The little boy had blue eyes just like his mother.
Suddenly the Prime felt very, very old, and very tired.
In thirty-six hours there would be a sensor network covering the entire Austin metropolitan area that read the heat signatures of every living thing that passed through it. It was keyed specifically to follow the lower body temps of vampires and could track their movements, creating a near-real-time grid of the city accurate to a single block. The last thousand sensors were being installed tonight, and after a day and a half of calibration and final tests, the whole thing would go live . . .
. . . too late to save Kimberly and Charlie Mason.
The Elite all froze when he moved. He stepped forward and went to one knee next to Faith, then reached over and closed first the child’s eyes, then the woman’s.
David looked up at the others, and when he spoke it was calmly, firmly, and with deadly purpose. “As of tonight,” he said, “we are at war.”
Twelve
Scott had been single for two days, and there was a condom burning a hole in his pocket. Restless, he haunted the bars all night, looking for somebody, anybody, to take home who didn’t remind him of Kenny. No blond hair, no blue eyes, no skinny soccer players. The perfect thing would be a huge hairy top in biker leather, but those were thin on the ground in Austin.
He’d never been good at the bar scene. He and Kenny had met at the library, for fuck’s sake, both reaching for the same Proust. It turned out they were in different sections of the same lit class at UT. The pretense of being “study buddies” had lasted about an hour before they were screwing like mad rabbits. Scott had only been out since he’d moved here for college. Kenny was a senior and had a Tantric master’s gift for giving head.
Scott left the Torch Song half-drunk and irritable, the remains of his third—fourth?—martini leaving him a little green around the gills.
“Fuck this,” he mumbled, digging in his jacket pocket for his cigarettes. He’d started again about an hour after he’d come home from class early and found Kenny in the shower with that bony jerk-off from the lacrosse team. At least now there wouldn’t be anybody bitching about the taste of tobacco on his breath.
It was a cold, nasty night, promising sleet. He was starting to really hate Texas; it was unbearably hot in the summer and messy and wet in winter. Spring and fall each lasted about four gorgeous days. He’d spent the last warm afternoons of the year out at the lake with Kenny and his friends. They’d skinny-dipped and made out passionately, smelling of cocoa butter and sex.
He puffed the cigarette angrily and stalked down Fourth Street, ducking his head against the damp wind. What was anyone doing out on a night like this? Hell, what was he doing out? Even if he did get laid, it was so cold he’d probably get his dick stuck to someone’s tongue.
His car was in a paid lot a few blocks away, and though in the back of his mind he knew he probably shouldn’t be driving, he didn’t much care—the streets were virtually empty.
He came around the corner of the Spaghetti Warehouse, and started, gasping. “Shit! I’m sorry, I didn’t see you.”
The young woman standing in front of him tilted her head to one side, her brown hair falling limply into her too-bright eyes. “No problem.”
He stepped to one side to let her pass, feeling a little uneasy under her unwavering gaze, and she continued to stare at him as he started walking again. There was another reason to transfer schools: Austin was full of freaks. Worse yet, they were proud of it.
He heard a footstep behind him and turned, head snapping around hard enough to make him dizzy.
The girl was standing a foot away from him.
“Is there . . . do you need help?” he ventured. She was starting to really creep him out—she looked like she was on drugs, or like she hadn’t slept in a year. She was incredibly pale, with hooded eyes that seemed hyper-aware, and her body barely seemed to move as she stared at him.
“Actually,” she said, “I’m hungry. How about we have a bite?”
He forced a smile. “Wrong tree, honey. And worst pickup line ever, by the way. Excuse me.”
Her hand shot out and seized the arm of his jacket, and he tried to wrench away, but her grip was like iron. To the left and right he heard more footsteps, and before he knew what was happening he was surrounded.
Oh God, I’m gonna get bashed. I should’ve called a cab. Where’s my phone? Should I scream? Oh God.
They half dragged, half carried him off the street toward a shadowy area next to a building that was roped off for construction. He tried to fight—he was in good shape, he should have at least been able to throw off the girl—but they were insanely strong, and there were three of them. The darkness beyond the building yawned at him, and some instinct told him if they got him over there, he’d never come back out.
A hand clamped over his mouth just as he took a breath to shout for help.
The only coherent thought he could seem to summon was the Hail Mary. He hadn’t said it in at least five years. Those Rosary beads were long gone.
Please, Jesus, please, they can have my wallet, just please don’t let me die . . .
He struggled again as the shadows surrounded him, and whimpered desperately.
“Shut up, faggot,” one of them hissed. “If you’re good, we’ll make it quick.”
Another one laughed. “Right.”
They pushed him to the ground, one grabbing his face and wrenching his chin back to expose his throat.
“I’m first this time,” the girl said with a wicked smile. To his horror, as he watched, her teeth started to grow longer, curving down over her tongue.
Raw fear made him writhe as hard as he could, which only made them laugh. Their ghostly white faces grinned down at him like baby demons.
Then, suddenly, everything . . . stopped.
