Granted, the two weren’t mutually exclusive.
Curious, David reached out his senses to get a read on the man’s energy and emotions. There he met with a surprise.
Shielded. Interesting. Was he gifted in some way, or was it a precaution against a vampire or Witch using their gifts against him?
Finally, David asked, “Do I call you Shepherd, or do you prefer another honorific?”
At last the man spoke. “Shepherd will suffice.”
David nodded. “I am sure you know who I am, Shepherd.”
“I do. You’re one of the eight archdemons.”
The Prime laughed. “Archdemons? Is that really what you call us? That’s adorable,” he told the Shepherd sardonically. Then David sobered, tapping his fingers together. “Here’s what I need from you, Shepherd. I need to know who’s in charge of your organization. What master puppeteer pulls your strings? You must answer to a central authority.”
The Shepherd raised an eyebrow. “Why? You don’t.”
“Not a temporal authority, no. Long ago we answered to a higher power.”
“As do we. Each of us was called to duty by Almighty God; it just happens that he speaks through a man, a holy vessel who delivers the commandments of our Lord so that we, his chosen people, may carry them out and purge the earth of the demonic forces that have caused its ruin.”
David had to restrain himself from snorting aloud. “You think vampires are the reason the world is like this? You’ve been reading the wrong history books, my friend. My people don’t start wars. There are no vampire senators. We don’t own corporations that destroy the environment. Making the earth uninhabitable would be rather counterproductive for immortals, don’t you think?”
“There are more varieties of demonic plague upon this earth than just you,” the Shepherd replied. “They will be dealt with as well.”
“Witches,” David surmised, holding up a finger. “What else?”
“You’re a clever man,” the Shepherd told him. “I think you’ll figure it out on your own.”
He chose to ignore the comment. “So does this leader of yours have a name?”
“We call him the Prophet.”
“And he’s just a man like you?”
A slight smile. “He is just a man like any of us, another of God’s children . . . and yet much more.”
“How much of this more-than-a-man’s plan are you made aware of? Does he trust his Shepherds with the endgame?”
“We know what we need to know, when we need to know it.”
“In other words, no.” David considered for a moment. “So . . . your leader receives the word of God and relates it to you, or relates the parts he wants you to know. In order to carry out this word, you conscript soldiers and turn them into robots.”
The Shepherd shook his head. “Our soldiers join us of their own free will and offer themselves up to the cause. In that way they are just like yours; but ours are men, not demons. They must be given power by God to defeat you.”
“Well, they’re doing a bang-up job.” David crossed his arms. “Yes, you’ve killed Primes—in ambush. You needed two dozen warriors at each attack to get the job done, with crossbows, and still only half of them came back alive. In straight combat, your people have fallen by the dozen every single time. Now, don’t get me wrong, they’re good. Very good. I’ve killed a lot of them, and I’d say they’re at the same level as some of my midtier Elite. But if you really want to take us all out, you’re going to have to do better. In the meantime just look at how many lives you’re wasting.”
“They are all blessed men. They will be greatly rewarded in heaven for their sacrifice.”
David recognized that kind of talk, as well as the faint gleam in the man’s eyes. It wasn’t the kind of thing said by a man who had a lot to lose; it was what you would hear before someone hijacked a plane and killed hundreds of people to earn a place in heaven.
A thought occurred: “Is there a way to reverse the . . . gift . . . you’ve given your soldiers? Can you turn them back into normal people once all of this is over?”
“No.”
“That’s a shame.”
The Shepherd smiled. It was a sincere smile, but there was something nasty underneath it. Was it really fanaticism he was seeing, or was it sociopathy? “Victory has its costs . . . as you will no doubt learn. Our God is vengeful, as are we.”
The Prime nodded once more. “Here’s another question: What is all this bother over our bloodlines?”
For the first time, the Shepherd looked genuinely taken aback. “Have you not found your Codex?”
“Wait . . . you have one, too?”
The Shepherd leaned forward as much as he could in the zip ties that had him bound to the chair. “We are opposite sides of a coin, our people and yours. The moon and the sun, returning over and over to fight for the heavens. You will find far more similarities than differences as all of this unfolds.”
