Shadow’s Fall

by Dianne Sylvan

  He hadn’t expected that her clumsiness with this sort of thing would actually endear her to people, but it did; they saw that she sometimes struggled, that not every decision was easy and might not be right, but she genuinely cared, and she would happily take a bullet rather than have the consequences of her inexperience cause someone else harm.

  “How are preparations going?” Miranda asked.

  “Smoothly. The Haven is ready—they got the table set up in the Great Hall tonight, and the ballroom is prepared. I spoke with Esther and Matthew, and the staff is almost ready. The delivery from the blood bank is scheduled for Thursday evening, and the first arrivals will be late that night.”

  “How many confirmations?”

  “Twenty-five,” David said, smiling. “All but Demetriou and Dzhamgerchinov, and there’s still a chance that Demetriou will change his mind … not that I particularly want him to.”

  Miranda took a deep breath. “I still can’t believe we’re letting Hart set foot in our Haven again.”

  “I know, beloved, but those are the rules. Everyone is invited to a full Council. I put in my bid to have this one in Austin ten years ago, and by the time things fell out with Hart it was too late to back out. But with the entire Council there he’ll be on his best behavior. He won’t risk losing support by making a dick of himself.”

  The Queen raised an eyebrow. “Or the Council meeting is the opportunity he’s been waiting for to get revenge on us in some public way that forces us to react.”

  “I’m trying to be optimistic, here.”

  “What about Cora? How can we force her to sit in the same room with that bastard?”

  He smiled. Miranda was very protective of Cora; indeed, the Queen of Eastern Europe seemed to bring that out in people. “No one is forcing Cora to do anything. Queens aren’t required to attend the official sessions.”

  “I understand that, but I can’t help but worry about her.”

  He leaned over and kissed her temple. “You can’t fix everything.”

  “At least he’s not bringing his … girls … this time.”

  “Not according to the Shadow operative in his Court, at least. For all that he’s been nursing his grudge for three years, he’s being very cautious not to tip his hand.”

  “Doesn’t that concern you just a little?”

  “A lot,” he admitted. “I prefer Hart when he’s being violent and out of control; it’s easier to deal with than his fake charm.”

  “Sire,” Faith spoke up from the front seat, “First-shift preliminary patrol reports are in. Everyone’s reporting situation normal.”

  “Thank you.” David took out his phone and did a quick systems check; situation normal there, too. With the exception of the Austin Live Music Festival and the Council meeting, the entire territory was almost eerily quiet this month.

  He wanted to believe it was because of the territory-wide sensor network and new Elite protocols he’d put in place, but it felt far more like some sort of demented version of Christmas Eve, and he was waiting with growing dread to see what kind of havoc Hart would leave under the tree.

  When he was finished, he looked over to see that Miranda had fallen asleep with her head leaning against the car window. He gingerly tilted her the other way so that she would be more comfortable on his shoulder, and with a sigh, she put an arm around him and settled in for the rest of the ride home.

  Faith looked back over the seat and said quietly, “She must be exhausted. She had that appearance at the ALMF opening concert, then we had that disturbance over at the university campus—even though it turned out to be nothing—then our session with the APD.”

  David nodded. “She’s been burning the candle at both ends lately … but try telling her to cut back and rest.”

  Faith made a noise of agreement. “Tell me about it.”

  “Sitting right here,” Miranda muttered, eyes opening a slit.

  David chuckled and kissed the top of her head. “Faith has a point, you know. You have been pushing yourself way too hard. You’re immortal, remember? You have plenty of time to have grand adventures.”

  The Queen sighed, shook her head. “I’ll take a break after the festival’s over and all the Magnificent Bastards have gone home.”

  The Council would arrive starting Thursday night, and the opening meeting would be held Friday night, followed by a formal ball. The main meeting was Saturday night, and everyone would depart predawn Tuesday at the latest; Miranda was headlining on the festival’s main stage Saturday night and would get home just before the Council got down to business, provided there weren’t any delays.

