by L. T. Kelly
“So, Pearl…” I changed the subject to one I genuinely wanted answers to, as well as helping Rose out of the awkward content of our previous conversation. “Any update on Bartholomew’s mission?”
Pearl sipped her drink. “No, but he only left last night.”
“I can’t reach him, and to be honest, I have no idea what’s going on. Whether the wedding is going ahead or not.” My words came out matter-of-factly. Fear of unleashing any emotion petrified me. Once I’d spoken the words, my confidence at stuffing it away could be described as non-existent.
“Oh, darling,” Pearl began, which was standard whenever anyone could be described as disgruntled or slightly upset. “He promised he’d be back in time for the wedding. You do realise the unconventionality of vampires marrying, don’t you?”
I wanted to roll my eyes. I loved Pearl, I really did, but there were times when people who saw the positive in everyone grated on me.
“She’s married.” I waved toward Rose.
“Yes, but not to another vampire,” Pearl pointed out. “When people can die, forever has a time-limit attached. I suppose, when you and Bartholomew make that pledge, it will be like a life sentence.”
I gasped, snatching my eyes to Rose’s downturned mouth. The earlier feed drained from Pearl’s face when she realised she inadvertently put an expiration date on Rose’s marriage, which seemingly teetered on the brink of despair already.
*****
The phone rang twice before Geo answered. “Hello.”
“Hi.” It seemed like forever since I last called him directly. “Any news?”
“About?” His voice edged with caution.
I huffed and rolled my eyes. “Grace.”
He sucked in a breath through his teeth. “She told you then?”
“She is the cat’s mother.” Sure, an argumentative thing to say, but I couldn’t help myself, and it was much easier to be sarcastic over the phone. Rose seemed so despondent the last time I’d seen her six nights ago, and Geo wasn’t being fair to her. “I need to talk to you, but not over the phone. Will you meet me?”
I waited for resistance and held my breath, steeling myself for rejection.
“Marc’s bar. Ten minutes.” The telephone line clicked dead.
Marc’s bar? It had long since been anything but that, but the sentiment forced a smile on my face nonetheless.
Bartholomew had been gone seven nights, not counting the night he left, which made eight in total. I hadn’t heard a word from him. It wasn’t unusual for him to be gone for a few days without a solitary call or text message, but given our fight and the dubitation of our affairs, I expected something. Especially after eight days. We’d argued before he vanished on Assembly business in the past, but he always made a special effort to let me know I’d been on his mind – phone contact, flowers, a letter or postcard. The hurt and uncertainty clawed at me, proceeded by agonising emptiness in my stomach.
I recalled the night out with Pearl and Rose. How Rose’s situation dragged me from my own. I craved a release from my tumultuous thoughts, and Geo’s predicament could steer my brain from my own diabolical situation.
Taking the easy route, I fed from the young, homeless man who appeared to have taken up residence on the same park bench, before rushing to the bar. Geo was already sitting at a table by the window, his knee bouncing and his finger pressed to his lips.
“Hi,” I greeted him. He jumped at the sound of my voice and gestured toward the empty chair opposite. He’d already ordered me a glass of red. I took the seat and studied him until he shifted under my scrutiny.
“It’s just us here, Geo,” I spoke gently, my head tipped to one side. He looked as though he’d aged another ten years in just the week since I last saw him.
He sighed heavily and scrubbed a palm over his face, his shoulders sagged. “I’m exhausted, Tea. Gabriella is at me constantly in a blind panic.”
“Understandable, but this isn’t all of your burden. What is she doing to find her?”
Geo took a long swig of his whiskey, his eyes darting out the window. I followed his gaze. The almost full moon lit up the sky, even through London’s light pollution.
I nodded. “I see.”
“We don’t want to head up north and be stuck in unfamiliar surroundings when we have to turn. And…” He huffed, his eyes narrowing with his own intrepid thoughts.
“And what?” I urged, desperate to get to the bottom of things.
