* * *
“My name is Miranda, and I am a vampire.”
Two pairs of eyes, wide, were locked on her. She might have expected disbelief, but by now they knew better. They were experienced enough, and smart enough, to recognize the truth when they heard it.
The Queen of the Southern United States stood with her arms crossed at the front of the room, every inch of her from her black boots to her jewel-red hair laced with danger and power, an immortal menace arisen from the darkness to elicit fear in her prey.
At least, she hoped so.
“I’m here tonight because the two of you have been given a special assignment for the Austin Live Music Festival: namely, me. Your supervisor, Detective Maguire, has chosen you to act as liaisons between my security staff and the Austin Police Department. We felt it was important that you know what you’re getting into in the unlikely event of an incident Saturday night.”
She caught each of their gazes and held them until they looked away. She had found that humans had a hard time keeping eye contact with her; she wasn’t sure what they saw, but she remembered a time when she couldn’t meet people’s eyes either, and she knew the power in that kind of contact.
Detective Maguire sat at the back of the room, keeping his distance from Faith, who was waiting for her cue. They could have sent another Elite to handle this meeting, but after what had happened to Detective Ojedo a few months ago, Miranda had wanted to make absolutely sure the two liaisons understood what they were dealing with.
“Do either of you know the circumstances of Detective Ojedo’s death?” she asked. They all did, but she didn’t wait for a reply. “He was investigating a drug ring that had hired several vampires as enforcers. He knew what they were, and he knew better than to pursue one alone, but he tried to play hero, and this”—Miranda opened her mouth and pressed her tongue against her canines—“is what happened.”
One officer gasped; the other shrank back visibly.
When her teeth had slid back into her jaw and she knew she could speak without lisping, she went on. “In the event that you are faced with a vampire, either Saturday night at the festival or at any point in your careers,
do not engage
. You have each been given a code to send via text message, which will bring my people in ninety seconds or less, but under no circumstances—no matter who is in jeopardy—should you attempt to fight or shoot a vampire. You will piss us off and die.”
She gestured to Faith.
The Second rose and walked down to the front of the conference room. The detectives hadn’t known she was there until now, and it was clear they had guessed what Faith was.
“All right,” Miranda said. “I want you to see why trying to fight one of us is suicide. We are stronger, faster, and much harder to kill than you are. Even in Kevlar with a nine-millimeter, you’re basically just food to us. We will drain your blood until you shrivel, and we will walk away smiling.”
Miranda nodded to Faith.
Faith shot her a grin, then took a swing at her.
The fight wasn’t choreographed, but they had practiced slowing things down just a little so that the audience would still be able to track their movements instead of just registering a blur of activity. They also had to hold back enough not to damage the room; the training spaces at the Haven were much bigger, and they were used to fighting in alleys without ceilings or desks.
Miranda spun around and blocked Faith’s kick, then backflipped in midair and landed about six feet away, dropping low so that Faith’s boot whizzed past her head but didn’t connect. They weren’t using weapons, which put Faith at an advantage, but Faith had said she considered this part of Miranda’s training, a chance for her to practice without a blade.
Not that the detectives knew that. To them, even the most amateur vampire warrior was Bruce Lee on an espresso-methamphetamine bender. By the time Faith and Miranda stopped their display, bowed to each other, and stepped back, one of the policemen was stark white, and the other one, a stoic Asian man who cleaned his glasses a lot, was gripping the sides of his desk with shaking knuckles.
“Thank you, Faith,” Miranda told her Second. “I’ll be out in thirty.”
Faith nodded, bowed, and strode out the door, locking it again behind her.
Miranda turned back to the detectives. “Now then. I only have half an hour, so let’s get down to it: Any questions?”
Two hands shot into the air.
David paused outside the conference room door, listening to the murmur of conversation inside. One woman, three men; three humans, one vampire … three detectives, one Queen.
