Changeless

Lord Maccon became even more angry. “Aye, well, he and his whole hive are deuced ignorant arses, and their opinion is of little consequence.”

“Husband, language please. Besides, the potentate and the dewan felt the same.”

“Did they threaten you?” The earl reared upright and grumbled several dockside phrases.

His wife interrupted his tirade by saying, “I completely see their point.”

“What?”

“Be reasonable, Conall. I am the only soulless in this area, and so far as anyone knows, only preternaturals have this kind of effect on supernaturals. It is a logical causal leap to take.”

“Except that we both know it was not you.”

“Exactly! So who was it? Or what was it? What really did happen? I am certain you have some theory or other.”

At that her husband chuckled. He had, after all, attached himself to a woman without a soul. He should not be surprised by her consistent pragmatism. Amazed by how quickly his wife could improve his mood by simply being herself, he said, “You first, woman.”

Alexia tugged him down to lie next to her and pillowed her head in the crook between his chest and shoulder. “The Shadow Council has informed the queen that we believe it to be a newly developed scientific weapon of some kind.”

“Do you agree?” His voice was a rumble under her ear.

“It is a possibility in this modern age, but it is only, at best, a working hypothesis. It might be that Darwin is right, and we have attained a new age of preternatural evolution. It might be that the Templars are somehow involved. It might be that we are missing something vital.” She directed a sharp glare at her silent spouse. “Well, what has BUR uncovered?”

Alexia had a private theory that this was part of her role as muhjah. Queen Victoria had taken an unexpectedly favorable interest in seeing Alexia Tarabotti married to Conall Maccon, prior to Alexia’s assumption of the post. Lady Maccon often wondered if that wasn’t a wish to see greater lines of communication open between BUR and the Shadow Council. Although, Queen Victoria probably did not think such communication would take place quite so carnally.

“How much do you know about Ancient Egypt, wife?” Conall dislodged her and leaned up on one arm, idly rubbing the curve of her side with his free hand.

Alexia tucked a pillow under her head and shrugged. Her father’s library included a large collection of papyrus scrolls. He had had some fondness for Egypt, but Alexia had always been more interested in the classical world. There was something unfortunately fierce and passionate about the Nile and its environs. She was much too practical for Arabic with its flowery scrawl when Latin, with all its mathematic precision, made for such an attractive alternative.

Lord Maccon pursed his lips. “It was ours, you know? The werewolves’. Way back, four thousand years or more, lunar calendar and everything. Long before the daylight folk built up Greece and before the vampires extruded Rome, we werewolves had Egypt. You have seen how I can keep my body and turn only my head into wolf shape?”

“The thing that only true Alphas can do?” Alexia remembered it well from the one time she had seen him do it. It was unsettling and mildly revolting.

He nodded. “To the present day, we still call it the Anubis Form. Howlers say that, for a time, we were worshipped as gods in Ancient Egypt. And that was our downfall. For there are legends of a disease, a massive epidemic that struck only the supernatural: the God-Breaker Plague, a pestilence of unmaking. They say it swept the Nile clean of blood and bite, of werewolves and vampires alike, all of them dying as mortals within the space of a generation, and no metamorphosis came again to the Nile for a thousand years.”

“And now?”

“Now in all of Egypt, there exists just one hive, near Alexandria, as north as it can get and still be delta. They represent what remains of the Ptolemy Hive. Just that one, and it came in with the Greeks, and is only six vampires strong. A few mangy packs roam the desert far up the Nile, way to the south. But they say the plague still dwells in the Valley of the Kings, and no supernatural has ever practiced any form of archaeology. It is our one forbidden science, even now.”

Alexia processed this information. “So you believe we may be facing down an epidemic? A disease like this God-Breaker Plague?”

“It is possible.”

“Then why would it simply disappear?”

Conall rubbed his face with his large callused hand. “I do not know. Werewolf legends are kept in the oral tradition, from howler to howler. We have no written edicts. Thus, they shift through time. It is possible the plague of the past was not so bad as we remember or that they simply did not know to leave the area. Or it is possible that what we have now is some completely new form of the disease.”

Alexia shrugged. “It is at least as good a theory as our weapon hypothesis. I suppose there is only one way to find out.”

“The queen has placed you on the case, then?” The earl never liked the idea of Alexia undertaking field operations. When he first recommended her for the job of muhjah, he thought it a nice, safe political position, full of paperwork and tabletop debate. It had been so long since England had a muhjah, few remembered what the preternatural advisor to the queen actually did. She was indeed meant to legislatively balance out the potentate’s vampire agenda and the dewan’s military obsession. But she was also meant to take on the role of mobile information gatherer, since preternaturals were confined by neither place nor pack. Lord Maccon had been spitting angry when he found out the truth of it. Werewolves, by and large, loathed espionage as dishonorable—the vampire’s game. He’d even accused Alexia of being a kind of drone to Queen Victoria. Alexia had retaliated by wearing her most voluminous nightgown for a whole week.

“Can you think of someone better suited?”

“But, wife, this could become quite dangerous, if it is a weapon. If there is malice behind the action.”

Lady Maccon let out a huff of disgust. “For everyone but me. I am the only one who would not be adversely affected, and, so far as I can tell, I seem to be essentially unchanged. Well, me and one other type of person. Which reminds me—the potentate said something interesting this evening.”

“Really. What an astonishingly unusual occurrence.”

“He said that according to the edicts, there exists a creature worse than a soul-sucker. Or perhaps it used to exist. You would not know anything about this, would you, husband?” She watched Conall’s face quite closely.

There was a flicker of genuine surprise in his tawny eyes. In this, at least, he appeared to have no ready answer carefully prepared.

“I have never heard talk of such a thing. But then again, we are different in our perceptions, the vampires and the werewolves. We see you as a curse-breaker, not a soul-sucker and, as such, not so bad. So for werewolves, there are many things worse than you. For the vampires? There are ancient myths from the dawn of time that tell of a horror native to both day and night. The werewolves call this the skin-stealer. But it is only a myth.”

Alexia nodded.

A hand began gently stroking the curve of her side.

“Are we done talking now?” the earl asked plaintively.

Alexia gave in to his demanding touch, but only, of course, because he sounded so pathetic. It had nothing, whatsoever, to do with her own quickening heartbeat.

She entirely failed to remember to tell Conall about his former pack’s now-dead Alpha.

Alexia awakened slightly later than usual to find her husband already gone. She expected to encounter him at the supper table so was not overly troubled. Her mind already plotting investigations, she did not bother to protest the outfit her maid chose, replying only with, “That should do well enough, dear,” to Angelique’s suggestion of the pale blue silk walking dress trimmed in white lace.

The maid was astonished by her acquiescence, but her surprise was not sufficient to affect her efficiency. She had her mistress smartly dressed, if a tad too de mode for Alexia’s normal preferences, and down at the dining table in a scant half hour—a noteworthy accomplishment by anyone’s standards.