“And then be weak for a few days afterward.”
I hadn’t been aware of that before. As far as I had been concerned, werewolves possessed power all the time. Their attitude always portrayed as such.
“I can help.” I swigged my drink, eyeing his features. It could be a way for them to get up to Scotland faster, and Gabriella had to be desperate by now. Possibly dejected enough to accept the assistance I offered.
Geo tapped his lips again, staring out the window. “I’ll run your suggestion by her,” he agreed, albeit with reluctance. Then his eyes widened. “Aren’t you meant to be getting married next week?”
Now I shifted uncomfortably. I cleared my throat and finally managed to meet his gaze. “I’m unsure if the two are in any way connected, but Bartholomew appears to have gone off-grid in the same sort of area.”
“Shit.”
“Quite.”
“Have you offered to help in earnest, or is this really us helping you out?” he asked with a gravelly voice, his burning eyes trained on me.
“You should know me better than that. I have plenty of people who’d go with me. In fact, to prove it, I’ll ask Pearl to come. Come to think of it, why didn’t you ask your goddamn wife to help?”
Geo’s face scrunched up as he pressed a palm to his forehead. He muttered something that would have been inaudible to human ears. “Because I don’t trust her.”
I rested back in my chair, glaring at him, scarcely able to believe what he uttered. “What the fuck do you mean?”
His head snapped back. “Can I trust you?” he asked with a blank expression.
I raised a brow. We’d known each other eighteen years. I cared for his niece as a baby, and he had the cheek to ask me that? Thankfully, the glare I shot him guided him away from the line of questioning.
“She’s hung up on not being able to have my baby. She thinks it would save our marriage.”
I tipped my head back and laughed, in spite of the seriousness of the topic of conversation. Geo offered me a warning glare.
“I’m sorry,” I spoke, holding a hand up and urging myself to stop giggling. “It sounds so ludicrous. How the fuck can a vampire expect to have a baby?”
I carefully monitored his features for any sign of amusement to indicate he was joking. He knocked back the remainder of his whiskey, the shards of ice jangling against the glass splitting through my aching brain.
“She reckons she’s studied some ancient text and some sort of fancy necklace can turn her human for a time. Time enough to carry and birth a baby.”
“Oh.” It dawned on me. His edginess had to do with his missing niece and his crackbrained wife.
There have been rare times in my life when I would describe myself as speechless, but this insane notion could be chalked up in history. I grabbed my wine and drained it.
“Another?” He dipped his head toward my empty glass, I gestured my confirmation with a bow of my head, my brain still trying to process what he told me.
He returned quickly, placing the drink in my hand. I took a mouthful, savouring the effect on my fraying nerves.
“What does she plan on doing if she finds this thing? If it works and she does conceive, carry and birth a baby, what happens afterward?” My words shook with the heft of Rose’s plan shared onto my shoulders by Geo’s avowal.
He shrugged. “Take it back off.”
I drew in a sharp breath. “A vampire raising a human child? What the everliving fuck? And how do you feel about all of this?” My voice bobbed up and down,
apprehensive about his answer.
He rubbed his eyes, a greying tinge evident beneath his olive skin. “Don’t get me wrong. Not having kids put a strain on our relationship, especially now Grace has left home, all grown up, but it’s so…” He looked to the ceiling of the bar, as though it may hold the word he searched for.
Disgusting, abhorrent, odious, obscene… All words to describe her plan sprang into my mind.
“Unnatural,” he concluded, his chocolate brown eyes meeting mine again.
“The way I see it, you have two choices.”
He leaned forward, eager to find a way out of this.
“You talk her out of it, tell her this isn’t what you want.”
His lips pressed into a thin line and twitched with dubitation. “And the other?” He cocked his head and swigged from his drink.
“Hope she never finds the fucking thing.”
Five
Mr Brightside
Pearl pulled her sleek, red Audi TT onto the expanse of greying concrete, weeds poked through the cracks, brightening the dull space.
