For all their ferocity and overwhelming numbers, these would-be Elite were nowhere near skilled enough for the second in command of Israel. He had them all down inside ninety seconds and was at the door in another ten.
He jerked the door open, twisted inside, and shut it, slamming down the steel security bar. “Geveret Amit,” he said, “you and your sisters must come with me now—”
He turned . . . and froze.
The cozy room was a shambles, furniture broken and curtains ripped down. The window had been shattered, leaving shards of glass everywhere. And all around him, lying headless or with hilted stakes jutting from their chests, were dead men, none of them Elite.
The women were gone.
The devastation, however, was not what gripped his attention.
At the far end of the room, in the only upright chair, a man sat calmly watching him, wiping blood from a blade. Dressed in black leather and almost certainly American, he was completely unaffected by the blood and death all around him.
The Second knew why without doubt: He had killed all of these men himself.
“Ah, there you are,” the man said. Even sitting still he had the preternatural grace of their kind . . . a very, very powerful one of their kind. His pale eyes swept the Second from head to foot and back up again, his expression one of a certain provisional approval. “The women are safe,” he stated in flawless Hebrew. “You should be far more worried about yourself.”
He stood. Normally, the Second would have laughed—this was hardly an intimidating figure—but there was such strength in his young-seeming body, and such great age in his eyes, that a towering giant would not have been half as frightening.
“Avishai Shavit,” he went on, sheathing the blade. There were at least four other visible weapons and signs of half a dozen more under his coat. “We have a mutual friend in the Mossad. He speaks highly of you.”
He had to mean Director Dagan. “Who are you?” he finally asked.
“I may be your salvation,” was the answer. “The men who have murdered your Prime will hunt you down and leave your head on a pike outside these gates before they will risk you making a play for the Signet yourself. One way or another, you have to leave Israel.”
Avi made a sardonic noise. “Yes, I figured that much out already. And?”
A slight smile. “You are fearless in battle—I was watching. You’ve been in military intelligence your entire life. Second in command is as high as you can go unless a Signet takes you, and you know, in your heart, that you are not a Prime. You are, however, exactly what I’m looking for.”
There was a pounding outside the door. They had to know their men were dead by now. “To what end?”
“You have heard the whispers,” he said. He didn’t seem to notice the people trying to break down the door. “When a despot falls dead in the middle of dinner from no discernible cause . . . when Death comes like a thief in the night where no mortal hand could reach . . . you hear someone say it, and someone else call him a fool, because no such thing exists.”
Avi stared, nodding slowly. “I have heard.”
“Then you know exactly who I am.”
“There are many warriors greater than I. Why go through all this trouble just for me?”
“You mean this?” He gestured at the bodies. “You will soon learn, if you accept my offer, that this, for us, is no trouble at all. Now . . . if you would like to hear more, I suggest we take our leave of this mess and go somewhere more private.”
“How do you propose we do that?”
A smile, amused but also sinister, leaving Avi uneasy . . . but also intrigued. “One moment.” The visitor drew a mobile phone from his coat and, when the other end of the line picked up, said only, “Activate.”
Beyond the door, a half-dozen piercing screams went up, screams of terror and agony that were all cut short, a strangled silence left in their wake.
“What did . . .”
The man met his eyes, and again Avi had to steel himself against an instinctive ripple of fear. “Lesson one,” he said. “Do not ask questions whose answers you don’t really want to know.” He opened the door and looked at the Second. “You have nothing to lose, Avishai Shavit. Will you come?”
He did not hesitate. “I will.”
“Good. Follow me.”
“What do I call you?”
His quiet, commanding voice held all the authority of a Signet—and all the warmth of the Arctic. “You will call me Alpha.”
PART ONE
The Eight of Pentacles
One
Just another night at the office.
The venue’s stage door swung open and several black-clad security staff emerged, trying to clear a path from the door to the car waiting nearby. Dozens of cameras clicked, lights flashing. A cacophony of voices erupted that drowned out even the sounds of nearby traffic. A moment later, a curly-haired redhead bobbed through the crowd, politely refusing interviews.
“Miss Grey! How are you feeling since you recovered from the shooting?”
“Miss Grey, have you started work on your second album yet?”
“Miss Grey, is it true that the man who shot you was killed while in police custody?”
She kept walking, letting Minh and Stuart keep the way open, until she’d passed through the reporters and hit the small knot of fans that had managed to get to the door before her guards blocked anyone else from entering the alley.
Most of them were bright-eyed young women who reminded her so much of herself . . . when she was mortal . . . before she’d gone insane.
These were the people who had given her a career. She made a habit of pausing with them for just a moment to sign a few CDs and give a hug captured on a phone camera—the image would be blurry, but with the chaos they would blame the phone itself. It wasn’t much of a stretch; Miranda almost never got a decent shot with her own phone, and hers was ten-years-beyond-state-of-the-art by virtue of her being married to the Fanged Wondergeek.
Finally with a parting smile she took pity on her bodyguards and headed for the car. Harlan held the limo door open for her and she slid in, dragging her guitar along with her onto the seat.
As pretentious as she’d thought it was the first week, she had to admit the limo was a comfortable way to travel; the Lincoln had thrown a rod or something and had to go to an actual mechanic for a change.
The car pulled away from the curb, and she reached into her coat pocket for her phone. The usual patrol status reports were coming in: situation normal.
“Straight to the rendezvous, my Lady, or did you need to stop along the way?”
She had already fed tonight, but as the high from the show began to abate, already her body was whispering pleas for more blood, and she was starting to get that itching, gritty feeling in her veins. Just thinking of fresh blood caused her stomach to lurch painfully.
Miranda sighed. “Stop before we leave downtown, please.”
