Long Live the Queen (The Immortal Empire) (4 page)

I would not be treated like a lowly serf, and I would not give her the bloody satisfaction of waiting on her any longer, the cow.

My hand had just turned the door knob to let myself out of the ostentatious parlour when I heard a slight creak behind me. I turned, and caught sight of my hostess closing a not-so-secret door in the far wall. Her gaze went to the chair where I had been sitting. She seemed surprised to not find me in it.

I dropped my hand, the latch clicking back into place.

Slowly, the Queen of England turned to me. “Alexandra, there you are.”

“How fortunate you came along when you did,” I replied
with the same false sincerity. “I was just about to take my leave.”

“Without giving me an audience?” Her voice was sweet, but had a core of razor-sharp steel so often possessed by tiny women. “How very rude that would have been.”

I was more than half a foot taller than she was, and outweighed her by at least two stone, if not three, and yet she looked at me as though I was an ant in her path. That blatant disregard dug at me like a finger in a wound. Vex told me it was my primal side – the predator – that rose up when someone tried to assert dominance over me.

I reckoned it was also plain, old-fashioned defiance.

Goblins were known for their arrogance, and I knew myself well enough to admit I was no exception to that rule. No midget-leech was going to treat me like a recalcitrant child.

“No more rude then being made to wait half an hour,
Victoria
.” If she was going to use my first name, I was sure as bloody hell going to use hers. “Your time might not be so precious, but mine is.”

Cool blue eyes narrowed. “Yes, I suppose it would be, given that most of it is spent in the company of illiterate dogs. Tell me, how often do you have to put down fresh newsprint?”

Oh, how I longed to snap at her bait. Instead, I looked around at my opulent surroundings. “You must find the palace so lonely after Albert’s murder.” A murder she was rumoured to have committed during the Great Insurrection. I nodded at her mourning gown. “Black widow… oh, I mean
widow’s black
suits you.”

She stiffened, and the room crackled with energy – the kind that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. I’d felt this before once when Vex had been angry. It was as
though the powerful old ones were capable of generating an electrical charge with their emotions. If only I had such useful parlour tricks.

I met her gaze. “Are we going to whip ’em out and see whose is bigger, or are you going to apologise for intentionally making me wait to have a discussion that was
your
idea?” We might be on her territory, but I wasn’t above pissing on it.

She drew herself up to her full height, which wasn’t terribly impressive. At one time I would have been intimidated regardless, but not any more. She couldn’t touch me because the goblins would retaliate, and I couldn’t slap her around because she could make life miserable for a lot of people I cared about.

So we stared at each other for a moment, and then she sighed. Her chin lifted. “Forgive me for keeping you waiting.”

I seriously doubted she was sorry at all. In fact, I’d wager the only thing she was sorry for where I was concerned was not commanding I be killed immediately after my birth. I knew that my mother would have been made to have an abortion had my father, the Duke of Vardan, not intervened.

What had my father told his queen that had convinced her to let me live? What promises had he made, and were they worth it? Somehow, I doubted that as well.

“Sure.” I wasn’t about to waste any more of her time or mine being a prat. I returned to the chair, which had started to mould itself to my arse, and sat down once more. Victoria seated herself on the sofa across from me.

“Since we’ve dispensed with small talk, I’ll get right to the point.” She called
that
small talk? I might have to respect her a little after all. “We have a common enemy, you and I.”

“I assume you refer to the humans?”

She gave a regal nod. “Specifically the Human League.”

Ah, they were a proper toothache to be sure – relentless, unexpected and impossible to ignore. They’d bombed a halfie/aristo bar a while back and injured Ophelia. They’d also blown up Vex’s car – luckily he wasn’t in it. And then they’d torched my house in Leicester Square. I hadn’t lost much, but it had pissed me off, and made the smug little bastards feel like they had the upper hand.

Since then, they’d become more and more public. My mother had come out of hiding to speak against them, but she had her own agenda and her own reasons for wanting to abolish the monarchy.

