Kingmakers, The (Vampire Empire Book 3) (21 page)

She felt a rush of cool air on her face and quickly sucked it into her aching chest. Her vision cleared enough to see she was on a patio outside the shattered French windows. Black oily smoke boiled out of the salon, slowly dissipating in the stiff wind.

“We must help Greyfriar!” she cried, starting for the door, eluding Shirazi's grasping hand.

A looming cloaked shape intercepted her and propelled her farther onto the soft lawn. Greyfriar knelt at her side gasping for breath. She clutched his arms.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“Yes,” he croaked in reply. Then he touched her face, and his gloved fingertip came away wet. “You're injured.”

“Nothing serious.” With watering eyes, she looked up at Captain Shirazi, who knelt with his service revolver trained at the door. “Where's Lord Aden?”

“I don't know, ma'am,” he said without moving. “I didn't see him.”

“We have to search the house.” Adele started to rise.

“Stay down!” the soldier snapped. “There are vampires inside.”

“They're dead,” Greyfriar said. “Captain, alert your men to search for Lord Aden.”

Adele nodded to Shirazi, saying, “Find him. And Captain…shoot on sight.”

Rome would do for now.

Lord Aden had a vast estate just outside the Eternal City, and the Romans were notably contentious in their dealings with the Empire. They wouldn't be quick to give him up should the Equatorians locate him and demand his extradition. However, if he feared that the empress had designs on his life, he could move to more isolated locations until the situation was rectified.

He stared down at the moonlight rippling on the Mediterranean far beneath his airship. The lights of Alexandria were a mere glow astern. He envisioned this as some romantic exile from which he would soon
return in triumph. Surely it wouldn't take long for the empress to be driven off or even killed, once the truth about the Greyfriar was revealed. Aden would be known as the man who freed the Empire from the rule of the insane Adele. But there was nothing romantic about this exile. He was losing money every minute he wasn't attending his business, and he didn't want to think about what havoc the imperials would cause to his operations in his absence.

Flay had given him several vampires to use as he saw fit, and they had come in handy after all. He had rigged his mansion with American shroud gas in case he needed protection against those things, and it had been a simple matter to trigger the gas in order to hamper Greyfriar's vaunted skills. Then he slipped out of his mansion via a tunnel right under the noses of the empress's toy soldiers.

Imagine the nerve of that little girl to call him a traitor for dealing with vampires. With one standing right beside her. Clearly all the rumors about her had been true. Adele wasn't just unfit to rule; she was irrational.

Lord Aden stepped from the stern gallery into his vast cabin. He closed the glass door behind him and slipped off his heavy overcoat. Options raced through his mind as he stirred a gin and tonic. Equatoria deserved to lose the war, as indeed it would, if he had anything to say about it. The government was incompetent if it couldn't even stand up to an unbalanced girl like Adele. A modern state needed a firm-minded businessman at the helm, not some ancient holdover from an era of divine right. Lord Aden would see to it that things changed in the coming regime. Perhaps it was time for the royal family to be deposed totally. Let men of sense and accomplishment rule the Empire.

Aden felt a blast of wind on his back. Damn latch never held properly. He turned, and in the blowing drapes he saw the figure of a man in the moonlight. Tall. Stern. Long black hair tousled in the gale. His eyes were vampire blue.

Lord Aden took a long drink to steady his nerve. He set the sweating glass on the sideboard. “You must be Gareth.”

“I am.”

“Have you come to kill me?”

“I have.”

“I'm very rich, and I can make you very rich. Would that appeal to you?”

“No.”

Aden held up a hand. “Hear me out. I have influence in many places, some you wouldn't suspect. What if I told you I could make you a king? Would that interest you?”

“No.”

“All right. Fair enough. Then tell me, what do you want?”

“To protect Adele.” Gareth was a blur in the dim light that Aden could barely see. And then Aden saw nothing else.

E
MPRESS
A
DELE AND
General Anhalt stood alone on the forefront of a reviewing stand as the men of the Twenty-fifth Suez marched past. The sergeant major shouted a command, and all heads turned toward them. The troopers flowed by, each man in lockstep with the drums, with rifles on their shoulders and bayonets shining in the early-morning sun. Their eyes were lost in the shadows of their khaki helmets. Anhalt held a salute, and Adele watched with a stern look.

