AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“There are things older than I am,” Beatrice said mildly.
“Fae.”
“Lovely for other indulgences. Not for snacking, sadly.” She stared into the car as if seeing an animal in an enclosure. Her lips parted as if hoping for a kiss, and my irritation increased. Eli might not be my lover, but I wasn’t keen on a dead woman trying to get into his bed. “He was at that tavern you frequent. He doesn’t carry your scent, but you smell angry now. Is he unattached? Or yours?”
I swallowed my tangle of feelings. Possessive. Protective. Fearful. I had no idea what to do with it other than say, “He’smine.”
She nodded once. “He is a fitting choice for your status. Beware the consequences, Daughter of Mine.”
“Not your daughter.” I bit off the words. My mother might be as flighty as a dragonfly, but she was my mother. I would have no other call me theirs. “Not even the monster that impregnated my mother was foolish enough to call me his daughter.”
Instead of answering me, Beatrice stared into Eli’s car and announced, “I have no quarrel with those who speak to earth and stone.”
I rolled my eyes. I was way past whatever mood I’d need to be in to parse the situation, and from the way she’d looked at Eli, even with glass between them, there was a meaning in the words beyond the obvious bit about no quarrel. My theory was that she was offering a ritual statement of some sort or another.
“How old are you?” I asked bluntly. My magic pushed toward her, as if I would pet her and read her with my grave knowledge. It wasn’t exactly carbon-dating, but there was a process akin to scientific dating when I let myself lean into it. Tonight, I knew I could read more than I ever had before in my life. Beatrice’s attire was Victorian, but there was no way she was younger than four-hundred-years.
Again, she laughed. “I danced with kings whose bones are dust, and watched men burn women like us alive over plagues and cattle.”
I revised my stance to five hundred.
“Helpful.” I obviously wasn’t getting a clear answer tonight, so I pointed at the building with my gun. “Dead guy in there.”
Beatrice followed my gaze. “Itisthe morgue, Geneviève. One would hope that the dead were in there.”
I nodded. “Usually my preference, as a matter of fact. I’d prefer the dead don’t walk.”
This time, Beatrice merely smiled. “And yet you have invited me here to speak . . .”
I sighed, looked around the lot, and wondered if this was the worst idea ever. There was no easy way to confess this to adraugr,especially this one,but I needed to know the Odem family wasn’t going to be dead by dawn.
I met her gaze. “Dead guy whoshouldbe muttering and rocking. Biting at flies.”
“Flies? Truly, Geneviève?” Her voice held all the laughter she didn’t show in her expression.
I shrugged. “I was here to investigate him. Saw the venom.” I swallowed louder than I meant to and admitted, “And when I saw it in his skin, I did as with rotting corpses. He was going to wake soon, but I pulled and he woke, and now, he speaks like he’s been out of the grave at least two or three decades.”
“That’s not possible. The venom, yes, but such alertness . . . no.” Beatrice pressed her pale lips together.
“Maybe it was the venom,” I offered hopefully. Please, let it be the venom. Not me.
She opened her mouth, and I expected a question.
Beatrice whipped her head to the side to glance at the building, and I knew without another word when she felt Mr. Odem’s presence. As her shock made her energy flash out, I felt echoes of her age and revised my assessment of her age to earlier than the Elizabethan era. I was guessing the early Renaissance, perhaps even earlier. It sent a wave of fear through me.
In a blink, Beatriceflowedtoward the morgue. I could typically track the motion of adraugr, but she moved so swiftly it was as if she’d teleported. She hadn’t, obviously. Whatever she’d done, however, meant that the door to the morgue opened in the next moment after she’d arrived at the top of the steps.
Mr. Odem, clad in suit jacket and pair of jeans I assumed the men had stolen from a locker, looked like a spry graduate student rather than wealthy businessman. Dead or not, he moved with a grace that old humans lacked. Heflowedand was up the steps, staring at Beatrice in an instant.
“Where did you get the venom?” Beatrice demanded. She had a hold of Odem, lifting him to her face as if he weighed nothing. His legs dangled as he was held in front of her like an oversized doll held by a child.
The suits exited the morgue in a run, and behind them was Tres. I wasn’t sure what Beatrice intended, but she was the oldest, strongest monster I’d ever met. It didn’t give me a lot of hope that this would go well.
“Fuck,” I muttered as Iflowedtoward the angrydraugrlady, the far-too-agile Odem, and three vulnerable humans.
Chapter Nineteen
Beatrice was holdingOdem aloft and staring at him with the kind of intensity that made me sure that there was a magic todraugrthat I hadn’t known until this moment. Behind her the three human men looked various sorts of shocked. I couldn’t blame them. I was betting that not many suits had up-close contact with again-walkers, and even if they had, the two here were the most unusual I’d ever met—unless I counted myself, which I didn’t.Draugrancestry or not, I was very much alive.
