Shadowflame

by Dianne Sylvan

  Deven reached sideways to close his hand around the doorknob and gave it an experimental turn. He frowned; Miranda heard the knob turning freely. The door was unlocked.

  With his other hand, Deven drew one of his stakes, clearly not trusting the situation any more than Miranda did.

  Slowly, a tiny bit at a time, he opened the door, exposing a darkened entryway. Miranda listened hard, but she couldn’t hear any movement inside. She glanced at David, who was watching Deven intently, the sensor grid up on his phone showing the positions of all the Elite.

  In a motion almost too rapid for Miranda to see, Deven darted into the apartment. Miranda stared at the doorway for a long minute with her heart in her throat, waiting for the sounds of a struggle or at least conversation.

  Finally Deven reappeared in the doorway and shook his head.

  “Shit,” David muttered. “She’s not there.” He addressed his com: “Suspect is not present. Hold your positions; I repeat, do not approach the building until it’s cleared. Faith, give me a visual inspection of the building exterior.”

  The light in his phone blinked as Faith beamed in images from her camera; Miranda leaned over and looked, but there was nothing to see, just stills of the apartment’s windows and the alley from different angles.

  Miranda looked back up at the door, where Deven had again gone inside. “I’m going in,” she said. “Are you coming?”

  “Yes,” David replied, standing still, eyes on the screen. “I’m right behind you. Let’s have a look. Maybe we’ll get something out of this wild-goose chase.”

  The stairs were rickety wood, and Miranda had no idea how Deven had managed to scale them without making any noise; she kept her steps light and still elicited a few creaks.

  She peered carefully into the apartment. It smelled musty and damp . . . but not as if anyone lived there, human or otherwise. “Deven?”

  “Hold on . . .”

  Miranda watched the Prime move slowly around the room, looking for signs of something she couldn’t see; he ran his hands along the windowsills, rapped carefully in several places on the drywall with his knuckles, then paused.

  “Well,” he said, “I think we’ve found the right place.”

  The Queen also looked around for any sign of habitation, but all her senses were telling her nobody had dwelled there in a long time. Even a vampire would leave behind some sense of her presence, and if Ovaska had stayed here for long, Miranda should have felt the echoes of her emotions, a vague sensory impression from buildup over time.

  Miranda picked her way across the refuse-scattered floor and joined the Prime where he stood at a coffee table in front of a couch that had spewed half its stuffing all around. “Whoa.”

  The table was covered in papers: photographs of various locations around the Shadow District; images of Kat leaving work, taken from a distance; a map with the location of Drew’s school highlighted in neon yellow as well as Mel’s Bar, Denise’s office building, and the Black Door.

  “We should get the rest of the Elite in here to tear the place apart for more evidence,” Miranda said, lifting her wrist. “Star-three—”

  “Wait,” Deven said shortly, grabbing her arm and pulling her com away from her mouth.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Deven’s head snapped up, and he looked around, something dawning on his face that left a burning chasm of fear in Miranda’s stomach. “We have to get out of here.”

  “What—”

  Deven’s voice was urgent. “No agent of mine would leave evidence lying out in plain sight unless she knew we would see it. She knew we were coming. Go!”

  He pushed her toward the door, just as David all but shouted from her wrist: “Get out of there! A signal was just sent from the—”

  Miranda ran for the exit, and no sooner had her face hit the cold air than she was jerked back into something hard—Deven seized her by the shoulders and shoved them both forward, over the railing, twisting in midair to pull her against his chest.

  The force of the explosion behind them threw them both through the air and into the street below.

  Miranda felt her shoulder hit the ground and crack beneath her, a dull but fierce pain engulfing her as Deven landed on top of her, shielding her body from flying debris. The noise was deafening—Miranda was sure she screamed, but she could hear nothing but the thunder of the apartment’s walls fragmenting and flying outward at lightning speed.

  She felt pain throughout her body, both from her own wounds and from David’s. Her shoulder was in agony, and something was stabbing her in the leg—no, David’s leg.

