David counted up the remaining territories and compared it to the calendar where he’d been keeping note of when Morningstar attacks occurred. “If the frequency of assassinations remains constant we’ll all be dead before the year is out,” he observed. “I know it won’t be that easy for them now that more of us are boosting security, but . . . still . . . the math is not comforting.”
“And they only have to kill one of our little group to ensure we can never pull out the big gun,” Miranda added. “Whatever the hell the big gun actually
is
. Hopefully that much at least is in the Codex. Meanwhile we have to find Olivia’s Consort . . . maybe we should hold a ball.”
David laughed. “I don’t think she’d be too happy with that idea. You do have a point, though . . . there must be something we can do to find this guy. Maybe there’s a divination or a spell or something in the Codex . . . if nothing else we could ask Stella to do a reading of some sort just to give us some clue we can work with.”
“I wonder how Olivia feels about all of this,” Miranda said. “I mean, her Consort is her soul mate, so they’re meant to be together, but it still sucks having so much riding on your love life.”
“She’s probably not too thrilled with the pressure, but a Prime without a Consort feels a constant, quiet emptiness that only one person can fill. We do our jobs, and we know we’re where we’re meant to be, but that space where
you
belong never stops aching. I haven’t asked her, but I’m sure by now she feels it. I started to feel it the same day I took the Signet. I just didn’t know what to call it for a long time.”
They held each other’s eyes for a moment, neither speaking, until the computer to his left chimed to let him know a call was coming in.
“That’s Tanaka,” David told her. “A few others will be joining in so we can all discuss additional security measures and precautions. It’s probably going to be boring.”
Miranda chuckled and kissed him. “That’s my cue, then. I need to spend some time in the music room anyway—crazy anti-vampire cult aside, I still have an album to finish. Let me know when you’re done.”
As she passed by his chair and he leaned over to grab the mouse and start the conference call, he caught her hand again, and they smiled at each other, her love warming him inside and out and banishing at least a little of the anxiety he’d been feeling since Jacob had called. The world might go to hell around them, but as long as he could look up into her clear green eyes there was one sure thing in his life.
Olivia deserved to feel that same certainty. Fate or no fate, he hoped he could help her find it, and soon.
• • •
Comedy or tragedy,
I know you’ll be the end of me . . .
There were a lot of unpleasant things in the Queen’s world, but the thing that drove her craziest was writer’s block. Enemies, she could fight; wounds could heal. Writing songs, however, was like trying to build a bridge out of smoke. Every time she thought she had a grasp on a song, it slipped out of her hands.
There was a reason she preferred playing covers. Writing new material was torture. Weaving together music and lyrics took confident hands, and hers were more than a little wobbly.
Suddenly, a flash of odd memory in her mind: threads of light as far as she could see, all crisscrossed and twisted around each other in what should have been chaos but was in fact an elegant, slowly-dancing order . . . her own hands reaching out . . .
The image was so powerful for a second that Miranda had to grab the edge of the piano to stay upright.
“What the hell . . .”
Stella had described the universe as a giant web . . . and Miranda had dreamed of a giant web . . . she remembered pieces of the dream, now, and though watching all those threads shift had been peaceful, underneath it was an urgency . . . someone was trying to tell her something.
She had a hunch who it was.
“Okay,” Miranda said quietly. “So we can’t talk to each other, but you can give me dreams . . . but if you’re trying to make a point, I don’t think I’m going to get it this way—tell Stella. Stella can tell me. Just . . . be a little gentler with her this time.”
The music room was so silent a human could hear a pin drop.
Miranda let out a breath. “Invisible superbeing,” she muttered, echoing David’s dismissal of the whole concept of deity. “I guess it’s not any crazier than talking to that painting of Queen Bess across the room. But if there’s any way you could let me know you actually hear me, I’d feel a lot better about this.”
Echo answereth not. The world was full of humans who believed in God even though they personally had no evidence to back up that belief and had to go on faith from the experiences of others. She at least had a conversation with an overly friendly raven under a tree. That was more than most people got.
