Shadowflame

by Dianne Sylvan

  Jackie, the head nurse, showed him to the administrative office, where Faith quickly brought his computer. He sat down at the desk and logged on to the sensor network and the Haven servers, though it took him a moment to remember his passwords, as there were twelve involved in just this part, each one different with at least twenty characters apiece. He had to pause once and shut his eyes, fighting against the panic of not knowing where she was, or how badly she might be hurt . . . she might be calling for him . . . she could be bleeding to death, or being tortured, her hand sliced off . . .

  “David!” Jonathan’s voice brought him back to reality, and he clapped his eyes back on the screen, where the master sensor grid was up and waiting for his commands. He brought up the Haven com network as well and overlaid the two.

  “All right,” David muttered. “Here we go. I’m going back through the data to analyze exactly what happened at the scene just before, during, and after the explosion. Here, look—the red dots are Elite, the blue dots are Miranda and I, and the white dot is Deven. There are no other vampires in the area. Deven and Miranda enter the apartment . . . and seventy-two seconds later a signal is sent from an outside location to the building.”

  The explosion showed on the network as a sudden relocation of every glowing dot—the Elite had either fallen, been blown forward, run, or died. Two of the dots flickered as their life signs faltered, then turned into Xs to indicate that the signal of the person wearing the com had ceased.

  He clicked on each X, bringing up the designation of each. “That one’s Lali,” he said, pointing to the dot nearest Deven and the Queen. “She was running to help.”

  Deven and Miranda’s signals were across the street from the apartment building; he watched, helpless, as the red dots all converged on his own, indicating that he’d just been shot with the poison dart. Seconds later, the other blue dot, and the white, disappeared, probably dragged by Marja, who still wasn’t showing up. Her amulet must have still been working.

  “Where did they go?” Jonathan asked. “Did she shield them, too?”

  “She must have,” David replied tersely. “Even if she loaded them into a car, they’d still show up on the network unless she had shields around them already. So whatever that amulet does, it must work on anyone she’s touching as well as herself . . . and they conceal her from all indirect forms of detection, so it blocks the com signal, too. Faith, get a team to those coordinates, and see if there’s a blood trail or any indication of where they went or how she transported them.”

  While Faith gave the order, he rewound the data again and scrutinized it a second time, then a third. “The answer isn’t here,” David said to himself. “We can’t track her based just on what happened tonight. There has to be something . . .”

  “Can you trace the signal that set off the bomb?”

  David gave a frustrated sigh. “It was bounced from location to location and most likely originated from a prepaid cell phone that was destroyed immediately afterward. I can narrow it down to within a one-block radius right now, but that doesn’t tell us anything—we already know she was within a block of the explosion.”

  He put his head in his hands again, trying to think. “Miranda said we should go back through the raw sensor data. We can’t track Ovaska herself—what if we could track the amulet?”

  “There were seven of them,” Jonathan pointed out.

  “Yes, but they all have to work the same way. Before, when I tried to find anomalies in the network, I didn’t know she had an amulet shielding her. I thought she might have some kind of scrambling device that would operate within known technological parameters and give off an electromagnetic field. This is something different.”

  “It’s magic,” said Jonathan. “How are you going to track magic?”

  “Everything that people perceive as magic is just science in a party dress. Whatever energy they’re sending out to block the sensors . . . it’s still energy. It had to have affected the environment somehow, and those effects are traceable. If I can pinpoint those effects, I can recalibrate the network to search for them.”

  “That could take days,” Jonathan said, dismayed. “They don’t have days.”

  “Days,” David said. “Right. Who am I, again? Give me twenty minutes.”

  His fingers flew over the keyboard, and he spared a second to dig in the laptop case and pull out the wireless mouse. He accessed the long-term data storage at the Haven and pulled up the readings for the night that Ovaska had killed Drew.