He heard her say something, and the humans all laughed;
whatever they were talking about, their fear of her had been put aside in favor of the camaraderie of law enforcement officers who all had one goal: to protect Austin’s citizens. Miranda had just expanded these detectives’ definition of
citizen
, and now she was letting them see that not all vampires were evil or had death in mind for all humans; the Elite, and the Signets, existed to protect and serve just as the human police did, and the Signet of this territory wanted a good relationship with the authorities for everyone’s sake.
Ojedo’s death could easily have been avoided; in fact, David had seen the fight go down over the sensor network, and he’d sent a team, but because the officer hadn’t sent out an alarm, by the time David realized something was wrong, it was too late. Ojedo had been dead on the ground when the patrol team arrived … but at least the vampire who had killed him had been apprehended and executed, and thanks to Ojedo’s work the drug ring had been dismantled, arrested, and beheaded where appropriate.
It was important that they got along with law enforcement because these officers had a vital—if unwitting for the most part—part to play in keeping Miranda’s super-secret identity super and secret. They had to be very, very careful whom they shared it with, and make very clear what their roles were; and in return for police cooperation in any sort of human security problems facing Miranda, the Signet stepped up Elite presence in violent areas of the city and helped the authorities deal with supernaturally related problems like the drug ring before more lives could be lost.
David didn’t enter the room; they had seen enough for one night. He waited until the laughter and joking faded and he heard Miranda call an end to the session. When he heard the two detectives approaching, David moved back out of the way, holding himself perfectly still; they left the room and walked right past him.
“Coffee?” one of them said to the other.
“Christ, yes,” was the reply. “As Irish as humanly possible.”
David smiled. Once they were gone, he returned to the door and peeked in to see Miranda conversing amiably with Detective Maguire, an affable red-haired cop with a galaxy of freckles and a surprisingly good sense of humor for someone who worked in Homicide.
Maguire was chuckling as he took a piece of paper—one of the promotional posters for Miranda’s performance this Saturday—from the Queen, who was capping a black marker. “Thank you, my Lady. She’s been a fan of yours since the beginning.”
Miranda smiled at him. “I hope it works, Detective. She’s a lucky girl.”
They shook hands; the detective was respectful but not afraid of her. It was a fine line they walked. The humans needed to fear vampires as a whole but also needed to know that some were fighting for them. They had to be willing to trust the Elite and the Signet but to be suspicious of any others.
It had already paid off handsomely for the Pair last year, when David had worked with APD to secure a floor at the Driskill for the
Rolling Stone
interview. That was, in fact, how they had met Detective Maguire, and so far David liked working with him more than anyone else he’d met on the force. Maguire had taken the existence of vampires remarkably in stride for a human, saying that he’d seen plenty of “weird crap” in his time.
There were a lot of irons in the fire that night, and any one part of the system failing would have destroyed the illusion that Miranda was human, but having APD on their side meant no interference from the hotel staff as David set up the cameras that projected Miranda’s “reflection” onto the fake mirror, proving, as far as that proved, that she wasn’t what she actually was.
Comparatively speaking, medical tests and surgical reports were much easier to fake. It was far easier to build celebrity gossip sites. Keeping Miranda’s secret in the closet was mostly a matter of outguessing the rumor mill and making their speculations ridiculous by introducing an even more ridiculous “truth.” Leaked reports, digital sleight
of hand, and now Miranda was an inspiration to a generation of young people with illnesses, disabilities, and checkered pasts to overcome to reach their dreams.
It was only partly fiction. It had been Miranda’s idea—in fact she had used her own money—to establish the foundation to research treatments for porphyria. She felt that having brought the illness into the spotlight, it was her duty to try to help those who really had it. Novotny had jumped at the opportunity, as most of the work he’d done for the Signet had been forensic rather than medical, and his first love was rare diseases.
Finally, Miranda finished her conversation with Maguire and approached the door; David took a step back, and as she walked out into the hallway, he was ready, holding Shadowflame out to her with both hands.
She smiled at him and took the sword. “My Lord Prime.”
He bowed slightly. “My Lady. Shall we?”
