Shadow's Fall (12 page)

Five

Don’t move. Don’t move …

Pain engulfed her, but she fought to keep her mind moving:
Fall down. Don’t move.

The cacophony came to her distantly. Someone yelled to call 911; footsteps rushed all around her; thousands of people roared in fear and outrage.

Part of her was tempted to stay on her feet and reassure the humans.
It’s just a flesh wound!
But she knew that if she were mortal, these wounds would probably kill her. She had to fall. She could only hope that her guitar wasn’t damaged by the impact with the stage.

The fear around her was overwhelming. She bolstered her shields as best she could around the burning pain in her chest, giving her enough space in her mind to think semilucidly.

Bullets. Not wood. Can’t heal them until they’re out, can’t dig them out with everyone watching.
She could feel herself weakening from the blood loss, though it wouldn’t kill her. The worst that would happen was she would lose consciousness while her body forced the bullets up to the surface and out of her body. She could feel them lodged in her muscles, each less than two inches from her heart.

Almost equally spaced. Perfectly placed shots. Not in the heart.

Sniper.

Faces moved in and out of her vision. The first she recognized was Jonathan’s; he’d been close by so he’d reached her first. “Darts?” he asked.

She managed to shake her head. She was having trouble maintaining her shields; she had no energy left for conversation. “Bullets,” she croaked.

Jonathan looked completely baffled. “Who the hell would shoot you with bullets?”

The Elite clustered around her, blocking the view from the stage as well as keeping the human security officers away. “We’ve got this,” she heard one of the Elite bark at the police. “Paramedics are on the way.”

“Miranda! What happened? Talk to me, beloved …”

David’s voice from her com was a thousand miles away, but she heard Jonathan responding to it: “She’s all right, David. Someone shot her. Stand by.”

Something made the world go partly dark. Most of the stage lights had been doused. The sound of metal wheels on the backstage ramp was like nails on a chalkboard.

The Elite parted to let the stretcher through, and Miranda half screamed in pain as they hoisted her up onto it. “Get these fucking things out of me!”

To her surprise, the uniformed paramedic who peered down at her was a familiar, heavily bearded face with sympathetic brown eyes. “Let us get you into the ambulance first,” Mo said. “Best not to have onlookers.”

“What are you … doing … here?” she panted. There was so much noise … it was getting harder to concentrate … one of the EMTs fitted an oxygen mask over her face, and though it might have been for appearance’s sake, she was grateful for the blast of air that shoved its way into her lungs.

“Our Lord Prime was concerned that something might happen tonight,” the Elite medic replied, staying at her side as the “EMTs” rushed her off the stage and around to a waiting emergency vehicle. “He assigned me and several of the Hausmann staff to be nearby just in case.”

There was another series of violent jolts as they loaded
her into the ambulance and slammed the doors. The rest of the staff peeled away, leaving only Mo and Jonathan with her.

Miranda had never been shot before. She had been staked more than once. Lead bullets weren’t as painful or as deadly, but the wounds were still agonizing. Now that she was safe from prying eyes, she dredged up as much energy as she could and fed it into the wounds. Her muscles ejected the bullets much too slowly for her liking—she could feel them moving toward the surface, red-hot, until with one last push she forced them out. She screamed in pain and then heard the plink-plink of the slugs falling off to the side and onto the ambulance floor.

Mo had taken her arm and already had a needle in her vein; he hooked up a bag of blood and switched on the pump. “Five minutes and you’ll be good as new,” he assured her. “It’s a nice fresh O neg.”

He was, as always, very calm, even cheerful. From most people it would be aggravating in this situation, but from Mo it was incredibly comforting. Just as he had taken David’s poisoning three years ago in stride, he didn’t seem at all alarmed at the fact that someone had shot his Queen in full view of the entire Austin Live Music Festival.

“Someone shot me,” Miranda said.

Mo lifted the oxygen mask. “Come again, my Lady?”

“Someone shot me!”

