God Save the Queen

CHAPTER 11

SURPRISES, LIKE MISFORTUNES, SELDOM COME ALONEAmazingly, the next two days passed quietly as I tried to distract myself from wondering if there was indeed something drastically wrong with me thanks to my mother’s metamorphosis – didn’t Bedlam have their own laboratory? – and if poor Simon was alive. I considered calling Val, but my brother was likely to ask questions I didn’t want to answer. Plus, I didn’t want him to get into any trouble because of me.

Fortunately, Vex was back from Scotland and proved to be a delightful diversion. I’d given up the supplements and Ophelia was right – it was hard. I kept to home because I could smell the blood all around me, and wanted to punch anything that got in my way. It was like a horrid case of PMS but I wanted to eat people instead of chocolate. No wonder they gave us the supplements. It would be bloody hard to concentrate without them. How did aristos do it?

The night before, while in bed with Vex, I bit him – with fang. He seemed to like it, and God knows I did. We were both a little like animals at that moment and he tasted like heaven on my tongue – warm and alive.

“I’m sorry,” I told him afterwards, wiping a spot of blood from his neck. The wounds had already begun to heal, thanks to his metabolism. Normally the vamp enzymes in my saliva would cause blood to thin rather than clot – not dangerously so, but just enough to make feeding easier.

Broad shoulders shrugged as he grinned at me. “Didn’t hear me complaining, did you?”

No, I hadn’t. Still, didn’t he find it weird? He had to know most halvies didn’t go around biting people. He must wonder why I’d stopped taking the pills all halvies were prescribed and mandated to take.

“Ah,” Vex said. “There you go.”

I glanced up at him. “What?”

He shook his head. “I thought I had you this time, but you just slipped away on me again.”

I really was a shit. “I’m sorry. I’ve been so distracted lately.”

He merely nodded and pulled me close, so that my head nestled against his warm chest. “You miss your sister.”

I did, but Dede took up less and less of my thoughts as of late. I didn’t want to be a freak, didn’t want to lie to people I cared about – or worse, suspect them of conspiring against me. The more I thought about the things I’d seen and heard at Bedlam, the more I doubted my own perceptions of right and wrong. I needed an anchor.

“I gave someone a sample of my blood to analyse and now he’s missing,” I blurted, hesitantly raising my head.

Vex went still. “Who?”

“Simon Halstead.”

“The kid the Yard’s looking for?”

I nodded. “He disappeared after he rang me to say he had the results of my blood work.”

Storm-blue eyes locked with mine. “What did he say?”

“Nothing.” I wasn’t about to reveal everything. I wasn’t that mental. “I went to meet him and he was gone. There was blood on the wall.”

A deep scowl cleaved his brow. “Xandra, I want you to be careful. Very careful. Do you understand?”

“Not in the least,” I replied honestly. “I don’t understand much of anything any more, so you’re going to have to give me a bit more than that.”

Vex lifted himself up on his elbow. I shifted so I could better look at him. “You remember how I told you that there were certain parties interested in other halvies – including you?” When I nodded, he continued, “There are seven that I know of. Three out of those seven half-bloods are missing. Disappeared without a trace.”

Cold raced down my spine, chilling each vertebra. “And the other four?”

“One’s in Bedlam, one’s dead, one is going about his business as usual and the last one is you.”

Fang me. “Is the dead one my sister Dede?” I don’t know why I asked, only that I had to ask it.

His expression changed. Resignation flashed in his eyes. He didn’t want to trust me any more than I thought I should trust him, but for some reason we did trust one another. “I think we both know Dede is the one in Bedlam.”

If he’d confessed to wanting to wear my underwear I couldn’t have been more shocked. “You knew?”

He nodded. “Fee told me.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I knew he had been keeping things, but I hadn’t expected this. It … hurt. And it irritated me.

“Because I didn’t think it was a good idea. I’m still not sure it was.”

“You could have told me.” I couldn’t help wondering if maybe I’d been used after all.

“The dead one is my son,” he said suddenly, effectively punching my anger in the face.

