Long Live the Queen (The Immortal Empire) (6 page)

I supposed I understood, but it was still rubbish. “Do me a favour? Tell Ethan to let me know when he’s ready to leave.”

She said she would, and left me outside Vex’s door. I was nervous as I turned the handle. I knew he wouldn’t blame me for this, but there was a part of me that thought the pack was right. Maybe I was responsible on some level. More rubbish, but there it was.

He was sitting up when I walked in. A mountain of pillows supported him. He watched me with his good eye as I approached, and what I saw there warmed me. He wasn’t angry. There was nothing but love in his gaze. Love and concern.

“We have to stop this thing, sweetheart,” he said. No declaration of affection, no jokes, no telling me not to worry. I suppose I should appreciate that he respected me enough not to attempt placation.

“We will stop it,” I promised, as I sat on the side of the bed. He didn’t flinch, so that was a good sign. “But right now I’d just like to sit with you for a minute, if that’s all right.”

He smiled. God, he was a mess. A beautiful, battered mess. “Of course.” He reached out and touched my cheek. “I didn’t need to catch her scent to know it wasn’t you. Even if I was blind and had a human’s sense of smell, I would still know you.”

One of the tears I’d tried so hard to hold back trickled down my cheek. Vex brushed it away with his thumb as I leaned in to kiss him. Whoever, or whatever, this creature was, she had almost taken Vex from me.

I was going to kill her for it.

Queen V was no more pleased to see me again that night than I was to see her. Still, this was bigger than both of us, and required immediate attention. If the thing with my face was running around London, no one was safe. And if it could take down Vex, it would have no problem eating a tiny little morsel like her.

Her son, Bertie, Prince of Wales, was with her. He was the official vampire liaison and heir to the throne, and he’d been getting a fair bit of attention lately as he lobbied for peace between humans and those of plagued blood. He was very well-spoken, and presented a much kinder face to the public on behalf of the aristos than that of his mother, who was perceived as a cold bitch.

If they wanted to persuade humans to like us, they should hire a couple of actors from the US to put a pretty face and spin on things.

I understood that Bertie was considered handsome amongst
the aristocracy, but I’d always suspected that applied more to his money and power than to his face. He lacked a certain ruggedness, or robustness, that humans seemed to find attractive. It wasn’t that he was ugly, just that his face was… soft – except for a sharp nose. He was fairly lean and wore his brown hair in a very current style, but his clothing – at least while at court – favoured the more late-1800s sensibilities preferred by his mother.

In fact, my snug velvet trousers and blood-red frock coat made me more of a peacock than him.

I wondered if he knew his mother had offered him to me as a potential husband some time ago.
That
was how much she wanted to keep an eye on me. Offered up her firstborn like a fluffy little lamb. Enemies closer than friends and all that.

“Lady Xandra,” Bertie greeted me, “it is a pleasure to see you again, despite the tragic circumstances of our meeting.” His voice was pleasant, and when he smiled I could see why he was rumoured to have bedded every woman with even a hint of plagued blood in her. He was charming, and had a way of making a girl feel as though she was the only one in the room.

I bowed my head to him. I was a bloody queen, so I wasn’t about to curtsy. Still, etiquette and proper address had been part of my training. “Thank you, Your Royal Highness. It is good to see you as well.”

Niceties were exchanged as quickly and with as little formality as possible. Still, I was a little twitchy; aristos did everything so bloody slowly.

William brought digital footage of the creature. This was no surprise to any of us. Goblins were like the old women that used to run the switchboards – they knew everything that went
on in the city because they were unapologetically nosy. They were tapped into security cameras all over London, and had even installed some of their own. They didn’t have footage from the actual raid, but only because the lab had done something to render nearby cams useless. Regardless, they’d picked up the escaped subject on several feeds afterward.

“Thought it was our lady at first,” William said as he popped another video cylinder into the playback machine. “So wrong was your prince.” That was directed at me rather than Victoria. William considered her nothing more than a bloodsucker – beneath him. And she treated him like he ought to be in a zoo, or better still, laid out as a rug in her den.

A somewhat grainy image appeared on the screen of the fifty-odd-inch box in the family room of Buckingham Palace. Victoria never struck me as the type to sit down and watch VBC 1 with her children, but this room definitely had more of a lived-in feel than the others I’d seen. There was a box of Cadbury’s chocolates on the tea table, next to a battered Wilkie Collins paperback novel. This decor was a far cry from the black-draped gothic nightmare I would have conjured for her.

We all looked at the screen. The lab had been located in Notting Hill, which was part of the Greater London area known collectively as the North End. The district name was Windsor, but few people called it that. The area surrounding the laboratory was nicknamed “Mostly”, as it was mostly made up of human relatives of noble families, those born aristo who didn’t carry the plague – rare, but it happened – and retired courtesans. Everyone there was “mostly” human, but important enough to the Crown to warrant their own neighbourhood and close proximity to Mayfair.

I spotted the creature as soon as she appeared on screen.

She didn’t look anything like me at all! Her hair was a fright and her clothing abysmal. And when she turned her head, the light lit up her eyes like a cat’s. But her face…

Albert’s fangs – she
did
look like me. Eerily so. I had to sit down on the arm of the sofa. If I didn’t know better, I’d wonder if maybe it was me too. Granted, she was dirty and wild-looking, but there was no denying her features.

Was she my twin, or a coincidence? My mother would surely remember giving birth to another child, but whether or not she’d tell me the truth was the question. After all, I’d thought she was insane, or dead, for years before I found out the truth about what had happened to her.

As far as parents went, mine sucked – literally and figuratively.

