Free Shadow's Fall by Dianne Sylvan Page A

her yoga experience, and before long she had slowed and deepened her breathing.
    Not two minutes later Miranda heard something tapping along the floor and looked up to see Cora’s gigantic dog trotting toward them. Miranda blinked in surprise; she had seen pictures of Nighthounds, but the real thing was even larger than she had expected. The dog’s head came up to Miranda’s shoulder.
    Vràna gave Miranda a quick look of appraisal, deemed her harmless the way David’s horses had once upon a time, and sat down at attention at Cora’s feet.
    Finally, Cora looked up at Miranda; she wasn’t crying, but there was such sadness in her eyes. “I thought I could do it,” she said.
    Miranda nodded and sat down, crossing her arms and toying with her Signet. “Before I came here, back when I was human … I was attacked by some men in an alley. They did things that …”
    She didn’t look at Cora, but she could feel the Queen’s eyes on her as she groped for the words and the will to continue. “When they were done, they intended to kill me … and for a minute, I wanted them to. I couldn’t imagine living with that. All I could think was that at least it would be quiet … that I would be safe, and no one could ever hurt me again.”
    “But you escaped.”
    Miranda met her eyes again. “I killed them,” she said. “All of them. There’s this thing I can do … I didn’t really understand it at the time, but I hit them with so much emotion, so much rage, that it snapped their lifelines. Their hearts just … stopped. In a way, mine did, too, and it took a long time for it to beat again.”
    Cora took a deep breath that was heavy with unshed tears. “You are saying, then, that you understand how I feel.”
    “What I went through was only one night, and your ordeal was years long. But I understand violation, fear, and anger.”
    The Queen tilted her head back to rest against the wall, regarding Miranda with something new in her face; after a moment she said, “If you were to face those men now, what would you say?”
    Miranda smiled. “I would kill them all over again … but this time I would take a lot longer.”
    “I want Hart to die, Miranda. I do not like feeling this hatred … not even for such a monster. And I cannot kill him—even if I were able, I do not think I could. So I am doomed to face him every ten years … forever.”
    “Not forever.”
    “What do you mean?”
    Miranda lowered her voice until it was barely a whisper. “All I’m saying is … if things continue as they are and Hart continues to bait us, his continued safety is in serious doubt.”
    Cora considered that, then asked gravely, “Could you kill him? Is it easy to take a life?”
    Miranda started to say that she’d already killed quite a few people and yes, it was incredibly fucking easy, but something in Cora’s tone made her pause. “I don’t think about it much,” she admitted. “I accepted that in this life there are things worth dying for and things worth killing for. I’m one of those things. My people are also. So are my friends and my Prime.”
    “I ask myself if I could kill Hart,” Cora said. “If I were to stand over him with a stake, knowing the shot would be true, over in an instant, and the suffering of all his harem girls and servants and those killed by his legions would end … in that moment, could I do it? And, in doing it, what would that do to me? What would I become, then?”
    Miranda found herself smiling softly at the irony of a vampire Queen who was, at this moment, hiding in a hallway outside a gala event, theorizing over the moral implicationsof killing a murdering rapist in a society of vampires. “I have to say, my Lady, you are the first person who has made me think about any of this since I became Queen.”
    Cora looked surprised. “I would think that such questions would be at the center of everything we do. If God has appointed us to this rule, we must be clear on where the lines are