Miranda felt tears in her eyes again, but this time it was from such a different kind of emotion, she didn’t try to hide it; it had been so long since she’d felt anything but mourning. Stella seemed to sense that, and went on.
“So I went into the store, and it was like I was in this trance—I bought the CD without ever having heard of you. That was back when Waterloo had those listening booths, so I took it in there, and . . . I knew you. You knew me. And for the first time in my life I felt like someone had heard me, had been there—you knew what it was like to feel crazy, to feel like damaged goods. But something in your voice told me that it was going to be all right. And I believed you, and I survived.”
Stella sat forward and took Miranda’s hand. The Witch’s eyes were filled with a kind of light. “And you’re going to survive. I promise, Miranda. It’s going to be okay. I believed you . . . now you believe me.”
Miranda smiled through her tears, nodding. “Okay, Stella . . . I believe you.”
“Good. Whatcha got?”
Miranda laughed and held up the two pints of Ben & Jerry’s. “Cherry Garcia or Chunky Monkey?”
“Monkey all the way.”
“Here . . . now tell me why the hell you named your cat Pywacket.”
At the sound of his name, the cat lifted his head and gave Miranda a baleful glare, then deemed her unworthy of attention and started licking himself with one leg sticking straight up in the air.
Stella grinned. “Wait . . . you’ve never seen
Bell, Book and Candle
? With Kim Novak? It’s like the quintessential old Hollywood Witchcraft movie. I thought you were supposed to be, like, two million years old.”
Miranda snorted. “I’m thirty,” she said. “I just look two million years old.”
“Any two-million-year-old would kill to look like you.”
Miranda handed her one of the pints and a spoon she’d found in the study’s drawer; Witch and vampire clinked spoons before digging into the ice cream, and for a while, at least, there were no tears in the Haven, only the bright sound of two young women laughing.
* * *
If either the South or the West had been in any shape to notice, they might have been pleased to see that the Northeast was in something of a disarray.
Prime Hart’s Second had vanished into thin air, and the communication network had been infected with a virus that David Solomon himself would have admired: Rather than simply bringing the network down, it took the signals and misdirected them, resulting in patrol teams showing up at the wrong locations and communications getting lost all over the place. Suddenly none of the lieutenants’ passwords were working, and everything from e-mails to training schedules went randomly missing, so the whole network had been rendered essentially useless.
It was a lovely virus. Jeremy had paid the programmer handsomely for it.
He was listening to the chaos, though he didn’t derive any real pleasure from it; he had access to several of the Elites’ phone logs and listened in on their voice mail—those few that went to the right phone—to find out just how well the virus was working.
Hart was, to put it mildly, in a bit of a temper these days . . . but it had very little to do with the computer virus, and not much to do with the lack of a Second.
On his way back from Austin, Hart stopped off in several cities, taking care of various forms of business, mostly illegal. The day he was set to return to New York, he got a frantic phone call from his Haven Steward . . . and it was really too bad Jeremy hadn’t been able to listen in to
that
conversation. That, he thought, would have been quite satisfying.
As it was, he had quite a vivid mental image built up of what came next: Hart stormed into the Haven, threw open the doors to the harem, and found . . . an empty room.
Lydia had kept her word.
The harem guards were found dead, and every single girl in the harem had been kidnapped—or, rather, freed. Given how tight security on the harem was—Hart kept all his collections under guard—Jeremy had no idea how Lydia’s people had managed it, but without even stirring the wind, the girls had vanished, and not a single person in the Haven saw or heard anything.
Hart and McMannis no longer had any leverage over Jeremy Hayes. Jeremy had never returned to work after completing his mission in Austin. He had simply gone to the apartment he had set up months before and waited.
He stood in the doorway of the dark bedroom for hours, just watching her sleep, wondering when the feeling of triumph would come, when he would feel some sort of relief.
Perhaps when she spoke.
If she spoke.
