Garrett Investigates

Introduction to “Twilight”

If we’re very lucky, at the end of our lives, we get to have and keep the thing we wanted most—if we can figure out what it was.

Twilight

London, 1941

The woman on the doorstep had drawn her black hood to a dripping peak that shaded her face. Dark gloves concealed the long hands that tugged her oilcloth cloak tight under her chin. Behind her, the night glistened and rang with rain.

The wampyr knew her by her smell, though the storm and something else had left a cool edge on it. One without the hissing allure of living blood moving beneath warm skin.

“Mary,” he said, and held the door wide. “Come in.”

“Don Sebastien.” She mounted the threshold. Careful of the rugs, she shed her dripping oilskin. She had a firm step for one he would have expected to find bent with age, tottering on a cane.

But she was as tall and straight as she had ever been, her medium-brown skin and mulatto features uncoarsened by age. Some gray stroked her temples—her wiry hair had grown long, and she wore it pulled back in a tight oiled bun now rather than caught up under a kerchief. Laugh lines showed at the corners of her eyes, but that was all.

He shut and locked the door behind her. When he took her coat and gloves, her hand was cool and soft.

Ah. So.

“No servants to open the door, Don Sebastien?” she asked, her eyes sparkling. The years had not amended her American accent, though the demure pink seed pearls at her throat spoke of money and Parisian pre-war fashion.

The wampyr had heard she’d done well for herself in France. And then the curtain of Prussian occupation had fallen across Europe, and he had heard very little more.

“Jason and Mrs. Moyer are abed,” he said. “And in any case, it does not trouble me.” He smiled. “I was awake.”

She nodded. Shed of her cloak, she stood revealed as a spare, tall woman clad in sensible black-and-white tweed, her heeled shoes laced over the arches. The seashell color of her blouse matched the pearls. It might have been silk, but Sebastien thought it rather one of the new synthetic fabrics. It smelled faintly of chemicals.

“You heard,” he said.

“More, I bring news you won’t have. Is she awake, then?”

“She sleeps not much more than I do, these days. She’s old, but she’s a sorcerer. She may live ten years yet. If you have come to see her, you’ve come in plenty of time.” Sebastien thrush his hands into his pockets, squeezing the hard flesh of his thighs with his hands. It was too late to say it, but he could not hold his tongue. “Mary. You know that this decision you have made will eventually leave you unstuck in time. Drifting. You will lose everything.”

“Sebastien,” she said. “I lost everything long before I entered Lady Abigail Irene’s service.”

He looked at her. He did not say to her, Your definition of ‘everything’ will change.

“If you need me,” he said, “I am ever your friend. Remember that in centuries to come.”


Garrett lay across her bed, drowsing irritably. There was no sleep to be had. She wondered if her body’s last rebellion against the long sleep to come was to abandon all the little ones.

So when her bedroom door cracked gently, even the softness of a wampyr’s approach alerted her. She didn’t need her spectacles to identify the slender frame silhouetted through the crack.

She pushed herself up on her elbows, which was enough effort to set her heart racing. How far we have fallen. “Well, don’t just stand there like Patience on a monument. I heard the voices. Who’s here?”

“Mary Ballard.”

She would have rubbed at her ears, if she hadn’t been using both hands to haul herself upright. It was a name she had not heard in years. “Mary?” she asked, despising her own querulousness. “My Mary?”

By the movement of his silhouette, he nodded. She groped on the nightstand for her spectacles and balanced them on her nose, fumbling with the arms because her fingers trembled. When she had them set to her satisfaction, she blinked to clear her vision. “I must see her at once.”

“She is not,” Sebastien said, delicately, “as she was. But I will fetch her for you.” He paused then, already turning, and looked back over his shoulder.


Never had Garrett so disdained the wheelchair to which her infirmity now largely limited her. She allowed Sebastien to help her dress, to brush her hair, to fit socks and house-shoes over her horny feet. The arthritis curled her toes in on themselves; when she walked at all, she hobbled like a spavined horse, and she did not walk far.

Even with his help, it took twenty minutes to struggle into her clothes. And then she had to nerve herself—it was as well Sebastien was pushing her, because she was not certain she could have made herself roll down the hall into the drawing room. Mary, alive. Mary, undead.

Mary, a wampyr.

All down the long hallway, she wondered if Sebastien would have done that for her. She thought of his children, the members of his court—the ones she had met, the ones she had watched die. Was it worse for him, she wondered, when children (inevitably) left him, or when courtesans aged and died?

Or was it worst of all when the children burned before your eyes?

Her hands knotted with fear and anticipation as the wheels whirred and squeaked down the long wooden boards of the hall, into the drawing room with its sprigged wallpaper, upright piano, and low shelves of books.

Then they entered and Mary stood to meet them, and all Garrett’s worry fell away. Mary crossed the room in three quick strides, her calves flashing under the hem of her skirt—Garrett would never get used to women’s legs made so plainly visible—and bent to encircle Garrett gently in her arms. She held her with such fragility that Garrett almost wanted to pound on her back and demand a better hug than that, but a wampyr’s strength was nothing to mock.

Instead, she put her crabbed and spotted hands on Mary’s fine shoulders and set her back so she could regard her better.

Mary disentangled herself gently from Garrett’s grip. “The war is over. The occupation of Paris is ended. And I hear through the grapevine that it’s you I have to thank?”

“Mine was only one small part of it,” Garrett said. She glanced at Sebastien. He steepled his fingers and leaned one elbow on the marble mantel, doing his undead best to impersonate a stick of furniture. A hat rack, perhaps. A very narrow armoire.

It had been his doing more than hers, the death of the Prussian Chancellor at the hands of one of his own berserker Ulfhethinn guards. For all his determination to leave politics alone, Sebastien’s courtesans had a way of drawing him into the world.

That Mary knew about Ruth Grell and her long-planned assassination told Garrett a good deal about how Mary had spent her war. “You were in the Resistance in France, I gather?”

“Once a detective, always so,” Mary said. Her diction had grown more polished; Garrett imagined it was the result of much effort. “Thank God it’s over now. The worst of it. There’s still the hungry to be fed and governments and industry to rebuild, of course…”

“I lived to see it end,” Garrett said. “And look at you.”

