Queen of Shadows

by Dianne Sylvan

  He could tell himself that all he wanted, but it apparently made no difference to his body. He had caught himself staring at her, his eyes following the sweet line of her neck and shoulder, remembering the sight of her fingers on the guitar and wondering what it would feel like to have those fingers ghost over his skin. Every time she spoke, the curve of her soft lower lip occupied his thoughts for hours.

  He had to fight with himself every night not to seek out her company, and he tried to be content with the time before and after their training sessions when they sometimes just talked for a while. He hadn’t known anyone since Lizzie who could make him laugh so easily. Miranda was far smarter than she gave herself credit for; there were times when she offered an insight into something weighing on his mind that made everything crystal clear. She made him laugh, she made him think, and she made him want desperately to tear the clothes from her body and taste the sweet flesh of her thighs . . . and her mouth . . . and the copper-cinnamon of her blood.

  It was slowly driving him mad.

  “Rough night, Sire?”

  Thankful for the distraction, he looked up at Miguel. “You could say that.”

  “I hear there’s a war coming. Bad for business.”

  “That depends on who wins,” David replied wryly. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard anything about these bastards.”

  Miguel shrugged. “Their kind don’t come in here. They don’t mess with me, I don’t mess with them. They know your people are my best customers.”

  “I figured as much.”

  He had to get back soon. Miranda was expecting him for another session. After almost another week she still wasn’t progressing nearly well enough for his peace of mind, although she had finally stopped having a panic attack every time she tried to shield. He wondered if perhaps, subconsciously, he was trying to sabotage her efforts by setting the bar too high, trying to keep her with him longer; but surely his subconscious wasn’t that stupid? The longer she stayed at the Haven, the more danger she was in. Before long the enemy would know all about her, and she would prove another vulnerability. Networks could be upgraded, but Miranda’s life was a risk he wasn’t willing to take.

  “Another?”

  “No, thank you, Miguel.”

  The bartender raised an eyebrow and said casually, taking his empty glass, “Why do I get the feeling like you’ve got something on your mind more important than war?”

  “What’s more important than war?”

  Miguel laughed. “Everything you’re fighting for, Sire. But most of all: women.”

  “Women.”

  “Damn right. You got woman trouble?”

  “Women are always trouble.”

  “I’ll give you that. But if you’ve got a woman, what are you doing here?”

  “I don’t have a woman,” David told the bartender, tossing a folded twenty on the bar and standing up, “but I’m afraid she has me.”

  “Shit! Lost it.”

  Miranda fell back against the cushions, gasping for breath, sweat pouring into her eyes. She reached for the bottle of water beside her chair and resisted the urge to pour it over her head instead of drinking it.

  “That was better,” David said. “Now tell me why it didn’t work.”

  “The back. I put too much into the front and it got unbalanced. Again. Fuck.”

  She cursed a lot more when they were in the training room. She didn’t especially care if she offended David’s delicate sensibilities. He had yet to complain.

  Despite her failure that first night—and her continued failure—David hadn’t let up on her. In fact he seemed more determined than ever that she master her powers, and though his methods weren’t nearly as relentless as they had been at first, he still drove her every night, sometimes for an hour and sometimes two, until she was so exhausted she wanted to cry, and often did.

  But she was getting better. She could get her energy into the shield, though keeping it up was proving the bigger challenge. Shielding demanded 360-degree awareness, and she had no idea how she was supposed to manage that and do anything else at the same time. David had promised her that once she got the trick of it, it would become second nature. She tried hard to believe him.

  After another forty minutes of brain-frying effort, he called a halt, and she sagged in her chair with her water bottle in her lap and her hair falling out of its ponytail.

  “Drink,” he reminded her. “Remember the headache you got last time.”

  She shuddered inwardly. A psychic overexertion migraine plus dehydration had added up to a truly miserable morning that two Vicodin had barely eased. Thankfully the rest of her body was mostly healed except for the cut on her hand, which still bothered her after she’d been playing guitar for too long. She hoped it would heal by the time she left here; if she decided to go back to performing, she’d have to be able to handle more than a couple of songs.

  That was still a pretty big if at this point, but she had decided not to rule anything out just yet. The future was too big and terrifying to contemplate, so she focused on here and now, and the twin tasks of learning to shield and trying not to smack her teacher.

  She finished off her water and capped it, staring at her hands. They didn’t seem quite as useless as they had Before.

  To her surprise, David asked her, “What are you thinking about?”

  She raised her eyes. “Do you think I’ll ever have a real life?”

  “Define real.”

  “You know . . . a job, a family, a house, stuff like that.”

  He laced his fingers together. “Is that what you want?”

  “I don’t know. I used to think the idea of normal was awful, but maybe that was just because I never thought I could have it. If I can really do this, and I go back to the world and can live like other people . . . I don’t know.”

