Sweep of the Blade (Innkeeper Chronicles #4) - Ilona Andrews Page 0,79

instant!”

Arland ignored her. They were almost to the bend in the hallway.

Suddenly Arland braked, and then the lees flooded all available space, their veils swirling, their jewelry shining, tails and ears twitching. Maud saw Nuan Cee in the center of the lees mob and reached out to him. “Helen…”

Nuan Cee took her hands into his furry paw-hands. “I know.”

The rest of the lees rushed past them, washing over them like a wave, and rolled down the hallway, parting around Ilemina, Otubar, and Soren.

“I have nothing to trade,” she said.

Nuan Cee’s turquoise eyes shone. He grinned, displaying sharp, even teeth. “I am sure we can come to an arrangement.”

“Get out of my medward, vermin!” the medic screamed.

“Do not worry yourself.” Nuan Cee patted Maud’s hands as a mob of lees carried the medic out of his medward. “All will be well now.”

15

Maud slumped in an oversized chair in Lord Soren’s study. She felt wrung out like a piece of wet laundry about to go in the dryer. The lees had treated Helen for the better part of an hour, and when Nuan Cee finally emerged from the medward, Maud felt ready to tear her hair out. He had announced that the danger had passed, Helen would be up in a few hours, and there was no need to worry.

Maud had been allowed to see her daughter and to kiss Helen’s warm forehead, and then the enraged vampire medic kicked everyone out. She wanted to be back in the medward, sitting by the bed, watching for minute signs of improvement, but it would accomplish nothing and Ilemina had requested her presence in her brother’s study.

The Preceptor of House Krahr sat in a chair by Lord Soren’s desk, looking grim. Otubar sat on his wife’s right, Arland sat on Maud’s left. He had put on his armor and his booster kept him awake, but she could tell by the slightly feverish look in his eyes that a crash was coming. Karat took a spot at the opposite end of the room. Soren presided over it all, sitting behind his huge desk as if it were a castle wall and he was watching a horde of invaders gather for a siege. Except this time the invaders looked back at them not from a field before the castle but from a massive screen, where the recording of the events on the mesa played out.

Maud had picked the farthest chair from the screen, maybe twenty feet away. It felt like miles. The room contained the Krahr, not the huge House, but the small nuclear family who ran it. She didn’t really belong here.

“So we have no useable footage,” Arland said.

Karat frowned. Her fingers danced across the tablet in her hand. The recording zoomed in past the game of krim, showing distant figures at the edge of the mesa. The image sped up and the figures jerked around in a slightly comical dance as knights mulled about.

“We know members of both Kozor and Serak were at the edge of the game grounds and had opportunity to fire the shot at Helen,” Karat said. “We know none of them had a gun on them, so they had to have assembled it on location. See how they keep crowding each other? They could’ve assembled a small space craft and we would’ve been none the wiser.”

“We should upgrade the surveillance,” Otubar said.

Soren grimaced. “Do you want to assign each of them a personal drone?”

“If that’s what it takes,” Otubar said.

“We would be breaking every rule of hospitality,” Soren said. “They would accuse us of cowardice and paranoia and claim we made the wedding impossible. We already failed to protect a child in our care and we were almost too late to prevent a confrontation between our other guests and these…ushivim.”

Karat jerked. “Father!”

Maud blinked. Of all the words she had expected the Knight Sergeant to use, the expletive meaning the bloody diarrhea of diseased vermin was the last on the list.

The corners of Otubar’s mouth rose a couple of millimeters. It was the closest she had ever seen the Lord Consort come to a smile.

“It was planned and premeditated,” Karat said. “As I pointed out, they had to have brought the weapon in pieces, assembled it on the spot, shot her, and disassembled it after. We scoured that entire area, on top of the mesa and down by the beach. If they had dropped any part of it, our scans would have picked it up. Each of them must have carried