Shadow’s Fall

by Dianne Sylvan

  “It was harder to find a job than I hoped it would be. Vampires are even worse than humans with their prejudices sometimes, because we have them so much longer.”

  “Do people here at the Haven mistreat you? You’d say something, right?”

  He shrugged. “I have been here long enough that it is not much of an issue.”

  “Does Firuzeh work here, too? I don’t think I’ve met her.”

  “She lives here with me, but her work is in the city, at the university. She has a medical background, too, but now she teaches history. Night courses, of course. And she’s writing a book.” He patted her arm. “Now, lie back, and let us see how you look.”

  Miranda climbed into the bed stiffly and tried to find a comfortable position. “I’m glad I don’t really have to deal with this. It’s so awkward.”

  “If you did, you would have very good drugs,” Mo replied, getting the camera and computer and setting them up on the bedside rolling table. David had modified a digital video camera to work with the program he’d created for reflections; a cell phone camera would have worked okay for a full-body distance shot, but she wanted a close-up, and for that she needed a clearer picture.

  Mo moved around, switching on monitors and attaching various things to her while she used her free arm to get the camera turned on and did a test shot.

  The little viewscreen on the camera showed up blurry, but David had said that would happen; the computer would translate the video through its various algorithms and produce a cleaned-up image it would record on the hard drive.

  She’d done a few audio blogs for her website in the past, but up until now video had been problematic; there were cell phone videos of her all over the Internet, but they were shot at concerts from far enough away that for the most part the poor quality of the recordings had gone unremarked upon. Now that David had made headway into improving the picture, she figured it would work well enough. It needed to be believable, but no one would expect Academy Award–winning documentary footage from her hospital bed.

  There were apparently fans staking out every hospital in Austin trying to figure out where she was being treated, and there was a lot of anxiety online and in the city over whether she was really all right; she wanted to get this out there before people started in with the conspiracy theories. Patrol units had sent in images of the shrine that had been erected at the Bat Cave, and looking at it left tears in Miranda’s eyes.

  She had to say something. The people who had supported her deserved to hear from her.

  “All done,” Mo said. “I shall wait out of the way until you need me to take everything off again.”

  “Thanks.” She adjusted the angle of the camera in her hand, resting her arm against the bed rail, until she could at least see her whole head in the viewer. Under the lamp Mo had turned on she did, in fact, look half-dead; vampires were creatures that needed mood lighting. Fluorescent light didn’t hurt them like the sun would, but the light was harsh enough to eyes used to darker rooms that she was likely to have another headache by the time she was done.

  Miranda took a last second to work out in her head what she wanted to say, then hit record.

  The cell where 8.3 Claret, otherwise known as Monroe, had been held—and had met his unfortunate and messy end—was built out of steel-reinforced cinder block and could stand up to quite a bit of punishment, but it wasn’t designed so much for explosions. Something like, say, the bomb used by Marja Ovaska when she kidnapped Miranda and Deven would have blown the building to smithereens.

  Whatever had been used to kill Monroe had been a relatively small charge, just enough to blast a body all over the walls but not enough to damage the structure. Even as hard to kill as vampires were, they were still flesh and blood—a lot of blood, from the look of it. Prime David had surmised that whatever the device was, it had been somehow placed on Monroe’s body—or worse, inside—and then detonated.

  Faith watched her commander in chief make his way slowly around the small room, examining the walls through a lens attached to some sort of scanning device. He was muttering to himself, which was a good sign; if he were completely stymied, he would be making an irritable growling noise every few minutes.

  She was not pleased to be spending her evening in a tiny room that reeked of charred flesh and splattered gore even after the housekeeping staff had done a cursory cleaning in order to properly see to the remains. David had on gloves and a disposable lab coat that made him look like a mad surgeon to keep any remaining remains off his clothes, and Faith was keeping her distance, though one good thing about wearing a black uniform was that stains weren’t much of an issue. She did, however, wish she had her coat; interrogation rooms were kept very cold, which was why David had been able to leave this for tonight.

  The staff hadn’t sanitized the place yet on David’s orders, and the walls were blood-dyed as dark as the floor … but this time not from interrogation.

  Plenty of people had died in this cell, but only two she could think of had done so against the Prime’s orders. The first, the traitorous Elite who went by Helen, had self-terminated after her Blackthorn co-conspirator Samuel had slipped her a stake. David had made changes in Elite protocol to make sure that didn’t happen again; now, only he and Faith had the code to enter the interrogation rooms, and they could transmit it remotely in an emergency, but otherwise nobody could get in or out of the cells … well, except for someone powerful enough to Mist.

  Prime Deven, for example … and Prime Hart.

  “Is Hart strong enough to Mist?” Faith asked.

  David, startled out of his wall-scrutiny, turned to her. “More than likely. Most of us are. But those who aren’t would never admit it.”

  “So he could have Misted in here and planted the bomb himself.”

  “Easily. That’s the only theory I have at the moment as to how this happened—the lock was still engaged up until the door blew out. No one opened the door.”

  “But that doesn’t prove it was Hart, just that it was a Signet bearer.”

  “Or one of a handful of non-Signet vampires powerful enough to Mist, yes.”

