Queen of Shadows (4 page)

Faith looked away. She did know. “Cheap shot, Sire.”

“But on the mark.”

“You always are.” His second in command crossed her arms, staring down at the world of trouble in the bed before them. “How did you find her?”

“By chance,” he replied, smiling a little at the memory. “We were in line at the grocery together.”

“Meet-cute,” Faith said, smiling back at him in spite of the situation.

“Not so cute. She was terrified of me, but that’s normal. I saw right away that she was gifted and deteriorating quickly. She didn’t know that while she was receiving, she was also projecting. I saw flashes of her memories, including the bar where she plays, and went back there last night . . . morbid curiosity, I suppose. I intended to follow her afterward. . . .”

“But I called you,” Faith said, realization dawning on her face, along with guilt. “We needed you at the crime scene. God—if I hadn’t done that—”

“This is hardly your fault.”

“I know, but . . .” Faith shook her head. “So you looked for her after we finished at the scene, and found . . . them.”

“Yes.”

Another smile, this one grim. “How lucky for her, I suppose, that the most powerful vampire in the Western Hemisphere happens to have an ice cream addiction. A pint of Ben and Jerry’s saved her life.”

He sat down in the armchair beside the bed. “She saved herself first, Faith. She would probably have died if I hadn’t found her, yes, but she was the one who stopped those bastards. I stanched the bleeding and brought her here to heal. She may not thank me for it.” Over on the chest of drawers, he saw that Faith’s team had delivered the human’s guitar as well as the gathered belongings from her purse. By some miracle, the instrument was intact.

“Thank you, Faith,” he said. “You can clock off now if there are no more loose ends.”

She didn’t look happy about leaving, but she bowed. “As you will it, Sire. Did you hunt tonight while you were out, or should I send in a bottle?”

He thought of the woman he had fed on before joining the hunt for Wallace. He had unconsciously selected a redhead from the teeming mass of youth and music downtown. She, however, had had blue eyes. He knew from a second’s glimpse that the woman in the bed had clear green eyes the color of sunlight on leaves.

It had been more than three centuries since he had seen sunlight, but it was the sort of thing his kind never forgot.

Faith departed, closing the door quietly behind her, leaving him alone with a broken young woman who, he recalled, liked Snickers bars.

That was about all he knew of her. She was extraordinarily gifted, completely untrained, and had a singing voice like dark honey touched with cinnamon. She had green eyes that never left the ground. She drank Shiner Bock. He hadn’t even had a chance to learn her name—it was something Grey, he remembered from the sign at the bar, but he had assumed, perhaps foolishly, that he would speak to her afterward and find out the rest.

There was nothing to do but wait. He didn’t want her to wake alone in a strange house with no idea what was happening or who had claimed her from the streets of Austin.

He sat back and pulled the phone from his pocket to read Faith’s reports . . .

Well, perhaps after a game of Tetris.

Everything was different when she woke.

She was warm, and comfortable. There were smells, but not blood and garbage; she smelled a wood fire, fabric softener . . . almonds, faintly, in some form of body wash or shampoo.

The air on her skin was clean and so was she. Soft fabric covered her, just the right weight, and it was warm . . . so warm.

Warm and silent.

Had she been more alert, the silence in her mind might have panicked her. Her thoughts seemed thin and stringy alone in her head, and didn’t fill the space. It felt like being onstage solo in a concert hall meant to seat thousands.

She tried to move, but pain coursed through her body, a dull throbbing from a dozen epicenters. Her muscles were so weak they wouldn’t respond to her commands, though with effort she could move her head and open her eyes. She half expected to wake to the storm-smudged sky back in that alley, bleeding to death in the dirt, but her vision gradually focused on what was above her—a ceiling.

She blinked, trying to make sense of it. Dreaming . . . oh, God, she’d been dreaming. The whole thing was a dream. Even her dingy apartment had all been the invention of her imagination; the bedroom there had a ceiling fan, and this one didn’t. She was somewhere else, somewhere safe and far away from the nightmare . . . where?

