Shadowflame

by Dianne Sylvan

  “Hmm . . . touché.”

  He stretched out next to her and, still not in a hurry, kissed her lips, eyelids, and nose. “You are so beautiful,” he murmured, running his hand down over her arm, then around to her back to draw her against him. She wrapped one leg around him, gasping as they slid back in together.

  Miranda opened her mind to him, and through their bond they were able to touch and connect to each other completely, one consciousness melting into the other the same way they wound around each other in the sheets, moving in a slow undulation, mingled breath the only sound in the room besides the crackling fire.

  Yes . . . this. It was so easy to forget what they really were, with flesh and bone and space in the way, but beneath it all, in a place where pain and sorrow could never reach, they were one, a single soul that had chosen, for whatever reason, to spend this incarnation walking the earth in two bodies. Here in this place there was no separation, no names . . . but there was joy in duality sometimes, a beauty in moving from separation into unity then back again, the intensity building from a reverent give-and-take to something wild.

  This time the tectonic shift hit them both. They clung to each other, breathing in tandem, drenched in each other’s sweat, tasting each other’s blood.

  There was no need to say she loved him—right now words would only force a limit on reality when the truth was simply there soaking into every cell. He laid his head on her shoulder, and she threaded her fingers through his damp hair, her other hand tracing the lines of ink on his back she had already memorized.

  Finally, knowing that she wouldn’t be comfortable with him asleep on top of her, he shifted off, landing with a grunt to her right.

  She looked over at him, grinned, and said, “Three.”

  Thirteen

  “What do you know about the Firstborn?”

  Faith peered quizzically down at David. “It’s an old vampire legend,” she said, handing him the wrench he indicated with his free hand. She had to speak a little loudly to be heard over the bump of the garage’s stereo bass. “Everybody’s sire tells it—if you go back far enough in our history, you find references to the vampires who weren’t sired, but born. Usually people say they’re spawn of Lucifer or Hades or some other dark god. They’re like the bogeyman. Behave, or the Firstborn will get you. But it’s a myth, like you told Volundr . . . right?”

  “As far as I know,” David replied, sliding back under the car. “I just thought it was odd that he brought it up, of all the things he could have said.”

  “He was playing on the fact that vampire history is your pet cause,” Faith reasoned. “I’m sure he’d heard that you’ve poked around for information over the years. A man like him hears everything, even living in the armpit of nowhere.”

  “I suppose.” Faith heard clunking noises, and a moment later the Prime emerged again, handing her the wrench. “Hand me the seven-sixteenths ratchet wrench, please.”

  “Only if you’ll turn the stereo down.”

  David sighed. “Philistine.”

  “Sire . . . I hate to tell you this, but you’re awfully white to be listening to Tupac.”

  David rolled his eyes, then made a twisting motion with his hand, and the volume of the music dropped to a more reasonable level. “Unless all you listen to are bamboo flutes, Second, you can fuck right off.”

  Faith stared down at the row of shiny tools on the cart. “Which one’s a ratchet again?”

  “The one that—never mind.”

  Faith watched as one of the tools rose off the cart and flew over to the Prime’s outstretched hand. She had long ago lost the ability to be shocked or mystified by his talent; now she merely said, “Why didn’t you just do that to begin with?”

  He shrugged. “You were standing right there.”

  “And why aren’t you having a mechanic do this?”

  David made a dismissive noise. “These cars are loaded with proprietary technology, Faith. I’m not letting anyone get their grubby hands on it unless they’re vetted by security. Right now there’s nobody in the Elite qualified to do it—let’s put that on the list for the next batch of recruits, come to think of it. Someone with automotive repair experience as well as computer programming skills who I can train to do routine maintenance. Familiarity with solar power systems would be a plus.”

  “Yes, that’s a combination you often find in warriors,” Faith remarked wryly.

  “Which is exactly why I’m doing this myself. Now, did you have an update for me?”

  “Yes and no. Two of the four names on Volundr’s list have alibis for all four attacks. One, Deven is still trying to track down for questioning.”