David started to contradict him but thought better of it and temporarily shifted his line of inquiry. “Where did you find your Codex?”
“We had contracted one of your number to perform certain tasks for which, at the time, our people were ill equipped. She infiltrated the Haven in New York to fetch the Codex for us so that we could begin preparations. After that, her mission was to bring us a live Signet, but her thirst for vengeance killed her.”
Marja Ovaska.
“No,” David corrected. “My Queen killed her. But why didn’t you have Ovaska bring you the other artifact as well? You needed it to create your army as much as you needed a copy of the ritual.”
“Hart didn’t have it back then. He acquired it about eight months before his death. With a few careful nudges, Jeremy Hayes delivered both artifact and Signet to us.”
“You still haven’t told me what our bloodlines have to do with this.”
“It is not for me to know,” was the reply. “I was ordered to wipe out the women of that bloodline. The rest of your family lines died out long ago; we’ve been looking over the entire globe and found nothing.”
David stared at him hard. “Did your organization have anything to do with the death of Marilyn Grey?”
The human blinked, clearly perplexed. “No. We were only in our earliest formative stages then. It wasn’t until we found our own Codex that we knew what had to be done.”
That, at least, would be a comfort to Miranda. Even though the reports of her mother’s death were detailed and precise, and there was nothing untoward about it, she was afraid that she was responsible for the death of her entire family. It was true that she was the only one left. They had done a quick search for cousins, aunts, anything . . . but there were none. Even the two cousins her own age Miranda remembered playing with had both died. He could understand why she thought Morningstar might have engineered the whole thing.
He had quite firmly disagreed, however. There were medical records, death certificates, and newspaper obituaries for all of the deaths, and they were diverse enough in cause and location that if it was a cover-up, it was massive. In reality human beings really weren’t that good at large-scale conspiracy; someone always talked. David knew, based on the video they had left, that Morningstar wouldn’t cover anything up. They wanted Miranda to know what they had done.
This man had ordered them to kill Marianne and Jenny and record the whole thing. Even military officers in the middle of a war would do anything possible to avoid taking innocent lives . . . especially those of children. Yet the word had come from on high, and the Shepherd had followed it without question.
Perhaps it was fanaticism
and
sociopathy.
What David really wanted to know was where the Prophet had come from and where he was holed up, but he knew, both by observing the Shepherd’s reactions and by intuition, that the Shepherd didn’t know any more than he had said already.
The Shepherds weren’t going to be of much use; they could try torturing one later, but David didn’t think it would do any real good. Information in Morningstar was apparently given out in miserly doses; it was no wonder the soldier Deven had interrogated hadn’t had much to say.
No . . . they were going to have to go up the food chain.
That meant this interview was over.
David stood up and returned the chair to its original spot. “Thank you for being so forthcoming, Shepherd. I think I’ve kept you tied up long enough.”
The Shepherd’s eyes fell on David’s sword. “Are you planning to cut my head off?”
David smiled, and this time, he finally got a response: Staring up at him the Shepherd paled a shade, and the vein in his neck began throbbing visibly.
“Oh, no,” David told him, watching the fear build. It was one thing to know your adversary was a vampire, and quite another to see his eyes turn black. “That would be a terrible waste . . . after all, it’s the new moon.”
• • •
Miranda fell back against the alley wall with a moan, letting the man slide slowly to the ground. The blood raced through her body, and though the effect wasn’t as extreme as the first time, she still felt renewed strength filling her every cell.
Last time they had waited far too long. This time, it was the night of the new moon, and neither had been feeling anything like they had before—Miranda noticed she was a little off, her responses slower, but it was nothing like last time. She could still think straight, choose a target with more deliberation.
She stared down at the body with contempt. This one was a loathsome excuse for a man. She had caught him leaving a church, and his thoughts and emotions were so disgusting she might have killed him regardless. His mind was full of a nine-year-old girl . . . and not with the love of a parent for his child.
