The woman in the mirror looked calm, capable. Her hair was loose in wild curls and gleamed in the low backstage lights with the aid of the Bed Head product line. She met the green of her own eyes steadily, and if it weren’t for the purple smudge beneath the left, she might have looked confident. She absently reached up to run her finger along the scar below her hairline.
The club was packed to capacity. She could hear the crowd as if it were a hundred-armed animal waiting for its dinner, and though she had her barriers up as always, she could feel their anticipation all the way backstage.
She cursed to herself and tried again to cover her black eye with makeup. She was lucky she hadn’t injured one of her hands yesterday—certainly the rest of her body felt the stiff and painful aftermath of three hours of being pummeled by a tiny barracuda pixie. If she’d been smart, she would have scheduled their meeting after her performance, not before. Now she was dreading not just playing in front of people again after so long, but having to stand upright for over an hour without dropping her guitar.
Now her to-do list was narrowed to cleaning the bathroom and murdering Faith, but “murdering Faith” had several gold stars next to it in her head.
Assuming tonight went well, it was going to be a busy winter. Sophie wanted to see her twice a week, and had given her a workout regimen as well as several acerbic recommendations about her diet, such as, “If you come in here smelling like pizza next time, I’ll kick you in the stomach.”
Goddamned vampires.
“Five minutes, Grey,” Mel called from outside the curtained nook.
Miranda decided there was nothing more she could do for her eye. She stood up and stretched, grounding quickly before her nerves got the better of her, and took her guitar from its case.
“Okay,” she said into the mirror. “Let’s do this.”
Her reflection nodded as she nodded. She told herself there was determination and strength in her eyes.
She waited in the wings for Mel to announce her, gripping the neck of her guitar tightly. The last time she had stood on this stage had not ended well. She tried to put it out of her mind, but she remembered that one of the men who had attacked her had been in the audience that night.
So had David.
As she walked out on the stage to a roar of applause, she swept the room with her senses, just on the off chance that she might feel a familiar dark presence among the teeming mass of humanity, but there was none.
That was all right. He had promised they’d see each other again, and she knew he wasn’t the kind who made promises lightly. He had his work to do, and she had hers.
Smiling out at the audience, she lifted her guitar and struck a chord.
Weeks later the applause and adoration were still ringing in her ears when she left the club after ten o’clock, bag over her shoulder and guitar bumping her butt, and headed for the bus stop.
She was also smiling—no, a more accurate term would be beaming. She was still so high off the crowd energy that she could barely keep her feet on the sidewalk.
Yes, yes. Now she remembered why she had started performing in the first place. Those first few long-ago weeks when she had learned what she could do but hadn’t let it consume her yet had been some of the happiest of her life. She had left the stage each night feeling like a goddess, or better yet, an artist. She had taken the dross of human emotion and spun it into the gold of harmony.
Miranda laughed to herself. She was even starting to sound as pretentious as an artist.
It wasn’t until she had found a seat and the bus lurched away from the curb that it occurred to her she should be afraid.
She should be staring at the floor and fighting off the voices in her head. She should be counting the blocks from club to home and repeating them like a mantra.
Here it was, late December; the weather had finally turned cold, and another hard freeze was forecast for Monday night. She had been back in the city since early October, and back onstage since Thanksgiving. The first few shows had been hard . . . she had trouble balancing the emotional flow of the audience without losing her shields, and the effort had cost her two-day migraines with accompanying hangovers.
Still, she refused to give up, and after a week, her training started to come back to her. Now she found herself actually excited before a show, and working with real enthusiasm on her original material. She was thinking of debuting the first song at the next gig.
A few days ago a woman had come up to her after the set and asked about representing her. Her card was still in Miranda’s wallet, the reality of the slip of stiff paper almost too good to be true; she’d Googled the woman and found out she was legit, and was strongly considering accepting her offer. Denise MacNeil had said that she could get Miranda into at least three more venues and, if she could get a demo made, probably land her a recording contract.
If things kept up, she might end up in the studio by spring. The thought made her beam even wider.
She looked around at the other people on the bus with her, letting her shields thin out just enough that she could assess whether any of them were a threat, but unless the old woman in the walker was hiding a gun, there was nothing to worry about.
Reclaiming her own mind, it turned out, was all she needed to start living her own life.
She looked people in the eye now—sometimes she didn’t want to, but she forced herself, to make sure she didn’t start to slip again. Most of the time people smiled. Some looked away. Those were the ones to keep an eye on. They were hiding something.
She was grateful to have the rest of the night free. She made it a point never to schedule sessions with Sophie the night after a show; she liked to have some downtime. Plus, whenever she tried to work out after she’d been performing, she was inevitably tired and distracted and Sophie ended up beating the crap out of her. On other nights, she was finally able to hold her own . . . for a few minutes, anyway. She was far from a warrior, but she was making progress.
Miranda also wanted the night off because there was something she needed to do.
