God Save the Queen (The Immortal Empire)
Read God Save the Queen (The Immortal Empire) Online
Authors: Kate Locke
Tags: #Paranormal steampunk romance, #Fiction
Trying to hide my fear was futile, as he could surely smell it. Still, I had to give it a go. “Would you be so kind as to share my sister’s whereabouts, my lord? Please? I am concerned about her.”
If there was one thing goblins understood it was blood – both as sustenance and connection. Offspring happened rarely because of their degree of mutation, and were treasured. No decent goblin – and I use “decent” as loosely as it can possibly be construed – would turn down a request that involved family.
“New Bethlehem,” he replied in a grave growl.
I pressed a hand against the boned front of my corset, and closed my fingers into a fist. I would not show weakness here, no matter how much the prince might sympathise with my plight – he was still a goddam goblin. “Bedlam?” I rasped.
The prince nodded. “She was taken in two nights ago, in shackles.”
Albert’s fangs
. I blasphemed the Queen’s late consort to myself alone. My mind could scarcely grasp the reality of it. “You’re wrong,” I whispered. “You have to be wrong.” But goblins were never wrong.
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 978-1-405-51169-8
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Kathryn Smith
Understanding the Aristocracy by Eric Jackson & Emelia Agrafojo Copyright © 2012
Excerpt from Tempest Rising by Nicole Peeler Copyright © 2009 by Nicole Peeler
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
This book is for my sisters: Heather, Linda and Nathalie.
I could list the reasons why
,
but that would be a book in itself.
God Save the Queen
is set, obviously, in an imaginary world – an alternate timeline. Some of its history, however, is exactly what you’ll find in the textbooks. In my world, history began to diverge in the late eighteenth century, when “mad” George III was still on the throne, and his son “Prinny” ruled as Regent. In reality, George III suffered, it is believed, from porphyria, a blood disease that is thought to also have affected Mary, Queen of Scots. The disease has many symptoms, including hallucinations, confusion, red urine and sensitivity to sunlight.
In my world, George III was simply the first of the “aristocrats” to show the effects of the Prometheus Protein, which was caused by a mutation of the bubonic plague. By the time Victoria was born in 1819, the aristocracy was beginning to display more and more vampiric and lycanthropic traits. It’s around this time that history as we know it begins to dissolve a little more. Certainly by the late 1800s, it was a different world entirely. America and Canada broke away from English rule and banded together. Britain kept many of her other colonies, and was still ruler of one of the largest empires in the world.
Enter the twentieth century and things change even more drastically. The Russian royal family was never assassinated. Anastasia is a vampire. World Wars I and II never happened. This is a world without Hitler, without the Blitz. Without the Beatles. Without
Doctor Who
. A world where Bram Stoker had to flee the UK after writing
Dracula.
Air travel is done in ships that, while modern, still look a lot like Zeppelins. Music and movies are stored on cylinders. Cell phones look nothing like what we’re accustomed to using. But technology is still there, though perhaps not as streamlined as it is in this world.
There is, however, one notable similarity between our world and that of
God Save the Queen
, and that’s hope. Everyone’s looking for a better tomorrow, and just trying to make the best of what they have.
And oh yeah, vampires don’t sparkle.
CHAPTER 1 POMEGRANATES FULL AND FINE
CHAPTER 2 IT RUNS IN THE FAMILY
CHAPTER 3 A HOST OF FURIOUS FANCIES
CHAPTER 6 THE LUNATICS HAVE TAKEN OVER THE ASYLUM
CHAPTER 7 STRAYING LATE AND LONELY
CHAPTER 8 IN THE COMPANY OF COURTESANS
CHAPTER 10 CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER
CHAPTER 11 SURPRISES, LIKE MISFORTUNES, SELDOM COME ALONE
CHAPTER 12 ADVERSITY IS THE FIRST PATH TO TRUTH
CHAPTER 13 THE PURE AND SIMPLE TRUTH IS RARELY PURE AND NEVER SIMPLE
CHAPTER 14 NOT SINGLE SPIES BUT AS BATTALIONS
CHAPTER 15 I BEHELD THE WRETCH – THE MISERABLE MONSTER WHOM I HAD CREATED
CHAPTER 16 MORALITY, LIKE ART, MEANS DRAWING A LINE SOME PLACE
CHAPTER 17 TO THE DEAD WE OWE ONLY THE TRUTH
CHAPTER 18 TRUTH IS THE BEGINNING OF EVERY GOOD THING
London, 175 years into the reign of Her Ensanguined Majesty Queen Victoria
I
hate
goblins.
And when I say hate, I mean they bloody terrify me. I’d rather French-kiss a human with a mouth full of silver fillings than pick my way through the debris and rubble that used to be Down Street station, searching for the entrance to the plague den.
It was eerily quiet underground. The bustle of cobbleside was little more than a distant clatter down here. The roll of carriages, the clack of horse hooves from the Mayfair traffic was faint, occasionally completely drowned out by the roar of ancient locomotives raging through the subterranean tunnels carrying a barrage of smells in their bone-jangling wake.
Dirt. Decay. Stone. Blood.
I picked my way around a discarded shopping trolley, and tried to avoid looking at a large paw print in the dust. One of them had been here recently – the drops of blood surrounding the print were still fresh enough for me to smell the coppery tang. Human.
As I descended the stairs to platform level, my palms skimmed over the remaining chipped and pitted cream and maroon tiles that covered the walls – a grim reminder that this …
mausoleum
was once a thriving hub of urban transportation.
The light of my torch caught an entire set of paw prints, and the jagged pits at the end where claws had dug into the steps. I swallowed, throat dry.
Of course they ventured up this far – the busted sconces were proof. They couldn’t always sit around and wait for some stupid human to come to them – they had to hunt. Still, the sight of those prints and the lingering scent of human blood made my chest tight.
I wasn’t a coward. My being here was proof of that – and perhaps proof positive of my lack of intelligence. Everyone – aristocrat, half-blood and human – was afraid of goblins. You’d be mental not to be. They were fast and ferocious and didn’t seem to have any sense of morality holding them back. If aristos were fully plagued, then goblins were overly so, though such a thing wasn’t really possible. Technically they were aristocrats, but no one would ever dare call them such. To do so was as much an insult to them as to aristos. They were mutations, and terribly proud of it.
Images flashed in my head, memories that played out like disjointed snippets from a film: fur, gnashing fangs, yellow eyes – and blood. That was all I remembered of the day I was attacked by a gob right here in this very station. My history class from the Academy had come here on a field trip. The gobs stayed away from us because of the treaty. At least they were
supposed
to stay away, but one didn’t listen, and it picked me.
If it hadn’t been for Church, I would have died that day. That was when I realised goblins weren’t stories told to children to make us behave. It was also the day I realised that if I didn’t do
everything in my ability to prove them wrong, people would think I was defective somehow – weak – because a goblin tried to take me.
I hadn’t set foot in Down Street station since then. If it weren’t for my sister Dede’s disappearance I wouldn’t have gone down there at all.
Avery and Val thought I was overreacting. Dede had taken off on us before, so it was hardly shocking that she wasn’t answering her rotary or that the message box on said gadget was full. But in the past she had called me to let me know she was safe. She always called
me
.