  As much of a clusterfuck as the timing was, it had been a calculated risk on his part; holding the Council during a festival meant that there would be thousands of additional humans in Austin, and therefore feeding all the Pairs, their servants, and their bodyguards would be much easier.

  “I vote you take a vacation,” Faith told them. “Make a state visit of it if you have to, but go somewhere for a few days and rest. New Orleans, maybe.”

  David felt Miranda perk up a little at the suggestion. “Could we?”

  He frowned, reluctant at first to leave Austin so soon after the Council, but if they waited until midweek to be sure things were calm …  “I don’t see why not. I could meet with Laveau while I’m there and visit a few of our far-flung Court members.”

  “We can get a place in the Quarter,” Miranda said, sounding more energetic than she had all night, “and I could stuff myself sick with beignets.”

  There was no way he could deny her anything that put such a spark in her eyes. “Sold,” he said. “I’ll call our travel agent and see what she can pull together.”

  “Thank you, baby,” Miranda murmured, reaching up to nip his earlobe and then settling back down against his shoulder to return to her nap. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

  Hours later and miles away, something jolted Deven out of sleep. His hand immediately snaked under the pillow for the knife he kept there, but otherwise he held himself completely still, senses on red alert.

  Evaluation: They were alone in the room, and the disturbance had come from Jonathan. Deven relaxed his grip on the knife’s hilt and turned toward his Consort, who had been curled up at his back.

  Jonathan lay staring at the ceiling, eyes wide, forehead glistening with sweat. The energy around him was practically crackling.

  Damn.

  “Easy,” Deven said softly, laying a hand against Jonathan’s face to try to bring him back. “You’re here in our Haven, in our room, with me, and you’re safe.”

  For a long moment Jonathan was frozen, his vision fixed on something Deven was grateful he couldn’t see, but as Deven continued to murmur to him, the sound of the Prime’s voice reached him, and Jonathan slowly returned to his body, his paralysis turning into a nasty case of tremors as the fever that held him broke as suddenly as it had come and he went from blazing to freezing.

  Deven acted on years of experience with this exact scenario. He pulled the blankets up around his Consort, pressing their bodies together and raising his own energy deliberately to transfer heat to Jonathan’s skin.

  “It isn’t now,” Deven told him. “Wherever you were, it isn’t now. Now everything’s all right.”

  There were few things that made Jonathan seem vulnerable, and this was the only one that Deven could do nothing about but offer comfort and safety. His healing power was useless here, and there was no enemy to impale or behead. All he could do was be there.

  It took nearly twenty minutes for Jonathan to speak. This had been a bad one.

  “I’m okay,” he finally rasped.

  “Like hell you are. Are you warm enough?”

  A nod. “Coke, please.”

  Deven withdrew reluctantly—he hated to risk Jonathan getting a chill—but if he didn’t get some caffeine quickly, he’d get a migraine that might last the whole next day. Deven fetched a soda from the fridge and brought it back to the b
ed, where to his relief Jonathan was sitting up and looking far more alert.

  The Consort grunted his thanks and drank the entire can in one go.

  “Aren’t you going to smash it on your forehead?” Deven asked. That, at least, earned a weary grin.

  They settled back down, this time with Jonathan’s head on Deven’s shoulder, and were silent for a while; sometimes Jonathan didn’t want to talk about whatever he had seen, and sometimes he did, but if pressed, he would shut down and refuse to say anything. Deven waited, running his fingers absently through Jonathan’s blond hair, soothing them both.

  This time, however, was different. Though Jonathan remained silent for a long time, Deven could feel him struggling, could feel his fear. Whatever he had seen had been enough to terrify him … and that almost never happened.

  Finally Deven couldn’t stand it anymore. “What did you see?”

  Jonathan shook his head and turned his face into Deven’s neck. “I can’t,” he whispered. “I just … I can’t, baby. I’m sorry.”