Her mind barely had time to register the immense relief of it all before reality began to settle back around her, heavy as a shroud.

Her body hurt. The left side of her torso sent pain through her every time she inhaled. Her face was swollen, the hand that had been cut with Gordon’s knife pulsing with her heartbeat. When she shifted her hips slightly, an arc of white-hot agony tore upward between her legs.

She whimpered softly. Relief gave way to the yawning pit of desolation.

There was a sound to her right, and she turned her head—too fast, it turned out, as another wrenching pain seized her neck and shoulders. The room swam in her vision for a moment before righting itself.

She stared, everything else momentarily forgotten.

He was sitting beside her bed in a plush-looking armchair, his slender body as unconsciously regal as a cat’s, reclining as if the chair—no, the
world
—had been created for his own particular use. As before he wore all black, perfectly hand-tailored to show off an almost inhuman grace. Raven hair fell into eyes that almost seemed to glow in the merry flicker of the fireplace at the far end of the room. He could have been a runway model—or, better yet, one of the gorgeous gay yogis she’d met during her brief stab at spiritual development a few months before everything went to hell. Everything about him was so perfect he might really have been something cooked up by her imagination. At the grocery store she had thought of him, vaguely, as handsome, but she was so focused on running away that the extent of his beauty had obviously failed to register.

The only anomalies were in the accessories: around one wrist, a flat featureless band of silver metal that reminded her of those slap bracelets that were popular back in the early nineties. Around his neck, a heavy silver chain ending in a fairly Gothic-looking amulet set with what was either the biggest ruby she’d ever seen or the gaudiest fake ruby she’d ever seen. The stone itself caught the firelight and glowed, too, so strongly she thought for a minute it had a tiny bulb inside.

He was staring down into the screen of an iPhone. Somehow that was every bit as weird to her as the ice cream had been a thousand years ago.

She stared, and stared—it was the longest time she’d been able to simply
look
at someone in months.

For a while he let her stare. She knew that he felt her eyes on him. Something about him kept teasing the back of her mind with knowledge she didn’t want.

Finally he lifted his gaze to hers.

It felt like the bottom had dropped out of her heart as she fell into his eyes, seeing . . . and feeling . . . so much more than she should have, but still far less than she got from people off the street. This . . . man . . . had barriers around his thoughts, and walls of steel around his heart, and had drawn the circle of power around her that now kept her mind silent with his own hands.

“I know you,” she whispered. Her voice sounded like it had been dragged over broken glass. “Where am I?”

His voice was the same as she remembered: low and musical, with a foreign cadence but no obvious accent. “We call it the Haven,” he replied, speaking gently, keeping the peace of the room intact.

“It was you in the store, and in . . . in the alley. Who are you?”

He sat back, sliding the phone into his pocket and folding his hands, considering her question. “There are several ways I can answer that. How much of the truth do you want right now?”

She started to snap that she wanted it all, but another look in his face made her think better of it. This man had found her surrounded by the corpses of men she had killed, and not only had he not called the police, he’d brought her somewhere safe and was now shielding her mind. There was far more going on here than a chance meeting in an alley.

She shut her eyes hard. “Just give me what you think I can handle.”

“Very well. My name is David Solomon. This, the Haven, is my home. You were brought here because you were injured, and because by striking those humans down with your power you inadvertently crossed a border into our world.”

“Your world?”

“On one side of that border, the police and government agencies enforce their law. On this side, the law is mine. As far as I’m concerned you were the hand of justice last night. The scale is balanced.”

“And you’re what, supernatural police?”

He smiled, and though it was a very attractive smile, it sent a chill through her bones.

“I thought I could help you,” he said after a moment. “I saw what you were and the road you were headed down.”

She closed her eyes for a minute, fighting tears, her fingers clenching in the pristine white sheets that cocooned her. She sought inside her mind for the cold comfort of voices and emotions, of anything . . . but there was a blank wall, one she couldn’t take down.

“It’s quiet,” she whispered. “It’s so quiet. What did you do to me?”

