1,148When Chow called, Thalia was halfway to Bon Temps for her regular security rounds at the Stackhouse property.
Fangtasia's basement door alarm had been triggered. Chow could not hear it from the front door where he checked IDs, but Indira did. It drew her off her position on the club floor. What happened next occurred quickly. Their barmaid Ginger found Indira's body mangled and unconscious in the service corridor. Ginger's screaming nearly caused a stampede among the club's patrons. Everyone upstairs was evacuated safely; they were blessedly unaware of the actual problem. Downstairs, Eric and Pamela's basement was a bloodbath. Vera and Kibwe, the remaining Counselors, were dead. Eva, too. Only Constantine Manetas and Bill Compton were spared. Their bloody footprints led out the back with those of the accomplice.
Thalia raced back to Fangtasia, calling six different numbers to locate Eric before she relented and tried her ex-husband. Her exchange with Sebek was brief, and her update with Eric even shorter. Godric intercepted the call and began barking orders at her like he was her Sheriff. "Forget the escaped prisoners. Have Chow track them. Protect Sookie."
She was just about to turn into the club parking lot. Now she had to turn back again. "Your progeny is a fucking idiot!" she hissed into the cellphone wedged between her cheek and shoulder.
"Steady, Thalia," Godric warned.
Her tires screeched as she pulled a hard U-turn across two lanes of oncoming traffic. She slammed her Corolla over a landscaped median in front of a convenience store to get back on the county road out of Shreveport. "Shady, sneaky Eric! No video surveillance! Who doesn't keep cameras on the service doors? Chow has no ID on the culprit."
"There is only one person we know who murders council members," Godric said calmly.
"I was promised executions." Godric had already got to kill a Counselor and now there were none left for her.
"What's your ETA?"
"Thirty minutes."
Godric bit back a growl. "Make it fifteen."
She already had the accelerator jammed to the floorboard. "Put Sebek back on."
"He is busy."
"Just…" Thalia weaved to avoid a car. "Tell him I won't fail." Again, she didn't quite say.
Her unexpected request made The Celt pause. "Do your best, Thalia. Don't take foolish risks."
"Tell Sebek." She hung up abruptly and cursed her sensible sedan to go faster.
~OOO~
Sebek had overheard every word of Thalia's call. He was less interested by what she had to say to him than by what she revealed about Eric's security. Fangtasia had extensive camera coverage. If there was a blind spot, it was intentional. "What are you hiding from the authorities?" he asked Eric. Everyone in the entertainment room turned to hear his answer.
"You mean other than the guts of our former Council members?" Eric replied coolly. Internally, he was raging that his club had been attacked. "If Area Five, hypothetically, had some problem, we wouldn't keep records of how those hypothetical problems were handled. My subjects know they can come to me any time in confidence. If, say, the Dollar Store next door happened to have full video coverage of my service entrance, then it would be their concern, not mine."
Pamela grinned like a cat. "I own the Dollar Store. Give me an hour, Vizier. We'll ID the perp."
The answer pleased the ancient. "Misdirection. Clever." Eric's subjects thought they could come and go as they pleased. They could not.
Iset spoke over her shoulder from where she sat with Arun. "Running your jail inside a dance hall is a stupid setup. Your security controls are not designed to keep other vampires out."
"To be fair, your Highness, my usual basement guests are V-dealers and lowlife fangs. They aren't exactly missed by society. I had no reason to suspect someone would want to bust anyone out. Who in Hel's fresh bowels would want to rescue Bill Compton?"
"Whoever did obviously knows your people's setup and movements. You rely too much on Thalia. They waited until she was gone."
Eric's smirk dropped from his face. "Or they got lucky."
"The operation is too clean. Of course no one is interested in this Compton or Roman's bureaucrats. But Eva and Constantine? They are the motive, means, and opportunity for a jailbreak all rolled into one. This is your buddy Amleth's doing."
