He wondered, specifically, if he was going to turn on the news one day and see these guys in a standoff with the FBI.
When he arrived at work to take the truck out to the base, he checked it over as always to make sure what was in it looked like it matched the work order. Once about a year ago the guys had loaded a truck with the wrong order and instead of a load of scrubs a hospital got fifty hotel maid uniforms. Since then they all double-checked.
He went back inside to fill up his travel mug with coffee and flirt with Stephanie, the receptionist. He was out of sight of the truck for maybe ten minutes.
At the base, the guards checked his ID and waved him through like always. He maneuvered the truck up the gravel road to one of the modular buildings, pulling around to the side where two guys were always waiting to unload the uniforms, and parked. Wrong they might be, but they were fine with him ducking into the building, after he unlocked the truck doors for them, to take a piss after all that coffee on such a long drive. He got out, pushing the driver’s-side door shut.
“Buenos noches,” he called over to the soldier guys. They gave him a nod but, like the others, didn’t smile or speak. “Let me get that.” The keys rattled in his hand. The doors were secured with a padlock, then a sliding bar. Same routine every time.
The doors swung open.
A pair of dark blue eyes. A wicked smile.
A glowing red amulet.
A sword.
And behind him, a dozen others.
Something whistled past Jorge’s head, and he heard both of the soldiers grunt—both fell to the ground, the hilt of a knife jutting out from their throats.
Panic as old as the human race seized Jorge, but there was nowhere to run. As they disembarked from the truck he started to edge backward toward the building, thinking if he made a break for it he could get there and yell for help. There were dozens of soldiers here. They must have lots of guns. These guys wouldn’t stand a chance.
“Bring me the Shepherd,” the dark man commanded. “Kill the rest.”
Jorge bolted for the door, running as fast as adrenaline could carry him . . .
. . . and woke with a start at nearly three A.M. to find himself stretched out on the seat, the truck back in its parking spot at the empty, dark Dallas warehouse, the pink copy of his work order signed and dated like always . . . with absolutely no memory of how he got there.
• • •
In the eerie silence that shrouded the Morningstar base, the sound of boots striding along the road between buildings echoed loudly from one metal structure to another. The sodium floodlights cast an orange-tinted glow over the compound, obscuring the star-filled blackness overhead.
It was a surreal scene. Bodies littered the ground on either side of the road. They weren’t all human. Some had slit throats, had penetrating wounds from a blade, or had been beheaded; a few had wooden stakes to the chest, usually at an angle to avoid the sternum in front and the spine in back.
At sunset there had been approximately seventy-five humans in the base, including all of the officers.
Now there was only one.
The first pyre had already been lit; that many bodies would take a long time to burn, and they needed to keep an eye on it. The impending autumn had brought rain to most of Texas, but there was no need to risk a wildfire. It was the same protocol they’d followed at the abandoned farm in Rio Verde, but here, they didn’t have to rush. No human authority would come out this far unless summoned.
The base was slowly starting to stink of burning flesh. Perhaps if more humans had occasion to smell a mass pyre, they wouldn’t be so enamored of bacon.
As David walked through the carnage amid still-open eyes and skewed limbs of the remaining dead, his com chimed, the tiny noise almost explosive in the deep quiet of the night. “Star-one.”
“We completed our sweep, Sire. No survivors found.”
“And our casualties?”
“Five, my Lord.”
“Send a team out to gather our dead and prepare them for sunrise somewhere far away from the humans. Transport will be here in twenty-six minutes—have everyone ready to go as soon as I’m done. Make sure all of their tech is loaded onto the second van.”
“As you will it, Sire.”
The single concrete building stood in the center of the compound. Four of the Elite were waiting outside for him and bowed at his approach.
“He’s secured in his office,” said Elite 41. “We searched the room for weapons and removed all communication equipment in case he got loose.”
“Good. This won’t take long.”
He paused for a moment, reaching into his coat pocket to turn on the recording app on his phone, simultaneously looking in the small window set into the door. A nice office, considering the austerity everyone else lived and worked in. Collapsible metal bookshelves with a variety of titles—mostly on religion and military history. The desk was bare now, its computer already confiscated, and beyond it, trussed to his own office chair, was the Shepherd.
From the report he already had about the Shepherd in California, David wasn’t expecting a crazed fanatic, but still, the man’s unnatural calm after his entire garrison had been slaughtered put the Prime on guard immediately.
The human looked up as David came in, seeming neither cowed nor surprised at what had just walked in the door.
He was a fairly ordinary-looking man with sandy brown hair, hazel eyes, and the stern mouth of a man who rarely had much to smile about. He was thin but not very muscular, and it didn’t look like he saw much more sun than David did. The Shepherd in California had worn clerical clothing, but far more casual; this one wore an unadorned black cassock.
David pulled a second chair over to the other side and sat down, elbows on the arms of the chair, fingers interlaced, and regarded the man in silence for a minute.
The Shepherd regarded him right back, unflinching under David’s gaze. Either the strength of his faith had stripped away all fear, or he was an idiot.
