Shadowflame Part 14

There . . .

She stared into the darkness, her eyes picking out the silhouette of a figure in the alley beyond the parking lot. It looked like a woman . . . a woman who was watching her.

Kat's stomach churned with acid as she got a feeling . . . barely restrained menace, even hatred, aimed at her, an oily black desire to drain the life from her, leave her bleeding on the street . . .

Kat jammed her key in the ignition and started the car, at the same time groping for her cell phone-should she call 911, or Drew, or Miranda? Was it a vampire or a mugger? Could the cops do anything if it was a vampire?

But when she looked up, the woman was gone.

Relieved, somewhat, Kat threw the car into reverse and pulled out of her spot, not caring one bit that she squealed her tires around the corner as she floored the gas pedal and headed home.

Miranda did not react well.

"I want her under surveillance twenty-four/seven, and under guard from dusk till dawn. Why the h.e.l.l isn't the sensor network catching this b.i.t.c.h?"

Kat, who was curled up on her couch drinking a cup of chamomile tea, shook her head. "I don't want to be watched all the time, Mira."

"Too d.a.m.n bad," the Queen snapped. "If she's after you, it's because you know me, and I'm not going to get you killed."

"Miranda," David said evenly, "Kat's safe for now. That's what matters."

Miranda shot him a distinctly uncalm look. "But what about tomorrow night? And after that?"

"No surveillance," Kat said firmly. "I'm serious."

Kat had to hand it to David; the Prime had listened to Kat's story without interrupting and was considering it from all sides without reacting emotionally. He practically oozed confidence and security, and he neither coddled nor silenced Miranda but tried to calm her down without discounting her fears. He was either a born leader or a master manipulator; the two weren't mutually exclusive.

It was weird having him in her house, though. It reminded Kat of the night he had shown up on Miranda's doorstep while Kat and Drew were there and swept into the room like Death popping in for a game of chess.

As if summoned by the memory, there was the sound of a key turning in the front door lock, and while Miranda spun toward the entrance with her hand already seeking beneath her coat for a weapon, David reached out and touched his Queen's arm, shaking his head.

Drew burst into the house in a flurry of coat and briefcase and clarinet case, all of which he dropped by the door so he could be at Kat's side in a heartbeat. "Are you okay?"

Kat smiled and took his hand. "I'm fine, honey, I told you I was."

It wasn't until she glanced up at Miranda that Drew seemed to realize they had company. He looked up at the Pair and went just a little pale before taking a breath and saying, "All right, what are we going to do to make sure this doesn't happen again?"

David regarded Drew much the same way he had the first time they'd met, as if he were some sort of curious creature in a zoo, but when Drew didn't avert his eyes, the Prime gave a measured nod. "You will do nothing," David said firmly. "There's no need to risk your own life."

"Bulls.h.i.+t," Drew countered, and Kat felt a little tug at her heartstrings at the way he refused to be cowed by a being who could quite obviously snap him in half like a twig.

David raised an eyebrow, and Drew just glared at him. Kat found herself smiling.

"Here's the thing, Drew," David said. "It's entirely likely that whoever was watching Kat was, in fact, one of our kind. If that's the case, there's nothing you can do to protect Kat. Even the weakest vampire could tear you apart before you could draw a gun . . . a.s.suming you're armed, like Kat, and have impeccable aim. Even then, bullets cannot kill a vampire. They only p.i.s.s us off."

"So how do we kill a vampire? Wooden stakes?"

Miranda snorted quietly. "Drew . . . you don't. Unless you have specialized weaponry or arm muscles like a wrestler, you wouldn't be able to get a stake through the sternum into the heart. You're not a vampire hunter. Giving you weapons you can't use would be stupid. It's better to concentrate on staying alert and keeping in contact with us until this all blows over. You have to use the resources you have-like your brain. You can watch and listen and remain aware of your surroundings at all times. Leave the killing to us."

Drew took a deep breath, weighing his protective instinct with what Kat knew was the truth. David and Miranda were both right; if they were dealing with vampires, vampires were their best shot at staying alive. "Okay. What can you do, then?"

David returned his attention to Kat. "During the day you're typically surrounded by people, yes?"

Kat nodded. "Even on weekends. The office itself has security and cameras, but the parking lots don't."

He said, reasonably, "We can't be absolutely sure yet that we're looking at a vampire, but regardless, it's unlikely you'll be attacked during daylight in a public place, so there's no real need for daytime surveillance. I would like to put a night guard on you, however, until we figure out whom exactly we're dealing with. Just one, at a distance, strictly non-interfering."

Kat started to protest that it sounded like surveillance to her, but for some reason she didn't want to disagree with David. He seemed like he'd be hard to argue with. "Okay. But it's only temporary."