I sat up. “Your son? But you’ve never … Have you?” Everyone always talked about the fact that Vex had yet to get married, had yet to produce any halvie offspring.

“She wasn’t a courtesan,” he replied, voice low and rough. “She was part of a family who had worked for mine for decades.”

“She had plagued blood.” I was master of the obvious, because that was the only way this sort of thing happened. Somewhere in that woman’s family tree was a noble bastard – probably more than one. “What happened to her?” I really didn’t want to know. She might still be out there. F*ck. Vex had a kid.

“I don’t know. Her family abandoned her for having a half-blood. She left the boy with me and then fled the country. Duncan – my son – never forgave me for the fact that he was an outcast.”

Halvies without registered courtesan mothers were considered odd, but they were hardly outcasts. My brain took a leap: the hospital records Ophelia stole. Whoever ‘they’ were, they were interested in us because we aren’t the same as other halvies. “He was different?”

Vex nodded. “He looked like a half-blood, and had all the markers of one, but he could transform into a wolf.”

“Albert’s fangs.” I gaped at him. “That’s incredible.” And up until recently I would have said it was impossible.

“He was.” He smiled – it was both sad and sweet, and it broke my heart. “He disappeared shortly before his eighteenth birthday. Three weeks later his body was found in an alley in Whitechapel. They’d used silver on him. They’d … done things.”

I thought of the halvies in Bedlam. “Experiments?”

“Aye. He must have put up a fight. The wounds that killed him weren’t medical, they were defensive. They shot him full of silver and cut off his head.”

Oh f*ck. The thought of Vex having to see that made my stomach heave. I put my hand on his arm. This revelation made up for not telling me he knew about Dede and then some. I’d been making this whole mess just about me, and it was about so much more. Realising that made me feel as though I wasn’t so alone. “I’m so sorry.”

He nodded, the sadness in his eyes gone in a blink, replaced by something hard and cold. “I swore I’d find the bastards who took him. I’d been told it was humans, but something didn’t smell right. I let it go because I felt guilty, but then I’d catch wind of halvies disappearing. I saw some of the ones in Bedlam. When Ophelia told me about your sister’s situation, I let her steal Duncan’s file. She took a stack so it wouldn’t be so obvious what we were after. I wasn’t surprised to discover yours was one of the flimsy ones.”

“My sister?” One thing at a time. My brain couldn’t keep up. “Dede?”

Another nod. “She believes the child she had with Ainsley is similar to Duncan.”

I closed my eyes. Oh Dede. You poor demented … Wait. My default with Dede was to assume she was hatters, but what if she really wasn’t? What if she was right? That in itself sounded completely mental, but so far the world was spinning backwards on its axis, so why not entertain the notion? That I could think of, Vex had no reason to lie. I couldn’t keep telling myself that everyone telling me these things were hatters and go ignorantly on my way.

Fang me. What if Dede had been telling the truth and we all treated her like a demented idiot?

I’d think about that later. “Why weren’t you surprised to find my files missing?”

“Because you’re different. You’re not quite a half-blood. You’re not aristo, though. Your scent is a combination of wolf and vampire, and something wild. I don’t know what you are.”

Well that made two of us, only he didn’t seem all that worried about it. I was. His son was dead, and he knew Dede wasn’t. He knew more than I ever could have imagined.

“You know about my mother.”

He nodded. “I’m not with you because of her – or any of this.”

I wanted to believe him. I really did. Time would tell. I didn’t think I was in any danger from him – not physically – and it seemed we had a fledgling trust going on. I had confided in him more than I had even in Church. I didn’t want to be wrong about him, but I wouldn’t put all of my faith into him just yet. Still, he’d told me things I never could have found out on my own, and that was reason to keep him close.

That and I wanted him close. I didn’t consider myself weak, but being with him made me feel stronger, and I needed that right now, whether it was real or not.

I had to find out about Dede’s kid. I had to do a lot of things. But first I had to eat. My stomach let out a low growl that sounded vaguely feral. I was starving – so much so that Vex looked tasty in ways that weren’t just sexual. “Breakfast,” I said. “We can talk while we eat.”

“I’ll cook,” he said, sliding out of bed. “It’s one of my many talents.”

