Shadowflame

by Dianne Sylvan

  “That is ridiculous,” David responded. “Amulets, spells—there’s no such thing.”

  Deven chuckled. “Darling, sometimes I think it’s a good thing you’re so pretty.”

  David looked like he was about to leap up and throttle Deven, but he didn’t. “Tell us what you came to tell us, then, and get the hell out of my house.”

  Deven sat back, retrieving his whiskey. “You’re angry.”

  “Damn right I am! I’ve known you almost a hundred years, and you never told me you were running the most notorious network of assassins in the world. You had a spy in my Haven all this time, and you’ve had your dirty little hands in every aspect of our lives. For all I know everything you’re telling me now is a lie. You even broke into this house and got past my guards—”

  “I Misted,” Deven said simply. “This isn’t exactly Hogwarts, you know. You might want to adjust your sensors in some way to account for the abilities of a Prime, although I doubt you have to worry about anyone else sneaking in here solo.”

  Then he rose, taking out his phone. “As to why I’m here . . . I brought you this.”

  He held up the phone so the Pair could see the screen: a map with a single red dot in its center.

  “This is where you’ll find Marja Ovaska,” Deven told them. “Thanks to Volundr’s information and Lalita’s excellent investigative work, I finally managed to pin down her location yesterday. I didn’t want to trust this information to e-mail, so as soon as I could, I flew in. I want to be there when you find her. At sunset I’ll take you there, and assuming she isn’t on to us, you can kill her yourself.”

  “Why should we trust you?” David wanted to know.

  “Trust me, don’t trust me, whatever suits you. But if you don’t act on this information, more people will die, up to and including both of you. Help me to help you, David. I made this mess. Help me clean it up.”

  “You’re giving yourself too much credit,” Miranda muttered. “Marja made her own choices.”

  “So did Sophie,” Deven replied, “but you still feel guilty for her death.”

  Miranda nodded slowly, then said to David, “He’s telling the truth.”

  David looked at her. “You’re sure.”

  “I can feel it, David. Besides . . . he came here alone, and it’s dawn. He knew he couldn’t escape—there’s nowhere to go until sunset. He put himself into our hands willingly.”

  Deven asked politely, “Would it make you feel better to cuff me and throw me in a cell?”

  “I’d like to throw you out into the sunlight,” David snapped. “But I trust Miranda’s instincts. If she says you’re telling the truth, I believe her.”

  Miranda listened silently, feeling numb from the mind outward, as David called in their door guards to escort Deven and Lali to a nearby guest suite and station as many warriors as they could spare at the entrance.

  “Your weapons,” David said flatly.

  Deven looked at him for a long minute, then reached into his coat and began removing blades, handing them to the Elite who had come in to essentially arrest him. First his sword, then another shorter one, four knives of various lengths, two hilted throwing stakes, and a talon-shaped blade he wore in a slit near his heart that Miranda recognized—Sophie had had one just like it.

  Lalita had only her Elite sword, a stake on her belt, and a single standard-issue folding knife. David let her keep her com for the time being, but Miranda knew he would put a network lock on it so her access would be limited.

  “Is that all?” David asked.

  Deven, completely unfazed at being disarmed, said, “Care to frisk me?”

  Miranda knew better, and she assumed so did David, than to think that they had all of Deven’s weapons, but David didn’t push; in reality if Deven wanted to get out of the room he didn’t need a sword. Even without Misting, he was still stronger and faster than any of them; he had spent the last seven centuries making himself into a weapon. Surrendering his toys to David was purely symbolic.

  One of the Elite started to step toward Deven, but Deven fixed him with a look, and the guard fell back. Deven nodded to the guard to lead the way.

  “Look to your Queen,” Deven said to David as they left. “Get her some caffeine and blood before she passes out.”

