by Thea Devine
He had to find Senna in a city of hundreds of thousands, concealed in any of a thousand hiding places, protecting their child, keeping the Tepes at bay with Mirya to help her and do her bidding. . . .
He pushed Dnitra out of the way as he transhaped into a bat to resume his search.
Beggars like Mirya generally congregated in areas with shops and wares and people with money. People they could steal from or run a con on. Shell games. Reading the future in lines on a palm.
Dominick had no lines, no future.
Except Senna, who was somewhere among the shops and sharpers. Not Oxford Street. Too posh. High Holborn, Lombard Street. He’d start by alternating between those two streets in the hopes of catching Mirya begging or scrounging for some food.
Or blood. Senna had to have blood. And the easiest way to obtain blood was to drain a body.
Senna wouldn’t kill Mirya. Not yet, if Mirya was providing for her needs.
After hours of winging up and down the streets where the Keepers had marched, he perched on a rooftop to consider things from Mirya’s perspective.
She wasn’t young. She wouldn’t go far. It made the most sense for her to exsanguinate a body close to where she and Senna were hiding.
Blood had weight. So she couldn’t carry it far or carry much of it in one trip. She’d have something, a tin, in which to carry it. She would go out under cover of darkness—no, at dawn, when she could see what she was doing. She’d go somewhere people avoided because they knew vampires were on the prowl.
The docks? In the shadow of the warehouses where you couldn’t easily be seen, and a body could vanish in the eternal depths of the river and no one would know?
Likely. More than likely. The sun was just over the horizon. Mirya could well be on her way back to Senna.
Even as he made the deduction, he was on his way. Funny how the streets cleared when the early-morning light flushed through the clouds. People were just beginning to straggle out of their homes to start the day. An old lady carrying a lunch tin would hardly draw attention.
Every instinct said he would find her as he crisscrossed the waterfront. And then he did. A little old lady in rags, faltering every several steps as she maneuvered the bail of her tin from one arm to the other.
He flew down toward her and settled himself on the shoulder of a passerby who was walking in the same direction. When she turned, he flew to cling to the next passerby.
This chore was obviously onerous for her. He wondered how she had taken the blood, and how long it had taken for the bloodletting.
He was now hanging on to her shawl. She crossed to Lombard Street, where merchants were busy opening shops and setting out wares to sell, and turned into a sliver of an alleyway between two buildings.
There, her hovel, her sanctuary. There, Senna waited, and there, he could not enter without Mirya’s invitation.
Mirya, I am with you.
She froze as she was about to open the door.
“I am aware of that. Is the bitch Other with you?”
No. Let me see Senna.
“That is her decision.”
Invite me in.
“If she agrees.”
Which you know she might well not.
Mirya made a noncommittal sound. “You’d best transfigure.”
He flew several feet away and transhaped into his corporeal body. “Let me in, Mirya.” Now his tone was adamant. “I need to see her. I need to know the child is all right.”
Mirya seemed not unsympathetic. She thrust open the door. “Very well then, come in, and bring the blood with you.” She stepped over the threshold and called out, “He is here with me.”
“No!” Senna bolted upright. “Go away. You have another life. We don’t need or want you.”
“Put the tin on the table,” Mirya directed, and he did so before approaching the raggedy, makeshift bed and kneeling beside it.
He could just see her. She still looked ravaged and tired. And so beautiful. He wanted to wrap her in his arms.
“I still can’t touch you, can I?”
“I don’t think so,” she said stonily.
“The child?”
“Keeps growing and growing.”
“And I can’t touch—”
She shook her head. “So now you can go back to your beautiful vampire lover for whom you abandoned me and make more baby vampires. At least you’ll be certain they are vampires.”
Devil’s bones, he wanted to hold her. Her wounds were still raw; her siring probably still seemed as if it had happened yesterday. She forgave nothing. In her mind, all she had left was the child, and she would protect it as ferociously as a mother lion.
But she didn’t understand that he had the child too. He would never surrender it or leave her. And he hadn’t left her—he’d been spirited away to Biru by Dnitra and Iosefescu for reasons he was just beginning to comprehend.
As if Senna had been negligible.
Nevertheless, he meant not to leave this hovel. Senna and his child would never feel alone or abandoned again.
He heard Mirya’s shuffling steps and moved so she could get to Senna with a bowl of blood. Senna drank hungrily.
Mirya looked at him. He shook his head. He could feed anytime. Senna could not.
“She must also eat food to nourish the child,” Mirya said. “I will prepare.”
That was curious. Vampires did not eat; in-the-womb vampire babies only required the mother-blood for nourishment.
“Why?” he finally asked as Mirya began chopping, mixing, and cooking some vegetable-and-grain concoction in her fireplace.
Mirya shrugged. “I don’t know. It is just so.” She handed Senna a bowl and a spoon.
