The phone rang suddenly and every single one of them froze, stunned that it really was happening. Storm reached for it, but Diana snatched it up first. She answered and put it against her ear. “Yes?” she said.
She listened to what the speaker on the other end was saying, and then she said, “We’ll see you there.”
When she hung up, Remi demanded, “Well?”
Diana turned to face them all looking a bit confused. “That was unexpected,” she said.
Chapter 28
DIANA
Storm and I arrived at the Ronin house and found that the door had been left open, just like the caller had said it would be. Leaving Storm, I made my own way down towards the rose garden cavern where I had agreed to meet the caller, who had insisted on speaking only with me and alone. Nobody else was to accompany me. Storm had not been pleased about staying waiting outside the house, but I had insisted. He had agreed only after a heated argument. I was still worried he would come after me.
As I walked through the house, the whole place was eerily quiet. I saw not a single servant. It was 2:00 pm, sleeping time for vampires, but where were all the human servants?
The caller was waiting for me at the same table where Finch and I had sat last time we were here. A pot of tea had been laid out, and biscuits and cakes. Audriett Ronin poured the tea for me as I took a seat.
“No sword, this time?” she asked.
I gave her a cool smile. “I don’t go anywhere without my sword.”
“I heard it had appeared out of nowhere,” she said. “Quite the trick.”
I accepted the cup of tea that she had passed to me in its pretty little saucer. “I’m surprised it was you,” I said. “I had been sure that it would be Marielle who called me.”
Audriette laughed. “Marielle is just a silly child playing games at being an elder vampire. She has much to learn.”
I wanted to ask Audriett whether she had really killed Leonie the way that I had thought she had. But that would have been giving my uncertainty away, and I needed to hold all my cards close to my chest. This was far from being over yet. I need her confession at the very least before Storm could arrest her.
“Why did you do it?” I asked.
“Because she wanted too much,” said Audriett coolly.
“That’s what her mother said. That she had become too greedy and grasping.”
Audrey yet scoffed. “Her mother.”
“Constance,” I said.
Audriett looked at me with surprise. “So you know. She admitted that much, then?”
“I still don’t understand why. You are the matriarch of this household, Gaius Ronin’s sister-wife. You gave him two sons, one his beloved damphir. Were you jealous that your precious son Steffane had fallen in love with an ordinary and sickly human girl?”
“Steffane would have tired of her in time, I thought.”
“But he didn’t tire of her? Was that it?”
“She could have had Steffane. I cared nothing for that. But the greedy grasping little bitch decided that wasn’t enough for her. She wanted to take what was mine.”
“Why did that matter? Surely Gaius would only have thought of her as Steffane’s unwanted cast-off?” Leone had been just a kid. I couldn’t imagine her succeeding in seducing an elder vampire like Gaius Ronin. And by all accounts, Gaius had had no interest in her.
“Do you know what my husband wanted most?” she said. “He wanted to build the most powerful vampire brood on this Earth. One powerful enough to challenge the might of the Ronin brood that we left behind in the Realm. I gave him two sons, but that was not enough for him. I understood his desire to breed with his pathetic sheep in the hopes of creating more children. But over the years none of them succeeded. Not a single one. Only I gave him his blood-kin children.”
“So you’re saying that Gaius would have happily used her for breeding purposes?” I said with distaste. “It still doesn’t explain why you would feel threatened. Surely she would have been the same as all the others? She would have tried and failed to give him children. He would have grown tired of her like he grew tired of her mother Constance. You would have carried on being his favorite.”
She nodded. “That’s what I thought at first. And then on the week before the party I found out that everything that I thought I knew was a lie. I overheard Leonie and Constance arguing. I discovered that Constance wasn’t Leonie’s aunt but her mother, and that Gaius knew all about it. And I thought why would the three of them lie to me about that? And then I realized the answer, and finally I understood why Gaius had agreed to let that scheming child stay in our home. It all suddenly made sense. She was his daughter!”
I was shocked but I did my best to hide it. I kept silent. I didn't want to interrupt her flow of words. It didn’t make sense. Leonie couldn't have been his daughter because that would have made her a sanguith. Sanguiths were weak and sickly. So fragile that they tired easily and spent much of their early years bedridden. Sanguiths needed to drink blood to survive. Leonie had been sickly but not weak. She had been strong and lively. Yes, her XP meant she had to stay out of sunlight, but she had been raised from a baby by Darya Palmer, who would have noticed if her baby had needed to drink blood.
Leonie could not have been a sanguith.
“They lied about when they met. Constance and Gaius had met a year before Constance moved into our home. He would never have had any interest in her, except she had managed to successfully grow pregnant with his child. So he kept her hidden away until she gave birth, and then they sent the baby to live with her brother. Because Gaius knew that I would have killed the child.”
“Would you have killed a baby?” I said.