Eric felt his maker's told-you-so eyes slide over him, showering his neck with cold tingles. A hammer dropped in his gut. "You think Amleth came back for them," he said reluctantly, and hated that it made sense the moment he said it out loud. The man knew his club like the back of his hand. Eva and Constantine could have easily fed their maker everything they observed. They had witnessed plenty enough to cobble together an effective attack.
Worse, Amleth had not hidden the fact that he was well-acquainted with Compton. Only he had made a show of being his enemy at the fundraiser. Too much of a show. They must have been in league the whole time.
"Wait. No, no, no, no," Eric said, backtracking. "Amleth would never have killed Eva. This is Roman."
Godric shook his head. "Does it matter? They are all implicated."
Next to him, Rosalyn had been sitting in silent shock over Eva's death. "It doesn't make sense," she said, sniffling. "Why rescue one but kill the other?"
Eric paused to consider it. It dawned on him. Eva had made one crucial, unforgivable mistake. "She let on that her maker was alive. We weren't supposed to know."
"No." Rosalyn sat up in alarm. "Be precise, like Godric says. She let on to Thalia that her maker was alive. Thalia said that Constantine tried to shut her up. Eva was desperately trying to tell us. He's been trying to silence her this entire time."
"So Roman executed her for it."
"You're not hearing me, Eric. Oh my god. You locked her up with Constantine - her sibling! Why did you do that?"
He shrugged. "Space saver."
"Eric! Siblings often kill one another - especially their sisters!"
Eric turned sharply to his maker. "What are you teaching her?"
"The truth." Godric huffed in surprise. "She's right. Something has been off between those two children since they arrived in Dallas." Thinking further he added, "Rosalyn noticed that Eva was quiet. I dismissed it. Foolishly. Constantine talked over Eva this entire visit."
Rosalyn's brow knit. "They disagreed about their mission. Or maybe it wasn't her mission at all but she figured out that Constantine was up to something. He might have killed her himself because she tried to tell us…." She sucked in a breath in shock. "She could speak to us because she wasn't compelled. Godric, there wasn't a maker's command on her! This could all be Constantine!"
Eric grew very quiet. Their entire interrogation had focused on Amleth. They had asked all the wrong questions. "Constantine had access to Godric's security system in Dallas before his arrest. He had free reign in the nest and in the city. He arranged the purchase of the house rigged with explosives. He conveyed the keys to Amleth -"
"And got smacked across the face for how he went about it!" Rosalyn reminded them, outraged. "Constantine was a total creep to me from day one. Amleth wasn't blind to his behavior toward me. He just didn't look further into it. Or he didn't have time. Amla only ever tried to deepen his relationship with me."
Eric drummed his knee rapidly with his fingers, the evidence piecing together seamlessly. "Constantine was stunned that Amleth was caught in the bombing. It wasn't the plan." He gave a pointed look at his maker. "That bomb was meant for you and Rosalyn, Godric. The Fellowship's barbecue was for you two. Amleth made a stupid split second decision to impress Ros and it nearly cost him his life."
Godric remained impassive. "Next you'll tell me it was Constantine who emptied the School of Night fund while incarcerated in your basement."
"I -" Eric's retort died in his mouth.
"Maybe it was Constantine's blood that magically healed Amleth from your jail cell too. Since we know it worked so well the first half dozen times I drained him."
"He could have been forced."
"Or not."
Arun folded his hands very carefully. When he spoke, he spoke with the command of a clan chief. "While we are planning our response, I would appreciate reports on everything Constantine and Eva did at the Las Vegas Summit. Someone knows something or saw something. And it is time that someone fully debriefs me on the charges against my bloodkin."
Eric sucked at his teeth. "You think you can just suddenly pop back up and play patriarch after hiding for two centuries?"
Slowly, Arun let his regal gaze drift to meet Eric's. "Yes." He waited for the blond to challenge his birthright further.
"Amleth abjured your House. Godric is the only one here with a claim on him."
Godric raised an eyebrow at him in warning. "It is more complicated than that now - and you know it. This is a matter for Arun and I to discuss privately. Later."
"Your elders are busy, Northman." Arun shooed him. "You can handle my debrief. I am especially keen to hear why your House was so quick to condemn my bloodbrother and heir after his millennium of loyalty and service to you."
