“Not important. But I don’t think ‘happy’ is the right word for this life. ‘Content’ might be better. Except . . .” Jonathan looked reluctant to say anything else but went on anyway. “There are so many things I wish I could change. So much I wish I could do for him. I envy you your power.”
The Elf had to smile at that. “Say you saw someone you cared for about to drown in a river, and you had the ability to dam that river so he would live—but you also saw that if you did, the river would not feed the fields around it and hundreds of people would starve . . . or you saved him from drowning and the next day he knocked over a candle that burned down a house with ten other people in it . . . how would you choose what future to create?”
“Then how do you ever act at all? I’d be paralyzed with fear over the consequences.”
“In this case the cost of not helping far outweighed the other potential outcomes . . . but still, being able to Weave is no guarantee of wisdom. The chessboard has no boundaries, and every move tips the fortunes of worlds.”
“All right,” Jonathan said, “I take it back. I don’t envy you.”
Nico lowered his eyes. Jonathan had no idea. “Nor do I envy you. I see a thousand possibilities before the fact, but you see a single reality after,” he said after a moment. “It would be a heavy burden.”
Now Jonathan was the one who looked away. “Over the years I’ve learned a lot of things I wish I could forget.”
Nico shook his head and smiled a little, returning his gaze to the forest, taking solace from the soft rustling sound of the canopy of leaves. “So have I, my Lord,” he said softly. “So have I.”
• • •
David sat staring at his laptop screen, one hand absently scratching his lower lip while he considered what he was looking at.
“You’re sure they were human.”
Deven sounded a good ten times more energetic than he had during their last conversation. “Yes. We had multiple reports from the scene and the blood we recovered was definitely human—I smelled it myself.”
“Send me all the forensic details you have from the scene.”
“Sending now.”
David continued to stare at the image while the files downloaded. He’d seen the same thing several times already, but this time, the implications were alarming.
Two earpieces, both alike in dignity: identical in design and construction to all the others associated with Morningstar. One of those first earpieces had been left in New York when the Order harassed Hart, whom Morningstar mistakenly thought had been recruited by Lydia and the Order of Elysium; another came from outside Stella Maguire’s apartment when an agent of Morningstar ransacked it—searching, David believed, for Miranda’s Signet, though how Morningstar had known to hunt down Stella was still a mystery. In both cases the person who lost the earpiece was definitely a vampire.
And now these two, taken from the bodies of two humans who fought like vampires and nearly took down some of the most fearsome Elite in the world.
“Do you think they’re still hiring vampires, if they’ve got humans who can do this?” Deven asked.
“My guess would be no. There are few ordinary mortals—even trained Hunters—who can fight a vampire face-to-face, so they brought in what they hated most in the world until they found a way to come at us themselves. Most likely they killed any vampires they still had on the roster . . . but a better question is . . .”
“How the hell they did it,” Deven finished for him. “The answer is pretty obvious, don’t you think?”
“I’d wager the death of a Prime would be enough to create superhuman warriors.”
“But how many?”
“It can’t be a limitless supply. We need to know more about what we’re dealing with here; there might have been other sightings of these people in other territories that nobody’s talking about.”
“True. No vampire is going to want to admit he got his ass handed to him by a human.”
Behind him, David heard Miranda enter the bedroom, remove her sword, hang it up, then sit down on the sofa to pull off her boots with a sigh. It was a little early for her to be back—dawn was three hours away. She was supposed to be in the middle of a training session with Bax.
Finally, they hung up, leaving David once again staring at the earpieces, not at all happy about where this might be leading.
Miranda came up behind him and put her hands on his shoulders, rubbing them as she peered down at the screen. “Those things again? Oh, goody.”
He smiled, enjoying her talented hands. “Oh, it’s much better this time.” He related the incident in California to her, and their suspicions that Jeremy’s death had been the catalyst for whatever magic had given Morningstar this lovely new thing to play with.
She digested the story for a moment, then said, “I’m not sure what’s worse, the thought that they made hundreds of vampire hunters, or that they could only make a few.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, turning his chair to look at her.
“Well, if Jeremy’s death let them create, say, only twenty vampire hunters, what do you think they’re going to do when we’ve killed all twenty?”
David blinked at her. “Damn. I didn’t even think of that. This could go very badly very quickly.” He shook his head. “On the other hand, the fear of being ritually murdered might convince the rest of the Council it’s in their best interest to help us track these people down.”
Miranda sat down in his lap, and he wound his arms around her gratefully. “What’s wrong?” he asked after a moment. “You skipped your session with Bax, and you feel troubled.”
She bit her lip, and he could sense a complex knot of uncertain emotions. “I got an e-mail . . .”
He gave her a questioning look. “Go on.”
Miranda took a deep breath and just blurted it out. “It was from my sister,” she said. “My father’s dying. She says he only has a couple of weeks. He wants to see me.”
The abrupt mental shift from Signet business was a bit jarring, but his emotional reaction to hearing anything about her family tended toward violence anyway. These people had abandoned her to her madness, just as they had her mother. Since then, Miranda had heard from them three times at most, always a cool and distant e-mail from Marianne, always wanting something.
