She picked up the small metallic device and shook her head.
“What’s that?” Stella asked.
Miranda held it up so the Witch could see it. “An earpiece,” she said. “I’ve seen one just like it before.”
“So . . . what does that mean?”
The Queen faced the Witch, pondering the blade in her left hand and the earpiece in her right.
“It means it’s time for me to go home,” she said softly.
Three
That night Stella did arguably the first smart thing she’d done all week: She called her father.
He arrived at her place inside ten minutes, took one look at the mess of Stella’s apartment, and said, “All right, start at the beginning.”
Just then Miranda emerged from the bathroom, where she’d been washing the dried blood off her already healed arm. “Detective Maguire,” she said. “Nice to see you again.”
Stella’s dad blinked at the Queen in astonishment. “You’re alive?”
Miranda smiled slightly. “Seems that way.”
“What about—”
Miranda shook her head. “The Prime is dead,” she said, the words hollow. Stella knew she was trying to push as much distance between herself and her grief as she could, at least for now.
Maguire sat down on Stella’s couch. Stella had never seen her father look quite so bewildered. “And Faith?”
Miranda closed her eyes for a second, then said, “She’s gone.”
He stared at her for a moment. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “For your loss . . . I know the entire Shadow World is poorer for it.”
“Thank you. We have a more pressing problem, though—someone knows I’m here. I don’t know who they are or what they want, but they have this place marked, and that means your daughter isn’t safe.”
“She’ll come stay with me, then,” the detective declared.
“Dad—”
“No arguments, Stella. I’m not going to let you get eaten by these people. Just because the whole city’s been a tomb for a week doesn’t mean you should be alone—”
“A tomb?” Miranda interrupted. “There hasn’t been any gang violence, any territory battles?”
He shook his head. “I expected there to be. Everything I know about Signets tells me that after one dies there should be a surge of attacks—I had extra men on the street, even covered the Shadow District, but it’s like everyone in Austin is scared shitless.”
“Why?” Stella asked. “I mean . . . aren’t your people out there doing their jobs like always?”
Miranda sighed. “No. We have . . . had . . . protocols in place for our deaths. The Haven and our entire network is on lockdown, and all the Elite will be in hiding until either a new Prime claims the Signet or we send the recall signal. Often when a new regime takes over, they start by killing off all the old Elite and destroying anything connected to the former administration. We didn’t want to make it easy for them, so not only is the sensor network down, the Haven itself is locked tight. Even the cars are locked down.”
“So if your guys aren’t policing the streets, why aren’t all the bad vampires out there having a people-eating party?” Stella asked.
“I don’t know. But we have to assume that whoever came here knew who you are, Stella, and that means they probably know who your father is. Staying with him might not be as safe as you think.”
“Don’t worry,” the detective said sternly. “I’ve got a really big gun.”
The Queen smiled again, this time with a touch of pity. “You know that won’t help if they come for her.”
“Then what do you suggest?”
Miranda looked at Stella. “I take her back to the Haven with me.”
Both Maguires must have looked flabbergasted; the Queen chuckled. “Only for a few days. I need to recall the Elite and get the network back up, and then I can have the evidence the vampire left behind analyzed and learn more about what he wants. Once I know what I’m dealing with, we can make a more sound decision about Stella.”
“Do I get a say in this?” Stella asked.
“No,” Miranda and the detective said at the same time.
Maguire rubbed his chin, and Stella almost smiled herself; he’d always done that when he was worried about something. She suddenly felt a little amazed by her father: All this time she’d thought he was so ordinary, but he had been up to his badge in vampires, knowing what they were capable of. His constant fretting over Stella’s safety made a lot more sense now . . . Stella was fretting a bit, too.
She couldn’t help it, though—the thought of seeing where Miranda lived gave her a thrill that overrode her sense of self-preservation. Lark would shit herself when she found out.
“Can you guarantee Stella will be safe with you?” Maguire asked. “I know you regulate your employees’ feeding, but I can’t say I’m too keen on the idea of her being surrounded by vampires.”
“Whoa . . . how many vampires are we talking about?”
Miranda glanced at Stella. “About a hundred, assuming they’re all alive. I give you my word, Detective, Stella will be under guard every moment she’s there. I’ll give her a com and put her on the network so even after she’s back in town she can call for help instantly if she needs to. Believe me, I won’t let anything happen to her. We’ve . . . we’ve lost enough already.”
Finally, Maguire nodded. “What do you need from APD?”
“Right now, nothing. Let me get my people back home and get a status report on the territory; as soon as I find out anything about the intruder I’ll send you the data and you can send out an alert to your officers.”
Which was how, two hours later, Stella wound up driving her car out Loop 360, a duffel bag full of clothes in the trunk, a cat carrier in the backseat, and a vampire riding shotgun.
She left Lark a voice mail calmly explaining the situation, though she anticipated a frantic call whenever her friend managed to check her phone. She also called in a “family emergency” to Foxglove at the shop; Foxglove knew her father was a cop, so she would probably assume something had happened to him. Stella hated lying, but she tried to be as vague as possible, hoping she could come up with something close to the truth by the time she got back to town.
