“Seconded.”
She hopped over the stair rail that surrounded the west side of the building, dropping down to the concrete and landing right in front of the panel. It was awfully unsophisticated-looking. “A Staedtler T-950? What is this, 1986?” She paused, blinked. “God, how do I even know that?”
“For better or worse,” came the wry answer over her comm. “Code: 666539.”
“666, like Satan?”
“I don’t know. But it does spell ‘monkey.’”
“I’m just going to assume that was the previous owner’s idea.” Miranda hit the code carefully, nodding in satisfaction when she heard the lock chunk open and the light went green. “I’m going in—”
Suddenly she heard a gasp, and a groan of pain, followed by a disturbingly loud thump. “David? You okay?”
There were several noises like someone fumbling with a phone, and to her surprise Stella said breathlessly, “He passed out, Miranda—he sounded like someone stabbed him, and then just toppled over. He’s breathing okay but he looks like he’s having a nightmare. Something’s really wrong.”
She could feel the pull of the bond, drawing energy from her to compensate for what must be a significant drain on him. She fought against a wave of dizziness, but once it passed there was no sense of emergency, just urgency. “Call Mo,” she said. “I’ve got to go in—I can’t wait or they’re going to know I’m here. I’ll check back once I’m out.”
She didn’t wait for a reply, but grabbed the push bar on the door and edged it open.
At first there was nothing to see but a staircase that went down into the darkness without a single light fixture. It was the only way forward, and she didn’t like it—too much possibility of being boxed in. “Elite team 1,” she said, “converge on my location and defend the door and stairwell behind me. Maintain distance until called. I don’t want to spook them.”
“As you will it, my Lady. Team 1 on the move.”
She slipped inside and let the door close behind her; the lock clanked shut, so loud in the metal-walled room it nearly made her jump.
Advantage of being a vampire: her feet were soundless on the stairs. She stayed against the wall, hand on Shadowflame’s hilt, not wanting to draw in such close quarters unless she had to—hand to hand would work just fine in here.
She really should have expected booby traps.
She’d barely placed her toe on the second fight of steps when it disappeared out from under her. Two treads folded back, leaving a huge gap, and at the bottom of it, God only knew. Miranda tried to jerk her foot back, but she’d lost her balance, and the dumbfounded surprise of being caught by such low-tech Indiana Jones bullshit cost her her hold on the rail. She braced herself for whatever was down there, praying it wasn’t giant wooden stakes waiting to pierce her entire body and leave her hanging, blood draining down their shafts to the floor—
Her whole body jerked upward as a hand closed around her wrist and lifted her up out of the hole.
Her feet found the next step, and she stared up at her rescuer.
Their eyes met, but neither spoke; there would be time for surprise later. Deven moved past her and jumped, landing gracefully at the bottom of the stairs and turning back to her with a nod.
She followed, trying not to stare—she’d hoped her harsh words would jolt something loose in his brain, but she hadn’t been entirely ready to see him look like himself again; he hadn’t reclaimed his Goth wardrobe so quickly, of course, or stopped mid-crisis to dye his hair, but he was wearing the black-ops clothes his agents wore, and was armed to the teeth, though most people would see one sword and perhaps a knife. She could count probably about half his complement of weapons. The sight of Ghostlight nearly brought her to tears of relief.
She dragged her focus back to the matter at hand.
There was another security panel waiting at the interior door. This one looked way more modern…and with David passed out, she had no idea how to—
Deven took her arm and pulled her away, then spun and kicked the panel hard. Sparks flew, and it fell off the wall. Beyond the door, alarms started blaring all over the place.
Well that was one way to go about it.
So much for stealth.
A cadre of humans met them in the hallway. Miranda seized the closest man, who had a crossbow, and turned him, hitting the trigger and firing the bolt into another soldier.
Nearby, she heard the most wonderful sound possible: Ghostlight, drawn.
