Met by Midnight: Shadow World Stories and Scenes, Vol. 1 (The Shadow World)

by Dianne Sylvan

  Miranda ignored the body; in the same swing, pivoting gracefully on her foot, she arced the sword downward to behead the one on the ground.

  That just left the crossbow guy, or rather the knife guy, and he looked at his two comrades with something approaching panic on his face.

  “Oh, come on,” Miranda said. “Every last one of your friends has met the same fate and still your little gang thinks it’s going to find a foothold here? There is no room in my city for your kind. I’d tell you to give your leaders a message…but I think there’s a more direct way to make my point.”

  This time she attacked him, and for a moment the guy held his own; he was clearly good with the knives. The two of them fought down the sidewalk, moving so fast I could barely see either, knives and sword hitting each other and throwing off sparks from the force of impact. At one point one of the knives actually got past Miranda’s guard, and I saw a red streak appear on her face.

  Even I, cowering and trying to decide whether or not to piss myself and faint, knew what the end result would be. Miranda kicked the guy backwards, and when he came forward again she did one last spin and her sword sliced through the guy’s wrists like they were made of butter.

  The guy screamed. You rarely ever hear a real, honest to god scream of pain—most of the time in the movies people scream because they’re scared, not because they’ve had limbs cut off and stood watching as their hands fell onto the bloody street still holding the knives.

  His agony was short lived. Between one scream and another, Miranda killed him, this time with something she pulled from inside her coat and slammed into his chest.

  A wooden stake.

  The third body hit the ground, and Miranda stood over them, stake in one hand, sword in the other, her face completely impassive. As I watched the cut on her cheek closed itself, then faded from angry red to pink, and vanished.

  She was still for a long moment, and it was so quiet that I heard the tiny splash of the drop of blood that fell from the end of her sword.

  The entire fight had taken maybe five minutes.

  I heard a voice from her wrist: “My Lady, report! Sensors picked up a convergence around your location—”

  “I’m fine,” Miranda said calmly. “More of those VLF bastards from Los Angeles.”

  Another voice erupted into the alley, this one male, and something about it—its depth, maybe, or the tone—was fucking terrifying.

  “Where the hell are your guards?”

  Miranda shook her head as she stowed the stake back in her coat and bent to grab one of the dead men’s coattails to wipe off the blade of her sword. “I’m fine, baby. There were only three this time. I’ll be on my way home soon—send a cleanup team to these coordinates.”

  The man’s voice was terse, and I sensed an argument brewing. “As you will it.”

  “Be sure you let California know we’re still cleaning up their mess,” Miranda added.

  “The VLF had already sent half its members to Austin before the LA branch was eliminated,” he said. “They’re desperate to gain any sort of power before we take them out, now that their bosses are dead.”

  “Well, this one bastard matches the description of their shot-caller, Ramos. If they’re sending his caliber after us they must be almost out of thugs.”

  “I’ll have Faith verify his ID. You just get home.”

  Miranda looked over at me, and said into her wrist, “I have something I need to take care of first. Send Harlan to the studio. I’ll meet him there.”

  “All right. Star-One, out.”

  Miranda returned the sword to a sheath concealed in her coat and gave me a regretful smile. “I’m sorry, Jane,” she said. “You shouldn’t have been here for any of this.”

  I got back to my feet, and retrieved my phone, but I was shaking pretty violently as I gestured at the bodies. “What…the fuck…is going on?”

  She sighed. “This is my life,” she replied. “This is my work. Unfortunately music isn’t the only way I draw blood.”

  “But what—”

  “Come on,” Miranda said, voice gentling. “Let’s get you back to the studio. You’ve got a plane to catch.”

  Numb, I did as she said, and we walked silently away from the crime scene; as we turned the corner I heard voices, footsteps, but since there were no sirens I assumed it was the “team” they’d been talking about. I absolutely could not process any of this.

