the parrot’s vibrant orange chest and leaned back, putting his feet up on the table. Of course, he wore boots. “I am just interested, Vincent. As are you. Reiko comes back to town after years and years of avoiding the rest of us, and that notoriously private little girl turns a human? Who then turns into a Sanguinate? Who then hires someone like that girl to be his Ailward? Am I the only one who finds all of this rather suspect?”
Annabelle sat back in her seat, her dark eyes on his and I let my hand drop slowly, degree by painful degree. “What are you getting at, you crazy man?”
The pirate’s eyes widened, comically so. “What if this were, quite simply, a coup?”
This created a flurry of activity in the room, and not one Vincent liked, judging from the way he cursed under his breath.
Someone sitting at the far end of the table held up a hand for attention. He got it, although it took some time. I thought it strange, almost polite his method of wanting the voice and eyes of those who sat at the table. “Fenrir, you are basing everything simply on speculation. Are you merely being dramatic?”
The pirate grinned. “You know me all too well.” Then, the smile faded away, replaced by an empty expression I trusted even less. “But that doesn’t change the fact there is something going on that hasn’t happened in a very long time. When was the last time we had a Sanguinate before us?”
Glasses glinted in the flickering candlelight as he placed folded hands in front of him on the table. I blinked. When was the last time I saw glasses on a vampire? “Almost a hundred years ago. But he was far gone. There was nothing we could do, nothing left in him to reason with. A hundred years ago, we had a monster on our hands. And that is why we have hunted them, haven’t we? For they were nothing but ravaging beasts. We, who have always prided ourselves on our dignity,” at this Annabelle snorted and he ignored, “had a monster that could not be quelled. So we hunted it down. And we killed it. That is the way a Sanguinate has always been. But look at the man standing there. Does he look like a slavering monster?”
All eyes turned to Jason who merely returned it with a tilt of his lips. He held out his arms to his sides and turned a slow circle. “The last time I drooled, I think I was two.”
No one laughed and the one with the glasses stood up. Dressed in a simple white dress shirt and dark pants, he looked the most normal out of everyone there, although his hair, straight and shoulder-length was beautiful as each strand seemed to glimmer like spun gold. “This man is of no threat to us.”
Vincent cleared his throat. “As much as I would like to agree with you, I’m afraid I cannot. He turned Vivienne’s throat into dog food. What he did to her throat...had Ryder and his Ailward not stopped him in time, he would have consumed her whole, Noir.”
Noir.
I felt like someone had slapped me across the face.
Next to me, I felt Jason stiffen.
“Don’t do it,” he whispered. “You’d never make it.”
And indeed, the thought had occurred to me. Conceivably, I could jump upon the table, dash down the long length, and bury my sword into his heart in less than five seconds.
Were he human, perhaps I could have killed him.
But he was not.
Still, I had little doubt this man was the one the Fellowship sought to eliminate. It seemed true, the fact that he seemed more civilized, perhaps even weaker than the other three Lords of the City, but watching him argue with Annabelle for the life of my Master, I realized only a fool could possibly mistake civility for weakness.
Someone sitting at the far end of the table stood up and it was not like how Noir had gained his turn at the conference. This one merely stood up and it was as though all sound had been sucked from the room.
You could have heard flowers bloom in the silence that issued from his acknowledged presence.
And when he spoke, it was with a low twang, an accent that put him south of Illinois, very much south. Perhaps Texas or Louisiana? I admit to a certain lack of knowledge in that area of the world.
“And while we sit here arguing for