Stella had no idea how to act in a car with her idol, but within ten minutes on the road, after giving her basic directions, Miranda fell asleep. With her head leaning against the window and her feet tucked up under her in the seat, the Queen looked so vulnerable and young—except for her face. Even asleep, there was pain in her face, and a kind of exhaustion Stella couldn’t even fathom.
How old was she really? Stella wondered, eyes on the road ahead. Miranda’s website bio said she was thirty, but how much of that was actual fact? She could be a hundred years old for all anyone knew, and looking at her now, Stella could believe it. There was so much weight on her heart . . . Stella remembered the night the call had come about her stepmother, shot in a robbery, and how she and her father had wandered the earth like ghosts for months . . . What must it be like to lose a soul mate?
“How old were you?”
Stella started, shooting Miranda a sideways glance. “Hey, no mind reading.”
A slight smile. “I can’t always help it. Plus . . . after all that suicidal energy work you were doing on me, I think we’re linked for a while. You might want to keep an eye on your shields for a few days.”
Stella bit her lip, then said, “I was twelve.”
“I was fourteen when my mother died . . . but she had been lost to me for a long time before that.”
“Lost, as in . . .”
“As in, committed to a mental institution. It turns out we had the same gift, but no one ever recognized hers for what it was.”
“Who recognized yours?”
Miranda closed her eyes again. “David.”
Stella immediately cursed herself for asking. “Sorry.”
“It’s all right.”
“Can I ask . . . I mea
n . . . how did you meet?”
The Queen looked out over the darkened Hill Country, and her eyes were bright with tears, but her voice was steady enough as she said, “In line at the grocery store.”
Stella laughed. “No, really?”
She gave a flicker of a smile. “Yes. He was buying ice cream.”
“So you can eat . . . other stuff?”
A nod. “Some of us do. Too much can make us sick, though. Most of us stick to liquids.”
“When you met, were you already a vampire?”
“No. Not for about a year.”
“Does it hurt—turning into one?”
“Yes.” Miranda looked at her gravely. “It was my choice, but it was excruciatingly painful . . . and it’s not an easy life, or a kind one. So don’t get any ideas.”
Stella laughed in spite of herself. “No freaking way. I’m not some goofy romantic teenager. I have no desire to be immortal.”
“Really? Most people seem to think it’s one hell of a prize, at least until they get it.”
“That’s because people are afraid of death.”
“And you’re not?”
Stella shrugged. “Maybe . . . I’m a Wiccan, though. We look at death as part of a greater cycle, not as an end. It’s a doorway to whatever’s next. Besides, I can’t imagine living forever, watching everything else die and change . . .” She trailed off, realizing that she really, really needed to change the subject, given what Miranda had just been through. “But . . . at least the clothes are cool.”
Miranda raised an eyebrow, not fooled by her lame attempt at steering the conversation away from death, but said only, “Take the next left turn.”
They were heading deeper into the hills, and the road wound around like a snake, guiding them farther and farther from the city. Stella began to feel a creeping sense of unreality pricking her spine. Out in the middle of nowhere in a car with a vampire . . . you are fucking brilliant, Stell.
She would never have seen the odd little unmarked turnoff that Miranda pointed out to her. It was so dark and the trees so dense it felt like they were in another world . . .
. . . until the trees opened out onto a wide valley cupped in the hands of the hills, and Stella caught sight of the magnificent house . . . no, mansion . . . no, that didn’t even cover it . . . at the end of the long, circular drive.
“Holy shit,” Stella breathed. She heard Miranda chuckle.
It was hard to really get an idea of what the place looked like. There were no lights anywhere, and the only real sense she got of its size was based on the enormity of the blackness where it blocked out the half moon’s light. It was gigantic, though, and she could see the edges of several other buildings behind it, all of them dark, like haunted houses, a ghost town.
They pulled up to the massive double doors at the front entrance. Stella grabbed her bag and Pywacket, who complained loudly from inside the carrier until she shushed him.
It was so quiet, and so dark. There was sound everywhere, crickets and night birds, but no traffic noise, no hum of the ever-wakeful city around them. The sky overhead seemed to go on forever.
Miranda walked up the steps and off to one side of the doors; she obviously could see just fine, though Stella had to pick out each step carefully to avoid stumbling and dropping the cat. Once she was closer to the building, Stella saw that the doors were actually made of steel, and it looked like all the windows were blocked off with metal, too.
Miranda reached out and pressed one of the bricks, which turned out to be a façade; it flipped up out of the way, revealing a touch screen of some kind.
The Queen pressed her hand flat against the screen for several seconds before there was a faint beep.
A small camera lens shot forward from the wall until it was close to Miranda’s face, and Stella saw a blue line of light travel over her eyes. Another beep, followed by a female computer voice requesting verbal authorization.
“Star-two,” Miranda said.
“Identity accepted. Access granted.”
There was a deep clanging sound, and a moment later the steel doors slid back like something from Star Trek, revealing a pair of equally enormous carved wood doors behind them. Seconds later the windows began to follow suit, making surprisingly little noise other than the soft flap-flap-flap of the metal shutters retracting.
