“For Pete’s sake, Conall,” said his Beta in tones of the deeply put-upon, “how did you manage to get so corned?” He tugged his Alpha away from the abused shed.
“Na drunk,” insisted his lordship, throwing one substantial arm across his Beta’s shoulders and leaning heavily upon it. “Jush a tiny little slightly small bit’a squiffy.” His lordship’s accent got distinctly more Scottish in times of great stress, strong emotion, or, apparently, under the influence of vast amounts of liquid intoxicants.
They left the safety of the potshed.
The earl pitched forward suddenly, his grip on his Beta the only thing that managed to keep him upright. “Whoa! Watch that bit’o ground there, would ya? Tricky, tricky, jumps right up at a man.”
“Where did you acquire the alcohol?” Professor Lyall asked again as he tried valiantly to get his Alpha back on track across the wide lawn of Woolsey’s extensive grounds, toward the castle proper. It was like trying to steer a steamboat through a tub of turbulent molasses. A normal human would have buckled under the strain, but Lyall was lucky enough to have supernatural strength to call upon at times of great difficulty. Lord Maccon wasn’t simply big; he was also tremendously solid, like a walking, talking Roman fortification.
“And how did you get all the way out here? I distinctly remember tucking you into bed before leaving your room last night.” Professor Lyall spoke very clearly and precisely, not entirely sure how much was seeping into his Alpha’s thick skull.
Lord Maccon’s head bobbed slightly as he attempted to follow Professor Lyall’s words.
“Went for a wee nightly run. Needed peace and quiet. Needed air in my fur. Needed fields under my paws. Needed, oh I canna—hic—explain… needed the company of hedgehogs.”
“And did you find it?”
“Find what? No hedgehogs. Stupid hedgehogs.” Lord Maccon tripped over a daphne bush, one of the many that lined the pathway leading up to a side entrance of the house. “Who bloody well put that there?”
“Peace, did you find peace?”
Lord Maccon stopped and drew himself upright, straightening his spine and throwing his shoulders back. It was an action driven by memory of military service. It caused him to positively tower over his second. Despite his ramrod-straight back, the Alpha managed to sway side to side, as if the aforementioned molasses-bound steamboat was now weathering a violent storm.
“Do I,” he enunciated very carefully, “look like I have found peace?”
Professor Lyall had nothing to say in response to that.
“Exactly!” Lord Maccon made a wide and flailing gesture. “She is wedged”—he pointed two thick fingers at his head as though they formed a pistol—“here.” Then rammed them at his chest. “And here. Canna shake her. Stickier than”—his powers of metaphor failed him—“stickier than… cold porridge getting all gloopy on the side of a bowl,” he finally came up with triumphantly.
Professor Lyall wondered what Lady Alexia Maccon would say to being compared to such a pedestrian foodstuff. She would probably compare her husband to something even less agreeable, like haggis.
Lord Maccon looked at his Beta with wide, soulful eyes, the color of which changed with his mood. Currently they were a watered-down caramel and highly unfocused. “Why’d she have ta go an do a thing like that?”
“I don’t think she did.” Professor Lyall had been meaning to have this out with his Alpha for some time. He had simply hoped the discussion would occur during one of Lord Maccon’s rare moments of sobriety.
“Well, then, why’d she lie about it?”
“No. I mean to say, I do not believe she was lying.” Lyall stood his ground. A Beta’s main function within the werewolf pack was to support his Alpha in all things—publicly, and to question him as much as possible—privately.
Lord Maccon cleared his throat and looked at his Beta in myopic seriousness from under fierce eyebrows. “Randolph, this may come as a shock, but I am a werewolf.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Two hundred and one years of age.”
“Yes, my lord.”
“Pregnancy, under such circumstances, you must understand, is not possible.”
“Certainly not for you, my lord.”
“Thank you, Randolph, that is verra helpful.”
Professor Lyall had thought it rather funny, but he’d never been much good at humor. “But, sir, we understand so very little about the preternatural state. And the vampires never did like the idea of you marrying her. Could it be they knew something?”
“Vampires always know something.”
“About what might happen. About the possibility of a child, I mean.”
