Timeless

and read the missive aloud.

“ ‘Send Lady Maccon for the baby, alone. Tonight, after sunset.’ ” She added, “And they provide an address.”

“Oh, Primrose!” Ivy burst into floods of tears.

Alexia said, “I suppose they were waiting for me to return.”

“Do you think they wanted you all along?” Madame Lefoux looked upset.

Alexia blinked. She felt as though her brain were moving like a snail—a real snail, slow and slimy. “That’s possible, but then, they kidnapped the wrong infant, didn’t they?”

The Frenchwoman frowned in deep thought. “Yes, I suppose they did. What if that’s it? What if they were after Prudence? What if they are taking you as a substitute? What if they still think they have Prudence, not Primrose?”

Alexia was already standing and wandering toward the door, her footsteps slow and measured.

“Where are you going?”

“It’s after sunset,” said Lady Maccon, as though it were perfectly obvious.

“But, Alexia, be sensible. You can’t simply trot to their orders!”

“Why not? If it returns Primrose to us?”

Ivy, trembling, could not speak. She looked back and forth between Alexia and the Frenchwoman. Her hat, a mushroom-puff turban affair with a peacock-style fan of feathers out the back, quivered with a surfeit of emotion.

“It could be dangerous!” protested Madame Lefoux.

“It’s always dangerous,” replied Lady Maccon flatly.

“Alexia, don’t be a peewit! You can’t want to die. You’re not one for melodrama. Conall is gone. You have to keep on going without him.”

“I am going. I’m going right out to find the kidnappers and retrieve Primrose.”

“That’s not what I meant! What about Prudence? She needs her mother.”

“She has Lord Akeldama.”

“That’s not quite the same thing.”

“No, it’s better—mother and father all rolled into one attractive package, and he doesn’t look to be dying anytime soon.”

“Oh, goodness, Alexia, please, wait. We must talk about this, devise a plan.”

Alexia paused, not really thinking out her next maneuver.

The hotel clerk came in to the parlor at that moment.

He approached Genevieve. “Mr. Lefoux? There is a gentleman for you. A Mr. Naville. Claims he has some important information to impart.”

Genevieve rose and brushed past Lady Maccon. “Just wait a few minutes, please, Alexia?”

Alexia merely stood, unresponsive. She watched as the Frenchwoman strode across the reception room to a small gaggle of gentlemen. One of them was very young. Another was carrying a leather case stamped with the image of an octopus. She watched Madame Lefoux tilt her head, lift up her short hair, and pull down her cravat and collar, exposing the back of her neck. She was showing them her octopus tattoo. Alexia’s brain said, Those are members of the Order of the Brass Octopus. Her practical side said, I hope she doesn’t tell them about the preternatural mummies. There will be a race to the bodies, to use them in munitions, to shift the balance against immortals. Her even more practical side remembered that there were men dressed in white willing to defend those mummies to the death. Her husband’s death.

The rest of her kept walking, in defiance of Genevieve’s request. She had her parasol hanging from its chatelaine at her waist. She had the address of the location on a scrap of paper. She moved across the reception room and out into the street, Genevieve unaware of her movements.

There Alexia hailed a donkey boy and told him the address. The boy nodded eagerly. With very little effort at all, she climbed astride, the boy yelled to his creature in Arabic, and they started forward.

The donkey took her into an unfamiliar sector of the city, a sad and abandoned-looking structure behind the customs house. She slid off the animal and paid the boy generously, sending him away when he would have waited. She climbed the step and pushed through the reed mats of the doorway into what looked to be some kind of warehouse, possibly for bananas, if the sweet smell was to be believed.

“Come in, Lady Maccon,” said a polite, slightly accented voice out of the dim echoing interior.

With a flitter of speed customary to the breed, the vampire was right up next to her, almost too close, showing his fangs.

“Good evening, Chancellor Neshi.”

“You are alone.”

“As you see.”

“Good. You will explain to me why the child isn’t working.”

“First let me see that Primrose is safe.”

“You thought I would bring her here? Oh, no, she is left behind, and she is safe. But I thought the abomination’s name was Prudence? You English and your many names.”

“It is Prudence. Did you want my daughter? You got the wrong child.”

The chancellor reeled back and blinked at her. “I did?”

“You did. You got my friend’s baby. She has not been happy about that.”

“Not the abomination?”

“Not the abomination.”

There was a long pause.

“So might we have her back, then?” Alexia asked.

The vampire went from confused, to angry, to resolved. “No. If I cannot use the abomination, I will use you. She cannot be let to suffer any longer.”

“Is this about Queen Matakara?”

“Of course.”

“Or should I say Queen Hatshepsut?”

“To use that name, you should say King Hatshepsut.”

“What does your queen want with my daughter?”

“She wants a solution. An easy solution. One that could be smuggled in and then back out with none of the others noticing. But, no, this had to be difficult. There had to be two black-haired English babies, and we got the wrong one. Now I am stuck with you.”

“I am not easy to smuggle.”

“You most certainly are not, Lady Maccon.”

“Yes, but why?”

“Come with me and you will learn why.”

“And Primrose?”

“And we will return to you the useless baby.”

He led her from the building and together they walked toward the hive.

It was a long, quiet walk through the city. Lady Maccon allowed herself to drift on that sea of absence.

Despite this, she found herself eventually thinking about Queen Matakara. Trapped in that chair, her eyes as sad as anything Alexia had ever seen or felt until now. They were the eyes of someone who wanted to die. She could sympathize.

“It’s Matakara,” she said into the silent night, stopping in her tracks.

Chancellor Neshi stopped as well.

“She set the God-Breaker Plague originally and she started it up again. She and my father.” Alexia talked out her revelations. “They struck a deal.”

The chancellor continued for her. “He broke with the OBO without telling them what he found. He agreed not to tell the Templars either. In return he got to continue the plague’s expansion with the certain knowledge that eventually it would take my queen, too.”

“Why not just bring a preternatural mummy into the room with her? Wouldn’t that work?” Alexia began