Shadow's Fall (20 page)

Sometimes it felt like joining together physically was almost unnecessary—it wasn’t as though they were ever apart, not really. But there was something so lovely about being in two bodies, bringing them together and apart, mingling skin and limbs and sweat; mystical unions were all well and good, but there was something to be said for the sticky parts.

They curled and twisted around each other in a double helix, rolling in slow motion from one end of the bed to the other. At last Miranda got her wish; time stopped in the
darkened room, and there was no
him
, no
her
, not even an
us
, only
this
… and
this
was all that mattered, tonight.

After affectionate embraces with their hosts and a mostly chaste kiss or two, the Pair of the Western United States departed in their hired limo, supposedly headed for Austin-Bergstrom International like the rest of the Council.

“To the airport, Sire?” the driver asked.

“No. Take us to the Ambassador Hotel.” Deven was watching the hill country roll by out the dark-tinted window, and Jonathan tried to relax despite the growing pool of molten dread in his stomach that had first started building when he realized who the blond woman in the alley was.

I was right. Oh, God, I was right. What do we do now?

Like Miranda, Jonathan had been unable to discern a motive in Lydia’s sudden appearance. She could be a friend or an enemy or a little of both. She might not
do
anything herself—but her arrival would start the dominoes falling, for good or ill, and Jonathan refused flat-out to leave Austin until Lydia and David had met and she had declared her intentions. He knew just as strongly that he and Deven had a part to play in all of this, and if they weren’t there … things would go badly.

He had expected at least a little resistance on Deven’s part; it was difficult, and somewhat hazardous, for a Pair to leave its territory even for a weekend, and the longer the Haven stood without its leaders, the more likely it was that the vampires of California would get unruly … while the cat was away, the mice would eat everyone in sight. It had happened to at least one Prime during every Council meeting—usually not a disaster, but a pain in the ass to deal with once the Signet was home.

Deven, however, was different from his peers. People thought David’s security measures were invasive because of the sensor network that tracked every vampire in the South, but in truth David had nothing on Deven’s
intelligence network. His Elite were ruthless, and there was no such thing as due process; the West, like the South, was a place where good vampires felt safe but bad ones felt hunted. Deven’s Elite were practically invisible and left bodies and blood without so much as casting a shadow. They were everywhere and nowhere; everyone and no one. Whatever the other Primes might think of him, the average vampire on the street found Deven terrifying, all the more so because so few had ever actually seen him.

That meant that Dev and Jonathan could spare a couple of extra days without coming home to too much of a mess. They sent their Elite home ahead of them, and between their Second, Thomas, and the Haven’s Steward, Deven wasn’t worried. That was, after all, why his hiring standards were so ridiculously high.

When Jonathan said he wanted to stay at least until Wednesday, Deven had merely nodded and said they already had a room waiting in town at a Signet-affiliated hotel where they could keep an eye on things without intruding. The Ambassador catered mostly to wealthy humans, but it also had a special concierge just for Shadow World guests.

“You said we might be here a while,” Deven said. “I booked the room before we left Sacramento. Besides …” His voice grew a bit impish. “When was the last time I had you all to myself?”

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.