Miranda nodded, glancing over at David. He stood cross-armed, frowning at the human who couldn’t see them and was therefore calm for the moment.
“What?” she asked.
David’s brow furrowed a little more. “I don’t like the idea of you getting up close and personal with that thing, especially not mind-to-mind. What little I saw was more than scary—it was dangerous. She’s big black hole that could suck you into her.”
“She’s not a thing,” Miranda reminded him sternly. “She’s a person in there somewhere. That’s what I want to know—if we can get her back. And the only way to know that is to take a calculated risk. I’ll have you anchoring me, and the boys back at the Haven. Besides, since when do you doubt me?”
He blinked. “I don’t doubt you.”
“Then let’s get to work.”
Not satisfied, but resigned, he nodded and gestured to Novotny to open the door.
For his part, the doctor didn’t look terribly enthusiastic about their prospects either, but he did as he was told and had one of his assistants carry a chair into the room for the Queen.
She had been holding her shields up as hard as she could against the woman until she was ready to get started, but kept them up a while longer, giving herself a chance to evaluate her subject with normal sight alone.
David joined her, staying on his feet and in the corner. They had already agreed that if the human attempted to lay a hand on Miranda he was going to snap the human’s neck without a parting glance…but it didn’t seem that would be necessary for the moment.
The human was pretty securely zip-tied to a chair of her own. She wore hospital scrubs, and had plain white socks on her feet against the chill of the tile floor.
Based on their descriptions of the possessed victims’ behavior Miranda had partly expected a zombie-like creature with filthy matted hair and dirty clothes, but Novotny’s people would have none of that nonsense, especially since the woman was docile as a lamb if there were no vampires in the room. The woman’s long hair was scrupulously clean and tied back from her face, and if it weren’t for her vacant stare, she’d be the picture of blooming health.
“Why isn’t she attacking?” Miranda asked.
“She’s sedated,” Novotny replied. He was already preparing a syringe. “This will bring her out of it in a few minutes.” He gently lifted the sleeve of the human’s shirt and injected her with whatever it was.
“Does she eat? Sleep?”
“We can feed her by hand, and she swallows,” Novotny replied. “She’s the only one whose programming didn’t override basic survival instinct, it seems. She passes out when she’s too tired to stay awake. The last survivor—the one programmed to kill humans—was impossible to tend, and I had requested Mo’s help, but before he could send someone, the victim died.”
Miranda realized she was stalling and mentally smacked herself. “Okay. I’m going to start before she’s completely conscious so I can watch the programming kick in. David, are you ready?”
“As I will be.”
She grounded herself as completely as possible, reaching out to anchor firmly in David’s strength; she could feel Nico and Deven back at home, ready to help if she needed them. She couldn’t imagine this one human woman would test her power that deeply, but then again, the whole reason she wanted backup was for things she couldn’t imagine.
“What’s her name?” Miranda asked, sinking into the level of attention that she needed to access the deeper echelons of her empathy.
“Luisa Munoz.”
“Luisa,” Miranda murmured, pulling her legs up into the chair and letting her palms rest on her knees. She stared at the human for a moment longer, then closed her eyes.
Very, very carefully, she parted the first layer of her own shields and reached through the gap, keeping most of her protections up but extending a touch of energy to tap lightly around the woman’s aura. There wasn’t much response, but that was fine—she just wanted to get a feel for Luisa Munoz as a person.
The woman was painfully normal, or she had been. She was in her mid 50s, a nurse who worked in her husband’s cosmetic surgery practice. They were extremely successful, and like many of the wealthy who had attended Miranda’s benefit that night, involved in a number of charities. Luisa had brought her granddaughter to the concert; thinking over the list of survivors Miranda knew the girl had escaped physically unhurt but probably traumatized for life at seeing her Abuela feral and bloody, trying to attack her musical idol.
Miranda had already informed the Porphyria Foundation that they were to reach out to the survivors and offer them any aid required on Miranda’s behalf, whether it was medical care or a lifetime of therapy. Everyone there had suffered because of a war they should never have known existed.
The surface sweep told Miranda about the woman’s life…a life that was over with unless she could help. Luckily whatever spell was on them didn’t do anything to shield them against prodding and poking; Luisa was an open book, either because the Prophet was too stupid to know what the Queen was capable of, or too arrogant to believe she could break the spell.
There was a third option, of course…that there was no breaking it, and the Prophet simply didn’t care what she found out, because there was nothing she could do. But Miranda wasn’t ready to entertain that notion just yet.
She braced herself and reached out with a stronger “hand” this time, looking for an easy access point to the woman’s internal world. She could sense that the woman was starting to wake up from her sedation; aside from her energy shifting, Miranda could feel…smell? Hear? It was hard to describe how a vampire sensed someone’s muscles tensing, the slightest uptick in adrenaline beginning to seep into the body. Heightened states of emotion all smelled bright and acrid. Fear had a particular tang like vinegar.
The woman began to twitch. Miranda waited.
