back his head and laughed.
Then a few people stepped aside, and I saw the mausoleum behind him. The door was open, and two vampires were visible inside. They were wearing gray uniforms.
“Oh shit,” I said out loud.
“Someone took video of Promenade,” Beau said, sounding both angry and confused. “I don’t understand. A vampire would never do this, and we would have smelled a human or witch in our midst.”
“The camera’s not shaking,” Simon pointed out. “Or moving at all. Look.”
We all glanced back at the screen, and of course he was right. “What does that mean?” Beau asked.
“It was probably filmed automatically,” Simon replied. “Someone set up a camera to record at a certain time, or activated it remotely. They probably weren’t even at the party.”
“Odessa,” I said. It fit her . . . style, for lack of a better word. She’d used modern technology to get around the wards. She could have left the camera there anytime.
Onscreen, the two vampires in the mausoleum laughed at something one had said, and then he pulled out a small tin and removed a cigarette and a small box of matches. “Vampires can smoke?” Tobias asked with surprise.
“Of course we can,” Milburn said. “We just rarely bother. The nicotine doesn’t affect us, and it’s expensive and requires extra energy to breathe.”
Onscreen, one man lit a match and tossed it down onto the marble floor of the mausoleum. A few seconds later he tapped ashes off the cigarette with the same carelessness. I winced.
“I know that man,” Milburn said, pointing at one of the vampires smoking in the mausoleum. I couldn’t make out his features, but Milburn’s eyesight was better than mine. “That’s Richard May. He’s in his own mausoleum.”
“The public won’t know that,” Beau said grimly. “This looks wildly disrespectful.”
On the screen, Beau himself appeared, strolling along in his gray suit, with another vampire next to him, a woman in a hoop skirt. Her hand was tucked into his elbow. Beau looked cocky and sure of himself, the grand marshal of this particular parade. Warton appeared next to him, whispering a question, which Beau answered. It was obvious from their body language, and the way everyone around them deferred to Beau, that he was in charge.
The video ended with white letters on a black screen: “Party by Abner Beaumont. Major donor to” and a list of charitable organizations. I recognized the History Center and Oakland, but there were a dozen more.
“That’s not good,” Simon murmured.
“No, it is not,” Beau replied. He immediately restarted the video, letting us see the video’s title: “White Supremacists Violate Graves for the Glory of the Confederacy.” It had been posted anonymously.
Not good.
We watched the entire thing through again, all of us silent this time.
“There’s nothing on there that reveals the Old World,” Lily offered when it was over. “So that’s something.”
Warton had probably used vampire speed to move to Beau’s side, but Lily was right—you couldn’t really tell from the footage. Even Odessa wasn’t stupid enough to reveal the existence of magic online. Then she’d have all vampires gunning for her, instead of just Beau.
“How bad is this?” I asked Beau.
“It’s a PR disaster,” Beau said. “We depend on anonymity to stay in the city, given that we do not age. This shines a light. And the organizations that I patronize will not be pleased—”
As if on cue, his cell phone rang, and so did Milburn’s. The two of them exchanged a troubled look. “Perhaps we’d better take these in the office,” Beau said to his friend.
There wasn’t much I could do to help Beau put out fires, so I looked at Simon and Lily. “Let’s go out on the back porch,” I suggested. “I can fill you in, and there are couches.”
“I love couches,” Lily said seriously.
I held up my hand. “Will you help me with this first?”
Lily took out my IV, and then I made her and Simon put on the last two obsidian necklaces before leading everyone out to the porch. It was cooler outside, but not cold, and we were all dressed for it—except for Tobias, but it took a lot for werewolves to feel cold.
Once he saw that I was settled and safe, Tobias asked if he could patrol the property again. He said it was important to keep watch, but I also thought he didn’t want to sit and listen to me tell the same story again. Werewolves need to move. I waved him off, and then it was just me and