She fell into step at his right hand, and they took the back hallway out of the precinct building, out to where Faith was waiting with Harlan at the car. As they hit the street, David noticed, with satisfaction, Miranda’s bodyguards emerging from their positions around the building.
“I think it went well,” Miranda said as Harlan shut the door and Faith slid into the front passenger seat. “They had good questions, mostly.”
David smiled. “Who was the autograph for?”
She grinned back. “Maguire’s daughter, Stella. They haven’t been getting along lately, and he’s hoping to bribe her to have lunch.”
“I see.”
Miranda sighed, leaning back in her seat, her fingers seeking to wind around his as the car pulled away from the curb. “I’m worried about them,” she said. “I think I got the message across, but … we thought we did enough before, and Detective Ojedo paid the price.”
“They won’t all listen,” David reminded her, squeezing her hand and then lifting it to kiss the palm. “We can’t control that. We’ve given them knowledge that most Signets
wouldn’t bother with, and it’s saved more than one officer’s life. But some of them don’t look before they leap with common criminals any more than they would with ours.”
“Still … I can’t help but feel responsible,” she said. “If we’d taken down that drug ring the minute we realized they were hiring vampires …”
“We were working on it. Another two days and we’d have had them. Ojedo broke protocol. He knew there was a plan in place, but he charged in anyway. That wasn’t our fault, Miranda. He made his choices.”
She wasn’t satisfied, but there was nothing he could say; she would have to work through it herself. She was disturbingly like him in that regard. People could talk until they were blue in the face, but once her mind was made up, it was made up, until she’d gone away and had time to mull things over. Stubborn, she was, to a fault; but once she realized she was wrong, she admitted to it readily and did her best to smooth over any hurt feelings … feelings being, of course, her specialty.
He hadn’t expected that her clumsiness with this sort of thing would actually endear her to people, but it did; they saw that she sometimes struggled, that not every decision was easy and might not be right, but she genuinely cared, and she would happily take a bullet rather than have the consequences of her inexperience cause someone else harm.
“How are preparations going?” Miranda asked.
“Smoothly. The Haven is ready—they got the table set up in the Great Hall tonight, and the ballroom is prepared. I spoke with Esther and Matthew, and the staff is almost ready. The delivery from the blood bank is scheduled for Thursday evening, and the first arrivals will be late that night.”
“How many confirmations?”
“Twenty-five,” David said, smiling. “All but Demetriou and Dzhamgerchinov, and there’s still a chance that Demetriou will change his mind … not that I particularly want him to.”
Miranda took a deep breath. “I still can’t believe we’re letting Hart set foot in our Haven again.”
“I know, beloved, but those are the rules. Everyone is invited to a full Council. I put in my bid to have this one in Austin ten years ago, and by the time things fell out with Hart it was too late to back out. But with the entire Council there he’ll be on his best behavior. He won’t risk losing support by making a dick of himself.”
The Queen raised an eyebrow. “Or the Council meeting is the opportunity he’s been waiting for to get revenge on us in some public way that forces us to react.”
“I’m trying to be optimistic, here.”
“What about Cora? How can we force her to sit in the same room with that bastard?”
He smiled. Miranda was very protective of Cora; indeed, the Queen of Eastern Europe seemed to bring that out in people. “No one is forcing Cora to do anything. Queens aren’t required to attend the official sessions.”
“I understand that, but I can’t help but worry about her.”
He leaned over and kissed her temple. “You can’t fix everything.”
“At least he’s not bringing his … girls … this time.”
“Not according to the Shadow operative in his Court, at least. For all that he’s been nursing his grudge for three years, he’s being very cautious not to tip his hand.”
“Doesn’t that concern you just a little?”
“A lot,” he admitted. “I prefer Hart when he’s being violent and out of control; it’s easier to deal with than his fake charm.”
“Sire,” Faith spoke up from the front seat, “First-shift preliminary patrol reports are in. Everyone’s reporting situation normal.”