“Yeah, I do,” I said. “I think I’d rather face them all at once. Get a good look at them. Besides, it’ll be interesting.”
“You always say that just before we get into the weirdest shit,” Ben said.
No doubt. One of these days I’d have to go for uninteresting. Spend the weekend in front of the TV eating popcorn. What were the odds?
Chapter 4
WE SPENT the night at Fortune House, in rooms that would have outdone the most spectacular five-star hotel: antique furniture, silk sheets, attentive room service bringing eggs and toast and fresh-squeezed juice for breakfast, and views of a quiet suburb out th
e window. In the morning, a horde of teenage boys decked in blue jerseys flooded one of the pristine grassy lawns outside the school to play soccer. Football, rather. It was a scene from a movie.
We got more of Ned’s story. He’d founded Dulwich College, at least its earliest incarnation as a charity hospital, back in his previous life, at the start of the seventeenth century. He’d had no children of his own so he funneled his fortune into various charities. He’d been watching over them ever since. I still didn’t know how a man who’d lived a full life, been famous and successful, became a vampire at the age of sixty. I’d looked up the official date of his death. There was some debate about the exact day—with a three day difference, which suddenly made sense, if you knew about the vampirism. An infected person lay effectively dead for three days before rising again. I wondered if Ned had been attacked and turned against his will, and I wondered if he’d ever tell me how it had happened.
Emma and Ned had made plans to send us on ahead to Ned’s Mayfair town house, where he stayed when he wanted to be in London proper. It was near the conference, and we’d have a day to get settled, sleep off more of the jet lag, and take a look around before the conference started. Andy the driver took us north in the sleek black cab, and I got my first look of Britain in daylight.
The city was a mix of ancient, modern, and everything in between. Nineteenth-century brick row houses mingled with 1960’s concrete office blocks, then suddenly the gray stone spire of an old church would rise in the distance, past supermarkets and subdivisions. Springtime made everything green—green lawns in parks, a bright green fuzz on trees, carpets of daffodils blooming on roundabouts. I had to quell an instinctive panic from being on the wrong side of the road.
London proper was a big city, with countless traffic-filled streets, tall buildings occupying entire blocks, and the sense that I had seen all this before in a movie. I imagined people felt the same thing when they visited New York City or Los Angeles.
Ben nudged me. “Kitty, look.” He pointed out the window to an iconic red double-decker bus. I started to “ooh” in admiration, when I realized he was actually pointing to the ad on the side of the bus: MERCEDES COOK IN CONCERT, THIS WEEK ONLY! The vampire’s gorgeous, smiling picture showed her in a spectacular black sequined gown, arms flung out to take in the audience she was singing to.
Oh, just great. Just horrible.
If I was the world’s first celebrity werewolf, Mercedes Cook was its first celebrity vampire. She’d been a star on Broadway since the sixties, and people had started to notice that she was looking remarkably well-preserved for her age. She hadn’t graduated to crazy mother and grandmother roles like most of the actresses of her generation. Turned out she was well preserved because she was undead. A vampire. She broke the story on The Midnight Hour, and I’d thought we were friends. Right up until she plotted to get my friend Rick killed, to prevent him from taking over as Master of Denver. She failed, he took over, and sent Mercedes packing.
So, at some point this week I was probably going to have to face the vampire who tried to take over Denver, probably on behalf of my archnemesis.
“That’s so not cool,” I stated.
“Ned called a truce, right?” Ben said. “What can she do?”
“I hesitate to even imagine,” I said.
“What you’re saying is I ought to keep a couple of stakes handy,” Cormac said.
“You mean you don’t anyway?” I said.
He shrugged. “There’s handy, then there’s handy.”
We rounded a corner and passed a stretch of sloping lawn lined with trees that were brilliant with new foliage. Andy identified it as Hyde Park. Wolf perked up her ears at the wide open space in the middle of the city—would it be useful in a pinch? I didn’t particularly want to find out. But as urban pastoral spaces went, the place was gorgeous.
I’d asked Ned and Emma about the local werewolves, and he’d said he’d be sure to introduce me to the alpha at the earliest opportunity. When, I’d whined, and he’d promised it’d be soon. Would the alpha be at the conference? At the vampire convocation? If I’d had the time, I’d have gone looking for werewolves myself. I’d heard that London was a good city for lycanthropes: tolerant, serving as it had as a crossroads for the world since the days of the British Empire, Indian were-tigers rubbing elbows with were-lions from Africa, and so on. I wanted to see it for myself.
There’d be time.
The neighborhood where Ned’s place was located looked like it had traveled through time: blocks full of stately façades, rows of windows, decorated molding, wrought-iron accents, elegant in the midday light. I flashed on any number of Jane Austen films or Sherlock Holmes reruns on PBS. There should have been fancy horse-drawn carriages clopping past.
The car turned onto an impossibly narrow lane packed with town houses, and through a gateway into a small, cobbled yard with a lovely, reaching tree in the corner. The building overlooking the yard was four stories of pale brick. The windows had white frames and stone balconies to lean on, and the roof was made of sloped gray slate.
Andy let us in through the front door. The interior was as much a time capsule as the neighborhood. A vestibule let out into a parlor with brocade wallpaper, age-darkened paintings decorating the walls, a carved mahogany mantelpiece over a marble fireplace, and so on.
“He did say make ourselves at home, right?” Ben said. “I feel like I’m going to break something.”
“It does feel a little like a museum, doesn’t it?” I said.
Cormac gave a shrug and slumped into a velvet-upholstered wingback chair, sprawling out and propping his booted feet on what must have been an extraordinarily valuable lacquered circular coffee table. “It’s a little much,” he said.
I had to admit, the right kind of vampire hospitality was impressive.