by Thea Devine
Senna landed on her shoulder as she entered the alleyway and remained there until they were safely inside Mirya’s little hovel.
“That is you?” Mirya asked. “Not Charles?”
“Me, if only I can transform myself. I’m trying. It’s just, I don’t know yet how it works.”
“Breathe deep. Think upward and outward.” Mirya bustled, putting up a pot of tea and setting out some biscuits from her meager stores.
“How do you know that?”
“I know many things.”
Senna breathed in as far as she could, envisioned herself upward and outward re-formed, and there she was, inhabiting her corporeal body as if she’d never transformed.
She slumped into the nearest chair, palming her belly. “That is damned tiring.”
“Tea.” Mirya handed her a cracked cup. “You will not eat me tonight.”
Senna sipped and sighed. “I need your help.”
“They, however, will kill me and devour me with no qualm at all.”
“Stop it.”
“It is the truth when you deal with vampires. If I help you, I die.”
“Lady Augustine lives.”
“Pah!” Mirya spit her tea. “Who sired her?”
“It wasn’t me. I found her dead in the parlor,” Senna said carefully.
“Dead and blood-soaked,” Mirya finished for her. “And so you did what you did.”
“I did not sire her.” Senna sipped again so she wouldn’t have to elaborate further.
Mirya shook her head. “No. You fed. Don’t deny it. You did.”
Senna preferred silence to confessing to that sin. The only absolution was Lady Augustine’s emergence as an undead, which was a mixed redemption at best.
“I have to find her,” Senna said finally. “The Season begins, the Queen will be more public than usual, and Lady Augustine—”
She couldn’t finish. She would sound like a lunatic. Lady Augustine taking the place of the Queen, and paving the way for the Tepes to take over the Palace, Parliament, the world?
“The Keepers of the Night are very vigilant in their zeal to protect,” Mirya said offhandedly, biting into a biscuit.
“They’re murdering people,” Senna said flatly, keeping her still-roiling feelings out of it. She still had enough humanity in her not to condone wholesale murder. Or taking down the Queen. She felt puny, weak, and too frail for a one-woman crusade to save the monarchy.
Charles would search relentlessly for her. And Dominick and that woman could return to wherever they came from. Senna had no use for him here.
“The baby moved,” she said suddenly.
Mirya perked up. “So.” She reached across to lay her palm against Senna’s stomach.
No sparks. No electrical jolt.
Senna let out a breath as the baby moved tight against her belly and Mirya’s hand.
Mirya nodded. “All is well. You should rest. Nothing more can be done tonight.” She cocked her head. “They are still searching.”
“Charles will never give up.”
“He will not find this place.”
“Can I stay?” Senna asked humbly.
“Oh, you are weary now, but in the morning . . .“ Mirya stopped and listened again. “In the morning, I could be dead.”
“You could kill me tonight,” Senna countered.
“Then we become wary allies until we’re not.”
Senna slept in Mirya’s bed, while Mirya curled up on the floor on a bed of rags. Blood dreams invaded Senna’s consciousness. She hadn’t fed in how long?
She couldn’t leave the hovel, could she? If she transhaped until she found her victim?
But the Keepers of the Night were prowling, guarding the city. They were everywhere. She’d be in danger of being seen, caught, turned over to Charles because she was so inept in her vampiric skills.
But Mirya was there. Whole and full of hot, pumping blood—she might have been right she’d be dead by morning.
Even a rat would do.
If she didn’t feed, she’d die . . . she’d be nothing but a desiccated body in the morning, her blood all sour and barely trickling out of her every pore.
Dominick . . . !
That cut deepest of all—Dominick and that vampire bitch. Dominick seemingly surrendering his claim on Senna, on her body, on their child.
The thought nearly crippled her.
It was too easy to jump to the worst conclusion.
She lay in Mirya’s bed, rocking her body, holding on to what was left of her sanity, trying to keep her mind on the child. It didn’t work.
Bite Mirya. Take Mirya, she expects to die.
NO! By the damned, if she did that . . .
She felt a nudge against her shoulder, and she slowly rolled over to face Mirya.
“This is for you.” Mirya held a basin in her hands, and Senna could just see that it was filled with liquid—no, blood.
She cupped the bowl in her hands and drank. Thick, hot, metallic, luscious. She paused once to gurgle, “How?”
“No matter. You will kill me anyway.” Mirya had already retreated to her little corner of the room.
Senna inhaled the scent. Fresh blood. Still warm. She thought she could feel the pulse of the body in which it had flowed. But she couldn’t let herself think about that. Nothing mattered but feasting on it.
In the end, it wasn’t nearly enough, but it was just what she needed at that moment. She could have drunk a bucketful.
She licked the sides of the bowl. She felt the child move. This was real. Life within her, conceived while she was alive.
She looked at the residue of blood in the bowl.
I am undead. I transformed my body. I can transport at will. I can compel a person’s mind. I will continue to eternity.