“The Elite are tearing through the place,” Jonathan told her. He had one hand on her arm, squeezing almost too hard, but she was grateful for his presence. “They’ve already got a basic trajectory analysis based on how you recoiled when you were hit, so they know the shots came from somewhere up the hill and off to stage right. They’re combing the grounds for shell casings.”

“Someone in the audience?” she asked. The blood flowing into her arm was bathing the still-burning wounds in warmth, renewing the flesh and returning it to health. She tried to keep her breathing steady and let her vampire power and the blood do their work.

“Only if they somehow got past the police with a gun,” Jonathan replied.

“This is Texas,” Miranda reminded him. “It could have been anyone.”

Mo was busy gathering up the slugs and slipping them into plastic bags. “We will know more once we have these analyzed,” he said. “They appear to be from a handgun, not from a sniper rifle, but I admit my experience with human bullets was long ago and far away.”

“Report!”

Both Miranda and Mo’s coms blared out with David’s voice this time, and she could hear the note of restrained terror in the words. She lifted her arm weakly and said into the com, “I’m okay, baby. I’m in the ambulance with Mo and Jonathan. The bullets are out and I’m healing.”

“I’ve called an emergency recess. I’ll be there in thirty minutes,”
he said.

“No—I’m fine, I promise. Stay there and do what you have to do. We’ve got Elite searching for the shooter and I’m out of danger. I’ll be home soon.” She dropped her arm with a grunt and shut her eyes for a moment.

“I’m headed to the server room,”
David said.
“I’ll know in five minutes whether the shooter was a vampire.”

Someone knocked on the ambulance door, and Miranda nodded; Mo opened it, revealing a human in a suit with an APD shield hanging from his neck.

“Detective Maguire,” Miranda said. “Nice to see you again. Did Stella like the autograph?”

“She’s here tonight,” Maguire replied. “I’d bring her to meet you, but I think now’s probably a bad time. What can you tell me?”

“Got shot,” Miranda told him. God, she was so tired. Such a large audience had taken more out of her than she thought; even before the shot, before their terror, they had been draining her. “It really hurt.”

The detective actually smiled, though he was clearly focused on the matter at hand. “I’ve got uniforms all over the place and more on the way,” he said. “The audience
nearly rioted, but between APD and ALMF security we got things calmed down. There were at least a dozen people with cell phones recording the concert. We’re rounding them up now to go over their footage—someone might have caught the shooter on camera.”

Miranda’s com went off, and David returned to the conversation.
“All right … I’m going back through the sensor data, and there were about thirty vampires in the audience, mostly in pairs and a few small groups. All of them arrived at least an hour ago, except … there’s one signal that shows up midway through your set, working his or her way up toward stage right. The shot goes off, you fall …”

“I’m okay,” Miranda said again. “I really am.”

David took a deep breath and went on, voice a little roughened with tension.
“Got him! Tracking northwest—he’s in a cluster of humans who are walking toward the parking lot. He’s blending in, not in a hurry. Detective, have uniforms in place for crowd control at the corner of Zilker Park Drive and the entrance to the botanical gardens. Try to clear the humans from the area. I’m sending all available Elite. Stand by.”

Maguire ducked out of the ambulance, and Miranda heard him yelling into his walkie-talkie.

Miranda found she was shaking—a delayed reaction, perhaps, but suddenly she was freezing and had the urge to curl up on herself and cry.

“Hey,” Jonathan said gently, taking her hand. “You’re all right. We’ll catch the bastard and figure this out.”

“My big night,” Miranda said around the knot in her stomach. “Guess it’s one they’ll remember.”

“Are you kidding?” He gave her a slightly uncertain grin. “You’ll be a legend.”

“If I live,” Miranda said. “If I were human … wait …”

“What is it?”

No one in the Shadow World would shoot a Queen with bullets. They’d use a crossbow or stake launcher. And what human would want to kill her, assuming she was human? A deranged fan? The shots had been awfully
well-placed … but if a human was going to shoot her in the middle of a concert, why not aim directly for her heart or head? A vampire wouldn’t bother, but a vampire would know that bullets wouldn’t kill her … but it would
look
like she was mortally wounded.

“Whoever did this knew what I am,” she said. “A human couldn’t survive a shot like that.”

