He was a handsome but imposing man—though Elves were stronger than they looked, Jonathan could easily have snapped Nico in half like a twig—but gifted with surprising good humor considering the life he led. Nico could sense that he, too, had a touch of the blood, but it was very far back, and searching out his actual family line would be intrusive to say the least. It was barely more than a trace; at most he would have stronger-than-usual psychic abilities.
“If I am disturbing you,” Nico began, but Jonathan waved his hand.
“No, no, I just needed some air.”
They pondered the view in silence for a while, but eventually Nico could feel the Consort’s eyes on him. He waited.
“If you’re waiting for my permission, you have it,” Jonathan said. “He and I have an understanding—we always have. He’s just never acted on it.”
“And why should he now?” Nico asked.
Warmhearted as he was, the Consort could still be menacing when he wanted to, and he towered over Nico by several inches. “Are we really going to play this game?”
“I do not—”
“You and I both know it wasn’t just some glowing rock that brought you here. Whatever prophetic impulse you’re acting on, pay me the respect of owning up to it.”
Nico sighed. He turned toward the view again, fear evaporating and weariness taking its place. “My people by and large fear and hate this world,” he said. “We have hidden for so long that many of us have forgotten what we were made for. A Prophet’s word did send me here. And though I want to be of service to this world as I have been called to do, I was not ready for . . .”
Jonathan chuckled softly. “You weren’t ready for Deven.”
“Not at all.”
“You came here thinking it would be straightforward work, only to find yourself crushing a bit on your patient.”
Nico shook his head, smiling at the absurdity of the conversation. “‘Crush’ is not exactly the word for it,” he said. “More like ‘pulverize.’”
The Consort nodded sympathetically. “I’ve been there. It was the quintessential thunderbolt, love at first sight. At that very moment, if you’ll pardon my language, I knew I was well and truly fucked.”
He met the Consort’s gaze. “Are you unhappy?”
Jonathan chuckled. “I suppose from the outside our relationship doesn’t make a lot of sense. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed, before I came to California, that I would end up bound to a spiky little warrior with more demons than a Halloween party.”
Nico frowned. “I do not understand the reference, my Lord.”
“Not important. But I don’t think ‘happy’ is the right word for this life. ‘Content’ might be better. Except . . .” Jonathan looked reluctant to say anything else but went on anyway. “There are so many things I wish I could change. So much I wish I could do for him. I envy you your power.”
The Elf had to smile at that. “Say you saw someone you cared for about to drown in a river, and you had the ability to dam that river so he would live—but you also saw that if you did, the river would not feed the fields around it and hundreds of people would starve . . . or you saved him from drowning and the next day he knocked over a candle that burned down a house with ten other people in it . . . how would you choose what future to create?”
“Then how do you ever act at all? I’d be paralyzed with fear over the consequences.”
“In this case the cost of not helping far outweighed the other potential outcomes . . . but still, being able to Weave is no guarantee of wisdom. The chessboard has no boundaries, and every move tips the fortunes of worlds.”
“All right,” Jonathan said, “I take it back. I don’t envy you.”
Nico lowered his eyes. Jonathan had no idea. “Nor do I envy you. I see a thousand possibilities before the fact, but you see a single reality after,” he said after a moment. “It would be a heavy burden.”
Now Jonathan was the one who looked away. “Over the years I’ve learned a lot of things I wish I could forget.”
Nico shook his head and smiled a little, returning his gaze to the forest, taking solace from the soft rustling sound of the canopy of leaves. “So have I, my Lord,” he said softly. “So have I.”
• • •
David sat staring at his laptop screen, one hand absently scratching his lower lip while he considered what he was looking at.
“You’re sure they were human.”
Deven sounded a good ten times more energetic than he had during their last conversation. “Yes. We had multiple reports from the scene and the blood we recovered was definitely human—I smelled it myself.”
“Send me all the forensic details you have from the scene.”
“Sending now.”
David continued to stare at the image while the files downloaded. He’d seen the same thing several times already, but this time, the implications were alarming.
