Deven’s count had been right: thirty.
“Weird,” she murmured without losing the vision. “Their minds are . . . I don’t know, it’s like they’re all copies of the same mind. They aren’t exactly a hive, but they all have the same emotions . . . the same programming.”
She followed the sounds of the engine and looked for the person closest to it, the driver. Pushing a surge of power toward the man, she loaded it with the most disruptive thing she could think of: panic.
Run. They’re going to kill you. Run. Run!
She heard a scream, and a commotion; the driver all but fell off his seat and bolted. To her shock, she heard a familiar click and whistle—they shot him.
Another human was already climbing into the driver’s seat. Miranda pulled her energy back from the first man and threw it hard at the second. He, too, leapt from the seat and ran, and he, too, fell with a crossbow bolt in his back.
A third human started to replace him, but before Miranda could ready another hit, she heard someone bark, “Forget the walls! They’ve got an empath! Move in!”
Miranda looked at Deven. “That leaves twenty-eight.”
Before she even got the sentence out, a wave of nausea and exhaustion hit her—already weakened, she’d overextended her gift. She didn’t have the energy to take down all of them that way—she had to pace herself.
The barn door shuddered, then splintered, falling off its hinges to the ground. The light that flooded in was bright enough to make her head pound, but she’d managed to stall them just enough that it was no longer genuinely dangerous.
From here on out, it was a fight to the death.
What seemed like a hundred uniformed humans poured into the door, some armed with crossbows, others with swords. The first arrows were already flying before the whole unit had even crossed the threshold.
Miranda ducked one that came at her head. Beside her, she heard Deven draw his sword.
“Stay up here as long as you can,” he said. “They can only come up the ladder single file—you can knock them down from there.”
“But where are you—”
Without another word, he jumped off the edge of the hayloft; her heart crawled up into her throat as he spun in midair, slicing open the throat of the closest human before he’d even landed.
A group of soldiers rushed him, and two were down in mere seconds. Meanwhile others kept firing up at her, and four more humans ran for the ladder, trying to scale it as quickly as possible. They were, she noticed, remarkably fast, just as she’d heard; she had never seen humans move like that. Up until that moment she hadn’t entirely believed it was possible.
Miranda made for the ladder. The first man reached the top, and she seized him by the shirt collar and hauled him up with her, letting the slowly mounting hunger she’d been fighting off all day have its way with him. The second soldier made it to the top, but without lifting her mouth from her prey’s throat, she wrenched herself around and kicked the ladder hard, sending it, and the three humans attempting to climb it, to the ground in a heap.
His blood hit her system like dynamite—and, with only a split second’s thought that she was going to kill him one way or another, she kept drinking until he stopped fighting her, until that rush of death flowed into her body and renewed every single tired, aching cell. She didn’t have time to truly enjoy it, though.
She shoved him off onto the fight below and, smiling, wiped the blood from her mouth. She felt awake again . . . awake, alive . . . and spoiling for a fight.
The Queen backflipped, pushing herself off the hayloft’s edge with her hands, and hit the ground rolling sideways until she was upright; the knives were in her hands, and the one in her left had already slammed into a human’s chest.
She looked over at Deven, who seemed to be enjoying himself. He had another five dead, strewn about the ground like fallen leaves.
Another bolt zipped past her ear. She reached out with her mind and caught it, then turned it around and sent it back to its rightful owner; the muffled scream told her it struck home. As she engaged two others, she glanced over to see how many crossbows they had left: three. Deciding on the easiest way to incapacitate them, Miranda grabbed the first one with her power and broke his fingers. He doubled over in pain, dropping his weapon.
She had to bring her full attention back to where she was, though, as her two opponents had intensified their attack. Miranda jumped back over a body and took the dead woman’s sword.
Distantly she heard a series of noises that her brain interpreted as car doors.
“More of them?” she called to Deven, too distracted to try to sense outside.