  We didn’t speak until we reached the door we’d left from. I managed to hold it together until then, but as soon as I could reach the rail, I sagged against it, gasping, the entire night whirling around my head. There are some things that you simply don’t have the resources to make sense of—oh, each component might make sense, but when you put them all together, it so thoroughly violates what you thought about the world that you just sort of shut down.

  I felt hands on my shoulders, and something…she did something, I don’t know what, but I felt calmer, and could breathe again.

  Her eyes, agate-green and troubled, held mine. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “I don’t want to do this, but…it’s safer for both of us.”

  “What are you talking about—”

  It’s hard to describe what happened next, but it felt kind of like she held out her coat and wrapped it around my mind; darkness moved through me like water, and I thought of the rain pouring down around the piano, silver and shadow and light all falling at once, washing the horror of the last half hour from my mind, leaving everything fresh and clean and cool.

  I blinked.

  “Jesus, where have you been?” April demanded, sticking her head out the door. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  I frowned, staring at her. “I’m sorry, what?”

  Now, she looked concerned. “Okay, you need sleep. Maybe I should cancel the flight and get us a hotel for the night?”

  I shook my head vaguely. “I’ll sleep better in my own bed.”

  “Fine, well…finish that and come in, okay?”

  She disappeared, and, confused, I looked down at my hand where she’d been looking. There was a half-smoked cigarette between my fingers, the ash so long I had to have been standing there staring off into space for several minutes.

  I looked around the alley. What was I doing? I’d been smoking out here, and Miranda Grey came out to meet me and we hung out for a minute talking about the single and our respective love lives…then what?

  Right, she’d been called back inside and I’d stayed out here to finish my cigarette.

  “Too many drugs in college, Jane,” I muttered. But April was probably right—I was sleep deprived, and tonight had been kind of weird from the get-go. Of course I’d zoned out the second I got a minute to myself. Who wouldn’t?

  Shaking my head again, I ground out the cigarette and went back inside.

  She Said, He Said

  He’s so weird.

  Now that a couple of years have passed and I can look at a bigger picture, I can see just how different he really is from what I thought—I mean that in a good way, but even now it surprises me sometimes. When I think back to the months I lived in the Haven as a human, how traumatized and confused I was, I don’t remember ever noticing a lot of his…quirks, let’s call them.

  It is a little strange to think of a Prime as quirky.

  Even though he let me in closer than he had allowed anyone in a good fifty years, there were barriers I still didn’t cross until after I had a Signet on my neck and a ring on my finger. I saw the outermost layers: the leader, the warrior, the genius, with glimpses of the geek, but what I fell in love with was something subtler, impossible to label. As time went on more layers peeled off and I found myself constantly having to redefine my understanding of exactly whom I had married.

  At this exact moment, for example, he’s playing Angry Birds. He’s really good at it. His favorite game is old school Tetris, but somewhere in the house there’s a vintage arcade version of Donkey Kong he apparently won like $
10,000 on in some kind of tournament back in the 80s.

  This is the same man who, last week, beat six members of the Vampire Liberation Front singlehandedly in armed combat, beheaded them in full view of the entire Shadow District, and had their remaining cronies on their knees publically falling over themselves to betray their friends while he stood over them, arms crossed, silent and cold as the distant galaxies.

  This is also the same man who’s scared of spiders. No, seriously. He doesn’t shriek like a little girl and demand that I kill them or anything, but they thoroughly creep him out, and once a tarantula (we get those, this is Texas and we live out in the middle of nowhere) was hauling ass across the office floor and came within two feet of his foot and he actually threw his phone at it.

  He has dozens of movies memorized from start to finish, and quotes them pretty much continuously. It’s not just movies, though: he also knows the entire works of Shakespeare…yes, all of them. Every line. Sometimes I entertain myself by quizzing him about it, going for the obscure plays nobody’s ever heard of like Timon of Athens. He says he doesn’t actually have an eidetic memory, but I think he’s just being modest, considering he can tell me exactly what I was wearing the night we met—and on any other night—down to my nail polish.