What no one seemed to understand was that this façade of hierarchy was the only thing preventing an all-out war. Violence was unseemly, but humans gave those of plagued blood a reason to drop the pretence. If Victoria was cut down, aristos and halfies would band together to defend themselves, and then it would get messy.

Very messy.

I cut right to the bone – no chewing around it. “What do you want from me? Other than for me to go away, that is?”

She shot me a rather cross look. What? Did she expect me to forget that she wanted me out of the way? It was only my usefulness that prevented her from calling for my head on a pike. “I would like to negotiate a treaty between the vampires and the goblins.”

I frowned. “What about the weres?” I was sleeping with the alpha after all.

She arched an imperious brow – it was a favourite expression of my own. “It is common knowledge that the MacLaughlin will align his wolves to your goblins.”

Blimey, she didn’t even try to sugar-coat it.

I made a show of looking around. “Odd, I don’t see Vex here. Did his invitation get lost in the post?”

“You are a most infuriating girl. I’ve no idea what Churchill ever saw in you. Then again, he’s proved his poor judgement.”

Right, most of the world thought Church was still alive; just that he’d fled England and Victoria’s wrath. I had to make sure I remembered that and didn’t talk about him in the past tense. That wasn’t the reason for my hesitation, though. There was something in the Queen’s expression. Something strange.

Something vulnerable.

“Fang me. You were sleeping with him.” Now some of her hostility made sense. No wonder she had a hate-on for me when Church had had plans to marry me – not that I ever would have said yes.

She could never, ever find out that I’d killed him – no matter that she never would have married him herself. Good enough to screw, but Church’s mother had been American, and that kept him from being suitable for anything else as far as the aristocracy was concerned.

And I would never tell her that he was behind the attempt on her life.

“Fifty years,” she admitted. “He was my consort and trusted friend, and he betrayed me.”

I met her gaze. “He betrayed us both.” I refused to think of Dede, but I let a little of that rage simmer in my gut.

Some of the coldness returned to her expression, as though she’d cracked a shell to let me peek inside and now snapped it shut again. “I will
not
watch everything I am, everything I’ve built crumble under human feet.”

I felt for her. Call me a sucker or naïve, but I did. I wasn’t
about to hug her or plait her hair, but we seemed to have found common ground, she and I. Who would have thought that resenting Churchill would be that blood-soaked, unhallowed, corpse-concealing ground?

I didn’t want to think too hard on that, either.

“Schedule another meeting,” I told her, leaning forward so my forearms rested on my bloomer-covered thighs. “This time you invite Vex and William as well, and we’ll figure out what to do about the League. Together.”

I thought I saw a hint of a smile on her lips, but it might have been a twitch. “You are very democratic, Xandra. I don’t have to tell you how unattractive that is. The secret to handling men is to make them
think
they have a choice, not to actually give them one.”

Was that a hint of admiration in her tone? I shrugged it off. “Let me put it to you this way – it’s the only solution that has any chance of getting you what you want.”

That seemed to be the deciding factor. “Fine. I will call a meeting of the faction heads.” She rose to her feet and I followed. She offered me her hand. I stared at it.

“Shake my hand, girl. That is how honourable bargains are sealed.”

I took her much smaller hand in my own. She might be dainty, but her fingers closed around mine like tiny steel vices.

“Does this mean I get to keep my head?” I asked.

This time there was no denying her smile. Sharp fangs bit into her lower lip. “For now,” she said.

Bitch.

I returned home from the palace the same way I got there – through the labyrinth of tunnels and catacombs beneath London. Seriously, it was a wonder the city hadn’t caved in on itself yet.

The last few months had given me plenty of time to learn various routes and short cuts, and also to become comfortable with the underground. It used to make me feel vaguely claustrophobic, but now it was more like my own little adventure land. A private treasure hunt. Sounds ridiculous, but it was true. In the last fortnight alone, I’d found three Roman coins, part of a fresco and a hand-hammered gold ring that I now wore on the middle finger of my right hand. Granted, sometimes I found things like discarded condoms and old chamber pots, but still, it was more fun than not.

