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

by Dianne Sylvan

  “What’s going on?” he asked, sitting up, barely catching his laptop before it slid off onto the floor. What had he been doing when he’d fallen asleep? Right—the sensor upgrade in Southeast Austin. “Is it the VLF again?”

  “We should be so lucky. Patrol unit 14E responded to a disturbance they figured was another gang skirmish but it turned out it was…something else. I’m not really sure how to describe the situation.”

  As the Second spoke, Miranda emerged from the bathroom in her robe, wet hair trailing down her back, looking about as alert as he felt. It had been a long week—the California gang calling themselves the Vampire Liberation Front had moved into the area a month ago and, while they weren’t a major threat to the Signet, they were attacking both humans and Shadow World denizens, vandalizing District businesses, and otherwise making a general nuisance of themselves. The Elite had been playing whack-a-mole with the VLF’s leaders all week.

  David gestured at the Queen, then down at his feet. She looked down at her own toes, which matched, and shrugged.

  “Seriously?” he mouthed.

  “I got bored,” she mouthed back and went to get dressed.

  “Well, try and describe it, if you don’t mind,” he told Faith.

  “There’s a kid here—a human, female, about 17—calling herself the Slayer. As in, Buffy the Vampire.”

  “Oh for fuck’s—”

  “Before you ask why I’m bothering you with this, I should notify you that she took down two Elite singlehandedly before they restrained her.”

  Miranda poked her head out of the closet. “The hell you say.”

  “Good evening, my Lady—this kid has training, damned good training. She’s also armed with some weapons I think you might be interested in. I’m not entirely sure what to do with her. I thought it best to turn her over to you.”

  He groaned. “I suppose you’re right. Fine…take her to the Hausmann, would you? That’s probably the safest place to hold her. Tranq her if you have to. We’ll be there in an hour.”

  “As you will it,” the Second said resignedly.

  David looked over at Miranda, who was in the process of pulling on her boots. “Goddamn Joss Whedon.”

  “I know,” Miranda replied. “Age of Ultron was a mess.”

  He sighed heavily, eliciting a giggle from the Queen.

  “It’s called Smile for the Glam-era, by the way,” she added, pointing at his feet.

  With an eyeroll, he got up and set to changing into work clothes himself. “I suppose I’m just grateful you don’t like pink,” he said, “Though I’d prefer a nice red, maybe something to match my Signet.”

  She giggled again. “Duly noted. Aren’t you going to take it off?”

  “Now? Waste of time. Besides, there’s something amusing about going into town in badass mode knowing your toes are covered in glitter. It might keep me from strangling this poor child.”

  “If you like that, you should try a pair of my extra-fancy underwear sometime. Totally liberating.”

  He snorted. “Those lacy things? Those are designed to be worn for ten minutes and then left on the bedroom floor, not for hand to hand combat and interrogation. Besides, I’m way too particular about what I let crawl up my ass.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Not that I’ve noticed,” she said archly, and stuck out her tongue. “Come on, Twinkletoes, let’s get this over with.”

  *****

  The Hausmann was a clinic, true, but it catered to a more diverse population than the standard trauma center, so in addition to its curtained bays and operating room it had two reinforced cells.

  Humans by and large were easy to manage when injured or ill; if nothing else they usually responded well to sedatives. With vampires things could get dicey, or dangerous, quickly. Sometimes vampire-grade drugs caused violent reactions. Sometimes catastrophic injury sent the victim into a near-feral state. Sometimes for whatever reason the vampire in question was starving, poisoned, or just plain insane, and needed to be contained.

  This was the first time David could remember putting a human in one of the cells, but it wasn’t because he thought she was genuinely dangerous.

  “Why not just keep her drugged and put her in a bed?” Miranda asked as they took the steps to the clinic’s front door.

  “Because I want to know more,” he replied, “don’t you?”

  “I was just assuming she’s nuts.”

