The Queen Is Dead (The Immortal Empire) (2 page)

The kid’s expression was one of sheer panic. His friends had scattered, brave lot that they were. “There isn’t anything else!”

Of course there was. “How was he dressed? What sort of vehicle did he have? What exactly did he say?”

“He wore a dark grey suit. Looked like a rag ad for cologne or something. He had a motor carriage and a driver, but I didn’t see either of them, I swear. He said, ‘I’ll give you one hundred pounds to nail this unfortunate beast to the door of the goblin queen.’ I took his money and that’s when he said he’d end me if I told.”

“If anyone’s going to kill you, it’s going to be me,” I told him. His face went completely white. Fang me, he wasn’t going to faint, was he? “I’m not going to kill you, you stupid git. No one is.” Especially not me. I was stronger than that.

Poor thing was trembling now. “You got a pen?”

He seemed surprised by the question, but pulled one out of his jacket pocket. I took it and grabbed his hand, turning it palm up. “If he comes to you again, I want you to ring me on this number.” I jotted my mobile number on the ball of his thumb. “If I start getting prank calls, I’ll rip your tongue out and eat it in front of you, understood?”

He nodded, then shuddered a little, but still no piss. He really was a brave one. Being a hormonal teenage halfwit helped.

“What’s your name?”

“David.” His voice was hoarse. He’d barely be able to talk tomorrow.

“David, if an aristo or anyone else offers you money to do anything so fucking stupid in the future, I want you to be a good boy and say no, all right? Whatever they offer won’t be worth it.”

Another nod. “Yes, Your Majesty.”

I rolled my eyes. “Sod off. Now go home. Tomorrow your cowardly friends will be impressed that you spent ten minutes alone with me and survived. Just don’t tell them what we talked about. I don’t want word getting back to your aristo friend that you betrayed him.”

He nodded yet again, and walked away with his fists shoved in the pockets of his jacket. I watched him go, smiling when he finally gave in and started to run.

I walked home, stopping for a coffee and a box of
doughnuts along the way. The middle-aged human lady behind the counter didn’t know–or maybe didn’t care–who I was, and put a vl r and pualiant effort into appearing friendly, but her indifference was written all over her slack features and sloped shoulders. It was actually nice to be treated with general disdain as opposed to abject terror.

A few months ago–when I believed I was nothing more than a regular halvie trying to make a name for myself with the Royal Guard–I thought I knew what it was like to be hated and feared. That was before I found out I was a monster. A pretty one, but a monster nevertheless, despite my barley-sugar-red hair and furless body. I was strong, very fast and generally considered ill-tempered. And as far as I knew, I was the only one of my kind. Not exactly something I aspired to.

I was eating the fourth of the doughnuts–bless my goblin metabolism–when I reached my house. It was still standing, which was good. Nothing dead on my step. No albino aristocrats.

There was, however, a halvie sitting there. I’d know her candy-floss-pink hair anywhere. “What the hell do you want?” I demanded.

My sister Avery rose to her feet. Her wide green eyes–the same colour mine had been before my goblin genes turned them slightly gold–were red, and her face had the haggard appearance of someone who hadn’t slept recently. “I need to talk to you.”

“You said enough when you kicked me out.” I brushed past her and dug my keys out of the pocket sewn into the waistband of my skirt. Fang me, my fingers were shaking.

“It’s important,” she told my rigid back.

“I’m sure it is.” I unlocked the door. “Why don’t you send me a digigram instead?” I stepped over the threshold.

“Damn it, Xandy! It’s Val.”

I stopped, then turned my head to face her. Val was our brother, and Avery wouldn’t have let go of her grudge to talk to me unless it was serious. Fuck it all. “You’d better come in.”

I made tea because it was the civil thing to do. And I shared my doughnuts because, despite not speaking to me for two months, Avery was my sister and I loved her. And because she looked like shit.

We were in the part of my rented home that used to be the main room of the pub–equipped with original nineteenth-century bar and fixtures. I was behind the bar while Avery sat on a stool at the counter.

“What’s going on?” I asked as I poured hot water into the pot. The scent of Earl Grey wafted up, delicious and sharp. This was like Dede all over again. Avery and I had had tea that night too. I didn’t want to think about that.

She pulled apart a chocolate doughnut. “I haven’t heard from Val in almost three days.”

“And you came to me?” What, she couldn’t just call? “How the hell would I know what he’s up to?”

“I reckoned you and he would be tight again by now.”

“Well, your reckoning is shit.” I should have taken better care to hide how much she and Val had hurt me. “You certain he’s not on a case?”

Val was Special Branch of Scotland Yard and worked all halvie and aristo-related cases. It wasn’t unusual for him to
disappear for days at a time. But Avery had said the same about Dede, and she’d got herself involved with traitors and then killed.

“I called his SI.” She shot me a glance. “She thought I was you.”

“Obviously you got over it. What did she say?”

“That she couldn’t give me any details on Val or the case he was on.”

“There, he’s on the hunt. No big deal.” Maybe Avery had invented all of this as an excuse to break the silence between us.

“She told me that his brother Takeshi had called as well.”

“I fucking hate it when they call Penny by that name.” Takeshi was better known as Penny Dreadful, one of the sweetest, most gorgeous trannies you’d ever meet. She was not Val’s brother–not to me. She was his sister. She was practically family, even though she wasn’t related to me by blood. She and Val shared the same mother, but not the same father.

“I know, but Penny said she found Val’s rotary at Freak Show.”