  “Fuck,” she heard Deven grumble near her ear. “That was so stupid.”

  “David,” she moaned. “David! He’s hurt—get off me!”

  “Calm down,” Deven commanded harshly, not budging. “He’s fine. You’re still alive, aren’t you? Hold still—we’re pinned underneath something.”

  He shifted on top of her, and she became aware of a weight pressing down on her that wasn’t him; he was, she realized, lighter than she had expected, probably lighter than her. She smelled scorched wood, so they were probably wedged under part of a wall. Beyond Deven’s body she could hear chaos—Elite yelling, sirens wailing in the distance, Faith’s voice giving orders. The odor of electrical fire and melted plastic and metal were thick in the air.

  “Miranda!” David said from her com. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay,” she panted around the pain in her shoulder. “We’re stuck under something. Where are you?”

  David sounded breathless but otherwise okay, the panic leaving his voice once he heard hers. “Near the stairs. I was halfway up when I saw the signal—I made it to the lee of the building and everything blew out over me, including you. I’m surrounded by debris and have a piece of rebar in my leg—stay where you are. Whatever you do, don’t try to Mist if you’re hurt. You won’t be able to focus and you might scatter yourself.”

  She could feel his fear, for her and for Deven, and she probably would have been afraid, too, but she was so relieved that he was all right that there was no room for any other emotion.

  “Can you move your legs apart?” Deven asked through gritted teeth.

  Miranda obliged slowly and painfully. “Probably the first time you’ve ever asked a woman that,” she said.

  Deven snorted, then made a strained sound and pushed upward, one of his knees between hers using the ground as leverage. She felt the weight on them lifting, slowly at first, then angled hard off to the side.

  Deven fell down next to her, breathing hard. “Stupid,” he said again. “Should have known better . . . but I was sure we had her. The intel was good . . . 5.23 has never been wrong.”

  He forced himself up onto his knees, and Miranda saw that he was bloody and disheveled. As she started to push herself up, too, it felt like something in her shoulder tore, and she cried out. Deven put his hands on her and nudged her back down.

  “Lie still,” he said. “I’ll fix your shoulder, but you have to give me a minute to catch my breath.”

  She nodded, trying to stay grounded and keep her breathing steady while Deven looked around them at the demolished scene. “We’re all the way across the street,” he commented, sounding impressed. “Whatever she used to blow the building had no smell, no vibration . . . I’d love to know what it was. It looks like the whole building went up . . . be glad you can’t see it yet. There are . . . a lot of bodies. Humans . . . from the crack house. I don’t see any Elite among them.”

  “Faith’s okay,” Miranda managed. “Have you . . .”

  “Sire . . .”

  The voice coming from Miranda’s com was hoarse and faint, but she knew it. “Lali?” she asked. “Lali, where are you?”

  A cough. “Sire . . . my Lord Alpha . . . I’m sorry. I failed you.”

  Deven leaned over toward Miranda, who held up her wrist. “No, Lalita.”

  “I was sure of the intel . . . must have missed something . . . I fa
iled you . . .”

  Miranda was astonished to see something shining in Deven’s eyes. He replied to Lali in a language Miranda didn’t understand, and Lali said something almost too quiet to hear. Then silence.

  “David?” Miranda asked urgently. “Do you have Lali’s signal?”

  She heard him take a deep breath. “She’s gone, beloved.”

  Miranda fought back tears as she asked Deven, “What did you tell her?”

  The Prime looked away. “I told her I was proud of her.”

  “And she said good-bye,” Miranda concluded, wiping her eyes with the hand of her uninjured arm.

  Deven started to speak, then clapped one hand against the side of his neck. “What the hell . . .”

  Miranda felt something small and hard hit her injured shoulder, and she whimpered, groping with her other hand and finding a thin cylinder of wood jutting out from her coat.

  She looked up, alarmed, and saw Deven pull an identical object from his neck.