Two earpieces, both alike in dignity: identical in design and construction to all the others associated with Morningstar. One of those first earpieces had been left in New York when the Order harassed Hart, whom Morningstar mistakenly thought had been recruited by Lydia and the Order of Elysium; another came from outside Stella Maguire’s apartment when an agent of Morningstar ransacked it—searching, David believed, for Miranda’s Signet, though how Morningstar had known to hunt down Stella was still a mystery. In both cases the person who lost the earpiece was definitely a vampire.
And now these two, taken from the bodies of two humans who fought like vampires and nearly took down some of the most fearsome Elite in the world.
“Do you think they’re still hiring vampires, if they’ve got humans who can do this?” Deven asked.
“My guess would be no. There are few ordinary mortals—even trained Hunters—who can fight a vampire face-to-face, so they brought in what they hated most in the world until they found a way to come at us themselves. Most likely they killed any vampires they still had on the roster . . . but a better question is . . .”
“How the hell they did it,” Deven finished for him. “The answer is pretty obvious, don’t you think?”
“I’d wager the death of a Prime would be enough to create superhuman warriors.”
“But how many?”
“It can’t be a limitless supply. We need to know more about what we’re dealing with here; there might have been other sightings of these people in other territories that nobody’s talking about.”
“True. No vampire is going to want to admit he got his ass handed to him by a human.”
Behind him, David heard Miranda enter the bedroom, remove her sword, hang it up, then sit down on the sofa to pull off her boots with a sigh. It was a little early for her to be back—dawn was three hours away. She was supposed to be in the middle of a training session with Bax.
Finally, they hung up, leaving David once again staring at the earpieces, not at all happy about where this might be leading.
Miranda came up behind him and put her hands on his shoulders, rubbing them as she peered down at the screen. “Those things again? Oh, goody.”
He smiled, enjoying her talented hands. “Oh, it’s much better this time.” He related the incident in California to her, and their suspicions that Jeremy’s death had been the catalyst for whatever magic had given Morningstar this lovely new thing to play with.
She digested the story for a moment, then said, “I’m not sure what’s worse, the thought that they made hundreds of vampire hunters, or that they could only make a few.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, turning his chair to look at her.
“Well, if Jeremy’s death let them create, say, only twenty vampire hunters, what do you think they’re going to do when we’ve killed all twenty?”
David blinked at her. “Damn. I didn’t even think of that. This could go very badly very quickly.” He shook his head. “On the other hand, the fear of being ritually murdered might convince the rest of the Council it’s in their best interest to help us track these people down.”
Miranda sat down in his lap, and he wound his arms around her gratefully. “What’s wrong?” he asked after a moment. “You skipped your session with Bax, and you feel troubled.”
She bit her lip, and he could sense a complex knot of uncertain emotions. “I got an e-mail . . .”
He gave her a questioning look. “Go on.”
Miranda took a deep breath and just blurted it out. “It was from my sister,” she said. “My father’s dying. She says he only has a couple of weeks. He wants to see me.”
The abrupt mental shift from Signet business was a bit jarring, but his emotional reaction to hearing anything about her family tended toward violence anyway. These people had abandoned her to her madness, just as they had her mother. Since then, Miranda had heard from them three times at most, always a cool and distant e-mail from Marianne, always wanting something.
“He can go fuck himself off a cliff,” David said.
Miranda looked taken aback, for a second, by the vehemence of his words, then chuckled. “That’s very sweet of you, baby.”
“Did your sister have any further details, or was it just a summons?”
The Queen’s eyes were on the wall across from the desk where their weapons hung. “It’s some kind of cancer,” Miranda told him. “He’s holed up in Rio Verde, with her playing nursemaid.”
“I thought they moved to Dallas to get away from your mother’s memory,” David said.
“They did. We lived in Rio Verde until I was nine, then moved to Austin, and after they put her away, Dad headed to Dallas. That’s why I’ve always considered Austin my hometown even though I wasn’t born here. But a couple of years ago he moved back to Rio Verde—to the same house.” Miranda paused, then said, “She said please. She’s never said that to me before.”
