Shadow's Fall (21 page)

Most of the time she didn’t think about it, but it was still strange to her and probably would be for a while, according to the others. But the thought of still being on the planet to see what happened to the world in a century—or, like Deven, most of a millennium—was still just a bit on the unbelievable side.

Okay, girl, not now. Get down to business.
Miranda pushed the thoughts away and brought her attention back to the room, specifically to the cell phone.

Telekinesis wasn’t just about pushing things over. That was certainly useful, but the juicy part came from learning to wrap her will around an object and, while holding on to it, shift it from one place to another. The kind of mental pull she exerted was similar to the one that moved her body from place to place while Misting, but Misting was more a matter of power than control, which was why Signets who weren’t telekinetic could still do it. The hardest part of Misting was bringing her body back together when she
arrived at her destination. Moving other things meant she had to both hold on to them and move them at the same time, which required two coordinated sets of mental “muscles.”

It didn’t take much effort to pick up the phone. She did that first, straight up into the air, then back down, then up again, then in a circle; up and down was easiest, but she was already used to tossing around things of its size. It was just a warm-up.

Now came the fun part. She tightened her focus to the phone’s screen. If there had been actual buttons it would be child’s play, but touch screens didn’t respond to her mental “fingers.” She was convinced that if she could figure out the right way to touch it, the right amount of pressure, she could dial it … but she had to be careful how much force she used, or she’d crack the screen. Again.

A couple of attempts and she already had a headache. She shouldn’t be surprised—David wasn’t terribly good with touch screens yet, and he’d been working on it as long as they had existed. She set the phone down with a sigh.

Next, the sword: She had to expand her energy-lasso out to either side, but the blade itself wasn’t that heavy, so she could lift it, no sweat. The challenge came from drawing Shadowflame from its sheath … lowering the sheath back to the floor … holding the sword up … and spinning it in slow circles like the needle of a compass.

Miranda held on to it and counted, quietly aloud, to thirty before stopping the spin and putting the sword down. By then she was sweating just a bit. But she was pleased with herself. She’d kept it spinning five seconds longer than last time.

Last trick: the guitar.

It was big, yes, but still lightweight compared to, say, a chair. Once she had it hovering a few feet off the ground, she turned it to face away from her and closed her eyes.

She split her focus into three “hands”: the bulk of her energy holding the instrument aloft, then a piece of it wrapping around the neck and another focusing on the
strings as if she were standing behind the guitar holding it to her chest.

Miranda squeezed her mind around two of the strings and pressed them back against the fretboard. Then, she concentrated on her other “hand” and tried to strum.

“Shit!”

The guitar nearly hit the floor when it slipped out of her grasp, but she caught it and lifted it back up again.

“Sorry, baby,” she told the instrument sheepishly. “I know you’ve been knocked around a lot lately.”

Despite the pain between her eyes, she tried it again, and again, but each time she ended up losing hold of either the strings or the guitar itself. It was just too much for her to do at once. If she set it down, she could play a chord or two, but not while still keeping it afloat. Not yet.

She finally put the guitar down and sat back, her head throbbing. “Star-one,” she said.

“Yes, beloved?”

“Are you busy?”

“I just finished meeting with the patrol leaders, and I’m about to go examine the interrogation room.”
She could hear him smiling.
“You’re in the training room?”

“Yeah.”

A matter of seconds later the door beeped, and David poked his head in. “Clear?”

She nodded. “Thank you for coming. I think I overdid it a little.”

He chuckled. “You? Never.”

She stuck her tongue out at him, and he grinned and laid his hand on her forehead. She felt an inrushing of energy, and the headache vanished between one breath and the next.

David looked at the objects on the ground. “Did you try using your hands?”

Miranda glared at him.

“No, no—” He was laughing again. “I don’t mean to pick them up, I mean, using gestures to help you focus, the way I do sometimes to lift heavier things.”

“You want me to play air guitar?”

He sighed. “Like this.”