  “Am I going to die tomorrow or anything like that? Because if I am, I need to go cancel my massage.”

  Jonathan looked at him, his usually bright hazel eyes full of anguish. “Please … don’t even joke about that.”

  Their eyes held. “All right,” Deven said with a nod. “Do we need to call off our trip?”

  “No. We have to go. It’s not … it’s nothing immediate, at least not for us. We’re the least of our worries right now.”

  Deven sighed, lying back; now it was his turn to stare at the ceiling. “Let me guess.”

  “Pack extra eyeliner,” Jonathan said. “We might be in Austin for a while.”

  Two

  “Damn it, would you hold still?”

  Faith managed—barely—not to roll her eyes at her boss. “Sorry, Sire.”

  The electrical hum in the room grew fractionally louder. It was starting to make Faith’s ears ring. “Any closer?” she asked.

  The Prime’s eyes were on the bank of monitors in front of him, their light glaring off his glasses.

  “You’re staring again,” he said mildly without looking up.

  “Sorry.” She held back her reaction, which was to flush at being caught, but there was no undertone to his words, just amusement. As far as he knew, she was staring at the glasses, and that was true … though not for the reasons he thought.

  Vampire senses were designed for hunting in the dark, their pupils dilating to take in far more light than a human’s could sense; that meant that bright lights hurt them, and they had found as technology continued to take over their lives that working in front of monitors for hours could cause a vampire as much eyestrain as a human. They recovered from it much more quickly, of course, and there was no long-term damage, but David had begun to have severe headaches after the network was extended throughout the South, and he spent so much time calibrating it that Miranda had suggested, half jokingly, that he get glasses.

  So he did. They weren’t prescription, but antiglare, and had a magnifying strip along the bottom for when he was doing delicate work with his lasers and soldering irons. They looked like everyday human eyeglasses … and Faith had finally allowed herself to admit that they made him unspeakably attractive.

  She took a long, slow breath. Oh, for fuck’s sake, Faith.

  “I know they look weird,” David was saying, “but Novotny’s lenses have really done wonders for me. I’m having him make pairs for the other network monitor Elite, too, so they don’t lose productivity to migraines.”

  He looked up at her, and again she was struck by how the glasses completed his face, finally made him look like the genius he was. Put together with his seemingly endless collection of geeky T-shirts—tonight’s bore an engineering schematic of the TARDIS from Doctor Who—it was a good thing he only wore them in his workroom. Faith wasn’t the only person in the Haven who had noticed, and she was fully aware that Miranda had pinned him to the lab table more than once with a “Talk nerdy to me, baby.”

  There was a series of clicks, and David said, “I think that’s got it. Now, on my mark, I want you to hold your arms out to your sides and turn very slowly in a counterclockwise circle.”

  “What is this accomplishing, again?”

  He sighed. He hated repeating himself. It amused her to make him do it. “I’m refining the camera technology that projected Miranda’s image into that fake mirror for her Rolling Stone interview. I need to be able to use it for other applications.”

  “But we show up on camera—sort of,” Faith pointed out.

  David shook his head and clarified, “We show up in digital formats that don’t use traditional mirrors. But the picture quality is almost always poor. People have recorded her on cell phone cameras at concerts, but if they try to blow the frame up larger or improve the resolution, it gets pixilated. The projector I used to fake out the Rolling Stone guy was … well, let’s just say it’s a good thing he didn’t look at the mirror more than once or twice. If I can refine the signal a little further, we’ll be able to show her on the big projection screens at larger concert venues, and I can help refine still-shot photography of vampires so she can do more photo shoots.”

  “Why?” Faith asked. “I mean, why don’t we show up on film? Do we reflect funny?”

  David smiled and gave her the rarest of answers, for him: “I honestly don’t know.”

  “You don’t?”

