The Parasol Protectorate Boxed Set

by Gail Carriger

  But they were not standing, and Alexia was now fully awake and unwilling to give in to the persuasions of her knees, her husband’s mouth, or any other area of the body for that matter.

  “Husband, I am very angry with you.” She panted slightly as she made the accusation and tried to remember why.

  He bit down softly at the meaty place between her shoulder and neck. Alexia let out a small moan.

  “What have I done this time?” he paused to ask before continuing with his oral expedition about her body: her husband, the intrepid explorer.

  Alexia writhed, attempting to get away.

  But her movements only caused him to groan and become more insistent.

  “You left me with an entire regiment encamping on my front lawn,” she finally remembered to accuse.

  “Mmm.” Warm kisses littered her torso.

  “And there was a certain Major Channing Channing of the Chesterfield Channings to boot.”

  He husband left off his nibbling to say, “You make him sound like some sort of disease.”

  “You have met him, I assume?”

  The earl snorted softly and then began kissing her again, moving down toward her stomach.

  “You knew they were coming, and you did not see fit to inform me.”

  He sighed, a puff of breath across her bare belly. “Lyall.”

  Alexia pinched his shoulder. He returned his amorous attentions to her lower body. “Yes! Lyall had to introduce me to my own pack. I’ve never met the soldier element before. Remember?”

  “I am given to understand, from my Beta, that you handled a particularly hard situation perfectly adequately,” he said between kisses and little licks. “Care to handle something else hard?”

  Alexia thought maybe she might care to. After all, why should she be the only one panting? She pulled him up for a proper kiss and reached downward.

  “And what about this mass exorcism in London? You did not see fit to tell me about that either?” she grumbled, squeezing softly.

  “Um, well, that…” He huffed against her hair. Persuasive mouth. Mutter mutter. “… ended.” He nibbled her neck, his attentions becoming even more insistent.

  “Wait,” Alexia squeaked. “Were we not having a conversation?”

  “I believe you were having a conversation,” replied Conall before remembering there was only one surefire way to shut his wife up. He bent forward and sealed her mouth with his.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Hat Shopping and Other Difficulties

  Alexia lay staring thoughtfully up at the ceiling, feeling about as wet and as limp as a half-cooked omelet. Suddenly she stiffened. “What did you say had ended?”

  A soft snore greeted her question. Unlike vampires, werewolves did not appear dead during the day. They simply slept very, very heavily.

  Well, not this werewolf. Not if Lady Maccon had anything to say about it. She poked her husband hard in the ribs with a thumb.

  It might have been the poke or it might have been the preternatural contact, but he awoke with a soft snuffle.

  “What ended?”

  With his wife’s imperious face peering down at him, Lord Maccon took a moment to wonder why he had thought to crave such a woman in his life. Alexia bent over and nibbled at his chest. Ah, yes, initiative and ingenuity.

  The nibbles stopped. “Well?”

  And manipulation.

  His bleary tawny eyes narrowed. “Does that brain of yours never stop?”

  Alexia gave him an arch, “Well, yes.” She looked at the angle of the sunlight creeping in around the edge of one heavy velvet drape. “You do seem to be able to give it pause for a good two hours or so.”

  “Was that all? What do you say, Lady Maccon—shall we try for three?”

  Alexia batted at him without any real annoyance. “Aren’t you supposed to be too old for this kind of continuous exercise?”

  “What a thing to say, my love,” snorted the earl, offended. “I am only just over two hundred, a veritable cub in the woods.”

  But Lady Maccon was not to be so easily distracted a second time. “So, what ended?”

  He sighed. “That strange mass preternatural effect ceased at about three a.m. this morning. Everyone who should have returned to supernatural normal did, except for the ghosts. Any ghost tethered in the Thames embankment area seems to have been permanently exorcised. We brought in a volunteer ghost with a body about an hour after normality returned. He remained perfectly fine and tethered, so any new ghosts should establish in the area without difficulty, but all the old ones are gone for good.”

