Shadowstorm (The Shadow World Book 6) (3 page)

A chill ran through her, and she came back to the room. “What are you working on tonight?”

“The new com system. I think it’s ready to road-test; I’ll just need volunteers.”

Now she grinned—it was a rare enough expression these days that he felt warm from the inside out—and said, “Oh, sure—‘Who wants to be injected with a microchip like a pet poodle?’ You’ll have them lining up.”

He grabbed the pillow they always threw at each other and mimed a toss, not wanting to risk the cat clawing Miranda’s thighs in fright. “Just wait. The idea of not having to wear a wristband anymore will appeal to them.”

She held up her own wrist. “I don’t know...I’ll kind of miss it. But you’re right, it’s time for an upgrade…plus there’s something satisfying about using Morningstar’s transmitter technology against them.”

“How about you? You’re home for the night, right?”

A nod. Jean Grey stood up in the Queen’s lap, arched her back Halloween-cat-style, and hopped down onto the floor, taking a moment to weave around David’s legs and leave hair all over his pants before heading off to cushier napping pastures. Miranda, meanwhile, stretched as well, hands clasped and arms above her head. As she lowered her arms the clip fell out of her hair.

“I need to work on the new arrangement for ‘Last Words.’ Oh, and I have a sparring session with Avi.”

“You’ve had a few with him now—what do you think?”

Miranda considered. “He’s good. Very good. He’s quiet, but the others respect him implicitly. He’s not the kind of leader who barks and bitches; a few words and everyone falls in line. As a teacher he’s not quite as solid, because he doesn’t really give enough feedback for beginners, but I think if he’s training more advanced warriors he’ll do fine.”

“I’m glad to hear it. His technique is a thing of beauty. It’s enough like our style to fit in, but still his own. I heard such fantastic things from the Mossad I had to at least give him a shot.” David toyed with his Signet and asked, “Do you get anything from him empathically that we need to worry about?”

“He’s got expert shielding. Apparently he’s run into empaths before; he’s actually trained to block out all but the most superficial sensory sweeps. But if you want my gut reaction...we need to keep him.”

“Second material?”

“Maybe.”

It would be a tremendous relief to finally have a new Second. David had his eye on a woman who had joined the Elite only a couple of months before Avishai Shavit had shown up out of nowhere a year and a half ago with an impeccable resume and blown everyone in his training group out of the water. Extensive background checks were performed on all incoming Elite, but Avi received nothing but glowing praise from all of his references, most of whom were high-profile and not given to exaggeration. Once Avi and the other candidate had both proven themselves for a few months on patrols and other routine duties, David had promoted both to instructors—one of the best ways to know if someone was equipped for leadership was to watch them try to teach.

If there was any hope of that, however, David needed to spend more time with both candidates. He knew finding another Faith was unlikely; she’d been a confidante as well as a right arm. But he had to at least trust his Second’s character as much as her skill. He needed to get to know them better.

No time like the present. “I think I’ll drop by Intermediate Training and have a peek. I need to talk to him about heading up your security detail on the tour anyway.” He rose, bent to kiss the Queen on the forehead and nose. She smiled and nipped his lower lip.

“You might want to change clothes,” the Queen pointed out. “I don’t think that outfit says ‘scary-ass megavamp and the boss of you’ so much as it says ‘yes I can fix your printer.’“

David looked down at himself: barefoot, jeans, and a moderately ratty t-shirt emblazoned with ‘If you’re telekinetic and you know it, clap my hands.’ “Point taken.”

Just like the Elite, his work clothes were black from head to foot, including the coat that was finally seasonally appropriate. The main difference was style and quality; everything he wore was hand-tailored, and a lot of his wardrobe was custom made. Miranda had laughed about him having a closet full of bespoke blue jeans until she’d had a pair made for herself. He’d always been something of a clotheshorse, but he hadn’t realized the full value of dressing the part until he got involved with the Signets.