I pulled my long, black coat tighter around me. The cold didn’t affect me, but this place always sent a shiver ebbing down my spine. My first visit to The Assembly headquarters had been utterly terrifying. The initial visit had been due to my arrest after The Assembly discovered my relations with a werewolf.
I endured many visits since then, cocktail parties and other forms of official gatherings with Bartholomew, but still, the place gave me the creeps.
Pearl stopped in the centre of the empty warehouse and heaved a trapdoor open, revealing the staircase leading to a long, white-walled corridor. Doors lined the colourless walls. The first door was Bartholomew’s living quarters, which he clung to, refusing to relinquish his bachelor pad. I stopped, pressing a palm to the thick steel, then turned to Pearl, who hung back to close the hatch behind her.
“Whatever is the matter, darling?” She rubbed my arm affectionately, tipping her head to study my face with a crinkle forming between her brows.
My stomach jolted. “He’s not in there, is he? Hiding from me?”
Pearl straightened up, smiling at me and shaking her head. “Oh, honestly, Teagan.” She waved a hand at me. “Bartholomew is hardly one to gush about private matters.” Her voice lilted musically with a hint of laughter, before her expression smoothed and she craned her neck with wide eyes. “He does adore you. I can tell, but it doesn’t take an expert.”
She held her palm over the centre of her chest, then lowered it to grab my hand. “Come on. They’re waiting.” She pulled me along the corridor to the door at the end where the conference room was.
Pearl and I met the previous night, and I recounted the conversation with Geo about the werewolves going to the border to track Grace down and raised concerns about Bartholomew somehow being involved. They had both gone to the same area of the country and disappeared, seemingly without a trace. Pearl worked on getting the remainder of The Assembly together. Not an easy task, considering her relatively short stint of twenty-five years as a member.
I withheld the information about Rose’s insane notions, trusting Geo to sort that entire mess out. The more I considered her crazy plan, the worse it became in my head. I mean, the poor child’s father would be an ageing werewolf, and its mother a vampire misguided into birthing him or her under the false pretence it would save her marriage. Just wrong. Geo promised to stop her. To beg her to see he didn’t want a baby.
Drawing in a sharp breath, I followed Pearl into the boardroom, taking in the sullen faces positioned around a long, dark wood table. Decanters of blood were laid out along the centre, with crystal glasses placed on thick, red leather coasters in front of ox-blood captain’s chairs, twelve in total. Tonight, only ten members occupied their seats, Bartholomew and his second-in-command, Bruno, missing.
My shoulders raised with Harold’s scrutinising stare. With the most senior members missing, decisions fell to him. The corpulent man, sporting a derisory handlebar moustache, had detested me since the moment I stood before them on the night Victoria, Bruno and Bartholomew had captured Marc and me as we arrived back in London. Well, the feeling was mutual.
I pursed my lips and offered him a glare beneath a raised brow as I removed my coat and hung it on the empty antique stand positioned in the corner of the whitewashed room. The only splashes of colour to the room were from the priceless pieces of artwork adorning the walls with gold picture lamps above them, serving to illuminate their exquisiteness.
Swivelling to address them from the corner. I huffed and placed my hand on my hip. If they considered I would stand before them and beg for information, they were wrong. The five members across the table examined me, until the six with their backs to me silenced their mutters about being called on the instruction of, basically, a subordinate.
Having won this crowd before I possessed vital knowledge. They adored pomp and pageantry, but tonight’s bedevilment was hierarchical. I peered at Pearl, her coiffed blonde hair pointed at me as she fiddled with a coaster.
“Enough,” I spat, jutting my chin toward the table. Gasps resounded through my ears, as I knew they surely would. “I don’t know who you lot think you are. How dare you judge either Pearl or I. What the fuck have you been doing? Where the fuck is he? Are you even aware?” I threw my hands up in exasperation, partly to get my point across, as well as disguise the tremble in my body. I had to show confidence in my words and actions, but beneath the façade, I was terrified.
