Shadowflame

by Dianne Sylvan

  “I know . . . I just hate that I’ve made her so unhappy. She deserves so much better. As a Prime, I can solve problems, put down insurrections, behead lawbreakers . . . as a husband, I’m useless.”

  A note of amusement entered Deven’s voice. “Last time you were a husband you were still a teenager, and your wife couldn’t even vote or pray aloud in church. Not even you can be instantly good at everything.”

  “What do I do?” David asked, barely able to hear himself over the rush of the wind.

  “Give her what she needs,” he replied. “Space, time, whatever. Let her come to you when she’s ready to deal with you . . . but make sure she always knows you’re there for her.”

  “There are days I wish she had killed me, Dev. What do I do with that feeling?”

  A quiet chuckle. “You’re not a coward, David. You don’t run away from your pain.”

  “I did last time.”

  “This is different,” Deven told him. “Last time you didn’t do anything wrong . . . and perhaps you ran, but only because I drove you away. This time you can’t put two time zones between you. You have to fight for Miranda . . . for her sake, for yours . . . and mine.”

  Dev couldn’t see him making a skeptical face, but David was sure it came across in his voice. “What good does it do you if we work things out?”

  “I have a vested interest in you and your Queen, dear one.”

  “Meaning?”

  “If you split up, I owe my Second twenty dollars.”

  David rolled his eyes. “You’re so full of shit.”

  “I’ll let that comment slide right by. I have to go . . . the first of those suspects is here cooling her heels in the Elite training room, and I have to go terrify her into talking.”

  “All right. Let me know what you find out.”

  “I will. I l—” Deven stopped midword and corrected himself with, “I’ll talk to you later.”

  David stared at the phone for a minute after he had hung up.

  The worst thing—well, one of a hundred worst things in this situation—was that the dam had officially broken. He could no longer pretend, to himself or anyone else, that he didn’t still have feelings for Deven that were, to his continued amazement, fully requited. And though he had always prided himself on self-control, he honestly didn’t think he and Deven would ever be able to be in the same room without a chaperone. Miranda’s trust in him had been shattered, yes, but he no longer trusted himself either.

  Emotions simply didn’t jump and claim him this way. He had fought long and hard to master his heart . . . yet from the moment Miranda had come into his life, that wall he had built brick by brick had begun to fracture, overgrown by tenacious flowering vines that, with each bloom, cracked him open more and more, and now he couldn’t be certain of anything except that somehow, some way, he had to make things right with her.

  It was lucky they were immortal. It might very well take eternity at this rate.

  His com chimed, and Miranda said, “We’re going to a movie—go ahead and head home, I’ll get a ride with Faith later.”

  Her voice had exactly the same effect Deven’s did . . . no, worse. “I’ll go back with Faith,” he said. “You keep the car. That way Harlan can take Kat home, too. I have some work to do here in town anyway.”

  “All right.”

  “Have fun,” he said hopefully, but there was no reply. She was always more terse when she spoke to him in front of Kat; he wondered if the two of them were discussing his sins, Kat tearing him apart with her quick tongue . . . no. Kat wasn’t a behind-the-back-bitching kind of woman. She was direct. She would listen to Miranda and commiserate but wouldn’t go out of her way to vilify him.

  He hadn’t been kidding when he told Kat he liked her or that he appreciated her friendship with Miranda. Without Kat she had no one to talk to right now. Faith had been making overtures, but Miranda needed someone who wasn’t directly involved, who had known her as long as Kat had.

  He tapped the back of his head against the concrete wall. Enough wallowing for one night. He did have work to do.

  He pulled his coat tightly around him, drew in his power, and then allowed the edges of his body to blur, forming the picture of where he wanted to go in his mind and pulling.