  “You mean, like your sire?”

  He frowned. “Oh, hell. That hadn’t even occurred to me. I honestly don’t know if she’s that strong—but it’s possible.”

  David went back to his examination for a moment, then made a triumphant noise. “Aha. Tweezers, please, Faith.”

  She picked them up from the open zipper case of probes, lenses, and other … whatever the hell they were … and handed them to him. He crouched down and gingerly removed something that was embedded in the mortar between two blocks.

  “Bag,” he said.

  Faith supplied a small plastic evidence bag that was already labeled with the date and location; the Prime had harvested several already that housed various bits of blown-up detritus that could be pieces of bomb or possibly pieces of Monroe, she couldn’t tell which. A series of samples from the floor and walls had been sent for analysis yesterday to test for explosive residue and anything else Hunter Development could find. David’s quest was to find evidence of the bomb itself.

  He held up the bag and peered at the small fragment of metal he’d retrieved; it was a section of a disk about the size of a button, and she would have thought it was a button. David brought it over to the table, under the light, and, after switching one of the dials on his scanner, ran it over the button.

  “Transmitter,” he said. “In fact … I’ll be damned … it’s remarkably similar to the one that Hart brought to me last time he was here. Same technology, and I’ll bet …”

  Faith watched, wondering for the thousandth time—that week—about his sanity, as David leaned in close to the wall where he’d found the button and sniffed the bricks.

  “Sire,” she said, “you know how people think you’re crazy?”

  “Do they?” he asked absently.

  “Well, I do, anyway.”

  David straightened and faced her. “Com
e smell this.”

  “Not a chance in hell, Sire.”

  He laughed. “All right, I’ll spare you—it smells very faintly of acetone.”

  “Nail polish remover?”

  “I don’t think it’s actually acetone. I do think it’s a liquid explosive, something along the lines of nitroglycerin. Liquid nitroglycerin isn’t as unstable as people think it is, but a good, sharp shock will still detonate it. Based on the spatter patterns …”

  “I do love it when you talk spatter patterns.”

  “ … he was standing about right here and blew out in all directions, which means either he was holding a bottle of the stuff, or …”

  He trailed off.

  “Or?” she prompted.

  “Given that we haven’t found any evidence of a container, I would have to assume it was taken internally. If this transmitter was the same as the last one, it had a tiny charge inside it, and if that went off anywhere on his body …” David made a boom! gesture.

  “Wait … if he drank it, that means he killed himself.”

  “Unless he didn’t know he was drinking it.”

  “But that kind of thing is highly toxic, Sire. He would have gotten sick.”

  David nodded, considering. “True. He probably would have vomited it up within minutes of ingestion … if he was conscious. If whoever Misted in here knocked him out first, then poured the explosive down his throat or even injected it with a hypodermic, then stuck the transmitter in his mouth, for example, and Misted out, then set off the charge, there would be no evidence left behind besides remnants of the transmitter itself.”

  “Why not just punch him in the stomach to blow it, then, and not leave any evidence? Or—here’s a wild idea—stake him?”

  “Stake him and you risk getting blood on yourself and being seen with stained clothes. This way he could set it off at a distance, and all that’s left are a few fragments of metal and traces of chemical residue. Best of all, liquid explosives are easy to make from common ingredients. There’s no way to trace them back to the bomber himself. And I didn’t get a damn thing off the last transmitter even before it blew, so I doubt there’ll be much on this one either.”

  “So we’re nowhere, still,” Faith said. “Fantastic.”

  “Not exactly nowhere.”

  “How so?”

  David began gathering up the sample bags and his tools, and said, “I’m going to get a closer look at this fragment. If in fact it is the same design as the one from three years ago, we know the two were made by the same manufacturer. There aren’t a whole lot of people who deal in this kind of tech. Chances are the same person who left behind the first one was responsible for this, too.”

  “But you said Hart didn’t have anything to do with the first transmitter—that he found it by a dead Elite. Shadow intelligence was that whoever was killing Hart’s people is still doing it, just only once in a while to spook him … Hart brought you the earpiece thinking you were behind it, right? Wouldn’t that mean Hart didn’t kill Monroe?”

  “That’s making the wild assumption that Hart was telling the truth about the earpiece in the first place,” David reminded her. “At the time I believed him. He seemed sincerely disturbed by the loss of his Elite. But I admit I could have been duped. I’m going to have to revisit my notes from back then and compare them to whatever I can get off this. Finding its origins became less of a priority with everything else that was going on, but now that I have pieces of two of them, I might make more progress.”

  As they left the interrogation room and locked it behind them, David handed her the instrument case long enough to strip off the plastic coat and gloves and stuff them in the trash. Underneath it he had on jeans and a tourist-looking T-shirt advertising someplace called Jaynestown, Canton.

  “If Hart didn’t kill Monroe …” Faith began, not really sure where the sentence was going to go; she had no idea what the alternatives were.

  “Then another Signet probably did,” David finished for her.

  “Sire …”

  He stopped walking. “What’s wrong?”

  “We have to consider … it might have been Deven. He was alone with Monroe when we walked in on them. He gave him blood—what if the explosive was mixed in the bag?”