  “So that is it? Crisis averted?” Lady Maccon was disappointed. She must remember to jot this all down in her little investigation notebook.

  “Oh, I think not. This isn’t something that can be swept under the proverbial carpet. We must determine what exactly occurred. Everyone knows of the incident, even the daylight folk. Although they are, admittedly, much less upset about it than the supernatural set. Everybody wants to know what happened.”

  “Including Queen Victoria,” interjected Alexia.

  “I lost several excellent ghost agents in that mass exorcism. So did the Crown. I also had office visits from the Times, the Nightly Aethograph, and the Evening Leader, not to mention a very angry Lord Ambrose.”

  “My poor darling.” Lady Maccon petted his head sympathetically. The earl hated dealing with the press, and he could barely tolerate being in the same room as Lord Ambrose. “I take it Countess Nadasdy was in a tizzy over the matter.”

  “To say nothing of the rest of her hive. After all, it has been thousands of years since a queen was in such danger.”

  Alexia sniffed. “It probably did them all some good.” It was no secret she bore little love for and had absolutely no trust in the Westminster Hive queen. Lady Maccon and Countess Nadasdy were carefully polite to each other. The countess always invited Lord and Lady Maccon to her rare and coveted soirees, and Lord and Lady Maccon pointedly always attended.

  “You know, Lord Ambrose had the audacity to threaten me? Me!” The earl was practically growling. “As though it were my fault!”

  “I would have suspected he thought it was mine,” suggested his wife.

  Lord Maccon became even more angry. “Aye, well, he and his whole hive are deuced ignorant arses, and their opinion is of little consequence.”

  “Husband, language please. Besides, the potentate and the dewan felt the same.”

  “Did they threaten you?” The earl reared upright and grumbled several dockside phrases.

  His wife interrupted his tirade by saying, “I completely see their point.”

  “What?”

  “Be reasonable, Conall. I am the only soulless in this area, and so far as anyone knows, only preternaturals have this kind of effect on supernaturals. It is a logical causal leap to take.”

  “Except that we both know it was not you.”

  “Exactly! So who was it? Or what was it? What really did happen? I am certain you have some theory or other.”

  At that her husband chuckled. He had, after all, attached himself to a woman without a soul. He should not be surprised by her consistent pragmatism. Amazed by how quickly his wife could improve his mood by simply being herself, he said, “You first, woman.”

  Alexia tugged him down to lie next to her and pillowed her head in the crook between his chest and shoulder. “The Shadow Council has informed the queen that we believe it to be a newly developed scientific weapon of some kind.”

  “Do you agree?” His voice was a rumble under her ear.

  “It is a possibility in this modern age, but it is only, at best, a working hypothesis. It might be that Darwin is right, and we have attained a new age of preternatural evolution. It might be that the Templars are somehow involved. It might be that we are missing something vital.” She directed a sharp glare at her silent spouse. “Well, what has BUR uncovered?”

  Alexia had a private theory that this was part of her role as muhjah. Q
ueen Victoria had taken an unexpectedly favorable interest in seeing Alexia Tarabotti married to Conall Maccon, prior to Alexia’s assumption of the post. Lady Maccon often wondered if that wasn’t a wish to see greater lines of communication open between BUR and the Shadow Council. Although, Queen Victoria probably did not think such communication would take place quite so carnally.

  “How much do you know about Ancient Egypt, wife?” Conall dislodged her and leaned up on one arm, idly rubbing the curve of her side with his free hand.

  Alexia tucked a pillow under her head and shrugged. Her father’s library included a large collection of papyrus scrolls. He had had some fondness for Egypt, but Alexia had always been more interested in the classical world. There was something unfortunately fierce and passionate about the Nile and its environs. She was much too practical for Arabic with its flowery scrawl when Latin, with all its mathematic precision, made for such an attractive alternative.

