Her right eye became hideously magnified out of all proportion as she twiddled one dial, homing in on the potentate’s face. Fine even features, dark eyebrows, and green eyes—the face seemed totally normal, natural even. The skin looked healthy, not so pale. The potentate gave a little smile, all his teeth in perfect boxlike order. Remarkable.
There would be the problem. No fangs.
Lady Maccon stood and went to stand in front of the dewan, stopping him in his impatient movements. She trained the glassicals upon his face, focusing on the eyes: plain old brown. No yellow about the iris, no hidden quality of open-field or hunter instincts.
In silence, thinking hard, she sat back down. Carefully, she removed the glassicals and put them away.
“Well?”
“Am I to understand you are both laboring under a state, that is, afflicted with, um”—she groped for the correct way of putting it—“that is, infected by… normality?”
The dewan gave her a disgusted look. Lady Maccon made a note in her little journal.
“Astonishing. And how many of the supernatural set are also contaminated into being mortal?” she asked, stylographic pen poised.
“Every vampire and werewolf in London central.” The potentate was incurably calm.
Alexia was truly stunned. If all of them were no longer supernatural, that meant that any or all of them could be killed. She wondered, as a preternatural, if she was being affected. She went introspective for a moment. She felt like herself—difficult to tell, though.
“What’s the geographical extent of those disabled?” she asked.
“It seems to be concentrated around the Thames embankment area, extending in from the docklands.”
“And if you leave the affected zone, do you return to your supernatural state?” the scientific side of Alexia instantly wanted to know.
“Excellent inquiry.” The dewan disappeared out the door, presumably to send a runner to find out the answer to that question. Normally they would have had a ghost agent handle such a job. Where was she?
“And the ghosts?” Lady Maccon asked, frowning.
“That is how we know the extent of the afflicted area. Not a single ghost tethered in that zone has appeared since sundown. Every one has vanished. Exorcised.” The potentate was watching her closely. He, of course, would assume Alexia had something to do with this. Only one creature had the inherent power to exorcise ghosts, as unpleasant a job as it was, and that creature was a preternatural. Alexia was the only preternatural in the London locale.
“Gods,” breathed Lady Maccon. “How many ghosts lost were in the Crown’s employ?”
“Six worked for us; four worked for BUR. Of the remaining specters, eight were in the poltergeist stage, so no one misses them, and eighteen were at the end stages of disanimus.” The potentate tossed a pile of paperwork in Alexia’s direction. She flipped through the stack, looking at the details.
The dewan came back into the room. “We will know your answer within the hour.” He resumed his pacing.
“In case you are curious, gentlemen, I spent the entire day asleep at Woolsey Castle. My husband can attest to that fact, as we do not maintain separate bedrooms.” Alexia blushed slightly but felt her honor demanded she stand up for herself.
“Of course he can,” said the vampire who currently was no vampire at all but a natural human. For the first time in hundreds of years. He must be absolutely shaking in those hugely expensive Hessian boots of his. To face mortality after so very long. Not to mention the fact that one of the hives was in the afflicted zone—which meant a queen was in danger. Vampires, even roves like the potentate, would do almost anything to protect a queen.
“You mean, your werewolf husband who sleeps daylight solid. And whom I highly doubt you touch while you sleep?”
“Of course I do not.” Alexia was taken aback that he need ask. Staying in contact with Conall all night, every night, would cause him to age, and while she abhorred the idea of growing old without him, she wasn’t about to inflict mortality on him. He would also grow facial hair and come over more than usually scruffy of a morning.
“So you admit you could have snuck out of the house?” The dewan stopped pacing and glared at her.
Lady Maccon made a clucking noise of denial. “Have you met my staff? If Rumpet didn’t stop me, Floote would, not to mention Angelique running about fussing over my hair. Sneaking out, I am sorry to say, is a thing of my past. But you are welcome to blame me if you are too lazy to try and figure out what is really going on here.”