  He solidified on the ground a block away; he could have Misted right at his destination, but he preferred to limit the distance unless it was an emergency. Misting was useful, kept one’s tracks hidden, and tended to impress the hell out of people, but it took a lot of power. Before Miranda had come along he had rarely used it, but now that he had a Queen, he could draw on their combined power to restore himself afterward, so it was much less draining. Short trips were still best.

  He’d been giving Miranda the basics of the theory behind Misting when they talked in the mornings, and he’d given her a meditation to do to prepare her for it, but it was very dangerous to undertake without a lot of practice and a lot of strength. Her first experience with it had been hard on her, even with Jonathan to guide her. David had heard of Primes accidentally scattering themselves all over the place, which wouldn’t kill a vampire any more than a gunshot would, but it took days to drag themselves back together and the burnout factor was astronomical. Prime Al-Bahin was actually missing part of a finger from a botched Mist early in his tenure.

  Most of the city’s sensors were installed on exterior walls about four feet off the ground, but in areas where the vampire population was especially dense, he had added extra surveillance from above and below, and the device in question was at the top corner of a three-story building. He was going to have to stand on a foot-wide ledge to reach the thing.

  Before he got down to business, however, he spoke into his com: “Star-three.”

  “Yes, Sire?”

  “Faith, I’m going to need a ride home. Can you meet me at these coordinates when you’re off patrol?”

  “Absolutely, Sire. I’ll see you shortly.”

  “Star-one, out.”

  David walked down the street without really paying much heed to the city teeming around him. He’d chosen a time and day when the district wouldn’t be very busy, and the building he was headed for didn’t house a club or bar. It was two stories of apartments over a set of offices, nothing glamorous enough to attract attention. He didn’t relish the idea of having an audience, especially because most of the sensors went unnoticed by vampire passersby and he wanted to keep it that way.

  He glanced around to make sure no one was watching, then Misted again, reappearing thirty feet aboveground perched nimbly on the ledge, letting his instincts take over to balance him. He was probably going to pay for the energy expenditure with a migraine later, but it was worth keeping his work out of sight. The last thing he needed was people sabotaging the sensors.

  He reached up to unscrew the sensor from its housing with one hand and reached into his coat with the other, pulling out what amounted to an entirely new computer system for the device.

  The sensor itself was about the size of a golf ball, convex like a store security mirror, with a hard black plastic casing. He swapped out its insides in a few seconds with deft hands, removing a small screwdriver from his coat and wiring the new unit into place, stowing the old one to strip for parts when he got home.

  Then he accessed the device from his phone and ran the initial calibration routine. It would have to be fine-tuned from the Haven, but it came online without any glitches, which pleased him. He needed as few problems as possible if he was going to upgrade in a few days.

  Compared to this system the original sensor network had been a clumsy, buggy mess thrown together out of necessity with little finesse. In July he had switched the entire network to something a bit more sophisticated, and teams in several other cities were installing systems for those areas. Within a year he’d have every major metropolitan area in the South wired and monitored like Austin was. That would make it much easier for the satellite Elite garrisons to keep things under control. Houston, N
ew Orleans, and Atlanta were first.

  His lieutenant in Louisiana, Elite 249, who simply called herself Laveau, had already dealt with quite a bit of grumbling over it. Vampires in New Orleans liked their city just as it was, mystery and mayhem intact. They were David’s most opinionated constituents.

  As Miranda had said, they could suck it up and deal.

  He put away his tools, turning around on the ledge to face outward, reflecting that it would be extraordinarily embarrassing to fall off and break his neck on the street in front of half the vampires of Austin, although chances were he could . . .

  Out of nowhere, he heard a whistle, then felt something thud lightly into his arm.

  David looked down to see a small wooden projectile sticking out of his coat; the pain registered a second later.

  He pressed himself back against the wall and swept the block with his senses, staring in the direction the hit had come from—east. He bent his will in that direction, seeking any sign of whoever had shot at him . . .