  Then he gasped and fell forward, catching himself on his hands with a choked groan. She watched in horror as blood began to drip from his mouth and nose . . . he sucked in a hoarse breath, eyes clamping shut, raising both hands to his head.

  It was only when the pain gripped Miranda’s skull that the realization came to her . . . and by then it was too late . . . She was already losing consciousness, the pain engulfing her so completely that she couldn’t even scream.

  Seventeen

  “Miranda!”

  David fought his way back to consciousness gasping, choking around the pain that racked his entire body as the antitoxin kit had its way with him.

  “Sire, please . . . you must hold still.”

  Blinding light sent new flashes of agony through his head, but he opened his eyes anyway, struggling against the arms that held him down until he recognized the tense, pale faces hovering over his.

  Faith. Mo. Jackie.

  Clinic.

  Poison.

  Miranda.

  “Where is she?” he demanded, his voice thin and raspy as if he’d been screaming—which, given the aftershocks still rolling through his body, was a distinct possibility. “Damn it, what happened?”

  He tried to sit up again, and again they held him down. “Sire . . .” Faith’s eyes were worried, but her voice was steady. “Tell me your name.”

  He shook his head. “Let me up.”

  “Not until I know you don’t have brain damage. Name.”

  Rolling his eyes—which hurt like hell—he said, “David Solomon, Prime of the Southern United States. You’re Faith, my Second in Command. This is the Anna Hausmann Memorial Clinic. Now tell me what the fuck happened!”

  “We don’t know,” Faith replied as Mo moved over and fussed with a monitor. “We got you out of the debris and pulled you off the rebar, and you were in the middle of giving orders when someone darted you—Ovaska, I assume. You went down bleeding. She must have gotten all three of you within seconds of each other.”

  “All three . . . oh, God.” David sought inside himself, trying to sense Miranda through the energy that linked them, but though he sensed she was alive, he had no sense of where she was or if she was hurt. He could always find her—he could be at her side in seconds, anywhere—but now something was blocking that knowledge, something that felt almost like . . .

  “A shield,” he murmured. “She’s under some kind of shield . . . a powerful one. If she were at full strength, she might be able to break it, but if she was poisoned, too, she’s weak.”

  “You can’t find her,” Faith said quietly, realizing what he meant. “Not psychically.”

  The fear was so thick in his mind he could barely think. “Did any of you see anything?”

  Anguished, Faith shook her head. “I had just sent Aaron and two others to find them and bring them back when you were hit—by the time we realized you weren’t the only one, they were gone.”

  “They . . . she got Deven, too?”

  Faith nodded. “No trace of either of them at the scene. She moves fast.”

  Now David sat up slowly, and the others allowed him. He leaned his head in his hands, trying to force himself into some kind of mental clarity around the lingering pain from the poison, the antitoxins, and the underlying terror of being so far from his Queen, unable to sense her the way he should. In four months he had already grown to depend on their bond; it was a constant low hum in his mind and heart, like the white noise of a nearby but unseen ocean. That tide of energy sustained them both . . . with it blocked, and the two of them separated, it would be only a matter of days before they both went insane . . . if they even had that long.

  “Faith,” David said softly.

  “Yes, Sire?”

  He looked up into her eyes. “I don’t know what to do.”

  A flash of fear—as uncharacteristic as his helplessness—crossed her face. Before she could speak again, one of the Elite standing guard at the door said, “Sire, you have a visitor.”

  Not really caring, David waved a hand, and the clinic door swung open.

  A tall, broad figure ducked through the doorway, his dark gray trench coat swirling rather theatrically as a blast of cold wind accompanied him in from the streets. The light caught the glowing emerald at his throat.

  Jonathan strode up to the gurney where David had been treated and crossed his arms, regarding the Prime gravely. “Now would be a really good time for one of your brilliant ideas,” the Consort said.

  “Thank God you’re here,” Faith told him, squeezing his arm. “We need all hands on deck.”

