“You mean, your werewolf husband who sleeps daylight solid. And whom I highly doubt you touch while you sleep?”
“Of course I do not.” Alexia was taken aback that he need ask. Staying in contact with Conall all night, every night, would cause him to age, and while she abhorred the idea of growing old without him, she wasn’t about to inflict mortality on him. He would also grow facial hair and come over more than usually scruffy of a morning.
“So you admit you could have snuck out of the house?” The dewan stopped pacing and glared at her.
Lady Maccon made a clucking noise of denial. “Have you met my staff? If Rumpet didn’t stop me, Floote would, not to mention Angelique running about fussing over my hair. Sneaking out, I am sorry to say, is a thing of my past. But you are welcome to blame me if you are too lazy to try and figure out what is really going on here.”
The potentate, of all people, seemed a little more convinced. Perhaps it was simply that he did not want to believe she had access to such an ability.
Alexia continued. “I mean, really, how could one preternatural, however powerful, affect an entire area of the city? I have to touch you in order to force your humanity. I have to touch a dead body in order to exorcise its ghost. I could not possibly manage to be in all those places at once. Besides which, I am not touching you right now, am I? And you are both mortal.”
“So what are we dealing with? A whole pack of preternaturals?” That was the dewan. He was prone to thinking in numbers, the consequence of an overabundance of military training.
The potentate shook his head. “I have seen BUR’s records. There are not enough preternaturals in all of England to exorcise so many ghosts at once. There are probably not enough in the civilized world.”
Alexia wondered how he had seen such records. She would have to tell her husband about that. Then she returned her attention to the business at hand. “Is there anything more powerful than a preternatural?”
The not-vampire shook his head again. “Not in this particular way. Vampire edict tells us that soul-suckers are the second most deadly creatures on the planet. But it also says that the most deadly of all is no leech, but a different kind of parasite. This cannot be the work of one of them.”
Lady Maccon scribbled this down in her book. She was intrigued and a little put out. “Worse than us soul-suckers? Is that possible? And here I was thinking myself a member of the most hated set. And what do you call them?”
The potentate ignored this question. “That will teach you to get full of yourself.”
Alexia would have pressed the issue but suspected that line of questioning would be ignored. “So this must be the result of a weapon, a scientific apparatus. That is the only possible explanation.”
“Or we could take that ridiculous man Darwin’s theories to heart and postulate a newly evolved species of preternatural.”
Alexia nodded. She had her reservations about Darwin and his prattle on origins, but there might be some little merit to his ideas.
The dewan, however, pooh-poohed the idea. Werewolves were, largely, of a much less scientific bent than vampires, except where advances in weaponry were concerned. “I am more sympathetic to the muhjah on this point if nothing else. If she isn’t doing it herself, then it must be some newfangled contrivance of technical origin.”
“We are living in the Age of Invention,” agreed the potentate.
The dewan looked thoughtful. “The Templars have finally managed to unify Italy and declare themselves Infallible; perhaps they are turning their attention outward once more?”
“You think this may herald a second Inquisition?” The potentate blanched. He could do that now.
The dewan shrugged.
“There is no point in wild speculation,” said the ever-practical Lady Maccon. “Nothing suggests that the Templars are involved.”
“You are Italian,” grumbled the dewan.
“Oh, fiddlesticks, is everything in this meeting going to come back around to my being my father’s daughter? My hair is curly too—could that somehow be involved? I am the product of my birth, and there is nothing I can change about that, or believe you me, I might have opted for a smaller nose. Let us simply agree that the most likely explanation for this kind of wide-scale preternatural effect is a weapon of some kind.” She turned to the potentate. “You are positive you have never heard of this kind of thing happening before?”
He frowned and rubbed at the crease between his green eyes with the tip of one white finger. It was an oddly human gesture. “I will consult the edict keepers on the subject, but, no, I do not think so.”
Alexia looked to the dewan. He shook his head.
“So the question is, what could someone hope to gain by this?”
Her supernatural colleagues looked at her blankly.
A tap came on the closed door. The dewan went to answer it. He spoke softly for a moment through the crack and then returned with an expression transformed from scared to bemused.
“The effects would appear to be negated just outside the afflicted zone we discussed earlier. Werewolves, at least, revert back to fully supernatural. The ghosts, of course, cannot relocate to take advantage of this fact. And I cannot speak for the vampires.”
What he did not say was that what changed werewolves was also likely to change vampires—they were more alike than either race preferred to admit.
“I shall look into this myself, personally, as soon as our meeting is concluded,” said the potentate, but he was clearly relieved. It had to be a product of his human condition; normally his emotions were not so obvious.
The dewan sneered at him. “You will be able to move that endangered queen of yours, should you deem it necessary.”
“Do we have any further business to address?” asked the potentate, ignoring the comment.