  It all happened in a matter of seconds. The pain from the little stake, which was no bigger around than a chopstick, became searing, and he felt something hot snaking out from the dart into his bloodstream, dispersing through veins and capillaries in the space of perhaps two heartbeats. By the time he even understood what was happening, his senses had gone totally haywire and dizziness swept over him.

  Poison.

  He grabbed the projectile and yanked it out; sure enough, it was a steel dart with a wooden head, and it smelled strongly of chemicals and now, blood. The wound it left was already closing. Poison couldn’t kill a vampire; the only reasons to use poison were either to cause pain during torture or to tranquilize the victim and transport him or her somewhere else . . .

  . . . perhaps after cutting off the victim’s left hand . . .

  David dug his fingers into the bricks so hard his nails split, but he could feel himself swimming sideways; there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t even get a thought organized in his mind, let alone coordinate his limbs to stay balanced. He fought hard to remember where he was, why it was so cold . . .

  Suddenly a voice cut through the fog. “Emergency rescue team to Block SD-Three, building Nineteen-A—authorization Star-two. Code Alpha One. I repeat: Code Alpha One.”

  He had time to register the fear in Miranda’s voice, just before the poison worked its way to his brain, and he felt blood vessels inside his head exploding.

  It was excruciating even through the fog. He groaned and put his hands on his head, trying to block the light from his eyes, but the pain was coming from inside, and it got worse and worse . . . this must be a stroke, blood clots in the brain, they’d heal in minutes as long as . . .

  “Sire! Holy shit!”

  The voice was a hundred miles away, which translated to about thirty feet below him.

  “Can anyone get up there?”

  Probably not . . . but I can certainly get down there.

  David didn’t even consciously choose to roll over; his body just did it, almost thrashing, his whole being too focused on the pain in his skull to care about staying aloft.

  The freezing wind rushed past him, and he waited to hit the pavement and hopefully break his head open to release the demons tormenting him, but instead four strong arms caught him and lowered him gently to the ground.

  “Sire! Can you hear me?”

  He grunted an affirmative, though Faith’s voice was fading in and out. His face felt wet; he patted his skin with a shaking hand and looked blearily at his fingers. Blood. He was bleeding from his mouth, nose, and eyes.

  Everything was burning . . . cracking . . . his insides were scorched. He could feel his strength sapping as his vampiric powers burned themselves to a crisp trying to stay ahead of the damage. More than anything, he wanted unconsciousness . . . oh, God, oblivion . . . anything to make it stop . . .

  “Get that thing to Novotny—don’t touch it with your bare hands! Help me get him into the car. I’ve got Mo on standby over at the Hausmann. Okay, one, two, three . . . lift . . .”

  David felt them picking him up off the ground and carrying him over to the street; before his senses completely shut down he heard the car door slamming and Miranda’s anxious voice asking from his wrist, “Are you all right, baby? Come on, talk to me. David!”

  Twelve

  Miranda could tell that Kat wasn’t very happy to be back at the Hausmann. The blonde hovered in the rear of the crowd as the Elite, Faith, and Miranda bore David’s unresponsive body into the clinic, where Mo and the entire staff were waiting to care for their Prime.

  Miranda turned to Kat breathlessly. “You don’t have to stay,” she said. “Harlan will take you home.”

  “Yeah,” Kat said, her eyes wide with remembered fear. “I think that’s a good idea.”

  Miranda ushered her back outside, told Harlan to take her wherever she wanted to go, and paused long enough to hug Kat. “Thank you for being here.”

  “Thanks for the night out. And tell the Count thanks for not getting shot until the movie was over.”

  Miranda waved at her quickly as the car pulled away, then ran back up the steps into the clinic, her heart lurching clumsily in her rib cage.

  “. . . poison,” she heard Faith say as she burst back into the clinic. “The dart had something on it. If he hadn’t called me for a ride, we wouldn’t have been there to catch him, and whoever fired the shot could have dragged him off the street without anyone seeing.”

