“Did you see what book it was?”
“No. It may not even have been a real book—you know how these things are. Sometimes they’re literal, sometimes they’re metaphoric, sometimes they’re rubbish. I wish I knew more.”
“Thank you,” David said, “I think.”
“Don’t thank me,” Jonathan told him, and he could hear the weight of too much knowledge in the Consort’s voice. “Never thank me for seeing things, Lord Prime. I don’t want this, I never have.”
“I know.” David smiled into the phone despite the way his heart was lumbering around in his chest. “But just think of what you’d be missing if you didn’t have it.”
“There is always that.” Jonathan’s voice perked up a little. “Speaking of which, I must go. My presence has been humbly requested in the bedroom.”
David rolled his eyes, chuckling. “Humbly requested, my ass. Give the Prime my best before you give him yours.”
“As you will it, my Lord. Good hunting.”
“Good hunting.”
Jonathan’s words replayed over and over through David’s mind as he left the bank tower and directed Harlan to return him to the Haven. He grunted noncommittally when Harlan asked if he’d had a good hunt; he was too preoccupied for conversation. The whole trip back, as the city’s bustling nightlife gave way to the scrolling central Texas hills, he thought about it, unable to banish the knowledge that arose from his very bones as much as it had from the Consort’s gift.
He was going to get Miranda killed. The longer she stayed at the Haven, the more danger she was in. One way or another she had to learn to shield, and fast. He already had the lives of enough innocents burned into his soul; he wouldn’t have hers, too.
The problem with visions was that they were born from a single instant in time. As soon as they were seen, the universe began to change around them. They showed what was most probable if the course of events went unaltered, but they weren’t set in stone. Jonathan had told him, and because of that, he would make one choice or another, veering closer to or further away from the vision itself. Right now, the deck was stacked against Miranda’s life. He had to do everything in his power to change those odds.
That meant getting her back to Austin. It also meant stopping the war before it escalated further.
Of course, Miranda being back in the city might be what got her killed; there was no way to know. So he would make sure she was safe in her mortal world until he was confident that she didn’t need a guardian. That would be easy enough.
It might be better if she left his territory entirely. He could arrange that, and it wasn’t as if she had a full life here to miss. The Blackthorn wouldn’t lower themselves to chase after a mere human, assuming they even knew she existed.
That thought did something strange to him, though. The idea of Miranda leaving Austin set off a dull ache, and a kind of wild desperate clawing in his throat, as if he were holding back a cry of pain.
He shut his eyes and rapped his forehead lightly against the car window, feeling like a fool.
By the time he was back at the Haven and had taken the usual patrol reports and updates from Faith, it was nearly dawn, and he had a splitting headache. Every time he exerted a tendril of energy to ease it, it returned moments later; if he left it alone it would be gone in an hour, but in the meantime he had to put up with it, and that left him snapping at Faith and acting generally bitchy toward everyone else.
“Sire?” Faith said at the end of the patrol meeting. “Permission to speak freely?”
“Since when do you ask for permission?” he scoffed, forehead planted firmly in his hands.
She ignored the statement and said, “Sire, go the fuck to bed before I have to kill you.”
For once, he did as she said without protest and tried not to look at anyone he passed lest he scare the servants.
He paused with his hand on the door to his suite, suddenly dreading the prospect of finding Miranda still asleep on the couch. He thought back to that ache he’d felt in the car and had half a mind just to bed down in one of the other rooms in the wing, but that smelled strongly of cowardice to him, and he was willing to have just about any vice except that one.
To his surprise, she wasn’t in the bedroom. She must have woken and returned to her own bed. Relieved, he stripped off his coat and poured himself another drink. He needed a shower; it was hot in the city, and though vampires didn’t sweat easily, he still felt coated by the humid air.
A sound reached him, and he stood with the bottle of bourbon still in his hand, listening.
It was coming from the adjacent room: music.
Hypnotized, he set down the bottle and followed the sound to the door, which stood ajar by an inch or so. Light was coming through it. He leaned to the left to see in without moving the door.
“Strange how hard it rains now . . .”
She sat on the edge of the bed, the light of the fireplace outlining her silhouette and catching her hair as it had at the window once before. Her guitar, a black acoustic he remembered from the night he’d brought her here, gleamed, and her fingers danced slowly over the strings while her bare foot tapped lightly on the side of the bed as her legs weren’t long enough to reach the floor.
Her curls were falling into her eyes, but that didn’t matter; she played with them closed, concentration on her heart-shaped face. The bruises had all faded, though there was still a cut healing on her forehead. What was truly remarkable was her expression: As she sang, the dark sweetness of her voice wrapping like a lover’s hands around the lyrics, she was smiling, completely at peace in a way he hadn’t thought she was capable of.