I chuckled and tossed back the blankets. I knew he was trying to lighten the mood. He was probably wondering if he’d revealed too much to me.

“I suppose you learned to cook while trying to charm a kitchen maid?”

“You’re right. Mary MacConnell.” He pulled on his trousers. “She was a fine little thing.”

I slipped into a purple satin kimono. “And how long ago was that?”

“Eighteen fifty-seven, before I even knew I was plagued.” The smile disappeared from his face as the glaze of a painful memory slid across his eyes. He reached for his shirt, which was tossed over a nearby chair. “That was the same year my brother Robert died.”

Fang me, but he’d lost a lot of people he’d loved. Near-immortality had its misfortunes. “What happened?”

“Apoplexy – that’s what they called it back then. I suppose it was a brain haemorrhage or the like. He died and I became the heir. I was the first wolf in our line, you know.”

I stared at him. “Your brother was …” I couldn’t quite make the words come out.

A small smile curved his lips as he pulled the fine linen over his shoulders. “Human, aye. I’m one of the few aristos who remembers where we came from.”

His smile was teasing, but I felt shame at his words all the same. “I didn’t know aristos could have human children.” Then again, I hadn’t known that an aristo and a human carrier could produce a full-blood.

“Well, we were all human at one time. It took centuries of plague waves to make us what we are. Human births were much more common in the beginning, but then more of us changed and our human relations aged and died. These days a human child being born to full-blood parents is more rare than a goblin. It’s not like our diets are conducive to carrying healthy human babies.”

“No, I suppose not.” Why had I never heard this before? Not even in school were we taught about the humans who came before aristos – who gave birth to aristos and in turn were sometimes born to them. This knowledge unsettled me a little, though it shouldn’t have. But I was even more disturbed by the fact that I had never once wondered about it.

I was trying to put the thoughts from my mind when there came a noise at my balcony – a scratching sound, like claws on glass. Vex and I exchanged glances and I moved towards the doors. He stepped in front of me, putting himself between me and whatever was outside. I peered over his shoulder as he turned the handle and opened the door.

It was something worthy of an old skit-based comedy production – or rather, it would have been were it not so terrifying.

A goblin stood on my balcony, shielding its eyes – already covered by bright magenta sunglasses – from the candlelight inside the room. Its paw slowly lowered as it realised the light wasn’t much brighter than that inside its den. It was wearing a cloak and a wide-brimmed hat.

Vex growled low in his throat – a rumbling, menacing sound that made the hairs on my body stand up and take notice. He didn’t attack, though, which said much for his control over his inner predator. Most people would react to a goblin with fear or violence and get themselves killed.

The goblin bowed. “The MacLaughlin. Lovely. Xandra lady – I have words for you by order of my prince.”

It was female, and obviously found Vex easy on her protected eyes. Scowling, I moved in front of him. His hands gripped my shoulders, as though trying to push me through the floor like a tack.

I regarded the goblin much like a mouse regarded a hungry tom. “It must be important for the prince to send you cobbleside.”

She nodded, the light from the room glinting on the numerous golden studs piercing both her tufted ears. “Something was left in the tunnels, something that reeked of the Xandra lady.” Her accent sounded vaguely Welsh, though it was difficult to tell when she spoke in that stilted English the gobs seemed to favour. “The prince says you should know. You should come.” And then she stepped back as though she expected me to follow immediately.

“She’s not going with you,” Vex informed her through clenched teeth.

The little goblin – she only came up to my chin – gazed up at him and smiled – baring her immense fangs. “Hers to decide, wolf.”

“I have to get dressed,” I told her. This wasn’t a ploy to get me into the tunnels – no goblin would be so obvious, nor would they come this far above ground, to a private home, to hunt. No, if the prince had sent this goblin to collect me, then he had something I needed to see.

The hirsute woman bowed her head, turning in such a way that her cloak opened, and I could make out the slight curve of her breasts. A pink nipple peeked through the fur. That was something I couldn’t unsee, no matter how much I wished it.