“He can go fuck himself off a cliff,” David said.
Miranda looked taken aback, for a second, by the vehemence of his words, then chuckled. “That’s very sweet of you, baby.”
“Did your sister have any further details, or was it just a summons?”
The Queen’s eyes were on the wall across from the desk where their weapons hung. “It’s some kind of cancer,” Miranda told him. “He’s holed up in Rio Verde, with her playing nursemaid.”
“I thought they moved to Dallas to get away from your mother’s memory,” David said.
“They did. We lived in Rio Verde until I was nine, then moved to Austin, and after they put her away, Dad headed to Dallas. That’s why I’ve always considered Austin my hometown even though I wasn’t born here. But a couple of years ago he moved back to Rio Verde—to the same house.” Miranda paused, then said, “She said please. She’s never said that to me before.”
David leaned forward and kissed the skin just above her Signet. “You’re going, aren’t you,” he said.
“It’s a last request,” Miranda said. “How can I deny a last request? Plus . . . it’s just one of those things I think I have to do. They’re the only thing left that links me to my history. I don’t want that history, but . . . I just have to see the house one more time, look them both in the face.”
“All right. Rio Verde’s five hours from here—we can get there and back in one night, but it’ll be pushing it.”
“I want to go alone,” she told him. “I’m a big girl. I can handle it.”
“Out of the question,” David replied. Her eyebrows shot up, no doubt a precursor to her pointing out, quite rightly, that he wasn�
��t the boss of her, but he added, more gently, “If you don’t want me to go, I won’t, but you must at least take a pair of guards. The thought of you being alone and something going wrong—”
“David, it’s a town of eight thousand people. I’ll be there for a few hours. What could go wrong?”
He frowned. “You do realize that by saying that you’ve already damned your luck.”
“Yeah, probably. If it will really make you feel better, I’ll take Minh and Stuart. I can go Friday—I don’t have a show.”
Their eyes met and held. “I know I can’t protect you from getting hurt,” he said. “I know it’s not my job. But I can’t help wanting to keep you safe, even from things I know you need to do. I would cheerfully dismember anyone who made you unhappy.”
She grinned. “And I love you for it, which is kind of twisted.”
He put his arms around her again and grinned back. “Remind yourself periodically over the next century or so that you said it, I didn’t.”
• • •
Amy’s Ice Cream on Sixth was an odd touchstone in Miranda’s life. Every time she sat down—always at the same table—she was a different person, living a different version of her life. What she ordered was never the same, but the place itself had barely changed in the time she had become a part of the Shadow World.
The first time had been her first date with David, though “date” was a bit of a misnomer. She was still human then, and though they had both felt the growing connection between them, she’d had no idea she would end up taking him to bed that very night.
She smiled to herself as she spooned up another bite of her ice cream. She’d been a cheap date—a sundae and a little Shakespeare was all it took.
That night was the beginning of the end of her humanity. Now, after death, war, infidelity, forgiveness, and still more death, she felt far more secure in her relationship with David than she ever had before, and certainly more secure than she would have expected three years ago. Despite all that had happened and all that still could, she had no regrets.
Yet now she had to step back in time and revisit the years before Austin, before she became what she considered the real Miranda. She would have said they wouldn’t recognize her now in Rio Verde, but given her celebrity status, they probably would.
That didn’t mean they’d see her, though. For her whole life, people had looked right through her. Marianne was the “good daughter,” the medical professional, smiling out from a cheerful Christmas card with her societally approved white-bread family all in matching reindeer sweaters.
Marianne had never been the kind of sister one confided in, or giggled with over boys as a teenager, but when they were children, they had known how to talk to each other. Adolescence followed by their mother’s madness killed that sweet, young knowledge between them. Miranda wasn’t really interested in rekindling a relationship, but still, she hoped that Marianne would remember that time of their lives when every day was a golden-hued summer and they had run through the sprinklers on chubby legs.
Behind her, she heard the creak and shudder of the ladies’ room door being shoved open, and a moment later Stella slid back into her chair with a grin.
“You okay?” the Witch asked, her smile fading.
“Yeah,” Miranda said. “It’s been a weird week.”
“No kidding. Where were we?”
“The Eight of Pentacles.”
Now, Stella bit her lip as she dug through the tarot deck in her hands and came up with the card in question. Stella held it up: a spider in a web with eight circles of light in its threads.
“When I pulled this one I got this crazy surge of intuition, and all I could think was, ‘The Spider is here.’ Do any of your people go by the name Spider?”
Miranda shook her head. “Not that I’ve ever heard of. But given the rest of the cards”—she picked up the Devil card, which Stella had already explained—“can we assume this Spider person, or thing, is responsible for the badness that’s about to go down?”
“I didn’t really get an enemy vibe—just a gigantic portentous vibe. Even if he is responsible, it’s not because he’s a bad guy. Kind of like how Deven’s always doing really bad things for good reasons.”
“He?”
