Timeless (5 page)

Prudence took refuge behind the spokes of the center area. Lord Maccon was having none of it. He wiggled one mighty paw through to get at her. The spokes bent slightly, Lord Maccon got stuck, and Prudence dodged out, pelting once more down the street. Her tail wagged even more enthusiastically at the delightful game.

Lord Maccon extracted himself from the monowheel, shaking loose and causing the beautiful contraption to crash over with an ominous crunch. Lady Maccon made a mental note to send a card of apology around to their neighbors as soon as possible. The unfortunate Colindrikal-Bumbcrunchers had suffered great travails over the past two years. The town house had been in Mr. Colindrikal-Bumbcruncher’s family for generations. Its proximity to a rove vampire was well known and tolerated, if not exactly accepted. Just as all the best castles had poltergeists, so all the best neighborhoods had vampires. But the addition of werewolves to their quiet corner of London was
outside of enough
. Mrs. Colindrikal-Bumbcruncher had recently snubbed Lady Maccon in the park, and frankly, Alexia couldn’t fault her for it.

She squinted at the Colindrikal-Bumbcruncher house, trying to see if an inquisitive face at a window might have observed Conall’s transformation in Lord Akeldama’s hallway. That would require an even more profound apology, and a gift.
Fruitcake, perhaps
. Then again, perhaps the sight of Lord Maccon’s backside might warrant less of an apology, depending on Mrs. Colindrikal-Bumbcruncher’s preferences. Lady Maccon was distracted
from this line of thinking by Professor Lyall’s shout of amazement.

“Great ghosts, would you look at that?”

Alexia could not recall Professor Lyall ever raising his voice. She whirled about and looked.

Prudence had reached a good distance away, near to the end of the street, where an orange-tinted lamp cast a weak glow on the corner. There she had turned abruptly back into a squalling, naked infant. It was very embarrassing for all concerned. Particularly, if her screams of outrage were to be believed, Prudence.

“Well, my goodness,” said Alexia. “That’s never happened before.”

Professor Lyall became quite professorial. “Has she ever gotten that far away from one of her victims before?”

Lady Maccon was slightly offended. “Must we use that word?
Victim
?”

Professor Lyall gave her an expressive look.

She acquiesced. “Quite right, it
is
unfortunately apt. Not that I know of.” She turned to look at Lord Akeldama. “My lord?”

“My darling
sweet pea
, had I known that if we simply let her run a little distance she would work herself out, I would have let her
gallivant
about at will.”

Lord Maccon, still in wolf form, trotted over to pick up his human daughter. Possibly by the scruff of her neck.

“Oh, Conall, wait!” said Lady Maccon.

The moment he touched her, Prudence turned once more into a wolf cub, this time stealing her father’s skin, and he was left to stand in the middle of the street, starkers. Prudence tore off back toward the house. Lord
Maccon made to follow, this time in his lumbering mortal form.

Alexia, forgetting the delicacy of the Colindrikal-Bumbcrunchers’ finer feelings, was seized with the spirit of scientific inquiry. “No, Conall, wait, stay there.”

Lord Maccon might have disregarded his wife, particularly if he had any thought of his own shame or the dignity of the neighborhood, but he was not that kind of husband. He had learned all of Alexia’s cadences and tones, and that one meant she was
on to something interesting
. Best to do as she asked. So he stood, watching with interest, as his little daughter dashed back the way they had come and then past the house in the opposite direction.

Just as before, at a distance from her victim, she turned back into a toddler. This time Lady Maccon went to retrieve her.
What must the surrounding households think of us? Screaming baby, wolf cub, werewolves
. Really, she would never put up with it herself were she not married into the madness. As she hoisted Prudence, she looked up to see Mr. and Mrs. Colindrikal-Bumbcruncher and their butler glaring daggers at her from their open front door.

Conall, with a little start, turned back into a wolf before heads turned in his direction and someone would be forced to faint. Knowing the Colindrikal-Bumbcrunchers, that someone would probably be the butler.

Sidheag Maccon began to laugh. Lord Akeldama hustled her swiftly inside, fanning himself with the feather fan.

Lord Maccon, once more a wolf, was in the door next. Alexia and her troublesome offspring followed, but not
before she heard the Colindrikal-Bumbcrunchers’ door close with a definite click of censure.

“Oh, dear,” said Lady Maccon upon attaining the relative safety of Lord Akeldama’s drawing room. “I do believe we have become
those
neighbors.”

I
don’t have much time,” said Alexia, sitting down with Prudence cuddled in her lap. After her exhausting shape-changing laps up and down the street, the infant had done the most practical thing and fallen asleep, leaving her parents to handle the consequences.

“That was a remarkable display of whatnot,” remarked Lady Kingair, settling herself gingerly into one of Lord Akeldama’s highest and stiffest-looking wingback chairs. She drew her shabby velvet cloak closely about her and tossed her long plait behind her shoulder.

“And an interesting newfound aspect of your daughter’s abilities.” Professor Lyall looked as though he might like a notepad and a stylus of some kind to make a note for BUR’s records.

“Or failing.” Lady Maccon was not so certain she liked the idea of her invincible little daughter having this weakness. Given Alexia’s own experience, it was more likely than not that someone, more probably several someones,
would try to kill Prudence over the course of her lifetime. It was far less comfortable knowing that all they would have to do was determine the limits of her abilities.

“That’s what it is, isn’t it?” Alexia looked to Professor Lyall, the only one who might qualify as an expert so far as these things went. “It’s a tether, much like a ghost’s to her corpse.”

