The sensor network was years ahead of its time, technologically speaking, but it wasn’t the most attractive thing in the world. He’d essentially cobbled it together out of the existing resources at the Haven, not wanting to waste time making it pretty while lives were at stake.
The Prime sat in his chair in the workroom, going over the latest diagnostics on his laptop. Things had been a bit turbulent since they’d gone live—the grid worked, yes, but during periods of high activity in the city, like rush hour or Saturday night downtown, sectors had a nasty habit of overloading from too much data and crashing the whole network. The processing power to handle that much information simply didn’t exist.
So he’d built it.
The hard part was getting the entire thing coordinated, a process similar to trying to time all the city’s traffic lights. Each of the thousands of sensors was tied into a hub, and those hubs routed back to the Haven. Eventually he’d be able to link his entire territory this way via satellite, but for now he had to be content with the Austin metropolitan area.
The thing that drove him, however, was that it was working. War had come to the city in the form of a symbol painted in vampire blood over the corpses of three insurgents: the Seal of Prime David Solomon. The message was clear, and it was heard.
He hadn’t figured they would go gently into the darkness, and they didn’t. The attacks tripled in frequency. The difference was that since that first night there had been no human fatalities.
The rebels had no idea what hit them. They had their victim chosen and isolated, but before they could put a scratch on the human, they were surrounded by Elite, all under the order to show no mercy. They were executed without question and without trial. Due process was for mortals. This was the Shadow World.
He had trained two of the administrative staff to monitor the network, and they took shifts, but regardless he had reports sent to his phone every ten minutes. The network took readings every three minutes and immediately reported every single vampire moving in the city. Any group of more than two on the streets had a patrol unit in its wake in ninety seconds. Any vampire approaching a human outside a known hunting ground was detained and questioned. The insurgents rarely worked alone, but he wanted it absolutely clear: The vampires of Austin were being watched. His eyes were everywhere and his reach was endless.
It was only a matter of time before they grew desperate and either tried something stupid or slipped up. Taking the heads of their henchmen wasn’t enough for David. He wanted the Blackthorn themselves. He wanted their blood spilled, and he wanted his own hands to spill it.
“Have you fed?”
He nodded absently. “Yes.”
“Are you lying?”
“No.”
For some reason Faith had taken it upon herself to act as his babysitter. He didn’t mind most of the time, but he hadn’t been terribly patient with her, or anyone, since autumn.
“What did you have?”
He stopped what he was doing and looked up. His neck hurt from being bent toward the monitor for so long; he knew she was about to tell him to take a break, and for once he was inclined to agree. “I had Esther bring me a bag. Ask her yourself.”
He noticed she was holding what looked like a newspaper; when he raised an eyebrow at it, she bit her lip a second before saying, “I thought you might want to see this. It’s this week’s Chronicle.”
“The entertainment newspaper? Since when do I care about that?”
“Since now,” Faith replied, opening the folded periodical and tossing it onto the table in front of him.
He sat back. “Miranda.”
The slightly grainy black-and-white picture showed her sitting on the edge of a stage, her guitar in her lap. She was smiling and looking directly at the camera.
He stared at it silently for a while, and then said, “She looks happy.”
Faith shrugged. “She’s making quite a name for herself. There’s an interview.”
He tore his eyes away from Miranda’s face and planted them firmly back on the computer. “I’ll read it later. I have more work to do.”
He could practically hear Faith shaking her head, but she left him alone obligingly enough. He tried to go back to his calibrations, but he could see the picture in his peripheral vision, Miranda’s lovely pale face fixed on him, eyes whose color was still burned into his memory watching him in shades of gray.
David started to shut the paper, but he couldn’t help seeing the header beneath the image: