Queen of Shadows

by Dianne Sylvan

  She noticed that he was dressed more casually than she had seen him before, and didn’t have the coat. He wore actual jeans, faded in that designer way, and a longsleeved dark blue shirt that set off the color of his eyes. The Signet lay glowing between his collarbones, wildly out of place with the rest of his attire.

  “How are you feeling tonight?” he asked.

  She thought about it. She was stiff, and sore, and hadn’t slept well, but she didn’t feel the edge of creeping panic she’d had every night so far. She could deal with being tired and in pain. That’s what drugs were for. “Okay.”

  “Good. I’d like to begin your training tonight.”

  “Training?”

  “Yes. You have to learn to control your gifts.”

  “And you’re going to teach me.”

  “I am.”

  The idea of mucking with her “gifts,” which was hardly the word for them, made her deeply uneasy, but he was right. She had to do something. She couldn’t be the servant of her power forever. It would kill her inside a year unless something changed.

  Learning to use it wasn’t nearly as scary as the thought of ending up in the County Hospital D ward . . . wasting away with the choir of the damned as her only company. She had been in that place once, seen the vacant stares of the incurable cases, and even then, long before the voices began to penetrate her mind, she could feel the desolation that had soaked those dingy white walls.

  “Miranda?”

  She shivered and looked up at him again. “Sorry. Okay, let’s do it.”

  He frowned, concerned, but didn’t ask the obvious question. “This way, please.”

  She followed him back to the suite, into his bedroom, where he sat in one of the two armchairs that flanked the sofa and gestured for her to take the one opposite. She pulled her legs up and crossed them, wincing at the pain it caused her back.

  “The first thing I’m going to teach you is how to ground,” he said, folding his hands with his elbows on the chair’s arms. “It’s a technique as old as psychic energy itself. Once you’re grounded you’ll be able to work from a stable, secure foundation—think of electricity, and how if it isn’t properly grounded it runs wild and can cause destruction. Your talent is the same way.”

  “But what am I supposed to do in an emergency, if I don’t have time to do the grounding thing?”

  “Ideally you’ll become so familiar with it that you can do it instantly, no matter what the situation. It takes practice, but in time you’ll be able to maintain a state of rational detachment where you can act instead of react.”

  “I take it you’re grounded right now.”

  He nodded, looking faintly amused. “I’m always grounded. Keeping my energy flowing in an even circuit is the key to my emotional equilibrium.”

  “Emotional equilibrium. Meaning you never get angry and you’re always perfectly calm.”

  “Yes.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Are you sure you’re not just boring?”

  The Prime blinked at her, then laughed.

  She’d never actually heard him laugh before, and somehow the sound made her feel better in a way she couldn’t quite define.

  “All right,” David said, sobering. “Let’s begin. Close your eyes, and bring your attention to your breath . . .”

  An hour later, Miranda was completely exhausted, her head pounding so hard she could barely think, and she had the urge to punch her teacher in his perfectly sculpted jaw.

  “Stop,” she panted, putting her hands to her temples. “I can’t.”

  He looked at her dispassionately. Though he’d been doing the same exercises as she was, demonstrating even more difficult techniques, he was as unruffled as before. She, on the other hand, must look like a funhouse mirror of him, her face red and sweaty and her hair hanging lank in her face. She was slumped in her chair while he sat as straight and regal as ever.

  She was as angry at herself as she was with him. What he was showing her wasn’t complicated, and she should have been able to get it. She could play two musical instruments, damn it! All she had to do here was ground herself, then draw energy up through her body and try to move it into a barrier around her mind. He showed her how to time it with her breath, inhaling to draw up energy and exhaling to move it, not forcing, but allowing it to flow so she could get used to how it felt.

  Easy enough, in theory. It was a lot like what she did onstage. The trouble was that here she didn’t have her guitar to hide behind. Instead it was just grueling repetition, the same exact exercise over and over and over until it felt like her skull was going to split down the middle.

  “Again,” he said.

  She wanted to scream, but she tried to do as he said. And failed. The rudimentary shield she tried to raise flopped down around her like a dead fish.

  “Again.”

  “Stop saying that! You sound like a fucking Teletubby! Let me rest for a minute.”

  The worst part was that he knew how tired she was, but she had no idea what was going on behind his mask of indifference. Didn’t he care that she was in pain?

  “We can’t move on from here until you get this right,” he told her matter-of-factly.

  “Fine, but does it have to be tonight? I’m tired. My head hurts. My back is killing me.” She fought back the angry tears that sprang to her eyes. “I don’t deserve this. Not after everything.”

  “Life doesn’t care what you deserve,” he replied with all the warmth of an iceberg. “You didn’t deserve to be raped, but it happened. The people who die out there on the street every night often don’t deserve their fates. Veal calves don’t deserve theirs. Do you want to spend the rest of your life as a victim, or do you want to be strong?”

  “I don’t know,” she groaned. “Right now all I want is for my head to stop hurting. Just let me rest.”

  “Not until you get this right. Now stop whining and do it again.”