I closed the door, relegating the fiend and her bits to the dark. I turned and immediately grabbed my underpants from the floor, where they’d landed earlier that evening.

“What are you doing?” Vex demanded as I shoved my feet in and wriggled the silk up my legs.

“I’m going with her,” I replied, snatching up my undershirt.

“Are you mental?” he demanded.

I pulled the thin garment over my head. “Quite, but that doesn’t change the fact that the prince sent her here. The goblin prince, Vex. Don’t you find that strange? Intriguing, even?”

“Aye, it’s a f*cking marvel, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s dangerous!”

I flipped my hair out from beneath the straps of the tank before reaching for my black-and-white-striped knee-length trousers. “I’ve dealt with the prince before. I’ll be fine.” Oddly enough, I believed it.

He turned the air blue with his curses as he began buttoning his shirt. He shoved the tails of it into the waist of his trousers before reaching for his boots.

“There’s no way I’m letting you simply walk off with a f*cking goblin.” He pinned me with a look that reminded me he was alpha for a reason. A look that also told me that once this current situation was over, I was going to have to explain just how I had “dealt with the prince”.

“Fair enough,” I replied, and meant it – on all accounts.

When we were dressed, I opened the French doors again. Leaving this way, I had less chance of disturbing Avery. The goblin was still there, sniffing the night. “Your house reeks of sex,” she said conversationally.

Sweet baby Albert. A flush rose to my cheeks. “Is that a problem?”

She met my gaze without guile or innuendo. “The thing what unites us all, Xandra lady. No problem, never.”

A philosophical goblin. Who would have thought? I supposed you didn’t survive and become the efficient predators they were without some manner of intelligence. They only sounded uneducated.

Before I could think of a response, she’d vaulted over the side of the balcony. I strained my ears and heard the grass below rustle as she landed. Vex followed – I suppose to make certain I wasn’t alone with the goblin for even a second – and then me. I landed with nothing like the goblin’s grace, but stealthily enough that I got my pride on. She gave me a nod, like a teacher approving of a student’s first attempt.

She led us through the shadows, blending with the darkness behind buildings and deepened by gardens. Perhaps five or six minutes passed before she ducked between two houses, the space barely wide enough for Vex to move through sideways. At the end of this narrow alley was a square grate set into the ground. Thick plumes of grass kept it almost completely hidden from sight, and the reinforced iron top gave it a formidable appearance. It would take several very determined humans to open it – determined and stupid.

The goblin lifted the iron with relative ease, and immediately disappeared into the hole without a word. I made to follow her, but Vex stopped me. “Me first,” he said.

I might have rolled my eyes if it weren’t for the fact that I found his protectiveness a little sexy and endearing. I’ve never been treated as something delicate – and I didn’t think that was how I was being treated now. It wasn’t that Vex doubted my ability to protect myself; he would simply rather that if one of us got hurt it be him.

It was rather lovely knowing that he was putting my welfare before his own.

As soon as he started down the ladder secured to the subterranean wall, I followed. Our hostess immediately climbed back up to pull the grate closed. I could have done it if she’d only asked.

A little ambient light found its way down to us, but it was going to get very dark very quickly – too dark for me or even Vex to see well. Obviously the goblins had prepared for this, because there was a soft click and the light of a very small hand torch made an oval in front of us.

Vex reached back and took my hand in his, guiding me. “Where are we going?” I asked.

“Little way,” the goblin replied, before taking a left turn down another corridor. It was like an underground labyrinth. Had the goblins carved these tunnels and fortified them, or were they from the London of years ago? I’d hate to be left to my own devices down here.

Eventually we came upon what looked like a tiny Met station. On the track was a small cart with an engine in front.

“Is this the old post rail?” I asked – with what I’m ashamed to say sounded like awe in my voice.

Ahead the goblin nodded. “City wanted we plague to be happy, so left us trains. Get in, please.”

At least she was mannerly. Vex and I joined her in the red cart – it was a close fit. Our companion didn’t have the odour I associated with goblins. In fact she smelled almost good to me, like warm fur with a smoky hint of incense.

“What’s your name?” I asked, tired of thinking of her as “the goblin”. I was curious too.