  David pulled his eyes from the Prime to Miranda, who started to protest that she was fine, but she found she was simply too tired to speak. She shook her head silently, not sure what she was denying, exactly; but between one breath and the next David was pressing a bottle of Coke into her hand and calling Esther to bring her blood. It seemed like days ago she’d fed last . . . had it really been only a few hours since she and Kat had been at Kerbey Lane? Everything had changed so fast.

  Almost as soon as Deven and Lali were led away, Faith came in, looking utterly confounded by the whole situation. “What in the world is going on, Sire?” she asked. “I got an e-mail from Lali resigning her post, and now Deven’s here in some kind of custody?”

  David had his head in his hands, Deven’s sword lying across his lap. “Sit down, Second,” he said hollowly. “I have one hell of a briefing for you.”

  Just before sunset, the Prime and Queen dressed silently, each strapping on as many weapons as they could comfortably wear. Miranda pulled her hair back from her face in a tight ponytail and wore the same kind of clothing she had the night she and Sophie had joined in the battle at the Haven.

  Miranda paused with her hands on her sword . . . Sophie’s sword. It was the only blade she’d ever felt comfortable wearing, and it had been on her hip every time she went into the city since that first battle. She had used it to take the heads of the last few Blackthorn and had fought the assassin—Marja—with it. Miranda stared down at the shining steel, thinking back, wondering if there had been a moment when she might have detected an ulterior motive in Sophie’s actions . . . but Sophie’s act, however much of it had been an act, had been flawless.

  David put his hand on hers. “She chose to fight with you when she could have run back to her lover and disappeared. In the end she cared enough about you to put her own life on the line. That means something, beloved.”

  Miranda looked him in the eyes. “So does what Deven did,” she told him. “I know you’re angry, but if you let this end your friendship you’ll regret it forever.”

  David turned away, buckling his belt. “I’ll think about that after we deal with Ovaska.”

  Miranda went to the mantel and lifted Deven’s sword down from where David had left all of the Prime’s confiscated weapons. She held it up to the firelight—Jonathan had been right, she could see the insignia of the Order of Eleusis, the same symbol that was on the note Deven had given Prime Horak, worked into the ornate carving that covered the blade. It was a beautiful sword, about the same size and weight as Sophie’s, but a little shorter and built for a smaller hand.

  There was, she noticed, some kind of writing on the other side near the hilt, but she was fairly certain it was in Gaelic. “Do you know what this means?” she asked.

  David glanced at the script. “Probably its name. Deven names all of his swords.”

  “You don’t read Gaelic?”

  “No. I speak it, but I don’t read it.”

  She offered it to him. “We need to give them their weapons back. We don’t know what we’re walking into tonight.”

  He pondered the blade, saying almost to himself, “I’ve never seen this one before . . . it must be new. His last one’s name was Ghostlight.” He turned back to Miranda and said, “We should make them both stay here. For all we know, this is all a plan he set up in collusion with Ovaska.”

  Miranda smiled slightly. “You do remember my saying that he was telling us the truth, right?”

  “Someone as old as Deven could fool even your gift, Miranda.”

  “Not likely, baby. You’re the one who told me that empathy is rare enough that it’s hard to protect against and even harder to outwit. Besides, like I said when you fi
rst figured out those stakes came from the West, Deven has no motive to kill us. Even if you take his feelings for you out of the equation, you’re his strongest ally in the Council, and without you the entire balance of power falls apart. I knew in my gut there was a reason that him being the Alpha didn’t make sense to me—turns out it wasn’t because he was the Alpha, but because the Alpha is not our enemy.”

  “I don’t suppose your gut has anything to say about what we’re doing tonight.”

  Miranda drew her awareness into her own mind for a moment to see if her fledgling precognitive gift was offering up any warnings, but mostly she just felt a vague sense of unease, probably the same thing she’d feel any time she was walking into a completely unknown situation to confront someone who wanted her dead. “No.”

  “We could send the Elite by themselves to check it out first,” David reasoned.

