Queen of Shadows

by Dianne Sylvan

  He shifted his vision into the sideways sight that allowed him to “see” energy; the sight was different for everyone with psychic powers, but to him it registered like waves of heat, sometimes in color, sometimes merely temperature and texture. Faith’s energy was cool, watery; Miranda’s had the shimmer of autumn fire.

  Miranda grounded flawlessly, and he watched with a critical eye as she slowly raised the barrier he had shown her how to create. She had finally caught the trick of keeping it all the way around her and not just in front, and this week they had worked on her keeping it up for longer and longer periods. Soon she would shield herself automatically and not have to constantly remind herself to keep the energy flowing, but she needed experience with the pressure of other minds, and he wasn’t about to let her work outside the training room until he was sure she could at least defend herself against Faith.

  “Okay,” she said. “I’m ready.”

  David directed Faith to start simply by aiming her telepathy at Miranda and seeing if the human could block it out. Miranda’s primary gift was empathy, which dealt in emotions while telepathy dealt in words; the two were otherwise difficult to distinguish from one another, and often having one gift meant having both in some measure. Emotions were by far the harder to filter out, but the shield was meant to do both.

  He watched, trying not to speak up, as Faith framed a thought and sent it strongly toward Miranda.

  The first time, her shield buckled, the front sagging under the pressure but not quite vanishing; Miranda hauled it back up again, breathing hard, her nails digging into her palms. At David’s signal, Faith tried again.

  This time, it held, though the effort showed in the sweat running down Miranda’s face. After several more attempts her T-shirt was soaked, clinging to her breasts.

  David did his best not to stare. Now wasn’t really the time to act like a horny teenager.

  He asked Faith to pause and took a moment to point out where Miranda was leaking energy. “On your left,” he said. “You need to divert from the front to the sides.”

  “But then how will I deflect the hit?”

  “Balance,” he replied. “Remember how my shield rippled the night you attacked me?”

  “You attacked him?” Faith asked, incredulous.

  Miranda shrugged. “It didn’t work.”

  “Exactly,” he said. “If the entire shield is equally strong, the back and sides can take pressure off the front. Then the entire sphere supports itself, absorbing the impact and grounding it out instead of shattering. That’s why we visualize it as curved instead of angular; curves follow the design of nature, and nature knows how to bend without breaking. Now try again, but this time, Faith, use emotion instead of thought.”

  “I’m not exactly an empath. You’re going to have to explain that one a little more.”

  “Think of something really sad,” Miranda told her. “So sad it makes you want to curl up in a ball and weep. Then throw it at me like you’re trying to force me to feel it, too.”

  Faith was at a loss, but after a moment she thought of something and gave it a try, to no avail.

  “Am I supposed to think of something that makes me sad, or something that would make her sad?”

  “Your emotion, your experience. She has to hold firm where she stops and you begin.”

  Faith frowned, and then something seemed to occur to her. She looked over at David, and he could tell exactly what she was thinking, and also what a horrible idea she thought it was.

  He agreed, but though his heart practically screamed in protest, he gave his Second an almost imperceptible nod.

  She swallowed and turned back to Miranda.

  “Okay,” she said. “Here goes.”

  David took a deep breath and held on to the arms of the chair. He saw Faith reaching into herself and digging up a memory from the distant past; it wasn’t one he had ever heard her speak of in detail, but he still knew it existed, and he knew exactly what it was going to do.

  Faith gathered the energy of that memory for a minute, steeling herself, before releasing it, letting the despair of that moment in her life hit Miranda full force.

  The echoes reached David seconds later: cries for mercy, laughter, the sound of cloth tearing, the terror of knowing her life was in the hands of those who thought she was less than dirt. A young girl on the streets of Edo, hurrying home alone at night, was nothing more than fresh meat . . . and afterward, her body bruised inside and out, she endured her father’s shame knowing he couldn’t give her to any man who wanted a virgin bride. That shame had turned to rage, and she had nowhere to go but the streets. There were plenty of brothels specializing in girls dolled up as geishas.

  All of this hit David in a heartbeat, and a heartbeat later, Miranda was sobbing.

  As she fell to her knees, he was on his feet, but Faith grabbed his arm and held him back.

  “No,” Miranda wept over and over. “No, no, no . . .”

  He nearly shoved Faith aside, but the Second refused to budge. Miranda doubled over beneath the force of shared pain, and Faith’s eyes were full of tears, but still, Faith wouldn’t let him go to her.

  Miranda’s hands on the floor curled slowly into fists.

  “No,” she murmured. “No.”

  David watched, heart in his throat, as she breathed in . . . and out . . . and pushed.

  The collapsing shield around her began to expand. Every time she exhaled, she fed more and more energy into it, until Faith’s memories and the grief they brought with them started to lose their hold over her. Her whole body shook with the strain, but the shield held.

  It held.

  Miranda lifted her head. There was fire in her eyes.

  With one last breath, the onslaught of emotion exploded into nothingness, and it felt like the air in the room had been scoured bare, as if a storm had swept through and lightning had struck.

  Faith broke the silence. She whooped and punched the air, diving to Miranda’s side and hugging her with the kind of outward affection he’d never seen her display toward anyone.