  “And the fourth?”

  “Dead,” Faith told him. “Cut down in a gang skirmish in Seattle two years ago.”

  “Damn,” David muttered; he started to push himself back under the car but paused and said, “We’re really screwing the pooch on this one, aren’t we?”

  Faith laughed loudly enough to startle one of the servants, who, nearby, was waxing one of the other cars. “Where on earth did you hear that phrase?” she asked.

  “From Miranda. Where else?”

  Faith wanted to ask how things were with the Queen, but she had learned to tread lightly there in the past month. She accompanied the Prime on his various forays into the city and on whatever mission he gave her, and tried to be as useful as possible, remembering what Jonathan had said. But neither of the Pair seemed inclined to open up to her. David simply wasn’t the sharing type, but Miranda had become strangely quiet lately, which wasn’t like her. Faith knew she’d talked to Jonathan a few times but wasn’t spending as much time with Kat as before, and she seemed . . . a bit lost. The Pair were sleeping together again and working hard to put what had happened behind them, but still . . . there was something new and sad in the Queen’s eyes, as if the first veil of illusion had been lifted and she found herself a tiny bit further from her mortal life than before.

  Faith didn’t envy her the next few years. That was the hardest part about becoming a vampire; in a lot of ways it just seemed like a new and different lifestyle, but if you had any ties left to humanity they were eventually severed one by one, either by time’s incessant decay or by the hard reality that though the human world and the Shadow World might exist within the same cities, in truth they were a thousand miles apart.

  Speak of the devil: The side door of the garage opened and Miranda’s red head poked in. “David?”

  The Prime responded to the sound of her voice like Pavlov’s dog, and Faith heard him drop his wrench on the concrete as he rolled out from under the car and sat up.

  Miranda gave him an appreciative look; he was dirty and sweaty, had engine grease smeared on his face, and wore a snug, ratty T-shirt bearing the slogan Han Shot First. Even Faith, who tried very hard not to look at her boss that way, had to admire the sight. The biceps alone were worth staring at.

  He smiled at Miranda. “Yes, my Lady?”

  She smiled back. For a second it almost seemed to Faith as if nothing had ever gone wrong. “We got a call from Signet Air,” the Queen said. “Janousek’s flight landed in Newark thirty minutes ago. He’s staying there for the morning. He’ll arrive in Austin tomorrow evening at five fifty and be here at the Haven by eight.”

  “Good, thank you,” the Prime replied. He looked up at Faith. “Is everything ready?”

  “Yes, Sire. I’ve got the usual detail to meet the plane, and his suite is prepared. We’re not anticipating any problems with this one.”

  “That’s exactly why we need to be ready for problems. The last thing we need is this assassin going after Janousek on his way from the airport.”

  David returned his gaze to Miranda. “What do you have planned for the rest of the evening? Are you going into town?”

  “Not tonight. Grizzly and the producers are mixing this week—they’re going to call me when they have something for me to listen to. I’ve got a gig Wednesday but until then I kept
things clear for Janousek’s visit. Tonight I’ve got yoga.”

  “When did you take up yoga?” the Prime asked.

  “Tonight, possibly. Lali has been giving Cora classes, and she asked if I wanted to join in.” Miranda raised an eyebrow and smiled. “I’m sure you wouldn’t object to my being more flexible.”

  “And on that note,” Faith said, “I’m leaving.”

  “Are you on duty all night?” Miranda asked, stopping the Second. “You could come along—Lali says that it’s a perfect complementary practice to all our fight training.”

  “No, thank you,” Faith replied with a grin. “I tried it once and ended up with my legs stuck behind my head. Lali actually had to come undo me. How about you, Sire?”

  David was laughing, probably at the mental image Faith had given him. “That’s quite all right. I have two more cars to work on and then a conference call with Lieutenants Craig, Laveau, and Nguyen at eleven. After that it’s back into the network upgrade. Oh—and I owe Novotny a call. He wants to run some additional tests on the hands.”