“If she had been an ordinary sanguith, weak and sickly as they all are, perhaps not. But she was not ordinary. She was strong like me. And Gaius knew it. That is why he had to keep her hidden away. She was his secret hope for the future. For eighteen years he lied to me about it. Constance’s twin brother Joshua fed the child blood in secret, not even telling his wife. The pathetic man thought that he was protecting the child from Gaius. That was the lie that Constance told him, her own twin. And then, when the girl was fifteen, Gaius decided it was time to bring her to our home. So he arranged for Joshua Ashbeck to die in a car crash.”
I could not contain a gasp of surprise. It turned out that Darya Palmer had not been paranoid about that after all.
Audriett nodded. “He knew that the girl would begin to sicken straight away, now that her father was no longer there to secretly feed her blood. Even the girl had not known that blood was the special ingredient in the so-called medicine smoothies that her beloved father had made for her to drink twice a day. The girl weakened rapidly without the blood, and then Gaius swept in like a hero to save the day. She only learned what she was when she came to live with us. And Constance forced her to keep it secret, telling her that I would kill her if I found out. Too bad for them they were so pathetic at keeping their secrets quiet.”
“She was just a girl, a victim. She didn’t even know what she was! None of this was her fault.”
Audriett gave a snort of derision. “Oh how she had loved it when she realized that she was a sanguith. She came around to the idea very quickly, rejoicing that she wasn’t sick as she had been told her whole life. Suddenly she was special. How quickly her thirst for power grew. She thought she could replace me a mistress of this brood. The foolish creature.”
“So you killed her because you thought Gaius would want her to breed with? To give him more dhampir children? Didn’t you care that Steffane had fallen in love with her?”
“Gaius may have loved Steffane, but he did not know that Steffane and Leonie had grown besotted with each other. It would have incensed him. He would never have allowed Steffane to take Leonie. Leonie was born of Gaius’s blood. She would not have been able to resist Gaius’s mesmerism. She would have bent to his will like a flower in a storm.”
“Did Steffane know that she was a sa
nguith? Did you frame him because you were angry he had not told you?”
“Steffane did not know. The girl was glorying in keeping her special little secret, even from him.”
“Then how could you let Steffane take the blame for Leonie’s murder? You said he was your favorite. You said you loved him.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be Steffane who took her to bed that night,” she said. “I knew Gaius had been planning to bed her that night, and I was so angry with him for betraying me. I had done everything he wanted. I bore him many children though they all perished in my womb. I had weakened myself for him and nearly died giving him the dhampir son he so desired. But I was no longer useful to him. He was ready to move on. And I would not allow myself to be used and discarded. Not me.”
“You wanted to make him pay for it. So it was Gaius that you planned to frame for the murder?”
She nodded. “I spiked his glass of blood with the magical narcotics that Steffane had been imbibing all night. A strong dose, and I added a mixture of Vaerus X and colloidal silver to help it along. Enough to knock him out cold, so that when he awoke beside Leonie’s dead body he would not remember whether he had done it or not. And he would have been arrested, and been sick from the Vaerus X for weeks, unable to defend himself until it was too late for him to wriggle out of it. And I would have been free. Finally I would have been free of him. Free to rule this family as I saw fit.”
Woah. She was cold. I could not help feeling a smidgen of respect for her plan.
“And then it went wrong.” I stated, as if I knew exactly what had happened.
“I had already stabbed Leonie. All that was left was for Gaius to take her to bed. I had arranged for that fool Constance to be in Gaius’s bedroom so that he and Leonie would be forced to go to Leonie’s bedroom where I had planted the murder weapon.”
“The spike that you had stabbed Leonie with?” Suddenly I realized that I had seen the moment of the stabbing in my vision of Leonie in the rose garden cavern. She had been putting a flower in her hair and Audriett had bumped into her. That had been the moment, and I had not realized what I was seeing!
“Yes,” she hissed with satisfaction. “My plan was done. I retired for the night. How could I have known that was the night that Steffane would finally seduce Leonie and disappear off with her before Gaius could get to her? She went to Steffane’s room and Gaius ended up in bed with Constance, and I awoke the next day to discover my son being arrested for murder. Constance had discovered Leonie missing from her room and grown hysterical and already called the police.”
“Was it you that stole Leonie’s body from the morgue?”
“I arranged for a servant to do that. I could not afford for the coroner to discover that she had been stabbed and start asking questions.”
“And it was you who paid off Constance Ashbeck to say that Leonie had been terrified of Steffane? The cowboy worked for you?”
Her mouth twisted into a little smile. “The cowboy worked for Steffane and was loyal to him. But he could see the way the tide was turning and he was smart enough to make an arrangement with me. After all, who would keep him supplied with the vampire blood he was addicted to after Steffane went to jail if not me?”
“Aren’t you worried that Gaius will find what you’ve done to his precious son?”