Smartly, before he started another blood feud, Eric gave a shallow bow and left the room.
~OOO~
Michael startled awake, disoriented. A kitschy wooden shelf - the kind one made in shop class - loomed overhead. He still wasn't used to sleeping in Jason Stackhouse's childhood room. Football trophies and posters of oiled women with big hair cluttered the walls. His bladder was full and his mouth dry. His hostess had plied him with too much brown liquor.
He extracted himself from a tangle of worn cartoon character sheets and made his way to the bathroom. The upstairs hallway was dark and he felt blindly around the peeling papered wall for the lightswitch. The wood floor on the far end of the hallway squeaked. "Sook?" he called out. "Can you hit the light? I can't find it."
There was a silent movement through a slice of moonlight and shadow. "Sookie? You okay?" Suddenly, he saw the silhouette of a man standing in front of him. "Alcide," he said in shock. The werewolf was not supposed to be inside. He was carrying a quilt.
"Sorry, man. I didn't mean to wake you." Alcide quickly thumped down the stairs before Michael could ask any more questions. The front door slammed shortly after.
Michael couldn't fault the guy for wanting to keep warm. The temperature had dipped this late in the year and Alcide rarely wore more than a checked flannel and down vest. It probably sucked sitting outside on guard dog duty. Michael was mid-stream pee when his brain caught up with his body. Alcide had come from Sookie's room. He definitely had no business being in there in the middle of the night. Concerned, Michael peeked around the corner, slowly at first, then he pushed the door wide open. "Oh, what the hell, dude." Her bed was empty. They had snuck off somewhere together. If the no sex with Sookie order applied to him, it definitely applied to her security detail.
A quick look around confirmed that he was alone in the house. He dithered for a minute over what to do. Godric wasn't reachable, and Thalia looked at him like she wanted to carve her initials on his skull. He found his jeans and grabbed his jacket off the entryway hook. "Sookie?" he called off the wraparound porch. "God dammit," he muttered to himself and charged across the grass. The woman lived in the pool chairs out back, despite having no pool. She seemed determined to give herself skin cancer.
"Sookie! Alcide!" he shouted, louder this time, seeing the chairs were unoccupied. He remembered something about a swimming hole off a trail in the side yard. Surely they hadn't gone that far. Was he the only one capable of following orders? He suddenly thought of Godric's piercing grey eyes and his shapely lips spelling out commands at him. It made him flush with heat. He swore again, confused by his body's reaction, and adjusted himself in his pants. Working with vampires had made him want to try all sorts of things he hadn't thought he was interested in.
He continued to call out as he hunted around for the trail at the edge of the property line. It was impossible to see anything in the swampy woods. From somewhere In the distance, he suddenly heard a wolf howl pierce the humid night. Michael spun, aware of how exposed he was. Don't run, jackrabbit. Running excites predators. Godric had taught him that.
"Shit. Shit, shit, shit," he chanted to himself, speed-walking as fast as he could back toward the safety of the house. The shadows seemed to dance eerily around him in the thin moonlight. He could feel his pulse pounding in his throat.
There was a blur at the treeline and he ran smack into a cold figure. "Watch it," it said in annoyance.
Michael jumped back, his heart nearly stopped. "Constantine," he gasped. "What the hell! Where's Thalia?"
The vampire tipped his head, studying him. "She sent me. I'm here to help."
He exhaled in relief. Constantine was one of the vampires from Godric's nest. His people were safe. "Dude, we've got major problems. Sookie ran off."
Constantine inhaled slowly, his nose tracing foul something in the air. "With the wolf."
"He took her out. I don't know where. We need to call Godric."
"Good thinking. Do you have a phone? The Sheriff doesn't want us to carry them anymore."
Michael's hand slapped an empty pants pocket. He'd left it on the bedside table. "Shoot. I spaced it. Alcide seriously freaks me out."
"Werewolves are freaks." Constantine accompanied Michael back to the house. "Has Sookie forced you to watch more television reruns?"