  The fact that he’s 350 years old tends to sneak up on me, too. He’s actually older than America. He turned 100 the year Thomas Jefferson was born. Though the idea of immortality is becoming easier to swallow, I still don’t know how to feel about that. I’m barely even 30! 90% of what he’s experienced, I learned about in history class…or I would have, but the parts of history he’s seen tend to be the ones they don’t tell you about in public school in Texas.

  He claims he spell-checked the Constitution. I’d say I don’t believe it, but hyperbole isn’t one of his quirks, so…who knows?

  In his workroom, over on a side wall I never really looked at while I was here the first few months, is a glass case containing a full set of replica sonic screwdrivers from Doctor Who; there’s also a lightsaber and a framed copy of Tales of Suspense #39, the first appearance of Iron Man, autographed by Stan Lee.

  Yeah, he’s got a thing for Tony Stark. Go figure.

  You would think, between the geekiness and That Thing That Happened three months in, my concept of him would have weakened—the hard-as-nails shell contains one hell of a gooey center, once you manage to jackhammer your way in. But if anything, by now, he seems stronger to me—more of a whole person than a two-dimensional legend. He can be a creature of myth to the rest of the Shadow World, but who wants to be married to that? What would we have to talk about for the next two hundred years if neither of us had odd enthusiasms? Sure, seeing him go all Badass Motherfucker on lawbreakers is incredibly attractive, but I find the triumphant look of “I just hacked the Pentagon…again” just as alluring.

  I suppose that’s why I’m his Queen. I can’t imagine being with someone whose excitement didn’t excite me. The really nice thing is it works both ways; I can go on about music or anything I’m reading for an hour and he’ll actually listen, actively, asking questions and getting into it. That insatiable lust for learning makes him a fantastic conversationalist.

  Lest anyone think I think he’s perfect—you know, aside from the obvious—I will admit that though his taste in music is eclectic, parts of it annoy the hell out of me. He loves rap; it took me a while to figure out why, but I get it now. It’s the patterns. He can dissect the rhyme structure of a rap just like a symphony (I never knew how complicated those are, either, until I met him.). But as lovely as that is for his weird little brain, it drives me batshit.

  When something he’s working on refuses to cooperate things tend to start floating, sometimes my things, and sometimes they get dropped suddenly and don’t survive the crash. He also has a habit of giving me these convoluted answers to very simple questions like “What the hell did you do to my phone?” Sometimes I have to give him the Death Glare and say, “Please pass the butter!” like Amy Farrah-Fowler on The Big Bang Theory.

  And whenever we fight, I react emotionally and he’s coldly logical, sometimes even condescending, and it makes me want to break his goddamned neck.

  He’s also the neat one in the relationship—I drop clothes wherever I shuck them, and leave things sitting out, and sometimes I catch him following me around putting things away. When I do, I deliberately drop something on the floor just to annoy him.

  Oh, I know I can be a pest at times too. For example, I tend to hum, or sing to myself, when I’m not aware of it, and that drives him crazy. “Sing, or don’t sing,” he says. “Not both at once!”

  Did I mention he can’t carry a tune? I’m sure if he tried he could learn any instrument in like a week, but for the love of God don’t ask him to sing. Or hum. Or whistle. I make it a policy not to say anything when he’s singing in the shower—that’s everyone’s God-given right—but it sounds like a masturbating coyote.

  Considering we’re two highly opinionated people with strong wills and passions and a lot of edged weapons, I think we do pretty well.

  I never knew it was possible to love someone like this—imperfectly, including all of their flaws and strengths, in a way that’s both the stuff of epic romance and the utterly unromantic night-to-night crap of real marriage. It’s slow dancing on the roof of a skyscraper, and it’s hogging the covers. Most people only want the pretty parts.

  I never really thought I’d end up married; even before I went crazy I had this sense of being separated from the rest of the world by this tiny extra space, like I was a second out of phase from reality. I watched my parents, my friends’ parents, every normal relationship in the world, really, and I just couldn’t imagine a guy worth putting up with through all that drama. I imagined marriage as giving up part of my identity and all of my freedom and having to dial down my expectations of the future…and for what? It never made sense.

