One of the standing men pulled a knife from his belt.
Miranda pushed backward, trying to put more distance between herself and what she was seeing, her entire being begging her to look away . . . but she couldn’t. She had brought this down on her sister. She had to witness this.
Miranda felt David’s fingers twine through hers, and she gripped his hand hard, tears streaming down her face as the humans who believed themselves among the righteous murdered an innocent mortal woman . . . and her seven-year-old daughter.
There was no sound. Marianne and Jenny died in total silence, Marianne’s last words of comfort to her child lost in the cold silence of the recording.
The screen faded to black, and Miranda thought it was over, but Morningstar had left her one last message. A row of still photographs appeared across the screen, images she knew: Marilyn, Marianne, Jenny, and then a photo of Miranda herself when she’d still been human. One by one, a red X crossed out each picture . . . except for her own.
Miranda stared at the screen, her brain refusing to process the implications.
Finally, she asked very quietly, “Does this mean they killed my mother?”
David made an indefinite noise. “I was looking into that right before you got here . . . as far as I can tell from a quick glance through her records, no. She committed suicide; they’re not taking credit so much as they’re making a point . . . showing their intentions.”
“Wipe out my bloodline,” she said hollowly. “My mother had no siblings . . . my maternal grandmother is dead . . . and now . . . I’m all that’s left.” She leaned forward and closed the laptop screen, banishing the image from her sight, if not her mind. Even so, her words grew less and less steady, her temporary calm fracturing, falling apart. “They . . . they slit the throat of a seven-year-old girl . . . for the sake of their war . . . because of me. Of us. A world they had nothing to do with. How could . . . how could anyone look at that little face and just . . . she was
seven years old
!”
She shut her eyes, trying to stay grounded, but another image jumped into her mind’s eye: a pen moving over a piece of paper, spelling out words.
YOU MUST NOT BLAME YOURSELF.
Miranda broke down sobbing, so angry and stricken she couldn’t contain it anymore. Even if Marianne had been a stranger, or they’d hated each other, she didn’t deserve this . . . to be forced to watch her own child’s murder, to die in terror without even understanding
why
. And Miranda had sat smiling at a school picture of Jenny, chuckling at the familiarity of her out-of-control red hair and those leaf-green eyes, and the thought had come to her: Jenny might have had a gift like Miranda’s. Miranda would have kept watch on her for just that reason, so that one day, if Jenny started to lose herself to her empathy, there would be somewhere she could go to learn how to control it.
She’d never liked children all that much, but that thought—all the things, from puberty to college to growing old, that Jenny would never get to do, just because a bunch of humans hated vampires enough to march to war through the blood of the innocent—made it so much worse. Marianne hadn’t led a happy life, but she was doing the best she could for her baby, trying to make sure things were better for her. It was the same struggle played out millions of times across every human civilization, but the smallness of a single life still mattered. The fleeting rush of every human life
mattered
.
The people Miranda herself had killed had mattered to someone, somewhere, once.
David drew her close, wrapping both arms and presence around her to give her shelter; she felt him step in and add his energy to her shields so that if she couldn’t hold them, they wouldn’t collapse.
He didn’t say anything at first, but as she started to calm down a little, she heard, “This is why I don’t want empathy.”
She let out a shaky breath. “I’m so tired of getting people killed,” she said into his neck. “Just once, I’d like to actually save someone.”
He didn’t argue that she already had; he understood what she meant. Signets were the most powerful vampires on earth, but for all their power, their war never truly ended. Whether mortal or immortal, there were always those willing to prey upon others, to crawl out of the shadows and paint the city with blood.
“It’s nearly dawn,” David told her, kissing her forehead and then her puffy nose. “You should go on to bed. I have a few e-mails to send and then I’ll join you.”
Miranda lifted her eyes to her Prime’s. “We have to stop them,” she said quietly. “We’re going to stop them.”
