She took a deep breath. Right or wrong, it was done.
The ruby in her Signet shone gently in the darkness, its light comforting to her frazzled nerves. After a moment she took a deep breath and dialed David.
“Can’t talk now, beloved—kicking ass,” he said a bit breathlessly, and hung up before she could reply.
She had to smile. Such a strange life she’d stumbled into. She would never have thought she would consider her own life worth the lives of two dozen others … and she was hardly proving that worth right now, sitting here doing nothing. Far more than twenty-eight lives were at stake right now, and it was supposed to be her duty to protect them.
Her smile faded, and she tucked her phone back in her pocket and touched her Signet again. David and Faith were out there defending the city. She should be there, too.
And if someone recognized her, they’d deal with it somehow … She couldn’t worry about that now, with so much at risk. If the entire Order of Elysium had died so she could remain Queen, and all her Elite and her Prime were risking life and limb to protect Austin’s people, immortal and otherwise … what was she doing here?
Miranda stood up on the roof, heartbeat quickening with a sudden and overwhelming sense of purpose.
To hell with this. I have work to do.
She left the roof and ran down to their suite, took up Shadowflame, and headed for her car.
Some people found their way to Witchcraft because of spiritual longing. They weren’t satisfied with mainstream religion and yearned for something different: something that honored the divine feminine, perhaps, or that didn’t threaten to cast them into hell for falling in love with the wrong person. In Wicca and the other neo-Pagan faiths that practiced the Craft, they found something that had been missing from the church services of their youths.
Then there were Witches like Stella who went hunting for something a little different.
She had known she was strange from childhood, of course; people looked at her funny when she said certain things, and one of the questions she heard most often, usually in an accusatory tone, was, “How did you know that?” She tried to explain it for a while, but eventually she realized that what she was Seeing scared people and she had to cut it out if she wanted to have friends and not end up in the nuthouse.
Most kids with psychic gifts went one of two ways: They clamped down on their talents until those talents disappeared, or they went crazy. Stella knew that mental hospitals were full of people who had been medicated out of their gifts, who couldn’t make sense of what they knew or told the wrong person and got sent away for it. She could only imagine the kind of hell that would be.
Stella was one of the quiet ones … but her gifts never went away. She never denied them. She just learned when to keep her mouth shut … until she got to college and learned there were people out there whose entire religion was built around the idea that the kind of thing she could do was perfectly normal. Not all Wiccans were outstandingly psychic. Lark, for example, could do magic but didn’t have a strong individual gift like Stella’s Sight. Those who weren’t psychic learned to use whatever they had, and those who were found their way to teachers like Foxglove.
Well … most did. A few still went crazy. But at least in the Pagan community they had a fighting chance.
She remembered when she’d been a new little Witchlet and had been determined to share her discoveries with her father. She’d worn a giant pentagram and carried her books around proudly. It wasn’t as though they’d been devoutly religious before that. The last time she could remember being in church was for her stepmother’s funeral.
Still, tell an Irish Catholic guy his daughter’s a Witch, and the result was pretty predictable.
Now they circled around each other on tiptoe, carefully avoiding The Subject. And in the handful of days since Stella and Lark were attacked, her dad was even more careful with the eggshells he walked on. Apparently seeing her in a hospital bed had shaken him up enough that questions of Satan were no longer quite so pressing.
Stella sat at her altar, which was basically a wooden banana crate with a piece of discounted sari fabric draped over it, decked with her favorite religious knickknacks and, just now, a deck of tarot cards.
She stared at the resin statue of the Goddess in front of her; it depicted the two faces of the Goddess Persephone, one a maiden with a loving smile and the other a raven-haired queen holding a basket of pomegranates. Stella hadn’t been sure when she bought the statue whether the nice half was Persephone’s alter ego, Kore, as she was known before she was taken to Hades, or her little-known twin, Theia, whom Stella had only seen mentioned once or twice in really esoteric out-there literature and who, most archaeologists agreed, had never been widely worshipped.
It wasn’t that Stella worshipped Persephone, exactly—she just liked the image, and it made her feel grounded and safe to meditate in front of Her. Stella wasn’t really sure she believed in gods the way some other Pagans did; she believed in the idea of God but wasn’t sold on the specifics. Luckily like most religions Wicca—in theory at least—didn’t focus so much on everyone believing the same way as it did on everyone celebrating the same holidays.
Persephone, Queen of the Underworld … Stella bit her lip, her eyes shifting sideways to another image she had kept on her altar for years: the cover shot from Miranda Grey’s CD. The image of the singer had been painted, not photographed.
Now she knew why.
She knew why she had been drawn to Miranda, why she’d felt like Miranda would understand what she was going through as someone who was different. Even before she was a vampire, Miranda had her gift, and it made her crazy—at least that was what Stella had gleaned from their all-too-brief conversation and her own intuition. Empathy, untrained, could drive someone to suicide really easily. Stella had never met anyone with it, but she’d heard stories.
She’s a vampire. An honest-to-God, blood-drinking, daytime-sleeping, fanged vampire. What the hell has gone wrong with your life, Stella Maguire, that this is your reality now?