  Jonathan gave her a smile that was both genuine and distracted by his own worries. “They’ve been shielded from us,” the Consort confirmed. “I can feel Deven . . . somewhere, but I can’t tell where, or what shape he’s in. Except . . . I know he’s in pain. I felt it the minute he was poisoned.” Jonathan moved to the side to let Mo come in to remove David’s IV. “What will happen to them without the antitoxins?”

  It was Mo who answered. “They will recover, but they will suffer first,” he said. “Probably for much longer than the Prime has . . . although, Sire, I suspect this killer has adjusted her dosage, because it affected you for only about twenty minutes once we got the kit into your IV. Last time it took over an hour. I would venture to guess that they’ll have two full hours of pain before the poison runs its course.”

  “That gives us two hours to find them,” Jonathan said. “She won’t kill them until then—otherwise she would have already. She wants them alert, so they’ll know it’s her.”

  “That first attack on me was a trial run,” David realized. “I thought it was a self-contained attempt to knock me down so she could get to Miranda through me, and I was wrong. The first time she shot me was to see how the compound would affect a Signet—she just wanted to test it on me before the big show.”

  “All right,” Jonathan said. “We need a plan. List the pertinents, please, Faith.”

  Faith glanced at David, who merely nodded; Jonathan could take charge if he felt up to it. David certainly didn’t, not while he was still so foggy from the drugs. Jonathan and Deven had been Paired much longer than David and Miranda, and so they knew how to manage the separation better; Jonathan certainly seemed calm and rational for the moment.

  “Last night we acted on Deven’s intel and invaded the suspect’s lair. Said lair was in fact wired to explode via a remote signal, which Prime David detected on the network just before it went off, giving him time to duck and cover. Queen Miranda and Prime Deven were thrown across the street underneath a segment of wall. We freed David from his entanglement and started to find the others, but Ovaska shot all three with toxin-loaded darts—seeing the Prime go down distracted the rest of us enough that she was able to make off with Miranda and Deven unseen.”

  “How did you get to Texas so fast?” David asked Jonathan.

  The Consort gave him a You really aren’t that stupid, are you? look. “I was here the whole time,” he repl
ied. “I checked into the Driskill while Deven came to the Haven to see you. I also brought twelve of my Elite—they’re outside ready to assist.”

  “How many casualties were there from the explosion?” David asked Faith.

  “Two Elite dead, five wounded; the wounded are all here at the Hausmann and have already healed, except Elite Seventy-three, who lost an arm.”

  “And the dead?”

  Faith took a deep breath. “Aaron and Lali.”

  David looked over at Jonathan, who was clearly stricken by the news. “So you know all the agents, too?”

  Jonathan shot David a warning look. “Mind how loudly you speak,” he snapped. “And no, I don’t know them all, but I did know Lalita.”

  “I’ll talk about whatever I damn well please in my own territory,” David returned coldly. “If it weren’t for your Prime’s lies and secrecy, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  “That’s beside the point—lives depend on our secrecy. Whatever regard you lack for us, have a care for them, and for Lalita, who died in the service of your Queen.”

  “And if both of you don’t shut up and put this aside for now, Miranda and Deven are going to die,” Faith interjected with surprising anger, given her usual reserve.

  David and Jonathan both looked at her, then each other, and nodded. “You’re right,” Jonathan said. “Let’s concentrate on finding them. David . . . David?”

  The Prime blinked and refocused his gaze on Jonathan. “Sorry.”

  Jonathan nodded grimly. “You’re already losing it. We don’t have much time. If Miranda and Deven are shielded, we have to find a way to track Ovaska down.”

  David, hands on his temples, returned the nod and dragged himself mentally back into the room. “Faith, bring my laptop from the car. While I’m working, get all the Elite you can back to the scene and comb it for even a hair’s worth of evidence. Put all available patrol units on the search for the Queen and Prime, but have them ready to divert at a moment’s notice when we find them.”

  “As you will it, Sire,” Faith said, and vanished.

  David managed to wait until Mo had unclipped and unplugged the various machines and monitors from his body before climbing off the gurney and buttoning his shirt. “I need someplace quiet,” he said.