I poured tea into Avery’s cup and then my own. “Not like him to forget his rote, but then he has a separate one for work, right?”

“Dunno. Perhaps.” She dumped several sugar cubes into her cup. “Val never said anything about an investigation.”

“Sounds like he wasn’t allowed.”

“And he didn’t say anything to you at all? Nothing about a case involving the Human League or anything?”

I stared at her. Was she fucking mental, or just not listening? “I haven’t seen Val for two months. You both decided to disown me, remember?”

She glared at me–she looked like a snarling doll. “You lied to us, about Dede, about yourself.”

“I kept quiet so the two of you wouldn’t get dragged down if it all went to hell–which it did. And I lied about me because I was just finding out the truth for myself. Thank you, by the way, for kicking me out when I needed you most.”

“I didn’t kick you out, you fucking left.”

“Because you didn’t want me in the house.”

“Who the bloody hell told you that?”

“Vardan.” Our father.

Her expression hardened. “He had no right.”

I sighed and plucked a doughnut dripping with frosting from the box. “It doesn’t matter now. Besides, Victoria made it clear she didn’t want me in her territory.”

She arched a brow. “Victoria, eh? On first-name terms, are you?”

I rolled my eyes. “Hardly. Regardless, what do you want me to do?”

Cheeks bulging with cakey goodness, my sister looked as surprised as a spinster matron in an all-boys shower. “Can’t you… you know, talk to the goblins or something? Get his phone from Penny?”

“Why don’t you go to Penny? And what makes you think the gobs know anything? Or do you think they’ve got him flavouring a stew as we speak?” I was going for a slightly more caustic tone that the incredulous one that clung to my words.

“They knew what happened to Dede, didn’t they?”

Yes, they had. That would explain the déjà vu. “And look where that got me. Us.”

Avery glanced up, cheeks normal, eyes wide. “Xandy, this
is Val we’re talking about. Our brother, who always came running any time you or I called.”

I refused to be guilted–mostly out of spite. “If something happeneo thing had with his case, then the entire Yard is out looking for him.”

“The Yard doesn’t have access to the goblins, or to you. If anyone can find him, you can.”

I ought to have been touched by the sentiment, and to an extent I was. I was still pissed off that Val had to get into shit for her to finally speak to me. “You going to help?”

Her cheeks flushed. “I can’t. I promised Em I wouldn’t go off courting trouble.”

But I could. If it weren’t for a promise to her fiancée, Avery would be out looking for Val right now, and I’d be none the wiser.

What a proper pair we were. At least I wouldn’t go fooling myself into thinking I’d be accepted back into the family fold any time soon. Which was ironic when you consider that family was what had got me into this mess to begin with.

“Fine,” I said finally, running my finger over the polished but scarred surface of the bar. “I’ll ask around.”

She opened her purse. “I can give you a few quid—”

My hand shot out and snapped the clasp shut. Avery squealed as the metal pinched her fingers. “You think I need money?”

Glaring and pouting at the same time, she shook her smarting hand. “I don’t know. The RG fired you.”

“I have my allowance,” I reminded her, not wanting to think of how my supervisor in the Royal Guard had informed me that my services were no longer required. You had to be a half-blood to be an RG, and I was no longer a halvie. Never had been.

“Besides,” I said lightly–I’d chew on silver razor blades before I’d let her think of me as a poor relation–“you know what they say about goblins and treasure.”

She frowned. “I thought that was dwarves.”

Albert’s fangs
. It was an old curse, a blasphemy of the late Prince Consort, and I used it without an ounce of remorse. “Dwarves,” I ground out, “don’t exist.”

Avery shot me a droll look as she polished off her doughnut. “Until two months ago, neither did a furless goblin who could walk in the sun.”

Touché. “I don’t need or want your money.”

“You’re so fucking proud.” She made it sound like a bad thing. “That’s why I didn’t want to come.”

“Right, it’s all my fault.”

She slapped the flat of her hand down on the bar. “It is! If you hadn’t been so afraid of what we’d think, or so dead set on protecting us, we could have helped you, Xandra. We could have been there for you, and for Dede. Now she’s dead and you’re living in an old pub in a human part of town, Val’s gone and Churchill’s supposedly on the run.”

The mention of his name made my heart skip. “I haven’t heard from him either.” No one would. Not ever again.

“Just as well. They’d probably give him a medal for killing her.”

At least that was something we agreed on. “Probably.”

She checked her watch and sighed. “I have to go. You’ll call me if you find anything?”

I shrugged. “Sure.”

“Promise?”

“Ruddy hell, Avery!” I silently counted to ten and met her earnest gaze. “I promise. Now get the hell out, wilng ell outl you?” The
longer she stayed, the more alone I was going to feel when she left.

As luck would have it, my sister seemed to understand exactly what I was feeling–the bitch. She nodded glumly, slipped off the stool and started for the door. I walked her out.

She paused at the threshold. “You’ll be careful, won’t you, Xandy?” She wasn’t just talking about my promise to check up on Val.

I nodded. “I will be.”

She smiled–just a little. “Good. If I hug you, will you hit me?”

“Not unless you want me to.”

She was just a tiny bit shorter than me, so as her arms went around me, our cheeks brushed. Hers was wet. Hesitantly, I returned the embrace. Something in my chest twanged painfully.

Just as suddenly, she released me. “Goodbye.” Then she ran down the few steps to where her shiny motorrad sat waiting. The two-wheeled vehicle roared to life and then sped off down the street. I hoped she’d stopped crying, because driving with blurry vision was hardly safe.