"Absolutely." David reached into his coat pocket. "May I have a look at your phone, please?"

Nonplussed, Kat handed it to him. He had pulled out his own, and he fiddled with the settings on hers for a second before taking a thin cable and connecting it to both phones.

"What are you doing?" Kat asked.

David ignored her, absorbed in his work. Meanwhile Miranda was pacing up and down the living room, making Kat faintly seasick, and Drew was squeezing her hand so tightly she was starting to lose feeling.

She looked at him. "Honey, you're cutting off my circulation."

Sheepish, he let go, nervously wiping his hands on his jeans. "Sorry. I just don't like feeling so helpless."

"It was probably nothing," Kat ventured, but she didn't believe it and neither did they.

"Whoever it was didn't show up on our network," David said without looking up. "That means it was either a human, which is easily dealt with, or the a.s.sa.s.sin who came after Miranda . . . and that's a much thornier issue. We can't track her and we don't know why, but she's already made an attempt on Miranda's life."

"Seriously, though, why me?" Kat asked. "I get that I'm connected to Mira, but if this chick has already been after her, why come after me? I'm not standing between them. I'm not a threat."

Now David looked at her. "Do you really want to hear my theory? I doubt it will make you feel better."

Kat pursed her lips. "Don't sugarcoat it, Count. Just tell me."

"I would guess that this isn't about killing Miranda . . . or, not just about that. There may be a personal feud involved. Someone who wants to hurt Miranda, not just kill her. The best way to do that is to start with her friends, particularly the human ones who are weak and vulnerable."

David saw their faces, gave a one-shouldered shrug, and unclipped the cable from the two phones. "As I said, it's just a theory."

He handed Kat her phone back. "Your signal is now coded onto our network," he told her. "Keep the phone on you at all times, and we'll be able to find you anywhere in the city at a second's notice. More important: I've set up a panic b.u.t.ton. Hit star-one and it will trigger an alarm; a patrol unit will be sent to your location immediately and you'll get a call from me within thirty seconds to check on your safety."

"Wow," Drew said, sounding reluctantly impressed. "You did all of that in less than two minutes?"

David smiled. "Didn't Miranda tell you? I'm a genius."

"You didn't tell her the whole truth," Miranda pointed out as they left Kat's house and walked up the street to where the car was waiting.

"She doesn't need to know the whole truth." David looked at her sharply. "She already knows way more than she should about us."

"But her life is in danger."

"Irrelevant." He put his hands in his coat pockets as he walked, and added, "The whole truth isn't always the best truth."

"What about Jake?" she asked. "We still haven't found his body. I find it hard to believe that it's not connected-what are the chances of someone kidnapping my bodyguard right after someone tries to kill me, and then someone else making fang-eyes at my best friend?"

"Remote," he admitted. "I'm almost certain the same person or people are behind it . . . and, if what Deven said holds true, it may in fact be connected to the Red Shadow, and possibly even to Hart. But we don't know, Miranda. We have no real evidence to bind it all together yet. And the more Kat and Drew know, the more danger they're in."

Just then, his phone rang. Miranda stopped, her first worry that it was Kat's panic b.u.t.ton, but David didn't look concerned; he merely said, "Yes?"

Miranda could hear the murmur of a male voice.

"Chief Brady, it's good to hear from you," David said. "To what do I owe this honor?"

She watched his face go from neutral to ever so slightly confused, then angry, then back to neutral again. Her heart sank.

"We'll be right there," he said, and hung up.

"What is it?" she asked, but David was already speaking into his com.

"Star-three."

"Yes, Sire?" Faith piped up.

"We have an Alpha Seven at 4109 North Grafton, apartment 28. The Queen and I are en route; send a team."

"As you will it, Sire."

Alpha Seven . . . a human murdered by a vampire. She hadn't heard that code since the war . . . but usually APD contacted Faith for suspected Shadow World crime, and for the chief himself to call . . . it had to be serious. "What's going on?" she demanded.

David met her eyes. "Denise."

The sun was well up, the Haven was silent, and Miranda was still sitting in her chair staring into the fire.

David had tried to ease her guilt and coax her into bed, but she refused; she just needed time to sit with what she was feeling. He had nodded, kissed her cheek, and let her be.

Denise MacNeil had been missing for about twenty-four hours; she hadn't shown up at the office, and by midafternoon her secretary was worried. Calls had gone out and Denise's landlady had finally agreed to check on her. The door was locked from the inside. The police had to break it down.

Dried blood was splattered all over the immaculate kitchen counters, soaked into the living room carpet and the sofa. a.s.suming it all came from Denise, it added up to fatal blood loss.