He wanted so badly to back away, but he couldn’t. Without even trying she had caught him in her spell.
Oh God. No, no, no.
She wasn’t working energy consciously, and a halfhearted check of the shield showed it as strong as before, but she didn’t need power for this. Perched on the bed, dressed in a threadbare Austin Celtic Festival T-shirt, she was, he suddenly realized, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
“But I’m still alive underneath this shroud. . . .”
It took more effort than he would ever have thought possible, but he pulled his eyes away and shut the door, fighting the urge to lock it.
Then he proceeded to the liquor cabinet and drank himself to sleep.
Seven
TO: Miranda Grey ([email protected])
FROM: Kat ([email protected])
SUBJECT: MIA?
Hey girl,
I know you said you were out of town but when you get back can we please have lunch? I really think we should talk. I’m worried about you, Mira-Mira. You don’t have to deal with this stuff alone. Just let me know you’re okay, okay? I miss you lots, sugarbean.
Hugs,
Kat
TO: Kat ([email protected])
FROM: Miranda Grey ([email protected])
SUBJECT: Re: MIA?
I’m okay. I’m staying with a friend in the country. I promise I’ll call as soon as I get back into Austin. Please don’t worry about me (even though I know you’re going to anyway). Miss you too.
~M
She clicked SEND and watched, amazed, as the message flew out of her outbox and into the digital ether a hundred times faster than it would have the last time she worked on her laptop.
“You’re pretty handy to have around,” Miranda commented.
Across the table, David looked up from the computer he was fixing and offered a smile.
She had mentioned, in passing, that her computer was a dinosaur; she’d bought it used off Craigslist, and though she’d loved it, it was slow and lumbering and almost full to the gills with music files. David had offered to have a look at it before they started their training session that night, and in approximately thirty minutes had it purring like a brand-new machine. While she tried it out, he cracked open the case of some server or another and spilled its guts all over the table, going af
ter it with a set of tiny screwdrivers to replace some kind of . . . chip? She couldn’t even begin to name the small, rectangular piece of hardware.
As usual he felt her eyes and said, without looking up, “It’s a security device to help keep predators out of the network.”
“Has anyone else broken in?”
“No, and they won’t.”
He was being a little short with her tonight, though she sensed it wasn’t anything she had done . . . although he had been giving her some odd looks when he thought she didn’t notice . . . speculative looks, almost wary, and what in any other person’s face might have been interpreted as fear.
She hummed softly as she cleaned out her inbox until she glanced up to see him looking aggrieved. “Do you mind?” he asked.
“Sorry,” she muttered. She almost started doing it again just to piss him off, but decided that probably wasn’t a good idea.
What was left of her good mood evaporated when she saw the sender of the next e-mail.
TO: Miranda Grey ([email protected])
FROM: Marianne Grey-Weston (marianne.weston@comtex .dallas.com)
SUBJECT: Dad’s birthday
Miranda,
If you’re planning to attend Dad’s 60th birthday party next month, please let me know so I can send an accurate count to the caterer.
I hope you’re doing well.
Sincerely,
Marianne Grey-Weston
She stared at the monitor for a long moment, biting her lip, before she shut the computer and pushed it away from her.
“What’s wrong?” David asked, finally looking up from his work.
“Oh . . . nothing. Just my sister.” At his surprised expression she added, “Older sister. She still lives in Dallas where we moved after our mother died. We don’t talk much.”
“Why not?”
She ran her finger around the Apple logo in the center of the laptop, trying to talk around the heavy feeling that always formed in her stomach when she heard from Marianne.
“We’ve never been close.” She knew he could hear the lie in her voice, but he didn’t comment. A moment later she said, almost unwillingly, “There was this thing, when we were younger . . . our mother, she . . . went crazy, sort of.”
“Crazy,” he repeated, the coolness of the tone he’d used all night warming just a tad. “Crazy like you went crazy?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. It happened when we were kids. Nobody would ever tell me what was really wrong with her. She was always so normal—she packed lunches, she went to school plays, all of that. Marianne was involved in everything. She was the good daughter.”
Miranda let her eyes drift around the room as she talked, staring at the servers, the monitors, anything but him. “Then one day Mama just sort of . . . stopped. She stared off into space and didn’t recognize any of us. They did every medical test they could think of and found nothing. Dad put her in the county hospital, and she died there when I was fourteen.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “That must have been hard for you, so young.”
“The worst part was Marianne and Dad. They both wanted to pretend nothing ever happened and act like she was dead even when she wasn’t. They were embarrassed. I think she caused some sort of scene in public once. They were both more concerned with what people thought than with what happened to Mama. I went to visit her once, but I couldn’t go back there. It was . . . it was hell. It was hell and she was locked up there forever.”
