Part 4 (2/2)
A soft snore greeted her question. Unlike vampires, werewolves did not appear dead during the day. They simply slept very, very heavily.
Well, not this this werewolf. Not if Lady Maccon had anything to say about it. She poked her husband hard in the ribs with a thumb. werewolf. Not if Lady Maccon had anything to say about it. She poked her husband hard in the ribs with a thumb.
It might have been the poke or it might have been the preternatural contact, but he awoke with a soft snuffle.
”What ended?”
With his wife's imperious face peering down at him, Lord Maccon took a moment to wonder why he had thought to crave such a woman in his life. Alexia bent over and nibbled at his chest. Ah, yes, initiative and ingenuity.
The nibbles stopped. ”Well?”
And manipulation.
His bleary tawny eyes narrowed. ”Does that brain of yours never stop?”
Alexia gave him an arch, ”Well, yes.” She looked at the angle of the sunlight creeping in around the edge of one heavy velvet drape. ”You do seem to be able to give it pause for a good two hours or so.”
”Was that all? What do you say, Lady Maccon-shall we try for three?”
Alexia batted at him without any real annoyance. ”Aren't you supposed to be too old for this kind of continuous exercise?”
”What a thing to say, my love,” snorted the earl, offended. ”I am only just over two hundred, a veritable cub in the woods.”
But Lady Maccon was not to be so easily distracted a second time. ”So, what ended?”
He sighed. ”That strange ma.s.s preternatural effect ceased at about three a.m. this morning. Everyone who should have returned to supernatural normal did, except for the ghosts. Any ghost tethered in the Thames embankment area seems to have been permanently exorcised. We brought in a volunteer ghost with a body about an hour after normality returned. He remained perfectly fine and tethered, so any new ghosts should establish in the area without difficulty, but all the old ones are gone for good.”
”So that is it? Crisis averted?” Lady Maccon was disappointed. She must remember to jot this all down in her little investigation notebook.
”Oh, I think not. This isn't something that can be swept under the proverbial carpet. We must determine what exactly occurred. Everyone knows of the incident, even the daylight folk. Although they are, admittedly, much less upset about it than the supernatural set. Everybody wants to know what happened.”
”Including Queen Victoria,” interjected Alexia.
”I lost several excellent ghost agents in that ma.s.s exorcism. So did the Crown. I also had office visits from the Times Times, the Nightly Aethograph Nightly Aethograph, and the Evening Leader Evening Leader, not to mention a very angry Lord Ambrose.”
”My poor darling.” Lady Maccon petted his head sympathetically. The earl hated dealing with the press, and he could barely tolerate being in the same room as Lord Ambrose. ”I take it Countess Nadasdy was in a tizzy over the matter.”
”To say nothing of the rest of her hive. After all, it has been thousands of years since a queen was in such danger.”
Alexia sniffed. ”It probably did them all some good.” It was no secret she bore little love for and had absolutely no trust in the Westminster Hive queen. Lady Maccon and Countess Nadasdy were carefully polite to each other. The countess always always invited Lord and Lady Maccon to her rare and coveted soirees, and Lord and Lady Maccon pointedly invited Lord and Lady Maccon to her rare and coveted soirees, and Lord and Lady Maccon pointedly always always attended. attended.
”You know, Lord Ambrose had the audacity to threaten me? Me!” The earl was practically growling. ”As though it were my fault!”
”I would have suspected he thought it was mine,” suggested his wife.
Lord Maccon became even more angry. ”Aye, well, he and his whole hive are deuced ignorant a.r.s.es, and their opinion is of little consequence.”
”Husband, language please. Besides, the potentate and the dewan felt the same.”
”Did they threaten you?” The earl reared upright and grumbled several dockside phrases.
His wife interrupted his tirade by saying, ”I completely see their point.”
”What?”
”Be reasonable, Conall. I am the only soulless in this area, and so far as anyone knows, only preternaturals have this kind of effect on supernaturals. It is a logical causal leap to take.”
”Except that we both know it was not you.”
”Exactly! So who was it? Or what was it? What really did happen? I am certain you have some theory or other.”
At that her husband chuckled. He had, after all, attached himself to a woman without a soul. He should not be surprised by her consistent pragmatism. Amazed by how quickly his wife could improve his mood by simply being herself, he said, ”You first, woman.”
Alexia tugged him down to lie next to her and pillowed her head in the crook between his chest and shoulder. ”The Shadow Council has informed the queen that we believe it to be a newly developed scientific weapon of some kind.”
”Do you agree?” His voice was a rumble under her ear.
”It is a possibility in this modern age, but it is only, at best, a working hypothesis. It might be that Darwin is right, and we have attained a new age of preternatural evolution. It might be that the Templars are somehow involved. It might be that we are missing something vital.” She directed a sharp glare at her silent spouse. ”Well, what has BUR uncovered?”
Alexia had a private theory that this was part of her role as muhjah. Queen Victoria had taken an unexpectedly favorable interest in seeing Alexia Tarabotti married to Conall Maccon, prior to Alexia's a.s.sumption of the post. Lady Maccon often wondered if that wasn't a wish to see greater lines of communication open between BUR and the Shadow Council. Although, Queen Victoria probably did not think such communication would take place quite so carnally.
”How much do you know about Ancient Egypt, wife?” Conall dislodged her and leaned up on one arm, idly rubbing the curve of her side with his free hand.
Alexia tucked a pillow under her head and shrugged. Her father's library included a large collection of papyrus scrolls. He had had some fondness for Egypt, but Alexia had always been more interested in the cla.s.sical world. There was something unfortunately fierce and pa.s.sionate about the Nile and its environs. She was much too practical for Arabic with its flowery scrawl when Latin, with all its mathematic precision, made for such an attractive alternative.
Lord Maccon pursed his lips. ”It was ours, you know? The werewolves'. Way back, four thousand years or more, lunar calendar and everything. Long before the daylight folk built up Greece and before the vampires extruded Rome, we werewolves had Egypt. You have seen how I can keep my body and turn only my head into wolf shape?”
”The thing that only true Alphas can do?” Alexia remembered it well from the one time she had seen him do it. It was unsettling and mildly revolting.
He nodded. ”To the present day, we still call it the Anubis Form. Howlers say that, for a time, we were wors.h.i.+pped as G.o.ds in Ancient Egypt. And that was our downfall. For there are legends of a disease, a ma.s.sive epidemic that struck only the supernatural: the G.o.d-Breaker Plague, a pestilence of unmaking. They say it swept the Nile clean of blood and bite, of werewolves and vampires alike, all of them dying as mortals within the s.p.a.ce of a generation, and no metamorphosis came again to the Nile for a thousand years.”
”And now?”
”Now in all of Egypt, there exists just one hive, near Alexandria, as north as it can get and still be delta. They represent what remains of the Ptolemy Hive. Just that one, and it came in with the Greeks, and is only six vampires strong. A few mangy packs roam the desert far up the Nile, way to the south. But they say the plague still dwells in the Valley of the Kings, and no supernatural has ever practiced any form of archaeology. It is our one forbidden science, even now.”
Alexia processed this information. ”So you believe we may be facing down an epidemic? A disease like this G.o.d-Breaker Plague?”
”It is possible.”
”Then why would it simply disappear?”
Conall rubbed his face with his large callused hand. ”I do not know. Werewolf legends are kept in the oral tradition, from howler to howler. We have no written edicts. Thus, they s.h.i.+ft through time. It is possible the plague of the past was not so bad as we remember or that they simply did not know to leave the area. Or it is possible that what we have now is some completely new form of the disease.”
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