Mary smiled. It made no dimples in her thin cheeks. “I’ve kept up on your exploits. You’ve had a busy forty years.”

“And I have heard so little of yours,” Garrett replied, “that you must now tell me everything. Sit, please. I’d ring for tea, but Mrs. Moyer is in bed.”

“It would be wasted on me.” Carefully, tucking her skirt with her hands, Mary settled again on the cream velvet divan opposite. “Tea, I miss.”

She offered it up like an admission, a confidence, and Garrett accepted it the same way. “Who was it—” she glanced at Sebastien, not sure if what she was about to ask was a terrible breach of etiquette among the blood. Sebastien’s face remained impassive. “Who made you?”

Mary smiled. “Alice Marjorie,” she said. “A friend of Sebastien’s.”

“Tea, I can make,” Sebastien said, and evaporated from his corner as if a wampyr could in fact sublimate away to a bank of mist. Garrett barely heard the door close behind him.

She did not miss the ease with which Mary said Sebastien’s name, dropping the title he was no more entitled to than the name itself.

“But that must have been before the Prussian invasion,” Garrett said. “You look—no more than ten years older, I should say, than when I saw you last. And I cannot imagine those bastards would have been kind to you.”

Her fierceness did not surprise her, but Mary blinked.

“Doctor Garrett—”

“Abby Irene,” she said. Of course Mary would remember what she had lost, when she fled America, and would not call her by the Crown Investigator’s title that had been stripped from her. “Please. If you can stomach it. If we are not old friends…” She sighed. “I cannot imagine calling you Miss Ballard, though I will if it makes you more comfortable.”

“Abby Irene.” Mary smiled. “Maybe I should get my business out of the way before you make any such decisions. I come with an invitation. On behalf of the King. He wishes you to be present when he returns to English soil.”

“King Phillip?” Garrett’s hand pressed to her breastbone, to the cloth that covered the faded remains of her sorcerer’s tattoo. “He asked for—me?”

“For you,” Mary said. “And for Sebastien—John Chaisty, I should say, though he knows that is an alias. And for your friend Mrs. Smith. Apparently his ministers are well-aware of the actions of the English Underground, and how directly they led to his reinstatement. And I think he knows too, of your relationship with his uncle.”

Phillip II’s uncle, Prince Henry—Garrett’s once-lover—had died in the Fall of London. Henry had been instrumental in spiriting the young Phillip—newly King of England on his father’s death, neither yet crowned nor consecrated—onto the aeroplane that had borne him, in an unprecedented midnight flight, across the wide Atlantic to Iceland and from there to the safety of New Amsterdam.

Garrett would have braided her fingers together, but it hurt, so she settled for clasping one hand inside the other. “Don’t you have a telephone in that shiny modern palace? Or did the Prussians take them all with them when they fled?”

“I do.” Mary smiled. “But it seemed too late to ring you.”


Garrett waited in the drawing room with Mary while Sebastien went in to wake Phoebe. Phoebe must have been roused by the conversation, however, because it wasn’t long at all before she had joined them downstairs—a vigorous little white-haired lady with a stoop, clad in a green knit dress and support stockings that hid most of the spider veins in her calves. She swept into the drawing room a few steps in advance of Sebastien, pulling him along like a toy bobbing in her wake.

“Miss Ballard,” she said, not batting an eye. “What a pleasure to see you again.”

Mary stood, as she had stood for Garrett, and smiled. Her surprise when Phoebe offered her a hand was palpable, but she took it. “Please,” she said. “Call me Mary.”

“Then I am Phoebe,” Phoebe said—and that being settled, and Sebastien having brought the promised tea, she sat herself down beside Mary and began cheerfully quizzing her about her adventures since they all had parted ways in Paris, so many decades ago.

“Sebastien has brought me up to date,” she said. “But you must tell me how on earth you wound up running errands for the King-in-Exile.”

“It’s a funny story,” Mary said, frowning at the tea with obvious longing. Garrett grimaced. Perhaps she should have forestalled Sebastien, so as not to tempt their guest with what she could not have. But then, it was Garrett’s experience with the blood that they found most food odors nauseating. “You see, after I left your company in Paris, I could not see myself taking up work as a domestic again. The intrigues and adventures of living in your house—” she smiled at Garrett “—quite spoiled me.”

Garrett leaned forwards. “So what did you do?”

“Ah,” said Mary. “Thereby hangs the tale. For you see, it occurred to me that in Paris I was the exotic. And I thought, I must learn the language, beyond the little you had taught me, and learn it quickly. So I put aside the severance package you had paid me, and I found work…” Her smile was enigmatic. “I found work in a bar.”

“I cannot picture you a barmaid,” Garrett said.

“I was a good one,” said Mary. “But not for too long. Only a couple of years, until I could make myself understood, and understand most of what was said to me. Then, I fear, I truly capitalized on my prior employment.”

“You became a detective,” Sebastien said, from his place by the mantel.

Mary grinned, showing tea-stained teeth in a broad smile. “You are ahead of me.”

“I beg your pardon,” he said, making a pretty bow of apology.

Garrett blinked. Was Sebastien flirting with her former housekeeper?

…and indeed, if he was, what of it? “Please,” she said, “Mary. Continue.”

“I fell in love with Paris. I could have stayed there forever, had the city herself but proved as unchanging as my love. In any case, I did not want for work, though mine was of a more prosaic sort than yours. I sought out cheating husbands and deadbeat debtors, not sorcerers and monsters in the night. But it was a living, and from observing your methods I developed my own.

“Eventually, my former employment with you led to the most interesting of cases. Do you remember Dr. Tesla?”

Garrett felt her eyebrows rise. “How could I forget him?”

“He hired me to track down a thief. This was a case that resulted in some notoriety, and guaranteed me steady business until the war came to us, in ’22.” She looked down at her hands. Garrett thought if she were alive, she would be weeping. “Paris,” she said, “is not what it was.”

“You joined the Underground,” Phoebe said, stirring her second cup of tea. Brightness was returning to her expression.

“I did. And there I met Alice Margorie, who took me in as her courtesan and eventually made me what I am today.” Mary looked directly at Sebastien now. “Grandfather.”

Sebastien looked down at his hands. “It suits you.”

“I am grateful to you for showing me that our kind are not monsters, but erratic beings of good and evil, love and hate—like any human thing.”

Sebastien bowed in silence.

“In any case, I was well-established within the Resistance by the time London fell. And I was one of the ones sent to spirit Phillip away during the invasion—although of course I could not risk the plane.” She curled her fingertips into the flesh of her leg. It was still soft, Abby Irene noticed, and the divan dented under her weight as it never would when Sebastien sat there. Mary was dead, but young. “I met him again in America, since I was a native there, and I have been with him—protecting him—ever since this summer.”

“A wampyr? In America?”

“Things have changed,” she said. “They do not burn the blood on sight there anymore, Sebastien.”

He licked dry lips with a colorless tongue. He had lost one child to colonials, and nearly his own life too. But that was long ago, half a lifetime by humanity’s mayfly standard, when America still languished under English rule.

Now it was an independent nation, in no small part due to Sebastien’s efforts, and things were bound to be different.

Garrett cleared her throat. She should have drunk more tea. “And you came back with him.”

“In advance of him, more precisely. It is not generally known,” Mary said. “But he flies in before dawn. Tomorrow afternoon, there will be a fanfare—but he wants a few hours to feel the earth of Albion beneath his feet beforehand.”

With uncommon gentleness, Phoebe said, “It has been thirteen years.”

Mary nodded. “And he understands, as one who…who also considers one of the blood his friend…that afternoon is not the best time to meet with you.”

Sebastien would have held his breath in shock, did he breathe. Surely, she was not implying—

“After His Majesty’s formal presentation to his people, there will be a reception at Greenwich Palace. His Majesty would like to see you there. You, Lady Abigail Irene. And you, Mrs. Smith. And you most especially, Monsieur Amédée Gosselin.”

Sebastien smiled, but it was a cool smile, and Garrett could tell already that he was unsettled. “This new King Phillip has no objection to wampyrs?”

“Oh, quite the opposite,” Mary said, with a small, pleased catlike smile. “I think you’ll find.”

He was too old and experienced to be surprised that someone he had known as a servant in apron and kerchief could be so very bold. She’d always been a woman of uncommon bravery, as one must to accompany Lady Abigail Irene Garrett anywhere.

But for a wampyr to seduce the King of England? That took a certain kind of gall.

Don Sebastien de Ulloa, ancient of his kind, was impressed.


Mary had brought a car—a Prussian staff car, it happened, with the Teutonic eagle crudely painted over on its grey doors and a gold lion stenciled in its place—and so it was not necessary for Sebastien to wake Jason, the household’s driver. Instead, he left a note for Mrs. Moyer the housekeeper, and helped Mary’s driver load Abby Irene’s wheelchair and bag into the boot while Mary saw to Abby Irene herself.

The drive to the palace was uneventful, London’s roads deserted at this cold and rainy hour of morning. Though the curfew of the Prussian occupiers was finally lifted, the habit of early retiring had not yet entirely broken its hold on London. The streets were not safe in the absence of law and the presence of shortages.

In a quick crisis, Sebastien had noticed, people became more altruistic. But over the long term they began to sneak and hoard—and England has been under siege for over a year. The rule of law must be reinstated, and quickly, before the sort of people who preyed on others realized how secure their position had become.

The palace itself, however, was quietly alive. If Sebastien had expected bustle and fuss, he was disappointed—but electric lamps burned in nearly every window of the long white facade, and the long sweep of drive had been raked and swept. Through the colonnaded walkways and across the courtyard, he glimpsed the dark sparkle of the Thames.

As he got out of the car, he paused to look at the flagpole, naked of standards in the rain and the dark, and imagined the Union Jack snapping there. The palace had not been a royal residence since before the reign of Alexandria, serving in the interim as a military hospital. But the Prussians had claimed it as a command center, and now—apparently—Phillip II expected to make it the center of his reign.

The symbolism was strong. Phillip’s grandmother had been born here, and many a King and Queen of England before her. It was here that Geoffrey II had taken the surrender of the Portuguese, and here that his great-great grandson had received the emissaries of Holland-in-Exile when they signed their colonies over to English rule.

It was an auspicious place for—not a coronation, for Phillip had been crowned in exile in the Americas—but a triumphant return to an England newly washed clean in the blood of her enemies. Except Sebastien was uncertain that any amount of blood could truly wash something clean.

But it was the nature of nations, he had observed, to act as if their existence had some objective, intrinsic value and meaning. And corporations, that relatively new colonial excrescence, did not bode to develop any better.

The driver had run around to open Abby Irene’s door, and Mary—with as much familiarity and ease as if forty years had not gone to dust in the interim—was helping her into the wheelchair she despised. It was a side effect of sorcery, it seemed, that allowed those of its practitioners who did not die young and violently live to unprecedented ages. But sorcery could not prevent the infirmity that came with age. Just as vampirism could not prevent the loneliness.

Together, the two old women and the two immortals proceeded towards the palace doors, as the car glided away into the night. Mary and Sebastien must carry Abby Irene’s chair up the steps between them, and Sebastien feared her response—but Mary had the wit to make a joke of it. And so Abby Irene angled her black umbrella like a parasol, and nodded gravely to each side as any Eastern queen in a palanquin.

Her weight was nothing to two of the blood, and the pause to situate her again on the landing gave Sebastien time to examine the façade of the great door, hewn with unrepaired scars on the pale wood where the Prussian eagles had been prized loose.

They set her down before that door as it swung inward, and an East Indian man resplendent in a footman’s uniform bowed low beside the frame. “Honored guests,” he said. “We were expecting you.”

A palace was a residence. Sebastien hesitated at the threshold.

“Please,” Mary said, directly to him. “Come inside.”

The wheels of Abby Irene’s chair squeaked over dished flagstones. The Prussians had taken the carpets, as well.


Garrett had seen photographs.

But nothing could have prepared her for the actual face of the man who awaited them in room the footman bowed them into, the first fully-furnished room they had come to. He was of slightly above-average height, his hair glossy black and curly enough that no amount of hair wax could tame it. A sprinkle of gray hairs at the temple loaned him a certain air of dignity, and his eyes were creased at the corners, as if he spent a good deal of time in the sun.

He wore an unassuming gray suit of excellent cut, and his only jewelry was a red stone in gold on his right hand, and a wedding band on the left.