She’d expended a lot of energy performing tonight. That must be why she was hungry again so soon; she was just getting used to being back onstage. Modulating her energy was different now—on the one hand she was stronger, but on the other, working her empathy through her new power was taking some adjustment. All of that extra power could burn out quickly, leaving her exhausted, if she got it into her head that she was invincible.
But even as she told herself she was just tired and overworked, she wanted to curl up and weep . . . because she knew it was a lie.
A few minutes later Harlan pulled over. “I believe this area should provide a nice selection,” he said.
“Thank you. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”
It was a warm, humid night at the end of July, a little cooler than average for this time of year but still growing steadily more oppressive. She and David had both switched to lightweight coats made for rain rather than cold—there were few other ways to walk around town concealing a sword, but their usual leather was a bit much for a Texas summer.
Tonight, though, standing on the sidewalk surveying the scene, she felt a chill move through her.
It had been only ten days since the attack on Hart’s Haven, less than a month since she had become . . . what she was now. Since that first night, since she had woken as this new creature and discovered she had killed someone, she had known that all of this new power had come with a price. She could run faster, fight harder, sense things beyond the perception of even the strongest vampire. A stake to her heart would no longer kill her. She could track a lawbreaker across the entire city without breaking a sweat, and she knew there were other changes she hadn’t discovered yet.
But true invulnerability was impossible. If they were now this strong, this hard to kill, there had to be an equal and opposite consequence.
She left the car and made her way down the street toward a crowded corner where a steady stream of humans crossed from one side to the other. Drawing near, she moved back behind a building and peered around the corner at them, feeling . . . what, exactly?
Distant. Alien.
Hungry.
The distance between her and the mortal world had grown so much in such a short time. She still had friends among them, but night after night she watched humans walking by, completely unaware of the creature whose eyes were sweeping over them, and she felt every inch of that distance, felt a final separation from their ordinary lives . . . lives that were so fragile, so easily ended.
A pert young Indian-American woman in a business suit caught her eye, and she bent her will against the girl’s, pulling her from the river of mortals and into the darkness, away from her kind, away from everything alive and familiar.
Miranda took the girl’s arm and steered her back against the wall, careful not to hurt her or get her tripped up on the human’s insanely impractical heels. The girl’s face was a vacant neutral, her consciousness wrapped in shadow so it would never occur to her to struggle.
But if she did struggle . . . if she tried to run . . .
Miranda’s teeth dug into her lip. She imagined the girl bolting, shedding those stupid shoes and running as hard and fast as she could . . . running for her life . . . she imagined giving her a head start, holding on to the wisp of her scent, and then running after her . . .
chasing her
.
All of this worrying about injury and tending to their prey’s memories was nothing but a conceit to civility—what her body craved as much as blood was to
hunt
, to bring the girl down and tear open her throat under the open sky and feel her heart shudder to a stop as her blood soaked into the . . . ground . . .
Miranda cried out and stumbled away from the girl, nearly losing her hold over the human’s mind. She wanted to tell the girl to run away as fast as she could, but was that to save her, or to revel in the bright salt-sweet adrenaline that would infuse the girl’s blood?
Before she could panic at her own thoughts, she pinned the girl back and roughly turned her head to the side to take what she had come for.
She understood, though she tried not to think about, why her teeth had changed. The second pair enabled her to get a harder grip on a human’s throat, and caused more damage, four punctures instead of only two. More blood would flow faster . . . she could finish in half the time. Lions and wolves had more than two pointed teeth. Their teeth were designed to tear flesh; a human’s were comparatively flat and dull. This new design made her a more efficient predator.
It had been tricky, but she’d figured out how to change the angle of her head so that she wouldn’t dig in with the second set. The girl gasped and struggled feebly, but Miranda tightened her hold over the girl’s mind and froze her in place.
Don’t fight. Please don’t fight. You’ll only make it harder to stop.
The girl tasted so young and innocent . . . and as she wandered back into the teeming masses of humanity, her hand reaching up to touch her neck, then running absently through her disheveled hair, the Queen watched her from her hiding place, letting the blood run through her body and satisfy her . . .
for now
. . . and wondering, with an aching heart, how much longer she would be able to let them walk away.
• • •
Every weekend in Austin, families gathered beneath the metal shelters of city park pavilions and held barbecues, birthday parties—piles of gifts, balloons, piñatas, a cooler of beer for the adults. Laughter and the shrieks of young children would fill the air; the little ones would run back and forth from the tables to the playground. By the time they went home everyone would be sweaty and tired on a hot, humid July night, but they would be smiling after a day with their friends and family.
They would have no idea that only two nights before, a corpse had lain on its back atop the same table where the children would sit with their feet swinging and their faces sticky with ice cream.
The pavilion’s lights were all on, and the whole park was swarming with police uniforms. A pair of overworked homicide detectives oversaw the scene.
One of the detectives, a redheaded, freckled man whose face looked like it would be far more comfortable in riotous laughter than grim determination, looked up from his notepad at the officer who had called for his attention. “What?”
“Um, Detective Maguire, there are some . . . people . . . here to see you. They said you called?”
Maguire nodded.
Here we go.
“Right, let them through.”
Once upon a time, a routine security detail for an eccentric celebrity’s
Rolling Stone
interview had blown Maguire’s horizons wide open. He didn’t expect to cross paths with the Signets again, but not long after, a bizarre murder caught his attention even though he wasn’t yet in Homicide. As soon as Maguire saw the body, he knew what they were dealing with, and his investigation brought Maguire back into the sights of a vampire . . . lucky for him, a vampire whose help would get him promoted to detective and help him solve half a dozen cases since, when cause of death was more Halloween than homicide. The prince of the city, ruler of the entire South, genius, warrior, and diplomat . . . and somehow Maguire . . . and his daughter . . . had come to call his people their friends.