She shot me another glance – one I’d seen a lot in my life. It was the look people gave me when they didn’t know what the blooming hell to make of me. “Elsbeth,” she replied, and then surprised me by adding, “Born of Norfolk.”

I had to clench my jaw to keep it from dropping. Norfolk was rumoured to have been the first dukedom ever bestowed in the Kingdom, and to think that this abomination descended from it … well, it made it that much harder to think of her – Elsbeth – as just a monster.

All goblins were of aristocratic birth, though they considered themselves something more. That they were monsters was what made them frightening – disgusting – but underneath that fur and sharp teeth beat hearts more plagued than mine had ever thought of being. They were mutations, simply put. The same as halvies.

“I think we might be related,” was all the intelligent response I could muster.

Beneath her muzzle I thought I saw a hint of a smile, but she said nothing. I wasn’t as afraid of her as I had been. Maybe that was because I had Vex with me. Or maybe it was because I was more afraid of this thing that was so important a goblin had come above ground to fetch me.

The rest of the trip passed in relative silence. From what I could tell, we were headed north-east – away from the den beneath Down Street station. Eventually our cart stopped and we disembarked, following Elsbeth on foot down another track. Just as I had thought – we weren’t far from the Prince Albert Hospital stop.

“Left it to be found, they did,” Elsbeth told us as the faint scent of train, dirt and decay reached my nostrils. “Reeking of Xandra lady and death.”

She hadn’t mentioned death earlier. “What is it?” I asked. My voice had a slight tremor to it. A suspicion had already begun to take root and I prayed that I was wrong.

“Left for us to dispose of,” Elsbeth continued, as though she hadn’t heard me. “For the plague to hide.”

She stopped walking and I was brought up short behind her. Out of the shadows came half a dozen goblins, one of whom was the prince.

“Xandra lady,” he said by way of greeting. “Your prince regrets, yes. Greetings, wolf.”

And then he did the damnedest thing. He took my hand in one paw and patted it with the other. I shivered but didn’t snatch my hand away. “Come.”

I walked beside him for maybe ten or twelve feet – Vex, looking tense, close behind, with the rest of the goblins closing ranks. We stopped next to what looked like a bundle of rags, but when the light of the torch made the journey from end to end, I knew it wasn’t rags. Rags didn’t wear loafers.

The prince nodded at another goblin, who came forward and turned the body over. I knew before I saw the face who it was, but the lifeless eyes that stared up at me drove a spike of dread right through my heart.

Simon.

When the gob … when Elsbeth had said that Simon’s body had been left for the goblins to hide, she meant that he’d been left for them to eat, effectively getting rid of the evidence. He would simply be one more missing person in the vast necropolis of London.

It made me think of all the bones I had seen in the plague den. Most of those were from the Insurrection, or scavenged, rooted out of plague pits and ancient graves, but how many of them were from murder victims tossed down here like garbage and blamed on the goblins? It was an easy and efficient way to dispose of a body. It was what would have happened to Simon if the gobs hadn’t caught my scent.

There was blood on Simon’s lab coat – my blood. Not much, but it was there. Perhaps from his tests, or maybe there had been some left over, I dunno. It was enough that the goblins had smelled it and identified it, and for that reason I was glad. I was still afraid of them – would be a fool not to be – but they could have just eaten him. Instead, they’d risked coming above ground, where some human might have tried to be a hero, to find me.

Simon hadn’t been dead for long, and judging from his injuries he’d been tortured shortly before being killed. I knew this because the wounds hadn’t been given a chance to heal. They’d stabbed him through the heart with a silver blade – it was still in him.

“He was killed because of me.” I glanced at the prince. “This is my fault.”

The prince regarded me with his one eye. It was a gaze full of knowledge, predatory yet sympathetic. “Because of you, yes. Fault of you, no. Many secrets is your life.”

“That’s one way to put it,” I agreed. “Could you smell anything on him?” My own senses were so overwhelmed by the scents of the underground that I didn’t trust myself to sniff out more subtle odours.

“He stinks of the blood.”

“My blood stinks?”