  “Well . . . I don’t want to disappoint or frighten you, but it’s been my experience that powerful people are rarely left alone.” There was something odd in his eyes as he said, “You’re a bright flame, Miranda. Flames attract others to their warmth and light. You can hide it all you want, but even a blind man could see you.”

  “I always wished I could just disappear.” She picked at a loose thread in the arm of her chair for a minute before asking, “Have you ever wished you could be human again? Live a normal life?”

  “No,” he replied. “I accepted what I am a long time ago. This life is where I belong. But there have been times when I’ve wished for . . . things that could never be. It does nothing but hurt to dream of the impossible.”

  “How do you know what’s impossible? Can’t things always change?”

  “Some can. Some can’t. For all that humans are limited in life span, you have more choices than we do . . . and you don’t have to live with those choices, or your mistakes, nearly as long. You can take a risk and fall on your face, but if I hurt someone, or lose someone, I have to live with it forever.”

  She could hear that loss in his voice, and it made her chest hurt; on those rare occasions when he showed genuine emotion, it always affected her. It was a consequence of being so close to his energy, she was sure. “Are you thinking about Lizzie?”

  He met her eyes. “No.”

  She broke contact first, feeling a bit disarmed and not sure why. “I think you’re probably right. I don’t really see myself in the suburbs with a husband and two point three kids. I think I’m probably too damaged for that.”

  “I don’t think damaged is the word,” David said.

  “Then what is?”

  He was smiling at her; she could tell even without looking. “Extraordinary.”

  Damn it, her face grew hot, and she smiled at him, her heart squeezing a little at the affection in that single word. “Thanks.”

  They held each other’s gazes until David abruptly looked away, saying, “We should head back. I’m expecting an update from Faith and this room screws with the com reception.”

  As usual they walked back down
the East Wing hall together, but Miranda paused after a few minutes and said, “Did you say there was a piano around here?”

  He gestured at one of the doors and unlocked it for her.

  Miranda took one look inside the music room and nearly fainted. All her exhaustion vanished into thin air.

  It was even more wonderful than the library had been. A full-sized grand piano occupied its center, and chairs and benches were arranged around for small performances, but there were also shelves and shelves of sheet music, both bound and loose in folders. There were reams of staff paper ready to write compositions on. Everything was meticulously organized and kept scrupulously clean, even though she knew no one had used this room in years and only the servants had been inside.

  The acoustics of the room were so perfect she couldn’t wait to bring her guitar in here. Her fingers positively itched for that piano.

  “I could spend every night here,” she breathed, her neck craning up to see the carved ceiling. It reminded her of the salons where great composers previewed their newest works of genius for select arts patrons.

  “Let me see your com,” David said.

  She held up her wrist, and he took it in one hand, the sudden contact of his fingers on her skin doing something weird to her stomach. With his free hand, he took something out of his coat.

  “How many pockets do you have in that thing?” she asked.

  “Why do you think I wear it?” He attached the small device to her com, then ran a short cable from it to his iPhone. “Give me twenty seconds.”

  She was used to him doing random geeky things by now and just stood still while he used the phone to perform some sort of technomancy on her com. His mind continually fascinated her; she never knew, when he was staring off into the fireplace, if he was thinking about patrol reports, an upcoming conference call with the Signet outposts in other cities, how to increase the efficiency of the solar panels that provided the Haven’s electricity, the 400th digit of pi, or the new flavor of Häagen Dazs.

  “There.” He unplugged and stowed both phone and device. “Now you have access to all the doors in this wing instead of just ours and the library. That way you can come here whenever you like.”

  She practically beamed at him. “Thank you!” Before she could stop herself, she flung her arms around him in a hug.

  After a second’s hesitation, he returned the embrace, holding on to her as long as she let him, releasing her as soon as she moved. Again . . . she felt nervous when he touched her, though there was no intent toward anything more sinister; it was just a hug. Touch had been such a loaded subject for her for so long, and now it was far worse. She didn’t know how to be touched without panicking, but somehow, David got in under her radar.

  She decided, then, to do something she hadn’t ever expected to do. “Do you have a few minutes?” she asked. “I could play something for you.”

  David had been about to make some sort of excuse, but at those last words, his protestations died on his lips. “I . . . I would be honored.”

  She sat down at the piano, exposing the keys and running her fingers over them reverently, pressing a few and finding that David had been as good as his word: The instrument was perfectly in tune.

  “God,” she murmured. “Is this what I think it is?”

  “It’s a piano.”

  “Not just a piano,” she said, smiling. “This is a Bösendorfer Imperial Grand, model two-ninety. She has ninety-seven keys, not eighty-eight—here on the left, see the black keys? They’re sub-bass notes that extend her range. Look at her . . . she’s beautiful. And she’s probably worth a quarter of a million dollars at least.”

  His eyebrows shot up. “I had no idea it . . . she . . . was that valuable.”

  “Whoever this Queen was, she knew her instruments. One of my favorite artists plays one of these. They have a darker and more complex voice than the other major makers. I read somewhere that these are built out of wood from the same forest as the Stradivari violins. I’ve always wanted to see one in person, but I didn’t want to torture myself.”