The ritual of arming himself was so old and familiar he could do it in his sleep…and had, a couple of times, when an emergency hauled him out of bed.

He could feel the Queen’s eyes on him, and turned to her with a smile. “Better?”

She gestured for him to come closer, and pulled his mouth down to hers. Kiss achieved, she reached up and ran her hands through his hair. “There. Scary and hot as hell.” Then, as he turned to go, she slapped him on the ass. “Now, go get ‘em, tiger!”

Luckily for his image, he managed to stop grinning by the time he reached the training center.

*****

He tried everything.

Drinking was unreliable. The intake had to be constant, yet not enough to pass out; it required too much supervision to stay drunk particularly when one had an Irish constitution and a vampire’s metabolism.

There were places in every city where their kind could get high and stay that way for as long as they wanted, provided they could afford it. What he was looking for cost nearly five thousand dollars a night…but what was money for? What purpose did keeping it serve? There was always more to be made when one was a murder pimp. He was already a billionaire; five grand in a night was pocket change.

Inquiries at the Black Door directed him to a place with no name, run by a woman who was called simply the Doctor.

Having known David Solomon for decades the first thing that came to mind when he heard her title was “Time Lord,” but no matter—whatever she really was, the Doctor knew her patients’ needs and tended to them diligently.

An unmarked door off a downtown alley led into an unadorned, dimly lit waiting area, where a bored vampire with tattoos all over her face signed patients in and alerted the Doctor to their presence. The Doctor, or one of the other trained staff, beckoned to whomever was next, leading him or her down a long hallway lined with curtained rooms—cubicles, more like, as they were about the size of a typical urban clinic exam room.

Passing each room, there was no telling what sort of sounds one would hear. There was a marker at the doorway with three designations—one for vacant, one for private, and one for “open to guests.”

His kind of money earned a private room. Regardless, he was always stared at when he bypassed the waiting area; he kept his Signet hidden, but even here, addicts weren’t a sophisticated or particularly hygienic lot. They were trying to escape reality, deny the physical world; there weren’t just a whole lot of junkies wearing John Varvatos, and even fewer who walked like a Prime.

He took the same room every time, on the end at the left. It was mostly taken up by a hospital bed draped with disposable exam paper. There was a small fridge with various beverages to combat dry mouth or sobriety, a sink, and a low cabinet containing basic medical supplies, but other than that, the only other furnishings were an IV stand and volumetric pump.

The Doctor had a businesslike manner and wasn’t much on conversation, which pleased him. She carefully pulled back the tape that kept the cannula in his arm from dislodging—he kept it concealed beneath his sleeve when he had to be back at the Haven. A human couldn’t keep an IV in the same place for more than three days, but a vampire could go for up to two weeks before the body pushed it out.

She hung a bag of what was labeled saline, and was mostly saline, on the stand and entered a time and rate on the pump. The Doctor and her associates—a network of chemists, dealers, and clinicians—ran a large and high-tech lab creating purified solutions specifically for the Shadow World, and they were very, very good at their craft. Within a few moments of her switching the pump on, he could feel a slow but steady drizzle of vampire-grade heroin snaking its way through his veins.

It was a delicious high, near-total oblivion. One bag would last nearly six hours.

For months, it worked perfectly. For most of the night, depending on how long it took to get through Austin traffic to and from the Haven, he could simply…stop. Occasionally he’d hand his credit card to the Doctor and stay all day too, but she warned him against doing that often; vampire systems acted the same way human systems did, gradually needing more and more of the drug. Her recommendation was to take a night off every week to ten days, let the needle wound close, and then start over.

He didn’t listen. She didn’t press the issue.

Everything was going fine until he woke up with a dick in his mouth.

Sometimes the first dose would wear off before the Doctor made it back to his room to check on his levels, and he’d come out of it for a few minutes, practically sobbing in pain until she brought more. It was a depressingly familiar situation; back in California he had been no stranger to opiates, and begging for a fix was not new.

Neither was this.

