Jonathan gave him a smile, but it was a bit forced, and Deven’s eyebrows quirked; he laid his hand on Jonathan’s knee and said soothingly, “You don’t know for sure something will go wrong.”
Jonathan almost laughed. “Yes, I do.”
“All right, you do, but you don’t know what or how bad it will be or even when it will go down, just that Lydia showing up starts something. You could say the same for the Council meeting or just waking up in the evening. Everything begins something, and everything ends something. We can’t be afraid of every possibility.”
Jonathan met his eyes. “Have I ever been wrong?”
A sigh. “No. But your visions tend to be open to interpretation—remember how you were certain David was going to get Miranda killed?”
“He did.”
“Yes, but she woke up and became Queen. I’m sure it was hell for her while it was happening, but wouldn’t you agree it was a good thing, in the long run?”
“So you’re saying I’m being silly.”
“No. You said we need to be here, and I believe you. I’m just saying that a lot of things could happen, and they’re not all disastrous.”
“I should have told Miranda,” Jonathan muttered, probably for the tenth time. “What if I could have stopped anything from happening?”
“Stop doing this to yourself,” Deven said, cupping Jonathan’s chin in one hand and holding his eyes. “You don’t have power over the future … just a glimpse of it here and there, and then through eyes that can’t know everything. You’ve never freaked out over your visions this much before.”
Jonathan sighed. The car rolled to a stop, and a moment later the door opened; they disembarked in front of the imposing edifice of one of Austin’s most exclusive hotels. “I’ve never had a friend like Miranda before,” he said to Deven as hotel staff leapt to action to collect their luggage and take it inside. “I know it sounds stupid, but … this one time, I’d like to avert fate. I want her to be happy, Dev.”
Deven’s smile was a little indulgent and a lot affectionate. “I know. And we’ll do everything we can. I promise.”
They arrived at the check-in desk, where the concierge was already waiting for them. Deven flashed his Signet, and the human nodded and bowed.
“My Lord Prime,” he said. “My name is Javier, and it will be my pleasure to attend to your every need during your stay here at the Ambassador. I’ve had the suite you requested prepared to all your specifications.”
“Good,” Deven said with a nod, beckoning Javier to walk with them to the elevator. “We have a dedicated system?”
“Yes, sir. The suite has its own private server, and you’ll have all the bandwidth you can stand.”
“And the fridge?”
“Stocked with a fresh supply of AB positive, as requested.”
“Thank you.”
The suite was as big as most apartments and had an entire room set aside for computer equipment. What appealed to Jonathan most was the enormous bed, calling out with the siren song of seven-hundred-thread-count sheets, but Deven made a beeline for the office while the bellhops brought in their things. Jonathan tipped them all heavily, then asked Javier, “Can I get a bottle of Woodford Reserve sent up?”
“Already done, my Lord,” Javier replied, inclining his head toward the bar. “The Prime sent a list.”
Jonathan raised his eyebrows, impressed. “Very good, then, thank you Javier.” He handed the concierge a hundred-dollar bill; Javier smiled, bowed, and departed, reminding them they needed only dial 0 to reach him directly.
As soon as he’d helped himself to the whiskey, Jonathan joined Deven in the office, where the Prime already had his laptop plugged into a bank of monitors.
“What exactly are you doing?” he asked.
Deven smiled. “Linking up to the Red Shadow network—I’m checking to see which agents are between assignments so I can pull a few here. I’ve got one researching Jeremy Hayes, but I’d like another two or three in town and at least one finding out what the hell Lydia wants … 5.1 Carmine is in Dallas, that should work … her mission won’t go critical for another week.”
Jonathan scrutinized the interface on the main screen. “Where did you learn how to write computer programs?”
Deven snorted quietly. “Darling, I have neither the patience nor the desire to learn any such thing. I had our favorite fanged geek design it for me, which is why it looks familiar—it’s based on the Haven system. From here I can keep an eye on every active agent, research past assignments, track the money, and recall anyone from the field.”
“Handy boy, our David … but you know he probably left a door open in there somewhere so he can spy on your spying.”
“Oh, I know he did. But he’s assuming I use accurate information in the records; it’s all encoded. Looking at this he’d think I have an agent in the Pentagon, for example, and another clerking for the CIA, but in actuality I have one in the White House and one in the FBI. I can’t have him knowing everything I’m up to. There are a couple of agents who aren’t in the network at all—special ops, you might say.”
Jonathan shook his head. “It’s refreshing to see two friends trust each other so completely.”
“Trust is for the fucked-over, darling.”
The Consort laughed. “You are something else, my love. You really are.”
Deven tilted his head back for a kiss, and Jonathan obliged, then said, “I’m going to lie down for a while—I’m knackered.”
“Go on,” Deven replied, touching his face. “And don’t worry … even if something horrible does happen, we’ll be here for them. You can only see parts of what’s to come—you don’t ever see the ending.”
“That’s because nothing ever ends,” Jonathan said tiredly.
“Precisely—and that’s why there’s always hope.”