Deven flashed her a grin. “I don’t think so.”
She parted the head of one of her opponents from his shoulders and turned to the door just in time to see the most welcome sight she’d had all day: her Elite.
More than a dozen black-clad vampires swarmed into the barn. The humans had to abandon their quarry and turn around to face their attackers, and for a moment they seemed evenly matched.
Then a man in a long black coat walked into the barn, his blue eyes on fire with wrath, power seething around him like the eye of a hurricane.
Miranda felt the humans’ fear breaking through their programming, but they had nowhere to run. They were blocked on one end by Miranda and Deven, on the other by David, and on both sides by Elite . . . but they didn’t surrender. In fact, they seemed to become even faster and stronger the more desperate their circumstances.
A vampire woman snaked her way through the crowd to the Queen. She had a sword in her hands. “My Lady,” she said, loudly enough to be heard over the din of battle, “I believe you left this in the SUV.”
“Minh!” Miranda pulled herself back into normal reality, took Shadowflame from her, and tossed the sword’s sheath back into a pile of hay where she could retrieve it later. “You’re all right—how’s Stuart?”
“Dead,” Minh replied. “The bastards left me unconscious on the driveway when they made off with you. Stuart was still inside, staked. He must have tried to save you.”
Anger rose hot and bitter in Miranda’s throat, and she snarled and closed on another soldier, Shadowflame flashing through his jugular and carotid with a spray of blood.
She looked around the barn for David. She could feel him in her mind, close enough to ease the growing anxiety of being so far from her Prime, and saw him off to one side of the fight, a human pinned back against the wall as David drank from him. She frowned—it was kind of an odd time to feed.
When he let the human drop, he met her eyes across the room, and they smiled at each other, adrenaline twisted around happiness at being reunited.
David’s eyes flicked past her for a moment, and she saw his expression change, his smile fading into alarm.
It happened so fast. She spun in the direction David was staring, fear choking her at whatever could possibly be bad enough to make him react that way . . . just in time to see Deven fall.
• • •
David couldn’t even move—Miranda, who was closer, was beside Dev in seconds. David saw blood, far too much of it, and the Queen had gone white as she eased the Prime onto his back. It wasn’t immediately clear what had happened, but one thing was clear: It was bad.
David felt the room around him slow down as his mind kicked into high gear. He counted the remaining humans: They were down to six. They were all within thirty feet of him. Close enough, and few enough, for a more direct approach than a fair fight. He calculated how to divide his power to reach them all at once. Normally six would be too many for this . . . but this time he had something he normally didn’t have to work with.
Rage.
Teeth pressing into his lower lip, the room gone red with the desire to make them pay, David seized all six humans and, his hands closing into fists, reached into them with his mind, took hold of all six hearts . . . and made them explode.
They had just enough time to scream.
/> The Elite froze, watching with fascination as their remaining half-dozen enemies fell to the ground simultaneously. As soon as the humans stopped moving, everything became eerily silent.
He shook himself out of his paralysis and made for the far end of the barn, joining Miranda just in time to see her pull a throwing stake from Deven’s chest and another from his side.
“It’s not a heart shot,” she reassured David, though her voice was tense at the sight of the wounds. The chest shot wasn’t that bad; it started to heal immediately. The side stake, however, looked like it had been in there a while, and the amount of blood was almost frightening. He had to have been wounded early in the fight and just ignored it—a very Deven thing to do.
“Idiot,” David scolded him gently. “You’re supposed to pull those out.”
“New piercing,” Deven replied, pale and shaky from blood loss. “You don’t like it?”
“My turn to hurt you,” Miranda told him. “Take a deep breath.”
Deven didn’t make a sound when she pulled the second stake . . . but he did pass out.
Miranda looked past David to the scattered bodies he’d left strewn about the ground. “If it had been me lying here, would you have been angry enough to do that?”