  Anger, poisonous and hot, boiled up along her spine. The feeling was familiar, and delicious, and it flooded her body with renewed energy, but she couldn’t think—all she could do was feel, and she summoned all her meager strength and struck out at the coldhearted bastard who was making her do this. She flung power at him almost like a lightning bolt, and she could hear herself snarling.

  As soon as the bolt left her body she realized what she was doing and tried to pull it back. Pain seared her mental “hands” and she cried out—too late. She tried to warn him . . .

  . . . but it turned out she didn’t have to. When the energy reached him, it hit his shields, and she could almost see the way they flexed and shifted around him to absorb the hit and ground it out without an iota of her rage touching him. She watched, fascinated, as the shield’s energy compensated for the hit and rippled backward like an indestructible soap bubble, then returned to normal, without the Prime seeming to consciously react. It all happened in seconds.

  They stared at each other. Her heart was hammering in her chest and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath.

  “Ground,” he instructed calmly.

  She was crying, but she ignored the tears and did as he said. Grounding was easy compared to the rest. When she was done, she wiped her eyes, the last of the anger gone, and put her head back in her hands. “You did that on purpose, didn’t you?”

  “It’s important that you understand what’s at stake.”

  “I’m sorry. I could have killed you.”

  There was a smile in his voice. “No, you couldn’t have. A psychic attack may kill a human and completely incapacitate an ordinary vampire, but never me. The shields you saw are a part of what we, as vampires, are. Mine are stronger than most because I had to learn at a very young age to control my abilities.”

  “Young? How young?”

  “I started manifesting talent when I was a child. It was . . . not accepted in that time and place. For most of my mortal life I never revealed to anyone what I could do.”

  “What can you do? I mean, besides .
. . that.”

  His eyes moved from her face to the coffee table, and she stared, openmouthed, as the entire table quivered, rose off the floor by several inches, then lit back down. He didn’t so much as bat an eye at the expense of energy.

  “Holy shit. I take it not all vampires can do that.”

  He shrugged fluidly. “Some Primes can. We have powers that aren’t found among lesser vampires. Still, mine are considered rare.”

  She stared at the table, almost waiting for it to move again. “So what happened, when you were human?”

  He met her gaze, and for just a second, the mask seemed to slip, and she saw pain beneath it—years and years of pain that no amount of power or prestige had eased. Then his expression cleared and she almost believed she’d imagined it, until he said quietly, “A stranger came to town.”

  She tried for the lame joke. “A gunslinger?”

  He returned her weak smile with one that was equally thin. “A Witchfinder.”

  Before she could ask, the bedroom door flew open, and Faith appeared, her face pale and grave.

  “Sire, you’re needed immediately,” she said with a peculiar catch in her voice. “There’s a . . . situation.”

  He held Faith’s eyes for a second, then rose smoothly from his chair. “Go to bed,” he directed Miranda as he pulled on his coat. “Tomorrow night you’ll try again.”

  They departed without another word, leaving Miranda alone in the Prime’s bedroom wondering what was going on. David had, of course, maintained that precious “emotional equilibrium,” but she had this feeling that underneath it he was upset, and that whatever had just happened was only going to make things worse.

  She found she was madly curious about the workings of the Court, like an anthropologist studying the Pygmies for National Geographic. She might as well have been hiding in the bushes with a video camera.

  A voice erupted from the band around her wrist, and she yelped.

  “All personnel are advised that the com network will be down for maintenance until further notice.”

  There was a click, and she felt . . . something change. The signal to the com must have been cut off; she hadn’t realized she could actually feel it until now.

  She started to get up and go to bed, as the Prime had commanded, but when she tried to stand, her legs wouldn’t support her. It was strange how her body was so worn out after an hour of working nothing but her mind. The room spun around her, and she made it a couple of feet sideways until her calves struck the edge of the couch.

  That would do. She let herself fall onto it, groping for the blanket she knew was still there, and though she didn’t have the strength to stay awake, sliding into sleep she could feel a current of deeply troubled emotions that crept into the darkness of her dreams.

  “. . . our unit has been ambushed. We received . . . a false call to these coordinates for backup . . . fired upon from above . . . all Elite down . . . the network has been compromised. I repeat . . . the com network has been . . . compromised . . .”

  Faith had worked for David Solomon long enough to know when he was pissed.

  She replayed the message from Elite 14 to the tense silence of the conference room, where all the other patrol leaders were gathered minus those who were out on duty now and the team she’d sent to recover the bodies. She watched as the Prime’s face went from calm to steely, and the blue of his eyes went icy at the edges. A silvering of the eye color was a sure sign that a vampire was about to spill blood.

  The aura of power around him swelled and darkened until it looked like a thunderstorm waiting to explode. The others took an involuntary step back.

  She didn’t. Running from fear only made it chase you.

  The Prime took a deep breath, withdrawing his aura to its normal level. She’d always admired his control, but she also knew it wasn’t infallible . . . and neither, apparently, was what he had built.

  “Report,” he said.