Above Stella’s head, two electric torches blazed to life, banishing the eerie darkness.
Miranda took a deep breath. “Welcome to the Haven of the South,” she said. “Follow me.”
As they crossed the threshold, the interior lights began to click on, and Stella finally got to see exactly what she was dealing with here: The doors opened into a grand vestibule with a staircase that rivaled any Hollywood plantation set. The room was cavernous, their steps echoing as they crossed the marble floor. Even Pywacket didn’t seem to know how to react; the cat was quieter than he’d ever been in his life.
They took a long hallway and several turns. Stella was good and lost before a minute had passed, but Miranda’s stride was purposeful, her expression fixed on her goal.
She led Stella to another steel door and held her wrist up to the scanner on the wall beside it; the weird bracelet thing she wore was some kind of key, and the light on the scanner changed from red to green, allowing her access.
“You can leave your things here for now,” Miranda told her.
Stella saw why: The door led directly to a staircase, and there wasn’t much room to spare. Getting her bag and Py down there would have been awkward to say the least. At the bottom of the stairs was yet another door.
The Witch wasn’t sure what she expected to find on the other side, but it wasn’t what she got. They walked into a windowless, freezing cold room full of computers—cabinets of servers, monitors, an entire store’s worth of laptops and other equipment meticulously organized on shelves.
Miranda went to a console where a red button was locked inside a shield, just like in a nuclear submarine movie. She held her wrist-thing to it, unlocking the shield, and flipped it up to expose the button.
She shot Stella a grin. “Watch this.”
She hit the button with her palm.
Around them, servers and CPUs leapt to life, whirring and beeping and clicking; Stella felt a faint vibration beginning all around her, the entire building seeming to wake up. A monitor nearby lit up and Stella watched, fascinated, as it showed the system booting up, running through script after script that switched on other monitors, other subsystems.
SOLAR POWER SYSTEM: ONLINE.
EXTERNAL LIGHTING SYSTEM: ONLINE.
COM SYSTEM: ONLINE.
SENSOR GRID: ONLINE.
VEHICLES: ONLINE.
A window popped up asking for a password. Miranda typed in what looked like more than two dozen characters. Finally, another window appeared, saying, CONFIRM ELITE RECALL?
Miranda said aloud, “Confirm, Star-two, Queen Miranda Grey-Solomon.”
RECALL MESSAGE?
She smiled softly, and when she spoke, her voice was clear and firm and held the barest touch of triumph: “Attention, all Elite and Haven personnel. Recall Code Omega-Nine, Star-two. Report to the Haven immediately. I repeat: Recall Code Omega-Nine, Star-two.”
RECALL SENT.
A flicker caught Stella’s attention: On a monitor showing a citywide grid, red lights had begun to appear in clusters throughout Austin, and after a few minutes they began to converge.
“Now,” Miranda said, still smiling, “Let’s get you settled in.”
* * *
Across Austin, in hidden shelters and safe houses scattered throughout the silent city, a woman’s voice broke into the darkness, and in every corner of the Shadow District, there were cheers.
Four
She couldn’t go in. Not yet.
She stood with her hands on the door, head bowed, for several minutes, but nothing she told herself could give her the will to open it or go inside.
She knew what she
would see: everything just as it had been that night. Her guitar would still be on her chair. The book on string theory he had been reading would still be lying on the side table, his place held with a sticky note. The pair of boots she had almost worn, then changed her mind about and tossed on the floor, would still be there. A silver pen engraved with David L. Solomon, PhD would still be in the groove in the desk.
There was a gentle voice beside her. “May I get you something, reinita?”
Miranda turned to the woman standing there. “Welcome back, Esther. Is everyone all right?”
“Yes, my Lady. The Haven staff was in the safe house—we were the first ones back.” Esther pursed her lips slightly and added, “I would have liked to stay, to watch the house until you came home.”
Miranda smiled. “I appreciate that . . . but it was more important that everyone stayed safe. You never know what might happen.”
Esther seemed to fight with herself for a moment, but then suddenly bundled Miranda into a hug. “Thank God you are home,” she murmured into Miranda’s hair. “I am so sorry about our Lord Prime.”
“Thank you, Esther . . . so am I.”
Miranda squeezed her back, and then Esther moved away, flushed a little at the emotion that had made her breach propriety for a moment. “I will go in and freshen things up,” Esther said. “It will be ready for you when you are ready for it.”
Miranda nodded, but she didn’t speak and didn’t stay to watch Esther go into the suite; she had to walk away.
She could hear the Haven coming back to life—the Elite were arriving in groups, the servants had returned, all systems were humming happily as if nothing had gone wrong. He would have been pleased, she thought, knowing how perfectly all the safeguards and contingencies had worked; everyone had done exactly as they were supposed to, waiting until they got the signal to emerge from hiding. If there had been no word for fourteen days, they were to disband. That way if a new Prime came forward and didn’t try to wipe them out, they could choose whether to pledge themselves to his rule or to leave the territory. If the worst happened, he had wanted everyone to be safe and for the Haven technology to be as difficult as possible for his killer to steal.
Of Shadow Born Page 5