Instinct told me this creature was too new to be my twin. Too young. She had been created, I was certain of it. Animal cloning had been going on for decades, and scientists already knew how to fabricate new organs. Hell, they’d cloned a human in the US six years ago. The whole thing was still tied up in a legal battle, and was illegal in Britain, but neither of those things would stop someone who truly wanted to give it a go. Parts of Europe had such facilities set up. Just last month doctors in Germany had announced that they had successfully grown new organs for a woman who’d had a complete hysterectomy due to cancer. She was pregnant now, I believed.

It made sense that this would be the point of the labs – to genetically engineer future generations.

Victoria stepped forward. “The resemblance is uncanny, but this footage is time-stamped during our earlier meeting, which proves that it is indeed someone else.”

The scene on the box switched to another camera. I watched
my blood-soaked doppelgänger as she moved southwards, pausing occasionally to sniff the air. What was she looking for?

Thankfully, there was very little pedestrian traffic, and most of what there was was on the opposite side of the street. To be honest, I was surprised she didn’t attack. And then, I saw her head turn. She stared as a motor carriage stopped at a traffic beacon.

This was not going to be good.

I think we all jumped when she leaped through the air on to the bonnet of the vehicle, crushing it like foil wrap. She tore through the windscreen and roof like a child ripping open a bar of chocolate.

She ate the driver in much the same manner.

“Dear God,” Victoria whispered, pressing a hand to her mouth.

I stared at her, frankly astonished. I knew she couldn’t feel sorry for the human. Could she? After all they’d done to us. To her. Had she never seen such violence before? Surely she had. After all, she’d been alive for almost two centuries. She’d survived the Great Insurrection. Had fought in it.

“She just ate that man’s liver.” Victoria’s eyes widened as she stared at the gory scene. “While he was still alive.”

I exchanged a glance with Ethan, who had accompanied me in Vex’s stead. The Scot looked as alarmed as I felt. This side of Victoria went against everything I’d ever heard or thought about her.

“Yeah,” I said, rather lamely. “She did. He’s dead now, though.” The tearing-off of his head made sure of that.

I watched as her face settled once more into the resolute countenance to which I was accustomed. Not one trace of
emotion remained. What did it say about me that I was more comfortable with this side of her than one capable of feeling?

“Word of this is going to spread. Human deaths at the hands of an aristocratic abomination is just what the Human League requires to start a full-fledged uprising.” She looked at me. “Something has to be done about it.”

“That’s why we’re here.” If I’d added “eejit” to the end of that, I couldn’t have sounded any more condescending.

Victoria’s blue eyes narrowed. “I mean that someone has to get to the scene of that accident and clean it up before humans find it.”

“So dig out your wellies, Vicky, and get to it. I’m more concerned with finding her than cleaning up her mess.”

It didn’t help that William decided to snigger at my tone. Victoria’s cheeks flushed. “I am the Queen of the British Empire. I do not dispose of human remains.”

“Oh, I think we both know you’ve disposed of your share of remains. You’ll just have to find someone else, then. I’m going looking for my feral twin so that I don’t end up with an angry mob outside my door calling for my head.”

“If I thought your head would appease them, they’d already have it.”

I smirked at her. “Good luck with the clean-up. Maybe the humans won’t blame you, the Blood Queen, for an attack on an innocent human. Maybe when they attack this time they won’t bring tetracycline or silver with them along with weapons and fire.” It was a prickish thing to say, especially knowing she’d sequestered herself to this posh prison years ago because she was so afraid of humans.

“Your Majesties,” Ethan interrupted, “I’m sorry to break up your pissing contest, but she’s moving.”

Both Victoria and I turned our attention to the insubordinate wolf, who pointed at the screen. On it, the doppelgänger was considerably south-east of where she’d started. The timestamp showed twenty minutes ago.

“Where do you reckon she’s heading?” Ethan asked. As a were, he spent most of his time in Scotland with the rest of the pack and took care of business there while Vex was here in the city. He didn’t know the layout of London like the rest of us did.

I watched as my double stopped again. From what I could see of her surroundings, I reckoned she was near the Serpentine, either in Kensington Gardens or Hyde Park. She lifted her head and sniffed once more.

“Tracking,” William said. “The not-lady is hunting.”

“Hunting?” There was a tremor in Victoria’s voice. “What is it hunting?”

“Something it smelled at the laboratory where it was found?” Ethan suggested.

“Or someone,” Bertie added.

“Oh my God.” Nausea slammed hard into my gut. How could I have been so utterly, totally, stupid-arse, straight-up hatters not to realise it before this? “We have to go. Now!”

I grabbed William by the hand and pulled. He came along willingly. I couldn’t see the question in his eyes, hidden by the dark glasses he had to wear above ground, even at night.

“What is it?” Ethan demanded, following us. Victoria stayed where she was, brooding. Too bad. She could take clean-up duty – or charge Bertie with it. I didn’t care. I was on the verge of hysterical panic.

“I know where she’s going!” I yanked open the door.

“Where?”

Fang me, couldn’t he just come with me? “Mayfair,” I shot back. “She’s tracking Vex.”

William dug a rotary out of the pocket of his shabby frock coat and dialled a number as we ran out of the palace. He barked – literally – into it before telling whoever was on the other end to haul arse to Vex’s house. I felt marginally better that the goblins would protect my wolf. If my doppelgänger could hurt Vex so badly, the only hope I had of protecting him was with the gobs.

Sirens wailed in the night – not unusual these days. At least a few of them had to be headed to that twisted wreck of a car – and man – the creature had destroyed.

At the gates of the palace I could hear protesters, even at this late hour. These humans were either incredibly brave or incredibly stupid to be causing a fuss during aristo hours. Safety in numbers was a fallacy – for both sides.