She pushed herself away from the tree and broke into a jog, then into a run.
The movement woke her entire body up and energy surged through her muscles, propelling her faster and faster. The freedom of it, knowing she wasn’t going to get a stitch in her side, made her laugh as she ran, no doubt giving any passersby something to talk about in her wake.
She stumbled to a halt outside the warehouse building and pounded on the door.
This time she could hear the footsteps approaching all the way from the inside. “Password?”
Miranda pushed her hair back from her eyes. “I mock you with my monkey pants.”
She heard a bitten-off curse, and the door opened.
Sophie stared at her, something utterly unexpected and, Miranda had thought, impossible on her face: shock.
“I need weapons,” Miranda said. “And your help.”
Wordlessly, Sophie let her into the hall, barring the door behind her with a quick, hunted glance out onto the street.
Miranda strode into the studio and studied the wall of weapons. She heard Sophie walk up behind her, then do her usual circle around her student, but this time instead of detached speculation, there was something akin to wonder in the vampire’s face.
“This is new,” Sophie said.
Miranda turned to look at her. “Are you surprised?”
“A little. The word is that you’re dead. Burned up, left as a warning. The Signet declared blood feud on the Blackthorns and it’s been holy war for a week. Where have you been hiding?”
“With a friend,” she answered. “I have to call the Haven. Do you have Faith’s number?”
“No. I have her e-mail.”
“That’s not going to be fast enough. Ariana and her followers are going to attack the Haven tonight.”
“How are they going to get past security?”
“They have a man inside. He’s one of the Prime’s bodyguards—he’s worked there for years. They’ll never see it coming. We have to warn them.” Miranda walked over to the wall and pulled down the sword she’d been working with. “Can you get me to the Haven?”
“I can draw you a map.”
Miranda turned to her, frowning. “You have to come with me. I need you.”
Sophie laughed. “Are you kidding? I told you, I’m not getting involved in Signet bullshit. I’m going to do what I always do, keep my head down and wait it out.”
“No,” Miranda replied. “You’re going to help me. You don’t want Faith to die and you don’t want some holy rolling crazy bitch to take control of this city.”
“I’ve done my part. I’m finished with this. If you want directions, I can give them to you. You want weapons, I’m your girl. But this is not my fight.”
Miranda’s eyes narrowed. “I suppose this is the part where I give you an inspirational speech about what’s right, and the value of freedom, and persuade you to risk your life for the greater good.”
She spun around, swinging her arm up, and stopped short with the blade hovering a millimeter from Sophie’s throat.
“I don’t have time for that crap,” Miranda said. “I’m not asking you to fight. All I need is a ride. Then you can crawl back under your rock and pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist all you like. But first, get your keys, little girl. We’re leaving.”
Sophie, unfazed by either the sword so close to her jugular or Miranda’s imperious tone, just stared at her for a minute . . . then burst out laughing.
Miranda lowered the sword. Sophie shook her head and went to the weapons wall, then started removing blades, still laughing as she said, “You, my Lady, are pure fucking awesome. I’m going to get a finder’s fee for you, right?”
Miranda smiled back at her and caught the knife Sophie tossed her way. “I’m sure we can arrange something.”
“Just one problem,” Sophie pointed out.
“What?”
“No way in hell I’m going anywhere with you in that outfit.”
“Sire.”
He didn’t answer.
“Sire, you need to sleep.”
Since the night of the fire there had been three attacks on humans in the city, but none had resulted in fatalities. Thanks to the network, the Elite were there in time to apprehend the fugitives.
Speed was still with them, but the insurgents were on to them and knew to expect a counterattack. They traveled in larger numbers now and were better armed. Each time an Elite unit descended upon them, the battle was bloody and ended in casualties on both sides. By Thursday, four Elite were dead, but they had taken out twice as many of the enemy, and five humans walked away without a scratch.
Well, they would probably need some therapy. But at least they were alive.
The city was crawling with vampires. Most were his. The Prime had them triple-teaming their patrol areas and checking in every twenty minutes instead of on the hour.
“I can’t, not yet,” he finally said to his Second. “I have to debug this search routine.”
“Which means?”
“I’m close,” he muttered, his eyes full of code. “Another hour and I’ll have it.”
“And you’re sure it’s going to work?”
“Positive . . . but it’s a very detailed routine.”
“And you’ve been in that chair for two days. Your ass is growing into the seat. You’ve only fed because I brought it to you, but I can’t bring you sleep unless I hit you over the head with a chair.”
“I’ll sleep when I’m done, Faith.”
She waved her hand between his face and the monitor. “Could you at least pretend to listen to me? Do I have to call California again?”
He didn’t stop typing, but shot her a poisonous look. “I’d really rather you didn’t. Is there any news from APD?”
Faith sighed. “Nothing we haven’t already heard. They’re still going through what’s left of the building. They’ve found eleven bodies so far and identified six. Three additional people are still missing. I told Sergeant Winters to have any personal effects sent here.”
“Good.”