“Poppycock! The howlers would have said somewhat to me at the outset.”
“Howlers do not always remember everything, do they? They cannot remember what happened to Egypt, for one.”
“God-Breaker Plague? You saying Alexia is pregnant with the God-Breaker Plague?”
Lyall didn’t even dignify that with an answer. The God-Breaker Plague was the werewolf moniker for the fact that in Egypt supernatural abilities were rendered negligible. It could not, by any stretch of the imagination, act as a paternal agent.
They finally made it to the castle, and Lord Maccon was momentarily distracted by the Herculean task of trying to climb steps.
“You know,” continued the earl in outraged hurt once he’d attained the small landing, “I groveled for that woman. Me!” He glared at Professor Lyall. “An’ you told me to!”
Professor Lyall puffed out his cheeks in exasperation. It was like trying to have a conversation with a distracted and very soggy scone. Every time he pushed in one direction the earl either oozed or crumbled. If he could simply get Lord Maccon off the sauce he might be able to talk some sense into him. The Alpha was notoriously emotional and heavy-handed in these matters, prone to flying off the cogs, but he could usually be brought around to reason eventually. He wasn’t all that dim.
Professor Lyall knew Lady Maccon’s character; she might be capable of betraying her husband, but if she had done so, she would admit to it openly. Thus, logic dictated she was telling the truth. Lyall was enough of a scientist to conclude from this that the currently accepted gospel truth, that supernatural creatures could not impregnate mortal women, was flawed. Even Lord Maccon, pigheaded and hurt, could be convinced of this line of reasoning eventually. After all, the earl could not possibly want to believe Alexia capable of infidelity. At this point, he was simply wallowing.
“Don’t you think it’s about time you sobered up?”
“Wait, lemme ponder that.” Lord Maccon paused, as though giving the matter deep consideration. “Nope.”
They made their way inside Woolsey Castle, which was no castle at all but more a manor with delusions of dignity. There were stories about the previous owner that no one entirely believed, but one thing was for certain: the man had an unhealthy passion for flying buttresses.
Lyall was grateful to be out of the sun. He was old enough and strong enough not to be bothered by direct sunlight for short lengths of time, but that didn’t mean he enjoyed the sensation. It felt like a tingling buzz just underneath the skin, highly unpleasant. Lord Maccon, of course, never seemed to notice sunlight at all, even when he was sober—Alphas!
“So where are you acquiring the alcohol, my lord?”
“Didna drink—hic—any alcohol.” Lord Maccon winked at his Beta and patted him on the shoulder affectionately, as though they were sharing some great secret.
Lyall was having none of that. “Well, my lord, I think perhaps you would have had to.”
“Nope.”
A tall, striking blond, with a perennially curled lip and hair in a military queue, rounded a corner of the hall and halted upon seeing them. “Is he soused again?”
“If you mean, ‘is he drunk still?’ then, yes.”
“Where, in all that is holy, is he getting the plonk?”
“Do you think I haven’t tried to
figure that out? Don’t just stand there gawping. Make yourself useful.”
Major Channing Channing of the Chesterfield Channings slouched reluctantly over to brace his pack leader from the other side. Together the Beta and the Gamma steered their Alpha down the hall to the central staircase, up several floors, over, and up the final steps to the earl’s tower sleeping chamber. They managed this with only three casualties: Lord Maccon’s dignity (which hadn’t very far to fall at that point), Major Channing’s elbow (which met a mahogany finial), and an innocent Etruscan vase (which died so that Lord Maccon could lurch with sufficient exaggeration).
During the course of the proceedings, Lord Maccon started to sing. It was some obscure Scottish ballad, or perhaps some newer, more modern piece about cats dying—it was difficult to tell with Lord Maccon. Before his metamorphosis, he had been a rather well-thought-of opera singer, or so the rumors went, but all remnants of pitch were shredded beyond hope of salvation during his change to supernatural state. His skill as a singer had fled along with the bulk of his soul, leaving behind a man who could inflict real pain with the slightest ditty. Metamorphosis, reflected Lyall, wincing, was kinder to some than to others.