Miranda swallowed her tears, forcing her voice to stay steady. “Marianne and I had a lot of fights about it. Dad refused to talk about it at all. He still won’t. So I moved back here to Austin as soon as I graduated high school. I only see them once a year or so, and it’s always miserable. When I see her, all she wants to know is if I’m getting married and how much money I make, even though for years it’s been the same answer. She just has to lord over me the fact that she’s a rich pediatrician with a lawyer husband.”
“Then why do you talk to her at all?”
She smiled helplessly. “I have no idea. They’re like . . . they’re like Hero and Claudio. The Blandersons of Blandville.”
“Then don’t answer,” David said reasonably, snapping the case back on the computer, then zipping the tools into their own case. “We don’t get to choose how we’re born, Miranda, and very rarely how we die; but we get to choose how we live. Life is too short to spend in dread and guilt.”
She cocked her head to one side and gave him a look. “You do realize that you lack any sort of credibility in the ‘life is too short’ cliché department.”
“Conceded,” he replied, rising. “But I’m still right. Shall we?”
Miranda sighed. “Now that we’re one for one on sharing our life stories, I guess we should get to the fun part of the evening.”
She slipped her laptop back into its bag and slung it over her shoulder, following him out of his workroom and down the hallway. She expected him to take her back to the suite, but he headed in the opposite direction, stopping in front of a locked door that was almost hidden in a corridor.
Like most doors in the Haven, it had an electronic lock. She had watched the Elite hold their coms up to the locks to open them; apparently the locks were programmed to check security clearance before admitting someone. David did the same, and the red light on the lock changed to green.
Whatever she was expecting from the room, what she found wasn’t it. Peering in she saw nothing but two armchairs, just like the ones near the fireplace in his room, but there was no hearth here; in fact aside from the chairs there was no furniture at all, and the floor was bare of rugs. There were no windows and only the one door, no decoration of any kind.
When she crossed the threshold, her knees almost buckled. It felt like walking through a wall of water; for a second she couldn’t breathe as power engulfed her, pushing at her nonexistent boundaries like a living thing trying to learn her shape.
She started to fight against it, but something dragged her forward—David’s hand.
On the other side of the threshold, the air felt normal, if a little too clear. Looking back at the doorway it almost seemed there was a veil of . . . not light, but diffusion, again like water.
“It’s a shield,” she realized. “I’ve never seen anything so powerful.”
He nodded and gestured for her to take a chair. “This is a protected room devoted to psychic training. There are several in the Haven, but this one belongs only to me. Primes have used it for centuries, so the walls are imbued with energy that keeps out unwanted influences and keeps in whatever we do here. That way if you lose control, no one outside this room will be hurt, and no one can attack you while you’re vulnerable.”
“Why are we working in here this time instead of in the suite?”
“Last time was all groundwork. This time, I’m going to lower your shield, and you’re going to rebuild it. If we tried that in the suite, you would have every mind in the Haven running through yours.”
“A hundred vampires in my head,” Miranda said, feeling cold. “Bad idea.”
“Precisely.”
They settled into their chairs. David looked to his left, and the lights dimmed slightly, mimicking the soft ambience of candlelight. There were no candles—no open flames, no lamps that could be knocked over, nothing to break or explode. She wondered if he had learned to work his telekinesis in a room like this.
She still hadn’t decided whether it was weirder that he was a vampire or that he could move things with his mind.
Actually the weird thing was that she now had a relativity scale for weirdness, and that just being a vampire wasn’t automatically at the upper limit of that scale.
“Let’s begin,” he said. “Ground.”
She did so, first slowing her breath, then connecting her energy to the earth beneath her, following the movement of inhalation and exhalation with her awareness. The world slowed down, and the agitation she was starting to feel about facing another l
esson grew still, not disappearing, but no longer grasping at the limelight.
“Very good,” David told her, warm approval in his voice.
She smiled in spite of herself. “I’ve been practicing.”
“All right. Now, keep your breathing steady, and try not to clench your energy. Act as though you’re still totally shielded and remember, in this space you’re safe.”
She nodded and did her best to stay calm. She was familiar enough with energy now that she could essentially see what he was doing: He parted the barrier around her mind like a curtain and drew it back, leaving her completely unshielded for the first time since she’d come here.
Panic seized her. There were no voices, no marauding emotions from outside, but it felt so . . . exposed. She tried to keep her ground, but she was a rodent in the middle of an open field with hawks circling overhead; the vastness of the sky and the need to hide were overwhelming.
“Put it back,” she moaned, clapping her hands over her ears. “I can’t. I can’t.”
“Breathe, Miranda. In and out. Come back to your breath. There’s nothing here that will harm you. I won’t allow it. You know that.”
“No, no . . . please . . . it’s too much. Put it back!”
Queen of Shadows Page 13