Henry, Garrett thought. But Henry was dead, had died saving this man.

“Your Majesty,” she said, as Mary and Phoebe curtseyed to either side, and Sebastien bowed at her back. “Forgive me if I do not stand.”

“At your ease,” he said. “Please. Lady Abigail Irene, Don Sebastien. Mrs. Smith. Mary.”

At his gesture, the footman shut the door behind them and withdrew. All around Garrett, her companions rose, and stood somewhat uncertainly in their places.

The King of England moved to a blue velvet chair in the corner and seated himself. He gestured to a marble-topped sideboard—once ornate, now somewhat banged around but serviceable—with a liquor service on top. “Help yourselves to brandy. Those of you who can. And please, take seats.”

Sebastien, ever the gentleman, poured two snifters and brought one each to Garrett and Phoebe, before settling himself beside Phoebe on a fainting couch. Mary stood by the door, her long arms folded over her belly.

The king raised his eyebrows at her. She nodded. I am content to stand.

No, joining the ranks of the blood had not changed Mary overmuch.

“Thank you for coming,” the king said. It was a needless pleasantry—they were on his soil and so his to command, for all they had each risked their lives to win that soil back for him. Garrett prickled, wondering if she should take offense at the hypocrisy or pleasure that he treated them as equals.

But the others were waiting for her to speak. “Your Majesty,” she said. “What we did we did not for reward, but because we could not bear the Prussian boot on English soil.”

She glanced at Mary. Mary’s eyes were forward, her face set in the stone dispassion of the professional servant. No help there.

She wondered, if Mary had to pick sides, which side she would fall upon.

“A reward you shall have nonetheless,” he said. “It is through your offices that the Chancellor fell; it is through your efforts that we sit here, in our great-grandfather’s palace. Dr. Garrett, you have not always been the truest friend of the Crown—”

Phoebe made a sound of protest, quickly throttled. Phillip gave her a slight, sideways glance, but she did not blush or look down.

“—but,” he continued, “you have been a good friend to England. Except inasmuch as the Crown is England.”

“It presents a complication,” Garrett agreed. She folded her hands over her lap-robe, the brandy resting in the topmost. By the aroma, it was excellent. She mourned that, given her age and the degradation of her senses, its excellence would be wasted on her.

“I would like to offer you a stipend,” he said, dropping into an informal—and personal—mode of speech. “Though my resources are not what they should be, and though the Prussians made off with the Crown Jewels as well as everything else of value on this island—it seems the least I can do.”

And if you will put me on the shelf, Garrett thought,

at least you will set someone to dust around me. But what else could he do with her? She still had her mind, and her wit, and her sorcery—even in a failing body, those remained strong.

“You will of course be pardoned fully, and invited to participate in the return of the Enchancery’s library to the Crown.”

And there was the true hook in the bait. She had preserved those books, and the archives of the Crown Investigators, all through the long years of occupation. It had not been an endeavor without risk—but even that was not enough to win Phillip’s trust.

She would die Lady Abigail Irene, or Doctor Garrett. And the thing she had fought to win and retain the first fifty years of her life, the title and work of Crown Investigator, would remain beyond her reach.

She would have liked to spend her last years teaching the next generation of forensic sorcerers. Instead she was to be packed away like a wedding goblet, like Gwenevere in her cloister.

“Thank you, your Majesty,” she said.

“The library,” he said, “will be catalogued and archived.”

She cleared her throat. “Excuse me, your Majesty.”

Raising his eyebrows at her, he nodded. “Speak your mind.”

“Will the library not be returned to the Enchancery? It was for that purpose that I preserved it—”

“That remains uncertain,” he said. “Frankly, there are not enough of your former colleagues remaining—”

She felt Phoebe shift beside her. Sebastien was too well-practiced to give so much away. “Your Majesty,” Garrett said urgently. “Allow me, if there is no other.

“Lady Abigail Irene. I will take it under consideration.” He turned his attention to her right. “And as for you, Mrs. Smith, I should like to create you Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and offer you a full pardon for whatever was done during the late war with the colonies.”

“That is very gracious,” Phoebe said.

The king said, “Don Sebastien, I am afraid that there is little service I can do you in return, but you have my word that so long as I am King, you and your kind will be welcome on British soil, and subject to the same laws as any of my subjects.”

Garrett glanced over her shoulder in time to catch the quirk of Sebastien’s smile. There was a hook there, of course: for his kind to reproduce required a murder. But he nodded, and seemed about to speak when the door opened without so much as a knock and a ginger-haired woman in an elegant cream silk dress entered. She might have been in her mid twenties, a little more than half the king’s age, and modestly pretty—but she was doing everything possible with that prettiness.

Her clothes and hair were impeccable, her matching shoes pristine to the soles. She extended a hand with the nails painted shell-pink and curtseyed to the King.

“Darling,” she said, in cultured American tones. “Pardon me for interrupting. But a supper—or perhaps a breakfast—or some sort of food in an hour usually reserved for sleeping—is being served.”

He cocked his head at her, but smiled. “And you could not send a page?”

“It was faster and more forceful to do it myself.” She waved his concern for protocol aside, and turned to Garrett and her companions, much animated by mischief. “Besides, it was my opportunity to meet Mary’s friends.”

The king stood, and so perforce did Phoebe and Sebastien. “Ladies,” he said, as Mary stepped away from the door and dropped a curtsey. “Gentleman. My royal wife, Queen Sofia.”


Sebastien recalled from his tabloid reading that the Queen was a distant relative of the royal family of Holland, a descendent of the Dutch peerage left behind when New Holland had been given over to England during Holland’s tenure as a French subject state. Phillip had married her in his exile, when it seemed possible that he would never reclaim his throne. Now, seated across from her at a breakfast table set with mismatched porcelain and silver that had obviously only just been polished until it shone, Sebastien thought that perhaps he had brought home a better Queen than anyone could have anticipated, from such a hasty love-match.

She seemed a sort of between thing, in a manner that Sebastien found fascinating. She was neither slender nor heavyset, but had a good Dutch sturdiness about her. Her hair was neither a carroty vermillion nor the ember-red of the Swedes, but a soft ash-and-cinnamon color that matched the powdered-over freckles on her cheeks. She was a Queen, but her American informality and impatience with protocol made it seem a role—a job—that she picked up and put down at need.