She still wasn’t clear on exactly why Miranda showed up on cell phone cameras but didn’t have a reflection, but from what Gandalf had told her, a lot of the old vampire lore either was misguided or simply didn’t apply, and modern technology had changed a lot about how the immortals lived. For example, every vampire in Austin was being monitored by some sort of network to make sure they didn’t hurt anyone, and that was how the good guys—Stella shook her head bemusedly at the term—knew she and Lark were in trouble.
In the picture Miranda wore that same ruby amulet, the Signet, her badge of office … but there was more to it than that, Stella knew. Gandalf didn’t know much about the Signets specifically, but he knew the basic organization of the Shadow World and had reluctantly told Stella as much as he could, hoping, she figured, that it would scare her away.
She was pretty sure his idea had worked. The thought that there really were vampires out there—hundreds of them, eating people, right under everyone’s noses—made her question every alley she’d ever walked past that gave her the creeps, every shady-looking person staring out at her from a doorway, every trick of the light that made her wonder if someone was there. What was stopping them from coming into everyone’s houses and killing every human they wanted to? Why should they care about taking lives if they really were that strong and fast?
Miranda.
Stella remembered the look on Miranda’s face as she heard about what had happened. There was a determination there, an authority; and she remembered Miranda’s rarely-seen-in-public husband, David, having that same aura, the same quiet nobility. Somehow they had power over every vampire here and kept them from killing. Those glowing amulets made all the difference. The way Stella’s dad had deferred to David, the way they’d spoken to each other … she had never seen her father cowed before, especially not by some guy in a trench coat looking like a cast extra from The Matrix. But Maguire had listened to the Prime and to the
Queen … though he didn’t seem so much afraid as respectful.
Dad knew. He knew all along.
She wanted to call him. She wanted so badly to call him and tell him straight out that Miranda’s vamp-mojo hadn’t worked and Stella remembered everything. A few details were hazy, but everything in the clinic was crystal clear. Everything about Miranda was etched in stone in her memory and would stay there the rest of her life. She wanted so badly to call her father out on it, to demand that he tell her everything. How long had he been working with them? Did they obey human laws at all, or was it just a courtesy that they spoke to APD?
At least now she knew why her dad had objected so strongly, at first, to her rabid Miranda Grey fan-girling. He’d known what Miranda really was. No doubt he’d wanted Stella to stay as far away as she could.
“Too late now, Dad,” Stella whispered into the silent room, her breath causing the candle on the altar to flicker. She’d sat down to try and clear her head. That was what the cards were for. Normally she didn’t need them, but as Foxglove had explained in her classes, tarot cards and runes and other oracles didn’t make someone see the future; they acted like a contact lens for your third eye, helping you to See more clearly and, at the very least, listen to your own intuition. Sometimes when she was confused, she would get a sensible answer from the cards even though her conscious mind was riding the Tilt-a-Whirl.
“What do I do?” she asked, eyes on Persephone again. “Do I pretend it never happened and go on like normal? How can I do that? Do I tell Lark? Do I try to talk to Miranda, or would she just try to Etch-a-Sketch my mind again? Would they hurt me if they knew I know? Or will they hurt me anyway? What do I do? Please …”
She shuffled the tarot cards mindlessly for a moment, trying to stay calm, then laid out three in a row for a quickie reading. At least she could get a direction to steer her thoughts in.
The first card was the Tower.
Stella swallowed hard. The Tower spelled violent upheaval, disaster, a total reordering of reality. It usually was for the best, a needed change, but it came at great cost and often through suffering.
“Awesome.” She sighed.
The next card: Death.
Most normal people always freaked out when they saw the Death card, but in truth, it didn’t usually mean actual death so much as irreversible transformation. It had foretold a few literal deaths, she was sure, but that was rare. Still, with the Tower … someone had a shitty hell of a time coming, and soon. Stella hoped it wasn’t her.
“Okay, who’s it for?” she asked. “Can you tell me that?”
She turned over the last card:
The Queen of Swords.
As soon as she saw the image on the card, she threw herself backward, seized with fear, and with knowledge. In her deck, the Queen of Swords stared at the viewer standing sideways, her long katana-like sword at the ready, her flame-red hair caught in a wind that carried with it autumn leaves, spun from a tree and falling. All around her were the colors of flame, and beyond the fire … darkness.
Miranda.
She’s in danger.
Stella felt herself rocking back and forth, trying to shake her way out of the knowledge, and as she did, the candle flared up so brightly it almost looked like the Queen of Swords herself had truly caught fire.
And from somewhere deep inside Stella’s heart, some corner she had barely even known existed, the voice came: Go to her, child. Go to her now. Go to her.
Stella was on her feet before she could think, grabbing her backpack and a flashlight and her can of Mace, and pulling on her boots. “Where? Where do I go?”
She strained to hear an answer, but her vision felt dragged back to her altar, where it fixed on the image of the Tower.
The Tower was burning as it fell. The world was burning as it fell.
Stella snatched up her cell phone and ran for the door.