  He was smiling at her enthusiasm, but unlike every boyfriend she’d ever had, he didn’t seem to be tuning her out when she got to babbling about music. Mike, for example, had only been to see her play a couple of times, and he’d done the nod-and-smile but never paid much attention.

  “Any requests?” she asked.

  “Whatever you like.” One of the chairs, at the front left of the room, seemed to have been placed specifically for the Prime; it was much more comfortable looking than the others. David took it and leaned back, elegant as always.

  Miranda wondered what the seventh Queen had been like, and how often she had been in this very spot with her Prime and other members of the Court listening to her performances. Perhaps she had played for him alone sometimes, saving a romantic piece for her lover. Perhaps she could feel his eyes on her, enraptured by her beauty and talent, as she played.

  Classical or Baroque seemed most appropriate for this room, but Miranda didn’t care much about tradition; what the piano needed was attention and energy. It was a crime for such a fine instrument to have been left unloved for so long.

  Miranda reached up and yanked the elastic from her ponytail. For some reason she’d never been comfortable playing with her hair up.

  She laid her hands on the keys and began to play, feeling something she hadn’t in a long time. There was a trancelike element to music for her, even before she started using it to siphon and spin emotion from the audience. Back when playing was something she did because she loved it, not a last bastion of sound between her and insanity, she had let it take her deeper, to a place beyond the world where the movement of her hands and the sound from the instrument fused with some part of her heart that amplified even the shallowest pop into something worthy of a backup choir.

  She leaned into the music, and it was almost as though the piano were alive and elated to be played again; it responded to the pressure of her fingers almost before she reached the notes. A moment later, she lifted her voice into the room’s still air.

  Faith heard the singing as she entered the hallway toward the Prime’s suite, and though she was on an urgent errand, she found herself drawn to the threshold of a room that, as far as she knew, hadn’t been opened in twenty years or more except by the servants who kept it clean.

  Several other Elite were hovering at the door, hanging back so they wouldn’t be seen; Samuel and Terrence were there as well as the East Wing guard, Saylor. They all looked up guiltily when they saw the Second, but she was too curious to reprimand any of them for leaving their posts, and besides, their job was to guard the Prime and his guest, and clearly they were all doing just that.

  Faith leaned her head around the door frame to see what was going on.

  First, she saw Miranda, the source of the unbelievable singing. She looked almost dwarfed by the instrument she played on, which had to be twice as long as she was tall. Still, it seemed like the aura of the human had expanded to include the piano as if they were one creature merged in common purpose.

  Miranda’s voice was both sweeter and darker than she would have guessed by hearing her speak, and she was so wrapped up in the music that she played with her eyes shut tight, swaying forward and back as her fingers hit the keys harder or softer. As she finished the song she was playing she went into what Faith assumed was an improvisation on its theme, a complicated line of melody and harmony that seemed to move in slow spirals around the piano. Faith had never heard anything like it.

  Years go by, will I still be waiting for somebody else to understand . . .

  Faith looked over to the chairs and saw the Prime, and she couldn’t help it: she grinned.

  She’d known him a long time and had never, ever seen the expression on his face before. It was beyond captivated, somewhere in the wild land between rapture and dissolution, underlined with a longing that was as painful for Faith to watch as it was satisfying to finally see him lose himse
lf to.

  She could have told him he was doomed the minute he brought Miranda to the Haven.

  No, now that she thought about it, she knew he was doomed when she saw how he reacted to the idea of cutting off Miranda’s hair. He had spent an hour working through it strand by strand with the focused attention he brought to debugging network code, and with the singular devotion of a monk praying the Rosary. He would never have done such a thing for anyone else.

  Yet he was still fighting it. Faith wanted to shake him sometimes.

  Luckily, one thing vampires had was time to wait.

  Faith moved out of the doorway and leaned back against the wall. She needed to talk to David, but a few minutes wouldn’t be the end of the world. Let them have this moment while they could.

  Faith knew with the certainty of two hundred years that the worst was yet to come.

  Nine

  The following Wednesday night, Faith asked quizzically, “You want me to do what, again?”

  David gestured at Miranda, who stood in the center of the training room. The furniture had been pushed to the perimeter, where he sat now in his usual chair. “I want you to poke her.”

  “That’s not really my thing, Sire. If you want, I could ask Lindsay when she gets back from patrol—”

  “Psychically poke her, idiot,” the Prime said.

  Miranda spoke up a little nervously. “I can hold my shield myself pretty well now—”

  “—but she has to be able to do it under duress,” David said.

  “Which means, under attack,” Miranda finished. “We need someone I’m not used to working with to push at my boundaries and see if I can push back.”

  Faith still looked dubious, but she wasn’t the type to contradict an order. She went where the Prime had indicated, a space a few feet in front of Miranda.

  “All right,” David said. “Go ahead.”