  “Do you really want to risk her getting away again? She was trained by a Prime—and not just any Prime. She could take down any of our Elite, even Faith. We don’t know how long that amulet of hers is going to keep working, so we might not be able to track her if she escapes. I think we should stick to the plan.”

  David nodded; she knew he agreed with her, he was just reluctant, and understandably so, to risk more lives in the pursuit of Marja Ovaska just on Deven’s word.

  Miranda wanted to be angry with Deven, too, but for some reason she couldn’t. She understood that David was having a hard time separating the truth from his perception of his former . . . sometimes . . . lover, but perhaps because she didn’t claim to know Deven that well, or like him all that much, she was able to step back and see that as old as Deven was, it was naïve to think he didn’t have secrets. Up until now there had been no reason for Deven’s two worlds to collide, and she knew that he hadn’t decided to reveal himself to them lightly. He didn’t strike her as the kind of person who would overshare when there might be lives at stake. She got the feeling that, cold as he might act, he took responsibility for his agents’ lives and counted their deaths against his own soul.

  That didn’t mean she didn’t have the urge to slap the smug right off his face, but she might give him a pass if his information did bring an end to all of this.

  “Ready?” David asked.

  Miranda took a deep breath. “I think so.”

  “Are you sure you’re up to this? I know last night wore you out—”

  “I slept like the dead,” she assured him gently, kissing his cheek. “And we’ll feed when we get to town. I’ll be fine.”

  He slid his arms around her, and they held on to each other for a while, her head resting on his shoulder precisely where it was meant to.

  “I just want this over with,” he said.

  Miranda sighed . . . a knot of knowledge was forming in her stomach, and she didn’t want it, but she voiced it anyway. “It will be. One way or another this will be resolved by the time you and I come home.”

  David shut the weapons cabinet, and hand in hand they left the suite. Faith fell into step behind them as they took the hallway out of their wing. The Second didn’t say anything—she, too, was troubled, though whether by the thought of going after Ovaska or the realization that Deven had a secret identity, Miranda couldn’t say.

  Four guards stood in a semicircle around the room where Deven and Lali were; it was the same room that Ariana Blackthorn had stayed in, but now it had a range of new security measures built into it, including a separate sensor system and audio surveillance. It was designed to house people who didn’t know they were being watched. So far nothing out of the ordinary had happened; Lali had apparently slept most of the day, and Deven had called Jonathan on his cell phone, but that was it. David had recorded the conversation and said that Deven had let Jonathan know what they planned to do, reassured the Consort he was safe, and that was about it.

  David nodded to the guards, and they moved aside, one of them unlocking the door and swinging it open.

  Deven stepped out with Lali at his back. “Good evening, Lord Prime, my Lady,” he said with measured deference. “Shall we?”

  David looked at Miranda, who inclined her head toward Deven encouragingly.

  David held out Deven’s sword with both hands.

  Deven met his eyes, then took it. As he buckled it on, David motioned for Faith and Aaron to bring forward the rest of Deven and Lali’s weapons.

  “Let’s go,” David said, and led the way out to where Harlan was waiting to take them into the city.

  Warmth and pleasure sang through Miranda’s veins as she climbed back into the car with David sliding in beside her. She licked her lips reflexively, seeking any lingering trace of blood, and spared her husband a smile. His eyes were a ring of silver around dark pupil, still dilated from the hunt, and he leaned over and kissed her lightly.

  Miranda resisted the urge to stick her tongue in David’s mouth just to spite Deven . . . barely. Now wasn’t the time to indulge in her passive-aggressive impulses, and truthfully she didn’t want to make the tension between him and David any worse . . . but the idea was still appealing. Instead she took David’s hand and squeezed it reassuringly.

  Once they were moving again, Deven leaned forward so they could all see the screen of his phone. “Right here,” he said. “It’s an apartment in a small complex off Manor Road. The place looks appropriately seedy. It should be fairly easy to surround. I’d recommend a detail on the roof as well.”