Nineteen
The Shadow District had never been so quiet.
Miranda steered her car through the streets of Austin past landmarks that were usually mobbed this time of night, even on a Sunday. There were no valets outside the Black Door, and no line of patrons waiting to enter. The windows of Anodyne were dark. There were people about—she saw a few humans passing through on their way to or from somewhere, no one lingering, probably remarking to each other that it was quiet … too quiet. Aside from that and a few Elite standing watch, the District was a graveyard.
She pulled into a space in front of the Hausmann. She sucked at parallel parking, but there were no other cars on the entire block, so she was unlikely to aggravate anyone.
As she got out, buckling Shadowflame to her belt and making sure the car was locked, an Elite approached her. “My Lady—we weren’t expecting you in the city tonight.”
Miranda looked around. Eerie. There might as well be tumbleweeds rolling down the street.
“What’s the situation?” she asked.
“Things have been calm for the last half hour,” the Elite replied. “The Prime just returned from putting down a nest of hoodlums who were trashing the Plague Rat.”
Miranda snorted. “How could they tell it was trashed?” When the warrior failed to reply, Miranda sighed and asked, “What about the Second?”
“She’s still out on the streets—we got word of a potential human attack and she took her team to snuff it out before anyone could get hurt.”
“Thank you,” Miranda said, taking the steps to the clinic. The guards out front bowed and let her pass.
The cacophony shocked her. She wasn’t expecting the clinic to be full, and the wall of noise and emotion that hit her nearly knocked her off her feet. She had to pause and bolster her shields, take a breath, and get her bearings.
Every curtained cubicle in the clinic’s main area was occupied. Nurses in black scrubs moved gracefully from one to another, poetic in their efficiency, checking IVs and making notes on charts. They were all calm but tense. About half the patients were vampires and half were human, in a variety of conditions. One person looked like she was in a coma. Most were bloody. In one cubicle the figure on the stretcher had been covered head to toe in a sheet.
Miranda had no idea where to go; she was about to grab the nearest Elite and ask where David was, but one of the nurses in the bay to her left shouted, “I need a hand here!”
The Queen was closest. She darted into the cubicle. “Where?”
“Right here—keep pressure while I clamp this off—”
Miranda did as she was told, sticking her hand out to press down on the pad of gauze the nurse had indicated that seemed to be all that was holding a vampire’s blood vessel closed. The Elite on the gurney had been stabbed in several places including the thigh, and Miranda thought it might be the femoral artery she was holding, but she really didn’t know anatomy well enough to be sure. There was a veritable ocean of blood soaking the vampire’s uniform and the sheet below him, and his eyes were glazed with agony.
The nurse was doing something with a pair of steel clamps that Miranda couldn’t really see given how she had to hold her arms. They must have gotten the Elite stabilized enough in the field to transfer him here, though she couldn’t imagine how.
“Harder,” the nurse commanded. She still hadn’t looked up from her patient. “Hold for another ten seconds … nine … eight …”
By the time she reached one, the bleeding had stopped. The vampire’s healing ability had caught up with the wound thanks to two people holding the vessel shut. Miranda watched the artery close itself and let out her breath in relief.
“All right,” the nurse said. “I’ll stitch this up to help it heal faster, but I think you’re out of the woods, Lieutenant. I’ll get you something for the pain—” She looked over at Miranda. “Thanks for the … oh.”
Miranda managed a faintly seasick smile. “You’re welcome. Do you need anything else?”
“Um … I … no … I … no, my Lady. I can take it from here if you’d like to wash up.”
/>
Miranda looked down at herself. She was bloodstained from belly to knees, and her hands looked like she’d dipped them in paint. She took the towel the nurse offered to stop the dripping and moved back out of the way, heading for the restrooms.
There wasn’t much she could do for her clothes, but she got her arms clean in the sink. Beyond the ladies’ room door someone cried out in pain, and she heard monitors beeping shrilly. For some reason she thought of the video she and Mo had made for the blog, and her heart felt heavy. Had anyone who had watched the video ended up here at the Hausmann this week?
She forced herself to leave the restroom and turn to the offices in the clinic’s rear. She could sense David nearby underneath all the other presences, a calm center in the storm orbited by the staff.
He had taken over the admin office. A huge monitor showed the entire sensor grid, and another had a readout of Elite designations and their statuses. The Prime himself was at the desk on the phone.
“ … under control,” he was saying as she came in. “I assure you, Chief, your presence on the streets here would only put your men in danger. I would advise you to keep patrolling the outer perimeter of the District and keep anyone from entering.”
He looked up at her approach, and his eyebrows shot up at the condition of her clothes—he would have known if she’d been injured, so the question in his eyes was Whose blood is that?
She tilted her head toward the clinic’s main room, and he nodded.
“I understand, Chief. Yes, we’re following several leads on the source of the problem … You’ll be the first to know.”
He hung up without any pleasantries and leaned back in the chair with a groan. “God, as if we needed any more trouble—APD wants to help.” Then he sat forward, looking at her. “What are you doing here?”
Shadow’s Fall Page 29
