Shadowstorm (The Shadow World Book 6)

by Dianne Sylvan

  Mouse was just staring at him. “Remind me never to try and screw you over. You screw back really really hard.”

  “That could be the title of my autobiography.”

  Mouse shook his head, impressed. “Well, scary as the whole thing is, I’m glad I could help. It was actually kind of fun.”

  David smiled and turned the laptop screen toward him. “There you have it: first payment of nine thousand, with one per month until you die, waiting in this account. You’ve got the card for it already.”

  The boy nodded. “Nine thousand — so the IRS won’t flag it?”

  “They won’t anyway. But better anal than annoyed. If you need an advance on it at any time just call the number in your packet.”

  Mouse’s face got a distant kind of happy expression, and David asked, “Planning to retire from Hunter?”

  “Nah…not yet. I love my job. It’s just… One of the first assignments they gave me was to run my own family tree to show how good I was at hacking records and analyzing data. I found my grandma. I didn’t even know she existed. We met, and we’ve been spending time. She’s in a shitty nursing home, or she will be for another week.”

  David smiled. “Well done, Mouse. Well done indeed. Now get out of here.”

  “Yes Sire. Again, thank you. I’m really glad I could help.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  He watched the lanky young genius weave his way out of the coffee shop. Miranda would be happy to know that something good had come out of all this.

  Speaking of which…he checked his inbox and found the video Miranda had just made for her fan site. Just like when she’d been shot, she wanted to reach out to her fans, both to thank them for their support and to encourage them not to harass the police. She was worried that Maguire in particular might be a target—not that they’d do anything violent, necessarily, but the poor detective’s life was already hard enough without his car being egged or worse.

  The camera system had improved by leaps and bounds. He’d refined the video to where once it was recording, it was almost crystal clear, albeit with periodic glitches and a slight graininess with too much zoom. It was certainly good enough for a home movie of the Queen at her piano, talking into her laptop and then playing an exclusive song for her fans.

  He switched the audio output to his com, where only he could hear it, and hit play.

  “Hi guys,” Miranda said, looking up into the lens. She looked tired, and vulnerable…perfect. “I know you’ve been hearing a lot of crazy stuff about me lately…”

  He adjusted the picture and ran a few filters over it to clear it up a bit and adjust the color.

  She took a deep breath, steeling herself for the implicit lie. “I can’t say much about the case, but I want to make one request: please let the police do their jobs. I’ve dealt with APD a lot over the years, and the detectives involved are good men who want justice. There are always false leads and exonerated suspects. I’m confident I’ll end up being one of those. Anyway, I love you guys and I’m so grateful for every one of you. If we got through my being shot together, we can get through this too.”

  Miranda offered the camera a smile, then reached up and tilted it down from her face to the piano. “Since we’re here, I thought you might like to meet my piano—if you’ve seen me onstage you’ve seen her twin, but this is my great love, the Empress. She was originally part of an inheritance of my husband’s, but over time, she became mine. And just for you, here’s a little bit of music.”

  David grinned. Fans who watched this would be overjoyed.

  He played the whole thing through another couple of times, tweaking settings here and there, before converting it to the format needed on the website and uploading it. Then, he reached into his coat and took out a USB drive.

  It took a few minutes to completely wipe the laptop—it would have been easier to destroy it in some decisively violent manner, but he really hated to waste a perfectly good computer. That meant a bit more effort to make sure there were no fragments of data left anywhere, no strings of characters, nothing but a blank slate without so much as an operating system. The version of OSX he used was not exactly the bog standard model; he had it reinstall the original operating system, putting it in a state of cheerful readiness for whoever owned it next. It had, in fact, another owner lined up; Stella’s friend Lark was in desperate need of a new machine.

  He had no real reason to linger and every reason to head home. Miranda was okay for now—she’d finished recording the video about half an hour ago, and would probably stay in her music room with her audience of one Elf and one Witch. The Queen was trying, subtly, to keep both Kai and Stella occupied so they couldn’t fret over what was really going on. David doubted it was working, but the two seemed pleased to be included regardless.

  David reached up and tapped the implant behind his ear. “Harlan, I’m ready.”

  “Yes, Sire. ETA five minutes.”

  He was pretty sure Deven was watching over Nico tonight. They’d been taking shifts. After three days in the interrogation room Nico had made his demands known: He would refrain from hurting or killing anyone, and submit to monitoring, if they let him return to his rooms. If not, he would Mist out of the room now that he was strong enough to do so and the next they would hear of him would be a trail of bodies left across Austin.

  They’d all braced themselves for whatever escape plan he’d concocted, but once he was back in his suite, he ignored them all completely. Mostly he just sat staring into the fireplace, seething.

  He hadn’t made a move to injure any of the guards, or to circumvent the two cameras David had halfheartedly placed in his room; he didn’t do much of anything.

  The one thing they had in their favor was that as long as David and Deven were both holding back power from him, the Weaving he could do was limited; the thought of Elven magic of his caliber turned on the Haven was the stuff of nightmares.