He shrugged fluidly. “I shielded you. It’s an energetic barrier that separates you from the emotions of others. If you had been properly trained to your gifts, you could do the same.”

She didn’t reply, but shut her eyes again, listening. Her hands gripped the sheets so hard her knuckles were white.

“What’s your name?” he asked.

She didn’t look at him. “Miranda Grey.”

“A pleasure to meet you, Miranda Grey. Are you hungry?”

She shook her head. She’d throw up anything she tried to eat right now. A moment later she asked, “What are you going to do with me? Are you going to fuck me, too?”

His eyebrows shot up in polite incredulity, and he said, “Certainly not.”

Now she shrugged. “I don’t think I’m much good for anything else.”

His nails dug into the arms of the chair as he said sharply, “Don’t say that.”

“Why not? You don’t even know me. Why do you care?”

He didn’t answer, and she looked away, toward the shuttered window. All the light in the room came from the fireplace—in August, in Texas, as out of place as the long coat he’d been wearing. Who the hell were these people?

To mask her sudden fear, she stammered, “What’s that thing around your neck?”

His fingers lifted to the stone almost unconsciously, and it seemed like the light flared subtly at the touch. “The Signet,” he replied.

She waited for an explanation, but none was forthcoming, so she said lamely, “It looks heavy.”

A smile crossed his face that was at once both wry and deeply, deeply weary. “It is.”

A breath later his expression had returned to neutral; he smiled again, and rose. “There are guards outside this door. No one will approach you without permission. I have arranged for food to be brought to you by the servants. If you need anything, feel free to ask them, and it will be provided. I must ask you not to go poking around alone beyond these halls—I can’t guarantee your safety outside the East Wing. When you are feeling better, you’ll have a tour.”

“Wait . . . am I some kind of hostage? What if I don’t want to stay here?”

He turned back to her, one hand on the door, and met her eyes. “Where would you go?”

Again, she looked away, staring into the fire. “Nowhere.”

“Rest, then, Miss Grey.”

“But where are you going?” She was suddenly afraid, though whether of him leaving or staying, she couldn’t say.

“It’s sunrise,” he replied. “I’m going to bed.”

With that, he left, and she stared blankly at the fire with silence echoing in her mind until slumber tugged her back into its web and spun oblivion around her.

Screaming. Groping hands. Laughter.

Miranda struggled against the sweaty, covetous hands that gripped her, her wounds tearing and bleeding again, desperation overriding pain. She could taste blood in her mouth and feel it oozing down her legs . . . she was so weak . . . but she wouldn’t be taken alive. Not this time. She screamed again and redoubled her efforts, but it was no use, they had her . . . they were dragging her to the lake to throw her body in . . . she felt the sickening lurch of flying through the air, and the freezing water was like a thousand knives in her lungs.

She tried to scream a third time but couldn’t take a breath. The world was fading to black. In the background she could hear shouting, crowd noise, screams. Classical music. The chaos of a hundred songs played in the recesses of her brain.

Then she heard the sound of metal sliding against something, like a sword being drawn. A swish, and a thump, and her vision filled with a pulsating red light. The din around her cut off abruptly.

She woke to a pool of moonlight over her bed and the taste of blood lingering on her tongue.

The fire had died down to embers, but the room was still perfectly comfortable. It took her a second to remember it was high summer and she really should be burning up.

Strange—she hadn’t realized the room had a window. Turning her head for a better look she saw there were some kind of metal shutters over the outside, just now slanted open so she could see the moon. To the left of the window, on the wall near the sill, there was a black button that she assumed operated the shutters. Had someone been in to open them while she was asleep?

More questions along those lines began to occur to her. She was clean—who had bathed her? Someone had bandaged her and dressed her, which meant someone had touched her naked, unconscious body. The way her palm was wrapped suggested someone knew what they were doing. Should she be angry about that, or grateful that they had taken care of her? Had it been David Solomon? The thought made her shiver. He’d claimed he didn’t intend to assault her, but why should she believe him? What kind of crazy fuck took in a strange woman he’d just seen kill four people?