"Nah, we finished Buffy ages ago. Have you heard from Godric? Where are they?"
"You know I can't say."
"Top secret, huh?"
"Very," Constantine agreed, teeth gleaming.
On the porch, Michael stopped short at the screen door with a creeping realization. The vampire needed an invitation to come in. "I'll be right back," he said as casually as possible. A cold hand closed loosely on his wrist.
"Invite me in."
"I don't think -"
Before Michael could say more, the cold hand was around his neck. There was no time to scream. Fangs sank into his throat.
~OOO~
Talking. Constantine was talking at him. Michael vaguely understood they were in the hallway by the stairwell. He had let the killer inside.
The vampire toyed with him as he bled him. Cruelly, painfully. He liked his cries. He told him as much. Then he nuzzled him and caressed him and licked him. Let enough time pass for Michael to recover and get a grip on the situation. Then he began all over again. Michael begged him to stop. Yelled until his voice broke. He could feel his life slipping away.
"I always wondered what it would be like to have Boy Death," Constantine confessed. "You're a poor imitation."
"Lucky I'm not him," Michael slurred.
"Hmm. True."
Michael pulled weakly at the vampire's blood-soaked clothes. He tried to explain he was killing him. "This?" Constantine pinched his shirt dismissively. "It's mostly my sister." He breathed blood-hot breath at Michael's ear in confession. "I killed her tonight." Michael hiccupped in silent despair. Fangs cut into his chest then. A burning ache and then a pause. "Eva was delicious," Constantine bragged. He shredded the boy's jeans off and gripped a meaty thigh, ready to try his meal further south. "You're average. A filling piece of-"
Sookie's mad shrieking interrupted his taunting. "Michael! Call the police!" Her footsteps pounded up the porch steps.
Michael's voicebox was blown. He tried to warn her. Don't come in. There was a vampire inside.
Sookie crashed through the house and slipped on his blood in the entry in slow motion. Her feet scrambled in circles comically before flying out from under her. She hit the wood floor hard and slid. In the long hallway in front of her, Constantine was hunched over a struggling body. Michael was pinned beneath him, gesturing wildly at her, pointing. She screamed in terror. "Behind you!" Michael managed to wheeze. Standing at the entryway was another tall figure clad in black. They were trapped. Constantine abandoned his victim and lunged at Sookie, barrelling into her with incredible force. He knocked her straight out the front door and onto the porch welcome mat.
"I rescind your invitation!" Michael gasped and collapsed on the oak floor. The two vampires glanced at him in disinterest and turned to each other.
"The werewolf?" Constantine asked.
"Neutralized. Who is he?" The figure nodded at the boy bleeding out inside.
"Texan blood whore. He's no one." Constantine tossed a limp Sookie over his shoulder. He hesitated. "Do you hear that?" A car was tearing down the pea gravel road. "Let's get out of here."
"Tsk, tsk, tsk." The tall vampire chastised the younger one in amusement. "Let us stay and see who it is."
A bronze Corolla screeched to a stop at the end of Hummingbird lane, spraying gravel in every direction. The car door slammed. "Roman!" Thalia bellowed.
"Excuse me." Roman patted Constantine on the forearm and descended the front steps. "Walk away from this now, Lady Thalia. You are outnumbered."
She responded by pointing a vicious knife at him. Roman cleared his throat and gestured for Constantine to come down. He took the fairy princess in his arms. "Go on then," he encouraged him, motioning toward Thalia.
Constantine looked around in confusion. "What do you want me to do?"
"Kill her? Get killed? It hardly concerns me now."
Constantine was taken aback. He stammered. "After all that I've done for you? You promised!"
"Ah, young one. I implied. You inferred. Promises were neither made nor broken. Have I not freed you?"
"She's going to gut me!"
Thalia took another step forward. "I will gut you, Tarquinii. Over and over."
"Hmm." Roman sucked at his teeth. "Best of luck, then. If you don't mean to fight her, young one, you ought to start running. She is fast."
