Shadowbound Read online

  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.

  The officers within the vicinity, as one, froze in the middle of whatever they were doing as someone rolled back the yellow tape to let in the strangest people most of them would ever see in this city—and that was saying something in a place like Austin.

  Four black-clad individuals surrounded a central figure, a man in a long black coat, wildly out of place this time of year. They were all pale and sharp-eyed, instantly sizing up every potential threat.

  They stuck close to their fifth member, who walked like a man who was used to getting his way; in fact, when one of the officers started to protest their presence, the man fixed her with his deep, shadowed blue eyes, and she went stark white, stammered, and moved out of the way.

  Maguire held back a smile.

  “Detective.” David Solomon, Prime of the Southern United States, gave him a nod of acknowledgment. “You called?”

  Maguire was a decorated military man who had been a beat cop for ten years and a detective for six, and as good as he was at being intimidating, he would never understand what it was about the Prime that commanded attention so completely. Other vampires were plenty scary, but they didn’t make everyone stop and stare like God had just walked into the room.

  “I need you to have a look at this,” Maguire said. He gestured at the table where the ME had already arrived and was preparing to take the body back to the morgue.

  “Is it an Alpha Seven?” Solomon asked, following him over.<
br />
  “I don’t think so—it’s a little weird.”

  A raised eyebrow. “Coming from you, Detective, that’s disturbing.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it.”

  When they reached the table, the Prime drew up short. “Son of a bitch.”

  “What is it?” Maguire asked.

  Solomon stood over the body, his face unreadable, looking down at the man who had been left there—a white-blond young man in his mid to late twenties. The body was badly beaten, and one wrist looked to have been slashed, but there was no obvious cause of death unless it was exsanguination; odder still, the ME hadn’t been able to estimate a time of death, because it appeared to her that the body had been kept in cold storage that delayed the onset of decay. The wounds suggested a battle or crime of passion, but keeping a corpse in a fridge suggested something else altogether.

  But what had caused Maguire to call the Haven, what gave him a feeling of unease he couldn’t shake, was what lay on the man’s chest: a heavy chain, an amulet, set with the shattered remains of some kind of stone.

  “This is definitely out of your jurisdiction,” the Prime said.

  “I was afraid you’d say that. What do you need me to do?”

  Solomon reached down and picked up the broken amulet. The ME and several of the Crime Scene Unit people started to dive toward him, each probably ready to yell something about disturbing the evidence, but Solomon merely held up his other hand, and they all fell silent.

  He ignored the police completely and stared at the amulet for a minute, troubled.

  Maguire moved closer so they wouldn’t be as easy to overhear. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “A Signet, yes.”

  Something in his face made Maguire ask, “Did you know this man?”

  The Prime looked at Maguire. “He killed me.”

  “Holy shit—that’s the guy? Well, do you know who killed him?”

  Solomon made a slow circuit around the table, eyes narrowed. “I know exactly who killed him,” he said. “I just don’t know what they gained from it.”

  “Is there any point in an autopsy?” Maguire asked quietly.

  “Do not let them do an autopsy,” Solomon said firmly, pitching his voice just loudly enough for Maguire to hear. “Do whatever you have to do to make this body disappear—get it out in the sunlight and have the paperwork misplaced. I don’t want the medical examiner running tests. I would take it, but I fear that would create more questions than a clerical error. You should have called me before the rest of them got here.”

  “I would have, but I wasn’t the first one on the scene,” Maguire replied. “Somebody called it in to 911. They sent one unit and the officers called the cavalry. Trust me, I would have left it to you.”

  “Someone called it in,” the Prime repeated thoughtfully. “Someone made sure the body was found before dawn burned it away.”

  “Huh. You’re right. And that means—”

  “They wanted me to see it.” Solomon nodded to himself, then said, tucking the Signet in his coat, “This is all I need, Detective. I leave the rest to you.”

  “Great. This should be easy.” Maguire gave him a wry grin. “Glad to have you back in the world, Solomon.”

  He smiled at Maguire—the sort of smile that made Maguire doubly glad the Prime was on his side. “I am glad to be back. Good night, Detective.”

  He nodded to his Elite, who fell back into step on all sides of him, and the five vampires walked away, leaving a scene full of detectives, officers, and medical examiners staring at each other with wide eyes.

  • • •

  Silence on the other end of the line.

  After a moment David asked, “Are you all right?”

  He heard her take a deep breath. “Yes. It’s . . . it’s really not a surprise. Now we know for sure.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you cared for him.”

  Across the country, in her new Haven in New York, Prime Olivia Daniels laughed a little, and he could practically hear her shaking her head. “Only you would feel bad that the man who murdered you was murdered. Have you told the others?”

  “Not yet. I wanted you to know first.”

  “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

  “Is there anything I can do for you?” he asked.

