Changeless (Parasol Protectorate #2)

Eventually, however, it became necessary for everyone but Tunstell to leave the still-unconscious Frenchwoman and dress for dinner.

Upon attaining her chamber, Lady Maccon received her second major shock of the day. It was a good thing she was a woman of stalwart character. Someone had upended her room. Again. Probably looking for the dispatch case. Shoes and slippers were everywhere, and the bed had been torn apart; even the mattress was slashed open. Feathers coated flat surfaces like so much snow. Hatboxes lay broken, hats disemboweled, and the contents of Alexia’s wardrobe lay strewn across the floor (a condition familiar to only the nightgowns).

Alexia propped her parasol safely to one side and took stock of the situation. The chaos was greater than it had been on board the dirigible, and the crisis was compounded shortly thereafter when Lord Maccon discovered the carnage.

“This is a gross outrage! First we are shot at, and now our rooms are ransacked,” he roared.

“Does this kind of thing always happen around a pack without an Alpha?” wondered his wife, nosing about, trying to determine if anything significant was missing.

The earl grunted at her. “A terrible bother, leaderless packs.”

“And messy.” Lady Maccon picked her way delicately about the room. “I wonder if this was the information Madame Lefoux had to impart before she was shot. She said something about trying to find me regarding the aethographor. Perhaps she disturbed the culprits in action when she came looking for me here.” Alexia began to form three piles: things beyond salvation, items for Angelique to repair, and the undamaged.

“But why would someone shoot at her?”

“Perhaps she saw their faces?”

The earl pursed his well-formed lips. “It is possible. Come here, woman; stop your fussing. The dinner bell is about to go, and I’m hungry. We shall tidy later.”

“Bossy britches,” said his wife, but she did as she was bid. It wouldn’t do to get into an argument with him on an empty stomach.

He helped her unbutton her dress, so well distracted by the day’s proceedings that he only fluttered kisses down her spine and did not even nibble. “What do you believe they were looking for? Your dispatch case again?”

“Difficult to know. Could be someone else, I suppose. I mean, not the same miscreant as when I was floating.” Alexia was confused. Initially, on board the dirigible, she had suspected Madame Lefoux, but that lady had been asleep and in company all day long. Unless the inventor managed it before she was shot at, this chaos must be attributed to someone else. A different spy with a different motive? Things certainly were getting complicated.

“What else might they be looking for? Did you bring something I should know about, husband?”

Lord Maccon said nothing, but when Alexia turned about and gave him the wifely eye of suspicion, he looked like a guilty sheepdog. He left off unbuttoning and went to the window. Throwing aside the shutters, he stuck his head far out, reached around, retrieved something, and returned to her side with a look of relief, carrying a small package wrapped in oiled leather.

“Conall,” said his wife, “what is that?”

He unwrapped and showed her: a strange chubby little revolver with a square grip. He clicked open the chamber to display its armament: hardwood bullets inlaid with silver in a cagelike pattern and capped to take the powder explosion. Alexia wasn’t big on guns, but she knew enough about the mechanics to realize this little creature was expensive to make, used only the most modern technology, and was capable of taking down either a vampire or a werewolf.

“A Galand Tue Tue. This is the Sundowner model,” he explained.

Lady Maccon took her husband’s face in her hands. His skin was rough with a day’s growth of beard; she would have to remind him to shave, now that he was human all the time. “Husband, you are not here to kill someone, are you? I should hate to find out that you and I were working at cross purposes.”

“Simply a precautionary measure, my love, I assure you.”

She was not convinced. Her fingers tightened about his jaw. “When did you start carrying the deadliest supernatural weapon known to the British Empire as a precaution?”

“Professor Lyall had Tunstell bring it for me. He guessed I’d be mortal while I was here and thought I might want the added security.”

Alexia let go of his face and watched as he wrapped the deadly little device back up and returned it to its hidey-hole just outside the window.

“How easy is that to use?” she asked, all innocence.

“Dinna even consider it, wife. You’ve got that parasol of yours.”

She pouted. “You are no fun as a mortal.”

“So,” he said, deliberately changing the subject, “where did you hide your dispatch case, then?”

She grinned, pleased that he would not think her so feeble as to have kept it where it could be stolen. “In the least likely place, of course.”

“Of course. And are you going to tell me where?”

She widened her large brown eyes at him, batting her eyelashes and attempting to look innocent.

“What is in it that someone might want?”

“That’s the odd thing. I really have no idea. I took the smallest things out and stashed them in my parasol. So far as I can tell, there is nothing too valuable left: the royal seal; my notes and paperwork on this latest issue with the humanization plague, minus my personal journal, which got pinched; the codes to various aethographors; a stash of emergency tea; and a small bag of gingersnaps.”

Her husband gave her his version of the look.

Lady Maccon defended herself. “You would not believe how long those Shadow Council meetings are prone to running, and being as the dewan and the potentate are supernatural, they don’t seem to notice when it’s teatime.”

“Well I hardly think anyone is ransacking our rooms in a desperate bid to acquire gingersnaps.”

“They are very good gingersnaps.”

“I suppose it could be something other than the dispatch case?”

Lady Maccon shrugged. “This is useless speculation for the time being. Here, help me on with this. Where is Angelique?”

In the absence of the maid, Lord Maccon buttoned his wife up into her dinner dress. It was a gray and cream affair with a multitude of pleated gathers all up the front and a long, rather demure ruffle at the hem. Alexia liked the gown, except that it had a cravatlike bow at the neck, and she wasn’t entirely behind this latest fashion for incorporating masculine elements into women’s garb. Then again, there was Madame Lefoux.