  That night had been an anomaly in the attack history; she had momentarily lost her shield, then dropped off the network as soon as she activated another amulet. Somewhere, in that moment, was the answer. Whatever those amulets did, they had to disturb the energetic field of the city somehow. Everything gave off an energy signature, including humans and vampires. He dumped all of the raw data into a single file and ran search strings for commonalities between that night and tonight.

  He compared the readings—air temperature, atmospheric pressure, even humidity, everything the sensors gathered, no matter how insignificant it seemed. The damn things had to be emitting some kind of signal or putting out some kind of field . . . even just a split-second blip each time . . .

  “There,” David said, pointing again. “At the exact moment that Ovaska activated the amulet outside the school, there was a temperature drop of one tenth of one degree and a twenty-pascal change in the atmospheric pressure where she was standing. If I compare the data from the night she attacked Miranda after her show . . . bringing up the temp and pressure of the entire room indexed in single square-foot sections, you can see a similar reading there . . . and watch it move . . . that’s it. There’s not an energy spike, there’s an absence, like a single dead pixel on a screen. I just have to find the spot at tonight’s scene where the temp and pressure are lower than the air surrounding it but she doesn’t already show up as a vampire . . . then we can track her like a very localized weather front.”

  “She could have been anywhere—”

  “No, not anywhere. She was within range to shoot all three of us within four seconds of each other, meaning she had to be somewhere here.” He highlighted an area on the grid. “Given that the nearest building has no windows facing the street . . . she was either to one side of it or on the roof. With this type of dart, the gun she had to have used has a range of thirty feet, maximum. That building is three stories, but if she shot downward, the darts had to hit each of us at an angle, which they didn’t. Mine was sticking straight out of my neck when I pulled it out. That means she was on the ground.”

  He focused the search on the area of the street where she could have reasonably been, given the wind’s direction and speed and the locations of the three Signets at the time they were all shot.

  A spot on the screen lit up and flashed with the temperature: 43.8 degrees, where at least the next five feet in every direction read 43.9. The air pressure showed a corresponding change.

  He locked the search on those readings and ran a trace that would follow that same anomaly as it moved over the grid, allowing for a slight variation in temperature as Ovaska’s body temp rose because of her physical exertion.

  A few pixels at a time, agonizingly slowly, the computer began to draw a line across the screen, starting at the point where Ovaska must have been standing out of sight to fire the dart gun, closing on Miranda and Deven’s location, then moving along the street as she dragged them both away from the scene.

  He suspected that if he were to go back and run the data right next to Ovaska, he’d find corresponding tracks for Deven and Miranda, but there was no time for that . . . and he had what he needed.

  The computer churned through immense amounts of data to provide the readings, and it was slow going, but the green line continued to snake its way through the streets of Austin . . . until it dead-ended deep in the warehouse district.

  David looked up at Jonathan and Faith and gave them a feral smile. “Got her.”


  She woke shivering, her body wrung out and exhausted by pain, the smell of blood still filling her nostrils and a nauseating metallic taste in the back of her throat. Her head still ached dully, but the writhing agony had faded so that instead of wailing she wanted to curl up and whimper.

  She could barely feel her fingers as she tried to move her hands, touching the ground beneath her, trying to learn anything she could about where she was.

  Grimy concrete floor. Damp. Slowly, she extended her arm and kept feeling around until her hand hit something hard.

  Bars.

  She pried one eye open, groaning softly as light intruded and sent sparks through her head. Everything was blurry at first, but she blinked until her vision started to clear.

  The only light came from a single incandescent bulb, leaving everything an otherworldly orange. She could make out the bars to her side, and turning her head a little she got a sense of the size of her prison: It was a cell about as big as a walk-in apartment closet.

  She heard metal clank and tensed all over, waiting for a door to open or something to change, but nothing did. A moment later she heard a faint indrawn breath that hitched as if around a sudden stabbing pain.

  She lifted her head. “Deven?”