“It tastes like straw,” Senna said after she swallowed a mouthful. “I hate it.” She kept eating until the bowl was empty, which was more a strategy to keep from answering any of Dominick’s questions.
Mirya put a bowl on the table with a thunk. “For you,” she said to Dominick. “It will be enough.”
He took it. He couldn’t imagine the effort it had taken for this little, old lady with no strength, no powers, no reason, to decimate a body to retrieve enough blood to feed two vampires.
Mirya looked at Senna. “It is time to tell him.”
Senna shook her head. “He has other priorities.”
“He has not said so.” Mirya turned to Dominick. “Lady Augustine is undead.”
Dominick didn’t react.
“You didn’t know,” Senna guessed. “I didn’t know. Charles told me.”
“But we did know they want our child,” Dominick said. “And they want to make you Queen of Vampires? Of England? Of the world? How?”
“Charles would say the world,” Senna said grimly. “And it’s not a lunatic’s dream. The next part of their plan is to compel the Queen.”
“And replace her with Lady Augustine,” Dominick deduced. “And when the army is grown, Senna takes her place and her child—our child—will eventually become the Eternal Ruler.”
“Something like that.”
“The child must bear the marks of the blood,” Mirya said. “They are counting on it, that the child is the fruit of the commingled blood of a Tepes and an Iscariot.”
“Are they counting on it being a boy?” Dominick asked roughly.
“I don’t know.”
“And if there is no sign of one or the other clan?”
Mirya didn’t mince words. “People will die.”
“I have to stop Lady Augustine,” Senna said at length.
“We will stop her,” Dominick said.
They stared at each other. Senna ignored the tug she felt. He had another woman. “There is no we,” she said finally.
“We won’t argue that now. Or about our child. Or how you possibly think you’re g
oing to stop her as encumbered as you are physically.”
“I will.”
She felt his admiring glance.
“The Queen has been traveling back and forth between Windsor and here,” Senna went on, keeping her tone neutral. “She’s due at the Palace sometime this week. It would be a perfect opportunity for Charles. He fakes an attempted assassination, just injuring the Queen so she must be confined. Lady Augustine takes the Queen’s place. She has the body, the size, the hair. When she is in the scrim, she looks terrifyingly like the Queen. No one could tell. No one will know.”
“And then she dies,” Mirya put in.
“Who? Lady Augustine or the Queen?”
“Both,” Mirya said.
“Charles is crazy. He always was.”
“So in preparation,” Senna went on, ignoring that, “I gained entrance to the Palace; there should be no impediment to my compelling one of her ladies-in-waiting and taking her place. Which will put me close enough to watch Lady Augustine. And then all will be well.”
“Except for the army of the Keepers. How will you defeat them?”
Senna’s eyes sparked. “I’ll kill Charles.”
“Not if I do it first.”
“You have that Other to take care of.”
Dominick gritted his teeth. “Dnitra can take care of herself.”
Mirya made a slicing motion. “Enough. Dnitra has no allegiance to anyone but herself. She will reap the consequences.”
“How do you know?”
“I know,” Mirya said. “She is of no importance.”
“Then I am staying here with you,” Dominick said to Senna.
Senna clenched her fists. “Not possible.”
“I’ll tuck myself up into the eaves. You won’t even know I’m here.”
“No.”
“Charles will be hunting me now,” Dominick pointed out.
“And he’ll assume you’re with me, and there goes our plan and Charles wins,” Senna said. “The Tepes win. The Keepers will win.”
“No, the Tepes might think they’re winning. But they’ll be dying.”
He was so confident about everything when anything could go wrong. And probably would.
“And who will kill them?” she demanded.
“Me. One by one if I have to.”
But Dominick would die. She felt a chill at the thought. He must not die. However much she despised him right now, she didn’t want him to die.
“Where do you think Lady Augustine would hide?” she asked.
Mirya held up her hand and cocked her head as if she were listening. “I don’t know. She is not there. Not now.”
“Lady Augustine, you mean,” Senna said.
Mirya nodded.
“Then isn’t it likely she’s somewhere on the Palace grounds?”
“Waiting for the moment?” Dominick asked.
“I will hunt her down,” Senna said fiercely.
In the fervor of the moment, Dominick reached for her hand. His touch set off sparks and crackles all up and down her arm.
It obviously hurt. She turned her head away as tears shimmered.
“Devil’s bones. How can I not touch you?”
“There is an Other for you to touch and play with,” Senna said tremulously, her head still averted.
She didn’t see him shake his head, and she didn’t want to hear explanations, not now. There were only two imperatives: save the Queen and save her child.
“We need a plan,” Dominick said abruptly. “Senna, you don’t have the strength for twelve-hour vigils at the Palace. You will keep an eye on the town house.”
She started to protest and he made a quieting movement. “You’ll be right in place to see and hear everything, but it will be less taxing for the child.” Which was perhaps the only argument she would listen to. “We’ll start tonight. We need to destroy Lady Augustine before the Queen returns to town.”
