“And the other night, you slept together?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you weren’t ready for men.”
Miranda cut up the last half of her pancake to make it look like she was eating it. “David is different,” she said, though it sounded weak even to her ears without any sort of background story. “I trust him. I don’t think I can ever trust any other man again.”
“Do you love him?”
“Yes. Very much.”
“I guess I’m happy for you, then.”
“You guess?”
Kat made a face. “To be honest, honey, he seemed like kind of a dick. But I only met him for about thirty seconds, so I could be wrong.”
Miranda laughed. “He’s not. I promise. He’s just . . . he has a lot of responsibility, and he’s not very good with normal people. He’s sort of a fanged teddy bear.”
Kat looked even more dubious. “I am going to get to meet him again, right? As best friend I reserve the right to kick his ass to the curb if I don’t approve.”
Miranda smiled at her, warmly, feeling grateful as well as ashamed. There was so much she wanted to tell Kat, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to. The secrecy of the Shadow World was what kept it from destruction. The Signets worked diligently to keep vampire kind out of the media and off the radar. Did she have the right to let a human in on its existence?
“We’ll all hang out,” Miranda told Kat. “It takes him a while to warm up, but you’ll like him once you get to know him.”
Kat insisted on paying the bill, and Miranda was relieved to leave the café. She’d gotten used to the pressure of a room full of humans, but it was still a strain, especially after a night of performing and two hours in the ER surrounded by the injured and dying.
She told herself it was that, and not the thought of what was in her fridge, that made her so anxious to get home.
Kat let her out at her door with a hug and cheek-kiss. “Call me,” she said firmly.
Miranda agreed, and watched her go, making sure she had pulled out of the parking lot before turning the deadbolt and switching on the living room lamp.
She felt sick to her stomach from the pancakes, and by the time she got her coat and boots off, she was so nauseated she flew to the bathroom, where her dinner made an inglorious return engagement.
It was Thursday. David had said she should be feeling more normal by now. She contemplated calling him, but didn’t want him to worry. She’d see him tomorrow anyway after her show. She just had to keep it together until then.
He was probably going to be angry with her. He’d wanted her to let his blood work its way out of her body this time, and turn her properly at the Haven where she’d be protected and he could control the situation. She knew he was right.
But she was so hungry . . . and nothing was helping. It couldn’t hurt to keep his blood alive in her veins for one more day, could it?
She flushed the toilet and washed her face with ice-cold water. Her reflection looked green around the gills, and the flush of power had faded from her face, leaving behind an ashen pallor much like the one she’d had that first night. She couldn’t stand to be that sick again.
Just this once.
Miranda fetched the bag from the fridge and set it on the counter, wondering how to go about it. Should she heat it? Put it in a glass? Stick a straw in it? She’d never seen David actually drink from one, but she couldn’t picture him sucking on the bag like a Capri Sun. Surely he used a glass.
She opened the cabinet. A champagne flute? No, something for a red.
She settled on a coffee mug so that she could put it in the microwave for a few seconds. That had to be better, more like . . . more like fresh from a person.
Snipping off a corner of the bag, she poured enough to halfway fill the mug, and the rich coppery smell of it hit her like a sledgehammer. Her legs almost buckled beneath her, but she held herself up and punched twenty seconds, watching the cheerful I WENT BATS IN AUSTIN! logo turn in circles.
She took the cup out and sniffed it, then took an experimental sip.
Miranda moaned softly. As soon as it hit her tongue, she felt warmth and renewed strength trickling through her. One sip turned into a swallow, and before she knew it she had drained the mug and was refilling it with shaking hands. The orgasmic rush she remembered from drinking David’s blood returned, though not as intensely. She had to force herself not to gulp—the thought of vomiting blood was the most disgusting thing she could imagine, and it would be such a waste. She didn’t know when she could get any more.
She ended up sinking to her knees on the floor, her hands splayed out on the tile, heady joy and pleasure rocking her back and forth. The painful burning and itching in her mouth was gone, and so was her fatigue and weakness. Her vision was acute again, the colors in the room sharper. She hadn’t realized how dull her senses were becoming as the week had worn on. Now everything felt right again.
It was wonderful.
She was laughing as she fell asleep on the kitchen floor.
David Solomon had been the first Prime to computerize all his records. Everything in his Haven was stored electronically; everything was beyond state-of-the-art, because if he didn’t have the technology he wanted, he simply created it. The com system, the network connecting all the Signets all over the world, the sensors that now helped protect Austin—he had a dozen patents to his name already and was in progress on several more, including a new kind of solar cell that harnessed the vampires’ universal enemy as a source of renewable energy to power not just the Haven, but all its systems and even the cars.
At first the other Signets had laughed, but eventually they caught on to the convenience and efficiency. California was the first to buy a software license and join the network; Deven knew a good thing when he saw it. After that, most of the others fell in line. Even a few Signets who were outright antagonistic toward California, and by extension the South, had expressed interest in upgrading their archaic communications.
The only area where Faith had really seen a problem was when it came to research. Everything David had brought with him from California, including all their information on the original Blackthorn syndicate, was on a server. Anything dated before the Signet changed hands was still kept in hard copies in the archives of the Haven. Auren had been particularly disdainful toward technology, so all his old patrol reports were still on paper, handwritten.