He turned to the other armchair, which she’d pushed up against the wall, and held out his hand, then made an “up” sort of motion. The chair shuddered slightly, then rose a few inches off the floor.

“Oh, the Magneto thing! I had completely forgotten about that.”

“Sometimes if you visualize your power as an extension of your arm, it can help. Or it does me—your mileage may vary.”

“Well, I’ll try it next time. I think I’m done for the night.”

He leaned down, put one hand on each arm of the chair, and caught her mouth with his; she kissed him back enthusiastically, and they smiled at each other.

“What do you have next tonight?” he asked, offering a hand up from the chair, which she took.

Miranda fetched her guitar case, buckled Shadowflame back on, and put her phone in her pocket. “I have a video blog post to record … you know, from the hospital?”

“Ah. Well, if you need any help, just call.”

She kissed his cheek. “My own personal tech support hotline. Emphasis on
hot
.”

He groaned. “I want you to love me for my
mind
,” he said, mock-offended.

“Oh, honey, I do.” She slapped him on the butt. “Now let me watch you walk away slowly.”

David rolled his eyes and took her arm, leading her out of the training room. They kissed one more time before parting, she to the music room to deposit her guitar, he to get bloody and gross with Faith.

Miranda met Mo on the other side of the Haven, in the Elite wing, where his clinic was; he rarely used the room that they were headed for, which was equipped with a hospital bed and the usual complement of medical machinery for life support, but it had saved more than one life since Miranda had been there, and it was much easier than having to go into Austin to the Hausmann.

“Here we are, my Lady,” Mo said, flipping on the lights. “You can change behind that curtain if you like.”

She took the hospital gown he held out to her. “Yay.”

Once she had shucked her clothes and had the gown on, Mo set about wrapping bandages around her chest and arm. It occurred to her that she had known Mo for several years but knew next to nothing about him; almost every time they met it was in a dire emergency with no time to chat. “How long have you been a vampire, Mo?” she asked.

“Forty-seven years,” he replied with a smile. “I came to America with my wife in the 1990s.”

“Were you a doctor when you were human?”

“Oh, yes. Medicine has always been my calling. But Firuzeh and I both tired of identifying corpses blown to pieces. We wanted to spend our eternity someplace a little safer.”

Miranda laughed. “So you came to work for a Signet?”

“It was harder to find a job than I hoped it would be. Vampires are even worse than humans with their prejudices sometimes, because we have them so much longer.”

“Do people here at the Haven mistreat you? You’d say something, right?”

He shrugged. “I have been here long enough that it is not much of an issue.”

“Does Firuzeh work here, too? I don’t think I’ve met her.”

“She lives here with me, but her work is in the city, at the university. She has a medical background, too, but now she teaches history. Night courses, of course. And she’s writing a book.” He patted her arm. “Now, lie back, and let us see how you look.”

Miranda climbed into the bed stiffly and tried to find a comfortable position. “I’m glad I don’t really have to deal with this. It’s so awkward.”

“If you did, you would have very good drugs,” Mo replied, getting the camera and computer and setting them up on the bedside rolling table. David had modified a digital video camera to work with the program he’d created for
reflections; a cell phone camera would have worked okay for a full-body distance shot, but she wanted a close-up, and for that she needed a clearer picture.

Mo moved around, switching on monitors and attaching various things to her while she used her free arm to get the camera turned on and did a test shot.

The little viewscreen on the camera showed up blurry, but David had said that would happen; the computer would translate the video through its various algorithms and produce a cleaned-up image it would record on the hard drive.

She’d done a few audio blogs for her website in the past, but up until now video had been problematic; there were cell phone videos of her all over the Internet, but they were shot at concerts from far enough away that for the most part the poor quality of the recordings had gone unremarked upon. Now that David had made headway into improving the picture, she figured it would work well enough. It needed to be believable, but no one would expect Academy Award–winning documentary footage from her hospital bed.