  Now he could hear her smiling. “Not unless you can alter time, speed up the harvest, or teleport me off this rock,” she quoted.

  David couldn’t help it—he laughed, surprised. “Did you just Star Wars me?”

  “You’re not the only nerd in the world, you know.”

  Despite the situation, he was grinning as they hung up. He looked across the bedroom to where Miranda sat cross-legged on the bed with her laptop; she was giving him a knowing look.

  “What?” he asked.

  Now she smiled. “Nothing. I just think it’s cute that the first female Prime in Signet history has a crush on you.”

  “Wait . . . what?”

  She giggled at the look on his face. “Oh, come on—you really didn’t know?”

  David shook his head. “I never thought about it.”

  Miranda was still laughing. “Don’t look so panicked, baby. It’s just flirty. Not a big deal.”

  He tried to come up with something to say that would assure her she was wrong, but contradicting an empath about emotional matters was like trying to tell him how the Internet worked.

  Olivia was a strong and extremely attractive woman, of course—not conventionally beautiful, perhaps, but he really had no use for convention. She had seen him through a violently painful transformation and taken care of him when he had no memory of who he was. He really did enjoy talking to her, but he’d assumed it was because she was a new Prime and he liked helping her get settled. But now that he thought about it . . . oh hell.

  “I really do think it’s cute,” Miranda told him, this time without laughing. “There’s nothing wrong with you being attracted to somebody. People are going to be hot for you no matter what—I mean, you have seen you, right? If I got uppity every time that happened, I’d never have a moment’s peace. And let’s not forget this link we all have as part of Persephone’s Circle; I’m sure that factors in. We’ve all got some weird emotional attachments to each other, but really, all either of you wants is a friend.”

  He half smiled. “That’s true. And . . . she reminds me so much of Faith, sometimes, it’s almost uncanny. Except I don’t think Faith would ever have been comfortable as a Prime, constantly in the spotlight—and Olivia is taking to it remarkably, like a cat to a keyboard.”

  “You know, if you would work with your empathy a little instead of ignoring it, you would have figured it out yourself.”

  David sighed. “I don’t want empathy, Miranda. I saw what it did to you—what it still does to you even now that it’s under control. I prefer to be a coldhearted bastard whenever possible.”

  “Oh, yeah, right.” She rolled her eyes.

  “Just do me a favor . . . if at any point you think Olivia is starting to feel like Faith did, or if I start acting that way . . . tell me. I never want a situation like that again.”

  She smiled a little sadly. “Would knowing about Faith have changed what happened?”

  “Probably not. But at least we could have been honest with each other and gotten everything out in the open. I of all people know what a bad idea it is to repress feelings for someone, especially when jealousy is involved.”

  “True.”

  She looked tired again, he noticed. They had both been feeling run-down the last couple of days and it was wearing on them emotionally as well as physically; they’d actually had a fight, of sorts, over the thermostat that dusk. He felt feverish and nauseated; she was freezing. They’d both realized how silly the argument was, but it was a sign of a larger problem; neither of them was feeling well, and it was getting worse, and though he kept hoping he was wrong, he had a sinking feeling that—

  Just then his phone vibrated i
n his hand, and he looked down at the text message that had just come in. “Speak of the devil.”

  Call me.

  He held the phone up where she could see the screen.

  Miranda frowned. “That’s the first we’ve heard from him since we got back from New York. Before that I was talking to him almost every day.”

  “I know. Whatever’s going on over there . . . I’m almost afraid to find out.” He stared at the phone for a moment longer before hitting call.

  “Yes?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” Deven lied. David hated how flat and worn down he sounded. “Everything’s fine.”

  “Then why did you text? I haven’t heard from you in days.”

  “I don’t know . . . I guess I just wanted to hear your voice . . . to hear something normal.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing, nothing. How are you?”

  “Actually, I was going to call you anyway. Detective Maguire called me to a crime scene earlier—someone left a message for me in a public park.”

  “What kind of message?”

  David took a deep breath. “Jeremy Hayes. Dead. With his Signet shattered.”

  “Well, that’s one way to get your attention. Have you told Olivia?”

  “Yes. I called her first. She’s all right—a little rattled, but like she said, it wasn’t exactly a surprise. If the artifact Hayes stole from Hart was exactly like the Stone of Awakening, it stands to reason it had a similar ritual attached to it. Hayes would have been far too convenient a target for Morningstar to resist—he had a Signet, he was badly injured, and he delivered the artifact right to them.”

  “The question being, of course, assuming the ritual accomplished the same thing as the Awakening, draining all the power from Jeremy, what did they do with that power? The Awakening used your life force to bust the lock off Persephone’s cage, but what was Morningstar trying to open? And why were they so keen for you to know it?”

  “I don’t know. But they didn’t leave him in Olivia’s territory, where I presume he was killed, and they didn’t return him to Australia. They brought him here to my backyard.”