His first impulse was to ignore it and drift back off—he was just high enough yet to do that, and pretend he’d dreamed the whole thing. But the stink of sweat on an unwashed body and the raw feeling in the back of his throat that told him his guest had been at it for a while hit him all at once, and the high evaporated into something far less pleasant.

Rage.

The man molesting him swore up and down that the marker by the door said “open,” and that the room was designated for E-21…or at least that was what the Doctor interpreted from his screaming, sobbing denials as he scrabbled on the floor in his own blood after Deven bit him and nearly severed his penis.

Deven ignored the screaming long enough to fetch a bottle of vodka and wash his mouth out. Then, he stood over the man, impassive, until footsteps ran down the hallway and the Doctor threw the curtain open.

She was a petite brown-skinned woman with a potent mind and an odd sort of compassion for her patients, even through her desire for profit. She knew that the only thing that would make a vampire lay in a clinic for twelve hours was intense and interminable suffering.

She did not, however, have compassion for people who broke the rules. There were two very large, very muscular vampires with her—security staff.

“Get him out of here,” the Doctor snapped. The thugs seized the man from the ground and dragged him out of the room, leaving a long smear of blood behind.

She turned to Deven. “My sincerest apologies…I caught that scumbag humping one of my clients six months ago and put him on the blacklist, but we have a new girl up front and she must have missed him sneaking in. I’ll comp you the night—can I set you up in another room for now?”

“No, thank you.” He walked out without another word. He knew he wouldn’t be back.

It was hardly the first time he’d experienced that kind of thing—he had, after all, spent half a century as an opium whore, offering whatever was asked for in return for drugs. It was just business—he wanted something, they wanted something, he didn’t care all that much about what they wanted from him, so why not let them have it?

Even as a human, he had learned that the Inquisition might burn every faggot it could find, but when the clergy wasn’t looking few guards would turn down a blowjob—a mouth was a mouth. No one in those cells died without having been raped or, at least, traded sex for food or protection and preferential treatment. Prison math: sucking one dick willingly instead of five forcibly.

Something about this was different. He stalked off down the street, angry—not even at being violated, but at having his one respite from reality ruined. He wouldn’t be able to relax there now, thinking someone might ignore the door marker again and he’d wake up being gang-banged or worse. That, too, had happened before. Now he had to find something else, something else to make it all go away, before…

He paused, dizziness rocking him back and forth.

…before he started to feel. Before he felt the barrier he had built with the steel of his will start to crack; before he could feel the sadness and isolation he had inflicted upon the pure and beautiful soul on the other side. He had to make it stop…or it would build, and build, and destroy him again.

He returned to the Black Door and tried a few other drugs, but none of them worked like heroin. He had to settle for another clinic, this one less comfortable and its staff less professional; but its rooms had doors that locked.

The drugs, at least, were grade-A quality, and as soon as he was hooked back up, he shut his eyes and started to slide…

…until
he
ruined everything.

“Seventy years,” came the voice, “And in all that time I never realized what a fucking idiot you are.”

Deven spun around, confused—but this wasn’t reality, it was dreamtime. He shouldn’t be here—the drugs should have sent him deeper into unconsciousness, past the reach of either memory or dream. He didn’t want either. He didn’t want…

“Me,” Jonathan said, crossing his arms and leaning against a tree—a redwood. “You didn’t want me.”

Deven backed up, shaking his head, shutting his eyes against that face, slamming his heart shut against that voice. “No. Go away. If I can’t see you in the real world I don’t want you here.”

“Are you sure you aren’t just ashamed of your spectacular lack of coping skills?”

He had expected, if he dreamed about Jonathan, it would be full of longing, tears, and the comfort of the Consort’s arms; instead, he felt only anger. “
You left me,
you bastard. You knew you were going to die and you left me alone—alone, in this world I wanted more than anything to leave. Now I’m trapped here for God knows how long—forced to fight, every waking moment, for sovereignty over my own soul. How I cope is none of your goddamn business anymore. You gave up all right to approve or disapprove.”