Alexia reached forward to tap at the harmonic auditory resonance disruptor with the butt end of her stylographic pen, getting it vibrating once more. Then she looked to the dewan. “Why have so many regiments returned home recently?”
“Indeed, I had noticed something of an overabundance of the military roaming the streets as I left my house this evening.” The potentate looked curious.
The dewan shrugged, trying for casualness and failing. “Blame Cardwell and his blasted reforms.”
Alexia sniffed pointedly. She approved of the reforms, far more humane to cut out flogging and change enlistment tactics. But the dewan was an old-timer; he liked his soldiers disciplined, poor, and mildly bloody.
He continued as though she hadn’t sniffed. “We had that steamer in from West Africa several months ago crying that the Ashantis were giving us hell. The Secretary of War pulled everyone we could spare out of the east and back here for rotation.”
“Do we still have that many troops in India? I thought the region was pacified.”
“Not hardly. But we have the numbers to pull several regiments out and leave the East India Company and its mercenaries to take the brunt of it. The empire should stay sound. The duke wants proper regiments with werewolf attachments down in West Africa, and I can’t say I blame him. It’s a nasty business down there. These incoming regiments you see around London are to reconfigure as two separate battalions and ship back out within a month. It’s causing a moon’s worth of mess. Most had to be routed through Egypt in order to get back here fast enough, and I still don’t know how we are going to stretch to fill the orders. Still, they’re here now, clogging up the London taverns. Best get them fighting again right quick.”
He rounded on Lady Maccon. “Which reminds me. Get your husband to keep his ruddy packs under control, would you?”
“Packs? There was only the one last time I checked, and let me inform you, it is not my husband who has to discipline them. Constantly.”
The dewan grinned, causing his massive mustache to wiggle. “I am guessing you met Major Channing?” There were just few enough werewolves in England that, as Alexia had come to learn, they all seemed to know one another. And gracious did they enjoy a good gossip.
“You would be guessing correctly.” Lady Maccon made a sour face.
“Well, I was referring to the earl’s other pack, the Highland one, Kingair,” said the dewan. “They were running with the Black Watch regiment, and there’s been a bit of a dust-up. I thought your husband might stick a paw in.”
Lady Maccon frowned. “I doubt it.”
“Lost their Alpha out there, the Kingair Pack, you do realize? Niall something-or-other, a full colonel, nasty business. The pack was ambushed during high noon, when they were at their weakest and couldn’t change shape. Threw the whole regiment over for a while there. Losing a ranking officer like that, werewolf Alpha or not, caused quite a fuss.”
Alexia’s frown deepened. “No, I was not aware.” She wondered if her husband knew of this. She tapped her lip with the back of her pen. It was highly unusual for a former Alpha to survive the loss of his pack, and she had never managed to extract from Conall the whys and wherefores of his abandonment of the Highlands. But Alexia was pretty darn certain that a leadership void placed him under some sort of obligation to his former pack, even if it had been decades.
The discussion moved on to speculation as to who might be responsible for the weapon: various not-as-secret-as-they-wanted societies, foreign nations, or factions within the government. Lady Maccon was convinced it was Hypocras Club style scientists and held firm on her stance over deregulation. This frustrated the potentate, who wanted the surviving Hypocras Club members released to his tender mercies. The dewan sided with the muhjah. He wasn’t particularly interested in scientific research of this kind, but he wasn’t about to see it fall wholly into vampire hands. This derailed the conversation onto distribution of Hypocras goods. Alexia suggested they go to BUR, and despite her husband’s charge of the institution, the potentate agreed so long as a vampire agent was attached.
By the time Queen Victoria arrived to confer with her council, they had come to several decisions. They informed her of the plague of humanization and their theory that it was some kind of secret weapon. The queen was appropriately worried. She knew perfectly well that the strength of her empire rested on the backs of her vampire advisors and her werewolf fighters. If they were at risk, so was Britain. She was particularly insistent that Alexia look into the mystery. After all, exorcism was supposed to be under the muhjah’s jurisdiction.
Since she would have gone out of her way to investigate regardless, Lady Maccon was happy to have official sanction. She left the Shadow Council meeting with a feeling of unexpected accomplishment. She desperately wanted to pigeonhole her husband in his BUR den, but, knowing that would only end in a row, she headed home to Floote and the library instead.
Lady Alexia Maccon’s father’s collection of books, normally an excellent, or at least distracting, source of information, proved a disappointment on the matter of large-scale negation of the supernatural. Nor did it have anything to say on the potentate’s tantalizing comment concerning a threat to vampires worse than soul-suckers. After hours of flipping through the worn leather-covered books, ancient scrolls, and personal journals, Lady Maccon and Floote had uncovered absolutely nothing. There were no further notes in her little leather book and no further insight into the mystery.