Hearts At Stake

chapter 14

Lucy

“What the bloody hell do you mean Solange went to see Veronique? And Natasha?” Everyone took a healthy step back out of range of Helena’s fury. “I specifically said she wasn’t to leave the house.”

Liam sat in his chair and grimly drank a brandy. Hyacinth’s pug was sniffing under the front door and whining. I shifted from foot to foot. The thick miasma of anger and pheromones was starting to make even me light-headed. Liam reached out for his wife’s hand.

“They’ll be all right,” he said darkly. I’d never heard his voice have that particular tone and kind of hoped I’d never hear it again. It made the hairs on the back of my neck shiver.

“Why’d Lady Natasha set a bounty in the first place?” Nicholas asked hotly.

“There’s a rumor going around,” Sebastian explained. “That Solange really is going to take Lady Natasha’s crown as soon as she changes.”

We stared at him, all sorts of horrible scenarios unfolding in the spaces between us.

“But Solange would hate that,” I said.

“But Lady Natasha would never want to be anything else,” Helena said. “So she’ll never understand that, or trust it. Also, she knows Montmartre is courting Solange, in his own twisted fashion. Even though they haven’t been together for a long time, she doesn’t share well.” She glanced at the window. “Where the bloody hell is Hyacinth? It’ll be dawn soon.”

“Bruno has his boys out looking for her.”

“I should be with them.” Sebastian was standing stiffly in the corner, glowering.

“No.” Helena narrowed her eyes in his direction.

“Mom.”

“I said no, Sebastian. You’ve done enough tonight.”

“What about London?” Nicholas asked. “She’s the one who came to get Solange.”

Liam sighed. “She’s a royalist, like the rest of that side of the family. But I have to believe she didn’t know about the danger.”

“There’s more.” Geoffrey tapped his pen on the cover of a leather-bound book. His hair stuck up everywhere; he’d been raking his hand through it constantly since he got here. Liam tilted his head back and briefly closed his eyes.

“Of course there is.”

“I’ve finished analyzing the Hypnos sample.”

Liam straightened, his eyes flaring like hot silver.

“Tell me.”

“Several zombie drugs, as we’d assumed,” Geoffrey said.

“And?”

His expression was hard. He didn’t look like a slightly distracted scientist anymore, or like the handsome intellectual who attracted all the divorced women in town.

“It’s ancient blood. Ancient enough to be Enheduanna.”

The silence fell like a hammer through a glass window. I blinked.

“Who’s Enheduanna?” I whispered to Nicholas. No one was speaking. It was kind of creepy, actually. “Hello?”

“An ancient.” Geoffrey was the one to answer me, though he didn’t glance my way. The fire crackled softly, falling to embers in the grate. “The oldest vampire still alive.”

“Oh. Um, and?”

“And her blood has magical effects. Like Hypnos, it takes away your will.”

“I remember.” I stifled a shiver.

“On vampires too, not just on humans.”

“Oh.” My eyes widened. “Oh!”

“Indeed,” Geoffrey agreed drily. “And now it’s in the hands of the Helios-Ra.”

“Who are only marginally better than Lady Natasha or her tribes.” Helena’s black braid lifted into the air as she whirled to kick the leg of a spindly Queen Anne chair. It splintered loudly.

“That was my mother’s,” Liam murmured.

“This is bad,” Nicholas said to me. “The thing about vampires, of any kind, is that we’re supposedly immune to each other’s pheromones. It’s what’s stopped us from wiping each other out entirely with clan wars.”

“But not anymore,” I whispered.

“Not anymore.”

“How did they even get it?” Sebastian asked.

“I can assure you I plan on asking Hart that myself,” Liam said through his teeth. “He’s on his way here.”

“Here?” Sebastian gaped at him. “You’re not serious.”

“He was amenable.”

“Amenable to staking each and every one of us in our own home,” Sebastian muttered.

“No, we’re safest here and we outnumber him. I allowed him only a single companion.”

“And a bucket of Hypnos powder.”

“Sebastian,” Helena snapped. “Your father knows what he’s doing.”

Liam smiled.

“I’ll remind you of that, love.”

Nicholas sat down, shaking his head.

“So, the head of the Helios-Ra is coming here for tea, they have Hypnos at their disposal, Solange is possibly in the hands of the vampire queen who set the bounty on her head, and we can’t find Aunt Hyacinth. That about cover it?” He looked suddenly young and overwhelmed, like the Nicholas I’d known before he turned. I touched his shoulder. Before I could think of a single helpful thing to say, Liam’s cell phone vibrated in his jacket pocket. He glanced at the display.

“Bruno.” He and Helena exchanged a grim look. “Hart’s here, and Hope.” They looked at us.

“Lucy and Nicholas, upstairs.”

“Mom!”

“But—”

“Now,” Liam insisted. “Lucy, the presence of a human girl will not help our cause at the moment. And Nicholas, you can barely stand.”

He was rather wobbly on his feet. Dawn must be filling the garden on the other side of the drapes. We shuffled upstairs, reluctant but obedient.

More or less.

Mom says my temper isn’t my only karmic baggage. I have this thing about taking orders, no matter how well meant. And though I completely understood why it might be best to remain out of sight, it hardly followed that I should sit alone in Solange’s room and not know what was going on. Just because they shouldn’t see me didn’t mean I shouldn’t see them.

“Lucy?” Nicholas whispered, stopping when he realized I wasn’t following. “What are you doing?”

In point of fact I was lying on my stomach at the top of the curving staircase. From this vantage I could see the front door. I couldn’t see into the living room, but I heard Helena ask Sebastian if he wanted to retire and his emphatic refusal. He was newly turned—it had only been a few years, after all—but I wouldn’t have left either if I were him. No matter how exhausted I was.

I wondered again where Solange was. And if she was okay.

“They can hear your heartbeat, you know.” Nicholas stretched out next to me.

“Hey, I’m upstairs. Technically I’m not breaking the rules.” I slid him a sidelong glance. “Can they really hear my exact location?”

“Probably not,” he admitted. He was very close. I could feel the cool length of his body pressing against mine. His eyes were very pale, his teeth very sharp. If I was immune to his pheromones, then why did I find him so annoyingly attractive?

A knock sounded at the front door. The dogs barreled into the foyer, growling. Mrs. Brown barked from behind Hyacinth’s bedroom door. Bruno escorted the heads of Helios-Ra inside, his expression implacable and hard. He considered the Drakes his own family, and Solange an honorary niece.

“Hart and Hope,” I muttered. “If you’re going to name your kids like that, of course they’re going to think they live in a comic book.” Although I had to admit Hart was handsome, practically debonair. His hair was threaded with silver and rakishly messy. “Okay, he’s totally got that yummy secret agent thing going on.”

Nicholas scowled at me. I didn’t have to turn my head to look at him to feel his eyes burning.

Hope was short, barely five feet tall, with a cheerful face and a ponytail swinging from the crown of her head. She wore jeans and a thick leather belt hung with stakes under her long sweater, and sandals. Somehow I hadn’t expected her to be so perky, in her strappy silver sandals.

“They’re going in,” I whispered.

“I can see that,” Nicholas muttered. His nose twitched.

“You look like a demented bunny,” I told him. “What are you doing?”

“You switched to lemon shampoo.”

I blinked, thought back to my morning shower, which felt like years ago. He was right. His hands were clenched, but his voice was soft and husky. He turned his head away, was close enough that his hair brushed my cheek.

“Smells good.”