  “I’m . . . going . . . to fucking . . . kill you,” Miranda panted. “Both of you.”

  “You did it!” Faith exclaimed. “I knew you could!”

  “I did it,” Miranda said to herself, staring down at her hands on the tile. “I really did it.”

  “You’re still doing it,” Faith pointed out. “You’re still shielded.”

  Miranda’s laughter was bright and joyful, and it tore him inside even as it brought an upwelling of joy to his own heart. She looked up at him expectantly, her green eyes sparkling, sunlit.

  Without speaking, he crossed the floor and knelt in front of her, opening his arms; she threw herself into them, still laughing. He held her as tightly as he dared and kissed the top of her head, inhaling the scent of her humanity, shampoo, and the unmistakable whisper of warmth and spice he knew was hers and hers alone.

  “What did I tell you?” he said into her hair. “Extraordinary.”

  When he looked up at Faith, she was giving him that mischievous little grin he’d come to recognize, and he pulled one hand away from Miranda’s waist to give his Second the finger.

  “I think we should celebrate,” Faith said. “Break out the good Scotch and let’s get fucked up.”

  “I have a better idea,” David replied.

  It started with margaritas but devolved quickly into tequila shots.

  “So how old were you?” Miranda asked, plucking a slice of lime from her mouth and tossing it in the bowl on the coffee table.

  “Nineteen,” Faith replied fuzzily around her margarita glass. “Already a decrepit old spinster.”

  “God, can you imagine getting married at nineteen?” Miranda asked. “When I was nineteen, I didn’t even know how to do my own laundry.” She added, for David’s benefit, “You know, laundry? Washing your own clothes? There are people who do that.”

  He rolled his eyes. “I know how to do laundry. I watched my wif
e do it dozens of times.”

  Miranda snorted and poured herself another shot. The room was spinning quite happily around her, and she intended for it to keep doing so as long as possible. “How did you turn into a vampire?” she asked Faith. “I mean, how does it work?”

  “Well, there’s blood involved.”

  “No shit, Sherlock.”

  Faith waved her hands vaguely, and if there had been anything left in her glass, it probably would have sloshed over the edge. “It’s not like in the movies. It’s a process. The main thing is you have to die with vampire blood in your veins. Right, Sire?”

  “Right.” David didn’t seem to be as far gone as she and Faith were. He was remarkably relaxed for him but managed to stay sober enough to mix drinks without getting the proportions horribly awry.

  “You exchange blood,” Faith went on. “Sometimes we do that for sexy reasons. It, ah . . . what am I trying to say?”

  “Gets you off really hard,” David concluded for her. “And it creates a psychic connection. But in a few days, if you just let it go, it fades and everything is back to normal. There are basically two ways to get it to stick. Either your sire drinks you to death the first time, then feeds you her own blood, and you die and wake changed in about a day; or you swap once, then you start drinking human blood to strengthen you, then die some other way to complete the transformation.”

  “The second way sounds like it sucks.”

  David made a face at the pun, unintentional though it was. “It takes longer and hurts a lot more. The best way is the first way. You sleep through most of it. That’s usually how it’s done—about three quarters of the time the human dies permanently in the second method.”

  “Yeah? How did you do it?”

  Faith said, “First.” David said, “Second.”

  “But you survived,” Miranda noted unnecessarily.

  David nodded. “Only because I wanted vengeance. I forced myself through the change by killing the men who sentenced Lizzie to death. They were my first blood—they tasted like moldy sacramental wine.”

  She could see him starting to brood; she refused to let him slide into melancholy tonight. “How did you two meet?” she asked, pointing from the Prime to Faith and back again.

  Faith chuckled. “I kicked his ass in the Elite trials. I would have ended up Arrabicci’s lieutenant if the old bastard hadn’t been such a sexist pig.”

  “He was not a sexist pig,” David insisted. “He was a racist pig. You’re lucky he didn’t fire you during World War II.”

  “He wouldn’t have, with Deven vouching for me. If Dev had told him pigeons fucked monkeys, he’d have looked outside for little hairy birds.”

  “This Deven guy sounds like an interesting piece of work,” Miranda observed, downing her shot of tequila and stuffing another lime wedge in her mouth.

  “Definitely,” affirmed the Prime. “You’ll have to meet him someday. His Consort, too. They’re the kind of people you want to have on your side.”

  Suddenly, Miranda’s mind brought itself back to clarity long enough to realize that in all likelihood she never would meet Deven. She could shield now. She wasn’t perfect, but in a matter of days she’d be able to leave the Haven and return to Austin.

  Back to Austin . . . back to the world. Her time at the Haven was almost over.

  “You okay?” Faith asked. “You look like you’re choking.”

  Miranda blinked back the burning in her eyes and said, “No, I’m fine. I think I’ve had one too many, is all. Everything’s fine.”

  Even as she said the words, and smiled heartily to back them up, something inside her was crying.

  A few nights later, under a sky that was heavy and threatening with more rain, Miranda walked outside in the garden, alone.

