CHAPTER FOURTEEN

In Which Lady Maccon Mislays Her Parasol

The countess jumped to her feet. So, too, did Felicity. Lord Ambrose decided Lady Maccon was no longer the greatest threat in his world and turned toward the racket.

“Now would be an excellent time,” prodded Alexia.

The countess shook her head in exasperation. “Swarming is not something one chooses. I know this is difficult for you to understand, soul-sucker, but not everything is the result of conscious thought. Swarming is instinct. I have to know, deep down in my soul on a supernatural level, that my hive is no longer safe. Then I would have to source a new hive, never to return to this one. Now is not that time.”

The house fairly rattled on its foundations as another mighty crash rent the air.

“Are you convinced of that?” wondered Alexia.

Something was literally tearing its way through the building, as a child will rip paper twists to get at the sugar candy inside. Tasty vampire candy. Mmm.

Felicity started to scream.

“Where did you stash Quesnel, Countess Nadasdy?” Lady Maccon raised her voice to carry over the din.

The countess was distracted by the commotion. “What?”

“I was simply suggesting you might want to retrieve him. Have him with you, and soon.”

“Oh, yes, excellent plan. Hematol, would you fetch the boy?”

“Yes, my queen.” The duke, having only just appeared, looked reluctant to obey; no vampire wishes to leave the side of his queen when she is in danger. But a direct order was a direct order, so he bowed perfunctorily and scurried off.

Yet another crash sounded. The door burst open. Dr. Caedes, a number of the footman-drones, and several other hive vampires ran into the room. Mabel Dair was the last inside, slamming the door behind her. The actress’s beautiful gold gown was ripped, and her hair had fallen down about her face. She looked as though she were just about to perform Ophelia’s death scene to a packed audience.

“My queen, you would not believe the monster down there! It is horrible! It ripped right through the wall, the one with the Titian. And it broke the bust of Demeter.”

The countess was obligingly sympathetic to the trauma. “Come to me, my dear.”

Mabel Dair ran to her mistress, knelt at her feet, and buried her face in the vampire’s full skirts. Her hands were trembling where they gripped the fine taffeta material.

Alexia was tempted to clap. Spectacular performance!

The queen set one perfect white hand atop Miss Dair’s cascading blond curls and looked to her hive. “Dr. Caedes, report! What is the octomaton’s armament? Is it standard to the earlier model?”

“No, my queen, it seems to have been modified.”

“Fire?”

“Yes, but only one tentacle. And the customary wooden blades. But a third seems to be able to shoot stakes. And the fourth has bullets.”

“Go on. That’s only four.”

“It hasn’t yet used any of the others yet.”

“If this is Madame Lefoux we are dealing with, she’ll have armed every single tentacle with something deadly. That’s how she thinks.”

Alexia couldn’t help but agree. Genevieve was like that about her gadgets—the more uses the better.

The wall on the opposite side of the room shook. They heard a horrible, wrenching, tearing, crashing noise. It was the sound of metal and wood and brick colliding. The entire wall before them was ripped asunder. Once the dust settled, the domed head of the octomaton became visible, balanced atop its many tentacles. The creature scrabbled for purchase within the rubble of what had once been one of London’s most stylish residences. The silver light of the moon and the bright gas of the streetlamps lit up the gleaming metal hide of the mechanical creature. Alexia could just see the fleeing forms of the countess’s party guests in the street below.

Alexia raised her parasol and stood. She pointed the frilly accessory at the octomaton accusingly. “Genevieve, I do hope you didn’t kill anyone.”

But if Madame Lefoux was in there, guiding the creature, she did not acknowledge Lady Maccon. She had one intended target and one target only—Countess Nadasdy.

A gigantic tentacle wormed its way up into the room and hit out at the vampire queen, trying to crush her. Alexia preferred to lead with an airborne offensive, but Madame Lefoux was opting for hand-to-hand—or was that hand-to-tentacle?—combat. Possibly to protect as many innocents as she could.

The queen, supernatural in speed and cunning, simply dodged out of the way of the massive metal thing. But she was well and truly trapped, for there were no other doors out of that room, and half of her house was now destroyed.

Felicity let out another scream and then did the most sensible thing she could do under the circumstances—she fainted. At which point, everyone else did an equally sensible thing and ignored her.

Lord Ambrose charged. Alexia had no idea what he intended to do or how he intended to do it, but he seemed bent on something. He leaped, impossibly fast and high, landing atop the head of the creature, where he began trying to scrabble for a way inside. Ah, going for the brains of the operation.

