And now that he knew what Morningstar was really about, they were even more of a mystery—they were supposed to hate vampires, but they’d sent vampires to attack Miranda twice now, and Cora once. Why would they employ what they hated, and what exactly did they want with a Signet? If all they wanted was to kill vampires, surely Ovaska would have killed both Miranda and Deven three years ago when she had them captive. There had to be something else.
He leaned his forehead on Osiris’s shoulder for a moment, frustrated and weary. Osiris responded by whuffling his hair, and David laughed.
“All right, let’s go,” he said, patting the horse’s neck. “We’ll both feel better after a good run.”
He and Osiris both knew the trails around the Haven property by heart, of course, so he barely had to hold the reins; he leaned into the Friesian’s neck and let him take to the wind.
An hour later, back in the stall grooming the horse, he did feel better, but still, as he brushed Osiris down and gingerly combed a few burs from his tail, David couldn’t shake the pervasive sorrow that he had been carrying since his memory had returned.
Life had been so good, for a while. Oh, he’d known better than to think it would last forever—that simply wasn’t possible for Pairs. Eventually everything fell apart; entropy was the nature of the universe. But for a brief three-year period he had felt invincible. As long as his Queen was standing with him, all those decades of loneliness, the pain of leaving California, everything felt worth it.
But now . . .
“Hey.”
Startled, he looked up from the hoof he was examining. “Hey.”
Miranda stood at the stall door, as usual keeping her distance from Osiris. She was dressed as if she’d been in the city.
“I had a meeting with Cynthia,” she explained before he could ask. “Picking a venue for my big comeback.”
He straightened. “You look tired,” he said.
“I guess.”
“You haven’t been sleeping.”
She looked at the ground. “I had a lot to think about.” She raised her eyes to him and added, “I wasn’t angry at you, I just . . . needed some space.”
“I know. I’m glad you had it.” He returned to his work, running his hands along the horse’s legs, looking him over carefully; it had been a while since Osiris had been ridden, and David wanted to be absolutely sure everything was sound. The grooms had been taking excellent care of him, though, as usual.
He was aware that Miranda was watching him, but he didn’t comment. He went about the old routine as he always had, waiting for her to speak.
Finally she said, “Lark went home tonight.”
“Did she? Good.”
“Maguire wants to come see Stella. He thinks she should be in a regular hospital. I think once he sees her he’ll change his mind. People who don’t understand what’s really wrong with her would only make things worse.”
“I agree,” he said.
“We need to talk.”
The words made his heart tumble down even further, somewhere around his feet. He felt like he already knew what she was going to say . . . and it was the death knell for what little hope he’d still had. “Okay. Here?”
“No . . . why don’t you get cleaned up and we’ll talk in the suite?”
He nodded. “I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
He finished up the last few tasks and paused to touch his forehead to the horse’s, seeking comfort wherever he could find it. Osiris seemed, as always, to understand, and again stuck his big nose in David’s hair, having learned over the years that his warm breath was comforting to his master. Finally there was no more putting it off; David left the stable and made his way back to the Haven.
Miranda was already in their suite, showered, and in her off-time uniform of black cotton pants and a tank top. He had to smile at that; even the most powerful vampires in the world were always creatures of habit. She had her yoga pants and tanks, he had his old worn jeans and T-shirts. They both tended to go barefoot around the Haven except when on duty, which had led to some sideways looks at emergency meetings when the Pair showed up without shoes on to confer with Tanaka on the other side of the world.
She was sitting cross-legged on the bed, holding something in her hand and staring at it: a black feather.
“Be right with you,” he said, bypassing the bed for the bathroom.
He stood under the blast of near-scalding water for as long as he could, but there was only so long he could stall; he had to face this and move forward. In a few minutes he’d know for sure if he was facing it alone.
She was still sitting where she’d been, and he joined her there as soon as he was dressed again.
Miranda smiled. “Thank you for not getting horse funk on the bed.”
He smiled back. “You’ve trained me well, my Lady.”