Now, as they sat at table, she was playing her part to the hilt—keeping the conversation smooth and fast-flowing, like light flashing on a brook. But Sebastien did not miss the sly smiles she turned on the king now and again, as if to say, See how clever I am?

It endeared her to him as no self-serious monarch could have managed.

He and Mary did not dine, which gave him more opportunity to observe his tablemates. The king ate with the manners of one bred and born to the public table and the state dinner. Abby Irene mostly pushed food around on her plate, though he saw her pick her way through most of a crab salad. Her appetite heartened him. The queen had a heavy hand with the salt shaker, though Phoebe seemed to find the food perfectly seasoned. And Mary, being Mary, turned a teacup on a saucer and frowned down into the brown liquid within.

He wondered if it was still strange for her to sit at table with kings and queens and her former employer. She seemed at ease, if pensive, which led him to thinking of the change in perspective for one who had spent so many years as a servant, to become one of the blood, a social outcast—or a social entertainment—in a completely different fashion.

There were salons that gathered around his kind, after all, people who would meet with them for sheer exoticism. And Mary, a Negro American, was more exotic than most.

She caught him staring, and gave him a look that said she’d read his mind. He smiled.

They were blood together, and she was his grandchild.

She smiled back.

When the meal was over and Sebastien and his companions had been excused from the Presence, she came to him in the hall. Phoebe was pushing Abby Irene ahead: they would remain here until after the triumphant ceremony scheduled for that afternoon. Mary had already sent a footman to retrieve appropriate clothes from Mrs. Moyer, a kindness for which Sebastien, incapable as he was of dignified travel by daylight, was most grateful.

As they walked, he lowered his voice. She had a predator’s hearing; she would pick out words the mortal women a few steps ahead would not notice.

He cleared his throat and whispered, “It was your idea, wasn’t it, to have Phillip summon us? He wouldn’t have done that on his own.” Sebastien would have spat on those bare scarred flagstones to clear the bitterness, if he’d had the moisture to spare. Abby Irene’s loyalty and service to the Crown had never, in particular, been returned. And how different is that from the manner in which any Crown treats its servants?

She did not look at him. “If anybody can figure out what’s wrong with his wife, it would be you and your friends.”

“Wrong with his wife? She seems delightful to me—”

“Oh, for sure,” Mary said. “But her blood tastes of poison, and though the best doctors in America can find nothing wrong with her, despite all of their efforts, she does not conceive. And the king—” she sighed “—now that it matters, the king is under pressure to set her aside. And then there’s the matter of me—”

“Of course,” Sebastien said. “Who would want a king who seemed to be under the thrall of a wampyr?”

“Thrall,” she said. “If only it were so easy. I’d have him give Abby Irene her Enchancery back, with a big bow stuck to the slates.”


In addition to sending for clothes, Mary had requisitioned quarters in the half-assembled palace interior where Phoebe and Abby Irene might nap until they were required to dress for the gala. She had her own duties as the king’s advisor—and whatever other roles she served for both the royals.

But this left the wampyr himself at loose ends. Mary addressed this by showing him into a library whose shelves the Prussians had somehow not entirely stripped, and bid him make himself comfortable. He could have waited—a few hours was nothing for one whose experience stretched back before the Black Death—but there was no percentage in it. Especially in a room full of books, a few dozen of which he found he had not even read before.

But he had just settled himself—well back from the thankfully heavily-curtained window—when long-ago familiar footsteps paused in the hall, and a long-ago familiar scent filled the room as the pocket door slid open again. Sebastien laid his book—a collection of American ‘tall tales’—upon the table, allowing his fingers to stroke its rich leather binding in reluctance before he drew his hand away.

And then he smiled and turned and stood, to greet a man he had not seen since before the war.

Dyachenko was a decade or so younger than Abby Irene. When Sebastien had first met him, he’d thought him fiftyish. A closer acquaintanceship had taught Sebastien that the then-Imperial Inspector was barely forty, but the worry lines were evidence of a life lived hard. And here he was now, seventy-eight if he was a day, stooped and white and—judging by the row of medals pinned to his tailcoat breast—dressed in Ambassadorial finery.

He had been dressed by a valet. Sebastien had no doubt of this: Dyachenko was not in the least rumpled, and the creases in his handkerchief and trousers were knife-sharp. There was no way the old man could have managed that on his own. As a young man, he had been an idiosyncratic—and sloppy—dresser.

—Yuri Danylevich, Sebastien said in Russian.—Of all the pleasures I did not anticipate in this palace, your presence is chiefest among them.

“Sebastien,” the man answered, in nearly-impeccable English. “As soon as I heard you and the ladies had survived the war in England, I knew I could not wait to greet you.”

He came across the little distance between them; Sebastien held out his arms. Dyachenko thumped his back with surprising strength—or perhaps not so surprising, for a man who had survived the death of the Tsar he served, a people’s uprising, Prussian conquest of half of Russia, and the pogroms that followed the Tsar’s daughter’s return to power and the crushing of the Prussian invasion in the aftermath of the Chancellor’s death.

“How did you wind up here?” Sebastien asked, gesturing Dyachenko to a chair while he, himself went to fix his old friend a drink. There was no vodka on the sideboard: they would have to make do with cognac. In Sebastien’s experience, Russians excelled at making do.

“Rankest cowardice,” Dyachenko said. “When Tsar Aleksandr fell, I was sent to serve a prison sentence in the military. But the Prussians invaded, and those of us serving our labor there were told that if we fought willingly, at the end of the war we would be pardoned.”

He shrugged and sipped his cognac. “But by the end of the war, the Undying Tsarina had seized command of the government. So I was pardoned out anyway and stayed on as military police, with the rank of Major-General. Eventually, I found myself in the political corps.”

“And here you are.” Sebastien resettled himself in the less comfortable chair opposite. His bones would not mind the stiffness as Dyachenko’s would. “You were a good detective.”

Dyachenko swatted Sebastien’s arm with the spotted back of his hand. “I still am.” He frowned at the fluid in his glass as if it were a scrying pool, twisting the garnet-set ring on his left hand in evident discomfort. “You have heard, of course, that Irina Stephanova did not survive the war.”

