“I didn’t really get an enemy vibe—just a gigantic portentous vibe. Even if he is responsible, it’s not because he’s a bad guy. Kind of like how Deven’s always doing really bad things for good reasons.”
“He?”
“Yeah. It felt male. Beats the hell out of me.”
The Queen considered everything Stella had told her for a moment, then shook her head. “Your cards are dicks.”
Stella laughed. “Most of the time they behave pretty well. You’re just lucky, I guess.”
Miranda’s eyes fell on the Ten of Swords, that horrible image of bloody death . . . a card of sacrifice, Stella had said. Instantly the memory of the woman she had killed flashed in Miranda’s mind. Was that what the card referred to? Taking a human sacrifice once a month essentially in Persephone’s name?
She could only hope that was the worst it might mean.
Stella picked up the cards one by one and returned them to the deck, wrapping the deck in a piece of black velvet and stowing it in a bag before she returned to the last few bites of her own ice cream.
Miranda, whose hot fudge sundae had been deceased for several minutes, said, “I’ll be right back.” She headed for the restroom; the ride back to the Haven was about forty-five minutes but felt like an eternity if she’d had a thirty-two-ounce Dr Pepper like tonight.
The Amy’s restroom was painted in bright cartoon images of cows wearing scuba gear and swimming with perplexed-looking tropical fish. She smiled at the artwork—it helped her avoid looking in the mirror while she washed her hands. Perhaps in another decade it would stop being so weird not to have a reflection, but right now it left her deeply uneasy, as if by not appearing in the mirror, she didn’t really exist.
As she yanked a paper towel out of the dispenser, something—a noise? a smell?—made her pause and train all her senses beyond the restroom door.
She could feel Stella at the table waiting for her, and the two employees behind the bar attending to the only other customer in the place. Only weeks ago the fact that the customer was human would have let her dismiss him as a threat, but now . . .
Miranda opened the door silently and leaned her head around.
She sighed.
It was a ninety-year-old man. She might still have suspected something amiss, but the clothes he was wearing and his stooped posture made it pretty clear he was unarmed.
Still, the vague feeling of unease remained, and Miranda knew it was time to leave. She couldn’t tell if Stella noticed her edginess or not, but the Witch followed her outside without comment.
“We’re about a block down,” Miranda said. “I told Harlan to wait on a side street since there’s not exactly room for a limo here.”
Stella laughed. “I’ve never really understood the point of limos. There are fancy cars that don’t take up nearly that much space or use that much gas.”
“It’s purely for show,” Miranda replied with a smile. “Our other car worked just fine and was a lot easier to maneuver. The limo doesn’t use that much gas, though—it’s a hybrid like all our vehicles.”
As they walked, Miranda kept her senses on alert and her hand on Shadowflame. Her eyes moved from shadow to shadow, her new vision allowing her to pierce the darkness and pick out details half a block away if she concentrated. Meanwhile she swept the area with her empathy looking for the usual emotions she’d find in an attacker: hatred, anticipation, fear, bloodlust. This early in the night there were still plenty of humans about . . . and now she had to worry about them, too. Any one of the people they passed could turn out to be Morningstar.
She was relieved to reach the empty parking lot where Harlan was waiting.
“Good evening, my Lady, Miss Stella,” he said, bowing and holding the door open. “Where to?”
“Stella’s apartment,” Miranda replied.
Almost the second the limo started to pull out onto Sixth, a wave of foreboding hit the Queen. She started to tell Harlan to stop and back up—
—but before she could speak she caught movement in her peripheral vision, something huge speeding toward the—
The impact was as loud as it was violent, the sound of crushing metal and tires squealing almost overwhelming Stella’s screams as the limo flew sideways and flipped over, throwing both women around in their seat belts like rag dolls.
Miranda could feel the cabin shrinking around her, and without thinking, without worrying if she had the strength or the ability, she seized Stella’s arm with one hand, reached through to the driver’s seat with her mind, and flung Harlan as hard as she could through the windshield to throw him clear as she and Stella vanished from the car.
• • •
Déjà vu. Noise blaring everywhere—sirens, shouting voices.