Mo looked thoughtful. “If one had adequate and immediate medical attention, one could survive. These particular shots missed your organs entirely. It would be a grave wound regardless due to the blood loss.”

Jonathan, with a stricken nod, said, “They wanted to end your career.”

“Suspect apprehended,”
came a voice over the network. It was one of the Elite who had been assigned to the concert.
“There was a fight but no casualties.”

“Do you have an ID?” Miranda asked.

A pause, then:
“Partial, my Lady. The suspect is identified as Monroe … he’s not talking.”

“He will,”
David replied shortly.
“Have him brought to Interrogation A. Did you recover the gun?”

“Yes, Sire.”

“Get it to APD—have them run prints and ballistics and check for registration. It’s probably illegal, but we might catch a break.”

“Shouldn’t we send it to Novotny?” Miranda asked.

“Hunter Development doesn’t have much on firearms,”
the Prime said.
“The human authorities will be able to get us faster information.”

“We’ve got quite a backlog in Ballistics,” Maguire spoke up. “It could take days.”

“Don’t worry, Detective. I cheat.”

Miranda sagged back on the stretcher, finally giving up on consciousness. “I want to go home,” she sighed as exhaustion washed up over her and she closed her eyes. “Can we go home now?”

Mo’s voice was kind. “Of course, my Lady. I will let the driver know we are ready—we are set to rendezvous in
town so the press will not see you leave Austin in an ambulance and try to follow. A car is waiting for us there.”

“Thank you, Mo.”

The last thing she heard before she passed out was Jonathan speaking into his phone, the tone of his voice one Miranda had never heard before. “Deven … call me back. We need to talk.
Now.
”

As soon as Cora heard that something had happened to Miranda, she excused herself from the tediousness of the Queens’ gathering and headed straight for the chamber where the Council had convened. They were in recess, the guard had said, and no one would notice if she was there.

Cora was both disappointed and relieved that she heard virtually nothing important during the party; she stuck to the outer edges of the group, making a little small talk here and there, but as she had predicted, few of the Queens were at all interested in her, and those who were didn’t seem all that happy to be there either. Queen Larimer, in fact, excused herself after half an hour of obligatory circulating; she did give Cora a fairly warm smile as she left, which was encouraging. But Cora was far too frightened of Mameha to approach her, and India’s Queen was surrounded by admirers—understandable, as she was stunningly beautiful and everyone seemed to want to know her.

Still, since she didn’t know what Deven was looking for, Cora made her way around the room, sipping champagne and exchanging polite greetings, most of the time following the Prime’s advice to pretend she didn’t speak much English.

She was happy to leave … although she would have preferred a less dire reason.

Even though it was certain Hart would be in that room, she didn’t care; she had to know what was going on, and that Miranda was all right. The rumor had spread among the Queens like wildfire even though none of them would admit who had first heard the news, and no one seemed to
know anything concrete. Worse, they didn’t seem all that interested in Miranda’s fate except as a source of idle gossip.

Vràna at her side, Cora entered the Council chamber to a scene of quiet anxiety. A few Primes were seated at the giant table, but most were milling around talking among themselves. She did not see Prime David, but her senses zeroed in on Jacob immediately, and she was with him in seconds.

“She’s all right,” Jacob said without asking why she was there. “Someone shot her while she was performing. They caught him—it was a vampire.”

“Shot her? With what?”

Jacob looked a bit bewildered. “With a gun. Regular old human-killing bullets.”

“Why would anyone do such a thing?”

He took her hand and squeezed it. “I suspect they were trying to make it impossible for her to ever perform again … to kill her without killing her.”

Cora felt anger stirring in her chest. “It must have been Hart, my Lord. No one else could hate her so much.”

“We don’t have any proof yet,” Jacob reminded her. “David can’t accuse him without some sort of evidence.”

Even as Jacob spoke, however, Cora saw one of the doors into the room fly open, and David Solomon walked in, cold fury written in every line of his body. Without speaking or acknowledging anyone in the room, he strode up to where Prime Hart was standing with several other Signets … and punched Hart in the face.