“It’d be rude not to at least hear you out after you came so far,” Gabriel said as he stepped back and waved his hand in exaggerated invitation. For a second, Took wondered if he should just skip to the fight, but he needed answers. He let go of Harry’s arm—the big man went limp on the ground in relief, his breathing ragged and the faint smell of piss in the air—and stepped over him. As he crossed the threshold, Gabriel leaned in to growl in his ear. “Then once we’re done, I’ll put you in the ground where you belong.”
Took didn’t even flinch. It wasn’t the first time his father had threatened to kill him.
Chapter Sixteen
SHE’D BEENbeautiful once—more than beautiful. When her beauty palled on her admirers—like rich food you’d overindulged in—she’d spent her fortune to reclaim their admiration. When it wasn’t enough, she sold her soul.
Elizabeth Bathory, one of only two vampires in the USA who didn’t trace their stunted family tree back to Tepes himself, the boyar who claimed the lion’s share of this new land when they arrived, before the terms of the Accord whittled it down to an advisory role and a throne room carved from salt.
“Countess,” Madoc said as he knelt in front of her.
The woman who inspired the Wicked Queen in every human fairy tale was a salt-wrapped husk. Stiff white armor plate creased and folded around her, the salt caked over silks and velvets long since rotted away. She was a shriveled brown thing with dry, white eyes in the heart of it.
Her voice rattled in her throat as stick-like tendons rubbed together like cricket legs to make a sound.
“A sor… cer… er killed the… children?” she murmured. “Put to it… by the… humans?”
Even in that ruin of a voice, Madoc could sense her weigh the idea. She had to decide if she wanted to believe it or not.
“Probably not,” he said.
“If I… say… they did,” Elizabeth ground out coldly, “they did.”
“But you don’t have to decide yet,” Madoc said. “Reopen the case. Give me Waring. The children who disappeared might still be alive.”
She didn’t need to speak. He knew that wasn’t motivation enough for her. Of all the boyars, she was the only one who hadn’t given the Kiss to her own children, who never wanted a dhampir to quick her womb. Daughters grew too beautiful, she always said as she watched them age and sicken, and sons too ambitious.
“Or dead,” he admitted. “Either way the Proverbial Church and their missions are implicated somehow. Even if we don’t want war—”
He didn’t. Peace, however full of compromise, had proved to his taste. And if there had to be war… not yet, not while Took’s traumatic rebirth was so fresh in his mind, when his loyalties still leaned toward the breathing.
“—we’ll have leverage,” he finished.
That made Elizabeth stir herself enough to nod in approval, and her dry ball of a head wobbled on her stalk of a neck inside the cowl of salt. She had no fear of war. Blood delighted her and death aroused her, but politics were her one true love.
“You think this… boy… of yours,” she ground out, “can be… trusted?”
Madoc felt his back tighten. He didn’t like the thought of Took in Elizabeth’s mind, didn’t want her to dwell on him.
“He’s mine,” he said, confidence layered over his words. “I won’t let him do anything to endanger us.”
A sigh like a man’s last breath rattled out of her. “Do as you think best, then,” she said. “I will… grease the wheels of the other boyars.”
The salt cracked and crumbled. Madoc set his jaw and watched it season the ground. A cured hand on a stick-thin arm, fat rendered down greasy and white, reached out toward him. Jewels still glittered cold on her fingers.
“You owe… a tithe,” she said.
Madoc did. He took her hand and let her pull him to his feet. Even in her desiccation, she was stronger than him. No one would call her beautiful now. Her hair had rotted and turned brittle, her face was a skull loosely covered with cheap leather, and her mouth was a slash of vanity red around a snaggle of rot-browned teeth. But her fangs were still sharp and white—sickles jabbed out of receded gums, as though she chewed on the salt to keep them sharp.
He obediently tilted his head to give her his throat and set his teeth to endure it. Her bone-hard fingers twisted his head and yanked it farther down, nails dug down into his scalp. Excitement rattled in her chest as she licked his throat with a dry strap of a tongue. Then she ripped into him. Pain was the point, not pleasure. Her fangs tore his skin and scraped over the bones of his neck like a peasant who sucked the meat off a goose’s bones. His blood spilled down her throat and seeped out of her rotted guts, the wet, black stain of it soaked into her thighs. She ripped at the edges of the wound with her fingers to tear it open, fresh gouts of slow, cold blood left to drip over the dried up sacks of her tits.
Madoc gripped the arm of her salt throne until it cracked and crumbled under his fingers. The pain took his legs from under him, and he slumped into her lap, cradled like a child as she tore his throat open from one side to the other.
It would end. He’d always been her favorite, the one servant who didn’t lust after her like a dog, and he was still useful. She wouldn’t kill him.
As she sucked at his throat, supped him like she’d starved, Madoc slid down into the dark. He didn’tthinkshe’d kill him.
BACK ATthe jet, Madoc slouched in the leather seats with a pint of cold blood curdled in his gut and another mixed into a bottle of whiskey at his elbow. It would do, but there was little pleasure in it.