  Pale eyes still glazed with the aftereffects of the toxin met hers. “Aye.”

  “What are you doing up there?”

  The Prime almost smiled. He had been chained by his wrists about a foot off the ground up against the back wall of a cell adjacent to hers. “You . . . don’t remember?” he asked, panting slightly.

  “No.”

  “You fought her,” he replied, sounding about as well as she felt. “She was going to chain us both, but you woke up and started struggling like a wildcat. She couldn’t hold you still enough, so she just dumped you on the floor and locked the cell. She was bleeding when she left.”

  Miranda heaved herself onto her side, wincing—her shoulder was still killing her and it felt like she’d been kicked in the kidneys. “Sounds pretty badass.”

  Deven chuckled weakly. “It was.”

  She ran her hands down over her body, patting herself for other injuries. “She took our weapons and phones . . . but I still have my hand, so I still have my com. Why?”

  “Don’t know. I didn’t get a dramatic villain monologue out of her.”

  Miranda shut her eyes again, trying to concentrate. If she could summon enough strength, she could call for help—surely David would be able to sense her, even if they were really far away. She reached out with her senses . . .

  . . . and found them blocked. She couldn’t feel anything beyond the cell. That meant that David couldn’t feel her either.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “I can’t project. We’re cut off.”

  “I know that.”

  “There’s a room like this at the Haven . . . it’s where I learned to shield myself. No matter what goes on inside, it can’t get outside. Psychic signals, even cell phones and the coms . . . they won’t be able to find us.”

  “It takes an incredible amount of power to create a shielded chamber,” Deven noted, eyes wandering around the room. “Either she’s got resources beyond a few amulets from Volundr or this place existed before she got here.”

  “What do we do?” she asked, starting to panic. “What do we do?”

  “First . . . calm down. They might not be able to find us via the Signet bond, but there are other ways. You’re married to a genius, remember?”

  “He hasn’t been able to find Ovaska so far. What if—”

  “Things are different now. By kidnapping us, she changed her MO. That throws in more variables. They’ll find us, Miranda. We just have to survive until they do.”

  “Can you Mist?”

  Deven shook his head. “I’m way too scattered already.”

  “Why hasn’t she killed us yet?”

  Deven snorted quietly. “Clearly you’ve never been vengeful. Killing someone who can’t see your face isn’t nearly as satisfying . . . and killing us while we were in pain would have been merciful.”

  “So she could be here any minute to finish us off,” Miranda concluded. “We have to be ready for her—I just need to get up—”

  She didn’t have a chance to finish the thought, much less formulate a plan. There was the sound of a metal bolt shooting home, and a door across from the cells swung open.

  Marja Ovaska walked into the room, giving them both a nasty, self-satisfied smile. She was wearing a metal disc on a chain identical to the one she’d lost at Drew’s school . . . and she was holding a hand-carved stake.

  She stood in front of the cell doors for a minute, not speaking, just watching Miranda. She was, Miranda noticed, a strikingly beautiful woman with cropped blond hair and large blue eyes; Miranda pictured her standing next to Sophie’s dark pixie looks, and the image made a wistful sort of sense. It also helped explain why Deven had developed a soft spot for the couple; physically they reminded Miranda of the Pair, with one small and dark, the other tall and blond.

  Miranda started to speak, but Ovaska cut her off. “Don’t bother,” she said, and yes, she had an accent now that Miranda hadn’t heard the night of Drew’s death. “I don’t care if you’re sorry.”

  “Well, good,” Deven said caustically. “Miranda may have sympathy for your sob story—poor you, your lover died, now you have to strike back. Cue the violins. I couldn’t care less.”

  Ovaska looked at him with loathing . . . but also, Miranda sensed, with the slightest undercurrent of fear. Deven had been right . . . even though she had the power here, and even though she was no longer part of the Shadow, an agent was always an agent, and even chained to the wall at her mercy, the Alpha was still the Alpha.