A soft bark – laughter. “The blood. The fanged ones killed but did not feed.” His muzzle wrinkled. “Tried to hide their stink.”

Nothing could be hidden from a goblin nose. I almost imagined I could smell the strains of the plague, the Prometheus Protein that made up the vampire bloodline, but it was only my imagination desperately wanting to assign blame so that I could assuage my own.

“You’re sure?”

He shot me a look of indignant arrogance. Of course he was sure. He knew. Fang me. Vampires had done this. Christ. A tear slid down my cheek. Poor Simon.

Soft fur touched my face – the prince was wiping my cheek. I froze, fear making steel of my spine as I waited for my throat to be ripped out. Claws brushed my skin but didn’t scratch. Gentleness from a goblin? Why the hell not, seeing as how f*cked-up everything else was. “He was your friend?”

I nodded, and he patted me on the shoulder with that same paw – it was a strangely soothing gesture. “The plague will not take him. The plague will honour your friend and put him where he will be found, not lost.”

I swiped the back of my hand across my cheek. I was not going to cry for Simon, I was going to find who’d done this and make them pay for it. “You will?”

A resolute nod followed. He turned to the others. “Take the meat to St James’s Park for the mice to find.”

Good God, and I thought I was bigoted – and harsh. Meat, of course, was what goblins called any food source, but hearing that term applied to my friend turned my stomach, even though it wasn’t meant to offend. And mice … well, that was a charming term for humans. Mice and rats didn’t cohabit, and those of the plagued blood thought of rats as our mascot, if you will. Like the Americans and their eagle.

“Thank you,” I said. “I owe you a great debt.” I felt the gravity of those words as I spoke. Indebted to a goblin was not a position in which I wished to find myself, but there was no way around it.

The prince shrugged. “I think not, but if pretty would like to bring tribute another day, that would be good.”

I was getting off easy and smart enough to know it. “All right.”

Two goblins picked up Simon’s body and made their way down the track, their eyes covered by dark glasses. A lump pressed against the walls of my throat, choking me. I had failed him. I hadn’t been careful, hadn’t taken all of this seriously enough, and he had paid for it.

Well, I was taking it rutting seriously now.

The prince bowed his head to me and disappeared into the dark. The others followed after him, leaving Vex and me alone. We found the exit and quickly escaped cobbleside. From there he hailed a hack that returned us to my place. Good thing Vex had a few quid in his pockets, else we would have ended up walking.

“Come,” he said when we were inside once more. Avery wasn’t home. He took me by the hand and pulled me into the kitchen. “I’ll make us something to eat.”

He was quiet while he cooked and so was I. What was he thinking? Was he wondering what the hell he had got himself into? Was he, like most people I had cared about, going to leave or be taken away?

Poor Simon. He’d said my blood was different. But the prince had said it smelled normal. Whatever my defect, it had no scent and was worth killing to keep secret. What the bloody hell was it?

I was pulled from my thoughts when a plate was set on the table in front of me. Steam rose, bringing the most delicious aroma to my nose. Saliva flooded my tongue.

I looked down at the thick steak, seared on the outside but undoubtedly red and juicy within. Vex had fried potatoes and eggs to go with it, and added toast that was such a beautiful shade of brown I was almost reluctant to butter it.

“I think you might be the perfect man,” I told him.

He chuckled and sat down across the small table from me. “I doubt that.”

I picked up my fork and hesitated. He was being so good. “Vex …”

“Eat first,” he commanded. “I can wait for an explanation – but you will give me one.” There was no anger in his eyes, just simple determination. I had no problem with that. He had come into the tunnels with me. We were in this together now, so I owed him at least an explanation. And my frayed nerves told me that if I held on to all of this any longer I’d blow an artery in my brain.

We ate in silence. It was so unbelievably good. I soaked up every last trace of yolk with my buttery toast and slumped back in my chair, sated. Vex had already finished and sat with an arm hooked over the back of his chair, legs stretched out, waiting for me to speak.