Between one breath and the next, Luisa’s eyes flew open, and she saw what was in front of her. With nearly vampiric reflexes the human threw herself forward against her bonds, letting out a shriek of rage that made Miranda’s ears ring—it was an animal noise, beyond coherent thought, primal.
The human’s placid, pretty features, which practically embodied “nurse” or some other kind of caregiver, twisted into a mask of hatred, and she kept throwing herself forward, her chair starting to inch across the floor with repeated loud creaks and clatters.
David started forward almost undetectably, but Miranda held up her hand to stop him, and he froze. “She’s fine,” she said sternly. “Leave her be.”
Miranda wanted to see her this way for a minute; she needed to know what she was up against. She dove into the cracks in the woman’s psyche, leaving only enough space in her own shielding to reach out with her empathy.
Instantly her mind was overloaded with pain, anger, and hate. She wanted to strike out, to drag her nails down the creature’s face, to tear into her skin, keep clawing, clawing, clawing until she hit bone, scratch her nails into the bone, leave gouges, keep clawing, KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT—
“Miranda!”
She jerked back at David’s sharp voice, but waved him away again. “I’m fine! Stay back until I call you, damn it!”
“The hell you are—look at your leg!”
She glanced down and saw her thigh was a bloody mess of long, parallel scratches—and so were her fingernails. “Well, shit,” she said irritably. “Still, I’m fine. If it happens again bring me out.”
“Miranda, I’m not going to let you—”
“You do not get to let me do anything,” she snapped. “Back off.”
She could hear the spell on the human speaking through her own voice, but she was still in control—she could sense what it was doing, wrapping tar-like sticky tentacles of energy around her the way it had the human’s mind. Once they took hold, they sent in tiny suckers, like a parasitic vine, and began to feed on her energy, using it for fuel for the spell. If
it got a deep enough hold in something as powerful as a Queen, it could turn her into a monster, ride her, until she was a burnt-out husk, the way this human was destined to be.
It was not, however, sentient—it had only one operating instruction and one goal, to consume and drive its host to kill. It could be programmed to seek out different kinds of creatures to attack, but it could only be programmed once; if it did get hold of Miranda, she’d start killing her own kind.
It was terrifying in both its simplicity and its evil. There was no positive use for this spell. To create a compulsion this strong took something that was darker than the Dark Web itself—not just darkness, but darkness merged with malice.
And it would not let go.
Miranda watched the sickening strands trying to wind around her own legs as it tried to crawl from Luisa to her, and she felt David’s rising panic at what had to be a gruesome sight.
She took a deep breath.
“It’s okay, baby,” she said calmly. “I think I know what to do.”
Her sudden stillness in the face of the monster shocked him into obedience, and he energetically “stepped” back where he’d been about to grab hold of her and try and pull her away from it.
Miranda kept breathing slowly, evenly, ignoring the creature for the moment, drawing power into herself from the Dark Web, which emerged in her mind with barely even a thought this time. She had a sense it would be there all the time now, for she had access to something now that neither the Prophet nor his disgusting blood magic had anticipated.
The Porphyria benefit had been before the Solstice, and based on the Prophet’s obvious intentions this human and the spell on her should have been dead days ago. It had not been designed or cast to counter the new power in Miranda’s blood.
Next time the Prophet would doubtless be ready, but this time…oh, this time, he and his toys didn’t stand a chance.
The Queen reached out to the Web, taking hold of the silver-black strands that wove through her body and her world, and pulled on them, gently, for there was no need for force, no violence. When her hands touched the threads she could feel them vibrating…she could feel music, the same melodies she had worked with when she had decided to teach herself to work with the Dark Web.
She knew this Song…she was this Song.
Miranda looked down at the pathetic, slimy thing writhing around her and still gripping the human woman. It was so tiny now, where before it had frightened her.
But why should she be afraid? It was barely a moment’s dissonance, a few jangling notes out of tune—
AND I AM THE SYMPHONY—
Power sang through her body, out through her hands, and her entire being filled with music, her vision with blood, her heart with wrath. She took hold of the spell and flooded it with power, and it began to dissolve, falling apart molecule by molecule. She burned its sticky fingers from around her legs, scorched its body, and then put her hands on the tentacles that held onto Luisa Munoz, watching them burn…loving how they burned.
Something behind her was niggling at her consciousness, something else she needed to see, but she knew she wouldn’t last much longer channeling so much energy—the part of her that was still Miranda knew she had to hurry. She didn’t know enough about what she was doing for fine control; right now she just needed to get the job done.
She finished burning out the spell and tried to “turn down” the energy as much as she could to avoid hurting the human even more. She had grown so used to using her empathy as a weapon she sometimes forgot it had another use.
Miranda put her physical, flesh-and-blood hands on Luisa Munoz’s shoulders, and stared into her eyes, reaching for her…for the real Luisa, praying she was still in there and that the monster hadn’t cleaned out her body.
She called to the woman, mentally, searching, hoping…there had to be hope. She sought Luisa’s soul in corner after corner of her mind, refusing to give up…please, please be alive…please come back…it’s safe now, Luisa, you’re safe. The monster is gone.