“Dinna wanna,” objected his lordship at the entrance to his sleeping chamber. “Reminds me.”
There was no trace of Alexia left in the room. She’d cleared out all of her personal possessions as soon as she returned from Scotland. But the three men in the doorway were werewolves; they merely needed to sniff the air and her scent was there—vanilla with a trace of cinnamon.
“This is going to be a long week,” said Channing in exasperation.
“Just help me get him into bed.”
The two werewolves managed, through dint of cajoling and brute force, to get Lord Maccon into his large four-poster bed. Once there, he flopped facedown, and almost immediately began snoring.
“Something simply must be done about him.” Channing’s accent was that of the privileged elite. It irritated Professor Lyall that the Gamma had never bothered to modify it over the decades. In the modern age, only elderly dowagers with too many teeth still spoke English that way.
Lyall refrained from comment.
“What if we have a challenger or a bid for metamorphosis? We should be getting more of both now that he has successfully changed a female into a werewolf. You cannot keep Lady Kingair a secret in Scotland forever.” Channing’s tone was full of both pride and annoyance. “Claviger petitions have already escalated; our Alpha should be handling those, not spending his days falling down drunk. This behavior is weakening the pack.”
“I can hold the challengers off,” said Professor Lyall with no shame, no modesty, and no boasting. Randolph Lyall might not be as large, nor as overtly masculine, as most werewolves but he had earned the right to be Beta in London’s strongest pack. Earned it so many times over and in so many ways that few questioned his right anymore.
“But you have no Anubis Form. You cannot cover for our Alpha in every way.”
“Just you mind your Gamma responsibilities, Channing, and leave me to see to the rest.”
Major Channing gave both Lord Maccon and Professor Lyall disgusted looks and then strode from the room, the tail of his long, blond hair swaying in annoyance.
Professor Lyall had intended to do the same, minus the long, blond hair, but he heard a whispered, “Randolph,” come from the wide bed. He made his way along the side of the big feather mattress to where the earl’s tawny eyes were once more open and unfocused.
“Yes, my lord?”
“If”—the earl swallowed nervously—“if I am wrong, and I’m na saying I am, but if I am, well, I’ll have to grovel again, won’t I?”
Professor Lyall had seen Lady Maccon’s face when she returned home to pack up her clothing and quit Woolsey Castle. She wasn’t big on crying—practical minded, tough, and unemotional even at the worst of times, like most preternaturals—but that didn’t mean she wasn’t utterly gutted by her husband’s rejection. Professor Lyall had seen a number of things in his lifetime he hoped never to see again; that look of hopelessness in Alexia’s dark eyes was definitely one of them.
“I am not convinced groveling will be quite sufficient in this instance, my lord.” He was not disposed to allow his Alpha any quarter.
“Ah. Well, bollocks,” said his lordship eloquently.
“That is the least of it. If my deductions are correct, she is also in very grave danger, my lord. Very grave.”
But Lord Maccon had already gone back to sleep.
Professor Lyall went off to hunt down the earl’s source of inebriation. Much to his distress, he found it. Lord Maccon hadn’t lied. It was, in fact, not alcohol at all.
* * *
Alexia Maccon’s parasol had been designed at prodigious expense, with considerable imagination and much attention to detail. It could emit a dart equipped with a numbing agent, a wooden spike for vampires, a silver spike for werewolves, a magnetic disruption field, and two kinds of toxic mist, and, of course, it possessed a plethora of hidden pockets. It had recently been entirely overhauled and refurbished with new ammunition, which, unfortunately, did little to improve its appearance. It was not a very prepossessing accessory, for all its serviceability, being both outlandish in design and indifferent in shape. It was a drab slate-gray color with cream ruffle trim, and it had a shaft in the new ancient Egyptian style that looked rather like an elongated pineapple.
Despite its many advanced attributes, Lady Maccon’s most common application of the parasol was through brute force enacted directly upon the cranium of an opponent. It was a crude and perhaps undignified modus operandi to be certain, but it had worked so well for her in the past that she was loath to rely too heavily upon any of the newfangled aspects of her parasol’s character.
