Shadow’s Fall

by Dianne Sylvan

  “Frivolous?” David asked. It was the first thing he’d said, and everyone hushed and focused on him.

  “I’m sorry, David, but it’s true. Miranda has every right to her ambitions, but in the long run, what difference does it make to any of us? The average popular musician has, what, a five-to-ten-year career? She’s not exactly Bob Dylan. By the time this Council meets again I doubt anyone in the media will even remember her. She would have to retire by then anyway, before people noticed she doesn’t age.”

  David glared at Deven, who remained unperturbed by the venom in his eyes and went on. “I’d like to propose an amendment to Prime Hart’s motion—that Queen Miranda Solomon be barred from performing in public as of the next Council summit in ten years.”

  “The woman could ruin us all in ten years,” Hart all but blurted, suddenly angry. “She’s come damn close in three!”

  “No, you’ve come close in three,” David snapped. “Or at least you’ve tried. Every one of your childish schemes has failed you.”

  “You have no proof of that whatsoever, and if you—”

  “There’s something else to consider.” Jacob came to the rescue of civility again. “If Miranda were to vanish from the public eye right now, there would be a lot of questions. The risk of exposure is greater in that case than if she were to go on about her career and then retire gracefully, or fade from sight, within the next decade. Right now the whole world is watching her.”

  “These incidents are only going to escalate,” Hart said, looking directly at David. “It is in everyone’s best interest, including the Queen’s, to put a stop to her foolishness now before her need for attention gets her, or anyone else, killed.”

  David knew a threat when he heard one. So did the rest of the Council, for that matter, but he knew no one would call Hart on it.

  He stood.

  “Honored Council,” he said, “I would like to make one thing perfectly clear.”

  Once again the silence was so complete it practically had a life of its own. David faced them all, catching each pair of eyes in turn to make absolutely sure he had their undivided attention.

  “I have no intention of defying the Council’s ruling on this matter,” he said. “I understand that our collective security is in question, though I vehemently disagree with the idea that the Council should—or does—have any authority over its individual members. However: If anyone, at any time, makes a move against my Queen, whether human or vampire, Prime or otherwise … I will rip his spine out and hang him from it. If she is hurt again, there will be hell to pay.”

  He sat down.

  After a moment of Primes staring at each other and trying not to stare at David, Tanaka cleared his throat. “All those in favor of adopting Prime Hart’s motion as stated, please raise your right hands.”

  David counted five hands.

  “All those in favor of adopting Prime Hart’s motion with the amendment proposed by Prime O’Donnell, raise your right hands.”

  Everyone else’s hand went up, except David’s. He abstained. He could feel, even across the table, Hart’s growing outrage.

  “Amended motion carried,” Tanaka said with obvious relief. “Now, let us move on to the closing procedures of our gathering …”

  After what seemed like years, the Council was adjourned, and Primes began to get up from their chairs and slowly leave the room, disbanding for another ten years.

  David got up from his chair and strode past the milling Signets toward the exit. As he passed the rest of the table, he glanced over to see Hart and paused.

  The Prime was looking at him with such open contempt that it was almost surprising; his handsome face was twisted, for just a moment, with rage, and it almost looked like he was about to spring up and come after David.

  David flashed him a wicked smile. “Strike three,” he said. “Now get the hell out.”

  Jacob and Deven were both waiting for David in his study, the Scotch already poured.

  When he entered, Deven made a face and asked, “Rip his spine out and hang him with it? Really? Why not ‘I’ll tear your skin off and wear it as a diaper,’ or ‘I’ll crack you open and feed your nuts to the squirrels’?”

  “Shut up,” David replied, flopping down into a chair and accepting Jacob’s proffered glass. He drank it in two swallows and held it out for a refill. “What about that bullshit you were laying on out there? ‘Not exactly Bob Dylan’? Were you trying to make me punch you?”

  Jacob was shaking his head, but he was also smiling. “The two of you are a piece of work, you know that? Worse still, you’ve sucked me in.”

  David sighed. “I knew he’d try something. It was the most likely scenario. Tonight was his only chance to get the Council to act against Miranda, and he failed. God knows how much money he wasted bribing the others to vote his way … but he was forgetting one important thing. No Prime is ever going to give up a single iota of his own power, not even if the entire Shadow World is at stake. That autonomy everyone prizes so highly is as much a weakness as a strength.”

  “One wonders,” Jacob mused, “what would happen if we were to work together for something for a change.”

  Deven snorted quietly. “The only way that would ever happen is if God himself came down and made it so.”

  Halfway through the bottle, the study door opened, and the three Consorts entered, all of them looking a little rattled.

  “There you are, my love,” Jacob said, rising to take Cora’s hands. “Did you enjoy your evening out?”

  She sat down beside him. “I think so.”

  David frowned and looked up at Miranda, who was hovering in the doorway uncertainly. “It’s all right,” he said. “Everything went as planned.”

  “That’s not …” Miranda looked from Cora to Jonathan, then back to David. “Something else happened tonight.”

  “Good God, now what?” Deven asked. “How much more alcohol are we going to need?”

