Shadowflame Part 23

"I'm not," she said. "I mean, I'm sorry you were hurt, but I'm not sorry that we're here now."

"Does that mean I'm forgiven?"

"I don't know. We can't just flip a switch and have everything back the way it was, but . . . I moved my things back in here this morning. I want to be with you, for better or for worse."

He started to say something but heard his phone ring, and Miranda twisted backward to pick it up off the nightstand. She saw who it was and paused for a minute before biting her lip and handing it to him.

"Go on," she said. "I'm sure he's been worried about you."

David shut his eyes, not wanting to deal with this right now when everything felt so good, but he hit talk anyway. "h.e.l.lo?"

The anxiety in Deven's voice made him sound young. "Are you all right?"

"I'll live."

"G.o.d, David, I . . . I'm so sorry. Jonathan knew something was going to happen, but he didn't know when or where. I should have called you anyway, just so you'd be on your guard."

David sighed. "It wasn't your fault."

Deven took a deep breath. "I can't stay on. I just wanted to hear your voice-Jonathan's been saying you would be fine, but I had to hear it for myself."

"Really, Deven, I'm all right. I'm weak, and I feel like I could drink an entire volleyball team, but I'm all right."

"Let me know when you figure out what that s.h.i.+t was."

"Okay. Good-bye."

David didn't wait for a farewell; talking took too much effort. He handed the phone back to Miranda. "Put that thing on silent," he said.

She arched an eyebrow at him. "Did you really just say that? Maybe that stuff did eat your brain."

"I just want an hour of peace."

With a smile, she turned off the ringer and put the phone back on the nightstand, then returned her attention to him. "Let me get you some blood," she said. "I had a fresh batch brought in-you haven't fed since the intern at the clinic. Don't worry," she added, knowing how he'd feel about feeding on his employees, "I asked for volunteers and offered a hefty bonus in return. The boy was happy to help, and it was much easier than going out and finding someone."

"Wait," he said as she started to get up. "Stay here for a moment."

She met his eyes, then nodded and lay back down, scooting closer and, after a second's hesitation, putting her arm around him.

Being free of poison had been nothing compared to the relief of that touch.

She burrowed her face into his shoulder, and he inhaled the scent of her hair; they settled in together as they had a hundred times before, and he felt her sigh against his skin.

"I deserved this," he said. "That's all I could think while I was lying there . . . for what I did to you, and what I did to that horrible old man . . ."

"Oh, David," she sighed. "You can't torture yourself . . . sorry . . . for what you have to do as Prime. I don't like it . . . and I know you don't either . . . but think of what will happen if this a.s.sa.s.sin succeeds and we die. There will be anarchy in the South and a lot of people will be killed. You told me yourself, a long time ago, that sometimes being Prime means doing what no one else should have to . . . that you can't always afford the moral high road."

He looked at her face. "You didn't always feel that way."

She smiled sadly. "You didn't always get this upset over these things." She ran her hand back through his hair and added, "I think we've changed each other, you and I."

"I know you've changed me."

Miranda was silent for a moment, but then said simply, "I missed you."

"I missed you, too."

"I don't know if . . ." She trailed off, searching for words, but he intuited her meaning.

"I understand," he replied. "I've never asked you for anything you weren't ready to give."

"I know." She smiled again. "That's one of the things I love about you . . . you philandering b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

He couldn't help but laugh, and she laughed a little, too, hugging him, and then kissing his neck. It was the first time she'd kissed him in three weeks.

"I just wish you hadn't f.u.c.ked up so badly, so I could go on thinking you were the perfect man," she added, sighing again.

He snorted softly. "I could tell you a thousand stories that prove I'm anything but perfect."

"Truthfully, I already knew you weren't. You listen to rap."

"I listen to everything." He grinned. "Miss 'three songs by Britney Spears on my iPod that I don't think anyone knows about-' "

"Hey, no snooping!"

"I didn't. That night I came home and you were singing in the shower with the stereo going, I looked at the playlist because I couldn't believe what I was hearing."

"If you have such exalted taste, how did you know it was Britney?"

They were both laughing, and it felt so incredibly good, but it was tiring, and he quieted out of necessity. "I love you," he said.

She took a deep breath. "I love you, too."

He could feel that she meant it. He had never been in danger of losing her love, only her faith in him. He couldn't say how or when he would earn it back, but he would. He would find a way. They were a Pair. So much in the world was uncertain . . . but that much, he knew with every bone in his body now, was unbreakable. Somehow he would restore her trust and they would find a way to live with what he'd done . . . for her sake, so she could have the happiness she deserved.

"Go to sleep," she whispered to him.

He closed his eyes. "Sing to me."

He could hear her smiling. "All right."

And, as she sang softly into his ear, and he began to drift off into sleep, he couldn't help but think that being poisoned might be the best thing that had ever happened to him.