The Queen didn’t normally feed on men—she still had a visceral reaction of fear and revulsion when a strange man got too close to her, and given how intimate feeding could be, she had long ago decided to stick with her own sex. But this time . . . perhaps it was because she still had the image of Jenny tied up and crying burned into her mind, but she had dragged the man into the alley and not bothered trying to soothe him as she tore open his throat.
Miranda looked around for a suitable place to leave the body. There was no Dumpster here, unfortunately, but the church had a little bit of land attached to it, and when she’d cased the place she’d noticed a storm drain. That would do for now. She held her hands over the body and concentrated, reaching into herself and
pushing
.
It vanished.
The Queen sighed, straightening her coat. She hadn’t wanted to leave the Haven tonight. She had wanted to stay near a computer screen and watch the raid unfold on the dedicated network David had built for the mission. He’d spent two weeks finalizing the details for this, making sure everyone he needed was in the right place at the right time, paying off one of the employees of the laundry company to get them into the warehouse and the truck, making sure everyone on the strike team had memorized the layout of the compound and knew where the highest concentrations of humans would be at that precise hour. He wasn’t leaving anything to chance, he said.
She was still worried. She hadn’t wanted him to go—why couldn’t he run the raid from the Haven and have the team bring the Shepherd there? This was a battle he didn’t have to fight himself, yet he wanted to send a very clear message to the rest of Morningstar. She could have joined him, but the Queen had had quite enough of that sort of thing for a while. If she raised her sword it was going to be here in Austin.
It was probably just as well she hadn’t been home for the fighting. Anxiety was already making her stomach hurt. The distraction of hunting had kept her from getting too crazy. She hadn’t sensed anything amiss along the bond; in fact, she’d felt grim satisfaction from the Prime . . . and then the wave of energy she already recognized. A battlefield was a good place to be when you had to drink someone to death.
Her phone rang. “Hey, Dev.”
“Feeling better?”
“I guess.” She started walking back toward the street where she was supposed to meet Harlan. “Good tip about the church.”
She had finally told Deven about the new moon, and in typical Deven fashion, he hadn’t expressed the slightest regret over the deaths; instead he had immediately suggested that since the new moon fell on a Saturday that month she should stake out a Catholic church to catch the postconfessional crowd the night before Mass.
“Ninety-five percent of the people there will be genuinely penitent over fairly pedestrian sins, but the rest want an audience,” he had said. “Murderers especially—if they get away with it, they have to brag, and they think a priest who can’t see their faces is ideal.”
“But won’t they have looked into the law and know they could still be arrested? Texas doesn’t have confessional privilege.”
“TV and movies make it seem like every criminal is a mastermind, but the truth is, most of them are depressingly stupid.”
All she had to do was wait behind a tree, scanning people’s emotions. Deven was right—nearly all of them were good people who went into the church feeling bad about something and came out feeling better . . . but it didn’t take five minutes to find what she wanted.
“Have you heard anything from the raid?” Deven asked.
Miranda waited at the corner for the
Walk
sign to light, standing among a group of humans on various nighttime errands. Several were on their phones, too, but she was willing to bet they weren’t talking about vampire warfare. “Not yet. I’m heading home now to check the network, but if anything had gone awry I’m sure he or one of the Elite would have called. How’s the Codex coming?”
“It’s . . . weird.”
“You’ve had the thing for two weeks—I thought you’d have it all translated by now.”
“Well, I’m getting there, but there are a lot of symbols I’ve never seen before, and they’re key to understanding the text, so it’s going more slowly than expected. Unfortunately the sections I haven’t been able to finish are the ones that seem to apply to us.”
“Of course they are. This is our luck we’re talking about.”
“Fair point.” He paused. “Look . . . I know you’re having a hard time with killing humans. But there are thousands of people like the one you found tonight. Organized crime, drug dealers, pimps, Congress—lots of things besides vampires slink around in the darkness. We walk among the unrepentant every night. You will never have to take an innocent life, Miranda. You have to shift your perspective or guilt is going to eat you alive.” She could hear him smile ruefully. “Trust me. I used to be Catholic. Guilt is my heroin. But guilt never made anyone a better person, and neither did shame. You are a good person. You’re doing the best you can to do what’s right in a painful situation. Do you hear me?”