“Or a queen’s to her hive,” added Lord Akeldama.

“Or a werewolf’s to his pack,” added Lord Maccon.

Lady Maccon pursed her lips and looked down at her daughter. The poor thing had inherited her mother’s complexion and curly hair. Alexia hoped the nose would not follow. She brushed back some of that dark hair. “Why should she be any different, I suppose?”

Lord Maccon came over to his wife and placed his hand on the back of her neck, caressing the nape with his calloused fingers. “Even you have limits, my dear wife? Who would have thought?”

That wrested Alexia out of her maudlin humors. “Yes, thank you, darling. We must press on. Woolsey is calling. So, if Lady Kingair would like to inform us as to the nature of her visit?”

Lady Kingair, it seemed, was a tad reluctant to do so in Lord Akeldama’s well-appointed drawing room surrounded by the expectant faces of not only her great-great-great-grandfather, but also his wife, his Beta, a very eccentric sort of vampire, that vampire’s lemon-colored drone, a sleeping child, and a fat calico cat. It was more audience than any lady of quality should have to endure when paying a social call on family.

“Gramps, could we nae go somewhere more private?”

Lord Maccon rolled his eyes around, as if only now
noticing the crowd. He was a werewolf, after all; he naturally acclimatized to the pack around him, even if that pack had gotten a little bizarrely dressed of late.

“Well, what I know, my wife and Randolph know. And, unfortunately, what Alexia knows, Lord Akeldama knows. However, if you insist, we could put out the drone.” He paused while Tizzy tried to look as if butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, or on his trousers for that matter. “And the cat, I suppose.”

Lady Kingair emitted an exhalation of exasperation. “Oh, verra well. To cut to the crux of it: Dubh has disappeared.”

Lord Maccon narrowed his eyes. “That’s not like a Beta.”

Professor Lyall looked concerned by this news. “What happened?”

Alexia wondered if he and the Kingair Beta had ever met.

Sidheag Maccon was clearly searching for a way of putting it that would not make her seem in the wrong. “I sent him away to investigate some small matter of interest to the pack, and we havena heard back from him.”

“Begin at the beginning,” instructed Lord Maccon, looking resigned.

“I sent him to Egypt.”

“Egypt!”

“To track down the source of the mummy.”

Lady Maccon looked to her husband in exasperation. “Isn’t that just like one of
your
progeny? Couldn’t just let sleeping mummies lie, could she? Oh, no, had to go off, nosing about.” She rounded on her several-times-removed stepdaughter. “Did it occur to you that I exhausted my
parasol’s supply of acid to destroy that blasted creature for a
very good reason
? The last thing we need is more of them entering the country! Just look at the havoc the last one caused. There was mortality simply everywhere.”

“Oh, really, no. I dinna want to collect another one. I wanted to find out the particulars of the condition. We need to know where it came from. If there are more, they need to be controlled.”

“And you couldn’t have simply suggested that to BUR instead of trying to manage the situation yourself?”

“BUR’s jurisdiction is homeland only. This is a matter for the empire, and I had the feeling that
we
wolves needed tae see tae it. So I sent Dubh.”

“And?” Lord Maccon’s expression was dark.

“An’ he was supposed tae report in two weeks ago. He never made the aethographic transmission. Then again last week. Still naught. Then, two days past, this came through. I dinna think it’s from him. I think it’s a warning.”

She threw a piece of paper down on the tea table before them. It was plain parchment of the kind employed by transmission specialists the empire over for recording incoming aetherograms. Only, instead of the usual abrupt sentence, one single symbol was drawn upon it: a circle atop a cross, split in two.

Alexia had seen that symbol before, on the papyrus wrappings about a dangerous little mummy in Scotland and later hanging from a chain around the neck of a Templar. “Wonderful. The broken ankh.”

Lord Maccon bent to examine the document more closely.

Prudence stirred, giggling in her sleep. Alexia tucked
the blanket, one of Lord Akeldama’s pink brocade shawls, more securely about her daughter.

Lord Maccon and Lady Kingair both looked at Alexia. Lord Maccon, it ought to be noted, was wearing another pink brocade shawl wrapped securely about his waist. It looked like a skirt from the East Indies. Alexia supposed her husband, being Scottish, was accustomed to wearing skirts. And he did have very nice knees. Scotsmen, she had occasion to observe, often did have nice knees. Perhaps that was why they insisted upon kilts.

“Oh, don’t tell me I never told you about it?”

“You never told
me
, my little robin’s egg.” Lord Akeldama waved his closed feathered fan about in the air, inscribing the symbol he saw before him.

“Well, the ankh translates to ‘eternal life’ or so Champollion says. And there we see eternal life destroyed. What do you think it might mean? Preternaturals, of course. Me.”

Lord Akeldama pursed his lips. “Perhaps. But sometimes the ancients inscribed a hieroglyphic broken to keep the symbol from leaking off the stone and into reality. When inscribed for that reason, the meaning of the hieroglyphic does not alter.”

“But who would nae want immortality?” asked Sidheag Maccon. She had pestered her great-great-great-grandfather for years to be made into a werewolf.

“Not everyone wants to live forever,” Alexia said. “Take Madame Lefoux, for example.”

Lord Maccon brought them back around to the point. “So Dubh has gone missing, in Egypt? What do you want me to do about it? Isn’t this a matter for the dewan?”

Lady Kingair cocked her head. “You are family. I
thought you might make some inquiries without having tae involve official channels.”