The three heads hovering over him snapped up, nostrils flaring wide as if to catch a strange scent. The girl’s fingernails dug into his arm until he could feel himself bleeding, but the pain came to him from a distance—his heart had all but stopped in his chest, and time had slowed to a crawl.
Something yanked one of the two men up off Scott and hauled him backward, flinging him into the bright orange pylons that tumbled over like bowling pins.
The other two leapt up, growling like animals, but in the next second there was the sound of metal singing through the air, and with a gushing spray of blood, the second man’s head flew off.
Scott screamed and rolled backward away from the blood, and though it mostly missed him, he felt hot droplets strike his face. He scrambled away toward the opposite wall and curled up in a ball, bile climbing the back of his throat.
He heard the girl’s strangled cry, and he looked up in time to see her beheaded as well.
There were five people in the alley with him now, all dressed identically in black uniforms of some kind. They all had swords.
Swords.
He’d heard that trauma could make people insane.
One of the figures separated itself from the rest, cleaning the bloodied blade of his sword on the shirt of one of the dead . . . people. He was dressed differently than the others, in a long black coat, and his eyes were a strange deep blue ringed with silver around the irises. He carried himself as if he were their leader, and indeed, as he scanned the wall above the bodies, his voice had the clear authority of a seasoned military officer.
“Paint it here,” he said. “Leave them beneath it. Elite Nine, see to the boy.”
Scott found himself being helped to his feet by a brawny, dark-skinned man whose grip was surprisingly gentle. The man set him on his feet like he weighed nothing at all and looked him over, and though his eyes were as alien and cold as those of the girl, he made absolutely no move to threaten Scott. “He’s not hurt, Sire,” the man called back over his shoulder. “This time we beat them.”
The dark man, the one with the coat, turned his head slightly in acknowledgment. “Good. Give him cab far
e and send him home.”
“Wait a minute,” Scott stammered. His tongue was thick and unresponsive in his mouth. “What the fuck is going on? Who are you people? I mean, thank you for saving me, don’t get me wrong, but . . .”
The dark man looked at him for a moment, and Scott felt another ripple of fear.
He approached Scott in almost an arc, the way Scott had seen horse whisperers approach skittish colts on TV, and came to stand close by . . . too close. Scott found himself staring, his breath catching, at the weird necklace the man wore, a heavy pendant set in silver. The stone caught some light that Scott couldn’t see and seemed to glow.
“What’s your name?” the man asked, voice just loud enough to carry. It was the kind of voice that traveled directly from Scott’s ears to his cock, and even through the fear he felt his jeans tighten.
“Scott Summers,” he answered. “Like on X-Men.”
“Well, Scott, here’s what you’re going to do,” the man said, leaning even closer so that all Scott could see were the endless pools of his eyes. His voice became hypnotic, rhythmic. “You’re going to go home and throw your coat in the garbage, and in the morning it will be as if this never happened.”
“But . . .”
“Repeat what I just said, Scott.”
“I’m . . . I’m going to go home and throw my coat in the garbage, and in the morning it will be as if this never happened.”
“Very good. I’m sorry you had to see this. It’s not your concern.”
“It’s not my concern.”
The man smiled. It was a blindingly beautiful smile. “Is there anything you need besides a cab, Scott Summers?”
Scott smiled back, his world full of blue eyes. “Your phone number?”
A chuckle, low and beguiling. “Tempting. But you’re better off going home alone tonight.”
He walked away. The large man who had helped Scott to his feet guided him out of the alley, over to where a Yellow Cab was already waiting. “Wow,” Scott muttered, twisting his head to watch the retreating form of the man in the long black coat.
His guide laughed. “I think the saying goes, ‘That’s too much car for you.’ ”
Scott shrugged, allowed himself to be bundled into the cab, and was already asleep before the car had pulled away from the curb.
The sensor network was years ahead of its time, technologically speaking, but it wasn’t the most attractive thing in the world. He’d essentially cobbled it together out of the existing resources at the Haven, not wanting to waste time making it pretty while lives were at stake.
The Prime sat in his chair in the workroom, going over the latest diagnostics on his laptop. Things had been a bit turbulent since they’d gone live—the grid worked, yes, but during periods of high activity in the city, like rush hour or Saturday night downtown, sectors had a nasty habit of overloading from too much data and crashing the whole network. The processing power to handle that much information simply didn’t exist.
So he’d built it.
The hard part was getting the entire thing coordinated, a process similar to trying to time all the city’s traffic lights. Each of the thousands of sensors was tied into a hub, and those hubs routed back to the Haven. Eventually he’d be able to link his entire territory this way via satellite, but for now he had to be content with the Austin metropolitan area.
The thing that drove him, however, was that it was working. War had come to the city in the form of a symbol painted in vampire blood over the corpses of three insurgents: the Seal of Prime David Solomon. The message was clear, and it was heard.
He hadn’t figured they would go gently into the darkness, and they didn’t. The attacks tripled in frequency. The difference was that since that first night there had been no human fatalities.