She sat on the edge of the table, crossing her arms, saying hesitantly, “You don’t suppose there’s any chance . . .”
“No,” he cut her off. “If Miranda were alive, she would have found a way to contact us by now. It’s been almost a week, Faith.”
He heard the hardness in his voice, hardness she didn’t deserve. He should let her have her hope. He had abandoned any such thing and accepted the truth, and if his heart was still howling in pain, he could ignore it. He had to. He had lost three days wallowing in self-pity and people had died.
He raised his eyes to her. “As soon as we have this under control, you can have some time off. I’m sorry you’ve been running nonstop since the fire.”
“So have you . . . and I’m in much better shape than you are. I lost a friend, yes, but not a Queen.”
“She wasn’t my Queen,” he said shortly and went back to the simple, heart-numbing task of proofreading lines of characters and symbols. That black-and-white place of numbers and letters, if and then, had been his escape, letting him focus on something that didn’t make him break things and scare the servants.
“There.” He sat back and rubbed his neck.
“You’re done?”
“No. I’ve got a check running. It’ll be done in a few minutes.”
He watched the progress bar on the screen inch its way from left to right. Thankfully he’d upgraded the server’s processors two weeks ago, otherwise there was no way he’d have the computing power for what he was doing. As it was, he’d had to do a lot of the work by hand instead of letting the network run it for him.
The sensors were programmed to take readings of body temperature, body mass, and speed of movement, then weed out anything above or below average human parameters; what fell into a certain range was most likely a vampire. So far he’d had a 98 percent accuracy rate with a couple of glitches involving large dogs and an immortal midget. He
knew that Ariana Blackthorn fit perfectly in the range, so all he needed to do was isolate her specific set of readings from every other vampire in Austin.
He’d gone back over the grid from the night of the raid, when her hench-vamps had all been taken outside and the only vampires in the house had been him, her, and the Elite. Everyone who was in the building that night had a com except Ariana, so he could eliminate anyone whose signal corresponded to one of the Elite. The remaining readings he was currently running against those of every vampire that had entered or left the city limits Friday night.
He’d found four likely candidates and was now letting the computer do the rest. Once he had a profile for her he could track her down within the grid.
It wasn’t a perfect plan—far from it, with so many variables—but it was the best thing he’d come up with since returning to his duties on Tuesday. They could continue to catch the attackers, slapping bandages over the city’s wounds until it bled to death by inches, or they could go to the source.
He wanted Ariana Blackthorn’s blood to spill over his hands. He wanted to see her head fall to the ground and her skull crack on the concrete. He wanted to see her body twitch and spasm into stillness.
Then, and only then, would he rest.
He heard a noise like a wind chime, and Faith slid off the table and took out her phone. “I’ll be damned,” she said. “An e-mail from Sophie.”
He looked up at her again. “Sophie . . . not Sophia Castellano?”
“You know her?”
“You mentioned her once before—something about her being a former agent of the Red Shadow.”
Faith frowned down at the screen of her phone. “The hell . . . Sophie says that the Blackthorn gang is planning to attack the Haven.”
David laughed. “And they’re going to find it, how?”
“I don’t know. She doesn’t say. She just says they’re coming . . . tonight.”
“What makes her think so?”
“Again, she doesn’t . . .” Faith trailed off, and when she looked up, her eyes were wide. “She says they have a spy in the Elite.”
“Even if that’s true, there’s no way they can get in.”
“Not even if they had someone inside?”
David’s laughter faded. “Impossible.”
“I’m e-mailing her back—damn it, I should have gotten her phone number, we could make short work of this.”
David moved to his laptop and pulled up the com system. “There’s no way they could have someone inside,” he muttered. “I’d know. I’ve gone over everything a hundred times since Elite Seventy turned on us. There’s been no unusual signal activity going in or out of the Haven . . . they’d have to communicate somehow. What the fuck are they using, then, Morse code? Smoke signals?”
He ran a secondary search for transmission anomalies, but he knew there wouldn’t be anything—everything from cell phones to radios showed up on his monitors, and he watched them all.
Something beeped.
“What is that?” he asked. “There’s something . . . or, there was something . . . Saturday night, there was a single burst transmission from the room where we had Ariana. It was less than a second long . . . and it came twice more this week.”
“What kind of transmission?”
“I don’t know. With all the com chatter that night it got lost. It’s not from a com, it’s . . . Christ.”
“It’s Christ?”
“No, no . . . Who’s the guard in the visitor’s wing right now? Send him to that suite immediately.”
“What’s he looking for?”
“Anything that looks like a GPS device.”
Faith gaped at him. “Bitch stuck a GPS in the Haven?”
“That’s what it looks like. It transmitted three times—Saturday, Tuesday, and yesterday—and then shut down. It was such a short-lived signal it was logged in the system but didn’t trip security. She planted it the night she escaped and I wasn’t watching the transmission logs.” He all but slammed the screen of his laptop shut. “They’ve got us mapped, Faith. Sophie’s right. They’re coming.”