The potentate, of all people, seemed a little more convinced. Perhaps it was simply that he did not want to believe she had access to such an ability.
Alexia continued. “I mean, really, how could one preternatural, however powerful, affect an entire area of the city? I have to touch you in order to force your humanity. I have to touch a dead body in order to exorcise its ghost. I could not possibly manage to be in all those places at once. Besides which, I am not touching you right now, am I? And you are both mortal.”
“So what are we dealing with? A whole pack of preternaturals?” That was the dewan. He was prone to thinking in numbers, the consequence of an overabundance of military training.
The potentate shook his head. “I have seen BUR’s records. There are not enough preternaturals in all of England to exorcise so many ghosts at once. There are probably not enough in the civilized world.”
Alexia wondered how he had seen such records. She would have to tell her husband about that. Then she returned her attention to the business at hand. “Is there anything more powerful than a preternatural?”
The not-vampire shook his head again. “Not in this particular way. Vampire edict tells us that soul-suckers are the second most deadly creatures on the planet. But it also says that the most deadly of all is no leech, but a different kind of parasite. This cannot be the work of one of them.”
Lady Maccon scribbled this down in her book. She was intrigued and a little put out. “Worse than us soul-suckers? Is that possible? And here I was thinking myself a member of the most hated set. And what do you call them?”
The potentate ignored this question. “That will teach you to get full of yourself.”
Alexia would have pressed the issue but suspected that line of questioning would be ignored. “So this must be the result of a weapon, a scientific apparatus. That is the only possible explanation.”
“Or we could take that ridiculous man Darwin’s theories to heart and postulate a newly evolved species of preternatural.”
Alexia nodded. She had her reservations about Darwin and his prattle on origins, but there might be some little merit to his ideas.
The dewan, however, pooh-poohed the idea. Werewolves were, largely, of a much less scientific bent than vampires, except where advances in weaponry were concerned. “I am more sympathetic to the muhjah on this point if nothing else. If she isn’t doing it herself, then it must be some newfangled contrivance of technical origin.”
“We are living in the Age of Invention,” agreed the potentate.
The dewan looked thoughtful. “The Templars have finally managed to unify Italy and declare themselves Infallible; perhaps they are turning their attention outward once more?”
“You think this may herald a second Inquisition?” The potentate blanched. He could do that now.
The dewan shrugged.
“There is no point in wild speculation,” said the ever-practical Lady Maccon. “Nothing suggests that the Templars are involved.”
“You are Italian,” grumbled the dewan.
“Oh, fiddlesticks, is everything in this meeting going to come back around to my being my father’s daughter? My hair is curly too—could that somehow be involved? I am the product of my birth, and there is nothing I can change about that, or believe you me, I might have opted for a smaller nose. Let us simply agree that the most likely explanation for this kind of wide-scale preternatural effect is a weapon of some kind.” She turned to
the potentate. “You are positive you have never heard of this kind of thing happening before?”
He frowned and rubbed at the crease between his green eyes with the tip of one white finger. It was an oddly human gesture. “I will consult the edict keepers on the subject, but, no, I do not think so.”
Alexia looked to the dewan. He shook his head.
“So the question is, what could someone hope to gain by this?”
Her supernatural colleagues looked at her blankly.
A tap came on the closed door. The dewan went to answer it. He spoke softly for a moment through the crack and then returned with an expression transformed from scared to bemused.
“The effects would appear to be negated just outside the afflicted zone we discussed earlier. Werewolves, at least, revert back to fully supernatural. The ghosts, of course, cannot relocate to take advantage of this fact. And I cannot speak for the vampires.”
What he did not say was that what changed werewolves was also likely to change vampires—they were more alike than either race preferred to admit.
“I shall look into this myself, personally, as soon as our meeting is concluded,” said the potentate, but he was clearly relieved. It had to be a product of his human condition; normally his emotions were not so obvious.