  “She probably is. But I want to know how she knows about us—it’s one thing to believe vampires exist, but another entirely to find a patrol team, and Faith said she was lying in wait. That means she was watching them and knew what they are, or what she believed them to be. How did she know that?”

  The Queen’s eyebrows quirked. “Good point. That is weird.”

  Mo and Faith met them at the triage station. “Sire, my Lady, I bid you welcome,” the medic said. “I have installed the young woman in Cell 1, as Faith requested.”

  Faith was looking a bit put out that this impudent human had interrupted her night, but she said, “We had to knock her out, but she’s coming around. She’s restrained.”

  David nodded. “Unchain her. Give her her weapons back.”

  The Second drew up short. “What in the what?”

  He just looked at her. When no explanation came, she just nodded. “Yes, Sire.”

  She went into the cell ahead of them, and while they waited, Miranda gave him a quizzical look.

  “What exactly is the plan here?” she asked.

  “If we want information out of her there are two ways to go about it. One is to interrogate her the old-fashioned way, and I know you don’t like that. Whether physical pain is involved or not, the psychological damage could easily be permanent. The second way, which is better for everyone, is to play into her delusions and see where it goes.”

  She frowned. “You wouldn’t actually torture a teenaged girl, would you?”

  “If I honestly thought she was a threat to our people, and that there was no other way to get her to talk, I would. You know that.”

  “Yeah.” She took a deep breath, facing the door. “But she’s not a threat. Right?”

  “It’s highly unlikely. Real Hunters don’t announce their identities. They’re assassins. They know they can’t physically overpower a vampire so they work with stealth, specialized weaponry, and subterfuge.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s a chance she’s the real deal.”

  At his expression, she chuckled and clarified, “I don’t mean Buffy, I just mean some sort of mystical warrior thing. Like Ovaska—with an amulet or something that gives her added strength so she can take us on.”

  “I’d love to say the idea is crazy but given what happened with Ovaska I can’t rule it out.” He shrugged. “Even if she’s supernatural, the Elite were able to overpower her, so she won’t stand a chance against us. On the other hand the whole thing could also be a ruse to get close to us. So stay on guard, regardless.”

  The Queen nodded. Faith poked her head out of the cell. “Ready,” she said.

  David supposed the cell would cater to the girl’s imagination, if nothing else. Both cells were located underground; once upon a time a network of tunnels had connected speakeasies, whorehouses, and other Prohibition outlaws. The Hausmann’s building had once been a hotel, derelict for years until he’d bought it, gutted it, and turned it into a memorial for one of the most remarkable women he’d ever known. The underground room made a perfect home for dimly lit, brick-walled, rather creepy holding cells.

  He walked through the door first, not sure what to expect.

  His first reaction was pity. The girl was dirty from her fight with the Elite, with blood smeared from a cut on her cheek and a black eye forming rapidly. She wore army green cargo pants that looked like they held quite a few weapons, and her tank top showed off surprisingly developed biceps—the sort one would work toward for if one intended to stab people through the sternum. She was in top physical form, not just for a
teenager, but for any human. Her dark hair was cropped short, her heart-shaped face hard and her expression schooled to neutral. Her only adornment was a plain gold cross on a chain around her neck.

  Her weapons lay in a line on the exam table, and she stood beside it, at attention.

  David stepped up to the table and looked it over. Strange: It wasn’t the kind of ad hoc vampire slaying package he’d come to expect from home grown Hunters, but had a standard-issue military kind of feel, everything immaculately maintained. The only anomaly was a large, hand-carved wooden stake with a well-worn grip and a dark-stained sharpened end. The stake was knife-sharpened, he could tell by the marks in the wood; most of their stakes were sharpened by machine except in the field.

  He stood before her with his arms crossed, just looking at her for the better part of a minute. Behind him he heard Miranda close the cell door and come to stand to his right; he knew she’d be examining the girl empathically…if she could.

  Psychically the girl was a vault. Her shields were solid and flawless. They were not the shields of an uncontrolled crazy person.