  “No. Novotny and I have conducted all sorts of experiments, changing different variables, and we can’t nail down exactly what it is that keeps us from reflecting in glass mirrors, water, or windows—but digital photography produces a slightly blurry image for most of us. I have no idea why. My concern right now is taking what we do know and making it work better.”

  “I heard it was because we don’t have souls,” she said softly, eyes still on the monitor where he worked.

  A shrug. “Perhaps. I don’t do mysticism.”

  Faith turned her head toward the screen where, presumably, her own image would show up eventually. “I haven’t seen my own face in a century,” Faith mused. “I barely remember what I look like, Sire.”

  He looked up at her. “Don’t worry, Second, you’re beautiful.”

  Now she did blush. Damn it.

  “Have you seen yourself?” she asked, stumbling only a little over the words. “On camera, I mean?”

  He gave her a rueful smile. “I can’t,” he said. “I’ve tried this thing on several people, and so far Miranda is the only one who’s worked well. She’s also the youngest. That’s why I wanted to try you, to see if it’s the age that matters; you fall right between the two of us.”

  “How odd.”

  “It has a sort of poetry to it,” he replied, turning a knob and entering a string of numbers. “The further we get from our humanity, the less of it you can see in images. Scientifically, however, I’m flummoxed. Now, hold still!”

  Faith obeyed, closing her eyes for a moment and trying to be patient. She had a lot to do; the Haven was in chaos with the first Pairs arriving in a few hours, and though the Haven’s staff and supplies were someone else’s department, security was very much Faith’s. She knew David was keeping himself occupied until the circus began so he wouldn’t have time to fret, but that was the luxury of being in charge.

  “Almost … got it … there!”

  Faith’s eyes flicked open, and she looked at the screen.

  Her breath caught hard in her chest, and she covered her mouth with her hand for a few seconds while she took in what she was seeing.

  She was staring at her own face.

  It wasn’t crystal clear, and the edges were definitely pixilated, but she recognized herself as the girl who had stumbled bleeding through the streets of Gion, so very long ago … but her face had changed. It was pale, yes, but also harder, colder. The wide innocence of her eyes was gone … her eyes were old.

  “That’s me,” she said softly.

  She heard David r
ise from his chair and come over to join her; a blur moved across the screen to her side, but it barely even registered as a visual anomaly. When he stood still beside her, however, he took on a more concrete shape, its edges a moonlit silver. He was, essentially, a living shadow.

  “As I said,” David told her with a smile. “Beautiful.”

  Faith stared at herself for a long time, trying to make sense of her face, and finally the picture began to lose its coherency. David turned the projector off to run analysis on the results. It was hard for Faith to look away from the screen even after the image was gone.

  “We’re in the early stages with all of this—up until the last couple of years I didn’t have the technology to really study the phenomenon. Eventually I hope to be able to offer everyone living here a sort-of-mirror for their quarters,” the Prime was saying. “Novotny’s holographic projection system would offer a much clearer picture, if I can compensate for the age factor, but that will take more experiments and probably a …”

  His voice turned into a murmur that meant she no longer had his attention and he had become absorbed in his work once more. She might as well talk to the empty screen.

  “I’m heading out, then,” Faith said. “Lots to do.”

  No reply.

  Sighing, shaking her head, Faith left him to his toys.

  After meeting with the shift team leaders briefly to go over the night’s arrival schedule, Faith headed across the Haven to check in with Miranda, who had barely left the music room in the last week except when she had to go into the city. The Queen was scrambling to get ready for her big show on Saturday night; she and three other bands would take the main festival stage that evening, with her performance last since she was the biggest name.

  The Austin Live Music Festival drew about fifteen thousand registered attendees every year, many of whom jockeyed for wristbands to the four-day event; there were close to a thousand performers on the schedule at outside stages, clubs and bars, and traditional music venues all over the city. The main stage would be surrounded by almost the entire congregation Saturday night. It was easily the biggest show she’d ever done; her album tour had focused on smaller, intimate venues and hadn’t strayed far from the South.