The dewan sneered at him. “You will be able to move that endangered queen of yours, should you deem it necessary.”
“Do we have any further business to address?” asked the potentate, ignoring the comment.
Alexia reached forward to tap at the harmonic auditory resonance disruptor with the butt end of her stylographic pen, getting it vibrating once more. Then she looked to the dewan. “Why have so many regiments returned home recently?”
“Indeed, I had noticed something of an overabundance of the military roaming the streets as I left my house this evening.” The potentate looked curious.
The dewan shrugged, trying for casualness and failing. “Blame Cardwell and his blasted reforms.”
Alexia sniffed pointedly. She approved of the reforms, far more humane to cut out flogging and change enlistment tactics. But the dewan was an old-timer; he liked his soldiers disciplined, poor, and mildly bloody.
He continued as though she hadn’t sniffed. “We had that steamer in from West Africa several months ago crying that the Ashantis were giving us hell. The Secretary of War pulled everyone we could spare out of the east and back here for rotation.”
“Do we still have that many troops in India? I thought the region was pacified.”
“Not hardly. But we have the numbers to pull several regiments out and leave the East India Company and its mercenaries to take the brunt of it. The empire should stay sound. The duke wants proper regiments with werewolf attachments down in West Africa, and I can’t say I blame him. It’s a nasty business down there. These incoming regiments you see around London are to reconfigure as two separate battalions and ship back out within a month. It’s causing a moon’s worth of mess. Most had to be routed through Egypt in order to get back here fast enough, and I still don’t know how we are going to stretch to fill the orders. Still, they’re here now, clogging up the London taverns. Best get them fighting again right quick.”
He rounded on Lady Maccon. “Which reminds me. Get your husband to keep his ruddy packs under control, would you?”
“Packs? There was only the one last time I checked, and let me inform you, it is not my husband who has to discipline them. Constantly.”
The dewan grinned, causing his massive mustache to wiggle. “I am guessing you met Major Channing?” There were just few enough werewolves in England that, as Alexia had come to learn, they all seemed to know one another. And gracious did they enjoy a good gossip.
“You would be guessing correctly.” Lady Maccon made a sour face.
“Well, I was referring to the earl’s other pack, the Highland one, Kingair,” said the dewan. “They were running with the Black Watch regiment, and there’s been a bit of a dust-up. I thought your husband might stick a paw in.”
Lady Maccon frowned. “I doubt it.”
“Lost their Alpha out there, the Kingair Pack, you do realize? Niall something-or-other, a full colonel, nasty business. The pack was ambushed during high noon, when they were at their weakest and couldn’t change shape. Threw the whole regiment over for a while there. Losing a ranking officer like that, werewolf Alpha or not, caused quite a fuss.”
Alexia’s frown deepened. “No, I was not aware.” She wondered if her husband knew of this. She tapped her lip with the back of her pen. It was highly unusual for a former Alpha to survive the loss of his pack, and she had never managed to extract from Conall the whys and wherefores of his abandonment of the Highlands. But Alexia was pretty darn certain that a leadership void placed him under some sort of obligation to his former pack, even if it had been decades.
The discussion moved on to speculation as to who might be responsible for the weapon: various not-as-secret-as-they-wanted societies, foreign nations, or factions within the government. Lady Maccon was convinced it was Hypocras Club style scientists and held firm on her stance over deregulation. This frustrated the potentate, who wanted the surviving Hypocras Club members released to his tender mercies. The dewan sided with the muhjah. He wasn’t particularly interested in scientific research of this kind, but he wasn’t about to see it fall wholly into vampire hands. This derailed the conversation onto distribution of Hypocras goods. Alexia suggested they go to BUR, and despite her husband’s charge of the institution, the potentate agreed so long as a vampire agent was attached.
