"Eddie, I'm not going to a ball."
"Why not?"
"For one thing, I don't have any regular clothes to wear, never mind a ball gown."
Don't worry," he beamed. "I can fix that."
I barely repressed a groan. With my luck, I'd end up in a hoop skirt. "For another, we're here on serious business."
"And that business is completed. The vampire is dead, the immediate threat dealt with. There is nothing more we can do at the moment. We might as well enjoy ourselves."
"He's got a point." Kabita gave me a wicked grin.
I glared at them both. "Fine." I may have slammed the door a little harder than necessary.
Back in Eddie's stateroom, I stripped off my boots and jeans, then put in a call to room service. I was starving. After being assured my meal would arrive within forty minutes, I hustled my way through a shower, finishing as the food arrived. My pile of dirty clothing, including my boots, had already disappeared from the middle of the floor.
Wrapped in one of the ship's wonderfully fleecy bathrobes, I perched on the edge of the bed to enjoy my meal and make a call to Trevor. He answered on the third ring.
"Are you eating?"
I swallowed a bite of my BLT. "Yes. I'm hungry enough to eat a horse. Do you know how much energy it takes to execute a vampire?" Not to mention channel the Darkness, but I wasn't about to bring that up. I gave him an abbreviated version of events.
"You're sure it was a soul vamp?"
"Yeah. No doubt. I thought your guys destroyed all the tech." Creating a vampire imbued with a soul required a very special kind of technology, one my father had tried to destroy before his death, to no avail. Instead it had been taken for some nefarious purpose we still hadn't figured out.
"We destroyed what we could find. But it's not unlikely Alister Jones has some of it hidden away somewhere."
Alister Jones was Kabita's father, former head of MI8, the United Kingdom's version of the SRA, and a genuinely bad guy. The recent appearance of soul vampires was thanks to Alister, and I was pretty sure he'd had something to do with the death of my father as well.
"Great," I snapped. "So good ole Alister is holed up somewhere cranking out soul vamps. But why?"
"Other than the obvious?"
"His chances of creating an army of these things are pretty low now," I said. "After all, we know about the vamps and the tech. The element of surprise is gone. And with most of the tech destroyed, he can't make as many or as fast." Unless, of course, he'd found someone to recreate the technology. Which was entirely possible and very disturbing. "There's got to be more to it."
"I've no doubt of that," Trevor agreed. "I just don't know what that is right now. I've got people on it. It's the best I can do." He paused. "How are you?"
"You heard about Inigo."
He cleared his throat. "Ah, yeah. Kabita called me. She was worried about you."
"I'm fine." My voice cracked a little. "Okay, maybe fine is overstating it, but I will be fine. I'm just…he's alive, Trevor. He's healed. And yet, he's not…him. He looks at me like I'm a stranger." My throat was so tight, I could barely squeeze out the words.
"Ah, Morgan, I'm sorry." He sighed. "You probably are well aware of this, but PTSD does funny things to a person. He needs time. And treatment. Hopefully he'll come around."
"And if he doesn't?" My darkest fear given words.
"Then we'll deal with it. Together. We're family."
Family. It might be the only thing keeping me sane.
"You seriously expect me to wear this thing?" I stared at my reflection in the mirror, half in awe and half in horror. "I can't even move."
"Oh, come on, they're not that bad," Kabita said, smoothing down her lapels.
"That's because you got the good outfit," I snarled.
I didn't know how Eddie had done it, but in under an hour, he'd come up with costumes for both of us. Unfortunately, mine was an utter fail as far as I was concerned. While Kabita's costume consisted of skin tight pants, boots, and an aviator jacket—not much different from her usual clothing—mine had so many layers of bustles and petticoats and whatnot, I was half afraid I would trip and fall on my face. As if that weren't bad enough, I had to wear a full corset over a thin, silky blouse. It looked great, but I could hardly breathe, never mind move.
"This is ridiculous. I can't wear this." Every time I took a step, my skirts made a rustling sound loud enough to wake the dead.
"We're not hunting, Morgan. We're dancing." Kabita shot me a smug grin. "Now come on before we miss the ball." She grabbed me by the hand and dragged me, protesting, from the room.