Although who would be horny enough to risk goblin attack
by having underground sex? I knew the thought of danger got a lot of people off, but there was fun danger and then there was
danger
. That made me think of humans who had sex with goblins, and my mind didn’t want to go there. I was learning to love my furry kin, but their sexual behaviour wasn’t something I wanted to explore. They were all kinds of freaky, and didn’t seem to care if anyone watched or not. Not that the humans seemed to mind either. No one that I knew of was ever hurt, but it worried me, letting humans into the den. Everyone was searched first, but what if someone came into my territory under false pretences? What if they managed to kill a few goblins before they were ripped apart?

What if they brought a bomb, or tetracycline?

I viewed gobs as the organised crime of the aristocratic world. Some of the things they did were all right, and others were more of a morally grey area, while a few were just outright wrong. However, they’d been doing them long before I came along, and there wasn’t a person in the UK – human or otherwise – who didn’t know the possible consequences of doing business – or pleasure – with goblins.

I’d eaten my mentor’s heart, so I wasn’t exactly in a position to judge, was I?

When I reached the forgotten ruin of Down Street station, I climbed on to the platform rather than continuing down the track to the entrance to the goblin den. Feeling lazy, I chose to take the lift.

I was distracted by my visit with Her Nibs. What the hell had I got myself into by shaking her bloody hand? I didn’t trust her, but she was right that we had to prepare for the human problem to escalate. It was time. Eighty years had passed since the Great Insurrection, and aristos had garnered
just enough negative attention lately to spark a new level of distrust and hate.

Honestly, I couldn’t blame the humans. Though it would be easier if they would just sod off. I wasn’t one of the aristos who had hurt anyone, so I didn’t deserve the animosity. I’d been a prisoner in one of those awful laboratories, and yet I was hated perhaps even more than a typical vampire or were, or even a goblin. The reason was simple: I was different. After years of being told the bogeyman could only come out at night, or could only get you underground, suddenly there was me – who could walk in the sun and looked relatively harmless.

I’d be afraid of me too. Still, it would be lovely if they’d just leave me alone.

The lift jerked to a stop. I walked out of the cage into the kitchen and immediately headed to the ice box. I put the cherries I’d snagged before leaving the den in a bowl to nibble on later, took out a bag of blood, then put a pot of water on the hob and popped the bag into it when the water began to boil. I preferred drinking blood heated this way than by a radiarange. I didn’t trust those things, and used them as little as possible.

Did Victoria even know what a radiarange was?

Fang me, but she was mad. Full-on hatters. Still, not having to worry about her cutting my head off – at least for the present moment – was a welcome respite.

I was lounging on the chaise with a book and a glass of Scotch when my rotary rang. I grabbed it off the coffee table and checked the incoming number. It was Ophelia.

I hesitated. This was a bit of alone time before getting together with Vex. I was really enjoying this book and didn’t
feel like chatting. Still, she rarely called, and she had been off to raid a lab. I pressed the connect button as the infernal device rang once more. “’Lo?”

“Get your arse over to Vex’s now.”

I sat up at her overly dramatic, sharp tone. “What is it?”

“Just hurry the fuck up.” The line went dead as she severed our connection.

I could dismiss it as typical drama-queen behaviour if it was my other sister, Avery, but Ophelia’s life was even more dangerous than mine, and if she told me to get my arse over to Vex’s, she meant I should do it and do it
now
.

And then it hit me. There was only one reason she would make such a call.

Vex
.

My mind went blank. No thought except getting to him as fast as possible.

His house was on South Street – close enough that it was faster for me to run and trespass on other properties than it was to drive the sometimes tiny and twisty roads of Mayfair.

A group of aristos having an outdoor gathering hissed and shouted at me as I ran through the middle of their party. I growled and kept running. A couple of gasps followed on my heels, and I knew from the sound that I had “gobbed out”. If it made me run faster, then I didn’t care how I looked.