Their eyes met. He looked for emotion behind her words, but empathically he sensed nothing amiss; she just wanted to know. “No,” he replied. “I would have ripped out their hearts with my bare hands and shoved them down their throats.”
She smiled. “I probably shouldn’t find that romantic, should I.”
The Pair rose simultaneously, and David gestured to one of the lieutenants he’d brought. “Very carefully get him to the car. Give him one of the blood bags in the cooler. We’ll be there momentarily.”
Four Elite clustered around the inert Prime. David took Miranda’s hand and drew her off to the side, where they’d be out of the way while the other Elite stacked bodies and prepared to burn down the barn.
Miranda threw her arms around him, and they held on to each other for a long time, neither speaking. All the fear he’d been carrying since he’d felt the first crossbow bolt hit her finally fell from his shoulders, and he felt like he could fly.
“I love you so much,” he murmured, touching his forehead to hers. “I’ve never been so scared.”
“You, scared?” she smiled. “Too bad I was half-dead and could barely feel you—that must have been something.”
He held her chin in his hand and examined her. “You’re a mess.”
“So are you. Did you by any chance look for Marianne? I have a few questions for her.”
David nodded. “She is currently holed up in the Verde Inn—I have surveillance on her. I also had a room reserved for us; we can make it back to Austin tonight if you want to deal with such a long drive after such a crap day, but I thought you might at least want a shower first, and I rather doubted you’d want to go to your father’s house.”
Miranda frowned. “I never did see him. There’s nobody there to take care of him.”
David met her eyes. “Your father is dead,” he told her gently. “After you were taken and Stuart was killed, Minh searched the house for some clue as to where they’d taken you, and she found him in his hospital bed along with an empty vial of morphine and a syringe hanging out of his IV. Either Morningstar killed him, or Marianne did.”
“They had her daughter,” she mused. “I want to be angry with her for selling me out, but . . . what else could she do?”
Before David could reply, there came a voice: “Sire . . . there might be a problem.”
The Prime lifted his chin, indicating the Elite should go on.
“You said when we came in that there were exactly thirty humans. There are only twenty-nine bodies. And one of their vehicles is gone—they must have bolted during the chaos.”
He nodded. “Noted, Elite Forty-six. Thank you for the report.”
Miranda looked quizzical. “Aren’t you concerned that one of them got away?”
Smiling, he said, “He didn’t get away.” He took out his phone, pulled up a map, and showed her the green dot moving rapidly down the interstate. “He’s taking us on a little trip back to Morningstar HQ.”
“You put a tracker on him? Or on the car? How can you be sure he won’t find it?”
“He won’t unless he goes through a metal detector.” David took her hand again and led her outside; the Elite could handle things from here. As they walked, David took a small case about the size of a mint tin from his inner coat pocket and showed her its contents: three tiny flat devices only a few millimeters long, with an empty slot where a fourth had been. “It’s currently residing under his skin, like an ID microchip in a dog.”
“How did you get it in him? There wasn’t exactly a lull during the battle.”
He grinned. “Each of them has a strip of temporary adhesive on the back. It got into his body via my right canine tooth.”
She stopped walking. “Seriously?”
“Yes. It’ll be in there at least long enough to trace the way to wherever his base is—and hopefully there we’ll find a Shepherd. If I’m really lucky he’ll live long enough for me to get a full read on their headquarters.”
Miranda shook her head, chuckling. “You really are something else, baby. What am I going to do with you?”
He leaned in and kissed her. “Let’s get to the hotel and hose you off, and then I’ll be delighted to show you exactly what you can do with me.”
Miranda’s laughter rang out just as, behind them, the old half-demolished barn and the twenty-nine bodies inside went up in flames.
• • •
By the time Miranda climbed out of the motel room’s minuscule shower, the filth scrubbed from her hair and the blood scrubbed from under her nails, she was feeling almost cheerful. She emerged from the steamy bathroom with her hair up in a towel turban.