For three weeks she had lain there, barely moving. She hadn’t acknowledged her freedom, or her father. She hadn’t said a word. He had fed her, tipping a cup of blood into her mouth a little at a time, and she had swallowed, but she’d given no sign she knew where she was, or who he was.
He had wept when he saw her. She was so thin, so weak, a wraith in a slip of a dress, old bruises that couldn’t heal mottling her body in patterns that left his chest clenched with impotent rage. The smudges of purple and black had faded once she fed, but her eyes were still sunken and stared sightlessly off at nothing, no matter what he said to her. He could count all of her ribs. Her clavicles stood out in sharp relief against her sallow skin.
She had been such a beautiful girl.
They had all been human once; he remembered the night she was born, her first steps . . . seeing her run in the sunlight, ribbons undone, in gales of laughter . . . It wasn’t until she was a teenager that the sickness came on her, stealing her life away little by little. They had tried everything, spent a fortune on doctors and cures from all over the world, but in the end, there was only one thing that could save her.
He and Melissa had chosen to come across with her, so she wouldn’t have to be alone in her eternal youth. She was sixteen.
He remembered her dancing outside in the moonlight. She always loved to dance.
For seventy years they had lived as a family, happy, while he worked his way up the ranks of the Australian Elite; he only got as high as lieutenant because Olivia had been so outstanding at her job, but that was fine by him . . . unlike McMannis, he had no problem answering to a woman. Unlike McMannis, after Bartlett’s murder, the Signet had chosen him.
He thought of how things could have been, if he had kept his Signet, if Melissa had been his Queen, the three of them living in the Haven, a royal family—Amelia had expressed interest in learning to fight, but he had never let her because he feared she would want to join the Elite and put herself in danger. If he had taught her, would she have been able to escape the men who came to kill her mother and drag her into the hell of Hart’s lusts? Was there anything he could have done to stop all of this?
It no longer mattered. He had her back. It might take years, but he would nurse her back to health, help her find herself again. She was still in there somewhere, her sweet smile hiding underneath months of torment. There was only so much violation one person could take without shutting down, but she was free now. Everything would be all right.
She would heal, and one day they would go home to Australia, and Jeremy would take his Signet back from the usurper whose filthy hands were all over it. Jeremy would expose McMannis and Hart to the Council.
He sighed. It was a lovely thought. There was just one problem:
If he ever showed his face, Miranda Solomon was going to kill him.
He deserved it. He knew the kind of death he had dealt David; he knew the kind of future he had left the Queen. David had said she would come for Jeremy, but even without that assertion, Jeremy was well aware of the fate waiting for him if he let anyone in the Council find out where he was. Between her and Prime Deven there would be no escape—especially if Jeremy’s suspicions were true and Deven was the Alpha of the Red Shadow. A great many Signets underestimated the South, but deep down everyone—even Hart—feared Deven. Their combined wrath would be Jeremy’s doom if they found him.
He couldn’t risk that. He couldn’t leave Amelia alone. So they would disappear and create a new life somewhere . . . somewhere quiet, far away from this madness, where Amelia could dance in the moonlight again, and he could learn to breathe without the sharp pain in his heart that was both grief over Melissa and fear for Amelia. Someday they would both learn to smile again.
Someday he would learn to live with what he had done to Faith.
Someday, perhaps in a hundred years . . . but not today.
* * *
The surest way to hide was in plain sight.
In Austin it was not possible for a vampire to go off the grid, because there actually
was
a grid—the Signet sensor network tracked them, one and all. Those among them who lived for the kill had to find somewhere else to live. In Austin, vampires fed discreetly, kept their heads down, and got used to the feeling of being watched, because it meant they were safe from the violence of their own kind and the humans who hunted them.
It took nearly eight years for her to start to relax, to stop jumping at shadows and looking over her shoulder.
Eight years to feel safe . . . and one night to destroy everything.
She was having a drink at the Plague Rat when she heard the name. It froze her entire body, her mind; she could hear her heart racing in her chest, but around her time stopped. Seconds later she slipped out of the bar and ran.