Lady Maccon figured that was a pretty intelligent plan, but the vampire was thwarted in his attempts to pull off the hatch of the dome. He tried to punch through the helmetlike mantle, but Madame Lefoux was a master worker in such matters. The head was practically seamless, with no possible way of getting in from the outside, not even for a vampire. She had given herself slits to see out of, but those slits were just big enough to peer through; they were not sufficiently large for a vampire to get his fingers inside and pry open the casing.

A tentacle whipped around and with a casual gesture brushed Lord Ambrose off as if he were a crumb. The vampire fell past the edge of the floor where the wall once had stood, grabbing wildly and missing, and disappeared out of sight. Only to reappear moments later, simply leaping up from one story to the next until he was back inside.

This time Lord Ambrose dove for the root of one of the tentacles, trying to tear it off the body. Relying on all his strength, he attempted to forcibly rip away the ball bearings and pulleys that directed the thing’s movements. Nothing. Madame Lefoux always thought in terms of supernatural strength and designed her devices accordingly.

While Lord Ambrose was thus occupied with a direct attack, several of the more courageous drones also charged the octomaton. These were swept aside with little more than the perfunctory wave of a free tentacle. Others made their way to their queen, standing in a protective huddle between her and the mechanical beast. One of the vampires was loading the pickled herring, which seemed to actually be some kind of ammunition, into an aethertronic Gatling gun. He cranked the belt through, and the machine spat the shiny fish at the octomaton in a rat-tat-tat of automated fire. The fish sizzled and stuck where they hit, eating angry holes into the octomaton’s protective plating.

Another tentacle crept into the room, which now seemed to be filled with writhing metal octopus arms. This one raised up slowly, like a snake. Its tip opened with a snap, and it shot a blast of fire at the group surrounding Countess Nadasdy.

Drones screamed, and the countess, fleet and fast, leaped to the side, carrying two of them with her. She would try to rescue any she could from the flames, much as Conall would do with his clavigers under similar circumstances.

Knowing it was probably futile, Alexia put her gun back in her reticule and activated the magnetic disruption emitter in her parasol, aiming it at the octopus. As before, there was no reaction to the invisible blast, although the Gatling gun seized up. The tentacle swung around, spraying fire over the boudoir. The canopy over the handsome four-poster bed caught and flamed up to the ceiling. Alexia popped open her parasol and raised it before her like a shield, protecting herself from the blast.

Upon lowering it, she found that all was chaos and dust, with the smell of burning and the sound of screaming around her. Yet another tentacle slithered into the room. She had a sinking feeling that this one might actually be a real threat. Madame Lefoux was done playing. Alexia knew what her parasol was capable of where vampires were concerned, and this particular tentacle dripped an ominous liquid out of its tip—a liquid that sizzled when it hit the carpet and burned a hole where it landed.

Lapis solaris, unless Alexia missed her guess. It was one of the most deadly weapons in her parasol, and a favorite among those who opposed vampires. The danger was that it had to be diluted in sulfuric acid, and that could kill most anyone else as well as damage a vampire.

“Genevieve, don’t! You could injure innocents!” Alexia was scared, not just for the hive but also for the drones and her sister, who all seemed to be in the line of squirt.

“Countess, please, you must draw her away. People will die.” Lady Maccon turned her plea on the endangered vampire queen.

But Countess Nadasdy was beyond reason. All her efforts were now focused on protecting herself and her people from annihilation.

The Duke of Hematol reappeared, carrying an undersized grubby boy child in his supernaturally strong arms. If possible, the duke moved even faster than the queen had, coming to a stop before her and thrusting Quesnel’s kicking form into her grasp. Everything stilled.

Quesnel was hollering and thrashing, but upon seeing the octomaton, he seemed more afraid of it than the vampires. He squealed and clutched reflexively at Countess Nadasdy’s neck with one skinny, smudged arm.

The octomaton could not fire without risk of injury to the boy. No modern science had yet devised a weapon, apart from sunlight, that could harm a vampire without also harming a human. One of the tentacles, already falling with deadly force toward the vampire queen, veered away at the last minute, landing with a crash on the laden tea trolley, which had managed to survive the chaos until that moment. It crumpled in half under the blow, spinning fine china, treacle tart, and finger sandwiches in all directions.

So far as Alexia was concerned, that was the last straw. The infant-inconvenience inside her beat a tattoo of encouragement as she strode forward and whacked at the metal tentacle with her parasol and all her might. “Genevieve! Not the treacle tartlets!”

Whack, whack, whack. Twang!

It was, of course, a futile effort. But it made Alexia feel better.

The tentacle’s tip flipped open, and a tube popped forward and out, becoming a bullhorn like those favored by circus ringmasters. The octomaton raised this to one of the slits in its eye. Madame Lefoux spoke into it.