After two years without picking up a sword she kind of expected Deven to be rusty, but seven centuries way more than balanced such a brief span, and he didn’t miss a step. As another group of men surrounded them, they fell into the fight together, just like that night in Rio Verde; she hadn’t wanted to admit it but fighting with both him and David had been so enjoyable it was practically a turn-on.
It wasn’t that hard to disarm the archers; their weapons were impractical in this much space, and their bulk got in the way. The soldiers were skilled both with weapons and without, and a few were very good; but Queen and Prime pushed them back, and back, into a junction of two hallways where there was more room, and once she had Shadowflame in her hand, the humans were done for.
It had been a while since she’d been in an actual fight, too. She wasn’t a centuries-old assassin; still, she felt herself slipping into that trance space again, and her energy and Deven’s connected with an ease that still surprised her. Without even speaking they were able to team up, the way she and David did—one of the men, a burly guy easily 6’8”, apparently had it in his head to pummel them into submission with only his fists, and in response, Dev grabbed Miranda’s arm and swung her around, giving her momentum and leverage to wrap her ankles around the man’s neck and slam him to the floor. She hit the ground in time to see Ghostlight run through the human’s throat.
They were down to three opponents when she noticed the smoke. It rolled into the hallway from another corridor, and with it came a totally different alarm and flashing lights up near the ceiling.
She put down two more humans roughly within seconds of Deven breaking the last one’s neck, and they halted at the same time. With a shared glance, they took off toward the smoke.
The screaming started when they were halfway down the hall—very clearly human screaming. She could hear water pouring down like Niagara Falls, and orders being barked, but the sounds made no more sense the closer she got. The building itself was not on fire, and the smoke had stopped billowing but still filled the air with a choking haze.
Miranda stopped, coughing. What the hell was that smell? It was acrid and disturbingly familiar, and she had a flash of a 4th of July barbecue—
Burning flesh. It was burning flesh.
She gestured for Deven to go on, and was only a step behind, trying to clear her watering eyes. What was going on here? Some kind of accident? How close had it been to wherever they were keeping Nico?
As they rounded the corner, she found out, and skidded to a halt, unable to process what she was looking at.
She looked over at Deven. He was staring and had gone pale, eyes losing most of their color.
There were black-clad bodies everywhere in groups of four and five, their weapons scattered on the floor. Some of them were charred, some drenched in blood, all of them dead. She saw strange lumps of oozing, bloody meat…no, organs. Hearts. Something had ripped their hearts out.
“Oh, Jesus,” she heard Deven say softly, the first words he’d uttered to her tonight. He was so openly astonished that she could actually hear his accent.
A figure emerged from a side room. It was not human. In fact, inhuman was the only word she could come up with for the way it moved, with a sinister stalking grace, one hand curving around the edge of the door, blood staining the fingers as if they’d been dipped in it.
Her mind flat-out refused to recognize him at first. She couldn’t reconcile the gentle creature she knew with this…<
br />
“Nico,” she said softly, “What did they do to you?”
He didn’t acknowledge the name, or seem to recognize her, but he looked at her, replying only with an animal hiss.
Her heart went cold in her chest.
His eyes were black.
Deven’s reaction was even more frightening; he stumbled back a step, groping for something to hold onto, and she grabbed his shoulder…just in time to see his eyes go black as well.
He blinked, and they had already returned to normal, though they were anguished as he returned his attention to Nico, taking a careful step forward.
“Nico,” he said, “Do you know who we are?”
No answer.
Deven tried hesitantly, “Do you know who you are?”
After a moment came an answer, a harsh whisper with none of the lilt and moonlight she knew. “Yes…I believe I do.”
“His hair,” she said.
It had been shorn off, probably by a knife, almost at the scalp. She looked closer: everywhere his skin was exposed, there were scars, most already healed to an angry pink that she watched begin to fade. Some of them looked like burns, some like almost surgical cuts, perfectly straight. Some looked like the skin had been ripped.