“We will,” he replied. “I give you my word, Miranda, we will.” Then he smiled lovingly and kissed her forehead. “Just not tonight. Get some rest.”
“Wait . . . stay here just a moment longer.”
He nodded. She returned her head to where it had been, the spot it fit perfectly where neck and shoulder met. She could feel his pulse beneath her ear. He pulled her up and around to where she was mostly in his lap and held her tight again, love moving from one to the other along their bond, soothing some of the horror, helping her get a grip on the rage that wanted badly to claw its way out of her and lay all of Morningstar to waste whether she was strong enough or not.
Miranda felt an exhausted sleep lapping around the edges of her mind and didn’t try to fight it. A day’s sleep would help put some distance between her and what she had seen; then she might be able to approach it with calm, in a way that would help, instead of falling apart or accidentally projecting all over the Haven and sending the entire Elite into a depressive tailspin. She closed her eyes and let the warmth around her, the heartbeat against her cheek, and the quiet peace of the room draw her into the dark . . .
. . . where again, and again, she dreamed in threads of light.
PART TWO
The Ten of Swords
Eleven
Retribution came to Morningstar in the back of a laundry truck.
The guards at the compound’s front gate were used to seeing the blue and white truck bearing orderly stacks of freshly cleaned, pressed, and folded black uniforms. With dozens of soldiers to clothe, the Texas base of operations received two such shipments per week, like clockwork, from a service located in Dallas.
The base itself was in the middle of nowhere, comprising precise rows of military surplus modular buildings, three Quonset huts as barracks, and one cinder block structure that housed the Shepherd and other officers. The huts were a recent addition—before they had discovered how to create effective soldiers, there had been few recruits, but now that they could use the power of a Signet’s death to mind-wipe and program people, they could pluck humans off the street from any city, and the plan was to do so in waves. The month before, the ritual performed in Europe had created a hundred, and the next was planned for America. Most of that lot would go to Texas . . . their greater numbers meant more strikes in the cities, and that would draw out the enemy.
They were unaware that they had already drawn him out.
The same driver was always behind the wheel of the laundry truck—Jorge, an affable man who blasted the Dallas
norteño
station in his truck and was always laughing. He tried joking with the guards the first few trips, but they were stone-faced and disinterested in most facial expressions, so eventually he just went about his business, tried to be friendly and professional, and got in and out as quickly as he could.
The people at that place . . . they were wrong somehow. Only a few of them seemed capable of eye contact. They acted like military, but there was no indication what branch or why in hell they’d be out here. He’d done delivery routes to enough places like this that he decided it was probably better not to ask. He was getting a ton of overtime for this one because it was so far out of town; his family needed that money. So . . . best not to ask . . . but he still wondered.
He wondered, specifically, if he was going to turn on the news one day and see these guys in a standoff with the FBI.
When he arrived at work to take the truck out to the base, he checked it over as always to make sure what was in it looked like it matched the work order. Once about a year ago the guys had loaded a truck with the wrong order and instead of a load of scrubs a hospital got fifty hotel maid uniforms. Since then they all double-checked.
He went back inside to fill up his travel mug with coffee and flirt with Stephanie, the receptionist. He was out of sight of the truck for maybe ten minutes.
At the base, the guards checked his ID and waved him through like always. He maneuvered the truck up the gravel road to one of the modular buildings, pulling around to the side where two guys were always waiting to unload the uniforms, and parked. Wrong they might be, but they were fine with him ducking into the building, after he unlocked the truck doors for them, to take a piss after all that coffee on such a long drive. He got out, pushing the driver’s-side door shut.
“Buenos noches,”
he called over to the soldier guys. They gave him a nod but, like the others, didn’t smile or speak. “Let me get that.” The keys rattled in his hand. The doors were secured with a padlock, then a sliding bar. Same routine every time.
The doors swung open.
A pair of dark blue eyes. A wicked smile.