Or at least it sounded like Madame Lefoux. It was odd to hear her cultured, slightly accented, mellow feminine voice coming out of such a big, bulbous creature. “Give me my son and I will leave you in peace, Countess.”

“Maman!” yelled Quesnel to the octomaton. Realizing it was his mother and not some nightmarish monster, he began struggling in the vampire queen’s arms. To absolutely no avail; she was much, much stronger than he would ever be. The countess merely clutched the boy tighter.

Quesnel began yelling in French. “Stop, Maman. They haven’t hurt me. I’m fine. They’ve been very kind. They feed me sweets!” His pointy chin was set and his voice imperious.

Madame Lefoux said nothing more. It was clear they were at an impasse. The countess was not going to let go of the boy, and Madame Lefoux was not going to let them go anywhere.

Alexia edged toward her sister, sensing that very soon the queen would have no recourse but flight. Leaving Felicity behind in this building was, unfortunately, not really feasible, appealing as the idea might be.

The house swayed on its foundation. Over half of it was now gone, with only the back section still intact, and there was very little holding that in place. The frame and supports were failing. Alexia had often thought London houses were built with far less structural integrity than even her cheapest bustle.

She waddled closer to the vampire queen, careful not to touch her. “Countess, I know you said practicality wouldn’t come into it, but this would be an excellent time to swarm, if you could but try.”

The countess turned eyes upon Alexia that were dilated black with fear. She drew her lips back in a shriek of wrath, exposing all four of her fangs: Feeders and Makers, the second set being ones that only a queen had. Very little of the sense was left in the woman’s face. In this particular arena, clearly vampires could end up like werewolves, creatures of emotion, dependent only on the little that was left of their soul to save them.

Lady Maccon was not normally an indecisive individual, but in that second she wondered if she might have chosen the wrong side in this little battle. Even though Madame Lefoux was rampaging through London in a highly unlawful and destructive manner, the countess was behaving like nothing more than a child snatcher. Alexia knew she had the capacity to end this. She could reach out and touch the vampire, turn her human and utterly vulnerable and unable to hold on to the wiry and gyrating Quesnel.

She hesitated, for Alexia could not escape logic, even in crisis. The only diplomatic faux pas worse than a hive queen dying at the hand of a scientist would be if she did so at the hand of Lady Maccon, soulless, muhjah, and werewolf lover.

As if to settle the matter, a tentacle came crashing toward them. It knocked Alexia back. She tripped and stumbled on her weakened ankle and, for what felt like the millionth time that evening, fell back upon her bustle.

She landed next to Felicity and so wiggled over to her and slapped her about the face for a bit. Finally, her sister blinked blue eyes open.

“Alexia?”

The infant-inconvenience was rather sick of this kind of overactive, not to say violent, treatment on behalf of its mother. It thrashed in protest, and Alexia lay back suddenly with an “oof” of distress.

“Alexia!” Felicity may actually have been a little worried. She had never seen her older sister show any sign of weakness. Ever.

Alexia struggled to sit back up. “Felicity, we have got to get away from here.”

Felicity helped Alexia to rise, just in time for them to see Lord Ambrose and two other vampires leap at the octomaton in one tremendous coordinated charge. They draped and strapped down a sheet of fabric, what looked to be a very large tablecloth, over the monster’s head. Smart maneuver, for it momentarily blinded Madame Lefoux on the inside. She could neither steer nor attack. The tentacles flailed futilely.

With the octomaton temporarily disabled, the countess sprang into action. So did her drones. They all ran to the open side of the building, the countess moving at speed and clutching Quesnel tight to her breast. Without hesitation, she leaped over the edge and down to the rubble. Quesnel let out a holler of fear at the plunge, quickly followed by what could only be a whoop of exhilaration.

Alexia and Felicity tottered to the edge after them and looked down. Three stories. There was no way they could jump and survive, and there was no other apparent way to get down.

However, they did have an excellent perspective on the carnage and could watch the countess and her vampires race between the tentacles of the octomaton and dash away into the moonlit city, swarming at last. The drones followed a little more judiciously, climbing down out of what was left of the house by degrees and then running after, unable to keep up with the supernatural speed of their mistress.

The octomaton screamed, or Madame Lefoux did, and set its flaming tentacle to burn away the tablecloth that obscured its vision. As soon as it was gone, it took the inventor only a moment to realize that her quarry had escaped. Only Alexia and her sister still stood in the swaying building—a structure that was clearly about to come tumbling down.

The monster turned to track the fleeing vampires. Then it crashed off through the streets, heedless of who or what it crushed. Madame Lefoux either hadn’t seen Alexia’s plight or didn’t care to help her. Alexia hoped fervently it was the former, or her friend was indeed more heartless than she had ever thought possible.