“Yeah. It felt male. Beats the hell out of me.”
The Queen considered everything Stella had told her for a moment, then shook her head. “Your cards are dicks.”
Stella laughed. “Most of the time they behave pretty well. You’re just lucky, I guess.”
Miranda’s eyes fell on the Ten of Swords, that horrible image of bloody death . . . a card of sacrifice, Stella had said. Instantly the memory of the woman she had killed flashed in Miranda’s mind. Was that what the card referred to? Taking a human sacrifice once a month essentially in Persephone’s name?
She could only hope that was the worst it might mean.
Stella picked up the cards one by one and returned them to the deck, wrapping the deck in a piece of black velvet and stowing it in a bag before she returned to the last few bites of her own ice cream.
Miranda, whose hot fudge sundae had been deceased for several minutes, said, “I’ll be right back.” She headed for the restroom; the ride back to the Haven was about forty-five minutes but felt like an eternity if she’d had a thirty-two-ounce Dr Pepper like tonight.
The Amy’s restroom was painted in bright cartoon images of cows wearing scuba gear and swimming with perplexed-looking tropical fish. She smiled at the artwork—it helped her avoid looking in the mirror while she washed her hands. Perhaps in another decade it would stop being so weird not to have a reflection, but right now it left her deeply uneasy, as if by not appearing in the mirror, she didn’t really exist.
As she yanked a paper towel out of the dispenser, something—a noise? a smell?—made her pause and train all her senses beyond the restroom door.
She could feel Stella at the table waiting for her, and the two employees behind the bar attending to the only other customer in the place. Only weeks ago the fact that the customer was human would have let her dismiss him as a threat, but now . . .
Miranda opened the door silently and leaned her head around.
She sighed.
It was a ninety-year-old man. She might still have suspected something amiss, but the clothes he was wearing and his stooped posture made it pretty clear he was unarmed.
Still, the vague feeling of unease remained, and Miranda knew it was time to leave. She couldn’t tell if Stella noticed her edginess or not, but the Witch followed her outside without comment.
“We’re about a block down,” Miranda said. “I told Harlan to wait on a side street since there’s not exactly room for a limo here.”
Stella laughed. “I’ve never really understood the point of limos. There are fancy cars that don’t take up nearly that much space or use that much gas.”
“It’s purely for show,” Miranda replied with a smile. “Our other car worked just fine and was a lot easier to maneuver. The limo doesn’t use that much gas, though—it’s a hybrid like all our vehicles.”
As they walked, Miranda kept her senses on alert and her hand on Shadowflame. Her eyes moved from shadow to shadow, her new vision allowing her to pierce the darkness and pick out details half a block away if she concentrated. Meanwhile she swept the area with her empathy looking for the usual emotions she’d find in an attacker: hatred, anticipation, fear, bloodlust. This early in the night there were still plenty of humans about . . . and now she had to worry about them, too. Any one of the people they passed could turn out to be Morningstar.
She was relieved to reach the empty parking lot where Harlan was waiting.
“Good evening, my Lady, Miss Stella,” he said, bowing and holding the door open. “Where to?”
“Stella’s apartment,” Miranda replied.
Almost the second the limo started to pull out onto Sixth, a wave of foreboding hit the Queen. She started to tell Harlan to stop and back up—
—but before she could speak she caught movement in her peripheral vision, something huge speeding toward the—
The impact was as loud as it was violent, the sound of crushing metal and tires squealing almost overwhelming Stella’s screams as the limo flew sideways and flipped over, throwing both women around in their seat belts like rag dolls.
Miranda could feel the cabin shrinking around her, and without thinking, without worrying if she had the strength or the ability, she seized Stella’s arm with one hand, reached through to the driver’s seat with her mind, and flung Harlan as hard as she could through the windshield to throw him clear as she and Stella vanished from the car.
• • •
Déjà vu. Noise blaring everywhere—sirens, shouting voices.
She opened her eyes and immediately regretted it. “Fuck me running,” she groaned.
Stella, who was staring into the Queen’s face, let out an anguished breath. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
Miranda shook her head and forced herself to sit up. She was hurt, but not badly—she had a splendid variety of lacerations and contusions, and her ankle felt broken, but it took only a moment to heal as she sat there in the middle of Sixth Street surrounded by the scattered and smoldering debris of the limo.
The car itself was on its back like some sort of stranded beetle, blocking the entire street. It was bent in a slight V where it had been hit. There were police cars, fire trucks, and an ambulance already on the scene, and she saw a team of paramedics running toward her bearing trauma equipment.
“I’m okay,” she said. “Take Stella and check her out.”
Stella tried to protest, but Miranda leaned hard on the paramedics’ minds to make them ignore the Queen and devote their attention to the human. Stella didn’t appear to have a scratch on her, but they needed to rule out internal bleeding.
Miranda was still mentally numb, but she got to her feet, an anxious thought filling her mind. “Harlan!”
She headed back toward the wreck, looking for any indication of a body.
There, about fifty feet away from the car—she saw something moving under a tree.
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