She locked herself in her apartment and didn’t leave for nearly a week. That fear she had fought for so long came roaring back, and she barely slept, couldn’t feed, couldn’t work; her supervisor left a message on her voice mail that she had been let go, and she didn’t even spare a moment to worry about the rent. It was a part-time thing anyway. It sure as hell wasn’t worth her life.
By the time she emerged from hiding, the Prime was dead, and that name she’d heard was no longer invoked around the District. As far as anyone knew, Jeremy Hayes had returned to New York and was no longer recruiting. Almost everyone he’d hired to go up against the Signet was dead, and those who weren’t had fled Austin fearing reprisal. Once the Signet’s dark gaze fixed on you, you were dead, and that was all there was to it; Hayes must have been offering obscene amounts of money to persuade anyone to join his cause.
But he was gone now. And there was no way he or anyone else would know she was here.
She was dead, after all.
The nights passed without anything calamitous happening. Life went on both in the Shadow World and outside it. She had to make a choice: either give up her life in Austin and run again, or find a new job and stick it out.
She decided to stay.
For once, luck favored her—she called George at Madre Luna to see if he had a chair open, and wonder of wonders, one of his artists had been fool enough to moonlight as a thug for Hayes and was now deceased. After months of waitressing she finally got to reclaim a little of her dignity, trading in the sound of clattering dishes and irritable humans asking if they could get their dressing on the side for the warm, familiar hum of a tattoo gun.
Tattooing vampires took a lot of skill, but it also took patience; a lot of vamps who wanted ink didn’t understand that they had to be actively involved in the process and couldn’t just sit there and bliss out from the endorphins. If they didn’t consciously slow down the healing process, the skin would reject the ink and heal over before she even finished the outline, wasting her time and theirs.
She’d had more than one customer scream and yell at her for what was essentially their fault, and she’d had to resort to violence at her last job, which was how she ended up waitressing. Old instincts had flooded through her, and she’d nearly killed the dumb bastard who was yelling in her face. She’d scared herself as much as she’d scared him and had steered clear of the District for weeks afterward just in case anyone had gossiped, even idly, about the dreadlocked tattoo artist who seemed unusually skilled in martial arts.
That was the best thing about working for George—he was big and scary and nobody fucked with his artists. He was also upscale enough that she could be more selective with her clientele, so she mostly picked vampires who had experience with getting tattooed. When it was right, when the client knew what he was doing and so did the artist, the experience was amazing, even borderline tantric.
“How long have you been a tattoo artist?” the woman asked, sounding a little nervous. It was her first time, but they’d discussed the process and she had signed the waivers.
Olivia, hands encased in latex, looked at her over the needle she was preparing. “Fifty years, give or take—off and on.”
“That’s longer than I’ve been alive.” The woman laughed. “I only came across four years ago.”
Olivia didn’t say what she was thinking—that wearing a butterfly on her shoulder for all eternity was the sort of thing only a baby vampire would go for—but the woman was nice enough, and it would be an easy hour’s work assuming she could handle herself.
“So why do you have to wear gloves?” the girl asked. “It’s not like you can give me HIV or anything.”
Olivia smiled. “Health department regulations—as far as the state of Texas knows this is a regular tattoo parlor. We follow the rules and nobody sticks their nose in our business.”
The woman seemed to accept that and went into the deep-breathing exercise Olivia had shown her in the consultation, and she had obviously been practicing; Olivia could feel her energy slowing down, and even after the initial shock of the needle scraping into her skin, she’d maintained her calm, holding off the healing like a seasoned professional. Olivia knew from experience that the girl would be sitting there with her silvered eyes closed, her canines out as if she’d just fed.
After a few minutes their breathing fell into sync, and Olivia guided the girl’s energy with her own, siphoning off the sparks of heat and electricity that shot from the skin of every person she’d ever tattooed and grounding them to help the girl last longer. She didn’t have much of a pain tolerance, but with Olivia’s help she’d be fine.