“Bugger,” said Lady Maccon succinctly.

Felicity gasped at her language, even under such trying circumstances.

Alexia looked at her sister and said, fully knowing that Felicity wouldn’t understand what she was talking about, “I’m going to have to arrest her, in the end.”

The hive house yielded to gravity, tilting forward in a slow, reluctant creak.

The two women slid toward the edge. Felicity shrieked, and Alexia, in classic fashion given the tenor of her evening, lost her balance and tumbled forward, also yielding to gravity. She went right over, scraping and scrabbling at the splintered floorboards.

She managed to just hang on. Her parasol fell, landing among wall fragments, bits of art, and torn carpet far below. Alexia dangled, desperately holding on to the side of a wooden beam that stuck slightly out above the abyss.

Felicity had hysterics.

Lady Maccon wondered how long her grip was going to hold, grateful she’d removed her gloves. She was rather strong, but it had been a very long week and she wasn’t up to her prepregnancy standards. Plus she was carrying a sizable amount of extra weight.

Well, she thought philosophically, this is a very romantic way to die. Madame Lefoux would certainly feel cut up about it. So that’s something. Guilt can be very useful.

And then, just when she thought all was lost, she felt a puff of air behind her neck and a tingling stirring of the aether.

“What ho!” said Boots. “Can I be of any assistance, Lady Maccon?”

The basket-shaped gondola of Lord Akeldama’s private dirigible came down out of the sky like some kind of fat and benevolent savior.

Alexia looked over her shoulder at him from where she dangled. “Not especially. I thought I might simply hang about here for a while, see what transpired.”

“Oh, don’t fuss about her,” yelled Felicity. “Help me! I’m far more important.”

Boots ignored Miss Loontwill and directed the pilot to float in until the gondola section of the basket was just under Lady Maccon.

The building lurched at exactly that moment, and Alexia, with a cry, lost her purchase on the beam.

She landed with a thud inside the basket. Her feet failed her and she went backward, once more onto the bustle, which had very little resilience left after the evening’s extensive abuse. After a moment’s consideration, Alexia just flopped right there on her back. Enough was enough.

“Now me, now meee!” shrieked Felicity, and she seemed to have good cause, for the structure was indeed falling.

Boots looked the young woman up and down, no doubt taking in the bite marks on her white neck. The remains of the house might well be tumbling down that very moment, but he hesitated.

“Lady Maccon?” Boots was a very well-trained drone.

Alexia sucked at her teeth and looked up at her sister. “If we must.”

The pilot gave the balloon some lift and it rose. Tizzy put out his arm politely, as though escorting Miss Loontwill in to dinner, and Felicity stepped off the ledge and into the dirigible with all the dignity of a terrified kitten.

The building crumbled behind her. The pilot pulled one of his propeller levers hard, and the airship let out a great puff of steam and surged forward, just in time to escape a large chunk of roof as the last of the hive house crumbled to the ground.

“Where to, Lady Maccon?”

Alexia looked up at Boots, who was crouched over her in evident concern. The child inside her was continuing to express its distress with the night’s events. Lady Maccon could think of but one place to go, with her husband out of commission and the moon still high and bright above them. All of her normal hidey-holes were inaccessible: Madame Lefoux’s contrivance chamber was out of the picture, and the Tunstells were still in Scotland.

BUR, she was confident, would already be investigating the scene of the destruction below or chasing the octomaton as it crashed through the city. BUR had an arsenal of weaponry at its disposal—their own aethertronic Gatling guns, mini-magnatronic cannons, not to mention Mandalson custard probes. Let them try to stop Madame Lefoux for a while. They probably wouldn’t be any more successful than she, given the inventor’s intellectual skills and mechanical abilities, but they might slow her down. Alexia, after all, had only a parasol. Then she swore, realizing that she didn’t even have that anymore. It was lying below, probably buried under half a collapsed building. Ethel was secured in the reticule tied at her waist, but her precious parasol was gone.

“I’m certain you gentlemen would agree with me. It’s at times like this that what a girl needs is some serious council on her attire.”

Boots and Tizzy looked with deep concern at Alexia’s sorry state of dress, her bustle flattened, her hem filthy, her lacy trim soot-covered and burned.

“Bond Street?” suggested Tizzy seriously.

Alexia arched a brow. “Oh, no, this is a profound clothing emergency. Please, take me to Lord Akeldama.”

“At once, Lady Maccon, at once.” Boots’s face was suitably grave behind the muttonchops. The dirigible floated up a little higher and, with another violent puff of steam, set a brisk glide north toward Lord Akeldama’s town house.