Changeless pp-2

by Gail Carriger

  Felicity shrugged, biting into a pickled onion. “I was the only one keeping respectable hours?”

  Alexia was instantly suspicious. “Felicity, did you encourage them in any way into this rash course of action?”

  “Who, me?” Her sister blinked wide eyes at her. “I never.”

  Lady Maccon was confident that if Felicity had helped, she had done so out of malice. She rubbed at her face with one hand. “Miss Hisselpenny will be ruined.”

  Felicity grinned. “Yes, yes, she will. I knew no good could possibly come of their association. I never liked Mr. Tunstell. I never even thought to look in his direction.”

  Lady Maccon gritted her teeth and opened Ivy’s message.

  All about the dining table, fascinated eyes watched her and less fascinated jaws masticated even more kipper.

  Dearest Alexia, the message read. Oh, please absolve me of this guilt I already feel squishing on my very soul! Lady Maccon huffed, trying not to laugh. My troubled heart weeps! Oh dear, Ivy was getting flowery. My bones ache with the sin that I am about to commit. Oh, why must I have bones? I have lost myself to this transplanting love. You could not possibly understand how this feels! Yet try to comprehend, dearest Alexia, I am like a delicate bloom. Marriage without love is all very well for people like you, but I should wilt and wither. I need a man possessed of a poet’s soul! I am simply not so stoic as you. I cannot stand to be apart from him one moment longer! The caboose of my love has derailed, and I must sacrifice all for the man I adore! Please do not judge me harshly! It was all for love! ~ Ivy.

  Lady Maccon passed the missive to her husband. Several lines in, he began to guffaw.

  His wife, eyes twinkling, said unhelpfully, “Husband, this is a serious matter. There are derailed cabooses to consider. You have lost your valet, for one, not to mention a promising claviger for the Woolsey Pack.”

  Lord Maccon wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “Ah Tunstell, the nitwit, he was never a very good claviger. I was having doubts about him anyhow.”

  Lady Maccon took Ivy’s note back from him. “But we must feel sorry for poor Captain Featherstonehaugh.”

  Lord Maccon shrugged. “Must we? He has had a lucky escape, if you ask me. Imagine having to look at those hats for the rest of one’s life.”

  “Conall.” His wife slapped his arm in reprimand.

  “Well,” Lord Maccon said truculently.

  “You realize, husband, this puts us in an exceptionally embarrassing position? Ivy was in my charge. We shall have to inform her parents of this sad affair.”

  Lord Maccon shrugged. “The newlyweds will probably make it back to London before we do.”

  “You believe they are headed there after Gretna Green?”

  “Well, Tunstell is hardly likely to give up the stage. Besides, all of his possessions are at Woolsey.”

  Lady Maccon sighed. “Poor Ivy.”

  “Why poor Ivy?”

  “Well, my dear, you must admit, she has come rather down in the world.”

  Lord Maccon waggled his eyebrows. “I always thought your friend had a flair for the dramatic, my dear.”

  Alexia winced. “You suppose she will join him in treading the boards?”

  Lord Maccon shrugged.

  Felicity, who had been avidly listening in to their conversation, slapped her fork down on her empty plate with a clank. “Well, I say! You mean she will not be completely ruined?”

  Lord Maccon only smiled.

  “You know, husband”—Lady Maccon glanced at her sister—“I think you may be right. She might make for a passing good actress. She certainly has the looks for it.”

  Felicity stood up from the table and marched out of the room.

  Lord and Lady Maccon exchanged grins.

  Alexia figured this was as good a time as any. “Husband,” she said, casually helping herself to another small portion of haggis and assiduously avoiding the kippers. Her stomach was still feeling a little queasy, having never really recovered from the dratted dirigible experience, but a body had to eat.

  “Aye?” Conall loaded his plate down with mounds of various dead critters.

  “We will be departing presently, will we not?”

  “Aye.”

  “I ken it is time you bit Lady Kingair, then,” she stated baldly into the quiet munching of the dinner table.

  The pack was immediately in an uproar, everyone talking at once.

  “You canna change a woman,” objected Dubh.

  “She’s the only Alpha we got left,” added Lachlan, as though Alpha were a cut of meat to be acquired at the butcher.