Which reminded her that, since Tunstell was on French-inventor guard detail, she would have to help her husband dress. It was a mild disaster: his cravat came out lopsided and his collar limp. Alexia was resigned. She had, after all, been a spinster most of her life, and cravat-tying was not a proficiency generally acquired by spinsters.

“Husband,” she said as they finished their preparations and headed downstairs for dinner, “have you considered biting your many-times great-granddaughter to change?”

Lord Maccon stopped abruptly at the head of the staircase and growled, “How on God’s green earth did that bloody woman persuade you to her cause?”

Alexia sighed. “It makes sense, and it is an elegant solution to Kingair’s current problems. She is already acting like an Alpha; why not make it official?”

“It isna as simple as that, wife, and you verra well know it. And her chances of survival—”

“Are very slim. Yes, I am well aware of that.”

“Not simply slim—they are beyond salvation. You are essentially suggesting that I kill the last living Maccon.”

“But if she survived…”

“If.”

Lady Maccon tilted her head. “Isn’t it her risk to take?”

He remained silent and continued on down the massive staircase.

“You should think about it, Conall, as BUR, if nothing else. It is the most logical course of action.”

He kept on walking. There was something about the set of his shoulders.

“Wait a moment.” She was suddenly suspicious. “That was the reason you came back here all along, wasn’t it? The family problem. You intend to fix the Kingair Pack? Despite the betrayal.”

He shrugged.

“You wanted to see how Sidheag was handling things. Well?”

“There’s this changeless issue,” he prevaricated.

Alexia grinned. “Yes, well, apart from that. You must agree I have a point.”

He turned to frown up at her. “I hate it when you come over all correct.”

Alexia trotted down the staircase until they were nose to nose. She had to stand one step up from him for it to be so. She kissed him softly. “I know. But I am so very good at it.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Great Unwrapping

They decided the mummy would be unwrapped, for the titillation of the ladies, just after dinner. Alexia was not convinced as to the cleverness of this plan. Knowing Miss Hisselpenny’s constitution, if the mummy were gruesome enough, dinner might just be revisited. But it was believed that darkness and candlelight best suited such an illustrious event.

None of the ladies present had ever before been to a mummy-unwrapping party. Lady Maccon expressed some distress that Madame Lefoux and Tunstell would be missing the fun. Lord Maccon suggested that as he had little interest and he would go relieve Tunstell, thus allowing the claviger at least to participate. Tunstell, everyone knew, enjoyed drama.

Alexia looked sharply at Miss Hisselpenny, but Ivy held herself composed and untroubled by the possibility of a redheaded thespian and naked mummy in the same room. Felicity licked her lips in anticipation, and Lady Maccon prepared herself for inevitable histrionics. But it was she, not Felicity or Ivy, who felt most uncomfortable in the presence of the ancient creature.

Truth be told, it was a rather sad-looking mummy. It resided in a not-very-big boxlike coffin that had only minimal hieroglyphic decorations upon it. Once removed from the coffin, the wrappings on the mummy were revealed to be minimally painted with one repeated motif: what looked to be an ankh, broken. The dead thing did not disgust or frighten Alexia in any way, and she had seen mummies before in museums without desultory effects. But there was something about this particular mummy that, simply put, repulsed her.

Lady Maccon was not given to bouts of sentimentality, so she did not think her reaction an emotional one. No, she was being literally repulsed, in the scientific definition of the word. It was as though she and the mummy both had some kind of magnetic field, and they were the same charge, with forces violently repelling one another.

The actual unwrapping seemed to take an exceptionally long time. Who knew there would be so dreadfully many bandages? They also kept breaking. Every time an amulet was uncovered, the whole operation stopped and people gasped in delight. As more and more of the mummy was revealed, Alexia found herself instinctively backing toward the door of the room, until she was at the fringe of the crowd, standing on tiptoe to witness the proceedings.

Being soulless, Alexia had never given death much consideration. After all, for preternaturals like her, death was the end—she had nothing whatsoever to look forward to. In BUR’s special documentation vaults, an inquisition pamphlet lamented the fact that preternaturals, the church’s last best weapon against the supernatural threat, were also the only human beings who could never be saved. What Alexia felt, most of the time, was indifference to her own mortality. This was the result of an ingrained practicality that was also due to her soullessness. But there was something about this mummy that troubled her even as it repulsed: the poor, sad, wrinkled thing.

Finally they worked their way up to his head, exposing a perfectly preserved skull with dark brown skin and some small portion of hair still adhered to it. Amulets were removed from ears, nose, throat, and eyes, revealing the empty eye sockets and slightly gaping mouth. Several scarab beetles crawled out of the exposed orifices, plopped to the floor, and skittered about. At which both Felicity and Ivy, who had until that moment remained only mildly hysterical, fainted.

Tunstell caught Miss Hisselpenny, clutching her close to his breast and murmuring her given name in tones of marked distress. Lachlan caught Miss Loontwill and was nowhere near as affectionate about it. Two sets of expensive skirts draped themselves artistically in ruffled disarray. Two sets of bosoms heaved in heart-palpitating distress.

The evening’s entertainment was pronounced a definitive success.

The gentlemen, marshaled into action by Lady Kingair’s barked commands, carried the two young ladies into a sitting room down the hall. There the ladies were duly revived with smelling salts, and rosewater was patted across the brow.

Alexia was left alone with the unfortunate mummy, unwitting cause of all the excitement. Even the scarab beetles had scuttled off. She cocked her head to one side, resisting the insistent push, which seemed even worse now that there was only the two of them. It was as though the very air were trying to drive her from the room. Alexia narrowed her eyes at the mummy, something niggling the back of her brain. Whatever it was, she could not recall it. Turning away, still thinking hard, she made her way into the other room.