With that, Roman crooked his knees and leapt into the sky with Sookie's unconscious body. Thalia's knife narrowly missed the void where he had been standing. It stuck into the clapboard siding of the house with a thud. Constantine gasped and tore off into the woods. Thalia gave chase, hot on his heels.
He made it to a decrepit cemetery. The open ground provided several good options for escaping the ancient. He was about to dart down a path toward an abandoned house when Bill Compton leapt out from behind a tombstone and tackled him to the ground.
"I got him!" Compton hollered. "Got him right here!"
Thalia caught up moments later. Compton was smiling in satisfaction and pointed to the man beneath his shoe. "Got him," he mouthed again, his proud smile evaporating as Thalia glared at him and stepped closer. "Um. Thalia, look now. I don't know why Roman let me out. I'm innocent. I have no business with that man. I'm on your side trying to help, see?"
Thalia despised beggars. She snapped Compton's neck, then Constantine's for good measure, and dragged the two immobilized men back to her car where her silver chains waited.
~OOO~
In a borrowed office in the Akhet House staff wing, Eric placed calls to palace secretaries himself. He issued subpoenas for witnesses at the Las Vegas summit and arranged for recorded depositions to be taken. He did gruntwork that he had not done in over a century - all because he had backtalked a patriarch. He used Arun's order as an opportunity to show Rosalyn the ropes.
"You're angry," she observed, breaking the silence of their work.
He did not look up from the papers he was signing with unnecessary force. "I've been made to look like an incompetent asshole." Fangtasia's massive security breach. His legal case against the Council dead. His interrogation of Amleth's children mismanaged because of his maker's insistence on a course of action. He looked up. "For the record, you look assholish too. You may have beaten an innocent woman."
Rosalyn froze. A long beat passed between them before she responded. "Arun's reappearance has brought out a lot of strong emotions in everyone."
"You mean like your horniness?" He snickered and tossed his pen down. "I'm not sure that counts as an emotion."
She snatched the papers he had signed, tapped them into a pile, and stuffed them into the printer to scan. Eric expected his jibe to send her fleeing from the room. Instead, she climbed into his lap and straddled him suggestively. She stroked his face with a soft hand. "You're angry because Arun has been your equal for a thousand years as a bloodline heir and the second you get him back, you're losing that comradeship too."
"Don't psychoanalyze me." She stared at him, one eyebrow raised. Eric sighed. "If he means to defend his position as patriarch, you cannot fuck him, or fuck around with him. It changes everything."
Rosalyn leaned in and put her lips to his ear. "I know." She slid off his lap and gave him a meaningful look. "But he doesn't know I know."
"You - " Eric's mouth dropped open, scandalized. Rosalyn had played the elder. He started laughing. "Who are you and what have you done with the little school marm I wanted to bite and claim so bad?"
"Hmm. Well, you did bite me and now I am your problem. Did we subpoena Colorado's delegates?" She gestured at the pile of paperwork.
Eric pulled her roughly back onto his lap. "Is it wrong how much it turns me on to see you in Pam's dress?"
"Oh, that is so wrong!" She pushed at him with a laugh.
He pulled her tighter. "A promise is a promise. You've been very good tonight. It's my turn to be very, very bad."
"Yeah, well. We still have to get through this planning meeting."
"Then you'll have time to think about what trouble you'd like when you're done."
"Eric Northman! You're going to ruin this dress, aren't you?"
He flashed a devilish grin. "You know it."
She smacked his bicep. "Just don't blow my cover. I'm a thirsty newborn with more curves and power than sense."
~OOO~
"Here." Arun pointed to a spot on a map of Eastern Europe. Everyone was gathered around the table. "Roman's hideout is here. I've had two hundred years to think about it." Thea had let slip with just enough detail as she tortured him and tried to murder him. "The internet has made confirming it much easier."
Arun's confidence made the elders uneasy. He might not be lying, but he could still be dead wrong. They had little choice but to accept his account. According to his research, Roman's compound was inside an unimportant rock tomb in a land littered with such historic sites. Thea had bragged about how clever Roman was to choose such an unassuming place. Its carved exterior face did not boast elaborate columns or figures like the royal burial compounds that drew tourists and international renown. Instead, the tomb was cut to appear like a freestanding cube set inside the mountain, with only a single tiny window high on its vaulted face. It was otherwise wholly unremarkable. The design was unusual, but not unique.
