a huge open room; before her was a balcony rail, with a grand staircase winding down from each end into a ballroom. Everything was spotless, the wood gleaming. Miranda felt as if she’d blundered onto the Embassy Ball set from My Fair Lady. She suddenly wished she had on something more impressive than an old cardigan and a ratty pair of blue Chucks.

  They took the right-hand staircase, but instead of leading her to the main doors, he angled right again, to a smaller door that led outside.

  The rain had passed, at least for now, leaving everything clean and fresh. The night was warm, and she was immediately dazzled by the starlit sky that peered out between the silver-edged clouds; the garden path they walked along was lined with electric torches, but they were dimmed to allow the overhead view to shine. She stared up, and up, into the spaces between the stars, feeling the world whirl away from her, suddenly tiny in the vastness of this world she had come to, and everything that might lay beyond.

  “Easy there,” she heard him say, taking her arm.

  She shook her head to clear it. “God.” She wasn’t used to looking up. It made her neck ache. She’d had her eyes on the ground so long she had forgotten there were stars. It helped that here, in the country, the sky seemed to go on forever without city lights or pollution to obscure its diamond-freckled face.

  They made a slow circuit of the gardens, stopping often to let her rest. She noticed that the plants were mostly night-blooming, and that the trees were planted strategically to give the beds adequate shade from the relentless Texas sun. The path flowed organically along the rise and fall of the land, skirting the edge of the dense woods that surrounded the Haven. Once or twice she heard hooves thudding away from the path as deer spotted them and ran for their lives.

  “Do you ever eat animals?” she asked, breaking the silence.

  “We can. The life energy in an animal’s blood isn’t as nourishing as a human’s, but depending on the animal, it can be adequate. Many of us live that way, believing it somehow ethically superior.”

  “You don’t believe that?”

  “No. If I feed on a human, I can give him or her energy in return—we give off a particular aura when we drink that keeps our prey from trying to escape, and it is . . . intensely pleasurable. It doesn’t work on animals. There’s nothing I can give a deer in exchange for what I take. Plus, the amount I need per night would kill a smaller creature, but barely even weakens a human.”

  “Does that mean everyone around here is going to want to hurt me?”

  “They may, but they know better.” David let her sit down on a stone bench to catch her breath—talking and walking were a little much at the moment. “I won’t deny that there are those who don’t like you being here, Miranda. Many of my people think humans are only useful for food, and the idea of you living among us offends them. But as long as you stay in the East Wing, and don’t go anywhere alone, you’ll be safe.”

  “I don’t know how long I can live like that.”

  “Trust me . . . I don’t want you here any longer than you have to be.”

  He must have seen the hurt on her face before she even realized she felt it, because he added swiftly, “For your safety, and sanity. This is no place for mortals.”

  She smiled wanly at the word sanity. It was probably years too late to save that.

  “Nonsense.” He contradicted her thought, offering a hand to help her back up. “You’re perfectly sane.”

  She snorted. “Sorry, but hearing that from you isn’t exactly comforting.”

  Miranda stared at his hand for a second, then reached up and took it. She expected his skin to be cold, but it wasn’t. It was definitely cooler than a human’s but not corpselike the way the legends said. She remembered Faith mentioning that vampires could control their body temperatures and that they hated to be cold. Miranda supposed it reminded them too much of being dead.

  Were they dead? The Prime breathed; she had heard his heart beating, and the fingers that closed around hers were full of life.

  “We die,” he told her, drawing her gracefully back to the path, “but to transform, not to decay. Dying is like hitting reset. It allows our genetic code to be rewritten. There’s some research into exactly how the process works—I’ll show it to you if you like. But we’re as alive as you are, just . . . different.”

  She drew her hand away and wrapped her arms around her stomach, holding her cardigan tight against a sudden chill that swept over her. “Does it hurt?” she asked.

  “More than anything you can imagine.”

  She held back another humorless laugh at that one. “Is it worth it?”

  He smiled, and the starlight glinted off his teeth. “Definitely.”

  Miranda said little until they returned to the Prime’s wing, where he had to leave her in the care of her guards. Then she gave him a quiet “Good night” and returned to her room, still hugging herself in the huge tattered sleeves of her blue sweater.

  He was satisfied for
now; her color was better, and she was growing stronger little by little, enough that the walk had tired but not exhausted her.

  Still, it had been only a week since her world had been razed to the ground. She could hardly be expected to jump up and embrace life, grateful for a second chance.

  He knew all too well how bitter life’s second chances could taste.

  Faith met him at the end of the hall, bowing. “Sire.”

  He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Is he here?”

  “Yes. We’ve got him isolated in interrogation room B. Shall we?”

  This time, the walk he took was for a much different purpose. With each step he felt himself shedding the human woman’s comparatively easy companionship and returning to what he knew best.

  He had not been exaggerating. This was no place for mortals.

  They headed outside, this time taking a different path than he had with Miranda, toward one of the smaller outbuildings. Tonight he was supposed to be evaluating the new recruits, spying on their training session, but instead Faith had brought word that he was needed for something a little more urgent.

  As he walked, he reached up and fingered the Signet, a habit he’d noticed almost all Primes had when they were deep in thought. He felt oddly preoccupied, and not remotely in the mood for the task ahead, though once upon a time the idea would have cheered him. Once, he would have looked forward to questioning a suspect all evening. When he had been second in command in California, he had earned the reputation that had followed him here, and since taking the Signet he’d kept it easily, but still, there were times . . .

  He didn’t allow himself to finish the thought. There was no room for doubt here.

  “This way.” Faith swung open the outer door of the cinder-block building and stepped back to allow him first entry. “We caught him in the act, blood still on his hands. The girl was still breathing, but she died en route to Brackenridge.”

  “Good,” he said, ignoring her raised eyebrow. With the victim dead, the suspect was under a death sentence; he didn’t have to worry about causing permanent damage.