“Now, Teagan…,” Harold started, his cheeks puffed out with apparent fury.
“Don’t fucking patronise me.” I stepped toward him, my movements jerky.
My attention turned to Virginia, huffing loudly in the seat beside Harold.
Virginia was The Assembly’s version of Germaine Greer. She should have won some sort of award for facial expressions portraying disgust when Bartholomew announced our engagement. Her beauty regime appeared to consist of hacking her hair off with a blunt pair of scissors without the aid of a mirror.
I yanked the woman’s chair back until it leaned precariously toward the polished parquet floor. She leaped to a standing position, her eyes narrowed and fists balled. I flung myself at her, the raging inferno inside me eradicating my nerves. I clutched the woman’s throat and dragged her roughly against the closest wall until her head became level with a stunning sixteenth century portrait.
“Darling.” Pearl’s soft tone pierced the stony silence. “Could you kindly place Virginia down so we can discuss matters as they stand?”
I had made sure all Assembly members thought I still had strong affiliations with the Romano family, subsequently resulting in Virginia’s hesitance to retaliate. She had to be several hundred years older than me to be at The Assembly’s table and could knock me on my ass if she wanted to.
There were a few things I knew could kill a vampire. The number one choice was absinthe. Yes, the alcoholic drink created in 1792 by a scientist wishing to cull the ever-growing vampire population. But another was a bite from a werewolf. Bartholomew described the experience to me in a way that would have made a human audience vomit.
I let go of Virginia’s body. She landed on her feet and whooshed back over to her seat, rubbing her neck and offering me a death stare.
“Fuck you,” I mumbled childishly. My heart palpitated so my chest ached as I turned to survey the occupants of the table. They stared at me for what seemed like a long time before setting about pouring blood into glasses, business as usual. The exception was Pearl, who sat cross-legged, smiling fondly at me, probably in an attempt to keep me calm.
Once they all appeared settled, they peered toward me expectantly. I marched to the table, snatched up a decanter and poured my own blood.
“Rude,” I said under my breath as I took a seat, without invitation.
They thought Bartholomew to be safe and well. I could tell by their apparent lack of panic. But they didn’t know him like I did. They couldn’t. I
wanted to sling my legs over the arm of the chair. Do something that displayed my utter lack of respect for these people. No wonder Bartholomew had to deal with everything. These imbeciles were completely incapable.
“Where is he?” I demanded lazily. Not in terms of that I didn’t care, but in such a way that showed an expectation they would give me an answer.
Harold pointlessly cleared his throat. He had a frog in his as much as I did mine.
“Well?” I raised an eyebrow in his direction and rested my forearms on the polished table, my fingertips pressed against the stem of the glass.
“He went to the Scottish border.”
I huffed and rolled my eyes. “No shit, Sherlock. Where is he now?”
“We, well… We aren’t privy to that information.”
“What did he go there for?”
“To rectify an issue between the Malapropos and the witch clan in Ancrum.”
I tipped my head to one side, frowned, then took a long drink of the blood from my glass. How it tasted so much better decanted and mixed with anti-coagulant was beyond me, but it did.
“The Malapropos?” My voice rose in question. What I didn’t need was to look fucking stupid, but I didn’t have the first clue what or who the Malapropos were.
Still, he latched onto my lack of knowledge like the blood-sucking leech he was. His lips tugged in the corners and brows quirked up.
“I’m not sure you are entitled to be made privy to any of this information. Whilst you’re partnered with our leader, we do not have to share information with you.” Harold’s expression was triumphant. I struggled to hold back on the violence I wanted to inflict. I held my breath and counted to ten inside my head, just like my mother always taught me.
“Oh, Harold. I’m certain Bartholomew would want Teagan to know. I was at their residence before he embarked on the trip. He would have told Teagan about his mission, I’m sure, though the space wasn’t confidential.” Pearl raised her brow expectantly at Harold.