"It's a needle in a haystack," Eric declared.
"There are only a handful of Thracian tombs with this shape, the minimal decor, the odd little entrance."
"Because we have so much time to trot around enemy territory and knock on crypts."
Arun folded his hands and waited.
Rosalyn elbowed him. "Go on," Eric relented. While everyone was focused on the map, he cast a scorching glance down at her. 'Behave,' she mouthed at him. He narrowed his eyes and shook his head in refusal.
"Thea let one crucial detail slip," Arun continued. "She called it the 'Tomb of Ezekios'." He turned to the Egyptians. "Does that mean anything to you?" Sebek and Iset both shrugged. They had never heard the name. "No one else seems to know either. It was officially noted by scientists, then forgotten. It's not a name in the royal rolls so the site has been dismissed as unimportant. That's why I'm sure this is the right place. Ezekios appears nowhere else in antiquity."
Godric flagged down one of Sebek's servants stationed by the door. She leaned down for his order. "Laptop." A machine quickly materialized and he reached down and pulled out a flash drive he had hidden in his Chelsea boot. He had not trusted his geospatial program to be left anywhere else.
Iset was appalled. "You've been walking around with that thing in your sock all night?"
"Better than a throwing knife," Sebek snorted.
Godric suppressed a smile. "That's the other sock, my Lord."
While they waited for the program to boot up, Rosalyn moved in closer to peer over Arun's shoulder at the map. "What should we be paying attention to?" she asked.
Arun was happy to explain the scales implied by the beige and taupe elevation lines.
"Don't be fooled," he warned. "The Balkans are formidable terrain."
"There aren't many roads," she observed.
Sebek reached over and tapped a thin, zigzagging line. "Just this one. Horus be praised, at least it appears to be paved."
Godric's fingers flew over the keyboard. He located the route and pulled up a 3D view. The road wound in blind switchbacks through thickly forested mountains that dipped suddenly into valleys pockmarked with spiraling rock formations as tall as skyscrapers.
Pamela was pacing in the background getting updates over the phone. She paused to look over and made a noise in disgust. "That looks like freakin' werewolf country if ever I saw it."
Godric glanced up. "It is."
"You know the area?" Rosalyn asked.
He pursed his lips and shook his head in consternation. "Only stories. Enough to not want to visit."
Arun looked up at Rosalyn. "Dragons," he said with a shudder.
"Get out. Dragons are real too?"
Sebek chuckled at her innocence. "No, little dove. The Dragwyla clan. Vampires infamous for their tastes," he traced out an invisible territory over the old Ottoman Empire, "They liked to eat their own." His eyes connected with hers. Cannibal vampires. "Too much of that kind of thing and you get mindless undead wandering the night."
"Fucking zombies," Pamela muttered, and returned to her phone conversation.
Godric paused from his typing. "The Dragwyla addicted the local werewolf packs to their blood and used them as muscle to defend their lands. Weres on V are extremely dangerous, Ros."
"Surely they're not still carrying on like that," Rosalyn supposed. "Who runs this part of Turkey, your Highness?"
Iset sighed. "Those borderlands have been a mess since Ra-Harakhty himself shined his light on this black Earth. The Sultan of Turkey has no control over it."
Sebek was struck by a thought. "Did not the Romanian clans clean out the House of the Dragon some time ago, Princess? It was very bad PR for them."
"It's perfect," Rosalyn declared. She waved at the map. "A dead zone no one wants or likes. Full of old hidey holes and scary rumors."
Godric set the laptop down for everyone to see. He had already managed to refresh the map with incredible surface detail. Eric let out a noise in displeasure. "Every switchback is a defense position. There's no getting in there unnoticed."
"Delivery truck," Arun suggested. "Find out what the local breathers eat there." Eric hummed in agreement.