You can go home, Luisa. You can see your grandbabies again, see your husband, your daughter. You can feel the warm sun and the cold wind. You can eat chocolate and listen to the Hamilton soundtrack…everything you love, Luisa, it’s all still here, waiting for you. You’re safe now. You can come back. Come back.
Come back.
And for just a moment, she felt her…felt Luisa, the soft flutter of a human life, a butterfly’s wing against her cheek, kissing her in gratitude, in peace.
“Miranda,” David said softly, “She’s gone.”
“No,” Miranda whispered. “Not yet. I’ve almost got her.”
“Beloved…she stopped breathing.”
Miranda’s eyes flew open, and she saw the flatline on the heart monitor, the woman’s open, dilated eyes.
She was smiling.
“No, no…” Exhaustion, overwhelm, and grief hit Miranda at the same instant, and she burst into tears, slipping onto her knees in front of Luisa’s chair, where the human’s head hung over her, her muscles slack now against the zip ties.
“A moment please, Doctor,” she heard David say, followed by the sound of the door opening and closing.
His arms wrapped around her as he knelt behind her, the sides of his long coat draping over her as they often did. She wept into Luisa’s lap, thinking how close she had been…so close, and Luisa could have gone home to her family, so close…
“You need to disconnect,” David told her in her ear. “You’re still hyperextended…you need to shield yourself again before you burn out completely. You’ve done all you could for her. You set her free. She doesn’t have to die a prisoner in her own body.”
He was right, and she knew he was, but it still felt like a failure, and she knew why.
Kai.
If she couldn’t free a human from a simple possession, how could she hope to free Kai from what the Prophet had done to him? Now she knew it was possible he was still in there, still alive, trapped beneath the filthy beast that had stolen his skin. He might be aware of everything, or he might be asleep, but either way he was trapped, and she couldn’t save him.
“Of course you can,” David told her, pulling her back against him, resting his chin on her head. “Look how close you came this time…your first time. None of us has ever dealt with this kind of magic before, but you stepped up and killed it without hesitation. Imagine what you’ll be able to do now that you know what you’re dealing with and can study it, practice, and plan.”
Her breath shuddered, but she listened, and clung to him, letting the words sink in. She had…what had she done? She had…
“You did what you do,” he said, kissing her. “You sang, and you changed the world. And you’ve barely even begun.”
She closed her eyes a moment and gathered her shields back around her where they belonged, letting them settle, feeling her edges, his edges. She was worn out but her mind had already begun to turn, taking the last few minutes and holding them in her palm, examining what she’d seen the way David would examine a troublesome line of code. She could already see places she could do it better next time, a better approach, a smarter way to anchor herself to her boys. More precision, less force. She had learned that from him, too—that she could combine intuition and intellect and come up with something stronger than either alone.
“That’s my Queen,” he murmured, holding her tightly. “Now…let’s let Novotny take care of Luisa. May I take care of you?”
She smiled at the wording, remembering how she’d snapped at him. She leaned back and turned so she could see his face. “Blood,” she said. “Home. Shower. You. Now.”
He bowed his head in assent, lifted her up off the floor, and would probably have carried her to the car, but she refused; many things had changed since her first night as Queen, but this had not. She would walk on her own two feet as long as she had the strength to stand.
She made it almost all the way t
o the car, which, she reflected as she passed out, wasn’t bad, all things considered.
*****
The study adjacent to the Haven library was the perfect place to settle in on a stormy late night and pore over books of ancient magical lore. It had large, sturdy tables, comfortable chairs, and cushions perfect for sitting by the fireplace to read or, if one was a gangly young dog, flop down and nap.
At the moment one of the tables also featured two half-dressed vampires in a state of breathless euphoria.
Nico chuckled up at the ceiling and panted, between the tremors still running through his body, “When I said…we should explore that passage more in depth…not what I meant.”
Deven had attempted not to collapse directly on top of Nico and had partly succeeded. His head had landed on Nico’s shoulder, one arm flung over the Elf’s middle, the rest of his limbs both on and off the table.
“Are you complaining?” Dev croaked, wincing at the strain in his voice. Surely they hadn’t been that loud?
“Not at all.” Nico grinned at him. “But as the corner of the Codex is stabbing me in the hip right now, I am reminded that there are beds all over this building and you in particular can Mist anywhere in seconds.”
“Sorry,” Deven told him, shifting off and trying to right himself by grabbing the far end of the table. He lifted his other hand and trailed his fingers down the Elf’s exposed torso, earning a weak shudder. “My mind was on something far more urgent.”
One body part at a time they gradually untangled and slid off the table, gathering their hastily shucked clothing and righting the stacks of books they’d knocked over. Nothing damaged, thank Goddess—he would have hated having to explain that to the Cloister.
Nico winced a bit as he got back into his chair and tried to reassume his work. Deven did the same, leaving them where they’d been half an hour ago, on opposite sides of the table, each absorbed in his own pursuits.
“That was your fault anyway,” Deven pointed out with a smile. “You’re the one who couldn’t stop staring at me.”
Shadow Rising (The Shadow World Book 7) Page 26