David’s unconsciousness suddenly made sense. If Nico had been torn apart as it looked like he had, the only way to heal all at once like this would be to flood his body with an enormous amount of power. Nico was hooked up directly to that power from two directions, and though he couldn’t pull much from Deven, he could take whatever he wanted from David. If it kept up she’d start feeling the drain in less than an hour, and be unconscious shortly thereafter.
Deven took in the scene in an instant and said, “Telekinesis…pyrokinesis…what else?”
“Obviously not empathy,” she replied.
Nico made a sound that might have been a quiet laugh if it hadn’t been so cold and empty. “Oh yes,” he said. “I felt it, all of it…terror, pain…their lives ending…I made sure they knew what it felt like even as they burned. Every second, every wound…their final minutes made up of nothing but agony and fear. They deserved it.”
Miranda swallowed. She didn’t know what to do. They had all killed, at one time or another, and some regretted it forever…but this was Nico. He couldn’t even feed on a live human without getting sick because the darkness scared him so badly. To have gone from there to here in a day…how were they supposed to pull him back?
“Come home with us,” she said. “We’ll take care of you. Whatever they did, we can help.”
“Can you?” Nico gave her a look that was full of rage, hate. It wasn’t at her, exactly, more…at everything. “How exactly can you help me?” His gaze sharpened on Deven, and that time, the loathing was very, very focused. “Neuter me with your pathetic moping? Make me hate myself as much as you do?”
“We’ll think of something,” she said.
“You cannot help me,” he snapped. “There is nothing left to help.”
Deven caught her eye, and she got a very strong sense of Keep his attention.
“I know you don’t mean that,” Miranda told the Elf. “You’re in pain, and you’ve been through…I can’t even imagine. But you know we care about you. We just want you to come home, and be safe.”
Another short laugh. It was a terrible sound, and she realized why: his voice was hoarse, like it had been dragged over broken glass. How long must he have been screaming that it still hadn’t healed?
“Safe? There is no safe, not in this world. I threw away safety, threw away everything, and now look at me.” Something shook in Nico’s eyes — something she might be able to take hold of, if she was careful. He lifted both hands so she could see the blood that had dried on both of them. “Doing it with my mind wasn’t good enough,” he said, almost in a non sequitur. “I wanted to feel their ribs break in my hands. But they kept falling with their eyes open, staring at me…the only way to fix it was to burn them. Have you ever crushed a human heart with your bare hands? They make more noise than you would think.”
“Nico…” She took another step forward and held out a hand. “It’s going to be okay. It’s terrible—I won’t pretend it isn’t. Just…take my hand. You can come home and rest, and we’ll figure all of this out tomorrow.”
Anger flashed in his eyes, and she braced herself, but before he or Miranda knew what had happened, he drew a ragged breath and fell to the ground.
She ran to his side, kneeling. There was a dart sticking out of his throat. It wasn’t another one of the little Morningstar specials; it was a more traditional looking syringe dart, about four inches long.
The Queen looked up at Deven. “Did you—”
“Tranquilizer,” he said, looking as shaken as she felt. “Enough to put down an elephant. It’ll only last ninety minutes. We need to get him out of here before more of them come.”
“I don’t think they will,” she said, looking around. “I get the feeling like the humans left here were meant as cannon fodder while the others vanished. Hopefully we can get more information…later.” She was about to call the Elite team in, but something occurred to her: “How did you get here so quickly?”
“I Misted. Chris had the coordinates.”
She’d forgotten most Signets had way more Misting range than she did. David could reach the city from the Haven when he had to, though it took a lot out of him.
She didn’t say any of the hundred things she wanted to; she didn’t want to scare Deven off again. “Elite teams 1 and 2, commence building entry—I want this entire place swept for evidence and then the interior torched. Harlan, I need you here immediately.”
Miranda barely heard the chorus of affirmatives; she was too busy trying to assess Nico’s injuries, and fighting back both sickness and sobs as she did. “I don’t understand why they did this,” she said, tears in her voice that she’d kept at bay talking to her people. “Was it just for fun?”
