Almost Lovers (21 page)

I walked off into the park; Prussia cradled
in my arms and held close to my chest. I had almost lost her into
the night. The same jogging path I had found her on, she had almost
died there with Robert, who apparently had thought to run instead
of standing to protect her. He wouldn't be a loss, not to Prussia,
not to humanity. But at least Lydia had been the one, not me. If
Prussia ever found out...it wouldn't be on my hands and I was
thankful for that.

I got rid of Robert's body and met Penelope
back at the warehouse. I dreaded going down into that basement
knowing that we had fucked up royally but I wouldn't survive the
night if I were an enemy of two courts instead of just one. The
heavy steel door slide open with ease as I stepped into the
basement.

"How the hell did Sebastian find us?" asked
Penelope.

I could hear the constant drip of a leaking
pipe somewhere and the gentle moan of the slaves shacked to the
ceiling in the stale walk in freezer. Adrenaline still raced
through me.

"I have no idea," I said, "Sebastian wasn't
supposed to be on the guard schedule, I swear. I thought it was
just the two guards,"

"We should have fought him," said Penelope,
standing up from the over stuffed chair behind her desk that was
littered with papers.

The basement was dark, damp, and full of
trash like the rest of the building. An abandoned warehouse we had
taken over for our operation. Any humans that questioned our
presence were shackled and kept in the freezer as meals until they
wasted away or someone got greedy. A few of our men were loitering
just outside of the basement listening. I could hear the gentle
whispers back and forth. An untrained ear would hear the wind. I
knew better. I walked over and slammed the steel door shut and
turned back to Penelope, pacing behind her desk now. She still
wanted a fight. Addictive, the rush of the hunt.

"He's much stronger than he looks," I said,
trying not to impart any undue flattery for my ex-lover, "He's got
a reputation and he used to captain the Royal Guard for a
reason,"

"I would have underestimated him, then?"
asked Penelope, her tone changing from anger to thoughtfulness. She
stopped pacing and picked up a dagger off her desk, still
thoughtful. She spun it on her finger tip, letting the drops of
blood slide down the blade.

"He subdued the Chancellor," I said,
providing an example, "When the Chancellor attacked me Sebastian
pulled him off of me like he was nothing,"

Penelope pursed her lips and the corners of
her mouth turned downward.

"Very good," said Penelope, "I'm glad you
intervened. I hadn't planned to die over a human,"

"Nor I. It all went wrong very fast," I
said, defeat in my voice as I put my hands on my head to stretch
and keep my head from spinning as my adrenaline continued to spike,
"he shouldn't have been there. The Queen will have my head by
morning,"

Penelope nodded, her hand still spinning and
playing with the knife she held.

"That is a problem," she echoed my concern,
"We still need you in the Queen's court,"

"If I go back she'll kill me," I said,
"There won't be a trial. She'll just kill me. She's been looking
for an excuse for years,"

"Then make sure there is a trial," said
Penelope as though it were common sense.

"What? Just walk in and demand a trial and
refuse to let her stake me in the chest?" I tried to stifle my
laugh but the thought was absurd.

Queen Victoria had always been above the
laws, even her own. The only thing a demand would get out of the
Queen would be a laugh before she finished me off. I would sooner
run than be given the eternal death.

"Yes," said Penelope, "But if Prussia saw
you, you're as good as dead with or without a trial."

"She can't order me put to death for being
with you," I said, "You didn't even kill Prussia. The twat is still
alive and I'm sure traumatized by now,"

Penelope sat on the edge of her desk and
held her knife out to me.

"She can," said Penelope, a serious
matter-of-fact look on her face, "You won't give me up and that's
an offense against the Queen. She could torture you and then put
you to death. The only way to prevent all of this is to make sure
you have a trial and to make Prussia disappear,"

"Disappear? They have her," I snatched the
knife from her and threw it at the wall to my right, "There is no
way to get to her! And even if we could, what makes you think she
hasn't already told them?"

"Because," said Penelope, pulling several
small stakes out of her desk and a gun, "You would have already
been summoned,"

I stopped talking, or ranting for that
matter. My Master had made a valid argument. I would be summoned
the instant they knew something. If I ran then a bounty would be on
my head, assumed guilt. If I came in, I would be handed a verdict
and sentence in one swift stab to the chest by the Queen herself,
if she felt like getting her hands dirty.

"What are you saying?" I asked, head
spinning at how things had gone completely sideways on us.

"We," said Penelope, "Are going to pay a
visit to the Queen,"

I pulled the knife out of the wall where I
had thrown it, bits of drywall falling and revealing even more of
the underlying brick. There were only a handful of us at our
satellite location. We weren't enough to go into the Queen's own
castle, her court, and just dictate how things would be.

"This is suicide," I mumbled, looking at the
blood that caked with drywall on the edges of the blade.

"Honey," said Penelope, grabbing my face and
squishing my cheeks together with her one hand so my lips puckered
up, "You're dead if we do and dead if we don't. Get your ass in
gear and call all the Lords and Ladies to the court immediately. If
I know the gossips of the court, they wouldn't miss this for
anything in the world. And if they're not there, you're an extra
dead vamp walking,"

She smiled at me. It wasn’t a request; it
was an order as my Master. Do what you're told or I'll make you
wish you had was what that smile meant. And I did what I was told.
She stowed all her weapons on her person and we headed for the car
as I typed up a message on my phone.

"What's that?" asked Penelope.

"A mass text.
To the Lords and Ladies of
the Queen's Court, I do humbly request your immediate audience in
the presence of the Queen and absence of my late husband, the Right
Honorable Chancellor
," I read the message aloud as I typed
it.