Anhalt murmured to her with an offhand air, “Don't worry about Greyfriar. He will be fine.”

“I'm not worried.” Adele sighed.

“You seem worried,” the sirdar said.

“Not about him. He can handle himself.”

“Then what? If I may ask. Please speak freely. No one can hear us over this band.”

Adele glanced at the sharp profile of her most trusted advisor. There was an unwavering sturdiness to him that she valued, now more than ever.

“What,” she asked, “do you think of me as an empress?”

“You are excellent,” Anhalt said without hesitation. “You have become a symbol that is uniting the nation, not just toward the war effort, which you see before you, but as Equatorians. You rule with passion and wisdom. You are thoughtful and just. You are everything I knew you would become.”

“Thank you.” Adele felt a flutter of emotion at the general's appraisal, but she had doubts that even his worshipful opinions couldn't overawe. “I'm afraid of what I'm becoming.”

“I don't understand.”

She clasped her hands in front of her, and then lowered them because that looked childish. “I just sent someone off to execute a man. With no trial.”

“Ah.” Anhalt pursed his lips in understanding as columns of cannons newly manufactured in the factories of Lord Aden rolled past accompanied by the clip-clop of horses drawing caissons. “Aden made his choices. He must now deal with the consequences. His fate isn't murder, Your Majesty. It's justice. Lord Aden is the vilest of criminals. He is in league with our enemy.”

“Am I so different?”

“Completely different. Your relationship with Greyfriar isn't affecting your prosecution of the war.”

“Isn't it?” she wondered aloud.

He dropped his salute as the artillery unit moved off, but remained at attention. “No, Your Majesty. I am your commander in chief, and my orders have been to kill all the vampires we encounter and liberate the humans under their sway. I must assume those will remain my orders. So far as I can tell, Greyfriar has not altered your commitment to the war.”

Adele considered his statement and admitted, “I'm not sure about that. There are things about me that you don't know. You saw what I did in the Mountains of the Moon and again in Grenoble. I know you're a man who believes in the power of steam and steel, but there are powers in this world beyond those. I can marshal those powers in ways I still don't completely understand. But Mamoru says…said…that I have a unique role to play in the defeat of the vampires.”

“There are things about me that you don't understand, Majesty. Yes, I believe in steam and steel. Fervently. But I am a man of strong faith as well. I don't discuss it because such beliefs are not looked on with favor, particularly in a man of position. I practice Hindu tenets, quietly. And yes, I have seen what you can do. I don't understand it in any way, but I accept it even though it frightens me. I pray you can control it.”

“I pray I can too. More than you know.” Adele smiled at her commander with an awareness of their shared unpopular beliefs. “I never knew you were a Hindu, dear Anhalt.”

The sirdar snapped up a new salute as the Seventh Isfahan Lancers passed. The unit's five hundred pennants swept into the air accompanied by the thunder of hooves and the dancing plumes on their turbans.

Adele gave a grateful nod to the passing horsemen. “You see, Mamoru believes that Greyfriar is attempting to subvert me, and the war effort, through some long convoluted scheme to gain my trust and separate me from those who truly serve humanity's cause.”

“I understand that argument.”

“What?” Adele gaped at Anhalt before recovering herself and turning back to the passing parade. “You don't think that he's using me, do you?”

“I believe what you believe, Majesty.”

“No. That's not good enough, General. I want to know whether you trust Greyfriar.”

Anhalt held his hand rigid before the brim of his helmet, squinting in the sun. “I understand Mamoru's claims. Greyfriar has, in fact, created a grain in your mind that vampires may have some redeeming quality, that perhaps they should not be wiped from the face of the Earth.”

Adele felt the pounding of the drums. Her head began to spin and her breath quickened. She was terrified by the doubts she heard from him. She raised a hand to her forehead, careful to maintain her imperial visage on the passing men going off to fight her war.

She whispered, “I can't believe this.”

“If I may, Majesty,” Anhalt said, holding his salute steady. “I have seen Greyfriar operate under many circumstances. I have served with him on the battlefield. There are many things he is—a swordsman, a ranger, even a figure of enormous melancholy and subtle wit. If his goal was to remove you from events, he would have killed you when he first set eyes on you. The fact that Greyfriar has troubled himself to protect you this past year means only one thing: that he means to protect you. That is his single goal in life.”

Adele took a deep breath of relief. “Thank you, General.”

