Maybe. “Alright, Dad, but assuming these are Vampires—and I’ll admit I encountered something not quite right and it had fangs—but how, please, with all due respect, did Alice and Gloria kill them? Aren’t Vampires supposed to be immortal?” And nonexistent, but that he’d keep to himself.
“I think, Gryffyth, we need to explain a few things,” Mrs. Burrows said. “You look confused.”
“Understandably,” Andrew Barron said. He shot Gryffyth a look of solidarity and sympathy. “I was for a long time. I think first, you should all tell him what you are.”
“Good idea.” That came from Gloria. “We know you’re a Dragon, like your father, but you don’t know what we are.”
Other than confusing him totally, no, he didn’t.
“Very well, then,” Andrew said, looking at Alice. “Why don’t you start, my dear?”
Chapter Nine
It was well and truly dark when Paul Schmidt walked up the curving drive of Wharton Lacey and approached the tradesman’s entrance. He was not feeling well-disposed to the world around him. The “lift” that Weiss had arranged for him was in a farm lorry smelling of pigs. The old codger driving it, a shriveled specimen of humanity scarcely worth biting, refused point-blank to take Schmidt up the winding drive. “I was told to drop you here,” he insisted as he pulled up at the gates. “That’s what I was paid for. I’m not going up to the house.”
Schmidt shoved aside the temptation to rip out the man’s throat for his impertinence. Unfortunately that might draw too much attention to his arrival, and anonymity was a necessary precaution. He cursed the old fool and set off walking.
And walking. The first sight of the house, as he reached a bend in the drive, was favorable. He might just arrange to keep it as his headquarters when the time came. He ran on in the dark, heading for the back door as he’d been directed.
If he hadn’t been a Vampire, he’d never have found it. The night was pitch dark and the drive bordered with shrubs, but he found his way around the house, pausing by a window to overhear a boring conversation about the quality of wartime cheese. Foolish mortals, death was about to rain on them and they worried about cheese!
He made his way around the side of the house and knocked on the kitchen door.
It opened a crack and a man’s voice asked, “Who is it?”
“Paul Smith,” Schmidt replied. “I’m the replacement gardener. Miss Aubin is expecting me.”
“Come on in then.” The door was opened just enough to let Schmidt slip in sideways. “Miss Aubin!” the man called as he led the way down a tiled passage and into a vast, warm kitchen.
And there, standing by the scrubbed table in the middle of the room, was their suborned ally.
“You got here alright then,” she said, looking up from rolling out pastry.
Obviously, since he was standing a few meters from her. Stupid cow! “Yes, I’m here, and with my things.” He indicated the cheap, cardboard suitcase Weiss had insisted he use.
“I don’t suppose you need to eat, do you?” she asked.
He was tempted to say yes, he needed fresh warm blood, but it was a little too early to break his cover. Once his job was done there would be time enough to feast. “Not right now, no.”
“Jacob, here, will show you your room.”
The man led him back out of the door and across the courtyard and opened the door to a stable block. He paused to light a hurricane lamp.
“Up there.” He indicated a flight of uncarpeted stairs. “You’ll need the lamp. There’s a row of rooms, used to be for the stable lads, when we had them. Miss Aubin had the one at this end cleaned out and the bed done up for you. It’s the biggest and the roof there doesn’t leak. You can come into the scullery to wash. There’s a tap out in the yard, but water will be warm in the scullery.” He handed the lamp to Schmidt. “Anything you need?”
Plenty, but it could wait. “No, I have what I need.”
“Good. See you in the morning. Servants’ breakfast is at six. Gets it out of the way before the family eat. ’Night then.” Without another word the man walked back to the house, leaving Schmidt holding the flickering lantern.
Damn and double damn! He was to sleep with the horses! One day someone was going to regret treating Paul Schmidt this way. Meanwhile he’d bide his time, and out here he’d be conveniently unobserved. There were two horses below if hunger became too bothersome and he could even set up his radio if he felt so inclined. How would these fools of Britishers know what he was doing?
As long as he didn’t hanker for creature comforts, it was close to perfect.
Gryffyth Pendragon looked across the table at Gloria. She smiled—well, it was almost a smile. Nervous grimace might be more accurate. “I’m a Shifter,” she said. “I don’t become a Dragon like you and your father.” Of course, she wouldn’t. She was English. “At full moon and sometimes in between, I turn into a fox.”
“Saved my bacon twice,” Andrew said, giving her a smile. And some smile it was. He almost devoured her with his eyes. Gryffyth understood the feeling. If only Mary were here too. “She raised the alarm back in September when the first one tried to sabotage my plant, and then last month when we ran into the second one.”
“You helped, Andrew. You had the stakes.”
“You ripped its throat and heart out.”
“You killed it, just like that?” Gryffyth asked. Seemed odd to be talking about ripping out throats and hearts, sitting at the same kitchen table where he used to do jigsaw puzzles with Alice’s younger brothers when it was too wet to play outside.
“It would have killed me. Tried to kill Andrew. You’ve been in battle, Gryffyth. So have we.”
Pretty to the point, that. Still seemed beyond reason that little Nurse Prewitt would take on a Vampire and dispatch it to wherever Vampires went. But then if she’d faced it as a vulpine Shifter, that made all the difference. “Yes. I’ve been in battle and seems I’ve come home to another one.”
“The war is everywhere, son,” Dad replied. “You never get away from it.”
Except he hadn’t faced Vampires in Norway. At least to his knowledge. “What about the rest of you?” he asked.
“I’m Pixie,” Mrs. Burrows said, going on and ignoring Gryffyth’s dropped jaw. “A Devon Pixie. So is Alice. Not a fact we broadcast any more than you do your Other nature, but there you are.”
“What about you?” Gryffyth asked Andrew.
“Me?” The man gave a shrug and a grin. “I’m a human hanger-on. Got caught up in all this through Gloria.”
“Me too,” Peter Watson added. “I got involved via Alice. Nothing special about me. I’m a conscientious objector, actually.”
Interesting. And he didn’t sound ashamed of it.
“No false modesty, now, Peter,” Gryffyth’s dad said. “We all know the truth, apart from Gryffyth here.” He looked sideways at his son. “There’s two lads cutting up and growing to be men up in London because Peter got them out when they were trapped in the cellar when the vicarage got bombed.”
Interesting, and obviously embarrassing to Peter. “I didn’t do it alone,” he said.
“No, lad, you didn’t. But you did it, and we all know why my part of it had to be kept under wraps.” Definitely a story here. He’d have a few questions when they got home, but