  Lady Kingair did not say anything, looking pale but resolute.

  Alexia, rather boldly, took her husband’s chin in one gloved hand, turning him mortal and turning him toward her.

  “You need to do this, regardless of your pack laws and your werewolf pride. Take my counsel in this matter; remember, you married me for my good sense.”

  He grumbled but did not jerk his head away. “I married you for your body and to stop that mouth of yours. Look where that’s got me.”

  “Aw, Conall, what a sweet thing to say.” Lady Maccon rolled her eyes and then kissed him swiftly, on the lips, right there in front of the whole dinner table.

  It was the surest way to silence a pack—scandalize them all. Even Conall was left speechless, with his mouth hanging slightly open.

  “Good news, Lady Kingair,” said Alexia. “My husband has agreed to change you.”

  The Kingair Beta laughed, breaking the dumbfounded hush. “I’m guessing she is a proper Alpha for all she was born a curse-breaker. Never thought I’d see you line up short to the petticoats, old wolf.”

  Lord Maccon stood up slowly and leaned forward, staring across at Dubh. “Want to try me again, pup? I can beat you down just as soundly in wolf form as I could in human.”

  Dubh quickly turned to one side, baring his neck. Apparently he agreed with the earl in this matter.

  Lord Maccon made his way over to where Lady Kingair sat, still and straight in her chair at the head of the table. “You certain about this, lass? You ken ’tis probably death that’s facing you?”

  “We need an Alpha, Gramps.” She looked to him. “Kingair canna survive much longer without one. I be the only option we’ve got left, and at least I’m Maccon. You owe the pack.”

  Lord Maccon’s voice was a low rumble. “I dinna owe this pack anything. But you, lass, you’re the last of my line. And it’s time I took your wishes into consideration.”

  Lady Kingair sighed softly. “Finally.”

  Conall nodded once more. Then he changed. Not entirely. There was no full breaking of bone, no complete melting from one form to the next, and no shifting of hair into fur—except about his head. Only there did Lord Maccon transform: his nose elongating, his ears expanding upward, and his eyes shifting from brown to full yellow and lupine. The rest of him remained fully human-looking.

  “Goodness me!” exclaimed Lady Maccon. “Are you going to do it right here, right now?” She swallowed. “At the dinner table?”

  No one responded. They all stopped eating—a serious business, indeed, to put a Scotsman off his food. Pack and claviger alike became still and focused, staring hard at Lord Maccon. It was as though, by sheer strength of will, they could all see this metamorphosis through to a successful conclusion. Either that, or they were about to regurgitate their meals.

  Then Lord Conall Maccon proceeded to eat his great-great-great-granddaughter.

  There was really no other way of putting it.

  Alexia watched in wide-eyed horror as her husband, wearing the head of a wolf, began to bite down on Lady Kingair’s neck and then kept on chomping. Never before had she thought to behold such a thing.

  And he was doing it right there, supper dishes not yet cleared away. The blood leaking down from Lady Kingair’s throat seeped into the lace collar and silk bodice of her dress, a dark spreading stain.

  The Earl of Woolsey savag
ed Sidheag Maccon. Not one of the pack stepped in to save her. Sidheag flailed against the full bite. Instinct would not deny such a reaction. She clawed and hit at Conall, but he remained unmoved and unhurt, his werewolf strength easily outmatching her pathetic human struggles. He simply clamped those big hands about her shoulders—and they were still simply hands, without claws—and kept on biting. His long white teeth ripped through skin and muscle right down to the bone. Blood covered his muzzle, clotting the fur there.

  Lady Maccon could not pull her eyes away from the gruesome sight. There seemed to be blood everywhere, and the copper smell of it battled against the scent of haggis and fried kipper. She was beginning to discern the inner workings of the woman’s neck, as though this were some kind of horrific tableside anatomy lesson. Sidheag stopped struggling, her eyes rolling far back, showing almost all the whites. Her head, barely still attached to the rest of her body, lolled dangerously far to one side.

  Then, in some farcical mockery of death, out came Conall’s big pink tongue, and like an excessively friendly dog, he began licking over all the flesh he had just butchered. And he kept on licking, covering Sidheag’s face and her partly open mouth, spreading lupine saliva about Lady Kingair’s gaping wounds.