Constance did not have a chance to answer. I felt something coming from behind me. I wasn’t a real feeling but just a puff of pressure in the psychic music that had been so calm all around us. Instantly I reacted.
One moment I was sitting in my chair, and the next I had shoved the chair back and I was on my feet with my sword in my hand just as Marielle appeared out of nowhere, coming for me with murder in her eyes. My sword arced through the air as she charged, and I watched in fascinated horror as it sliced her arm clean off. She screeched, arcing her body away from that deadly blade. She fell to the ground, clutching her severed upper arm.
She kicked her legs and scuttled away from me like a beetle, her eyes fixed on the sword. She was panting with fury. She was looking at Audriett and not at me.
“I knew it!” she shrieked. “I knew you would meet her to pay her off! Why couldn’t you just keep quiet? She’ll tell them that Rodrigge killed that girl! Once she has the money, she’ll tell them the truth!”
Marielle reached out to grab the hem of Audriett’s dress, but Audriett kicked her away in disgust.
“He did it for me!” Marielle screamed. “He got rid of Steffane because he loved me. You were always jealous that Rodrigge loved me!”
“You foolish creature,” Audriett said. “All these years you thought Rodrigge was the one that killed Leonie?”
Marielle did not realize that this was a question. “Leonie deserved it. She flirted with him and then she laughed at him and rejected him,” she shouted. She pointed at me. “We can’t let this bitch live. She’ll tell the Agency the truth about Rodrigge. If Gaius ever finds out that Rodrigge framed Steffane, Gaius will kill Rodrigge! You can’t let that happen! Please!”
“You fool!” sneered Audriett. “Gaius is no threat to us! Did you really think that he has been in seclusion all this time?”
Of all the things she had said, this shocked me most. “You’ve been keeping him sick!” I gasped.
“My was my master. He would have mesmerized me and found out what I had done to Steffane. He would have killed me. I had no other choice.”
“What do you mean?” Marielle wailed, her eyes wild. She still was not fully sure what was going on.
“It was so easy to keep him tamed in the end.” Audriett sneered. “For so many years I had been in thrall to him, so afraid and awed by his power. And in the end it was his mighty ego that reduced him into my puppet. He thinks he has never recovered from that one Vaerus X infection six years ago! He thinks I inject him with a medicine potion to keep the sickness from getting worse. The fool has no idea I inject him with the Vaerus X and colloidal silver to keep him weak. He is so ashamed of his affliction and inability to recover that he won’t allow anyone else to see him in that state except me. Isn’t it amusing?”
She seemed relieved to have finally been able to tell someone this after so long. She almost seemed to be boasting, proud of how she had brought her great master down low.
She turned to me. “How much do your people want to keep quiet?” She named an outrageous sum, and then she astonished me by adding, “Each.”
“No!” Marielle screeched. “No! No! No!”
She launched herself at me again so fast that if the sword had not tugged my arm into her direction, she might have got me this time. Instead, the blade of the sword went right through her chest. Through her heart. The sword seemed to ring with a mighty satisfaction. I could feel it radiating from the blade through the hilt and into my hand that was holding it. Marielle did not even screech. Something awful was happening to her. Her body was blackening before my eyes, and her face was frozen in a rictus of shock. Her mouth was open, as if she had been about to scream. No sound came out.
Her body turned black as ash and stiff as a coal, and then suddenly it just collapsed into a fine ash that drifted softly onto the ground. I couldn’t believe it. In that shocking moment, I thought that Audriett might try to attack me, but she merely said, “Well, that was unexpected.”
I didn’t say anything. I’d didn’t trust my voice to come out sounding anything but shocked. The sword was happy. The sword had done what it wanted. The sword was sending an emotion pulsing into me that made me want to dance about with joy and leap in victory. It was telling me I’d killed a bad bad thing and I should be celebrating. Perhaps if I hadn’t been so stunned by the suddenness of it I would be celebrating.
“Are we agreed on an amount?” said Audriett Ronin.
I pointed the tip of the sword right at her heart. “Sorry,” I said. “I already made a deal with your son Steffane.”
Chapter 29
DIANA
Five days had passed since Audriett Ronin h
ad made her confession and I had marched her at sword point up to the top floor of her house where Storm had been waiting to arrest her. It had taken five days to arrange and agree all the details of Steffane Ronin’s release with the various authorities involved.
The chief had been very pleased on his return to work on Monday with the team’s result, and even happier to be able to tell the vampire council and the embassy people how wrong they’d been.
It was Friday mid-morning and we were preparing to pick up Steffane Ronin from the prison and take him to a safe house. The plan was that Storm and I would be in the front of the car, and Leo would be in the back with Ronin. Storm had not wanted to take me along, but Ronin had insisted that his deal had been with me and he was only going to speak to me alone about the Devil Claw Killer.
Killer's Gambit Page 24