A glowing red amulet.
A sword.
And behind him, a dozen others.
Something whistled past Jorge’s head, and he heard both of the soldiers grunt—both fell to the ground, the hilt of a knife jutting out from their throats.
Panic as old as the human race seized Jorge, but there was nowhere to run. As they disembarked from the truck he started to edge backward toward the building, thinking if he made a break for it he could get there and yell for help. There were dozens of soldiers here. They must have lots of guns. These guys wouldn’t stand a chance.
“Bring me the Shepherd,” the dark man commanded. “Kill the rest.”
Jorge bolted for the door, running as fast as adrenaline could carry him . . .
. . . and woke with a start at nearly three
A.M.
to find himself stretched out on the seat, the truck back in its parking spot at the empty, dark Dallas warehouse, the pink copy of his work order signed and dated like always . . . with absolutely no memory of how he got there.
• • •
In the eerie silence that shrouded the Morningstar base, the sound of boots striding along the road between buildings echoed loudly from one metal structure to another. The sodium floodlights cast an orange-tinted glow over the compound, obscuring the star-filled blackness overhead.
It was a surreal scene. Bodies littered the ground on either side of the road. They weren’t all human. Some had slit throats, had penetrating wounds from a blade, or had been beheaded; a few had wooden stakes to the chest, usually at an angle to avoid the sternum in front and the spine in back.
At sunset there had been approximately seventy-five humans in the base, including all of the officers.
Now there was only one.
The first pyre had already been lit; that many bodies would take a long time to burn, and they needed to keep an eye on it. The impending autumn had brought rain to most of Texas, but there was no need to risk a wildfire. It was the same protocol they’d followed at the abandoned farm in Rio Verde, but here, they didn’t have to rush. No human authority would come out this far unless summoned.
The base was slowly starting to stink of burning flesh. Perhaps if more humans had occasion to smell a mass pyre, they wouldn’t be so enamored of bacon.
As David walked through the carnage amid still-open eyes and skewed limbs of the remaining dead, his com chimed, the tiny noise almost explosive in the deep quiet of the night. “Star-one.”
“We completed our sweep, Sire. No survivors found.”
“And our casualties?”
“Five, my Lord.”
“Send a team out to gather our dead and prepare them for sunrise somewhere far away from the humans. Transport will be here in twenty-six minutes—have everyone ready to go as soon as I’m done. Make sure all of their tech is loaded onto the second van.”
“As you will it, Sire.”
The single concrete building stood in the center of the compound. Four of the Elite were waiting outside for him and bowed at his approach.
“He’s secured in his office,” said Elite 41. “We searched the room for weapons and removed all communication equipment in case he got loose.”
“Good. This won’t take long.”
He paused for a moment, reaching into his coat pocket to turn on the recording app on his phone, simultaneously looking in the small window set into the door. A nice office, considering the austerity everyone else lived and worked in. Collapsible metal bookshelves with a variety of titles—mostly on religion and military history. The desk was bare now, its computer already confiscated, and beyond it, trussed to his own office chair, was the Shepherd.
From the report he already had about the Shepherd in California, David wasn’t expecting a crazed fanatic, but still, the man’s unnatural calm after his entire garrison had been slaughtered put the Prime on guard immediately.
The human looked up as David came in, seeming neither cowed nor surprised at what had just walked in the door.
He was a fairly ordinary-looking man with sandy brown hair, hazel eyes, and the stern mouth of a man who rarely had much to smile about. He was thin but not very muscular, and it didn’t look like he saw much more sun than David did. The Shepherd in California had worn clerical clothing, but far more casual; this one wore an unadorned black cassock.
David pulled a second chair over to the other side and sat down, elbows on the arms of the chair, fingers interlaced, and regarded the man in silence for a minute.
The Shepherd regarded him right back, unflinching under David’s gaze. Either the strength of his faith had stripped away all fear, or he was an idiot.