Senna touched her belly as she sat restively on the roof of the town house, listening for movement or conversation. Obviously no one was about—or one of them was shrouded in the armoire coffin.
From her rooftop vantage point, she saw faint flares of green moving stealthily through the streets. The Keepers of the Night on the prowl, looking for victims.
She was no better. Were it not for Mirya, where would she be? She would never get away from being one of them. That she was now a monster and that she didn’t care about temporal things anymore, except her child. And before that perfect vampire Other appeared by his side, Dominick.
She was crazy to have listened to him. She was always destined to be the one to confront Lady Augustine. She would be the one who attacked. It was already foretold: she was the one who would die.
“Ah, dear Senna.” Charles’s voice was suddenly in her ear. A moment later, Charles leaned against her and she instinctively wriggled away. “Sent to Siberia by our hero, were you?”
She glared at him.
“There’s nothing here. Peter is in the coffin, I’m afraid. I have no idea where Lady Augustine is these days.”
“Of course you don’t.”
“I gave her a free hand to accomplish our objective. It will be very soon now.”
“How soon?”
“Days, Senna. Maybe even hours.”
That sent a chill through her. Dominick was already in the Palace, and the Queen’s carriage could be approaching.
“Senna. Have the child. Let Lady Augustine go through with the plan.” Charles grasped her arm, ignoring the burning pinpricks that shot out from her skin. “Ah, Senna, you don’t have to run away from me.”
“Really?”
“The ladies-in-waiting are arriving even as we speak.”
She started to get up. If the ladies were arriving tonight, it meant the Queen would be in residence tomorrow.
He tightened his grip as she pulled away, ignoring the sparks.
“There’s nothing you can do now.”
Oh, but there was. She wrenched her arm from his grasp and her body catapulted across the roof as she transhaped into a large bat.
“Senna!” Charles shouted, just before transforming into a bat as well and chasing after her.
She recognized she was much too burdened to evade him. She aimed at the treetops, cautiously weaving her way through the leaves and branches, before heading toward the Palace.
Ladies-in-waiting arriving . . .
It wasn’t that late—she should have been there, Senna thought desperately. Dominick should have found some way to alert her. So much for planning.
And it didn’t bode well that Charles had utterly disregarded the sparks that singed him so painfully when he touched her. It meant something. Only she was too tired, as she drifted down toward the mews, to figure out what.
The connecting door to the service entrance was closed. There seemed to be no undue activity yet. She had no way and no time to try to contact Dominick. She settled in the corner of the nearest empty stall to wait.
She slept. It was almost as if her body and the child took control when she was at rest. And especially after she’d transhaped and felt so deadly tired.
She never heard the carriages rolling into the mews, or the whispers of the ladies as they blew into the Palace, or the voices of staff streaming out of the entrance door to handle the luggage and hatboxes.
Nor did she see Lady Augustine swooping into the entrance behind the ladies, a silent slice of shadow following them down the service hall.
When Senna awoke, it was near daylight, the entrance door was open, and staff bustled to off-load wagons of foodstuffs backed up to the entrance.
The ladies had come and she’d missed the moment. By the damned, this pregnancy was confining her in too many ways. She felt sluggish and nerveless, but she had to gear herself up to fly.
A moment later, she found some lift and winged her way into the service hall.
The Queen was scheduled to arrive, Senna learned, after noon. And everyone had already started to scramble.
She attached herself to the starched cap of a maid who was heading toward another wing of the Palace.
Everything was a gamble now—she was operating on sheer gut, depending on intuition and instinct, clinging here, flitting there, trying to recall what she knew about ladies-in-waiting.
They were appointed. They rotated in and out of service every several months because the Queen didn’t wish to unduly disrupt their family life. They accompanied and served the Queen at her direction.
There was a hierarchy as well, about which Senna knew nothing. So that would entail another educated guess. The lowest rung of service would suit her fine, but she had no way of knowing which lady served in which capacity. She’d just have to make that decision on first glance.
The maze of rooms through which she flew seemed like interlocking pieces of a puzzle, almost dizzying in their opulence and formality.
But she was getting nowhere. As her energy flagged, she snagged the hem of another maid’s uniform and watched carefully as she turned down a corridor, finally, with floor-to-ceiling windows that seemed to be a bridge between two of the wings, and entered a door at the far end.
At last, the ladies’ suites and formally furnished salon. Senna tumbled off the hem to which she’d been clinging and flitted under a table.
From that vantage point she saw four ladies were here already, beautifully dressed, of varying ages, polite and restrained, either reading or conversing.
She listened for a moment. The maid was discussing the Queen’s arrival. They were to meet her as she entered the Palace. These newly appointed ladies would be formally introduced. They would adjourn to a parlor afterward where they would await the Queen’s pleasure.
Simple, then. She had only to wait until one of them was alone in the room. Any one of them would do.