The only available room had one bed and an armchair whose questionable provenance made both of the Pair a little uneasy, so David was sitting cross-legged on the bed with his laptop. He looked up and smiled at her. “The barn has burned to the ground and the fire’s out,” he said. “The Elite I had keeping an eye on it are on their way back.”
“What did you do with Deven?” she asked.
“He’s gone,” David replied. “He was eager to get back to California before sunrise.”
Miranda pulled on her spare set of clothes. She’d thrown away most of what she’d had on earlier. “I really need to stop getting staked,” she muttered. “It’s costing me a fortune in shirts.”
“And to think you used to roll your eyes at my keeping a change of clothes in the car.”
“Considering how high we are on the food chain, we sure do have a messy job.” She paused. “Speaking of which . . . did Jonathan send the jet to Houston to pick Dev up?”
“No. There was a commercial flight out of Bush at twelve thirty—it was pushing it, but I’m sure the airline knows to hold takeoff until he’s there.”
“He was covered in blood,” she pointed out. “Drenched. I know he didn’t have extra clothes. There’s no way TSA would let him through security looking like that, first class or not.”
David had returned his eyes to the screen but told her absently, “He said he was going to stop in town and buy something.”
Miranda couldn’t help it; she burst out laughing and giggled uncontrollably until she had to sit down.
“What on earth is so funny?” he asked.
“This is a small town in Texas,” she replied, wheezing a little. “The only place to buy clothes here that’s open after sundown is Walmart. Just take a minute and picture Deven standing in line at Walmart.”
David laughed so hard he nearly choked. “Oh dear God.”
Still giggling, she found her phone, and when Deven answered, she said, “Tell me you’re wearing sweatpants right now.”
She could hear him rolling his eyes. “Don’t you have a sister to hunt down?”
> “Not until you tell me what you’re wearing.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake. The least offensive thing I could find was jeans and a T-shirt.”
“What’s on the T-shirt?”
“Nothing, it’s just black.”
“Liar!”
A sigh. “I can neither confirm nor deny the presence of Snoopy and/or Woodstock. Happy?”
This time she laughed until her stomach hurt; at some point, Deven muttered something in Gaelic and hung up.
Flopping back on the bed, Miranda said, “I needed that.”
David smiled at her. “It’s good to hear you laugh. Especially that little snort—I love that little snort.”
“It feels good.”
“Snoopy or no Snoopy, remind me to send that boy a fruit basket for getting you back to me.”
Miranda moved over to him, shifting up behind him to wrap her legs around his waist and rest her head on his shoulder. “I wish you had been here with me.”
“You do understand that if you uncover any additional estranged relatives, I’m going with you even if I have to hide in the trunk.”
She grinned and kissed the nape of his neck. “So we’re five hours from Austin . . . if we’re going home tonight we need to leave soon. I still want to talk to Marianne, if I can find her, but I want to go home so badly I can taste it. What do you think?”
“Room two-twenty-one,” he said. “As long as you don’t take more than an hour, with the new window tint we’ll have sufficient time.”
Twenty minutes later, Miranda stood at the door to room 221—this time with her husband’s assurance that there was nobody in the room but Marianne and Jenny . . . but flanked by two bodyguards, wearing Shadowflame, and aware of the three other Elite watching the door, just in case.
Marianne looked even worse than the last time she’d opened a door to Miranda’s knock. Again, they stared at each other, then Marianne moved back out of the way to let her in. Marianne’s eyes moved from Miranda’s face down to the sword she was wearing, but she didn’t comment.
A room identical to the one Miranda had showered in presented itself as well as it could. The curtains were shut tight, and the rumpled bed held the form of a seven-year-old girl sound asleep in Minnie Mouse pajamas, her red hair a slightly frizzy halo around her head. Jenny didn’t even stir—given the night she’d had, Miranda wasn’t surprised. The Queen herself was looking forward to passing out and staying that way for as long as possible.
Shadowbound Page 14