  Lord Maccon pursed his lips. “It was ours, you know? The werewolves’. Way back, four thousand years or more, lunar calendar and everything. Long before the daylight folk built up Greece and before the vampires extruded Rome, we werewolves had Egypt. You have seen how I can keep my body and turn only my head into wolf shape?”

  “The thing that only true Alphas can do?” Alexia remembered it well from the one time she had seen him do it. It was unsettling and mildly revolting.

  He nodded. “To the present day, we still call it the Anubis Form. Howlers say that, for a time, we were worshipped as gods in Ancient Egypt. And that was our downfall. For there are legends of a disease, a massive epidemic that struck only the supernatural: the God-Breaker Plague, a pestilence of unmaking. They say it swept the Nile clean of blood and bite, of werewolves and vampires alike, all of them dying as mortals within the space of a generation, and no metamorphosis came again to the Nile for a thousand years.”

  “And now?”

  “Now in all of Egypt, there exists just one hive, near Alexandria, as north as it can get and still be delta. They represent what remains of the Ptolemy Hive. Just that one, and it came in with the Greeks, and is only six vampires strong. A few mangy packs roam the desert far up the Nile, way to the south. But they say the plague still dwells in the Valley of the Kings, and no supernatural has ever practiced any form of archaeology. It is our one forbidden science, even now.”

  Alexia processed this information. “So you believe we may be facing down an epidemic? A disease like this God-Breaker Plague?”

  “It is possible.”

  “Then why would it simply disappear?”

  Conall rubbed his face with his large callused hand. “I do not know. Werewolf legends are kept in the oral tradition, from howler to howler. We have no written edicts. Thus, they shift through time. It is possible the plague of the past was not so bad as we remember or that they simply did not know to leave the area. Or it is possible that what we have now is some completely new form of the disease.”

  Alexia shrugged. “It is at least as good a theory as our weapon hypothesis. I suppose there is only one way to find out.”

  “The queen has placed you on the case, then?” The earl never liked the idea of Alexia undertaking field operations. When he first recommended her for the job of muhjah, he thought it a nice, safe political position, full of paperwork and tabletop debate. It had been so long since England had a muhjah, few remembered what the preternatural advisor to the queen actually did. She was indeed meant to legislatively balance out the potentate’s vampire agenda and the dewan’s military obsession. But she was also meant to take on the role of mobile information gatherer, since preternaturals were confined by neither place nor pack. Lord Maccon had been spitting angry when he found out the truth of it. Werewolves, by and large, loathed espionage as dishonorable—the vampire’s game. He’d even accused Alexia of being a kind of drone to Queen Victoria. Alexia had retaliated by wearing her most voluminous nightgown for a whole week.

  “Can you think of someone better suited?”

  “But, wife, this could become quite dangerous, if it is a weapon. If there is malice behind the action.”

  Lady Maccon let out a huff of disgust. “For everyone but me. I am the only one who would not be adversely affected, and, so far as I can tell, I seem to be essentially unchanged. Well, me and one other type of person. Which reminds me—the potentate said something interesting this evening.”

  “Really. What an astonishingly unusual occurrence.”

  “He said that according to the edicts, there exists a creature worse than a soul-sucker. Or perhaps it used to exist. You would not know anything about this, would you, husband?” She watched Conall’s face quite closely.

  There was a flicker of genuine surprise in his tawny eyes. In this, at least, he appeared to have no ready answer carefully prepared.

  “I have never heard talk of such a thing. But then again, we are different in our perceptions, the vampires and the werewolves. We see you as a curse-breaker, not a soul-sucker and, as such, not so bad. So for werewolves, there are many things worse than you. For the vampires? There are ancient myths from the dawn of time that tell of a horror native to both day and night. The werewolves call this the skin-stealer. But it is only a myth.”

  Alexia nodded.

  A hand began gently stroking the curve of her side.

  “Are we done talking now?” the earl asked plaintively.

  Alexia gave in to his demanding touch, but only, of course, because he sounded so pathetic. It had nothing, whatsoever, to do with her own quickening heartbeat.

  She entirely failed to remember to tell Conall about his former pack’s now-dead Alpha.