  I am never going to be able to perform my wifely duty with that man ever again, thought Alexia, her eyes wide and fixed on the repulsive sight. Then, entirely unexpectedly and without even knowing it was about to happen, she actually fainted. A real honest-to-goodness faint, right there, face forward into her half-eaten haggis.

  Lady Maccon blinked awake to her husband’s worried, looming face. “Conall,” she said, “please do not take this the wrong way. But that may have been the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in my life.”

  “Have you ever attended the birthing of a human child?”

  “No, of course not. Don’t be vulgar.”

  “Well, perhaps you had best wait to pass judgment, then.”

  “Well?” Alexia levered herself up slightly and glanced about. She appeared to have been carried into one of the drawing rooms and put to rest upon a brocade settee of considerable age.

  “Well what?”

  “Did it work? Did the metamorphosis work? Is she going to survive?”

  Lord Maccon sat back slightly on his haunches. “A remarkable thing, a full Alpha female. Rare even in our oral histories. Boudica was an Alpha, did you know?”

  “Conall!”

  The head of a wolf came into Alexia’s line of vision. It was not one she was personally familiar with: a craggy, rangy creature, graying about the muzzle but muscled and fit despite evident signs of age. Lady Maccon struggled to prop herself farther up onto the pillows.

  The wolf’s neck was covered in blood, the fur matted with a dark red crust, but otherwise it showed no injury. As though the blood were not her own. Which, technically, as she had now become supernatural, it might not be anymore.

  Sidheag Maccon lolled a tongue out at Alexia. Alexia wondered how the wolf would respond to a scratch about the ears and decided, given the dignity of the woman when mortal, not to risk such an approach.

  She looked at her husband. At least he seemed to have changed his shirt and washed his face during her mental absence. “I take it it worked?”

  He grinned hugely. “My first successful change in years, and a female Alpha at that. The howlers will cry it to the winds.”

  “Somebody’s proud of himself.”

  “Except that I should have remembered how distressing metamorphosis is to outsiders. I am sorry, my dear. I didna mean to upset you.”

  “Oh pish tosh, it wasn’t that! I’m hardly one to be overcome by a bit of blood. It was simply a little dizzy spell.”

  Lord Maccon shifted forward against her and ran a large hand down the side of her face. “Alexia, you have been entirely comatose for well over an hour. I had to send for smelling salts.”

  Madame Lefoux came around the side of the couch and crouched down next to Alexia as well. “You had us very worried, my lady.”

  “So what happened?”

  “You fainted,” accused Lord Maccon, as though she had committed some egregious crime against him personally.

  “No, with the metamorphosis. What did I miss?”

  “Well,” said Madame Lefoux, “it was all very exciting. There was this crash of thunder and a bright blue light and then—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” snapped Lord Maccon. “You sound like a novel.”

  Madame Lefoux sighed. “Very well, Sidheag started to convulse and then collapsed to the floor, dead. Everyone stood around staring at her body, until all of a sudden, she began spontaneously changing into a wolf. She screamed a lot—I understand the first change is the worst. Then we realized you had collapsed. Lord Maccon threw a conniption fit, and we ended up here.”

  Lady Maccon turned accusing eyes to her husband. “You didn’t, and on your granddaughter’s metamorphosis day!”

  “You fainted!” he said again, disgruntled.

  “Stuff and nonsense,” replied his wife sharply. “I never faint.” A bit of her old color was returning. Really, who would have suspected she could turn quite that ashen?

  “There was that one incident, in the library, when you killed the vampire.”

  “I was shamming and you knew it.”

  “How about that time we visited the museum after hours and I trapped you in a corner behind the Elgin Marbles?”

  Lady Maccon rolled her eyes. “That was an entirely different kind of passing out.”

  Conall crowed. “My point exactly! Just now, you actually, positively, did faint. You never do that kind of thing; you’re not that kind of female. What’s wrong with you? Are you ill? I forbid you to be ill, wife.”