Granted, the two weren’t mutually exclusive.
Curious, David reached out his senses to get a read on the man’s energy and emotions. There he met with a surprise.
Shielded. Interesting. Was he gifted in some way, or was it a precaution against a vampire or Witch using their gifts against him?
Finally, David asked, “Do I call you Shepherd, or do you prefer another honorific?”
At last the man spoke. “Shepherd will suffice.”
David nodded. “I am sure you know who I am, Shepherd.”
“I do. You’re one of the eight archdemons.”
The Prime laughed. “Archdemons? Is that really what you call us? That’s adorable,” he told the Shepherd sardonically. Then David sobered, tapping his fingers together. “Here’s what I need from you, Shepherd. I need to know who’s in charge of your organization. What master puppeteer pulls your strings? You must answer to a central authority.”
The Shepherd raised an eyebrow. “Why? You don’t.”
“Not a temporal authority, no. Long ago we answered to a higher power.”
“As do we. Each of us was called to duty by Almighty God; it just happens that he speaks through a man, a holy vessel who delivers the commandments of our Lord so that we, his chosen people, may carry them out and purge the earth of the demonic forces that have caused its ruin.”
David had to restrain himself from snorting aloud. “You think vampires are the reason the world is like this? You’ve been reading the wrong history books, my friend. My people don’t start wars. There are no vampire senators. We don’t own corporations that destroy the environment. Making the earth uninhabitable would be rather counterproductive for immortals, don’t you think?”
“There are more varieties of demonic plague upon this earth than just you,” the Shepherd replied. “They will be dealt with as well.”
“Witches,” David surmised, holding up a finger. “What else?”
“You’re a clever man,” the S
hepherd told him. “I think you’ll figure it out on your own.”
He chose to ignore the comment. “So does this leader of yours have a name?”
“We call him the Prophet.”
“And he’s just a man like you?”
A slight smile. “He is just a man like any of us, another of God’s children . . . and yet much more.”
“How much of this more-than-a-man’s plan are you made aware of? Does he trust his Shepherds with the endgame?”
“We know what we need to know, when we need to know it.”
“In other words, no.” David considered for a moment. “So . . . your leader receives the word of God and relates it to you, or relates the parts he wants you to know. In order to carry out this word, you conscript soldiers and turn them into robots.”
The Shepherd shook his head. “Our soldiers join us of their own free will and offer themselves up to the cause. In that way they are just like yours; but ours are men, not demons. They must be given power by God to defeat you.”
“Well, they’re doing a bang-up job.” David crossed his arms. “Yes, you’ve killed Primes—in ambush. You needed two dozen warriors at each attack to get the job done, with crossbows, and still only half of them came back alive. In straight combat, your people have fallen by the dozen every single time. Now, don’t get me wrong, they’re good. Very good. I’ve killed a lot of them, and I’d say they’re at the same level as some of my midtier Elite. But if you really want to take us all out, you’re going to have to do better. In the meantime just look at how many lives you’re wasting.”
“They are all blessed men. They will be greatly rewarded in heaven for their sacrifice.”
David recognized that kind of talk, as well as the faint gleam in the man’s eyes. It wasn’t the kind of thing said by a man who had a lot to lose; it was what you would hear before someone hijacked a plane and killed hundreds of people to earn a place in heaven.
A thought occurred: “Is there a way to reverse the . . . gift . . . you’ve given your soldiers? Can you turn them back into normal people once all of this is over?”
“No.”
“That’s a shame.”
The Shepherd smiled. It was a sincere smile, but there was something nasty underneath it. Was it really fanaticism he was seeing, or was it sociopathy? “Victory has its costs . . . as you will no doubt learn. Our God is vengeful, as are we.”
The Prime nodded once more. “Here’s another question: What is all this bother over our bloodlines?”
For the first time, the Shepherd looked genuinely taken aback. “Have you not found your Codex?”
“Wait . . . you have one, too?”
The Shepherd leaned forward as much as he could in the zip ties that had him bound to the chair. “We are opposite sides of a coin, our people and yours. The moon and the sun, returning over and over to fight for the heavens. You will find far more similarities than differences as all of this unfolds.”
David started to contradict him but thought better of it and temporarily shifted his line of inquiry. “Where did you find your Codex?”
“We had contracted one of your number to perform certain tasks for which, at the time, our people were ill equipped. She infiltrated the Haven in New York to fetch the Codex for us so that we could begin preparations. After that, her mission was to bring us a live Signet, but her thirst for vengeance killed her.”
Marja Ovaska. “No,” David corrected. “My Queen killed her. But why didn’t you have Ovaska bring you the other artifact as well? You needed it to create your army as much as you needed a copy of the ritual.”
“Hart didn’t have it back then. He acquired it about eight months before his death. With a few careful nudges, Jeremy Hayes delivered both artifact and Signet to us.”
“You still haven’t told me what our bloodlines have to do with this.”
“It is not for me to know,” was the reply. “I was ordered to wipe out the women of that bloodline. The rest of your family lines died out long ago; we’ve been looking over the entire globe and found nothing.”