She opened her eyes and immediately regretted it. “Fuck me running,” she groaned.
Stella, who was staring into the Queen’s face, let out an anguished breath. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
Miranda shook her head and forced herself to sit up. She
was
hurt, but not badly—she had a splendid variety of lacerations and contusions, and her ankle felt broken, but it took only a moment to heal as she sat there in the middle of Sixth Street surrounded by the scattered and smoldering debris of the limo.
The car itself was on its back like some sort of stranded beetle, blocking the entire street. It was bent in a slight V where it had been hit. There were police cars, fire trucks, and an ambulance already on the scene, and she saw a team of paramedics running toward her bearing trauma equipment.
“I’m okay,” she said. “Take Stella and check her out.”
Stella tried to protest, but Miranda leaned hard on the paramedics’ minds to make them ignore the Queen and devote their attention to the human. Stella didn’t appear to have a scratch on her, but they needed to rule out internal bleeding.
Miranda was still mentally numb, but she got to her feet, an anxious thought filling her mind. “Harlan!”
She headed back toward the wreck, looking for any indication of a body.
There, about fifty feet away from the car—she saw something moving under a tree.
She fully expected to find him dying, but amazingly, he was alert and leaning back against the trunk. He looked dreadful—though certainly not as bad as he should have after going through a windshield—but she could tell he was going to be fine.
“Thank . . . God,” he panted. “Couldn’t see you from here. Called for help—ours and theirs. There are two teams en route and the Prime’s on his way.”
“Just relax,” Miranda said. She smiled. “Consider yourself off duty for the night.”
In the distance she heard car doors slamming—a lot of car doors.
Mere seconds later David was at her side. “Are you all right?” he asked, pulling her into his arms. “I mean, I know you’re all right, but . . .”
“I’m okay,” she replied. “We need to get Harlan some blood and rest.”
“Mo’s on his way over—he stopped to check in on Stella since they’ve got her at the ambulance already.”
David knelt to make sure Harlan wasn’t badly injured; the driver was bloody and battered, but as Miranda had thought, he didn’t seem to have any truly grave wounds. “How the hell was he thrown clear?” David asked as he squeezed Harlan’s shoulder with a reassuring hand and stood back up.
“I did it,” she said. “I grabbed Stella and Misted but I couldn’t reach Harlan physically, so the best I could do was throw him through the windshield.”
“You didn’t throw him through the windshield,” David said, shaking his head. “I walked by the car on my way here. The windshield is shattered but still in place, no body-sized holes.”
“How is that possible?”
“You must have Misted him, the way I’ve done with bodies—it stands to reason you would be able to.”
Miranda swallowed hard. “I guess so.”
Mo and his team arrived and clustered around Harlan. Mo had come prepared; he had bags of blood for both of them. Miranda moved around the back of the tree where she wouldn’t be seen and drank half of her bag, letting the blood move through her and take care of the last few injuries. Then she gave the rest back to Mo.
“Give this to Harlan, too,” she told the medic. “He needs it way more than I do.”
Hand in hand, she and David walked back toward the limo, where a dozen or more police officers were already swarming. One of them started to command them to leave, but David raised an eyebrow at him and he went back to what he was doing without saying another word.
Miranda watched her Prime examine the wreckage; he didn’t touch anything but walked around the entire car, and she could see him analyzing every detail. At one point he bent and picked something up off the ground.
When he returned to her, she saw he had Stella’s purse. “Stella was on the passenger side, right?” he asked, handing her the bag.
Miranda shook her head. “Driver’s.”
He frowned. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah, why?”
David gestured at the driver’s side of the car, which was bent in at a scary angle. “That’s the side that got hit. Even if you Misted before the car rolled, she should have been at the very least badly injured or more likely killed.”
“She’s not hurt at all,” Miranda said, suddenly realizing how strange that was. She turned toward the ambulance, where the EMTs had Stella sitting on a stretcher with an oxygen mask over her face, and walked over.
Stella gave her a thumbs-up, then lowered the mask and smiled weakly. “I’m okay,” she told Miranda before the Queen could even ask. “I don’t even have a bruise. They said it’s the damnedest thing they’ve ever seen.”