“I had not heard,” Sebastien said. “But I am not surprised.” She, too, had been of his court in Moscow. She had been a revolutionary and an artist and the lover of Jack Priest, his then-protégé.

“She died of tuberculosis,” Dyachenko said. “It is ironic, because she was one of snipyeri zhenshin—the women snipers—and she had been sent to Pavelgrad, where the siege was worst. But she died of something a little sorcery or antibiotic could have cured.” He drank, tossing his head back. “I am sorry you must hear it from me.”

“It is a pity.” Sebastien reached out and laid a hand on Dyachenko’s knobby wrist. His pulse fluttered under Sebastien’s fingertips like a trapped and frantic animal. “But I am glad to see you again. So tell me, Yuri—the Undying Tsarina. Is it true what they say of her? Or do you serve her out of love?”

“Which part?” Dyachenko shook his head. “That she was a sickly child, inbred and haemophiliac? That is true. That she has worked some sorcery for a cure, and seems forever twenty-one and inhumanly lovely? That, too, is true. That she has hidden her heart in a needle, in an egg, in a duck?” He smiled, for the cognac more than for Sebastien. “You would have to ask the duck. But yes, she is a sorceress. And not a tame one like your Abby Irene.”

Dyachenko set his glass aside with his free hand, then reached out and placed the palm against Sebastien’s throat. The fingers curved to embrace his neck, thumb stroking the corner of his mouth. “I thought it would be hard,” he said. “Getting older while you stayed young.”

Sebastien leaned forward to kiss him. The man was old, but his heart beat strongly under the skin. Their lips brushed, and Sebastien smelled the cognac on him, the sweetness of blood beneath. When he leaned back again, Dyachenko’s eyes were closed, his breath caught with his lip between his teeth.

“Oh,” he said, when that breath came out of him.

“And is it?” Sebastien asked.

Dyachenko shook his head. “What amazes me is that any of you survive beyond a hundred years. So much room for mistakes in a life so long. So much room for mistakes, and the pain of living with mistakes. How do you have time for anything else?”

Sebastien could not miss the flush of embarrassment and distress that colored Dyachenko’s features.

“You were never a mistake,” Sebastien said, and stood to latch the door before Dyachenko could contradict him.


For the gala, Garrett dispensed with her lap-robe. She doubted she’d be cold within the expected press of bodies, and if it came to the worst her beaded gown was equipped with a convenient burnt-velvet shawl. She didn’t need it to keep her shoulders free of drafts—her dress had sleeves long enough to tuck her wand inside of, which incidentally concealed the ropy, striated flesh of her upper arms. She might be an old wreck but she wasn’t an old fool, though gone with her commission was her right to be armed in the presence of the king.

She couldn’t do anything about the fact that in her chair, her head was navel-height to most of the crowd, and she couldn’t see a damned thing around whoever she was talking with at the moment. And she wanted badly to get another long look at the queen, given what Sebastien had whispered in her ear as he sent her and Phoebe off to bed.

The queen is under a spell.

Sebastien had left her with an old—and unexpected—friend, the Russian police investigator for whom she’d often consulted when they lived in Moscow. Yuri Dyachenko was still spry enough to push her chair around on a flat floor, for which she was envious and grateful in equal measure, because the press of bodies and Garrett’s burgeoning deafness in noisy crowds made navigation difficult for her.

Dyachenko was pleased enough at her company to not complain too much when she asked him to find her a place near the dance floor, where she might observe the royal couple when they arrived. Fashionably late, of course, because it would be impolite in the extreme for anyone to arrive after them, and so they would give stragglers every chance to avoid embarrassment.

The queen is under a spell.

There was plenty of warning when the royal couple arrived. They could all hear the cheers from outside, where Phillip addressed his people one last time. They could hear the band strike up a processional. They arranged themselves in tidy lines, and footmen took hold of the handles on the great double doors.

Even Garrett, who considered herself entirely too old for this sort of theatrical nonsense, felt the thrill of tension in her chest. Dyachenko reached over her shoulder and put his hand against her collarbone. She reached up and squeezed—a feeble squeeze, but she hoped a comfort nonetheless.

The king would pension me off. He thinks nothing of me. But the queen is under a spell.

And then the doors swung wide, and Garrett saw Henry’s face over Phillip’s shoulders, his wife sturdy and smiling at his side. And she cursed herself for an old fool after all, and did not hear a word of the pretty speech King Phillip made.


Sean Cuan found her later, by the table where Dyachenko had parked her before going off to fetch champagne and pastries. He cleared his throat; she glanced up, surprised to find herself staring at a face that should have been familiar if it wasn’t so damned old, and framed by a neat white beard.

“DCI Garrett,” he said, and his voice was all the clue she needed.

“DCI Cuan,” she said. She would have started to her feet, but it was beyond her. So instead she waved to a chair beyond the one Dyachenko had claimed. “Sit. My god, it’s been a long time.”

He glanced over, but did not sit. He had never had what she thought of as a classically Irish face, and the years had stretched it long and gullied it with hard-work lines.

“It’s good to see you,” she said. “But it’s not DCI anymore.”

“Ah,” he said, distress creaking through every word. “I’m an idiot, ma’am.”

“You’re a man,” she said. “You came back with the king?”

He smiled. “Not exactly. I was in Africa, fighting the Prussians there. But I came back because of the king. You know we’re shy of Crown Investigators now.”

He’d been a skinny kid when she met him, a skinny knob-eared Detective Sergeant with the newly established Criminal Investigations Division. She had been the only woman among the Crown’s Own. He’d impressed her on a jointly-worked case, and she’d written him a letter of introduction to the Dean of Sorcery at Oxford University.

They’d remained fast friends until her flight to America. And this was their first reunion since.

She waved him impatiently at the chair until he relented and sat.

“I understand you saved some of the Library,” he said.

“The Enchancery still stands,” she said, not as tiredly as she felt she should. “But how many of the Crown’s Own live?”

“Four or five,” he said. “The youngest in his fifties.” He pressed his hands together, palm to palm. “Maybe one or two more in hiding somewhere on the Continent who has not yet found a way to contact the King. And the King is not eager to let us back in to the Enchancery. As if it could be broken by so simple a thing as a few squads of Zauberers.”