That meant that when David asked her to find out more about Ariana and Bethany Blackthorn by going through Auren’s files, she wanted nothing more than to beat him about the head with the 1954-1955 bound reports until he had a better idea.
“All I’m asking is for you to pull relevant files,” the Prime said. “Eventually I’m going to try to scan and upload all of Auren’s old shit so we can go through it and save what we want, then shred and burn the rest. All it’s doing right now is taking up space. Just bring me what you think I should look at.”
“How the hell do I find it?” Faith asked. The task ahead was daunting, to put it mildly. The archives consisted of eight rooms lined floor to ceiling with shelves of files, some so old they were falling apart or unreadable. “Is any of it in order?”
“Yes, Faith.” This newfound patience of his, though refreshing in some senses, tended to make her even more impatient in response. “Auren’s archive will be the most recent, so it will be in room eight. According to Bethany, she and Ariana were only here for about four years before Auren died, so look for anything that corresponds to that timeline, pull it, and bring it to me.”
“And why do I get this honor? Am I the secretary in command now?”
David looked at her from the array of electronic bits and half-constructed sensors he was working on to further refine the network in town. “I don’t trust anyone else in those rooms,” he said. “There could be a thousand kinds of sensitive information in there, and it’s for our eyes only.”
Grumbling, Faith stalked off to the archive hall, where each room’s number was hung on its corresponding door. Room eight was on the left end. She unlocked the door with her com and let herself in, trying not to choke at the dust and the stuffy smell of neglected space.
“Oh, Jesus,” she muttered. “This is going to take me all year.”
Faith took a minute to get her bearings; near as she could tell, the files were in something like chronological order. She started to sort through the first stack, finding as she’d figured mostly patrol reports that were essentially useless now.
An hour later she was still going through them and her patience was wearing perilously thin. She tossed another handful of papers onto the stack on the floor; at least she’d have a box of them to incinerate later so that in that distant era when David had time to spare for archiving, he could skip over them.
The entire Haven was full of people who could be doing this. Surely she had more important work to be going on with. She could have assigned a couple of green recruits to this and gone back to the city for another round of patrols. She didn’t trust the peace any more than the Prime did, but he was using the momentary respite to tighten the network. She wanted to be out on the streets making sure the Shadow World knew who was in charge.
Aggravated, she pushed another stack of papers onto the floor, sending a cloud of dust up into the air. She coughed violently and cursed Auren for not at least using file cabinets for all the accumulated garbage of decades of rule.
Under the stack, she saw something odd: a metal box.
She pulled it out and wiped the lid off. It was a nondescript gray, the sort of thing where people kept important papers locked up in case of fire, and was about legal size; it had no com lock, of course, but regular locks were no real obstacle for her. She took out her pocketknife and jimmied it open easily.
The contents were bundled in plastic sheeting, taped shut, and labeled: AUREN: PERSONAL EFFECTS.
Now this was interesting. She took the box over to a table, pushed the files that were on it off onto the floor with a satisfying thump, and set the box down, taking out the bundle and slitting the tape with her knife.
A handful of loose items fell out: a passport, a few expired credit cards, other detritus that was probably in the Prime’s wallet when he was assassinated. She wondered who had gone through his clothes; it hadn’t been her, and David had been far too busy to care what happened to Auren’s Visa card. There was an assortment of keys—she was thankful for the com system, so she didn’t have to carry so many. He’d seemed to have one for every locked door in his wing. There were also a handful of pens in half a dozen colors.
The last item surprised her: a black hardbound book, worn with age. She paged through it gingerly.
Auren had been something of an amateur artist. The book had mostly been used for sketches, though there were a few scattered journal entries written in what looked like German. Faith recognized images of the Haven gardens, the stables, one of the huge oak trees flanking the driveway; there was even a sketch of the Signet. The drawings were rendered in pen with touches of color here and there. A few were smudged in a way that suggested Auren had been left-handed, just like David was.
She should take this to him. He spoke German; he could translate the journal entries. Who knew what Auren had written down in his final days?
Faith turned to the last few pages, and her mouth dropped open.
A few rough sketches had been blocked in of a woman’s face, and one had been completed. It was a remarkable likeness, and underneath Auren had written ARIANA. He had even drawn her wearing the Queen’s Signet that she had never earned in life. She was smiling out from the page, coy and flirtatious.
There was just one problem.
The woman in the drawing was blond.
Ariana Blackthorn—the Ariana Blackthorn they’d executed—had black hair and hazel eyes. This one had blue. She also looked a good five years younger.
“Son of a bitch,” Faith said.
She shut the book and rushed from the archive room, calling into her com, “Elite Forty-Three, I need the status of the Blackthorn girl.”
There was no answer.
She tried again and got only silence. The same result came from trying to raise the other guard on Bethany’s door.
Cursing, she switched to broadcast mode. “Security to the visitor’s suites immediately.”
A beep. David’s voice: “Faith, report.”
She set off for the hallway where the girl was staying at a dead run. “Sire,” she said, “We have a very serious problem.”