  But right now I’m pretending to check my email and watching him out of the corner of my eye, and he finished with his game a while ago and is now reading a gigantic book in Russian (the biggest tech fanboy in the universe doesn’t do Kindle), taking notes on a legal pad; he badly needs a shave, still has bed hair, keeps fiddling with his pen in that way that’s about to turn into tapping, which I hate and will beg him to stop doing, and he’s still the hottest thing I’ve ever seen and my heart is suddenly frozen in fear that something will happen to him…that something could take him away and I’d be trapped in eternity without him.

  Luckily I know that’s nonsense, at least. It literally can’t happen. But sometimes I have these little squeezes of fear that we won’t live long enough…that forever just isn’t long enough for this ridiculous beast of a love.

  Then of course he catches me staring, gives me an eyebrow and a “What?” and I have absolutely no choice, none at all, but to push my computer aside and jump him, and I can forget about all of that, at least for now.

  *****

  The night erupts in shattering glass, and she comes flying through the broken window, hits the ground rolling, and is up and running again in a heartbeat.

  “Sorry!” she yells, falling into step beside me. “I got held up!”

  The rabbit knows we’re after him, and he’s running with all his strength, snaking through the back streets of Dallas and probably hoping we won’t know the city well enough to catch him. But blind panic is making him stupid, as are the mute stares of others we pass, those who are surely wondering what this man could have done that merits both Signets chasing him downtown in a non-Haven city.

  That is, of course, precisely what we want them to wonder, which is why tonight Faith is on coms, directing us through the streets, with the rest of the Elite moving to flank the rabbit so he can’t veer too far off, while we take center stage.

  I glance over, and she grins at me. Her hair is trailing out wild behind her, her green eyes flashing, heightened exertion silvering their edges slightly. She loves every second of this and
I love every inch of her.

  That’s my wife. Holy God, what lottery did I win?

  The woman fate has partnered me with for all time, this creature of fire and song, who I have somehow not driven off with my horrific mistakes and emotional stupidity, laughs as she runs. I am momentarily jealous of the black leather surrounding her thighs and securing all those delicious curves; it’s difficult to stay on task when the most beautiful woman on the planet is giving me that look, the one that says she knows exactly what I’m thinking, that as soon as this business is dealt with and blood has splattered over the sidewalk and the Elite have brought me the other two and they’re dead and we’ve had our debriefing with the DFW-area lieutenant and are back at the hotel, we’ll each do irreparable damage to the other’s clothing, and she’ll laugh again and more or less dare me to fuck her through the bedroom wall.

  Challenge accepted.

  To think there are Primes out there—most of them, in fact—who prefer their Queens stay at home and act more as decorative objects than partners. Poor dumb bastards. No sparring, no running down rabbits together, no chance to see the night-dark satisfaction on her face when she merely lifts an eyebrow and her enemies fall down begging for their lives. Surely they know something is missing? Don’t they know how much better, how miraculous, Pairing can be? It’s more than some cosmic OKCupid—it’s, and I hate to even say this, a sacred thing, to be so connected to someone. If there’s anything truly holy in this world, it’s this.

  It’s her.

  I’ve heard men talk about how they never realized how much better life was with a woman until they had one—but they’re talking about women who clean up after them, anticipate their needs, steer them gently through adulthood…basically offer them a mommy with sex. Sweet, I suppose, if your standards for yourself are that low. I always considered myself a self-contained unit as far as taking care of myself goes.

  Aside from that intense, agonizing decade in California, I never really expected to have a partner. Before that I was too arrogant and self-absorbed; after that, I was too broken, and concentrating too much on closing and barring the cracked gates that let it happen in the first place. The thought of letting anyone in that far again…terrifying. No, not even terrifying: Impossible. Love was high-velocity blood spatter on a wall. Loving someone was handing them a hammer and showing them where to strike. Love had destroyed me, and I would not be destroyed again.