She let the bus carry her past her stop, down Lamar; past the mammoth Whole Foods flagship store, past Book People, past the University of Texas campus . . . all the way up past Thirty-Eighth Street, with a dozen stops in between.
Yanking the stop cord, she swung to her feet and bumped her way past the few people still on the bus. Then she stepped out into the frigid night air, pulling her coat tighter around her, and stood in front of the Travis County Psychiatric Hospital for a long minute, just thinking.
The intake desk was open twenty-four hours. She picked her way along the tall hurricane fence that surrounded the industrial gray buildings, not in any hurry to go inside, but eventually she faced the glass doors of the main lobby and had to make a decision.
When the doors shut behind her, she stopped and grounded to quell the first stirrings of anxiety in her stomach, and she forced twice as much energy as usual into her shields as soon as the whispers began in her head.
She could feel them rubbing against her mind—light fingers of ghostly presence, some crawling with madness, some just . . . empty. Hollow people, scarecrow people, full of nothing but screams . . . how the doctors and nurses could bear it, she couldn’t fathom. Maybe they were numb. So many humans were.
For the hundredth time she considered giving up on this little mission and trying proper channels . . . but that would involve filling out endless paperwork, and worse yet, dealing with her father. She’d much rather break the law.
The whole place was government-issue circa 1970, the predominant color hospital green. Everything was dingy despite the pathetic attempts to liven up the place with encouraging posters and announcements on neon paper. There were hardly any patients here anymore; the county facility had given way to a more modern, more politically savvy building farther from downtown that looked more like a school than a concentration camp. This place was slated to close next summer.
A bored-looking young woman sat playing solitaire on the front desk computer, but Miranda walked right past her to the building map. It looked for a second like the receptionist might have noticed her, but Miranda paused, infusing the energy of her shield with what Sophie called a deflector, the subtle mental suggestion to look the other way, and the woman went back to her game with a yawn. It was one of the little shielding tricks Miranda had been working on and apparently was one of the primary ways vampires moved through the city unnoticed by humanity when combined with their incredible speed and grace.
Miranda’s speed and grace were questionable, but one thing she did have was power.
She scrutinized the map until she found what she was looking for, tucked her guitar case behind a listless potted ficus tree, and walked right down the hallway, her boots clomping purposefully on the linoleum floor. She was still in her stage clothes because they made her feel tough and untouchable: she’d borrowed the look from Sophie and rather liked it, at least for a few hours a night. Black pants, black boots, black corset top with rivets and buckles, heavy silver jewelry, and a lot of makeup she’d retouched after sweating it off onstage . . . all she lacked were the piercings. She’d even invested in a long black coat to sweep around in.
Of course, after an entire show in that getup, she couldn’t wait to pry the top off and put on her sweat pants, but in the meantime, it was nice knowing that she looked a little scary.
The hospital’s layout was miraculously precise. Most of the government buildings she’d been in had seemed designed by monkeys. She found 48-D without too much trouble.
A security guard was making rounds of the hallways. He was more alert than the receptionist and wouldn’t be so easily fooled by her tricks. She would have to be more direct.
She strode right toward him, and he looked totally flabbergasted that a random civilian was wandering the halls of the nuthouse at this hour. “Excuse me, ma’am, this area is off limits—”
She smiled her most winning smile, which wasn’t terribly winning, and looked him in the eyes. She had learned how to open her shields only a tiny bit, enough to let selected people in, and how to thin them and change their texture so she could screen out some emotions and read others. It was all energy, all subject to her concentration and will. She reached out to the guard, a balding man of about forty-five whose most pressing desire, aside from getting rid of the troublesome redhead in front of him, was to have a cigarette.
Child’s play.
Miranda took delicate hold of that desire with a wisp of her power and tugged at it lightly, saying in a low voice, “It’s all right, sir. You’re on break. You need to go outside and have a cigarette.”
He frowned. He wasn’t a terribly strong mind, but he didn’t want to lose his job. She didn’t want to cause him any trouble, really—she was the one doing wrong, not him. So, she revised her plan, and said, “Go finish your round. I’ll be gone when you get back. You won’t think of me again, and no one will ever know I was here.”
Finish his round—that he could do. He walked off without looking back at her, his steps slow and purposeful as before, the edge of anxiety that arose when he had seen her eroding into the usual boredom of his shift.
Miranda nodded, satisfied. Now she had to hurry.
It was, of course, locked; the medical records department was open only from eight to five on weekdays, and this was a secured file room for old cases, a dumping ground for records from all over the county. It was likely nobody had been in there for a month or more. So much was going digital these days, and ancient files like these were the lumbering dinosaurs that kept getting shoved from one building to another. No one cared much about patients who had been dead for so long. When the building was emptied in a few months, it was likely all these histories would be destroyed, their statute of limitations on usefulness long since passed.
She smiled to herself. Personal medical histories were kept under lock and key here, but in a very literal sense—there was no key card, no electronic pad, no combination. Perhaps the Haven should loan some of its technology to the Department of State Health Services instead of just the Department of Defense.