“So, my lord?” said she to the vampire, not at all up for dillydallying.
Lord Akeldama got straight to the point. Which was, in and of itself, a marker of his distress.
“My precious plum blossom, do you have any idea who is sitting in the back alleyway behind the kitchen right this very moment?”
Since Alexia was pretty darned convinced she would have spotted the octomaton from the roof, she took her second best guess.
“Countess Nadasdy?”
“Behind the kitchen! By my longest fang! I—” He interrupted himself. “Gracious me, buttercup, but how did you know?”
Even coping with the violent kicking and squirming in her tummy, Alexia couldn’t help but smile. “Now you know how I always feel.”
“She swarmed.”
“Yes, finally. You wouldn’t believe what it took to chivy her out of that place. You’d think she was a ghost, so tightly tethered as to never be separated from her fixing point.”
Lord Akeldama sat down, took a deep breath, and composed himself. “Darling marigold, please don’t tell me you’re responsible for?.?.?.?you know.” He fluttered one perfectly white hand in the air, like a dying handkerchief.
“Oh, no, silly. Not me. Madame Lefoux.”
“Oh. Of course. Madame Lefoux.” The vampire’s expression was arrested, deadpan at this latest bit of information.
Lady Maccon swore she could see the cogs and wheels of his massive intellect whirring away behind that effete painted face.
“Because of the little French maid?” He finally hazarded a guess.
Lady Maccon was enjoying having the upper hand for once. She had never dared to hope that someday she would have more information in a crisis than Lord Akeldama.
“Ah, no—Quesnel.”
“Her son?”
“Not exactly hers.”
Lord Akeldama stood up from his casual lounging posture. “The little towheaded lad the countess has with her? The one who ripped my jacket?”
“That sounds like Quesnel.”
“What’s the hive queen doing with a French inventor’s son?”
“Ah, apparently, Angelique left a will.”
Lord Akeldama tapped one fang with the edge of his gold and ruby monocle, pulling all the threads together right before Alexia’s eyes. “Angelique is the boy’s real mother, and she left him to the tender care of the hive? Silly bint.”
“And the countess stole him from Genevieve. So Genevieve built an octomaton and destroyed the hive house trying to get him back.”
“Upon my word, that’s escalating things rather much.”
“I daresay it is.”
Lord Akeldama stopped tapping and began swinging his monocle back and forth while he took up a slow pace about the room. His white brow creased in one perfect line between the eyebrows.
Lady Maccon rubbed her protesting belly with one hand and sipped tea with the other. For once, the magic liquid was unable to disseminate any beneficial effects. The child was not happy, and tea was not going to pacify the beast.
The monocle stilled.
Alexia straightened up in her chair expectantly.
“The question remains, what is to be done with an entire hive skulking in my back alley?”
“Have them in for tea?” suggested Lady Maccon.
“No, no, not possible, little cream puff. They can’t come in here.”
Vampires were peculiar about etiquette. “Buckingham Palace? That should be relatively secure.”
“No, no. Political nightmare. Vampire queen in the palace? Trust me, darling, it is never a good idea to have too many queens in one place, let alone one palace.”
“To be really safe and buy us some extra time, we really ought to get her out of London.”
“She won’t like that at all, but there is sense to the suggestion, bluebell.”
“How long do we have? I mean to say, how long does a swarming usually last?”
Lord Akeldama frowned. Concerned over whether he should give her this information, she suspected, rather than over any possibility of his not having it. “A newly made queen has months to settle, but an old queen has only a few hours.”
Lady Maccon shrugged. Only one solution readily presented itself. It was the safest place she knew of—defensible and secure.
“I will have to take her to Woolsey.”
Lord Akeldama sat down. “If you say so, Lady Alpha.”
There was something in his tone that gave Alexia pause. He sounded like that when he had recently purchased a particularly nice waistcoat. She couldn’t understand why he should be so self-satisfied with this predicament. As her benighted husband would say, vampires!
Someone had to do something. They couldn’t let the Westminster queen simply cool her heels in an alleyway behind Lord Akeldama’s and Lord Maccon’s respective houses. What a scandal if the papers ever found that out! Alexia very much hoped Felicity was locked away. “It will only be until we can determine what’s to be done with her. And how to resolve this situation with Quesnel. Hopefully without destroying any other perfectly innocent buildings.” Lady Maccon tilted back her head and yelled, “Floote!”
The rapidity of Floote’s appearance suggested he had, indeed, been waiting just outside the door.
“Floote, how many carriages do we have in town?”
“Just the one, madam. Just arrived back in.”
“Well, that’ll have to do. Hitch up the goers and have it brought round to the back, please. I shall meet you there.”