  “What kind of tests?” Miranda wanted to know.

  “He finally got a full analysis back on the poison and wants to see if the assassin also used it on Jake and Denise.”

  “Do you think she did?” Faith asked.

  “Yes and no,” David said, reaching under the car for his discarded wrench and returning it to the cart. “If she’d poisoned Denise, there wouldn’t have been nearly so much blood at the crime scene—Denise put up a hell of a fight for a human, and that toxin would have killed her before she could even struggle. But she might have poisoned Jake to bring him down before cutting off his hand. That’s Novotny’s theory, anyway. But he wanted to run the list of parameters by me first.”

  Miranda leaned her hip against the car, one hand trailing over its glossy finish. “I hate that we’re stuck waiting for this bitch to make the next move, David. Something has to give.”

  “I know, beloved. I’m hoping that decreasing the network’s cycle time from five seconds to three will give us something.”

  “What about the raw sensor data?” she asked. “How far back does it go?”

  “Ninety days,” he replied. “Why?”

  “What if you compared the readings at the time of each attack and looked for blips?”

  “You said there were no blips,” Faith pointed out.

  David nodded. “There weren’t on the network itself. But when something moves past a sensor, it records an array of information. The network is calibrated to collect more than two dozen parameters, but only the important ones—height, weight, temperature, and speed—are analyzed, and then the system displays only combinations of readings that indicate a vampire’s presence. If something corresponds to, say, a toddler or a German shepherd, it doesn’t show up on the grid. But all the raw data is dumped every ten minutes into the backup server. There’s a vast amount of data, so it overwrites every ninety days, otherwise we wouldn’t have nearly enough drive space to store it all. Most of it is just noise.”

  Faith nodded. “Based on observations from you, Prime Deven, and Kat, our killer is totally average for a vampire, although she is damned fast.”

  Miranda said, “Something about her keeps her from showing on the grid. But the sensors might have picked up something else, something nonvampiric.”

  “Maybe she’s a werewolf,” Faith said, grinning at the dirty looks they both shot her. “Kidding.”

  “I did a search on the raw data right after Jake went missing and got nothing,” David mused, “but once I get the upgrade done, the enhanced sensitivity and processing speed may produce something. I’ll try it again. It certainly can’t hurt at this point.”

  “I can’t believe that with all the technology we have and all the brain power working on the problem, we can’t find a single damn thing,” said Faith irritably. “Who the hell is this woman? What could she have that makes her harder to find than the Blackthorn?”

  “It could be magic,” Miranda said.

  David laughed. “Of course. She’s a magical werewolf. Why didn’t I see it before?”

  “Don’t laugh,” Miranda admonished him. “You don’t know how everything in this world works.”

  “Beloved, there’s no such thing as magic.”

  She gave him a look that Faith almost laughed at. Few people ever seemed to think that David was capable of saying something stupid.

  Miranda pointed wordlessly at her Signet.

  The Prime considered that for a second. “I don’t think it’s magic. I think there’s some technology to it that we simply don’t understand yet. That’s what magic is, in the end.”

  Again, Miranda gave him that look. “So you think that a glowing ruby that has the power to pick out your soul mate has a tiny little hamster on a wheel inside it? What about our psychic abilities, or Misting, or the fact that if one half of a Pair dies, the other does, too? What is that if it’s not magic?”

  He shrugged. “Physics is a mysterious thing, but it’s not mystical.”

  Miranda shot Faith an amused glance, then said to her husband, “Whatever you say, dear.” She leaned down and kissed the top of his head, earning a sweet smile. “I’m off to learn the Badass-asana.”

  After she had gone, David asked Faith, “Was she mocking me just now?”

  Faith grinned. “I think it was more a case of humoring you than mocking you.”

  The Prime didn’t seem bothered by that; in fact, quite the opposite. He looked relieved. “That’s a good sign . . . isn’t it?”