  Terrence had gotten used to the paths she took, so he maintained a greater distance and kept an eye on her from farther away than he had the first week he’d been on guard duty. She was grateful for the consideration. Being followed, even by someone who wanted her safe, made her uneasy, especially now that there was no external shield around her that would warn the Prime if she was in trouble.

  He had taken it down the night before, just as an experiment, and she had left the training room completely under her own power for the first time. So far things were going well, though she hadn’t dealt with more than two people at a time. She was anxious at the idea of going outside, but she still had her com, and if anything went wrong, Terrence would be at her side in seconds.

  September was doing its best to cling to summer as long as it could. The days had been scorching—according to the weather report—and the nights were humid and thick. Everyone was looking forward to the approaching front and its resulting storms to give some relief from the heat. It was the first tumultuous moment of autumn, and Miranda, like anyone who had lived in Texas for years, knew it would be another month before things genuinely cooled off.

  She had been at the Haven for a month now, though it felt like years. Her little room had come to bear the stamp of her personality and habits, and she was a familiar sight to the Elite as she took the halls to and from the garden, library, and music room.

  She felt a pang of loss at the thought of leaving the Bösendorfer. She had only been playing it for a week, but it felt like a part of her . . . like so many things here. Somehow the Haven had crept into her brick by brick, and the Stephen King-esque strangeness of life here had become normal. Austin, with its thousands of humans and daytime schedule, seemed alien in comparison.

  Faith had intimated more than once that she should stay. Even David had hinted, without really meaning to, that he didn’t want her to leave, but he had also said flat out that she was at risk here, and that the best thing for her safety was to return to the anonymity of the city.

  Miranda wasn’t totally sure she believed that. Surely the safest place for her, if vampires wanted to kill her, was with the Prime? But he was adamant, so much so that she had to wonder if there was something he wasn’t telling her.

  As if summoned by her thoughts, David emerged from the Haven, pausing at the head of the path to look for her. She waved.

  He crossed the garden to her, stepping adroitly between plants and around a fountain, and joined her with a smile of greeting.

  “I’m going into town tonight, but I wanted to see how you were,” he said.

  “Not bad. How does it look?”

  He scanned her quickly. She felt the light touch of his energy again, and when it was gone, she missed it terribly. She’d gotten so used to the embrace of his power, her security blanket, that living without it was much harder than she had expected.

  “Good,” he answered. “You need to bolster your right side a little, but overall the flow is pretty consistent.”

  Miranda took a moment to feel around where he’d indicated and breathe more energy into the shield; she never would have believed it, but he was right when he said it got easier. He’d been so proud of her. She was proud of herself.

  “Any news?” she asked.

  He made an indefinite move with his head. “Nothing concrete. We’ve had the warehouse under surveillance for days with no results. They move their meeting spots around, never the same place more than twice.”

  “What about the mystery Blackthorn woman?”

  “She doesn’t fit the descriptions of any of the clan’s women, and there weren’t many. The Blackthorn didn’t let their female members ascend very high in the ranks. There are two unaccounted for after the California wars, but without more evidence we can’t be sure which one she is, or if she is at all.”

  “But the attacks have stopped—do you think they’re planning something?”

  “They must be. I’ve stepped up patrols all over the territory, not just in Austin, but anywhere there’s been a related murder.”

  She saw the frustrated look on his face, and said, “You hate that they’ve got the next move.”

  “Yes. Until something breaks, they’re
in control, and I find that rather distressing.”

  “What about the citywide sensor network you were talking about?”

  He made an impatient noise. “It’s going to take months. I’m still working bugs out of the prototype system, and after that it has to be manufactured, then installed, calibrated, tested . . . not to mention I have to convince Washington to loan me another satellite. Still, it’s the only workable plan we’ve got. Once it’s running I’ll be able to track every vampire in the city down to a one-block radius with only a two-second delay.”

  “I guess you could always catch one and put a GPS collar on him before releasing him back into the wild.”

  He chuckled, but looked thoughtful. “It’s an idea.”

  His com chimed, and a voice said, “Sire, the car’s ready for you.”

  “Five minutes, Harlan,” he replied.

  David turned his gaze to Miranda, and she could tell there was something he needed to say but didn’t want to. Even through her shield—and his—she felt a brief second of confusion mixed with apprehension, even a little embarrassment; but of course, it was all smoothed over and put away before she could say anything.

  “I’ll be back in time for our session later,” was all he said. “Try to get some rest.”

  “Good hunting,” she said.

  To her surprise, before he left, he reached down for her hand and lifted it to his lips; again, she was sure he was going to say something, but all he did was release her hand and step back, saying, “Be safe.”

  Then he walked away. She stood staring after him, her hand held up to her heart, the skin tingling long after he was gone.

  A low rumble of thunder brought her back to herself, and she started walking again, this time almost furiously. Out of nowhere her thoughts went to what Faith had said that night, about her becoming Queen one day, and helpless anger roiled in her stomach the way the oncoming storm did in the sky.

  Damn Faith for dangling such an impossible idea in front of her. It did nothing but feed on the niggling little fear in the back of Miranda’s mind that no matter what she did, she would never fit in among other people, and that here, the Haven, could be her home.