  Every night someone would go in to see if he needed anything, and try to engage him in conversation, just to make contact. He rarely acknowledged they were there unless he wanted something, and there wasn’t much he wanted. A cloud of dark emotion churned around him every moment he was awake; when he slept, dreams took control and almost every morning he ended up screaming himself awake.

  It couldn’t go on like this, but no one seemed to know what to do. They had to tread carefully.

  David had seen people he loved tormented in just about every imaginable way, but he’d never seen anyone react quite like this. Nico wasn’t just letting himself indulge in the violent side of their kind, he was reveling in it. He’d left the gentle healer he’d been strapped to that table to bleed out, and all that was left was everything he’d denied about himself, all the parts of becoming a vampire he’d feared and hated.

  They’d been dealing with Deven’s breakdown for two years, but that one was, in a way, simpler: Deven had always been depressive and self-loathing, so his behavior was, while extreme, nothing new. Nico had done a 180 like nothing David had ever seen.

  Harlan was waiting at the curb when David emerged from the coffee shop in a blast of espresso-heavy air conditioning. David sighed heavily once the Escalade was in motion and shut his eyes for a moment.

  “Everything all right, Sire?” Harlan asked. “Or at least no worse than earlier?”

  He had to smile at that. “Better, actually. I’ll know in a few days if tonight’s work was successful, but I have every reason to believe it will be.”

  “That’s good to hear, Sire.”

  David did a network check on his phone: all systems nominal. “You don’t happen to know any psychiatrists, do you?”

  “Not personally, Sire, but surely you can find one—I assume you’re thinking of someone who specializes in PTSD.”

  Frowning, David said, “You know, I was joking, but that’s not a bad idea. I know there are a few vampire psych doctors here in town, and there are probably a lot more out th
ere. It’s a surprisingly lucrative field.”

  “I would imagine,” Harlan said wryly. “We can’t all be as well-adjusted as you.”

  David laughed. “True. Maybe I’ll put feelers out. Even if I can just talk to someone about how to approach this, get some ideas, that would be helpful. We didn’t do terribly well on our own with Deven.”

  “I think we’re all treading in unknown waters here, Sire. We need all hands on deck.”

  “Aye, matey,” he replied, half-yawning. He pulled over the bag Mouse had given him and dug out the swiftly-melting pint of Chocolate Therapy. In the absence of an ashtray the Escalade had a push-button compartment for phones and whatnot; this one contained, among other things, a stack of plastic spoons. “If you’ll pardon me, Harlan, we’re twenty minutes out from the Haven and that’s just enough time for me to eat my feelings.”

  “Of course, Sire. Cheers.”

  *****

  It had been a long, long time since Miranda had last walked into the study to find Deven drinking. It was comforting, in a way, to finally do it again.

  The Prime was curled up in the chair with his head against the armrest, a bottle of Scotch on the table…and an empty glass.

  “You’re not drinking?” she asked, kind of alarmed.

  Deven glanced at the bottle. “Oh…I forgot it was there.”

  She had no idea how to react to that. The best course of action seemed to be fetching herself a drink and sitting down. She tried to look him over without being obvious.

  Casual dress: jeans, t-shirt. He looked way more put-together than the night she’d followed him to the hospital. Clean-shaven, for one thing, and to her relief, he’d redyed his hair. It was just black, lacking the streaks or tips in red or blue or violet he’d always favored, but it was something. She wouldn’t feel like he was really himself until she saw eyeliner.

  Something random occurred to her. “Avi works for you,” she said. “He’s one of your agents.”

  “Well, he was.”

  “David said you had a spy in our Elite, but he said it was a woman.”

  He gave the tiniest flicker of a smile. “I had two spies in your Elite. David was supposed to make her.”

  She had to laugh. “You boys are ridiculous, you know that. Have you talked to Avi since New York?”

  “Not directly. I sent him a message telling him not to worry about being killed as a deserter—Signets trump pretty much everything. I said we’d be in touch to discuss the end of his contract. It may seem unbelievable, but he didn’t actually know who I am—I’ve been careful not to be seen since I’ve been here. He knows I’m familiar with the Signets — familiar enough to know their inner workings so I could assign him this detail. That’s all.”

  “He’s going to have kittens when he figures it out.”

  “An entire litter, yes. The second the Circle is together and he sees me it’ll all be out in the open.”

  “Why not tell him now?”

  Now she could definitely see the smile. “Mostly for the fun of seeing his face.”

  Miranda popped the top on her Coke and poured it over ice, adding two rather chubby fingers of rum. She didn’t want to get drunk, exactly; she just wanted to turn down the dial on her anxiety for a while.

  Finally she forced herself to ask: “How is he tonight?”

  Deven closed his eyes. “The same. Not interested in talking, not interested in anything. I know he’s thinking about something—maybe a plan, maybe just making sense of it all. I can feel his mind whirling underneath all the anger. There’s nothing to orient him, no compass points. He may still be in there, or he may be dead and this is all that’s left. I just don’t know.”

  She knew she shouldn’t say it. She’d been trying not to bring it up. But she had to. “Maybe if you lowered the barrier—”

  “I can’t.”

  “Of course you can!” Exasperated, she sat forward, holding her glass in both hands. “There’s no reason to keep it up anymore — imagine if all that love were to reach him.”