Faith and the Prime stared at each other.
He said, very, very calmly, “Plan Alpha Delta Nine.”
“Yes, Sire.” She lifted her wrist and hit broadcast mode. “All Haven Elite and personnel, incursion code Alpha Delta Nine. Battle stations. Double coverage on every door. Windows closing down in twenty seconds.”
David leaned over and hit the override switch that would close the metal shutters, then flipped several more security switches, turning on firewalls to protect the network and scramble any outgoing frequencies.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got sensors covering the Haven, too,” Faith said hopefully.
David smiled wickedly. “As a matter of fact, I do. They were the first test system before the grid went live. I didn’t think we’d ever need it, but I left them in place anyway.”
A diagram of the property came up, and within seconds each vampire within its borders was highlighted as a red dot; most of them were in motion, the Elite headed to their stations for an invasion, the servants migrating to the secure rooms belowground.
Faith leaned over his shoulder. “Holy fucking mother of shit.”
There were red dots moving steadily toward the Haven in groups of ten or twelve, approaching through the forest from three sides. David added them up quickly in his head.
“Eighty-three,” he said. “How many Elite do we have?”
“Thirty-two in house,” she replied. “The rest are out on patrol. I can send out the recall signal—”
“No,” he told her, rising. “They need to stay put and defend the city. We can handle a siege here. Secure all the entrances as well as the underground tunnels. There’s no way they can get in—all we have to do is keep them out until sunup. I’m going to get the rest of my weapons. You check the entrances.”
“On it!”
David quickly connected his phone to the computer system so he could monitor the sensors from anywhere in the Haven and left the server room, locking it down; the door and walls were steel-reinforced, and the only way anyone could break in was with a battering ram.
He emerged from the stairway and strode down the hall to his suite, and Paul, the second door guard, said, “Sire, is it the Blackthorn?”
“It looks that way—where’s Samuel?”
“He said Faith called him to the front doors and he took off running.”
David took his sword down from the wall, then grabbed two long daggers with smooth, tapered wooden blades and strapped them to his waist.
As he was about to leave the suite, he saw something out of the corner of his eye that made his blood run cold.
The cabinet where he kept Miranda’s book and the Queen’s Signet had been pried open, the door cracked and splintered and hanging partway off its hinges.
He jerked it the rest of the way open and saw that someone had torn through the contents of the cabinet, tossing things aside until they found what they wanted.
The metal box had been jimmied open, the wooden one inside left empty.
Someone had stolen the Signet.
Faith ran down the hall out of the East Wing, checking as she passed that everyone she saw was at the ready, weapons drawn; they had been trained in how to handle an invasion, even though such a thing hadn’t happened in decades. Few interlopers were ballsy, or stupid, enough to lay siege to the Haven. Almost every assassinated Prime was killed beyond the walls of his home.
“Elite Twelve, is the West Wing secure?” she asked.
“Secure and ready.”
“Sire, what’s your position?”
David’s reply was terse. “I’m in my suite. Tell Samuel I need him back here. I think Paul’s gone rogue on us—he broke into the suite and then abandoned his post.”
She halted. “Samuel’s not there?”
“No—he’s not with you?”
“No.”
Normally she enjo
yed hearing David curse, but lately it seemed to be happening with unfortunate frequency. “I’m running a trace on his com,” he said. “He’s in the building, near the front doors. I can’t raise him or Paul. The insurgent signals are converging on the entrance—get everyone there now.”
“Sophie said they had a man inside,” Faith realized, starting to run again. “I’m on my way.” She hit broadcast. “All available Elite to the front doors!”
Faith raced down the hall and around the corner toward the front entrance . . .
. . . just in time to see Samuel swing the double doors open.
Then all hell broke loose.
Twenty
Sophie pulled her little black car up behind the stables and parked; before she even had the key out of the ignition Miranda had leapt out.
The horses were out in the paddock, clearly distressed, whinnying and pawing the dirt the way they did before a storm broke. Miranda climbed up on the fence to get a better look at the Haven.
An animal hiss escaped her lips. She could see dark figures streaming into the Haven like ants and the broad front doors standing open. Even if Faith had believed their warning, it had come too late. The enemy had taken them by surprise and found no resistance at the doors. Miranda could only hope that the Elite were strong enough to drive them back.
“Hurry,” she called to Sophie and hopped down. “We have to get in there.”
“Hang on a minute. Do you have any sort of strategy here, or are we as stupid as I think we are?”
Miranda was staring at the Haven, wishing she could see through the shutters; from out here it looked almost normal, but even at this distance she could hear breaking glass and the clear ring of metal on metal.
“We fight our way in and take out as many as we can.”
Sophie snorted, hard. “Not to be a pain, here, but there are exactly two of us, and you’ve never even been in a real fight, much less as a vampire. You can win one on one, but if we go in the front it’s us against all of them. If we want to help, we need a plan, which is what I told you in the car.”
“Fine, fine. Ideas?”
Queen of Shadows Page 35