  “Already on their way,” David told him, switching to all-business mode. “I’ve got Faith in the van with two units set to rendezvous with us when we reach the block, and a third coming in armed for roof duty.”

  “Good. The layout is typical of cheap second-floor apartments. Stairs up to a concrete landing. One door with an adjacent window, two windows on the side, no other exits. Lalita’s recon showed that half the building is empty, and this unit here on the first floor is a crack house. We probably don’t have to worry about human interference.”

  David pulled up the sensor grid on his own phone. “There are no other vampires in the building and no signals of any kind coming in or out except for satellite television in the crack house. I’m still not picking her up, if she’s there.”

  “She may not be,” Deven admitted. “I know that’s her home base, but there’s no way to confirm she’s actually there without a direct sighting. At the very least we should find some fun souvenirs.”

  “Are you sure she doesn’t have anything else from Volundr?” Miranda asked. “Other magical weapons like the amulets?”

  “Not to my knowledge. Volundr was pretty forthcoming about the amulets, but he could easily have left something out. The way he talked about it, though, it sounded like crafting the amulets was a huge achievement for him. That kind of thing isn’t easy to make, and it usually involves blood sacrifice at the very least. I doubt he was in the habit of selling that kind of favor—he just didn’t have the psychic strength for that much magic. Either she paid him an outrageous sum for his help, or she was far more persuasive about her cause than I was about mine.”

  “Maybe he bought a shipment of fairy dust from Finland, too,” David suggested.

  Deven gave him a withering look. “If you don’t have anything useful to share with the class, put your head down on your desk.”

  “How about you go to—”

  “Boys,” Miranda said tiredly, “can we save the cockfight for later, please?”

  “At any rate,” Deven went on, glaring at David, “I don’t believe she has anything else like that in her possession, but we can’t rule anything out, so we have to proceed with caution.”

  “Two Primes, a Queen, a Second, a dozen Elite . . . surely we don’t have anything to fear,” Miranda pointed out. “She may be your prodigy, Lord Prime, but she’s still only one woman.”

  “Oh, she’s far more than one woman,” Deven said with a grim smile. “I made sure of that. But between us I think we can take her—the worst that could happen is that she’ll g
et away.”

  The car slowed to a halt, and Harlan said, “Sire, we’re at the rendezvous location.”

  The night was bitterly cold, but at least it wasn’t raining; Miranda felt the temperature distractedly, her body still running hot from feeding. She got out of the car and immediately swept the block with her senses, but all she could detect were Faith and the other Elite arriving on the scene and dispersing to await their orders.

  The three Signets and Faith made their way toward the apartment building in silence, David in the lead, with Miranda at his right hand and Deven at his left. David scrutinized his phone as they walked, then motioned for them to stop just before they came into view of the building.

  “Still no sign,” David said quietly. “The Elite have the place surrounded and the rooftop team is in position. Faith, I want you on the side of the building to block any escape through the windows.”

  “Yes, Sire,” Faith said, and melted into the shadows.

  At the base of the stairs Deven held up his hand for them to wait. “I’ll go in first,” he said. “Wait for my signal.”

  “Why?” Miranda asked.

  “I’m more likely to escape in one piece if it’s a trap.”

  David shook his head. “If she’s got any tech in there, it’s not showing up.”

  Deven smiled grimly. “There are plenty of ways to booby-trap a place like this, and I know for a fact Ovaska knows most of them. I know what to look and listen for. Just stay back until I’m sure.”

  Miranda watched, heart pounding, as he took the stairs quickly without making so much as a footfall’s sound. He pressed his back into the exterior wall beside the door, listening into the darkened apartment.

  As he’d said, the place was a dump. It didn’t look like anyone had lived there for years. There were lights on in the first-floor unit, but the target unit looked uninhabited; Miranda saw that one of the windows was boarded over, and the other had an air conditioner hanging out of it with a ribbon of torn duct tape fluttering in the air. A pile of old newspapers was stacked in front of the door, and one of the apartment numbers was hanging by a single nail.