She felt David approaching, and sure enough there was a soft knock a moment later. He opened the door partway. “Clear?”
“Yeah. I’m pretty much stuck for the night. How was your conference call?”
He came in and closed the door behind him, saying, “Surprisingly productive.”
When he looked over at her, he paused. “What are you staring at?”
Miranda’s breath had gotten stuck in her chest, hemmed in by her heart flying all around inside her rib cage. “What . . . what is that in your hand?”
He looked puzzled. “This? It was on the floor outside the door. I think one of the servants was dusting in the corridor. Why do you look so spooked?”
She couldn’t answer. She could only stare at the object in question in mute astonishment:
A black feather.
• • •
“I had an idea,” the Witch said, ushering Miranda into her room after the Queen knocked on her door. “It’s pretty simple, and sometimes I just get gibberish, but it’s only as hazardous as a tarot reading and might give us more concrete information.”
“What, a Ouija board?” the Queen asked, sitting down where Stella directed her, on the floor in front of the table Stella had commandeered as an altar. It was almost exactly the same as the one she kept in her apartment, but this time Stella had added a careful drawing of the Seal of Elysium, as well as a plump pomegranate.
“Actually you’re not far off. It’s called automatic writing,” Stella explained, joining her on the floor and busying herself lighting candles and a stick of incense. “I go into a light trance, nothing scary, and then just let my pen move over the paper, the idea being if Persephone has something to say she can use my hand to do it without having to nuke my brain.”
Miranda watched her lay out a few sheets of notebook paper and a pen, which the Witch scribbled with first to make sure the ink was flowing. “And you can get good information like that?”
The Witch nodded. “It’s kind of hard to do the first time, because your conscious mind doesn’t want to give up control and you end up pushing the pen—just like with a Ouija board. But the cool thing is that whereas tarot is all symbols and can be interpreted wrong or misunderstood, automatic writing gives the spirit or deity or whatever a chance to say stuff flat-out without having to speak in riddles. Sometimes they still speak in riddles, but the chances of getting a direct answer are way higher.”
“What do you need me to do?” Miranda asked.
“Wait until it seems like I’m pretty well under, then ask a question. Just see where it goes from there.”
Stella had pulled a rather large book off one of the shelves in her room—a photographic coffee table book about horses—and rested it in her lap with the paper and pen. She and Miranda sat facing each other, and the Witch took a deep breath and closed her eyes.
Miranda wasn’t sure where to look. If she sat staring at Stella it was bound to make the Witch uncomfortable, but she needed to know when she’d hit a trance state. Miranda settled for looking over at the altar but keeping her senses trained on the human to alert her to any energy changes.
There were, as before, strong wards on the room, but this time it looked like Stella had changed her strategy a little—instead of just encircling the room with protective power she had interlaced that Circle with a matrix of energy that radiated out from the altar itself. There was a piece of polished labradorite the size of Miranda’s palm sitting in the middle of the altar, and she could feel power thrumming within it; the Witch had harnessed the stone’s energy, coupled it with her own, and was using it as the anchor for the structure she’d built. It was like the wards were now reinforced with steel beams.
Miranda was even more impressed with the Witch than usual—Stella had learned new ideas about how to work magic after the time she’d spent digging around in the Signets’ bonds, and now she was adapting her own work to reflect what she had discovered there. Miranda wondered if Stella would have been strong or skilled enough to create such a thing when they’d first met even if she’d known it was possible.
Miranda felt, or heard, or both, movement in front of her, and she returned her gaze to the Witch, whose eyes were still closed. Stella’s hand moved slowly to pick up the pen and hold it over the paper. Stella had been right; the trance hadn’t caused a major energy shift in the room. It was definitely gentler than the Drawing Down.
Miranda cleared her throat. She felt a little silly, but not an hour ago she’d been talking to the empty air, so, “What do you want me to know?”
Stella’s hand lowered the nib to the page, and Miranda watched, craning her neck closer to see if she wrote actual words or just scribbles. One letter at a time appeared on the paper, disjointed and irregular at first but then gaining confidence, becoming more legible.