  “Oh, really. Stop fussing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with me. I’m just a tad off-kilter, have been since the dirigible ride.” Alexia pushed herself more upright, trying to smooth her skirts and ignore her husband’s still-stroking hand.

  “Someone could have poisoned you again.”

  Alexia shook her head decisively. “As it wasn’t Angelique who tried before, and it wasn’t Madame Lefoux who stole my journal, and both occurred on board the dirigible, I believe the perpetrator never followed us to Kingair. Call it a preternatural hunch. No, I’m not being poisoned, husband. I’m just a little bit weak, that’s all.”

  Madame Lefoux snorted, looking back and forth between the two of them as though they were both batty. She said, “She is just a little bit pregnant is what she is.”

  “What!” Lord Maccon’s exclamation was echoed by Alexia. Lady Maccon stopped smoothing out her skirts, and Lord Maccon stopped smoothing out his wife’s face.

  The French inventor looked at them, genuinely amazed. “You did not know? Neither of you knew?”

  Lord Maccon recoiled away from his wife, violently, jerking to stand upright, arms stiff by his sides.

  Alexia glared at Madame Lefoux. “Don’t talk piffle, madame. I cannot possibly be pregnant. That is not scientifically feasible.”

  Madame Lefoux dimpled. “I was with Angelique during her confinement. You show every possible sign of a delicate condition—nausea, weakness, increased girth.”

  “What!” Lady Maccon was genuinely shocked. True, she had been slightly sick to her stomach and unreasonably off some foods, but was it really possible? She supposed she might be in an indelicate condition. The scientists could be wrong, after all; there didn’t exist very many soulless females, and none of them were married to werewolves.

  She turned a suddenly grinning face to her husband. “You know what this means? I am not a bad dirigible floater! It was being pregnant that made me ill on board. Fantastic.”

  But her husband was not reacting in quite the manner anticipated. He was clearly angry, and not the sort of angry that made him bluster about, or shout, or change form, or any of those normal Lord Macconish kinds of things. He was quietly, white-faced, shivering angry. And it was terribly, terribly frighte
ning.

  “How?” he barked at his wife, backing away from her as though she were infected with some terrible disease.

  “What do you mean, how? The how should be perfectly obvious, even to you, you impossible man!” Alexia shot back, becoming angry herself. Shouldn’t he be delighted? This was evidently a scientific miracle. Wasn’t it?

  “We only call it ‘being human’ when I touch you, for lack of a better term. I’m still dead, or mostly dead. Have been for hundreds of years. No supernatural creature has ever produced an offspring. Ever. It simply isna possible.”

  “You believe this can’t be your child?”

  “Now, hold on there, my lord, don’t be hasty.” Madame Lefoux tried to intervene, placing one small hand on Lord Maccon’s arm.

  He shook her off with a snarl.

  “Of course it’s your child, you pollock!” Now Alexia was livid. If she hadn’t still been feeling weak, she would have stood and marched about the room. As it was, she groped for her parasol. Maybe whacking her husband atop his thick skull would drive some sense into him.

  “Thousands of years of history and experience would seem to suggest you are lying, wife.”

  Lady Maccon sputtered in offense at that. She was so overset she couldn’t even find the words, a remarkably novel experience for her.

  “Who was he?” Conall wanted to know. “What daylight-dependent dishtowel did you fornicate with? One of my clavigers? One of Akeldama’s poodle-faking drones? Is that why you’re always visiting him? Or just some milk-curling mortal blowhard?”

  Then he began calling her things, names and words, dirtier and harsher than she had ever heard before—let alone been called—and Alexia had encountered more than her fair share of profanity over the past year. They were horrible, cruel things, and she could comprehend the meanings of most, despite her lack of familiarity with the terminology.

  Conall had committed many a violent act around Alexia during their association, not the least of which was savage a woman into metamorphosis at the supper table, but Alexia had never been actually afraid of him before.

  She was afraid of him now. He did not move toward her—in fact, he’d backed farther away toward the door—but his hands were fisted white at his thighs, his eyes had changed to wolf yellow, and his canines were long and extended. She was immeasurably grateful when Madame Lefoux physically interposed herself between Alexia and the earl’s verbal tirade. As though, somehow, the inventor could provide a barrier to his horrible words.