The rebels had no idea what hit them. They had their victim chosen and isolated, but before they could put a scratch on the human, they were surrounded by Elite, all under the order to show no mercy. They were executed without question and without trial. Due process was for mortals. This was the Shadow World.
He had trained two of the administrative staff to monitor the network, and they took shifts, but regardless he had reports sent to his phone every ten minutes. The network took readings every three minutes and immediately reported every single vampire moving in the city. Any group of more than two on the streets had a patrol unit in its wake in ninety seconds. Any vampire approaching a human outside a known hunting ground was detained and questioned. The insurgents rarely worked alone, but he wanted it absolutely clear: The vampires of Austin were being watched. His eyes were everywhere and his reach was endless.
It was only a matter of time before they grew desperate and either tried something stupid or slipped up. Taking the heads of their henchmen wasn’t enough for David. He wanted the Blackthorn themselves. He wanted their blood spilled, and he wanted his own hands to spill it.
“Have you fed?”
He nodded absently. “Yes.”
“Are you lying?”
“No.”
For some reason Faith had taken it upon herself to act as his babysitter. He didn’t mind most of the time, but he hadn’t been terribly patient with her, or anyone, since autumn.
“What did you have?”
He stopped what he was doing and looked up. His neck hurt from being bent toward the monitor for so long; he knew she was about to tell him to take a break, and for once he was inclined to agree. “I had Esther bring me a bag. Ask her yourself.”
He noticed she was holding what looked like a newspaper; when he raised an eyebrow at it, she bit her lip a second before saying, “I thought you might want to see this. It’s this week’s Chronicle.”
“The entertainment newspaper? Since when do I care about that?”
“Since now,” Faith replied, opening the folded periodical and tossing it onto the table in front of him.
He sat back. “Miranda.”
The slightly grainy black-and-white picture showed her sitting on the edge of a stage, her guitar in her lap. She was smiling and looking directly at the camera.
He stared at it silently for a while, and then said, “She looks happy.”
Faith shrugged. “She’s making quite a name for herself. There’s an interview.”
He tore his eyes away from Miranda’s face and planted them firmly back on the computer. “I’ll read it later. I have more work to do.”
He could practically hear Faith shaking her head, but she left him alone obligingly enough. He tried to go back to his calibrations, but he could see the picture in his peripheral vision, Miranda’s lovely pale face fixed on him, eyes whose color was still burned into his memory watching him in shades of gray.
David started to shut the paper, but he couldn’t help seeing the header beneath the image:
Rising Stars of Austin
Giving up, he turned away from the monitor and picked up the paper. There were profiles of three hot new acts: Gerry Ford, a band called 3 Tequila Floor, and Miranda Grey. Some of the facts in Miranda’s profile made David smile, and others made his heart want to crack into slivers inside his chest.
Birthplace: Rio Verde, Texas, “though Austin will always be my hometown.”
Favorite instrument: “My first love is my Martin 12-string, but not long ago I got to play a Bösendorfer Imperial Grand, and I think may have found the love of my life.”
Genre: Eclectic, more or less. “Well, I curse a lot and I don’t sing about how much my life sucks without a man. I think music should be about creating something beautiful out of even the worst of humanity. Whatever genre that is, I’m it.”
Plans to record: “I’m hoping to go into the studio this summer, which will be a new experience. I think I’ll always be more of a live performer, though. The audience’s energy is the greatest inspiration I could ever find.”
Favorite Austin restaurant and local beverage: “Take me out to the Texican Café for their frozen margaritas and veggie fajitas and I’m
all yours.”
Response to rumors that have her dating the drummer for 3 Tequila: “No offense meant to any of the guys I’ve met in the last few months, but . . . hell no. I’ve been off the market for a while now. I’m waiting for someone extraordinary to catch up with me, and until then, I’m not going to settle for less.”
David didn’t realize how badly his hands were shaking until the last paragraph was impossible to read.
He pushed his chair back from the table and left the server room, taking the Chronicle with him back to his suite. He was still staring at her picture and barely nodded to Samuel as he passed.
At his desk, he took out a pair of scissors and cut the picture and interview out of the paper, then dropped the rest into the recycling bin. He crossed the room to the locked cabinet.
Inside, in addition to the Queen’s Signet and everything else he kept safe, was a leather-bound copy of Shakespeare’s comedies; he opened it and tucked the clipping inside, where it rested along with several others like it, mostly paragraph-long announcements of her performances. This was the first one to have a picture with it.
He carefully closed the book and started to lock it away, but one of the clippings slipped out and fluttered to the floor like a fallen leaf. He placed the book on its shelf and bent to retrieve the paper.
He frowned. It wasn’t a newspaper clipping. It looked like a page from a lined journal torn out and hastily folded.
His name was written on it in hurried but precise script.
David shut the cabinet and took the note to his chair by the fireplace. Esther had kindly added extra logs to the blaze to combat the icy January night, and she’d thrown a few sprigs of rosemary in for the scent. It occurred to him that Christmas had passed several weeks ago. He’d been buried in his work, but he vaguely remembered most of the Elite having the night off for something.
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