  “Exactly,” Deven said sharply. “Imagine it. Imagine I take the wall down, and he’s hit with the full weight of power that’s built up behind it. I don’t have the strength to moderate a flow of that size—it’d be like hitting him with the entire ocean. It would kill him, or at least drive him even more insane.”

  Miranda stared at him as it started making sense. He hadn’t kept refusing to lower the wall because of his own fear, at least not entirely—but because of fear for Nico, fear that the force of everything he’d held back from his Consort would dash Nico to pieces on the rocks.

  An oddness again: knowing that made her feel a little better. Deven wasn’t being quite as obstinate as he seemed.

  “I concur,” came a tired voice, and Kai poked his head into the study. “I have looked as closely at the situation as I can without myself being a vampire, and I believe Deven is right. Without someone to help dampen the flow of energy, it would burn them both out in seconds. It would take a sorcerer of great skill to do so—at least Nico’s level or better if we could find it. I do not even know anyone in Avilon who…” Kai trailed off, narrowing his eyes. “Excuse me.” and he vanished.

  “Do you think he’s thinking of calling another Elf?” she asked.

  Deven shrugged. “He’s been a little scattered the last few days. It’s hard to get him to complete a sentence.”

  She nodded. Seeing what this was doing to Kai was one of the hardest parts of an entire truckload of hard parts. Kai, Stella, the Pair, and Deven couldn’t all have been more different, but they were united by their love for Nico. They’d all grown a lot closer in the last week as everyone tried to cope with yet another change in their reality. Nobody was dealing all that well, though she had caught Kai and David actually having an amiable conversation, and something in her chest had unclenched a little.

  Surprising her, Deven asked, “You’re not actually worried about this murder nonsense, are you?”

  “I don’t know. I know that in the long run it’s meaningless. I could break out of any jail they tried to put me in. Texas is a death penalty state, but fat lot of good lethal injection’s going to do them. Convicted or acquitted, I’m still Queen. But am I still Miranda Grey to my fans? That I don’t know. I don’t want to hurt them. The best thing would be if David’s plan goes off without a hitch and the whole thing just goes away. It’s not like Morningstar was invested in getting me put away—they wanted to split us up into smaller groups so they could kidnap Nico. He was what they wanted, not me. I just wish I knew why.”

  “Well, what’s unique about him?” Deven prompted.

  “He started out an Elf, not a human.”

  “And what were they interested in when they had him?”

  “His body, mostly. Nico mentioned something in one of David’s visits about how they really didn’t want him at all—they just wanted to cut him open and play with his insides knowing he wouldn’t die from it. David surmised that they want to do something to a full Elf, but didn’t know enough about Elven anatomy for what they’re planning. There aren’t exactly a herd of Elves running around, so if they get hold of one, they have to be careful with her. But now they know a lot about how to hurt one without killing her.”

  “Comforting.”

  “Plus it still leaves the central question unanswered,” Miranda pointed out.

  “And unanswered it’ll remain until we know more about this Prophet and what he wants. Jacob pointed out a while back that aside from killing vampires, nothing they’re doing fits with the usual behavior of religious zealots; they’re not turning their swords on entire Shadow Districts, but on very specific targets, the Signets. They don’t want to exterminate us, not yet—first they want to destabilize our power so the entire system collapses, possibly to cause anarchy and widespread violence to make themselves feel righteous in killing us off wholesale.”

  “But that answer is incomplete,” Miranda not
ed. “I don’t know why, but it just is.”

  “I know. But I have nothing.”

  “We need to double the guard on Kai,” she muttered. “He shouldn’t leave the Haven again.”

  “Agreed.”

  They drank in silence—or at least she drank—for a while. A dozen questions fought for the first chair in her mind. There was so much she needed to tell him, months of sorrows and now all of this, but she was terrified to ask too much, to expect anything. She was so afraid to drive him away again—this time he might never come back. If she was careful he might be her friend again someday.

  “I’m sorry,” he said softly.

  Startled, she looked at him. “For what?”

  He looked down at his empty glass, whose ice cubes were slowly turning into a tiny lake. “I can’t…I can’t make up for everything. I can’t fix who I am. But you deserved better — a better friend. Someone to talk to, about…everything. I could have been there for you. But I wasn’t. I couldn’t see past my own brokenness. And I’m sorry.”

  She smiled through a knot in her throat. “I forgive you.”

  He nodded. There was just the slightest shine to his eyes, but he wouldn’t look at her. “I don’t know how to help…but if you ask for something, I’ll try to give it to you.”

  Miranda took a deep breath. “You know, there’s only one thing, really, that I wish…right now, I mean…I think we could both use…shit, never mind.”

  But Deven had already intuited her meaning from the word salad, and with something oh so close to a chuckle, moved over, making enough room for her in the chair.

  Miranda didn’t give him a chance to change his mind. She moved over to the chair, drawing her legs in and snuggling up next to him while he draped the throw blanket around them both. She leaned her head on his shoulder, but rather than being content just to lean, Deven turned toward her—the chair was enormous, after all—and wound his legs around hers, drawing her head against his chest, his hand curving around the back of her head, the other around her hip.