David stared at him hard. “Did your organization have anything to do with the death of Marilyn Grey?”
The human blinked, clearly perplexed. “No. We were only in our earliest formative stages then. It wasn’t until we found our own Codex that we knew what had to be done.”
That, at least, would be a comfort to Miranda. Even though the reports of her mother’s death were detailed and precise, and there was nothing untoward about it, she was afraid that she was responsible for the death of her entire family. It was true that she was the only one left. They had done a quick search for cousins, aunts, anything . . . but there were none. Even the two cousins her own age Miranda remembered playing with had both died. He could understand why she thought Morningstar might have engineered the whole thing.
He had quite firmly disagreed, however. There were medical records, death certificates, and newspaper obituaries for all of the deaths, and they were diverse enough in cause and location that if it was a cover-up, it was massive. In reality human beings really weren’t that good at large-scale conspiracy; someone always talked. David knew, based on the video they had left, that Morningstar wouldn’t cover anything up. They wanted Miranda to know what they had done.
This man had ordered them to kill Marianne and Jenny and record the whole thing. Even military officers in the middle of a war would do anything possible to avoid taking innocent lives . . . especially those of children. Yet the word had come from on high, and the Shepherd had followed it without question.
Perhaps it was fanaticism and sociopathy.
What David really wanted to know was where the Prophet had come from and where he was holed up, but he knew, both by observing the Shepherd’s reactions and by intuition, that the Shepherd didn’t know any more than he had said already.
The Shepherds weren’t going to be of much use; they could try torturing one later, but David didn’t think it would do any real good. Information in Morningstar was apparently given out in miserly doses; it was no wonder the soldier Deven had interrogated hadn’t had much to say.
No . . . they were going to have to go up the food chain.
That meant this interview was over.
David stood up and returned the chair to its original spot. “Thank you for being so forthcoming, Shepherd. I think I’ve kept you tied up long enough.”
The Shepherd’s eyes fell on David’s sword. “Are you planning to cut my head off?”
David smiled, and this time, he finally got a response: Staring up at him the Shepherd paled a shade, and the vein in his neck began throbbing visibly.
“Oh, no,” David told him, watching the fear build. It was one thing to know your adversary was a vampire, and quite another to see his eyes turn black. “That would be a terrible waste . . . after all, it’s the new moon.”
• • •
Miranda fell back against the alley wall with a moan, letting the man slide slowly to the ground. The blood raced through her body, and though the effect wasn’t as extreme as the first time, she still felt renewed strength filling her every cell.
Last time they had waited far too long. This time, it was the night of the new moon, and neither had been feeling anything like they had before—Miranda noticed she was a little off, her responses slower, but it was nothing like last time. She could still think straight, choose a target with more deliberation.
She stared down at the body with contempt. This one was a loathsome excuse for a man. She had caught him leaving a church, and his thoughts and emotions were so disgusting she might have killed him regardless. His mind was full of a nine-year-old girl . . . and not with the love of a parent for his child.
The Queen didn’t normally feed on men—she still had a visceral reaction of fear and revulsion when a strange man got too close to her, and given how intimate feeding could be, she had long ago decided to stick with her own sex. But this time . . . perhaps it was because she still had
the image of Jenny tied up and crying burned into her mind, but she had dragged the man into the alley and not bothered trying to soothe him as she tore open his throat.
Miranda looked around for a suitable place to leave the body. There was no Dumpster here, unfortunately, but the church had a little bit of land attached to it, and when she’d cased the place she’d noticed a storm drain. That would do for now. She held her hands over the body and concentrated, reaching into herself and pushing.
It vanished.
The Queen sighed, straightening her coat. She hadn’t wanted to leave the Haven tonight. She had wanted to stay near a computer screen and watch the raid unfold on the dedicated network David had built for the mission. He’d spent two weeks finalizing the details for this, making sure everyone he needed was in the right place at the right time, paying off one of the employees of the laundry company to get them into the warehouse and the truck, making sure everyone on the strike team had memorized the layout of the compound and knew where the highest concentrations of humans would be at that precise hour. He wasn’t leaving anything to chance, he said.
She was still worried. She hadn’t wanted him to go—why couldn’t he run the raid from the Haven and have the team bring the Shepherd there? This was a battle he didn’t have to fight himself, yet he wanted to send a very clear message to the rest of Morningstar. She could have joined him, but the Queen had had quite enough of that sort of thing for a while. If she raised her sword it was going to be here in Austin.
It was probably just as well she hadn’t been home for the fighting. Anxiety was already making her stomach hurt. The distraction of hunting had kept her from getting too crazy. She hadn’t sensed anything amiss along the bond; in fact, she’d felt grim satisfaction from the Prime . . . and then the wave of energy she already recognized. A battlefield was a good place to be when you had to drink someone to death.
Her phone rang. “Hey, Dev.”
“Feeling better?”
“I guess.” She started walking back toward the street where she was supposed to meet Harlan. “Good tip about the church.”
Shadowbound Page 21