Jonathan, taken aback, said, “Did you just say something optimistic? You?”
Deven actually looked a tad sheepish. “Well … sixty years you’ve been at my side … I guess eventually you were bound to rub off on me. Miracle of miracles: Even I can change. A little.”
Jonathan felt something in his chest unclench just a tiny bit. “Then perhaps there is hope … for all of us.”
PART TWO
Ashes to Ashes
Ten
Telekinesis was not for wimps.
Learning to control the power she’d somehow gotten from David was every bit as grueling as her first lessons in shielding—which had been, once upon a time, conducted in this very room.
It was easy enough to throw things if she was angry and didn’t care what happened to them; she did it from time to time when in pursuit of a lawbreaker in the city. That burst of emotion gave her energy but no finesse, and if she wanted to have any kind of control, she had to practice. Her ability had been tenuous when it first showed up, and it had taken her months to strengthen it. Even three years in she hadn’t progressed as much as she’d have liked, but she had been a little busy with other things. She wanted to be able to do more than fling trash cans and asshole Primes.
She figured out pretty quickly that she had to change the way she shielded. Sophie had told her that different gifts required different kinds of protection, and though Miranda had gone along with it at the time, she hadn’t really understood the difference until now. To use her empathy on an audience, she thinned the outermost layer of her shielding so that she could sense things outside herself, and it had to be able to go both ways; she had to draw in people’s emotions and then reach out to affect them. To move things with her mind she didn’t let anything in, just reached out.
It was a subtle difference, but trying to move something the way she worked an audience left her feeling wide open and vulnerable. Once she realized that she needed to change her approach, it was much less overwhelming.
David had taught her the fundamentals, but he wasn’t an empath. When it came to the fine-tuning, she was on her own, using what he’d shown her and what
she had learned from Sophie about using psychic gifts as a weapon.
Every night, if she could, she at least sat down and did a few exercises, working with her shielding, empathy, and telekinesis one by one. Most of the time she just did simple things wherever she happened to have settled for the evening, which usually meant the music room, but Monday night she wanted to do something a little more challenging to try to occupy herself.
Until the meeting with Lydia was over she was going to be a nervous wreck; something about it was giving her an uneasy feeling, and while she hadn’t gotten very far in dealing with her half-woken precog ability, it was strong enough to drive her insane, and she knew the only thing she could do was distract herself.
If she was being honest, she would admit she had been trying to ignore the precog completely in the faint and childish hope it would just go away.
Miranda sighed, speaking to Shadowflame as she removed the sword and laid it on the floor in the training room. “So I’m a vampire, a musician, an empath; I swordfight; I can move stuff with my mind and sometimes sort of halfway see the future. What’s next? Hey, maybe I’m a firestarter, too. That would be cool.”
The unfortunate thing about swords was that they tended to be as good at conversation as paintings of dead people, as in, not at all.
She flopped down in the armchair a few feet away from where she’d placed the sword, her guitar, and her cell phone. She had the best luck starting with something small, then gradually moving to larger objects. So far she hadn’t tried anything alive, at least not on purpose; throwing Hart had been simple brute force, and David had said living things were the hardest and that when he’d started, he had more or less sprained his brain doing too much too fast.
Miranda sat cross-legged in the chair and concentrated, first grounding, then lowering and raising her shields a couple of times just to stay limber. As always, the act brought a smile to her face. Four years ago this had been the hardest thing in the world to do, and now it took her five seconds tops to go through the entire routine.
In a hundred years, how easy would it be?
The thought that she might live a hundred years or two hundred or more still didn’t really make sense to her. She knew she was immortal; she could feel it, feel the stillness in her body when she was walking down the street surrounded by humans, animals, and plants that were all aging. She was a constant. Unchanging. Sometimes she would stop where she was and watch them all going on about their lives—lives that would be measured out in decades, bodies that were already dying, each day moving immeasurably closer to the inevitable.
Most of the time she didn’t think about it, but it was still strange to her and probably would be for a while, according to the others. But the thought of still being on the planet to see what happened to the world in a century—or, like Deven, most of a millennium—was still just a bit on the unbelievable side.
Okay, girl, not now. Get down to business. Miranda pushed the thoughts away and brought her attention back to the room, specifically to the cell phone.
Telekinesis wasn’t just about pushing things over. That was certainly useful, but the juicy part came from learning to wrap her will around an object and, while holding on to it, shift it from one place to another. The kind of mental pull she exerted was similar to the one that moved her body from place to place while Misting, but Misting was more a matter of power than control, which was why Signets who weren’t telekinetic could still do it. The hardest part of Misting was bringing her body back together when she arrived at her destination. Moving other things meant she had to both hold on to them and move them at the same time, which required two coordinated sets of mental “muscles.”
It didn’t take much effort to pick up the phone. She did that first, straight up into the air, then back down, then up again, then in a circle; up and down was easiest, but she was already used to tossing around things of its size. It was just a warm-up.