  She nodded briskly. “The rescue team arrived to find four bodies, all shot full of wooden-shafted crossbow bolts. It appears they were fired on from the building across the street. There was no immediate evidence of who killed them, but we’re running a check on the arrows to see if we can nail down the manufacturer and go from there.”

  “All right.” David looked to each patrol leader in turn. “I’ll be making an upgrade later tonight but not until I’ve found out where the leak is and we’ve dealt with him appropriately. I want all of you on high alert the minute you set foot in the city now. Obviously the situation is escalating. You’ll be advised of further developments as they come. Dismissed.”

  A chorus of “Yes, Sires,” and everyone but Faith left.

  She leaned forward and put her hands on the table. “There was nothing we could do. By the time Malia called in, it was too late. The nearest team we had was ten minutes away.”

  He looked like he wanted to break things, but there wasn’t anything in the conference room that would do unless he wanted to fling furniture, and she knew he wasn’t given to that kind of dramatic display. The going rumor was that he was incapable of emotion, and though she knew better, she could see where the story had come from.

  “Come,” he said, rising.

  She followed him down the stairs to the server room, the nerve center of the network he had created from the ground up. That network was his baby, and the idea that someone had broken into it probably made him angrier than the loss of four Elite. Every Signet in the world knew that the Southern network was the pinnacle of communications technology. If word got out that it had been hacked . . .

  “Have a seat.”

  She slid into a chair beside him while he took out his laptop and logged on to the main server. She wished she’d remembered how cold it was down here—he kept a sweater slung over his chair, and she really ought to squirrel one away in the cabinet.

  Every single transmission sent over the coms, over e-mail, and over their phone lines was routed through this room, recorded and documented down to the word. Everyone who worked for the Haven knew there was no such thing as private communication except for between Faith and the Prime himself.

  She smiled to herself. You can’t stop the signal.

  “How in the hell could someone hack us?” she asked, disbelieving. “As many layers of authentication as we have, and with the voice recognition built into the system, what kind of crazy genius could out-crazy-genius you?”

  “That’s the problem,” he muttered, his eyes on the screen. “The more complicated a system is, the more likely it is that a complete moron can bring it down. The simplest route is usually the one that’s overlooked. Here . . . the logs for Malia’s patrol. Everything routine . . .” He sighed as he read, and she moved closer to see what had been going on.

  Everything was so normal it hurt. The patrol unit talked and joked with each other as they made their usual sweep of Austin’s west side. It was the most affluent section of town, so there was rarely anything to do. That was why she’d assigned the youngest, least experienced Elite to the unit. That was probably why the attackers had chosen them, too.

  Malia was a bright, cheerful woman, and while she wasn’t the best warrior, what she lacked in fighting skill she made up for in leadership ability. Everyone liked her. She would have risen through the ranks eventually once she matured a little.

  That would never happen now. She and Mickey and Jones and Parvati were all gone, all erased from the night in a few short minutes of vengeance and blood.

  “We have to stop them,” Faith said, surprising herself with the emotion in her words.

  David looked up at her. “We will.” There was a burning intensity in his eyes, and she believed him. His word was law.

  “Here . . . right here is where the distress call came in, at 22:34. There was no verbal message, just coordinates sent via the emergency protocol. Well, that’s not going to happen again. From now on all emergency calls will require voice recognition—I don’t care if it slows the respo
nse time.”

  He was mostly talking to himself, which had always amused her to hear, and as he spoke his fingers were flying over the keyboard. At least four windows were up on the screen, and another two or three on the second monitor to the left, and he was working in all of them at once, tabbing between them with lightning rapidity. One was the network log, another the code for the emergency system, another some sort of logarithm he was actually working out in his head while he did everything else.

  And people thought telekinesis was the scariest thing he could do.

  Another window appeared. “I’m tracking the distress call,” he said for Faith’s benefit. “Location, frequency, duration . . . everything is normal. The encoding . . . son of a bitch.”

  He sat back hard.

  “What?”

  “Do you see that?” he pointed at the screen.

  “That squiggly line with all the gibberish? You’re going to have to translate it into Normal People-ese.”

  “This is the carrier signal of the false distress call. It’s in-network. Passwords, voice recognition, everything passed security when they logged on, because the network wasn’t hacked from outside.”

  “It came from one of us,” Faith said, shocked. “One of the Elite sent the call.”

  “I designed this to be nearly impossible to break into from the outside, but apparently there’s a flaw in our personnel screening methods. Somehow a mole slipped by the background checks, the applications, the evaluations . . . or, they changed allegiance after joining.”

  “How do we find them?”

  “If this were a normal system, we couldn’t. He or she is a skilled enough programmer that when I try to trace the signal to its location of origin, it reroutes itself and gets caught in a loop. But this system has a few fail-safes that our spy didn’t count on.”

  “Such as?”

  “This,” David replied, unlocking one of the cabinets to his left and removing a small metal box. It, too, was locked, but with a fingerprint recognition system, which he opened, revealing what looked like an ordinary USB drive.