She closed her eyes. It did not keep her from seeing the revelers moving around her. “Less than ten of us. That’s not enough.”

“And so many of the younger students may be corrupted by Prussian ideals…” He let his voice drift off. He shrugged. “There will have to be significant intervention. And they will need to be closely observed.”

Garrett lifted her chin as if he had challenged her. “Have we traded one police state for another?”

Before he could answer, the Russian ambassador, war hero, and once-homicide detective reappeared at Cuan’s shoulder. He set a glass before the Crown Investigator, a second before Garrett, and kept the third for himself after setting down the plate of pastries that had been balanced across its lip.

He extended his newly-freed hand to Cuan. “Sorcerers are always hungry, aren’t they?”

“And thirsty,” Garrett said, picking up the vodka tonic Dyachenko had set before her. “Yuri, please meet DCI Sean Cuan. Sean, this is Ambassador Yuri Danylevich Dyachenko. But don’t let the fruit salad on his breast pocket fool you; when I knew him he was a homicide dick like any other.”

Dyachenko extended a hand. “Always nice to meet another old copper. Did you think we’d live to see this day?”

Hesitantly, Cuan returned the clasp. “As an Irishman, I have somewhat mixed emotions about English rule,” he admitted. Garrett leaned forward, unwilling to reveal just how much of this conversation she was navigating by lip reading. “But I will grant King Phillip this, sight unseen. It would take a damned lot of work to be worse than the Prussian bastards.”

“Even if he wishes to disband the Enchancery?” Dyachenko asked. He looked down at his drink, as if the question had burst out of him unconsidered.

Garrett rocked back in her chair, wicker creaking with the suddenness of her movement. If they had heard of the new King’s intentions via the grapevine…

“Would he?”

Dyachenko shrugged. “There are rumors,” he admitted. “Perhaps it is too damaged to preserve? Perhaps he distrusts sorcerers—just a little?”

She tilted her head and squinted at him. Something about him seemed off. Was he lying?

But he stared out at the dance floor over the mouth of his glass, and she could not read his expression. If an expression he could even be said to wear.


The royal couple danced one dance together, for display, and then parted to spread their attention among the eager guests. The room was awash in pale English faces—weak-chinned, snub-nosed, framed in fine waves of fair or auburn hair.

They didn’t really all look alike, Sebastien reminded himself. It just seemed that way when you took a lot of them together without having made their individual acquaintance first.

Despite the hundreds of people swirling through the palace’s great ballroom (and in this room, at least, every attempt at fitting furnishing had been made), Sebastien managed to keep some fragment of his attention on both Phoebe and Abby Irene, while reserving the bulk of it for the king and queen. Mary, he noticed, shadowed one or the other at all times. She was acting as a bodyguard, but anyone who noticed her would see only a tall Negro woman, dressed impeccably, and perhaps wonder if she was an Algerian diplomat.

After some time observing, Sebastien contrived to come near her when she crossed the room. He touched her arm, as if in a chance encounter, and waited for her to turn her ear to his lips. He spoke softly.

“Abigail Irene has agreed to examine the Queen,” he said. “But it cannot be done without the Queen’s participation.”

Mary’s cheeks creased around her frown. “I will see what I can do,” she said. “She is American.”

And Americans were notorious for their distaste for all things magical. It was, Sebastien thought, the Puritan heritage.

He nodded, though, and withdrew to seek Phoebe or Abby Irene.

Phoebe was in intense discussion with a gentleman novelist who Sebastien recognized from his book-jackets, so he joined Abby Irene. She held court at a table near the dancers, Dyachenko and another white-haired gentleman seeming to hang on her every word. But she looked up as he approached, and smiled to welcome him.

Introductions were quickly accomplished, and so Sebastien learned that the new gentleman—Sean Cuan—was one of the Crown’s Own. “If,” he said, “there are even going to be such things in the long run.”

“Don’t be foolish,” Abby Irene said. “We’re British. When have we ever let a tradition die?”

“You mean like burning witches?” Sebastien offered.

Dyachenko touched his throat, where the high collar concealed it. Sebastien could not avoid his gaze. Nor the flash of understanding in Cuan’s expression as he looked from the ring glittering on Dyachenko’s gnarled finger to the one that Abby Irene wore.

As for Abby Irene, she glared at Sebastien, but she could not maintain it for long. “As if there weren’t fools in white robes dancing around Stonehenge every May Day, without even consulting the lunar calendar for the proper alignment,” she scoffed.

He covered her hand with his. “Touché.”

Whatever he would have said next was interrupted, as Mary bent down between them. “The queen,” she said, “requests your presence, Lady Abigail Irene. And that of Don Sebastien as well.”

Dyachenko looked up, stretching out one hand as if to stop them. But then he put his hand down and smiled.

“Your pardon,” Abby Irene said, as Mary took charge of the handles of her chair.


Garrett was unsurprised to find that the queen had not gone far. Mary led them just a few feet down the hall, to a little retiring room with a quite medieval character. The stone flags here were softened by rush mats, and the furniture was solid and simple and dark. If it had not started that color, centuries of polish and oxidation had sufficed to change it.

Garrett imagined it was stuff that had been stored under the palace in some forgotten cellar, spurned by the Prussians, until the returning king’s household had found a use for it in desperation.

In any case, the young queen—she could not be more than twenty-five, considerably her husband’s junior—sat behind a small table, her hands folded on its surface as if she were a partner at some firm, reviewing a miscreant employee.

“Come in, please,” she said, when Mary held the door for Garrett and Sebastien. “Mary tells me I need to speak with you.”

She glanced at the wampyr as she spoke; Mary stepped into the room and made the door shut with a definitive sound. “Your Majesty,” she said, deferentially. “We have reason to believe that some sort of hex has been laid upon you. Probably without your knowledge. Most likely by people who do not mean you or your royal husband well.” She gestured with one hand to Garrett. “Lady Abigail Irene believes that she may be able to identify the nature of the sorcery, and perhaps lift it.”

Queen Sofia looked at Garrett steadily. Garrett met her gaze, aware that she did so with the rheumy, clouded eyes of the ancient, and that the queen would be well within the realm of reasonable responses to laugh in her face and say, This old wreck? What can she do?

But after a long and doubtful moment, the queen nodded. “Will you need sorcerer’s tools? We might be able to find some around the palace. I think there’s a wizard or two who’s followed my husband home.”