Yet another car pulled up onto the scene, one she recognized as Detective Maguire’s. Miranda smiled. The poor man—this was the third time he’d been called in to a disaster that his daughter was either involved in or witness to. As if, being a parent, he didn’t have enough to worry about without vampires getting involved.
Miranda returned to where David stood and told him the Witch’s condition.
“None of this makes sense,” he said. “Look at the tire marks here—whatever hit you was enormous, like a dump truck, and it kept pushing the limo until it flipped. But then it backed up and left the scene. Whatever it was, it hit Stella’s side dead-on at . . . forty-two miles per hour. With that much momentum she should have been squashed like a bug on impact, but she doesn’t have so much as a hair out of place.”
“Do you think it was Morningstar?” Miranda asked.
He looked confused, a rare and unsettling sight. “Why would they do this? They would have known a wreck was unlikely to kill you unless something sheared your head off or you bled to death before you could heal, and at your strength, in the middle of the city where help is always nearby, those are slim odds. Why do something so big and public with so little chance of success when they haven’t even tried attacking Austin with their new warriors yet?”
Miranda’s eyes fell on the stretcher again. “It wasn’t about me,” she said. “It was about Stella.”
“There are much easier ways to kill a human.”
She felt that little intuitive tug at her mind. Stella had been the channel for Persephone’s power at the solstice. She was growing progressively stronger. Persephone had told Stella that getting involved with all of this would change her life, and now Stella had not only survived what should have been a fatal crash, she had miraculously come through completely unharmed.
“They weren’t trying to kill her,” Miranda said softly. “It was some kind of test. They were watching . . . waiting to see if she was hurt. They know something that we don’t know.”
“I’m afraid they know a lot of things we don’t know,” David said, meeting her gaze. “I’ll go talk Maguire out of shooting us both.”
Miranda returned to the stretcher. Stella had been freed of the oxygen mask and was sitting wrapped in a blanket, her feet swinging back and forth while she waited for the paramedics to clear her.
The Witch saw the look on Miranda’s face, and her own face changed; for a moment she looked much older.
Stella’s voice was grim, but accepting. “I’m going back to the Haven, aren’t I.”
Miranda nodded.
The Witch sighed. “Damn,” she said. “Pywacket’s going to be so pissed.”
• • •
“This is Lieutenant Neelesh—emergency code four-two-four—my team is under attack! We have heavy casualties—I repeat, code four-two-four, the Pair is in imminent danger—”
A blade sang through the air and opened his side, sending him to the ground in a rush of his own blood. Around him he could hear the rest of his team trying desperately to fight their way to the Prime—but no one had seen this coming, no one had been prepared for an ordinary-looking group of mortals to suddenly fall upon them like demons. They had taken several of the attackers down, but more kept coming, putting themselves between the Elite and their Signet, cutting him off from aid.
Neelesh wrenched himself up onto his hands despite the agony in his side and tried to get back to his feet. He would not die in a pool of blood on the streets of Mumbai, not like this. He saw an opening and bolted for it, summoning all the strength he had left to reach the Prime.
He was close, so close, when he felt the stake bite deep into his back with such force that it knocked him back to the ground.
He could no longer think through the pain, but loyalty still drove him, and he tried, with unresponsive limbs, to rise again.
A pair of boots entered his vision, and he heard a sword being drawn.
The last thing he saw was the Prime falling back against the side of the car, a stake jutting from his chest . . . and just as the world went dark, he heard the desolate, wailing death shriek of the Queen.
Four
Australia was still in chaos, a dozen gangs ripping each other’s throats out to try and take charge. In the Mideastern United States, once ruled by Joseph Kelley, things weren’t much better: Someone had claimed the Signet only to die two days later, and now the continuous warfare Kelley had battled his entire tenure had erupted into violence that was claiming both human and vampire lives.
And now, Varati.
In the sixty-plus years Deven had ruled the West, he had seen three Signets lose their bearers. In the past
two months
four Signets had died. McMannis, Hart, Kelley, Varati . . . five, if he counted David. All but one had been directly linked to Jeremy Hayes, but it was still alarming, and this last one . . .