By the time Queen Victoria arrived to confer with her council, they had come to several decisions. They informed her of the plague of humanization and their theory that it was some kind of secret weapon. The queen was appropriately worried. She knew perfectly well that the strength of her empire rested on the backs of her vampire advisors and her werewolf fighters. If they were at risk, so was Britain. She was particularly insistent that Alexia look into the mystery. After all, exorcism was supposed to be under the muhjah’s jurisdiction.
Since she would have gone out of her way to investigate regardless, Lady Maccon was happy to have official sanction. She left the Shadow Council meeting with a feeling of unexpected accomplishment. She desperately wanted to pigeonhole her husband in his BUR den, but, knowing that would only end in a row, she headed home to Floote and the library instead.
Lady Alexia Maccon’s father’s collection of books, normally an excellent, or at least distracting, source of information, proved a disappointment on the matter of large-scale negation of the supernatural. Nor did it have anything to say on the potentate’s tantalizing comment concerning a threat to vampires worse than soul-suckers. After hours of flipping through the worn leather-covered books, ancient scrolls, and personal journals, Lady Maccon and Floote had uncovered absolutely nothing. There were no further notes in her little leather book and no further insight into the mystery.
Floote’s silence was eloquent.
Alexia nibbled a light breakfast of toast with potted ham and kippered salmon and went to bed just before dawn, defeated and frustrated.
She was awakened in the early morning by her husband, in an entirely dissimilar state of frustration. His big rough hands were insistent, and she was not unwilling to awaken thus, especially as she had some very pressing questions that needed answers. Still, it was daylight, and most respectable supernatural folk ought to be asleep. Fortunately, Conall Maccon was a strong enough Alpha to be awake several days running without the ill effects younger members of a pack would sustain from such solar contamination.
His approach was unique this time. He was squirming his way up under the covers from the foot of the bed toward where she lay. Alexia’s newly opened eyes met the ludicrous sight of an enormous lump of bedclothes, swaying back and forth like some sort of encumbered jellyfish, laboring toward her. She was lying on her side, and his chest hair tickled the backs of her legs. He was lifting up her nigh
tgown as he went. A little kiss whiskered just behind one knee, and Alexia jerked her leg in reaction. It tickled something dreadful.
She flipped the blankets and glared down at him. “What are you doing, you ridiculous man? You are acting like some sort of deranged mole.”
“Being stealthy, my little terror. Do I not seem stealthy?” He spoke with mock affront.
“Why?”
He looked a little bashful, which was a categorically absurd expression for an enormous Scotsman to wear. “I was after the romanticism of an undercover approach, wife. The BUR agent mystique. Even if this BUR agent is disgracefully late home.”
His wife propped herself up on one elbow and raised both eyebrows, clearly trying to suppress laughter but still look intimidating.
“No?”
The eyebrows went, if possible, higher.
“Humor me.”
Alexia swallowed down a bubble of mirth and pretended a gravity suitable to a Lady Maccon. “If you insist, husband.” She placed a hand to her heart and sank back into the pillows with a sigh of the type she imagined emitted by the heroine of a Rosa Carey novel.
Lord Maccon’s eyes were halfway between caramel and yellow, and he smelled of open fields. Alexia wondered if he had traveled home in wolf form.
“Husband, we must talk.”
“Aye, but later,” he muttered. He began hiking her nightgown up farther, turning his attention to less ticklish but no-less-sensitive areas of her body.
“I loathe this article of clothing.” He pulled the offending garment off and tossed it to its customary repose on the floor.
Lady Maccon went almost cross-eyed in her attempt to watch him as he moved predatorily the rest of the way up her body.
“You purchased it.” She squirmed down to bring herself in greater contact with his body, her excuse being that it was cold and he had yet to replace the covers.
“So I did. Remind me to stick to parasols from now on.”
His tawny eyes turned almost completely yellow; they tended to do that at this stage in the proceedings. Alexia loved it. Before she could protest, had she thought to, he swooped in for a full, all-absorbing kiss of the kind that, when they were standing, tended to make her knees go wobbly.
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