  Jonathan, taking his own position next to his Prime, laughed a little. “That depends on whether David thinks it’s good news or bad news,” he said.

  David reached out for Miranda, who slid her hands into his and sat down; he felt his entire body relax slightly at the contact, the way it did every time one of them came home to the other. “What is it, beloved?”

  “You didn’t have anything scheduled for Tuesday night, did you?” she asked.

  He blinked. “Um … not that I know of. The last of the Pairs is leaving Tuesday—Jacob, I believe you’re scheduled for a midnight flight?” At Jacob’s nod, David asked hesitantly, “Why?”

  “Well … you have a meeting that night. In town, at Anodyne.”

  Again, he blinked. “With whom?”

  She met his eyes.

  “Lydia.”

  “Lydia?”

  Miranda nodded.

  “As in …”

  She nodded again. “As in, the vampire who made you. Lydia. She wants to see you. She showed up at the bar tonight out of nowhere and demanded to come to the Haven. I told her as politely as I could to kiss my ass, and that if she wanted to talk to you, she could take a number like everyone else. We settled on a public meeting, contingent on your agreement, of course.”

  David looked like he’d been smacked in the head, and it wasn’t entirely inaccurate to say that he had. “Good plan,” he managed. “What in hell could she possibly want?”

  “She said something about defeating your enemies,” Miranda replied. “I have no idea what it meant. Do you know anything about her, Deven?”

  Dev shrugged with one shoulder. “Nobody gives a damn about lineage except the underclass. The only thing that seems to matter when it comes to the Signets is that you were sired by a vampire of considerable strength; and at our level of power, whomever we sire has the potential to be equally strong. Unless it was a love thing, few people really make a point of keeping tabs on who brought them over.”

  “Do you know who your sire was?” Miranda asked.
>
  Deven’s eyes were as frosty as his voice as he said, “No.”

  It was a highly personal question, she realized, and not her business … and she should have known that Deven of all people wouldn’t want to discuss the matter. Almost everything she knew about his past was painful; it stood to reason that however he’d become a vampire, it had been some kind of nightmare. “So it’s not normal for this Lydia to come looking for David,” she said, opting not to push.

  “Maybe she wants to borrow money,” Jonathan suggested with a grin. “You know how it is—get rich, become a Prime, and suddenly everyone’s your long-lost sire.”

  “But why now?” David asked. “She’s had years.”

  “She must want something.” Deven looked thoughtful. “Perhaps she’s in trouble of some kind—on the run or in debt or something else she thinks you owe her help with.”

  “Owe her?” Miranda said in disbelief. “She killed a bunch of humans and let David’s wife get burned at the stake for it, and then she turned him and left him to roast without so much as a ‘Hey, get some sunblock.’ He doesn’t owe her anything.”

  The Prime of the West shrugged again. “It could be argued that what he is now, he is because she made him. I’m not saying I agree, just that she might think so. We know nothing about this woman, her motivations, or her intentions. It’s pointless to speculate.”

  Miranda heard Cora hold back a yawn, and smiled. “I think we could all use some sleep,” she said. “It’s been a rough few days for all of us.”

  The others agreed and went their separate ways. Miranda took David by the arm and all but dragged him to their suite, despite his protestations that there was still enough time before dawn to do a systems check and talk to Faith about the departure schedules.

  “Bed,” she insisted. “With me. Right this minute. That’s an order, Prime.”

  He chuckled. “What a fool I’d be to deny the Queen her due.”

  She shut and locked the suite door behind them, then leaned back against it with a heavy sigh, taking a moment to luxuriate in the quiet warmth of the room. There had been so much noise, so much fear and unhappiness in the last few days … but it was over now. The Bastards were going home, and their life could return to normal.

  Except that it couldn’t, at least not yet … she couldn’t go onstage again until enough time had passed that people would believe she’d healed from her gunshot wounds. In fact she was going to have to stay out of the city as much as she could, except the Shadow District itself, to make sure no one recognized her—and then there would be press conferences and interviews, more lies to tell …

  And in ten years it would all be taken away from her anyway.

  David had taken his jacket off and unbuttoned his shirt, and was watching her from near the bed. He knew, without asking, what was on her mind. “It will work out,” he said. “Ten years is a lot of time for things to change. You would have had to retire not long after that anyway—you’ll find other ways to keep your career going. We’ll think of something.”

  “I know,” she said. “And you were right; it gets the Council off our backs. It’s just … the idea of all of those people sitting there debating on whether I should live my own life … It pisses me off, David. And so does the idea that they could have just up and decided to take away a part of me like it was nothing.”

  “Come here,” he said gently, gesturing at the bed. She sighed once more and did, throwing herself down on her back, earning a quiet laugh as David sat down and set to unlacing her boots. “I wouldn’t have allowed that. The whole thing was orchestrated to make Hart seem unreasonable compared to Jacob and Deven, and to remind them all that if they start doling out rules on Signets they might get one made against themselves one day.”

  “That doesn’t make it okay.”

  “No,” he agreed. “But it was the best we could do under the circumstances.”

  “Have you heard from Maguire or gotten a report on the explosion?”