And so I spoke. I told him about Dede going missing and how I’d gone to the goblins for information. I told him how she’d been taken to Bedlam – which he already knew because of his association with Ophelia. I told him that I had seen the halvies in the cells, and that I’d been told I was different. I went on about giving Simon my blood – even though I’d already told him some it before. I told him I didn’t know who I could trust, that I didn’t think I even knew myself any more.

Afterwards I fell silent, gnawing on the side of my thumb as I waited for him to say something.

“You need to get someone else to take your blood,” he said finally.

“Ophelia kept a sample to test.”

He nodded. “Good. I’ll check with her. Don’t use your rotary or house line for discussing any of this.”

“I’ve taken care of that as well – now. That’s how I reckon they” – I made quotes with my fingers in the air – “found out about Simon.”

“You’re no doubt right.” His expression was grim. “Promise me you’ll be careful. If the people who took Duncan are involved, they won’t hesitate to kill you.”

An image of Simon’s corpse flashed in my mind. The marks on him … there were worse things than being murdered. “What about you? How deep are you in this, Vex?”

He got up to pour each of us a second cup of coffee, obviously weighing how much to tell me. I think we’d both begun to realise that we’d only get the answers we wanted if we took a chance on trusting each other. “I met Victoria and Albert not long after their marriage. She was enamoured of Scotland and our people – we were a curiosity for the English back then, with our wolves. Still are, for that matter, though many vampires treat us like well-behaved dogs. I got on well with Albert. He was a good man. Smart, fair. He didn’t see humans as simply a convenient food source. He wanted to do right by them.”

I took my cup as he offered it across the table. “I can’t imagine having that sort of sentiment for humans.”

“Aye.” He took a drink. “This was before your time – long before the Insurrection. Things were different then. Everything changed in the nineteen-thirties.” He fell silent, remembering.

“Albert was killed by humans.”

“He was killed. I’m not convinced it was at human hands, not with the finesse with which he was done in.”

I frowned. “What do you suspect?”

Sharp grey-blue eyes lifted to stare at me. “He was killed by someone every bit as strong as he was. Someone he knew. He hadn’t tried to defend himself.”

“You don’t think …” It was almost too horrible for me to even speculate. “… that she killed him?”

The corner of his mouth lifted. “Careful, sweetheart. That sort of talk will get you arrested. All I know is that after he died, I asked a few questions and suddenly Her Majesty wasn’t so in love with Scotland any more, and my wolves became somehow inferior to her vampires. Did you know that I was supposed to be in charge of training half-bloods at the Academy?”

“No. She gave the job to Churchill instead?”

“Yeah, for all the bloody good it’s done him, the bastard. He’s never forgiven me for it, either. He thought it would curry favour, but all it got him was kicked down the social ladder. Makes me wonder what he did to get her to notice him in the first place.”

His tone made me frown. “Are you insinuating that you think Church killed Prince Albert?”

Vex held up his hands. “I’d never dream of impugning the honour of your hero, but I notice you’ve not confided any of this to him.”

“No.” I looked away. “I haven’t.” Why hadn’t I? Church had always been there for me. I should have gone to him straight away, but I hadn’t. I hadn’t wanted him to know. Hadn’t wanted him to look at me differently. Hadn’t known if I could trust him. I still didn’t know.

But I trusted Vex, and he was a human sympathiser.

“Are you a traitor?” I asked him, lifting my chin to meet his gaze once more.

“No,” came his quick reply. “I love my people and my country. I’ve not done anything to jeopardise that, but I will do whatever is necessary to protect them both.”

I understood what he meant. I didn’t mean to keep to myself what I knew about Bedlam, but I couldn’t hurt people I loved. At least I knew my priorities now.

“I’ve been worrying this bone for a long time, Xandra.” Vex’s voice rumbled down my spine. “And now that you think you have blood on your hands, I reckon you won’t be able to play ignorant any more. I will find out what happened to my son. I will find out why you’ve been singled out, and I will deal with the people responsible.”

“Even if they’re of the aristocracy?” The word trembled on my tongue. Fang me, why couldn’t I have simply believed Dede was dead?

He flashed a slightly feral grin. “Sweetheart, I might be a wolf, but I’m a Scot first, and I’ve never trusted those English bastards.”