There were apparently fans staking out every hospital in Austin trying to figure out where she was being treated, and there was a lot of anxiety online and in the city over whether she was really all right; she wanted to get this out there before people started in with the conspiracy theories. Patrol units had sent in images of the shrine that had been erected at the Bat Cave, and looking at it left tears in Miranda’s eyes.

She had to say something. The people who had supported her deserved to hear from her.

“All done,” Mo said. “I shall wait out of the way until you need me to take everything off again.”

“Thanks.” She adjusted the angle of the camera in her hand, resting her arm against the bed rail, until she could at least see her whole head in the viewer. Under the lamp Mo had turned on she did, in fact, look half-dead; vampires were creatures that needed mood lighting. Fluorescent light didn’t hurt them like the sun would, but the light was
harsh enough to eyes used to darker rooms that she was likely to have another headache by the time she was done.

Miranda took a last second to work out in her head what she wanted to say, then hit record.

The cell where 8.3 Claret, otherwise known as Monroe, had been held—and had met his unfortunate and messy end—was built out of steel-reinforced cinder block and could stand up to quite a bit of punishment, but it wasn’t designed so much for explosions. Something like, say, the bomb used by Marja Ovaska when she kidnapped Miranda and Deven would have blown the building to smithereens.

Whatever had been used to kill Monroe had been a relatively small charge, just enough to blast a body all over the walls but not enough to damage the structure. Even as hard to kill as vampires were, they were still flesh and blood—a lot of blood, from the look of it. Prime David had surmised that whatever the device was, it had been somehow placed on Monroe’s body—or worse, inside—and then detonated.

Faith watched her commander in chief make his way slowly around the small room, examining the walls through a lens attached to some sort of scanning device. He was muttering to himself, which was a good sign; if he were completely stymied, he would be making an irritable growling noise every few minutes.

She was not pleased to be spending her evening in a tiny room that reeked of charred flesh and splattered gore even after the housekeeping staff had done a cursory cleaning in order to properly see to the remains. David had on gloves and a disposable lab coat that made him look like a mad surgeon to keep any remaining remains off his clothes, and Faith was keeping her distance, though one good thing about wearing a black uniform was that stains weren’t much of an issue. She did, however, wish she had her coat; interrogation rooms were kept very cold, which was why David had been able to leave this for tonight.

The staff hadn’t sanitized the place yet on David’s orders, and the walls were blood-dyed as dark as the floor … but this time not from interrogation.

Plenty of people had died in this cell, but only two she could think of had done so against the Prime’s orders. The first, the traitorous Elite who went by Helen, had self-terminated after her Blackthorn co-conspirator Samuel had slipped her a stake. David had made changes in Elite protocol to make sure that didn’t happen again; now, only he and Faith had the code to enter the interrogation rooms, and they could transmit it remotely in an emergency, but otherwise nobody could get in or out of the cells … well, except for someone powerful enough to Mist.

Prime Deven, for example … and Prime Hart.

“Is Hart strong enough to Mist?” Faith asked.

David, startled out of his wall-scrutiny, turned to her. “More than likely. Most of us are. But those who aren’t would never admit it.”

“So he could have Misted in here and planted the bomb himself.”

“Easily. That’s the only theory I have at the moment as to how this happened—the lock was still engaged up until the door blew out. No one opened the door.”

“But that doesn’t prove it was Hart, just that it was a Signet bearer.”

“Or one of a handful of non-Signet vampires powerful enough to Mist, yes.”

“You mean, like your sire?”

He frowned. “Oh, hell. That hadn’t even occurred to me. I honestly don’t know if she’s that strong—but it’s possible.”

David went back to his examination for a moment, then made a triumphant noise. “Aha. Tweezers, please, Faith.”

She picked them up from the open zipper case of probes, lenses, and other … whatever the hell they were … and handed them to him. He crouched down and gingerly removed something that was embedded in the mortar between two blocks.

“Bag,” he said.