“No. I’ve got a check running. It’ll be done in a few minutes.”
He watched the progress bar on the screen inch its way from left to right. Thankfully he’d upgraded the server’s processors two weeks ago, otherwise there was no way he’d have the computing power for what he was doing. As it was, he’d had to do a lot of the work by hand instead of letting the network run it for him.
The sensors were programmed to take readings of body temperature, body mass, and speed of movement, then weed out anything above or below average human parameters; what fell into a certain range was most likely a vampire. So far he’d had a 98 percent accuracy rate with a couple of glitches involving large dogs and an immortal midget. He knew that Ariana Blackthorn fit perfectly in the range, so all he needed to do was isolate her specific set of readings from every other vampire in Austin.
He’d gone back over the grid from the night of the raid, when her hench-vamps had all been taken outside and the only vampires in the house had been him, her, and the Elite. Everyone who was in the building that night had a com except Ariana, so he could eliminate anyone whose signal corresponded to one of the Elite. The remaining readings he was currently running against those of every vampire that had entered or left the city limits Friday night.
He’d found four likely candidates and was now letting the computer do the rest. Once he had a profile for her he could track her down within the grid.
It wasn’t a perfect plan—far from it, with so many variables—but it was the best thing he’d come up with since returning to his duties on Tuesday. They could continue to catch the attackers, slapping bandages over the city’s wounds until it bled to death by inches, or they could go to the source.
He wanted Ariana Blackthorn’s blood to spill over his hands. He wanted to see her head fall to the ground and her skull crack on the concrete. He wanted to see her body twitch and spasm into stillness.
Then, and only then, would he rest.
He heard a noise like a wind chime, and Faith slid off the table and took out her phone. “I’ll be damned,” she said. “An e-mail from Sophie.”
He looked up at her again. “Sophie . . . not Sophia Castellano?”
“You know her?”
“You mentioned her once before—something about her being a former agent of the Red Shadow.”
Faith frowned down at the screen of her phone. “The hell . . . Sophie says that the Blackthorn gang is planning to attack the Haven.”
David laughed. “And they’re going to find it, how?”
“I don’t know. She doesn’t say. She just says they’re coming . . . tonight.”
“What makes her think so?”
“Again, she doesn’t . . .” Faith trailed off, and when she looked up, her eyes were wide. “She says they have a spy in the Elite.”
“Even if that’s true, there’s no way they can get in.”
“Not even if they had someone inside?”
David’s laughter faded. “Impossible.”
“I’m e-mailing her back—damn it, I should have gotten her phone number, we could make short work of this.”
David moved to his laptop and pulled up the com system. “There’s no way they could have someone inside,” he muttered. “I’d know. I’ve gone over everything a hundred times since Elite Seventy turned on us. There’s been no unusual signal activity going in or out of the Haven . . . they’d have to communicate somehow. What the fuck are they using, then, Morse code? Smoke signals?”
He ran a secondary search for transmission anomalies, but he knew there wouldn’t be anything—everything from cell phones to radios showed up on his monitors, and he watched them all.
Something beeped.
“What is that?” he asked. “There’s something . . . or, there was something . . . Saturday night, there was a single burst transmission from the room where we had Ariana. It was less than a second long . . . and it came twice more this week.”
“What kind of transmission?”
“I don’t know. With all the com chatter that night it got lost. It’s not from a com, it’s . . . Christ.”
“It’s Christ?”
“No, no . . . Who’s the guard in the visitor’s wing right now? Send him to that suite immediately.”
“What’s he looking for?”
“Anything that looks like a GPS device.”
Faith gaped at him. “Bitch stuck a GPS in the Haven?”
“That’s what it looks like. It transmitted three times—Saturday, Tuesday, and yesterday—and then shut down. It was such a short-lived signal it was logged in the system but didn’t trip security. She planted it the night she escaped and I wasn’t watching the transmission logs.” He all but slammed the screen of his laptop shut. “They’ve got us mapped, Faith. Sophie’s right. They’re coming.”
Faith and the Prime stared at each other.
He said, very, very calmly, “Plan Alpha Delta Nine.”
“Yes, Sire.” She lifted her wrist and hit broadcast mode. “All Haven Elite and personnel, incursion code Alpha Delta Nine. Battle stations. Double coverage on every door. Windows closing down in twenty seconds.”
David leaned over and hit the override switch that would close the metal shutters, then flipped several more security switches, turning on firewalls to protect the network and scramble any outgoing frequencies.
“I don’t suppose you’ve got sensors covering the Haven, too,” Faith said hopefully.
David smiled wickedly. “As a matter of fact, I do. They were the first test system before the grid went live. I didn’t think we’d ever need it, but I left them in place anyway.”
A diagram of the property came up, and within seconds each vampire within its borders was highlighted as a red dot; most of them were in motion, the Elite headed to their stations for an invasion, the servants migrating to the secure rooms belowground.
Faith leaned over his shoulder. “Holy fucking mother of shit.”
There were red dots moving steadily toward the Haven in groups of ten or twelve, approaching through the forest from three sides. David added them up quickly in his head.
“Eighty-three,” he said. “How many Elite do we have?”
“Thirty-two in house,” she replied. “The rest are out on patrol. I can send out the recall signal—”
“No,” he told her, rising. “They need to stay put and defend the city. We can handle a siege here. Secure all the entrances as well as the underground tunnels. There’s no way they can get in—all we have to do is keep them out until sunup. I’m going to get the rest of my weapons. You check the entrances.”
“On it!”
David quickly connected his phone to the computer system so he could monitor the sensors from anywhere in the Haven and left the server room, locking it down; the door and walls were steel-reinforced, and the only way anyone could break in was with a battering ram.
He emerged from the stairway and strode down the hall to his suite, and Paul, the second door guard, said, “Sire, is it the Blackthorn?”
“It looks that way—where’s Samuel?”
“He said Faith called him to the front doors and he took off running.”
David took his sword down from the wall, then grabbed two long daggers with smooth, tapered wooden blades and strapped them to his waist.
As he was about to leave the suite, he saw something out of the corner of his eye that made his blood run cold.
The cabinet where he kept Miranda’s book and the Queen’s Signet had been pried open, the door cracked and splintered and hanging partway off its hinges.
He jerked it the rest of the way open and saw that someone had torn through the contents of the cabinet, tossing things aside until they found what they wanted.
The metal box had been jimmied open, the wooden one inside left empty.
Someone had stolen the Signet.