She shuddered as she looked around the little room. It reeked of poverty and despair, the scent of the elderly and smoking candles, of dust, decay, and creatures hiding in the eaves. The furniture consisted of a bed, chairs, a table, a fireplace, a rocking chair, some cast-iron pots, some plates, and a rack of pegs on which to hang some ragged clothes.
Two dirty windows were on either side of the door, and under one of them Mirya had made the pallet of rags and dirty laundry on which she’d slept.
I am suffused with someone else’s lifeblood.
What did she care about Lady Augustine? Or the Queen? Let them kill everyone, they couldn’t kill her, and she’d protect the child growing in her with every ounce of vampire cunning she possessed.
She palmed her belly. Faint movement, a flutter. Who are you, baby?
What are you?
She became aware that Mirya was watching her. Mirya knew. She’d felt the movement. She could tell.
“Mirya!”
Mirya waved her question away as if she knew what it was before Senna could ask it. Nor would she look at Senna. “Stay and rest,” Mirya told her, then got up and began preparing the morning tea.
“Mirya.”
“I know nothing.”
“You know many things. You felt it move. What did you sense?”
“It is an active baby.”
Senna’s patience was wearing thin. Obviously vampires did not have much to spare.
“The child is healthy, it moves, it kicks, it grows. What more do you need to know?”
“Does it inherit its father’s vampire blood?”
“How can I know that?” Mirya asked reasonably. “Have some tea.”
“You know.” Senna was absolutely certain of that.
“Lady Augustine,” Mirya said instead. “She is undead. She is not contained.”
“No.”
“And dangerous.”
“Possibly.”
“Dominick does not know.”
S
enna went silent. The tea tasted like hot stale water. Mirya’s gaze looked beyond her, to a place where she could see and sense things. Things she’d never tell.
But there were things Senna knew: that Charles and Peter were scheming to take down the monarchy. That they planned to kill and sire every last person into clan Tepes. They would make the streets awash with vampires, who, would, when they finally had nowhere else to root and roost, swell out to the countryside, to Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Europe, in a killing and siring spree until the Tepes ruled the world. And then what? Factions forming and reforming? New alliances? Prefectures of enemies? Interclan wars?
Where did the Iscariot fit in their doom-filled fantasy?
Charles must be stopped. Lady Augustine must be contained. The Queen must survive.
“Dominick doesn’t know,” Senna said finally.
“He will help.”
“He is busy with other matters.”
“She is not important. Dominick, however, is. The Tepes must not rise to power.”
“Can they?”
“Anything is possible.”
“Mirya—” Senna hated the warning note in her voice.
Mirya shook her head. “Anything is possible. You must determine what you will do.”
“They plan to compel the Queen and put Lady Augustine in her place.”
Mirya shook her head again. “She has not been in London all that often. She will return as the Season commences, and the planning for her Jubilee begins. Lady Augustine will not get near her.” Mirya thought for a moment. “She could scrim a lady-in-waiting, perhaps.”
“That’s more than close enough,” Senna murmured, struck by this observation. A lady-in-waiting had access. A lady-in-waiting could maneuver and manipulate, impede, impair, waylay, and engineer an accident, a fall.
She wouldn’t let that happen. She’d be there. Somehow she’d compel her way into the palace, and she would derail all their plans.
She borrowed Mirya’s clothes against Mirya’s protests. “I have to see, I have to find a way to get access before anything happens.”
“You go to kill,” Mirya grumbled. “My blood was not enough for you.”
“Your blood?”
“Your breakfast,” Mirya amended. “Dominick will find you.”
“How? Look at me.”
Senna had started to swath herself in the rags she’d found at the foot of the bed. “A hood over my head, my face in shadow, my body bent like an old lady’s—how would he recognize me?”
“There are colors,” Mirya whispered. “Auras.” She took Senna’s foot and began sliding on one of a pair of thick cotton stockings.
“Bloodred?” Senna asked caustically. “All I’m going to do is find out when foodstuffs are delivered to the Palace and when the Queen might be in residence. If I plan it carefully, I can take the place of one of the ladies and from there keep my eye on Lady Augustine.”
“It’s a plan,” Mirya said carefully. “But it’s too dangerous. You’re too pregnant, and you can’t move fast enough if there should be trouble.” She handed Senna a hooded cloak.
“I have the sun stone,” Senna said, ignoring that. “I’ll be safe.”
“Dominick will have one too. Perhaps Dnitra. Or she might steal it from him.”
Dnitra. The mention of her name made Senna’s skin prickle.
The child moved. She cupped her stomach, now shrouded in rags. It felt larger, she thought, as if it had grown and was stretching to find room after that compressed transformation. Maybe she ought to not transhape into a fly next time.
Today she would be an old, decrepit woman, limping her way around London, picking and pecking at garbage to find a crust of bread. Rags and a hooded cloak should be enough of a disguise to find out what she needed to know.
Though in the meantime, Lady Augustine could be anywhere, even back at the town house, reclaiming her property.
One thing at a time. Lady Augustine hadn’t shown herself yet for whatever reason. She might well be entranced by the idea of impersonating the Queen. They were of a height. Their bodies were a similar shape, and the hair, the posture.
