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“Er... He was okay.” It was probably best not to mention him being tied to that torture device of a chair. “Do you not visit him?”
A darkness seemed to come into her already dark eyes. “No,” she said shortly.
I sensed that she would like to, but she was not allowed. Who was stopping her? Her husband? But clearly this topic was off limits.
“Do you think he’s innocent?” I asked.
She contemplated this for a long moment, and then said, “Steffane was never innocent of anything.”
“But you loved him?” I asked. Somehow I was sure this is true.
“Steffane was our darling. We adored him. His father idolized him. A daywalker son! Such an unexpected and joyous bounty. Steffane was the greatest gift I ever gave my husband.”
She stopped speaking, and I knew that she was thinking of whatever had gone wrong.
“What happened?” I said.
“He was infallible. His many gifts went to his head. He could not be controlled. And his appetites became… insatiable.” She said it all with a small smile on her face.
“You liked that about him?”
She laughed. “Oh yes. He was our joy, but such a trial to his father. It was fun to see for a while. But then he left. He rejected our world and went to live his life in the sunshine where he knew none of us could follow. Whoring and gambling and petty criminality. Associating with the most disreputable creatures. Befriending humans.” Her lip curled at that. “Experimenting with narcotics and magic, needing ever higher levels of depravity to satiate his appetites. And worse, he liked to make a show of himself. Always in the media, flaunting his sordid life. He took great joy in embarrassing his father, undoing all of Gaius’s hard work to build our prestige in this world.”
“Did Gaius want to be rid of him?”
She shot me a startled look. “Gaius adored him. Gaius wanted him home.” She smiled. “In the end he did come home. He grew wiser. He made things right with his father and his brother, and returned here. Gaius was so excited. He had such plans for extending his businesses with Steffane on board. It would have worked but for that stupid child Leonie. I knew it was a mistake to keep her here with us. So innocent and sweet as she was, such a shy little creature. Steffane always desired to corrupt the pure. She proved too much of a temptation for him.”
“Why did she live here? She was human wasn’t she? But not one of your sheep?”
“She was the niece of one of Gaius’s sheep. Her brother’s daughter. After the brother died, the girl had to come and live with her aunt.”
“But taking in a human teenager? That’s not normal for vampires, is it?”
“We are not monsters,” said Audriett coolly. “The girl needed a place to live.”
“The aunt wasn’t worried? What was her name?”
“Constance Ashbeck. Of course she wasn’t worried, or why would she have wanted the girl to stay here?”
I tried to keep my doubts from showing on my face. This aunt had either been damn careless, or there been something more sinister at play that Audriett was hiding. I couldn’t imagine any aunt wanting a teenage niece to live in a vampire nest. Surely even foster care must have been a better choice? And even if it had been innocent, why would Gaius Ronin have bothered to do such a favor for one of his sheep? Vampire’s regarded their sheep as little more than property, as mere chattel. Unless…
“Did Gaius favor Constance? Was she one of his enthralled ones? Is that why he let her niece stay here?”
“Gaius does not favor his sheep,” Audriett said icily. “The woman Constance must have begged.”
This did not ring true to me, but I could not read Audriett so I could not be sure. Like the other vampires, my psychic senses were having difficulty picking up any nuances about her at all. I wondered if Audriett’s possessiveness of her husband was what made her refuse to believe he could favor anyone but her. I glanced at Finch to see what he was making of all this. His face was carefully blank, but the quiet hum of psychic music coming from him seemed tightly wound and resentful. He did not trust these vampires, and clearly he was still obsessing over whether any of them had anything to do with Zezi’s disappearance.
Taking pity on him I asked, “Did you know a girl called Zezi Shahidi?”
Audreitt’s completely baffled expression told me everything I needed to know.
“Was she a friend of Leonie’s?” Audriett asked with a frown. “I don’t recall Leonie having any friends.”
“Not even school friends?”
“Her aunt home-schooled her with the help of a private tutor, I believe.”
“Was that because she was living here with vampires? Was her aunt worried a school wouldn’t want her or might be difficult for her?”