You're in my blood like holy wine

You taste so bitter and so sweet...

Running the South on her own was exhausting, but there was satisfaction in knowing that she could handle it, at least for a couple of days.

In the evening at sunset she met with Faith for a briefing on the night's upcoming patrols, and then just at dawn, when the shutters of the Haven had closed and the teams had all returned from the city, she met with them to go over the night's events. Sometimes David simply took a summary report from Faith, but with the a.s.sa.s.sin on the loose Miranda wanted to hear everything herself.

And though she didn't have anything like David's technological genius, she knew how to monitor the sensor network, routing it through her phone to alert her to problems. He had shown her how to run the routine on the main server that compiled all the night's data into a single report and saved it for later reference. Technically she didn't need to look it over, because the system was programmed to contact the administrator if anything weird happened, but she gave it a once-over anyway. There were always two Elite monitoring it from the office where the property's security cameras were based, but they could only watch, not interpret, and David had them observing the network mostly as a backup in case on some off chance he or the alert system missed something.

Tuesday night she had to mediate a dispute between two members of the Court. Both were nightclub owners and one suspected the other of using mind control to steal patrons. The second owner claimed the humans were migrating to her club because she had started serving food-in fact the Austin Chronicle had voted her tapas the best in the city. As petty and ridiculous as the whole thing seemed, if the issue wasn't officially settled it could lead to violence, intimidation, and the risk of exposure. Miranda made both owners submit to a psychic evaluation, looked into their hearts, and found something interesting: The second owner had not been coercing her patrons, but the first one had been, in retaliation for a perceived threat to his business. He'd been sending his employees over to the second club to "advertise" for his own place, meaning to compel a few humans here and there to come back.

The Queen was within her rights to shut him down completely, but she knew from watching David deal with similar situations that a popular vampire establishment disappearing would raise a lot of questions, and besides, she wanted people to feel that the South was a solid place to do business. She slapped him with the maximum fine demarcated for the circ.u.mstances and ordered him to pay rest.i.tution to the other owner, then informed him that there would be Elite watching both establishments for any further misbehavior.

Surprisingly, the first owner wasn't terribly angry about the loss of income-he was more satisfied that his rival hadn't been stealing his customers. Both left the Haven feeling that the results were fair, and Miranda was pleased.

She'd been half afraid since the incident with Prime Hart that she had no political savvy at all and was going to have to stay out of administrative and judicial affairs, which she hated to do because it was what all the other Queens did. But it gave her a shot of confidence knowing that she could learn and that she just needed experience and patience. She didn't have much of either, but she was working on it. Her empathy gave her an advantage in this kind of mediation, and the more she learned to use it the better she would be at all of this . . . she would never have believed a year ago that she would think of her gift as anything but a curse, but now she found herself wanting to push it further, see where its edges were, experiment . . .

She had to laugh at herself. Yes . . . David had influenced her, all right.

She persuaded David to take it easy Tuesday night, although he was totally recovered by the time he woke up and fed. She knew he agreed just to make her happy, but she didn't care. She wanted to be sure he was back to 100 percent before hitting the Austin streets again.

Seeing him hurt had shaken her badly. His being hit in the eye with earpiece shrapnel had been minor, but it had freaked her out; this was the real thing. The a.s.sa.s.sin hadn't been trying to kill him, but she had wanted him down, and if Mo hadn't used the ant.i.toxin kit on him he would have been left in a coma. The preliminary a.n.a.lysis on the dart was that it was a synthetic toxin that targeted blood vessels in the brain; nervous system injuries were tricky and delicate to heal, and something that extreme would have taken even a Prime a week or better to recover from. A lesser vampire could have been out of commission for more than a month. It would have killed a human in minutes.

Maybe it hadn't been life-or-death, but feeling his pain and knowing that even the most powerful vampire in the Southern United States could be hurt so badly terrified her beyond rational sense. She wanted to lock the doors, tie him to the bed, and do anything she could to protect him, and therefore herself, from going through that again. Part of her was still so angry at him, yet part of her-a bigger, deeper part that she couldn't deny-just wanted her husband back and was willing to throw aside everything just to make sure he was safe.

It was so aggravating. She wasn't ready to stop being upset. She had thought she wanted to hurt him for what he had done to her, but then she realized that was the last thing in the world she could stand to see, and now she was left with a pile of conflicting feelings and the nagging knowledge that she was going to forgive him, even though part of her never wanted to. It offended her knowing that something as cliche as having a soul mate could override her perfectly justified outrage.

Things with Kat were still awkward. Though Faith had made it clear she was happy to listen, Miranda hated to put the Second in the middle of her and David's relations.h.i.+p troubles. Faith had been David's friend first, and Miranda could sense she felt conflicted about the situation already. Miranda didn't know what else to do . . . so, in a fit of desperation for someone to talk to, she finally called Jonathan, and they were on the phone for more than an hour.