She stretched out on the bed, saying, “Lie down with me.”
He did as she asked, and she moved closer, pressing herself against him with a sigh, her head on his shoulder and one hand around his upper arm. David held on to her tightly, trying to memorize every last sensation: her scent, the weight of her head, her bare foot curved around his ankle. To have known such grace, even for a little while . . . he had been blessed.
The minute stretched out into several before she asked, “Why did you come back?”
“What do you mean?”
“You were done,” she said. “You could have gone on, not had to deal with this world anymore. I know how tired you always were . . . you could have gone to rest. Instead you came back, knowing the risks, knowing it would hurt . . . why? Was it a sense of duty, to fight Persephone’s war?”
“No,” he replied. “That was a condition of my return, not the reason. As far as I was concerned, she could find another vampire to be her Second. All I cared about, the only reason I agreed to any of it, was to get home to you.” He sighed into her hair and said softly into her ear, “I love you so much, Miranda. Nothing could keep me away from you, no fate could stop me from finding you. And no god could win my allegiance if you weren’t by my side.”
He didn’t look at her face, but he could hear the tears in her voice. “I know,” she said. “I just needed to hear you say it, just to remind me why I’m doing this.”
“Doing this . . .”
“I’m scared,” she whispered. “This whole thing is too big for me . . . but after everything we’ve been through, I can’t give up on us.” She drew back and looked in his eyes, and in that moment his heart rose up from the floor and remembered how to fly. “I am still, and will always be, your Queen,” she said. Then, she smiled. “Any questions?”
Fifteen
It was one thing to watch a building blow up from a distance, too far away to hear the screams of the dying. A rumble of thunder, a flash, flames, smoke . . . then sirens shrieking out into the night as the human authorities raced to extinguish the inferno . . . too late to save anyone. From nearly half a mile away, it might be any city fire. Perhaps a faulty gas line had ruptured in a restaurant.
Most people would hear the noise, maybe even smell the smoke, then go back to their lives, uninterested, perhaps seeing a news story about the accident and remarking to a friend that they had heard the explosion.
From that far away Olivia could almost pretend it was an accident and not mass murder.
This time would be different. This time the Haven had once been her home.
She had at least earned clemency for the servants and Elite—she had begged Jeremy to see reason, especially since nearly all of McMannis’s Elite had been hired after Jeremy was deposed, so they had nothing to do with what happened to Amelia and Melissa. Perhaps they worked for a villain, but their complicity in his deeds didn’t make them deserve the same fate. He had to see that. He
had to
.
But it wasn’t until she threatened to leave that he relented. He needed help, and he was basically out of allies. If the choice was only kill the Primes or kill no one at all, Jeremy was willing to spare the others. He wasn’t happy about it, but Olivia didn’t really care. After seeing what had happened in Chicago, she couldn’t let him do it again.
It turned out that Jeremy couldn’t use the same method for Hart or McMannis as he had for Kelley, anyway. Just in the brief span of days since Kelley’s demise, the other two Primes had overhauled their security systems and had barely left their Havens. Both had brought in extra hands—hired thugs off the street, she supposed—and locked down their Havens as much as possible. With all those eyes on the Havens there was no way to plant bombs, no way to even get close enough to bar the windows and doors shut. They’d be killed before they even reached the building. A different strategy was called for.
“All right,” Jeremy said, spreading a roll of blueprints and plans out on the table in their shabby, anonymous motel room. “Jameson finally came through—we’ve got a new diagram of the system.”
Olivia leaned over and studied it. “It looks a little patched together.”
“Very. McMannis was in a hurry to get new alarms in place—I suppose he expected me to strike all three of them within days of each other. I’d rather give it time for him to let his guard down.”
The lamplight made him look sinister . . . or at least it didn’t hide it. Olivia held back another gut reaction, which was to flinch when he leaned closer. She’d been deliberately shoving away her intuition for days now, but she knew one thing: This would not end well.