There had been a struggle: lamps knocked over, several things broken. The stereo was still playing, the same three CDs repeating over and over. There was a gla.s.s of wine undisturbed on the side table and a folder of redlined contracts still lying open on the couch.

All that remained of Denise was her left hand.

The police had called David because they knew Denise was Miranda's agent and there might be a connection. So far the police had no leads.

The Haven had one.

The Elite team had taken samples from the scene, and they would be sent to Dr. Novotny for further testing. It was still too soon for the results on Jake, but Miranda hoped fervently there would be something, any clue, no matter how tiny, to link the two to the a.s.sa.s.sin who had called herself Stacey. That woman was the only possible suspect they had.

Miranda sat by the fire until almost nine in the morning, her heart heavy. First Jake, now Denise . . . was Kat next? It looked like she was already staked out as a possible target. Yes, she was under guard, but Miranda had been under Haven guard once, too, and Ariana Blackthorn had killed her in the middle of the city and dumped her body in the lake. Were they going to find Kat's left hand next? And whose after that?

Leaving the hand, Deven had said, was the Red Shadow's way of leaving a message. But if it was the Shadow, for whom were they working? Who could possibly hate Miranda enough to go to this much trouble?

It could be a remnant of the Blackthorn . . . or it could be Hart . . . but the Shadow didn't work for vampires, and they commanded huge sums for their services. Hart could pull it off, but none of the Blackthorn or their cronies had been very wealthy. Then again, what human would want to hurt her this way? She barely knew any other humans before she had come to the Haven; who would be after her now? It made no sense.

Too restless and anxious to sit still anymore, she got up off the chair and left the suite.

She glanced over at the bed to see David deep in slumber, and she smiled in spite of herself. He was sleeping in the same position they tended to end up in, except that his arm was stretched over an empty expanse of blankets when it should have been around her body. For the first couple of weeks she'd had trouble sleeping with anyone so close to her, but she had already come to depend on his presence at her back.

Emergency tunnels connected the main house to the other buildings, so if she really wanted to, she could go work out; she could also go to the library, or pound her stress into the piano or her guitar strings. None of those options sounded appealing, for once, but there was something that did.

There was a study right between their wing and the guest wing, where David and Tanaka had held informal chats; it wasn't her favorite room, being far more masculine in decor than she preferred, but she happened to know it had the most well-stocked liquor cabinet in the Haven as well as a fridge that hopefully still housed some of David's ice cream stash.

She nodded to the hallway guard as she pa.s.sed, then opened the study door.

To her dismay she found she wasn't alone.

"Oh, it's you," she said.

Prime Deven sat with his feet up on a dark leather chair, one hand around a half-empty bottle of whiskey. He looked about as thrilled to see her as she was to see him.

He said something in what she guessed was Gaelic.

"Come again?"

With a slightly lazy smile, he translated, "The flame enters and casts all the world 'round her into shade."

"Are you drunk?"

He shrugged. "I'm Irish," he said. "I've spent most of the last millennium drunk."

"You have an accent when you're drunk," she observed.

"I have an accent all the time," he replied. "It hides its head in shame when I'm sober."

Miranda had to smile at that, as well as at the marked contrast in his appearance and demeanor to all their other meetings. He was dressed casually in old jeans and a T-s.h.i.+rt advertising the Vatican gift shop; barefoot, his hair damp from a recent was.h.i.+ng and therefore not glamorously spiked, without any makeup on, he looked . . . almost normal.

She found she was fascinated by the tattoos, though, and tried not to stare as she entered the room, closed the door, and headed over to the cabinet to fetch a bottle of her own, this one of rum. She also grabbed a bottle of c.o.ke and a gla.s.s of ice.

"Are you religious?" she asked as she set her wares on the coffee table and flopped down on the couch opposite his.

Deven rolled his eyes. "I'm far too old to believe in fairy tales."

She indicated his arms with the neck of the bottle. "What are those about, then?"

He laid one hand on his shoulder and absently ran his fingers along the line of the angel's wing. She noticed, looking more closely, that the feathers had been designed to run parallel to a series of long scars in his upper arm; the scars were almost invisible with the angel carved over them.

"It's a giant Catholic yin-yang," Deven replied, closing his eyes blearily. He seemed so tired; was it a function of being seven hundred years old, or something else? What kept one of the world's oldest vampires awake all morning?

Miranda poured rum halfway up her gla.s.s, then topped it off with a splash of c.o.ke and took a long swallow, making a face at the taste. "And the scars? Are they from a giant Catholic lion attack?"

He took another hit off the whiskey but didn't seem affected by the bite of the alcohol. She suspected the bottle had been full when he started. "A whip," he answered. "You should see my back."