"How in h.e.l.l are you doing it?" she asked.

She could tell he was smiling. "For starters, you can't compare your coping skills to mine or anybody else's. Everyone deals with life's steaming s.h.i.+t piles in a different way."

"So you're just . . . okay with the fact that he cheated on you?"

Jonathan chuckled. "There you go again. You forget: We don't have cheating, because we decided at the beginning that there were going to be other men in our lives. Of course . . ." He paused, then clarified, "I don't deny I was angry. It shocked me how angry I was, because I thought I was all right with the idea of his taking a lover at some point. It was so hypocritical of me, not to mention totally out of character. But then once we were back home, on familiar ground, I was able to think about it rationally, and I realized the problem was that this wasn't just some b.l.o.w.j.o.b at the zoo."

"The zoo?"

"Don't ask. The point is, I'm not emotionally attached to any of the people I step out with. It's just s.e.x and we both know it. But whether you or I like it or not, David and Deven love each other, and it's not going away. We can either accept that and deal with it, or we can wallow in our misery for all eternity. I'm accepting it for two reasons. One, because I love Deven and don't want to lose what we have. Two, because he's a recovering Catholic and you wouldn't believe the guilty mess he's been, both for damaging y our marriage and for making me upset. He's spent too much of his life hating himself. I can't bear to make it worse . . . which goes back to reason number one. I love him. And one way or another, we're going to work all of this out, as are you."

Miranda sighed, picking at a loose thread in the throw she'd draped around herself when she flopped on the couch with her phone. "How old do I have to get before I'm as well adjusted as you?"

"It's a matter of priority. I just know that I want to stay with the love of my life . . . above and beyond the fact that I can't leave. Technically we could live separately and only see each other every few days when the need gets overwhelming, but it would be an awful existence."

"Yeah. I tried that. It sucked."

"My advice is just this: Do what feels right whether it's 'appropriate' or not. Emotions have no manners. They don't care about what people in relations.h.i.+ps are 'supposed' to do. You're not Mr. and Mrs. Solomon living in the Austin suburbs, after all."

Miranda smiled. "Really, this whole thing is more like a cross between the British monarchy and Dawson's Creek."

"Perhaps. In fact, definitely. But after sixty years I can say in all honesty that it's worth it. Trust me, Miranda. It's worth it."

After they hung up she sat staring at the fireplace for a while, digesting everything he'd said. She felt a lot better just having talked to someone; there had been such a weight on her back, and she hadn't felt comfortable unburdening herself to Kat, or Faith, or anyone. There were some things that only another Consort would understand.

A moment later the suite door opened and David returned from an evening spent in the stables. He looked disheveled but content, and smelled like sweat and horse.

They smiled at each other. "How are you feeling?" she asked.

"Right as rain," he replied. "Except I have some news that might not be entirely welcome."

"Oh, G.o.d, what now? Did you hear back from the West about those clients of Volundr's? Were they all dead ends?"

David shook his head. "Not yet. They're still questioning them. This is something else."

"Go on."

He put his phone on its charging dock and his wallet on the desk in preparation for taking a shower-he knew she wouldn't let him sit on the couch if he smelled like Osiris. "Another state visit."

Miranda let her head fall back on the couch. "You've got to be kidding. Can't we put it off?"

"Only if we want the Council to start gossiping. The others will want to know why we're stalling, then they'll speculate on what's going on in our territory . . . they love nothing more than blood in the water. Besides, it would be a breach of protocol."

"f.u.c.k protocol."

"I feel the same way, to be honest. But we have to present a strong front."

"I know, I know. So who is it this time? Someone I'll have to throw at a wall, or someone else you've slept with?"

He looked away when she said that, but said, "Neither. It's Eastern Europe-Prime Janousek. He's an ally and a friend, but nothing more."

She almost felt bad for needling him . . . almost. "No Queen?"

"No. He's been in power for eighty-seven years, so it's a bit unusual that he's still solitary. And a bit sad, because he's a good man and a solid member of the Council. No real enemies, no drama. He's a competent ruler and a decent warrior. I think you'll like him."

She nodded. "That doesn't sound too bad. When's he getting here?"

"Next Monday. He'll only be here for three days. It should be painless."

"Let's not tempt fate by saying that."

"Good point." He pulled his sweater off over his head, then the T-s.h.i.+rt underneath. "At any rate, the visits should slow down after he leaves. There are five or six others who will want to come in the next few months, then after that it will probably stop until a full year has gone by."

"Good," Miranda said. "I've had enough Magnificent b.a.s.t.a.r.ds for a while. That will make seven, right?"

David ticked them off on his fingers. "j.a.pan, the Plains region of the U.S., the Middle East, Western Europe, the Northeastern U.S., and the Western U.S., plus Eastern Europe. Seven."