  Mo didn’t normally work at the Hausmann, but this week as luck would have it he had been asked to come train a new mortal intern on vampire medicine and the needs and rights of the fed-on human. That intern was also standing back, looking bewildered and unsure of himself as the doctors moved the Prime onto an exam table and set about stripping off his coat and shirt to see the wound.

  “All right,” Mo said, taking control of the situation, “I need a pint of O negative infused with antitoxin serum. I’ll start a line—Nurse, if you would get the monitors hooked up, please, and reset them to vampiric levels.”

  They looked relieved at having someone tell them what to do. Most of the staff were human. They had never had to deal with an injured Prime; probably none of them had ever even seen their employer in real life. Normally the direst situation Mo had to deal with was a severed thumb, but obviously he was well versed in his craft.

  “I can heal him,” Miranda said, her voice cracking. “Let me do it.”

  Mo saw the state she was in and came over to speak to her. “My Lady,” he said calmly, “right now if you tried, you would drain yourself for nothing. This is not an injury that requires a bone set or a laceration healed. The only way to deal with poison is to force it through his system faster, and your mutual healing ability cannot do that. Just as with a stake, the invading body must be removed before healing can begin. We use the antitoxin kit for that, but antitoxin is a misnomer; it is more of a toxin accelerator. It changes the toxin’s half-life so that it metabolizes much more quickly. Once it is out of his system, then you come in and heal the damage the antitoxins will cause.”

  “Like chemotherapy,” she supplied lamely. “Kill the cancer and hope nothing else dies with it.”

  “Essentially. Now, you must prepare yourself, my Lady . . . some of the substances in the kit may make things worse for a short while. It will not kill him, of course, but it will hurt. It might be best if you left the room for this.”

  Miranda shook her head and struggled to her feet. “No,” she said stubbornly. “I want to be here. I can’t leave him alone.”

  Mo knew better than to contradict a Queen, so he went back to his work. David’s vital signs were erratic; a vampire’s pulse and blood pressure were low compared to a human’s, but his had dropped almost to nothing. The only thing that reassured her that he wasn’t dying was that she could still feel him, his warm presence in her mind where it belonged, and though it was weakened it showed no sign of letting go.

  Bu
t he was in pain. His brain was bleeding . . . if they didn’t get the poison out of his body soon, the damage might take weeks to heal, and the brain was such a delicate organ, what if . . . she imagined him losing some part of his vast intellect, even temporarily, and helpless tears flooded her eyes. Aside from the horror of it, it would leave the South vulnerable if anyone found out the Prime was mentally compromised.

  She half stumbled to the bedside and pulled up a chair, sinking into it and reaching for the hand that they hadn’t run the IV into. On the other side, Jackie, one of the nurses, was setting up the bag of blood mixed with a half-dozen specially treated virulent substances, both natural and human created. Mo informed Miranda matter-of-factly that it included tetrodotoxin, botulinum, and dioxin, which were all known to affect vampires strongly. Botulinum was the most agonizing; it passed through fairly quickly but caused such excruciating pain that the victim often snapped his spine spasming before he could metabolize it. The other toxins weren’t as painful but would take about an hour total to break down.

  Miranda’s eyes, blurred with tears, were locked on her husband’s ashen face and the blood that had marred its flawless features. “Give me something to clean the blood off,” she said quietly, but she knew everyone heard her. Someone pressed a damp cloth into her hand.

  At the touch of the fabric, David’s eyes fluttered open and she could feel him trying to focus on her.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m here . . . and you’re going to be all right.”

  He couldn’t answer. His eyes rolled back, and he was no longer aware of her presence. She kept at her work, concentrating on wiping the blood away so she wouldn’t lose her sanity. She tried to project comforting energy, but she was so scared she had started to go numb.

  Gentle but strong hands took her shoulders and guided her back into her chair.

  “Easy,” Faith said. “You’ve got to ground, Miranda, and reinforce your shields. You’re freaking out the mortals.”