“Thank you,” Garrett said. “I’ve brought my own.”

She reached under the seat of her wheelchair and drew forth the threadbare blue velvet bag that dwelt there, its hinges cracking, its clasps the worse for wear. She should have replaced it years ago, she knew, but she kept thinking it was likely to hold out as long as she did, and it would be a waste to replace it with something new when she’d get so little use out of it.

“Mary,” Garrett said to the queen, “has noticed that you have an unnatural hunger for salt.”

Queen Sofia looked at Mary in surprise. Mary nodded. “It does seem,” the queen admitted softly, “that no chef, of late, can season worth a damn.”

“That may be a good sign.” Garrett began laying out her tools upon the table, starting first with the black bag of crushed sea salt. “If you have any thaumaturgy in the family—if you have a spark, as we say—you may be instinctively drawn to a substance that protects you from some aspects of the sorcery. Salt is a common cure for curses.”

“Oh,” said the queen. “What shall I do?”

“Hold still,” Garrett said. And laboriously, feeling the horrid pain of her crabbed and gouty feet pressed against the floor, she grasped the table edge and hauled herself out of her chair.

Mary rushed to support her elbow; Garrett would have waved her back, but the look that Mary gave her silenced any protest. Sebastien stood back, guarding the door, one hand resting on the inside of the knob as Garrett cast her circle round, painfully hauling the table out of the way to do it.

It was not perfect, but it did not need to be. It closed Queen Sofia and Garrett within, and the blood without, and that was the thing that mattered. “Is that quite safe?” Mary asked. “You’ve shut yourself up in there with whatever comes out of her.”

Garret shugged. “I have to be able to touch it.” Besides, it was unlikely to be any worse than the last exorcism

she’d attended.

Leaning heavily on on the table, Garrett fumbled her ebony wand from her left sleeve. The queen’s hazel eyes widened, showing chips of green. “You were armed in my presence?”

“I swore once to defend you,” Garrett said. “Or to defend the Crown. And you are one half of the Crown, your Majesty. I have never been released from that vow, though the Crown’s to me was abrogated.”

The queen sat still in her magic circle. Her back straightened. She was no fainting flower, then. “Do what you will, magician.”

It was consent. Garrett lifted her wand and began to trace the spirals in the air, first chasing the negative energies away from the queen and then pinning them against the barrier of salt to disentangle and dispel them. It was slow, painstaking work, exhausting, requiring great care because the energies were intricately linked with the queen’s own body and generative force. It was a booby-trap of sorts, in its intricacy: hasty work would have ripped the queen’s own life-force to shreds, with results that could range from an explosive event to the reduction of the queen to a mewling idiot.

Garrett thought it was nice work. The effort of only a half-hour, however, for her to disassemble.

Before she was quite finished, someone pounded on the door. It could have been disastrous, because she was engaged in a particularly delicate manipulation, fingers crabbed and forehead slick with pain, but she kept her concentration on the work at hand, and trusted Mary and Sebastien with her back. And indeed, when the door knob rattled, it rattled against Sebastien’s iron grip, and Sebastien held it firm.

Garrett unwound the last bit of barbed and chancrous energy from the Queen’s person, and ground it out against the slender line of salt upon the floor.

“There,” she said. She scuffed the circle open with one pain-stabbed foot, and heavily made her way back to her chair. “That was hairy. But that should repair things. Sebastien, let that in, whoever it is.”

Unceremoniously, the wampyr removed his hand from the door. Mary moved to intercept whoever barreled through; the arm her hand closed on was that of Yuri Dyachenko.

“Abigail Irene,” he gasped. “You must not touch that sorcery—”

“It’s trapped,” Garrett said calmly. “I know. Journeyman work, but quite solid. I dealt with it.”

Dyachenko gasped. He leaned back against the doorframe. “I thought we were all dead of backlash,” he said. “I came as soon as I realized what you intended.”

“But why would anyone poison the Queen of England? Except the Prussians,” Mary amended. “Are you a sorcerer? How do you know that?”

Dyachenko sighed. “I know it,” he said, “Because I am the Tsarina’s emissary, and sometimes diplomats know things. Like where to grow the best plants, for example. Did she send it herself?”

“I didn’t recognize the sorcerer’s energy signature,” she said. “Your Tsarina?”

The Russian nodded, lips thinning. “She’ll kill me now.”

Sebastien reached out a hand and laid it on Dyachenko’s arm. “Only if you go home.”


When she was no longer pale and shaking with release, and the cold sweat had been dabbed from her brow, Queen Sofia took Mary and left Garrett and Sebastien alone with Dyachenko while she went to speak with her king. When she returned, Phillip was with her. Mary remained at their side.

Phillip paused within the door, crowding the little room with the weight of his presence. He held his wife’s hand in his own white-knuckled one. When he came before Garrett, he bowed, shocking her.

He glanced at the queen. The queen nodded.

“Lady Abigail Irene. Once again, at great personal risk, you have been of service to us.”

She slipped her wand into her sleeve, aware that his eyes followed the gesture. But he said nothing about it, just continued, “Mary explained what you accomplished here tonight. You have saved my queen, and quite possibly my kingdom. And it seems to me that I have been churlish in my appreciation of your prior acts, when they have prevented my kingdom being passed to a collateral relative.

“You have also kept safe our royal libraries once housed in the Enchancery. We understood this before, but we did not understand fully what it implied. We are given now to understand that those books you preserved are priceless and irreplaceable relics of the Crown’s Own. For this great service, we commend you. And furthermore we find that the position of Crown Investigator was unduly stripped from you, and we would reinstate you to that organization, under the rank of Commander of the Crown’s Own.”

“Your Majesty,” she said, startled. But she found her feet fast enough. “I’ll need DCI Cuan. Someone has to be my feet.”

“Welcome back to the Crown’s Own, Commander Garrett,” the King said. He looked at Mary, who folded her arms. “I have a sense that history will long remember what you do next. And may God preserve us all from the machinations of the meddling undead.”

“Your Majesty,” Mary said, mock-stiffly.

He waved her away, and turned back to Garrett. “Somebody’s got to bring law and order back to this land,” he said, gruffly. “I don’t see why it can’t be you.”