Godric zoomed in on the tomb set into the mountainside. He pulled up a side panel with data scraped from the internet. A furrow formed between his brows. "It's too small. Arun, they've studied this." A grainy photograph from the 1960s showed the inside. It was a single chamber exposed to daylight. A block plugged a narrow hole for the burial.
Rosalyn zeroed in on a detail from the site survey. "No, look. They didn't actually excavate behind the stone. They assumed it was an ossuary, but it could be anything. A tunnel, a stairway." A vampire could easily move a block that size. "Zoom out?" The map shifted. "What's that?"
Godric spun the image 180 degrees and zoomed back in. "An Orthodox Church."
"Is there anything else in these mountains? Buildings, infrastructure?" she asked.
Godric squinted and tilted his head, and zoomed out on the series of peaks. He looked up at his wife. He knew what she was thinking. "You're brilliant."
Arun sat back, equally impressed. "You think they are connected?"
"Always have an emergency exit the world has forgotten, right? I bet the Church is the main entrance. Easy access. Predictable human activity. The tomb is the emergency exit."
Iset leaned closer to the table. "How do you figure? There are kilometers between these two structures. That church was probably built last century. Roman has been set up somewhere for centuries longer."
"I saw a tv show about Turkey, your Highness. The ancient people built whole underground cities. People still use them when conflicts break out. They're mostly abandoned."
Godric nodded. "It's what I would do."
Iset took a moment to consider it. "Then I suppose we'll proceed as if that is what Roman has done. But just so we're clear - Egypt does not like this."
"As in 'we're on our own'?" Godric asked peevishly.
"No," Sebek said quickly. "We will provide support, as promised."
Iset gestured at the computer and the map it sat on. "It could be a rabbit warren down there. There could be collapses. Booby traps. Certainly enemies in close quarters. Egypt wants her blessed daughter safe."
Rosalyn did not understand who they were discussing at first. She thought the princess was referring to herself. Then, with all eyes on her, she realized Iset was issuing a royal degree - about her. "We definitely need more info before any of us consider going near there," Rosalyn said. Her gaze drifted. "We need a human."
She left the room on a mission. Eric followed her casually until they rounded a corner. He slammed her up against a carved limestone pillar in a fit of passion. "Gods, tell me something filthy." He bit her chin with blunt teeth.
"Niobe wants to be mine."
He moaned. "And you want to share…?"
Fangs raked at her throat. "How much money do I have?"
"Depends." He straightened. "What kind of money do you need, poppet?"
"Can I afford a courtesan? How much does that cost?"
Eric snorted and rolled his eyes. He circled her waist with his arms. "Ros, that's operational budget."
"So yes?"
"There's always passive income to pay staff and maintain infrastructure. If you wanted an airport built or a global corporation set up, I'd say run it by me first. Our assets took a beating after your little endowment fundraiser and wedding."
"Oh." She felt sheepish. "How dangerous do you think it would be to send Niobe into that Church? She could do recon for us in the daylight."
He frowned. "A courtesan like her is a high value asset. It's a waste if something happens. Send Michael."
Pamela cleared her throat behind them. "Yeah, about that. Sorry to break up your little make-out fest, but we have a problem."
Eric let out an exasperated breath and waved two fingers for her to let them have it. "What's the good news?"
"We've got a positive ID on Roman. He's stateside, in our backyard. So holy actual shit."
"That's good news?" Rosalyn cried.
Pamela threw her hands up. "At least it was an ancient who popped our basic-as-fuck door locks and not some hoedown breather."
Eric swore. "Bad news?"
"Oh, I'll get to that. Better news is that Thalia captured Constantine and Bill."
"That's great," Rosalyn sighed in relief.
"Yeaaah," Pamela drawled. "Constantine nearly killed your boy Michael." Rosalyn's hand flew to her mouth. "I'm having him airlifted to Dallas so Grandsire's surgeon friend can treat him under the radar."
"And?" Eric prompted, knowing Pam wasn't done.
"Roman has Sookie."
A/N: Thoughts? Theories? Leave a comment! xx, M