Thus she left Lord Akeldama’s chubby calico reclining in untroubled indolence and dashed to the side of the door, parasol at the ready. It was an odd set of coincidences, but every time she visited Lord Akeldama’s drawing room something untoward happened. Perhaps this was not quite so surprising if one knew Lord Akeldama intimately.
A top hat, with attached head, peeked into the room and was soon followed by a dashing figure sporting a forest-green velvet frock coat and leather spats. For a moment, Alexia almost pulled back on her swing, thinking the intruder was Biffy. Biffy was Lord Akeldama’s favorite, and prone to wearing things like velvet frock coats. But then the young man glanced toward her hiding spot—a round face sporting muttonchops and a surprised expression. Not Biffy, for Biffy abhorred muttonchops. The parasol hurtled in the unfortunate gentleman’s direction.
Thwack!
The young man shielded his head with a forearm, which took the brunt of the blow, and then twisted to the side and out of the parasol’s reach.
“Good gracious me,” he exclaimed, backing away warily and rubbing at his arm. “I say there, do hold your horses! Pretty poor showing, walloping a gent with that accessory of yours without even a by-your-leave.”
Alexia would have none of it. “Who are you?” she demanded, changing tactics and pressing one of the lotus petals on the shaft of her parasol, arming the tip with a numbing dart. This new stance did not look quite so threatening, as she now appeared to be about to issue a prod instead of a thwack.
The young gentleman, however, remained respectfully wary. He cleared his throat. “Boots, Lady Maccon. Emmet Wilberforce Bootbottle-Fipps, but everyone calls me Boots. How do you do?”
Well, there was no excuse for rudeness. “How do you do, Mr. Bootbottle-Fipps?”
The self-titled Boots continued. “All apologies for not being someone more important, but there’s no need to take on so vigorously.” He eyed the parasol with deep suspicion.
Alexia lowered it.
“What are you, then?”
“Oh, no one of significance, my lady. Just one of Lord Akeldama’s”—a hand waved about, indicating the general splendor of the house—“newer boys.” The young gentleman p
aused, frowning in concentration and stroking one of his muttonchops. “He left me behind to tell you something. A sort of secret message.” He winked conspiratorially and then seemed to think better of the flirtation when the parasol was raised against him once more. “I think it is in code.” He laced his hands behind his back and stood up straight as though about to recite some long Byronic poem. “Now what was it? You were expected sooner, and my memory is not so… Ah, yes, check the cat.”
“That was all he had to tell me?”
Green-clad shoulders shrugged. “ ’Fraid so.”
They spent several moments staring at each other in silence.
Finally, Boots cleared his throat delicately. “Very good, Lady Maccon. If you do not require anything further?” And without waiting for her to reply, he turned to leave the room. “Pip pip. Must, you understand, press on. Top of the morning to you.”
Alexia trailed him out of the room. “But where have they all gone?”
“Can’t tell you that, I’m afraid, Lady Maccon. I understand it’s not safe. Not safe at all.”
Alexia’s confusion turned to worry.
“Not safe for whom? You, me, or Lord Akeldama?” She noticed he hadn’t actually admitted to knowing his master’s new location.
Boots paused at the door and looked back. “Now, don’t you worry, Lady Maccon; it’ll be all right in the end. Lord Akeldama will see to it. He always does.”
“Where is he?”
“Why, with the others, of course. Where else would he be? Off and about, you know how it goes. A goodly numbered hunting party has gone afield, you understand, tracking, as it were. Gone to find…” He trailed off. “Oops. Never you mind, Lady Maccon. Just attend to what his lordship said about the cat. Toodles.” And, with that, he gave her a funny little half bow and let himself out of the house.
Alexia, mystified, returned to the drawing room where the calico still held court. The only thing odd about the animal, apart from the creature’s murderous tendencies toward tassels, was the metal collar about her neck. Alexia unclipped it and took it over to the window to examine it in the sunlight. It was thin enough to unroll into a flat ribbon and had been punched all along in an apparently random pattern of dots. It reminded Alexia of something. She ran one glove-covered fingertip along the indentations, trying to remember.
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