Still, she waited . . . waited to figure out what to do. She didn’t want to stop him from killing McMannis or Hart, but the more time passed, and the more plans they made, the more she realized that he might not stop there. If he looked far enough, every Signet in the Council had something to do with Jeremy’s downfall, even if it was just turning a blind eye . . . and that blind eye would be taken for an eye.
“The good thing is, in his haste, he left a security hole,” Jeremy was saying, bringing her back to the table before her. “The guard shift changes at two
A.M.
—the standing guard isn’t allowed to leave his post until the new guard arrives, but if you compare the personnel lists, you see that over here”—he tapped an exterior Haven door with his pen—“the incoming guard for this station is returning from a patrol, meaning he has to enter the building from the outside. If we catch him and use his key, we get in without tripping the system.”
“What kind of identification are they using?” Olivia asked. “It can’t just be a key.”
“Key cards and fingerprint scanners,” Jeremy replied. “McMannis is working on a more sophisticated system, but the kind he really needs only exists in the Southern U.S. and there’s no way in hell he’s getting those designs.”
Olivia snorted softly. “Solomon would probably give him fake plans anyway to make sure they failed.”
“I was thinking of doing something like that with Hart—his system is already more secure than McMannis’s, but after what happened with the harem I’m sure he’s working on an upgrade.”
“This is probably a dumb question, but why don’t you just Mist inside? You did it to set the explosives in Chicago.”
“That was outdoors in line-of-sight,” Jeremy replied with a self-deprecating smile. “To be perfectly honest I’m dreadful at Misting. My control is iffy at best if I can’t see where I’m going and haven’t been there before. Since McMannis took power he remodeled the west side of the Haven, so I have no idea what I’d be Misting into. You should have seen me sneaking around the Southern Haven peeking in all of the interrogation rooms so I wouldn’t accidentally land in a wall.”
That was news to Olivia. “I thought all Signet-level vampires could Mist the same.”
“Oh, no. There are a few who can’t at all, and then there are others, like the West, who can go great distances and even take someone with them. I wish I could—that would simplify things quite a bit.”
“All right, so we get in at two
A.M.
at this location. What then?”
Jeremy pulled another sheet of designs out of the stack and laid it over the security grid. “Knowing McMannis, he’ll figure his security is sufficient and won’t have bothered moving to a bunker. I made sure my style was obvious enough in Chicago that they’ll be assuming I’ll stick with what worked, an external attack. They won’t be expecting a surgical strike.”
Olivia’s stomach twisted remembering Chicago. So many dead . . . and she had helped lay the bombs and block the exits. She had honestly thought that most of the Elite were out that night . . . or that was what Jeremy had led her to think. She had racked her brain trying to remember their conversations, trying to pinpoint whether he had said for sure how many would be trapped in the Haven, trying to figure out if he had lied or just been vague . . . The difference between the two was huge when there were a hundred lives at stake.
At least the Australian vampires wouldn’t have to suffer the same agonizing fate. She told herself it was enough.
Her hope—a faint and fading one, but a hope all the same—was that after McMannis was dead, the Signet would remember Jeremy and Jeremy would remember it, and he would be loath to throw it away; he might give up on Hart for the time being, choose to stay and rule his territory, and look for a less hands-on way to get rid of Hart. Plenty of people wanted Hart dead. Surely if they all pooled their resources they could make it happen no matter what kind of security the bastard had.
When trying to decide whom to attack after Kelley, Olivia had lobbied for McMannis for exactly that reason, though she’d told Jeremy it was because they would need more time to strategize for Hart since he already had better security and getting hold of the plans would be difficult, if not impossible. Australia’s Haven was isolated from the rest of the world, and despite McMannis’s being a cowardly jackass, things had remained peaceful here since he stole the Signet.
The plan was straightforward, which Olivia liked—the more complex something got, the more places it could snag. They would get into the Haven, find McMannis, kill him, and get out in a matter of minutes, hopefully before a single alarm went off. She knew they could do it—once she had slipped back into her role as Second, her training came back to her in full force, and she knew they were both up to the task.