“If you'd care to direct your eyes to the roof across the square, just to your right.”

The empress looked beyond the marching troopers passing their reviewing stand, across the crowded Victoria Square where units moved in undefined order. The chaotic border of the Turkish Quarter rose up with its shuttered windows and awnings. In the jagged shadows created by the old buildings, she saw a figure moving strangely above the ground. Some flowing shape moved across the gap from one structure to another, and then it paused.

Greyfriar.

He clutched an iron balcony, leaning off into space, his cloak fluttering in the wind. Adele knew he could see her clearly given his amazing eyesight. She let out one breath of relief. He raised his arm and waved to her. It was done. For better or worse. She nodded, as if to the soldiers, but he would've known it was to him.

And then he was gone into the shadows.

“They'll never find Aden,” Gareth said, tugging the scarf from his face. “He's at the bottom of the sea.”

Adele sat quietly staring at a tray of sweets without appetite. She stroked her grey cat, Pet, a gift from Gareth and a remembrance of their time together in Edinburgh.

General Anhalt poured coffee for Adele and then himself. Gareth paced thoughtfully along the far wall. The door to her private chambers was locked against the constant parade of servants, and Captain Shirazi was posted in the corridor to ensure privacy.

Gareth asked, “What do you intend to do with Montrose? Kill him as he wishes?”

Adele laughed bitterly. “I don't know. Kill one man without trial. Leave another alive who wants to die.”

Gareth said, “Don't waste your sympathy on either of them, Adele. Aden was your enemy. Montrose is Undead. He would do anything Cesare told him.”

Anhalt stared out the window at the blurry lights of distant airships in the night. “They seem completely human. Difficult to tell them from real human beings.”

“They are real human beings,” Adele replied with a tired smile. “That's how Aden brought them in, as part of the humanitarian refugee relocation from the front.”

“Of course. I only meant…
civilized
human beings. It seems rather complex planning for vampires.”

Gareth laughed as he slapped his gloves against his thigh. “Why do you continue to underestimate us? After Adele's kidnapping? After Gibraltar? After the attack on Marseilles? And after your own near disaster at Grenoble? Even with your superior weapons, your inability to see us for what we are could be your undoing.”

“Thank you,” Anhalt said frostily, “for the lecture on your kind.”

Adele studied the ripples in her coffee cup and took a deep breath, loathing what was coming next. “I need to talk about Mamoru.”

Gareth and Anhalt halted their pacing out of respect for her obvious dilemma.

“It is painfully clear to me,” Adele began with a strong voice that still quavered beneath, “that Mamoru cannot bring himself to accept my situation. I have overlooked his lack of forthrightness over the years, but I don't have that leisure any longer.”

“With due respect, Your Majesty,” Anhalt said, “he's always been a shady character. I believe he has manipulated you, and the court, to pursue his private agenda. You need not labor to convince us.”

“I need to convince myself. I believed in him.”

Gareth's voice was cold. “There comes a time when we must face the future, no matter how dire. Youth is gone forever, and those ideals must be sacrificed, when necessary, to greater causes. Mamoru is party to every secret you have, large and small. If you no longer trust him, you must deal with him.”

She looked up sharply at the unmasked face of the vampire prince. “What do you mean,
deal
with him?”

He stared at her in silence.

Adele got a chill and heard echoes of Mamoru's ravings about Gareth's sinister schemes:
It orchestrated the attack on Alexandria, murdered your father, ruined the American coalition, and steers us on a losing war!
Now Gareth was suggesting she eliminate Mamoru. “Dear God. I feel sick. He has committed no crime.”

“Then why are you holding him?” Gareth asked.

“You know why.”

“My point exactly. You already know what must be done.”

Adele swung her feet to the floor and bent over in anguish.

General Anhalt moved to her side, but remained rigid and military. “Your Majesty, do you trust Mamoru to do your bidding?”

She took a deep, shuddering breath. “No.”

“Do you believe that he will use his privileged information for his own purposes, whatever they may be?”

“Yes.”

“Do you believe that if the secret of the Greyfriar ever became known, it could shatter your reign?”

“Yes.”

The sirdar said, “There is your answer, Your Majesty.”

The empress looked up at the general and whispered hoarsely, “He's Mamoru. I can't kill him.”

“Very well, but…”

“But I can never let him go. Can I?”

“No,” Anhalt said. “You cannot.”