It took almost a full minute to complete the first word:
YOU
Miranda read the word aloud, quietly, to encourage Stella, or Persephone, to keep going.
MUST
Sweat was pouring down Stella’s face, but she seemed otherwise okay. The Witch’s facial expression remained perfectly blank; the sweat was the only sign she was burning energy at all.
NOT
Miranda’s heart began to beat faster with a sudden urgency. Her nails dug into her knees, even a few seconds of waiting becoming too much . . . she could feel the import of the words, whether a commandment or an admonishment.
Stella’s hand was shaking slightly. The next few letters became increasingly hard to read, but they were still clear enough.
BLAME
Now the Witch faltered, hanging on to the pen, and her trance, as hard as she could. Fatigue was wearing on her, threatening whatever connection she had opened.
Miranda watched, hand lifting to her mouth, as the last word formed haltingly, letter by letter, each taking a monumental effort.
Y OU R SELF
Miranda swallowed and read the whole sentence softly. The pen fell from Stella’s hand and rolled off the book onto the floor; whether it was the plastic clattering or a coincidence, Stella’s eyes snapped open right at that moment.
“What did you get?” Stella asked. She looked down at her lap and froze. “Fuck, that can’t be good.”
Before Miranda could say anything, her com chimed. She lifted her wrist closer to her mouth, still staring at the words in front of her.
“Star-two,” she said.
“Miranda,” David said, “I need you to come to our suite . . . right now.”
She stammered for a second. “Why?”
“Please . . . just come. Now.”
Miranda got to her feet and left the room—she’d thank Stella later—and took the short series of hallways back to her own, a strange combination of numb and terrified. She knew that tone in David’s voice. It wasn’t just the bad news tone, like the one she’d heard when Jacob called earlier that night; it was a tone that meant he had to tell her something he knew would upset her, something that had already upset him. He was trying to remain professional for the sake of anyone who might have been listening until he had her alone.
He was waiting in his chair in front of the fireplace, his laptop open on the coffee table, his face that long-cultivated mask of neutrality that she had learned to see beneath even before she was his Queen.
“Sit down,” he said gently.
“What’s going on?” she asked. “What happened?”
He took a couple of breaths to choose his words. “A few minutes ago I got a call from Ken Gregory of the U.S. Marshals. He had finished settling your sister and niece into WITSEC in El Paso. Everything went smoothly. She was supposed to check in with him once a day. Yesterday she didn’t call.”
There were already tears in Miranda’s eyes, and she didn’t try to stop them from emerging. That same bones-deep foreboding she knew far too well had gripped her as soon as she walked into the room. All she could do now was wait.
“Gregory sent uniforms to the apartment. There was . . .” He met her eyes. “There was blood in the living room, signs of a struggle. The Crime Scene Unit is still there now, but their initial finding is that there were two large pools of blood and that the amount was indicative of fatal blood loss. They didn’t find any bodies, but . . .”
He passed his hand over his forehead, and she saw the mask crack; he’d been trying not to react, hoping it would keep her calm if he was calm, but whatever he had to say next was too much to let him feign complete stoicism.
He leaned over and turned his laptop toward her. “There was a flash drive placed very deliberately between the two pools of blood. There was only one thing on it . . . a video. Miranda . . . you don’t have to watch this. I don’t want you to. But you have to decide for yourself.”
She was shaking inside and out. “Show me,” she said hoarsely.
David closed his eyes a second, nodded, and hit play.
The video was shockingly clear, not the sort of shaky-camera, dimly lit thing she expected. It was in the apartment living room. There were four men in black, complete with ski masks: two standing in front, the other two holding a struggling woman and a little girl on their knees.
The camera zoomed in on their faces, the tears flowing down over the duct tape that silenced their screams. Their hands were bound behind their backs. There was a black eye forming on Marianne’s face and blood already smudged on her shirt. Miranda would have bet her entire fortune that Marianne got the wounds trying to protect Jenny.