  Finally, he said, “My name is David Solomon, Prime of the Southern United States. Tell me who you are.”

  Her voice was young…so young. “Into each generation there is born—”

  “Your name,” he cut her off.

  “Kennedy,” she said simply.

  He groaned inwardly. Buffy, season 7—God, he’d hated that character. “Willow’s new girlfriend?”

  A flicker of a frown. “Who?”

  “I think you might have missed the finale,” he told her. “There is no single Chosen One anymore, remember? All the potential Slayers were awakened at once.”

  Blank stare.

  “If you’re going to cosplay you should at least watch the show,” he went on. “You don’t look anything like her.”

  Incomprehension, tinged with an odd kind of frustration. “There is only one Slayer,” she said firmly. “I was chosen at birth and trained from childhood.”

  He glanced at Miranda, whose eyes were a little wide. “Getting anything?” he asked.

  She shook her head, but he got a mental impression: Keep her busy.

  “Where is your Watcher?” he demanded, turning back to the girl. “Who trained you?”

  No answer.

  “Fine. Let’s cut to the chase. I assume you intend to kill me,” he said, inclining his head toward the table. “Go ahead and give it a shot.”

  Again, that look of confusion. “You want me to kill you.”

  He smiled coldly. She had the good grace to flinch. “I want to watch you try.”

  “This is a trick.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is. You have years of training, and I’m told you held your own well enough in battle, but the problem is...I cheat.”

  David gestured, and the girl rose up off the floor and flew back against the wall—he moderated the push so it was firm enough to mean business but not hard enough to hurt her. “I take it your Watcher sent you here to hunt down any vampire you could find? How did you find us?”

  “I could sense you,” she panted, struggling against the invisible hand that held her to the wall. She was strong, rather shockingly so, and obviously trained against psychic attack. “It’s who I am.”

  David nodded. “I see. Did your Watcher tell you about these?” He tapped his Signet with one finger.

  She shook her head as much as she could. Fear was starting to leak around the edges of her shields, and he fed into it a little, allowing his own aura to puff up a tiny bit—not to the level he’d use to make other vampires piss themselves, but enough that she could certainly feel it if she did, indeed, have some sort of gift.

  “Good news and bad news, then, Kennedy,” he said. “Good news: You found Austin’s vampire population. Bad news: You also found the people in charge of it.”

  He felt Miranda sneaking up to the girl, energetically speaking. David’s dominance display was shaking the girl enough that tiny gaps had appeared in her shielding, and the Queen exploited them as gently as she could, sending tendrils of her gift in to see what the hell was going on in there.

  “Now, technically it’s my duty to kill you.” David moved a little closer, using a trick that most vampires never mastered: force-silvering his eyes. The change was governed by hunger and emotion, both of which he had way more control over than the average vampire. Being able to choose when to show his wrath had proven quite effective when he needed to intimidate someone quickly. The last thing any vampire wanted was to make a Prime angry, and having someone stand over you stone-faced and then suddenly silver out was shorthand for “Oh boy are you ever fucked.”

  Now she started to struggle even harder. Whatever programming or delusion she was operating under wasn’t stronger than survival instinct; small favors, he supposed.

  “Do you want to die, Kennedy?” he asked her quietly, holding her eyes, letting her see. “Is that why you were chosen—to serve as food for immortals and vanish into the night? Is this romantic to you, perhaps, the thought of giving your life to save the world? Did someone convince you, persuade you, to value yourself so little? You’re a child with decades ahead of you to walk in the sunlight…whoever told you this was where you belonged was a liar and a thief who stole those years from you.”

  Beside him, the Queen said, “I’m in.”

  He took a step back, letting his eyes return to blue, and let her drop slowly until her feet hit the floor. Her knees buckled, but he caught hold of her arms and settled her in the nearby chair without touching her.