  David lifted his eyes to the star-flecked sky, sighing wearily. “The thought had crossed my mind. I just don’t see what advantage he’d gain by killing his own agent after going to all that trouble to get Monroe into Hart’s Elite and having him botch the shooting, then get caught. It makes far more sense for Hart to have done it to destroy evidence connecting him to the crime. Plus, as you said, it would have been hard to get Monroe to drink the stuff—I’ve never tasted nitroglycerin, but I’m betting it comes through the taste of blood.”

  “Red Shadow operatives are more than willing to die on command, Sire.”

  “True. But again, why? Monroe was supposed to testify against Hart. Deven hates Hart as much as I do. And Deven, for all his faults, doesn’t throw his agents’ lives away without good reason. It would have taken Monroe decades to get to Claret level; that’s a lot of time and training gone to waste.”

  “I don’t know,” Faith answered truthfully. “I’m just saying it could have been him. His agenda is about three miles past inscrutable.”

  “Acknowledged, Second. And as much as I don’t want to believe that Deven would conspire against us, he was willing to let Miranda get shot, and although I think … or want to think … that his intentions are good, who knows? He operates from a rather skewed sense of morality. He’s not above lying to me, that’s for damn sure.”

  The Prime started toward the Haven again, and she fell into step beside him, frustrated. “I hate this,” she said. “Is there anyone left who can be trusted?”

  He offered her a smile. “Besides you? I doubt it.”

  She nearly tripped over a nonexistent pebble in her sudden discomfort. “I … I appreciate that, Sire.”

  David held open the side door for her. “At least I have something to work with. I only hope it’s the only transmitter Hart—or whoever—left here.”

  Faith froze halfway over the threshold.

  Expecting her to have entered already, David nearly blundered into her; he caught himself on the door frame and said, “What the hell?”

  She stepped out of the way, brain spinning, and put her head in her hands. “I’m so stupid,” she said. “Stupid, stupid—”

  “Faith, what are you talking about?”

  Averting her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see his face, Faith reached into her pocket and handed him Jeremy’s cuff link.

  Eleven

  “Hi everyone … it’s Miranda. As you can tell by my awesome fashion statement here, I’m out of commission for a while. I wanted to thank you all for your wonderful support. I heard today that the blood bank has had a record number of donors …”

  Stella paused the video, biting her lip.

  She’d always played it off as a trick of the light, or a reflection, but … the necklace was glowing. She could see it through Miranda’s hospital gown, just barely, and there was no way that was a reflection. Especially now that Stella had seen that other guy’s green one doing the same thing.

  She grounded and centered herself, then lowered her shielding enough that she could See, and started the video again.

  “ … going to be a while before I’m back onstage, but I’ll be keeping you up to date here on the website. And since I can’t really go anywhere, I’ve got plenty of time to work on songs for the new album … as soon as I can sit up and hold my guitar, anyway. But I did want to ask you guys for one thing: Please don’t hang out at the hospitals. I don’t want anybody to get in trouble over me. I’m at a private facility and not at one of the big Austin hospitals, so you’re probably not going to find me anyway.”

  Miranda looked like crap. She was all bandaged up and hooked up to monitors … just like a normal human would be. And Stella couldn’t See a damn thing, not e
ven her regular aura; something about the video was weird. It might be the editing; Stella had tried Looking at some of the other footage she had downloaded of Miranda onstage at different times, but only a couple of them showed anything psychically, and they were all normal … sort of.

  Stella had figured one thing out: Miranda was gifted. Watching her perform with her inner eyes open, Stella could See something when she played—it was subtle, and if she’d just Seen it once, she wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but after poring over a dozen videos, she knew it wasn’t a coincidence.

  She just had no idea what it was.

  Stella’s gift was visual clairvoyance; she could See people’s energy, and it told her a lot about them: whether they were lying, what kind of intentions they had, how strong they were. She could spot another Witch in a crowd of a hundred people, and often she could tell what kind of abilities they had, but whatever Miranda had … she’d never seen it before.

  It was hard to detect and definitely rare … and Miranda was definitely aware she had it. The way it showed up, like soft tendrils reaching out to the audience, was too perfectly controlled, and the shielding around it was too organized to be purely instinctive. Miranda had been trained.

  Stella’s phone rang. She jumped, losing her hold on the Sight with a bitten-off curse. She looked at the phone and sighed: her dad.

  She’d call him back later.

  Maybe.

  He was trying. She had to give him credit. She’d never expected him to be the one to reach out to her after months of hardly speaking, but he’d called her last week wanting to have lunch and even got her a signed poster and a wristband for the music festival as a tacit apology. They’d talked about the festival and the bands she was going to see; he’d asked about her job, carefully avoiding The Subject, and she’d asked him about work. He always had great stories—fewer now that he was a detective and wasn’t busting naked crack addicts anymore, but still. It had felt good to talk to him again.

  She wondered if he knew anything else about the shooting; there wasn’t a whole lot he could tell her other than they had a guy in custody and had some letters he’d written Miranda, but he might be willing to offer up a little extra info if she agreed to go to lunch again.