David leaned forward and kissed the skin just above her Signet. “You’re going, aren’t you,” he said.
“It’s a last request,” Miranda said. “How can I deny a last request? Plus . . . it’s just one of those things I think I have to do. They’re the only thing left that links me to my history. I don’t want that history, but . . . I just have to see the house one more time, look them both in the face.”
“All right. Rio Verde’s five hours from here—we can get there and back in one night, but it’ll be pushing it.”
“I want to go alone,” she told him. “I’m a big girl. I can handle it.”
“Out of the question,” David replied. Her eyebrows shot up, no doubt a precursor to her pointing out, quite rightly, that he wasn’t the boss of her, but he added, more gently, “If you don’t want me to go, I won’t, but you must at least take a pair of guards. The thought of you being alone and something going wrong—”
“David, it’s a town of eight thousand people. I’ll be there for a few hours. What could go wrong?”
He frowned. “You do realize that by saying that you’ve already damned your luck.”
“Yeah, probably. If it will really make you feel better, I’ll take Minh and Stuart. I can go Friday—I don’t have a show.”
Their eyes met and held. “I know I can’t protect you from getting hurt,” he said. “I know it’s not my job. But I can’t help wanting to keep you safe, even from things I know you need to do. I would cheerfully dismember anyone who made you unhappy.”
She grinned. “And I love you for it, which is kind of twisted.”
He put his arms around her again and grinned back. “Remind yourself periodically over the next century or so that you said it, I didn’t.”
• • •
Amy’s Ice Cream on Sixth was an odd touchstone in Miranda’s life. Every time she sat down—always at the same table—she was a different person, living a different version of her life. What she ordered was never the same, but the place itself had barely changed in the time she had become a part of the Shadow World.
The first time had been her first date with David, though “date” was a bit of a misnomer. She was still human then, and though they had both felt the growing connection between them, she’d had no idea she would end up taking him to bed that very night.
She smiled to herself as she spooned up another bite of her ice cream. She’d been a cheap date—a sundae and a little Shakespeare was all it took.
That night was the beginning of the end of her humanity. Now, after death, war, infidelity, forgiveness, and still more death, she felt far more secure in her relationship with David than she ever had before, and certainly more secure than she would have expected three years ago. Despite all that had happened and all that still could, she had no regrets.
Yet now she had to step back in time and revisit the years before Austin, before she became what she considered the
real
Miranda. She would have said they wouldn’t recognize her now in Rio Verde, but given her celebrity status, they probably would.
That didn’t mean they’d see her, though. For her whole life, people had looked right through her. Marianne was the “good daughter,” the medical professional, smiling out from a cheerful Christmas card with her societally approved white-bread family all in matching reindeer sweaters.
Marianne had never been the kind of sister one confided in, or giggled with over boys as a teenager, but when they were children, they had known how to talk to each other. Adolescence followed by their mother’s madness killed that sweet, young knowledge between them. Miranda wasn’t really interested in rekindling a relationship, but still, she hoped that Marianne would remember that time of their lives when every day was a golden-hued summer and they had run through the sprinklers on chubby legs.
Behind her, she heard the creak and shudder of the ladies’ room door being shoved open, and a moment later Stella slid back into her chair with a grin.
“You okay?” the Witch asked, her smile fading.
“Yeah,” Miranda said. “It’s been a weird week.”
“No kidding. Where were we?”
“The Eight of Pentacles.”
Now, Stella bit her lip as she dug through the tarot deck in her hands and came up with the card in question. Stella held it up: a spider in a web with eight circles of light in its threads.
“When I pulled this one I got this crazy surge of intuition, and all I could think was, ‘The Spider is here.’ Do any of your people go by the name Spider?”
Miranda shook her head. “Not that I’ve ever heard of. But given the rest of the cards”—she picked up the Devil card, which Stella had already explained—“can we assume this Spider person, or thing, is responsible for the badness that’s about to go down?”