Now came the fun part. She tightened her focus to the phone’s screen. If there had been actual buttons it would be child’s play, but touch screens didn’t respond to her mental “fingers.” She was convinced that if she could figure out the right way to touch it, the right amount of pressure, she could dial it … but she had to be careful how much force she used, or she’d crack the screen. Again.
A couple of attempts and she already had a headache. She shouldn’t be surprised—David wasn’t terribly good with touch screens yet, and he’d been working on it as long as they had existed. She set the phone down with a sigh.
Next, the sword: She had to expand her energy-lasso out to either side, but the blade itself wasn’t that heavy, so she could lift it, no sweat. The challenge came from drawing Shadowflame from its sheath … lowering the sheath back to the floor … holding the sword up … and spinning it in slow circles like the needle of a compass.
Miranda held on to it and counted, quietly aloud, to thirty before stopping the spin and putting the sword down. By then she was sweating just a bit. But she was pleased with herself. She’d kept it spinning five seconds longer than last time.
Last trick: the guitar.
It was big, yes, but still lightweight compared to, say, a chair. Once she had it hovering a few feet off the ground, she turned it to face away from her and closed her eyes.
She split her focus into three “hands”: the bulk of her energy holding the instrument aloft, then a piece of it wrapping around the neck and another focusing on the strings as if she were standing behind the guitar holding it to her chest.
Miranda squeezed her mind around two of the strings and pressed them back against the fretboard. Then, she concentrated on her other “hand” and tried to strum.
“Shit!”
The guitar nearly hit the floor when it slipped out of her grasp, but she caught it and lifted it back up again.
“Sorry, baby,” she told the instrument sheepishly. “I know you’ve been knocked around a lot lately.”
Despite the pain between her eyes, she tried it again, and again, but each time she ended up losing hold of either the strings or the guitar itself. It was just too much for her to do at once. If she set it down, she could play a chord or two, but not while still keeping it afloat. Not yet.
She finally put the guitar down and sat back, her head throbbing. “Star-one,” she said.
“Yes, beloved?”
“Are you busy?”
“I just finished meeting with the patrol leaders, and I’m about to go examine the interrogation room.” She could hear him smiling. “You’re in the training room?”
“Yeah.”
A matter of seconds later the door beeped, and David poked his head in. “Clear?”
She nodded. “Thank you for coming. I think I overdid it a little.”
He chuckled. “You? Never.”
She stuck her tongue out at him, and he grinned and laid his hand on her forehead. She felt an inrushing of energy, and the headache vanished between one breath and the next.
David looked at the objects on the ground. “Did you try using your hands?”
Miranda glared at him.
“No, no—” He was laughing again. “I don’t mean to pick them up, I mean, using gestures to help you focus, the way I do sometimes to lift heavier things.”
“You want me to play air guitar?”
He sighed. “Like this.”
He turned to the other armchair, which she’d pushed up against the wall, and held out his hand, then made an “up” sort of motion. The chair shuddered slightly, then rose a few inches off the floor.
“Oh, the Magneto thing! I had completely forgotten about that.”
“Sometimes if you visualize your power as an extension of your arm, it can help. Or it does me—your mileage may vary.”
“Well, I’ll try it next time. I think I’m done for the night.”
He leaned down, put one hand on each arm of the chair, and caught her mouth with his; she kissed him back enthusiastically, and they smiled at eac
h other.
“What do you have next tonight?” he asked, offering a hand up from the chair, which she took.
Miranda fetched her guitar case, buckled Shadowflame back on, and put her phone in her pocket. “I have a video blog post to record … you know, from the hospital?”
“Ah. Well, if you need any help, just call.”
She kissed his cheek. “My own personal tech support hotline. Emphasis on hot.”
He groaned. “I want you to love me for my mind,” he said, mock-offended.
“Oh, honey, I do.” She slapped him on the butt. “Now let me watch you walk away slowly.”
David rolled his eyes and took her arm, leading her out of the training room. They kissed one more time before parting, she to the music room to deposit her guitar, he to get bloody and gross with Faith.
Miranda met Mo on the other side of the Haven, in the Elite wing, where his clinic was; he rarely used the room that they were headed for, which was equipped with a hospital bed and the usual complement of medical machinery for life support, but it had saved more than one life since Miranda had been there, and it was much easier than having to go into Austin to the Hausmann.
“Here we are, my Lady,” Mo said, flipping on the lights. “You can change behind that curtain if you like.”
She took the hospital gown he held out to her. “Yay.”
Once she had shucked her clothes and had the gown on, Mo set about wrapping bandages around her chest and arm. It occurred to her that she had known Mo for several years but knew next to nothing about him; almost every time they met it was in a dire emergency with no time to chat. “How long have you been a vampire, Mo?” she asked.
“Forty-seven years,” he replied with a smile. “I came to America with my wife in the 1990s.”
“Were you a doctor when you were human?”
“Oh, yes. Medicine has always been my calling. But Firuzeh and I both tired of identifying corpses blown to pieces. We wanted to spend our eternity someplace a little safer.”
Miranda laughed. “So you came to work for a Signet?”
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