Deven knelt next to her. She felt him raising healing energy—not along the bond, but via his gift—and pouring it gently into the Elf. The rest of the scars began to disappear rapidly. “I don’t know,” he said. “Look at his ear—they cut it off and reattached it. Most of this looks surgical.”
His hand hovered just over Nico’s face for a moment, so close to touching him, but he withdrew, clenching his lowered hand into a fist.
Miranda let out a breath and forced herself not to remark on it. “They went to a lot of trouble for this. It just doesn’t make sense.”
Near-silent footsteps heralded the arrival of the Elite teams, who all drew up short when they arrived at the scene. The carnage took them all aback, as did both the sight of Nico in such horrible shape and Deven armed.
Miranda rose. “27, 44—get him to the car. The rest of you know what sort of thing the Prime will want to see.”
Because they worked for whom they worked for, all the Elite had evidence bags and a few other tools of that sort. Part of their training included learning the numbering system David used for specimens that would go to Hunter Development or to him. She’d thought it was silly when he first instituted the protocol, but it didn’t take long to see she was wrong.
She stood back as the two warriors she’d indicated gingerly lifted Nico up off the floor and carried him out of the building. She and Deven both followed, neither speaking.
Harlan was waiting in the parking lot. They had to do a bit of maneuvering to get Nico into the car, as he was taller than the seat was long. They ended up with the Elf’s head in Deven’s lap and his feet in Miranda’s, more or less.
She could see a tumult of emotion moving through Deven’s eyes, but again, she held her tongue. It would be too easy to say the wrong thing and make him shrink back into his self-imposed exile. Best just to let him brood until he made a move.
“Miranda.”
A knot in her chest untied itself. “David —are you okay?”
“No. Tel
l me.”
“I don’t even know how,” she said. “He’s alive, but…it’s bad. I can’t even—”
Suddenly Nico’s entire body twitched, and his eyes flew open, black as hell. He tried to push himself up and at Miranda, teeth already extended, a combination of anger and mindless panic on his face. She threw herself back against the door, crying out, as he fought to get away from them like a cornered wild animal.
Deven’s hands closed around Nico’s throat and hauled him back. He twisted so that he had a knee on Nico’s chest, pinning him solidly to the seat while he produced another tranquilizer dart and jammed it hard into Nico’s neck.
The Elf struggled for a few more seconds, then his muscles went slack.
She and Deven were left staring at each other and panting.
Miranda swallowed hard and said softly into her wrist, “Yeah…it’s bad.”
*****
By the time they had Nico somewhere secure, which turned out to be the reinforced interrogation room they’d built after the explosion during the Council summit, he’d needed another two darts to stay unconscious, and each time fought like a rabid dragon to get free of them.
The room had a window for observation, though it would just look like a wall on the inside. The thought of making him sleep on the floor didn’t sit well with anyone, so the Elite brought in a cot to deposit him on before making as quick a retreat as possible. The Elite were shaken by the situation too; Nico was unfailingly kind to everyone from servant to Signet, and while few really knew him, nearly everyone liked him.
David, who was leaning against Miranda while he regained his strength, watched Kai with unaccustomed sympathy. The Bard stood at the window with his hand against the glass, his eyes shining and periodically brimming with tears he didn’t shed. He looked very young, watching his twin, and said only, “I knew they were doing this. I didn’t feel it, exactly, but…I knew.”
Miranda reached over and squeezed his shoulder but he didn’t seem to notice. They were all a little numb by now.
David stared at Nico for a long time, his heart utterly lost at sea. All he could think was I’m sorry…I’m sorry. I’m sorry. The words were beyond inadequate. Nico, the most loving person he’d ever met, so past broken there might not be any repairing him…those elegant hands David had felt on his skin, now dyed red…that soft mouth whose kisses he’d fallen into so many times, bloody like the rest of him, some kind of indefinable innocence destroyed. In his sleep Nico couldn’t lay still, and clawed at the blanket draped over him.
Shadowstorm (The Shadow World Book 6) Page 20