  “We both know this isn’t about Miranda getting Sophie killed,” Deven went on. “Sophie made her own choices—that’s what’s eating you alive. Because when it came down to it, she chose Miranda, and the Signets, over you.”

  “Shut up,” Ovaska said softly.

  “If you’re going to kill us, kill us,” the Prime told her. “If you stall, you’ll be caught. I taught you better than that . . . unless . . .”

  “Deven,” Miranda interrupted, “don’t taunt the crazy person with the stake!”

  But Deven was staring at Ovaska hard, eyes narrowed. “She’s not crazy. Are you, Marja? Did you really bring us here to kill us? This whole setup . . . the bomb, the cells, the poison . . . it’s more than simple vengeance. I know you.”

  Now Ovaska smiled. “Do you think so?”

  “You’re not this sentimental. Sophie was the one who begged me not to kill you both. Even in love, even facing execution at my hands, you didn’t betray a scrap of emotion. If all you wanted was revenge, you would have found a way to kill Miranda by now . . . you wouldn’t have missed the first time.”

  “You said she was sizing me up,” Miranda said. “And that killing the others was to hurt me.”

  Deven shook his head. “That may be true, but it’s not the whole story. The more complicated this whole thing became, the less sense it made. It’s cliché, Marja. Scorned woman out for blood—bullshit. Volundr introduced you to someone, didn’t he? Someone with a lot of money and a very particular purpose.”

  Still smiling, Ovaska took a key from her pocket and opened Deven’s cell door. She walked up to him so that they were inches apart and said to him very calmly, “Now you’re the one who’s stalling.”

  She rested the point of the stake against Deven’s cheek, then drew it slowly down his neck, over his chest. “What do you suppose would happen to the Red Shadow if I killed the Alpha?” she asked.

  “Well,” Deven replied, “given that I issued a kill order on you, even if you walk out of this building alive, you’ll find out pretty quickly.”

  “I fooled you once,” Marja told him. “You walked right into the trap I set for you. I evaded the Southern Elite for weeks. If I can do that, I can outfox your agents.”

  “Why did you
set a trap, again?” Deven asked. “Why are we here?”

  Miranda focused her will on her limbs, and slowly, very slowly, she got her hands underneath her to try and push herself up. She didn’t know what she was going to do, but she wasn’t going to lie there on the floor and wait for Ovaska to make a move. One way or another she was going to go down fighting.

  Ovaska’s head jerked toward her. “Don’t try it,” she snapped. “There’s nowhere for you to go.”

  Deven seized her lapsed attention, pulled his knees up to his chest, and kicked Ovaska hard in the midsection. She staggered backward, hitting the bars with a loud clank, and flailed sideways to grab the bars and stay upright. The stake, knocked out of her hand, clattered to the floor inches from the wall of bars between the cells.

  Miranda shoved herself up and dove for it, sticking her arm through the bars and getting her hand around the stake.

  As she jerked backward Ovaska regained her footing, and pain exploded through Miranda’s hand as Ovaska stomped on her fingers. Miranda cried out and dropped the stake, which Ovaska bent and retrieved. Miranda pulled her arm back just in time to avoid another stomp.

  Miranda held her arm against her chest, the pain of her broken fingers nearly making her sick.

  Ovaska glared down at her. “Bitch,” she snarled.

  She returned her attention to Deven, who didn’t look particularly disappointed that the gamble hadn’t worked. “Worth a try,” he said.

  Ovaska straightened her clothes, rotating her neck as if to work out a kink, then considered the stake in her hand and the Prime bound before her. “You’re right,” she said finally. “Yes, I wanted revenge. Killing all her little friends did make me feel better . . . although if one of them had talked, told me how to find the Haven, that would have made things much easier for me. Your people are nothing if not loyal. It’s annoying. But it turns out there are greater powers out there than the Signets . . . and bigger paychecks than the Shadow.”