  “No. I didn’t really expect to tonight—I’m going to examine the scene myself tomorrow. It’s been cleaned, just to get all the … Monroe … off the walls, but there’s still a lot I can learn from it. And the team got detailed images of everything first as well as samples sent on to Novotny.”

  He pulled off first her left boot, then her right, and she groaned with relief. Her socks went next, but then David paused.

  “Don’t,” she said before he could speak. “Don’t ask me anything about Lydia or bring up anything else about the goddamned Council … just lie down with me. The door’s locked and the world can wait.”

  David smiled. He stretched out alongside her, burying his face in her hair, and sighed, arms wrapping around her.

  Their eyes met. “Just kiss me,” she whispered, “and we can pretend everything’s all right.”

  He gazed down at her, still smiling softly. “It is all right,” he said. “As long as you and I are together, nothing can break us.”

  “Baby … I’ve seen enough movies to know you shouldn’t say something like that … as soon as you do, the whole world goes to hell.”

  “You’re right,” he murmured into her ear. “No more talking.”

  She curved her hand around the back of his neck and drew his mouth against hers. For some reason, though she hated Scotch, the taste of it on his lips was irresistible, warm and familiar like the feel of his body shifting over hers while his hands relieved her of her clothing.

  The night after the ball they had come at each other like animals, but tonight was different. Neither wanted time to pass any faster than it had to, and they touched and kissed each other with a delicious slowness that could just as easily have driven her crazy with need … but right now she wanted the hour to be a hundred, the moment to be a lifetime.

  He sighed contentedly against her neck and then lifted up her torso with one hand on her back to peel her shirt away, and she did the same to him, both of them so well acquainted with each other that they could undress each other in perfect concert. He knew exactly where the ties on her favorite shirts were, and she had unbuckled every one of his belts at least a dozen times—but it wasn’t a tired dance they performed, not at all. She was sure that in a hundred years feeling his skin bare against hers would still be exhilarating, still as new as it had been the first time. They melted into each other, boundaries blurred, that connection that was still so strange to them both rising up and weaving itself around them as effortlessly as her hair spilled down over his shoulder.

  Sometimes it felt like joining together physically was almost unnecessary—it wasn’t as though they were ever apart, not really. But there was something so lovely about being in two bodies, bringing them together and apart, mingling skin and limbs and sweat; mystical unions were all well and good, but there was something to be said for the sticky parts.

  They curled and twisted around each other in a double helix, rolling in slow motion from one end of the bed to the other. At last Miranda got her wish; time stopped in the darkened room, and there was no him, no her, not even an us, only this … and this was all that mattered, tonight.

  After affectionate embraces with their hosts and a mostly chaste kiss or two, the Pair of the Western United States departed in their hired limo, supposedly headed for Austin-Bergstrom International like the rest of the Council.

  “To the airport, Sire?” the driver asked.

  “No. Take us to the Ambassador Hotel.” Deven was watching the hill country roll by out the dark-tinted window, and Jonathan tried to relax despite the growing pool of molten dread in his stomach that had first started building when he realized who the blond woman in the alley was.

  I was right. Oh, God, I was right. What do we do now?

  Like Miranda, Jonathan had been unable to discern a motive in Lydia’s sudden appearance. She could be a friend or an enemy or a little of both. She might not do anything herself—but her arrival would start the dominoes falling, for good or ill, and Jonathan refused flat-out
to leave Austin until Lydia and David had met and she had declared her intentions. He knew just as strongly that he and Deven had a part to play in all of this, and if they weren’t there … things would go badly.

  He had expected at least a little resistance on Deven’s part; it was difficult, and somewhat hazardous, for a Pair to leave its territory even for a weekend, and the longer the Haven stood without its leaders, the more likely it was that the vampires of California would get unruly … while the cat was away, the mice would eat everyone in sight. It had happened to at least one Prime during every Council meeting—usually not a disaster, but a pain in the ass to deal with once the Signet was home.

  Deven, however, was different from his peers. People thought David’s security measures were invasive because of the sensor network that tracked every vampire in the South, but in truth David had nothing on Deven’s intelligence network. His Elite were ruthless, and there was no such thing as due process; the West, like the South, was a place where good vampires felt safe but bad ones felt hunted. Deven’s Elite were practically invisible and left bodies and blood without so much as casting a shadow. They were everywhere and nowhere; everyone and no one. Whatever the other Primes might think of him, the average vampire on the street found Deven terrifying, all the more so because so few had ever actually seen him.

  That meant that Dev and Jonathan could spare a couple of extra days without coming home to too much of a mess. They sent their Elite home ahead of them, and between their Second, Thomas, and the Haven’s Steward, Deven wasn’t worried. That was, after all, why his hiring standards were so ridiculously high.

  When Jonathan said he wanted to stay at least until Wednesday, Deven had merely nodded and said they already had a room waiting in town at a Signet-affiliated hotel where they could keep an eye on things without intruding. The Ambassador catered mostly to wealthy humans, but it also had a special concierge just for Shadow World guests.

  “You said we might be here a while,” Deven said. “I booked the room before we left Sacramento. Besides …” His voice grew a bit impish. “When was the last time I had you all to myself?”