Soulless(18)

The vampire sampled the fish, but the delicious taste did not seem to improve his temper. He pushed the dish away peevishly and sat back, tapping one expensive shoe against the other.

“Don't you like the Westminster hive queen?” asked Alexia with wide dark eyes and a great show of assumed innocence.

Lord Akeldama seemed to remember himself. The foppishness reappeared in spades. His wrists went limp and wiggly. “La, my dear daffodil, the hive queen and I, we... have our differences. I am under the distressing impression she finds me a tad”—he paused as though searching for the right word —“flamboyant.”

Miss Tarabotti looked at him, evaluating both his words and the meaning behind them. “And here I thought it was you who did not like Countess Nadasdy.”

“Now, sweetheart, who has been telling you little stories like that?”

Alexia tucked into her fish, a clear indication that she declined to reveal her source. After she had finished, there was a moment of silence while Floote removed the plates and placed the main course before them: a delicious arrangement of braised pork chop, apple compote, and slow roasted baby potatoes. Once the butler had gone again, Miss Tarabotti decided to ask her guest the more important question she had invited him over to answer.

“What do you think she wants of me, my lord?”

Lord Akeldama's eyes narrowed. He ignored the chop and fiddled idly with his massive ruby cravat pin. “As I see it, there are two reasons. Either she knows exactly what happened last night at the ball and she wants to bribe you into silence, or she has no idea who that vampire was and what he was doing in her territory, and she thinks you do.”

“In either case, it would behoove me to be better informed than I currently am,” Miss Tarabotti said, eating a buttery little potato.

He nodded empathetically.

“Are you positive you do not know anything more?” she asked.

“My dearest girl, who do you think I am? Lord Maccon, perhaps?” He picked up his champagne glass and twirled it by the stem, gazing thoughtfully at the tiny bubbles. “Now there is an idea, my treasure. Why not go to the werewolves? They may know more of the relevant facts. Lord Maccon, of course, being BUR will know most of all.”

Alexia tried to look nonchalant. “But as a minister of BUR's secrets, he is also the least likely to relay any cogent details,” she countered.

Lord Akeldama laughed in a tinkling manner that indicated more artifice than real amusement. “Then there is nothing for it, sweetest of Alexias, but to use your plethora of feminine wiles upon him. Werewolves have been susceptible to the gentler sex for as long as I can remember, and that is a very long time, indeed.” He wiggled his eyebrows, knowing he did not look a day over twenty-three, his original age at metamorphosis. He continued. “Favorable toward women, those darling beaslies, even if they are a tad brutish.” He shivered lasciviously. “Particularly Lord Maccon. So big and rough.” He made a little growling noise.

Miss Tarabotti giggled. Nothing was funnier than watching a vampire try to emulate a werewolf.

“I advise you most strongly to visit him tomorrow before you see the Westminster queen.” Lord Akeldama reached forward and grasped her wrist. His fangs vanished, and his eyes suddenly looked as old as he really was. He had never told Alexia quite how old. “La, darling,” he always said, “a vampire, like a lady, never reveals his true age.” But he had described to her in detail the dark days before the supernatural was revealed to daylight folk. Before the hives and packs made themselves known on the British Isle. Before that prestigious revolution in philosophy and science that their emergence triggered, known to some as the Renaissance but to vampires as the Age of Enlightenment. Supernatural folk called the time before the Dark Ages, for obvious reasons. For them it had been an age spent skulking through the night. Several bottles of champagne were usually required to get Lord Akeldama to talk of it at all. Still, it meant, by Alexia's calculations, that he was at least over four hundred years old.

She looked more closely at her friend. Was that fear?

His face was honestly serious, and he said, “My dove, I do not know what is transpiring here. Me, ignorant! Please take the gravest of care in this matter.”

Miss Tarabotti now knew the real source of her friend's trepidation. Lord Akeldama had no idea what was going on. For years, he had held the trump card in every major London political situation. He was accustomed to having possession of all pertinent facts before anybody else. Yet at this moment, he was as mystified as she.

“Promise me,” he said earnestly, “you will see what information you can extract from Lord Maccon on this matter before you go into that hive.”