  She was shaking violently, drenched in sweat. She started to speak, but Miranda took firm hold of her mind, and her expression went blissfully blank. Her body sagged back into the chair, her rigid posture finally softening.

  Miranda knelt in front of the chair and took the girl’s hands. “Easy there, little one,” the Queen murmured soothingly. “You don’t need to fight right now.”

  The Queen began to rock slightly from side to side, and the girl mirrored the movement unconsciously. She only did that when she was going into a full empathic trance, something she usually refused to do; it took so much out of her, and was dangerous for both parties. Her own identity could slip, and she could get lost in the subject’s pain…but something had compelled her to go that far with this girl, and he felt a slow ripple of disquiet wondering what that might be.

  Long minutes passed before he heard Miranda sigh, “Oh, honey…I’m sorry.”

  The girl’s eyes drooped shut, and Miranda straightened, placing the girls’ hands on the arms of the chair.

  “Call Faith in,” Miranda said.

  The look on her face wasn’t one to argue with. He merely obeyed.

  The Second looked from Prime to Queen, then to the girl, then back to him. “What the hell happened?”

  He leaned back against the wall and gestured to Miranda.

  “She’s out of her mind,” Miranda said, looking down at Kennedy’s array of weapons. “But not by chance. She followed the VLF here—they killed her mother and sister a few years ago in California, right in front of her.”

  Faith nodded slowly. “Jonathan warned me they were brazen. But he didn’t mention anything like that.”

  “They just broke into the house, stole what they wanted, and started killing. They consider it their right as the superior race. You know the drill. But they left her for dead, and she survived. The human authorities thought she had some kind of traumatic psychotic break and locked her up. Then someone…I’m not entirely clear on whom…broke her out and programmed her to be their Slayer.”

  “She doesn’t know who it was?” David asked.

  “There’s a block around the memories. It’s in there, but she can’t access it. She didn’t do that to herself—whoever’s doing this is good, scarily good. And she’s not the only one. I could see shadows of other girls…they told her she was the Chosen One but there were dozens of other…”

  “Potentials?” David
supplied, suddenly feeling old and tired.

  “Yeah. And if she failed there would always be another to take her place. After all, if they expected her to come back alive, why block out her memory of them? So somewhere out there are a bunch of other messed up girls being trained to get themselves killed.”

  “But why?” Faith asked. “Why would anyone do that? If they know anything about real vampires they know they don’t stand a chance. But they’re using lingo and mythology from a TV show to brainwash teenagers…for what?”

  “I don’t know.” The Queen’s irises went silver at the edges as she added, “I intend to find out.”

  “First things first,” David said. “Faith, bag and tag all these weapons…have them all sent to Hunter for full analysis. That stake is probably a gold mine of information about where these people are. Then double patrols and ferret these gang bastards out—I’m officially upgrading them to Clear and Present. I want the entire VLF on their knees in front of me, in the middle of the District, in 72 hours. Understood?”

  “Yes, Sire. On it.” Faith disappeared, already on her phone.

  He regarded the unconscious girl for another moment. “What would be best for her?” he asked.

  Miranda bit her lip, then said, “She’s exhausted…she’s been here in town for three days tracking us. She wasn’t prepared for how things really work—that there would be so many of us and that we’d be so organized. She needs sleep and food and safety, but beyond that, what she needs we can’t give her. And Health and Human Services won’t have any idea how to deal with her—they’ll medicate her into a stupor to banish delusions that aren’t delusions. She would disappear into the system and never have a chance. But we can’t let her go back to those Watcher people, and that’s what she’ll try to do if we just let her go.”

  “Agreed.”

  She went back to the girl and touched her head, stroking her hair lightly. “Do you think the vampires who killed her family are still alive?”

  “I doubt it. Only a dozen or so made it out of California alive—the leadership, mostly. It’s never the leaders who do the overt killing—they’re too smart for that. They send the minions out to be executed in the name of liberation while they stay hidden and wait to take charge of a new order born from the blood of expendable believers.”