  Alexia awakened slightly later than usual to find her husband already gone. She expected to encounter him at the supper table so was not overly troubled. Her mind already plotting investigations, she did not bother to protest the outfit her maid chose, replying only with, “That should do well enough, dear,” to Angelique’s suggestion of the pale blue silk walking dress trimmed in white lace.

  The maid was astonished by her acquiescence, but her surprise was not sufficient to affect her efficiency. She had her mistress smartly dressed, if a tad too de mode for Alexia’s normal preferences, and down at the dining table in a scant half hour—a noteworthy accomplishment by anyone’s standards.

  Everyone else was already seated at the supper table. In this particular case, “everyone else” included the pack, both residents and returnees, half the clavigers, and the insufferable Major Channing—about thirty or so. “Everyone else” did not, however, appear to include the master of the house. Lord Maccon made for a tangibly large absence, even in such a crowd.

  Sans husband, Lady Maccon plonked herself down next to Professor Lyall. She gave him a little half-smile as a partial greeting. The Beta had not yet commenced his meal, preferring to begin with a hot cup of tea and the evening paper.

  Startled by her sudden appearance, the rest of the table scrambled to stand politely as she joined them. Alexia waved them back to their seats, and they returned with much clattering. Only Professor Lyall managed a smooth stand, slight bow, and reseat with the consummate grace of a dancer. And all that without losing his place in his newspaper.

  Lady Maccon quickly served herself some haricot of veal and several apple fritters and began eating so the others about the table could stop fussing and continue with their own meals. Really, sometimes it was simply too vexatious to be a lady living with two dozen gentlemen. Not to mention the hundreds now encamped on the Woolsey grounds.

  After only a moment to allow her husband’s Beta to acclimatize to her presence, Lady Maccon struck. “Very well, Professor Lyall, I shall bite: where has he gone now?”

  The urbane werewolf said only, “Brussels sprouts?”

  Lady Maccon declined in horror. She enjoyed most foods, but brussels sprouts were nothing more than underdeveloped cabbages.

  Professor Lyall said, crinkling his paper, “Shersky and Droop are offering the most in
teresting new gadget for sale, just here. It is a particularly advanced form of teakettle, designed for air travel, to be mounted on the sides of dirigibles. It harnesses the wind via this small whirligig contraption that generates enough energy to boil water.” He pointed out the advertisement to Alexia, who was distracted despite herself.

  “Really? How fascinating. And so very useful for those more frequent dirigible travelers. I wonder if…” She trailed off and gave him a suspicious look. “Professor Lyall, you are trying to persuade me away from the point. Where has my husband gone?”

  The Beta put down the now-useless newspaper and dished himself a fine piece of fried sole from a silver platter. “Lord Maccon left at the crack of dusk.”

  “That was not what I asked.”

  On the far side of Lyall, Major Channing chuckled softly into his soup.

  Alexia glared at him and then turned a sharp look onto the defenseless Tunstell, seated at the other side of the table among the clavigers. If Lyall would not talk, perhaps Tunstell would. The redhead met her glare with wide eyes and quickly stuffed his face with a large mouthful of veal, trying to look as if he knew absolutely nothing.

  “At least tell me if he was dressed properly?”

  Tunstell chewed slowly. Very slowly.

  Lady Maccon turned back to Professor Lyall, who was calmly slicing into his sole. Lyall was one of the few werewolves she had met who actively preferred fish to meat.

  “Did he head off to Claret’s?” she asked, thinking the earl might have business at his club before work.

  Professor Lyall shook his head.

  “I see. Are we to play at guessing games, then?”

  The Beta sighed softly through his nose and finished his bite of sole. He put down his knife and fork with great precision on the side of his plate and then dabbed, unnecessarily, at his mouth with the corner of his serviette.

  Lady Maccon waited patiently, nibbling at her own dinner. After Professor Lyall had put the damask serviette back into his lap and shoved his spectacles up his nose, she said, “Well?”