"That will do it," said Penelope, smiling at
me as we both opened our car doors and got in.

We didn't take any of the others with us. We
were the only ones going in case we didn't make it back. If we
didn't they would inform our own court. And then they would know
that war had begun. The tires spit rocks as we spun out and sped
onto the road. We weren't far from the Queen's castle, as close to
my apartment as we were. At this speed, we would be there in only a
few minutes.

I felt my adrenaline spike again. The fear
hit me first but the euphoria and realization kept me from losing
my mind. We were going in. After years of waiting, the time had
come.

"What's the plan?" I asked, getting myself
pumped up for the possibility that I could die the eternal death
tonight and okay with it so long as I inflicted as much damage as
possible.

"I go in, you wait in the car," said
Penelope.

I thought I had heard her wrong. Penelope
wanted to go in alone?

"You're just going to walk in, alone, all by
yourself?" I asked, "This is your suicide mission and I'm just
going to be a bystander?"

"No," she gave me an annoyed look and
shifted the car into another gear and sped up even more, "I'm going
to go in alone and if I'm caught I'll say that I'm there to pay
fealty to the Queen and ask forgiveness for attacking Prussia. The
minute I find her I'll grab her and get out of there. We'll meet
back at the warehouse,"

"If we're separated," I said.

"You sent that text?" asked Penelope.

"Yes," I said, "Mass text, just the press of
a button. I turned my phone off so it won't give away our
position,"

"Turn it back on," said Penelope, giving me
a stern look, "You're not coming in. You have a trial. I need you
to be there. I need you to make sure everyone knows what the Queen
has been up to and most importantly I need you to tell me what is
going on. Be my eyes and ears. She won't kill you with witnesses
watching, all over a human,"

"Okay but what are you going to do with
Prussia?" I asked, not sure where this was all going, "Why not just
kill her?"

"Because the Queen and the Prince both have
gone to great lengths to keep this human alive," said Penelope,
focusing on the road, "No vampire goes to that much trouble to keep
a human alive if she's not important for some reason. I want to
know what that reason is. And I'm going to find out one way...or
another,"

I put Prussia in her car. I hardly broke a
sweat running with her in my arms to get to her car in front of her
apartment. Her apartment wasn't safe. We had to go to the Queen
immediately. The family doctor could see her and know exactly what
to do given our special...situation. I didn't see any bite marks
but if there were any, the doctor would know what to do and if
there were any risks.

As we drove to the castle I kept going over
and over what had happened. If I had skipped tonight and just
stayed in, Prussia would be dead. If I had been there later, she
would be dead. If I had been there earlier, maybe I could have
prevented all of this. What had Prussia seen? Did she know about
me? About what I am?

She lay unconscious in the seat next to me
and I prayed she would stay that way until I got her to the castle.
The gods must have listened because when I pulled in, gravel
spitting everywhere in the drive, Prussia hadn't budged an inch,
still out cold.

It wasn't until I had picked her up in my
arms again to get her in the house that she started to wake up.
Charlie wasn't at the front door and I had to juggle with Prussia
waking up in my arms to get the door open. At least it wasn't
locked. I kicked at the door and it swung open. I yelled for a
guard that had just come out of the corridor leading to the Queen's
chambers.

"Fetch that kid, what's his name…Tommy," I
ordered him, "NOW!" I yelled as the blank faced guard gaped at me,
an unconscious girl in my arms.

I tried to walk steady so as not to jostle
Prussia completely awake. I had no idea how she would react. I had
no idea what she had seen. I just knew that Robert had died and a
vampire had been standing right on top of her when I had found her
unconscious. The fact that Prussia hadn't died had been a miracle
in and of itself.

I got to the Queen's chambers and the guard
opened the door without hesitation. He reacted so fast that I
didn't stutter a single step. I walked right into the Queen's
chambers and after a quick scan of the room found her sitting on
the chaise lounge reading a book.

"What happened?" she asked, not a second
thought given to my barging-in, "Is she alive?"

Victoria stood up and pointed with the book
she had been reading to where she had been sitting.

"I didn't have time to check on the guards,"
I said, looking at the guard that had opened the door for me, "I
want 100% accountability on all on-duty and off-duty guards. I
don't care if they are in their beds, wake them up. Eyes on every
single body,"

"For the love of the Gods," said an
impatient Victoria, "What happened?"

"Prussia was attacked in the park," I
said.

Victoria's face reflected that she
understood the gravity of the attack.

"Alive?" she asked, looking at Prussia where
I set her on the chaise lounge.

"Yes," I said, huffing from the worry and
less from being winded, "Robert was with her."

Victoria's eyebrow went up and she looked at
me, waiting for an answer to the question I knew she held in her
mind.

"He didn't make it," I answered.

The Queen nodded her head.

"Someone did us a favor," said the
Queen.

I had to agree. The last words Robert and I
had spoken had made our situation clear. Robert had told me to back
off from Prussia. He had made it clear that while he didn't love
Prussia, he wasn't going to let anyone else have her either. I had
told him she deserved better. Now here we were. Prussia unconscious
and Robert dead. That cleared up any worry about competition.

"Who attacked her?" asked the Queen.

I had no idea what to tell the Queen. I had
wanted to keep Prussia in a safe place, to make sure she hadn't
been bitten and to have a doctor take a look at her. I hadn't
planned on how to explain any of this to the Queen. The door opened
then, giving me a moment to pause and think. Tommy came in.