If Lady Augustine could get close enough. No easy task. She might be nosing around the Palace right now, looking for an opening.
“They’ll scent you out,” Mirya said. “You’ll be hungry. You’ll want to feed again. What will you do then?”
“Where did you get my breakfast blood?” Senna countered.
“I have my ways,” Mirya answered evasively. “Which are much less dangerous than yours.”
“You understand I have to do something.” Senna eased off the bed and straightened the hood so it concealed her face. “I can’t just sit here and wait for the worst to happen. My world has to be safe for this child.”
“That’s another thing. They want the child.”
Senna bit her lip. “I know.”
“It shows even more now.”
“I’m aware.”
“You will see it sooner than you think,” Mirya added cryptically, handing her a belt.
Senna notched it around her waist. “What do you mean?”
“There is a season in which the child is born.”
“When? Soon?” It wasn’t possible. Except her belly felt more like five or six months big suddenly.
“In time,” Mirya said, raising her hand over Senna’s head, almost like a benediction.
“I have to go.”
“There may be no deliveries. Remember, the Queen is still at Windsor until later this week.”
“I know.” The Queen had been loath to spend any time at all in London since Albert’s death twenty years before. But that had changed; now she periodically returned to the Palace to take care of business, or to attend state functions, and now, it was announced, to plan her upcoming Golden Jubilee.
Senna tucked the chunk of obsidian into her belt. “I’ll find out what I can anyway. At the very least, I’ll try to get into the Palace and eliminate that obstacle.”
It was hot. The streets felt as if they were giving off steam. The obsidian, absorbing the sun’s rays, felt as fiery as lava in her hand.
The streets were crowded, the air humid and cloying, with the mingled scents of garbage, horse, smoke, and perfume.
And blood. Pulsing beneath the skin. She felt a roaring in her ears, her body shaking, her palate shifting.
No feeding. Not now. For her child—not ever again.
This was such a bad idea. She should have thought of a different way to approach it. She should have transported. And she hadn’t thought through the difficulty of getting permission to enter the Palace.
Over and above that, she’d underestimated the pull of blood among all those strangers. She bent over and kept limping toward her objective.
The noise of wagons, vendors, footsteps, and random conversation sounded chaotic in her head, in tandem with the waterfall of her hunger.
How many of these strangers might be vampires, given the mission of Charles and the Keepers of the Night; how many bodies had they fed on and turned last night? Any number passing her on the street right now could be newly sired members of Clan Tepes.
She saw now why Mirya was so worried.
There are colors. . . .
She kept her eyes on the ground and her pace as steady as an impaired old lady could manage. She was a lousy actress. Her mouth burned with need.
She needed to concentrate. Charles could be anywhere. He was the most dangerous. He was as bloodthirsty as a pirate. He loved to kill. He lived to feed. There could never be enough blood to satisfy him.
Even in the ebb and flow of these early-afternoon crowds, Charles could be somewhere above her, swooping among the pedestrians, looking for her. He was already too comfortable in his vampire skin.
But Dominick must know this—C
harles was his half brother after all. Dominick would stop him.
If Dominick even cared.
Of course he didn’t. He had other interests now. He and Dnitra had probably gone off to establish their own intimate little vampire lair.
Stop it!
She bumped into a body. “Excuse me, sorry, forgive an old lady.” She scurried on. Mirya was right, she shouldn’t have come out on the street. She wasn’t nearly ready to handle being among people, especially with the hunger gnawing at her, and her body shifting to accommodate it.
The lust corroded everything. She had no mastery over it yet.
Charles was right: she was a baby vampire. She hadn’t even begun to crawl, let alone develop the powers that would help her achieve her mission.
She kept on, swallowing her hunger, pushing back on her body’s demand that she prepare to feed. Useless. It took only a moment for her to release her ferocious hold on her thoughts as she waited to cross the street, and she doubled over as the lust took her.
She had no choice: she wheeled and threw herself in front of an oncoming dray.
She was so suffused and plump from feeding, she could barely move. She lay slumped against the wall in a straw-covered stable, her victim lifeless beside her, and the wagon shielding them from the stable door.
An inspired idea, throwing herself under the wagon. Too easy to induce the driver to take her to a for-hire stable, where she could finally feed. The grace note was now she had the wagon and, with it, the wherewithal to approach the Palace.
Not yet though. Have to think. Have to plan.
It was beyond fortunate his wagon was filled with baskets of vegetables and fruit among other things. He was off to market, he’d said. He couldn’t imagine how he’d run her down.
Don’t think about that, about him and what he said.
A fluttery movement drew her attention and she cupped her stomach.
Poor child. Your mother is a vampire. She must feed, so she must hunt and kill. How can I raise a child with that demon living in my heart, my mind, and my body?
She was in. At least in the inner courtyard of the royal mews, with the Lord Steward directing her to turn the wagon around, adamant that nothing was wanted with the Queen not in residence at this time, as anyone with half a brain knew.