  Faith stood out of the way while he rolled the tool cart and the flat thing he’d been lying on—a creeper, she thought it was called—over to the next car on the row. There were eight vehicles in the garage right now as a nasty autumn storm was supposed to move in sometime after two that morning. Faith’s little red hybrid was at the far end, parked next to Miranda’s Prius. There were two vans present of the three that shuttled patrol teams to and from the city; those, she guessed, were the ones David needed to work on next. The Town Car that Harlan drove was the Prime’s ride of choice, but there was also a limo, a Rolls, and a Bentley, the three of which were rarely used as David hadn’t converted them to solar yet. The two vans were gas/electric hybrids.

  It had never really occurred to Faith before coming to serve the South that vampires should have an interest in the environment, but David had wisely decided that immortality would be far less pleasant on a burned-out husk of a planet, so one of the first things he had done upon taking the Signet was to put the entire Haven complex on solar power. Aside from the ecological impact, it helped keep the Haven concealed; they were completely off the city power grid, a self-contained village of vampires out in the Hill Country. If they could have grown their own blood, David would probably have the place running like the world’s weirdest hippie commune.

  “I think so,” Faith responded, not sure what Miranda’s comment was a sign of, exactly, but wanting to be supportive.

  David moved on to the first of the two black vans, settling himself on the creeper again. Faith did as Miranda had done, leaning on the side of the van watching wrenches float from the cart to the Prime, who dragged a plastic tub underneath the van and set to unscrewing something—the oil filter? Faith cheerfully admitted she didn’t know a thing about cars.

  “You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself,” Faith heard herself say before she could stop.

  He rolled back out and looked at her. “Yes, I should. What I did was indefensible.”

  “But you didn’t hide it from her; you stepped up and accepted the consequences. Believe me, a lot of men wouldn’t. You could have blamed it on Deven—there’d be no love lost there. But you took responsibility and you’re doing everything you can to make it right. There’s only so much good that hair shirt is going to do you, Sire, before you just have to stop castigating yourself and move on.”

  He frowned. “Are you saying that it’s . . . no big deal?”

  “No.
You fucked up big-time.”

  “Good. As long as we’re on the same page.”

  “I’m just saying that if the woman you love doesn’t hate you for what you did, then you shouldn’t either.”

  He half smiled. “I’ll take that under advisement, Second.”

  Faith rolled her eyes and started to leave the garage, but David said, “Thank you, Faith,” and she turned back to him one more time.

  “I appreciate that you’ve stood by me,” he went on. “By both of us. I’m sure you were angry at me for a while, too, but it didn’t interfere with our working relationship, and for that I’m grateful.”

  Faith nodded, bowed. “Just don’t do it again,” she told the Prime, “or I’ll have to castrate you with a seven-sixteenths ratchet wrench.”

  The Prime looked at the tool in his hand and laughed, arching an eyebrow. “Seven-sixteenths wouldn’t be nearly big enough.”

  Faith snorted. “Too much information, Sire. I’ll take my leave now unless you need anything else.”

  “Nothing further. Dismissed.”

  He disappeared back underneath the van, and Faith left him to it, heading out to an advanced combat training session with several of the newer Elite.

  Outside, she looked up at the lowering black sky where thick storm clouds hung amid the expectant, electric feel of an oncoming torrent. The wind had kicked up and was whirling leaves all over the gardens. Faith could smell the rain and the lightning and hoped the servants had all the windows shut; they’d been opening some of the groundfloor panes at night to let the fresh, crisp air in between cold fronts, to keep the Haven from feeling stuffy with so many fireplaces going.

  A chill crawled over her skin. The weather had been building toward this storm for days . . . and as the first few drops began to fall, she hurried from the garage to the training building, hoping to avoid the worst of the rain.

  Cora was more than one hundred years old and had spent all but eighteen of them trying very hard to divorce herself from her body, teaching herself to run away inside her mind so that she was distant, safe from Hart’s perversions. The thought that she might one day want to reclaim her violated flesh and learn to live in it, or perhaps even enjoy physical sensation or, God forbid, sensuality had always been depressingly laughable.