is me trying to convince people I’m not a lunatic.”
“The problem is that you explain it quite poorly,” Bella chimed with a teasing smile at her older companion. “And you are a lunatic, so there’s no helping that.” The young blonde turned to her, a kind and sympathetic look in her blue eyes. “The King of the Vampires commands the creatures you have felt. He has begun a siege on this city. He works to cut the transportation lines in and out. Soon, he’ll do more than curse the moon and take a few lives to feed his hordes every night. He will unleash terror on this city. Thousands will die if we do not stop him from raising a new empire of the dead.”
“Well, doesn’t he sound charming.” She smirked into her teacup.
Bella chuckled. “He is. That is another issue. He commands other vampires as well. He is an ancient, powerful thing. We are here to stop him.”
“If he is ancient, why do you think you can stop him where all others have failed?”
“What makes you think others have failed?” Alfonzo had an oddly pleased and knowing smile on his face.
“The way you speak tells me that he has done this before—that he has taken over cities before, or tried to. Since he still walks the Earth, it tells me that no one has been successful.” She paused and scrutinized Alfonzo. He was still looking at her with the expression of a man who knew he had a straight flush and was betting as if he had a pair. “Or is that not true?”
“He cannot die. He cannot be destroyed, and believe me, hunters have tried. He has been beheaded, burned, hanged, dismembered, and buried in a silver coffin flooded with holy water. Yet he always returns.”
“You fight the inevitable, then.” She spun the teacup idly between her fingers, watching the little hand-painted flowers on the porcelain as they rotated in and out of her view. “You battle against a creature you cannot truly defeat. You ask for my assistance in a game that cannot be won.”
“We can’t kill him, but we can stop him. And that is what we seek to do. To spare this city and to spare the lives he would see ended.”
She squeezed the muscles at the back of her neck, trying to ease the tension that was working to give her a headache. She was prone to them. Maxine joked that if she sneezed too hard, she’d have a migraine for days. She blamed it partially on her gift and partially on bad luck.
When some of the knot eased, she put her gloved hand back on the table. Her gaze drifted to the ruby brooch that sat in its center. It burned in her perception like the ember of a flame. It reeked of tragedy and destruction. She had no desire to hold the burning coal and learn precisely how it might harm her. But, sadly, she assumed that was what they wished her to do. “And how am I to help you destroy this ‘Dracula’?”
“He is biding his time, and we need to find a way to draw him to the surface,” Bella interjected. She struck Maxine as an intelligent woman. And perhaps a little dangerous in her own right. Her dress was a pale green, and it offset her blue eyes, although Maxine suspected that was likely by accident. There was little of the woman that belied any sense of “culture” or “fashion.” Maxine could tell by her posture that Bella didn’t wear a corset. She could see pockets and slits hidden in the folds of the skirt, and she wondered what Bella carried that she might need to produce in short enough order that she needed to conceal them in her skirts. She could tell Alfonzo and Eddie were both armed. The former with a knife in his belt, the latter with two guns in leather holsters. It did not trouble her, but it made her wonder what the woman carried that made her similarly formidable.
As someone who also did not conform to the ideas of what a woman was meant to be in the eye of society in 1897, Maxine instantly felt a fondness toward Bella. It was a camaraderie that came with two souls fighting the same battle, if clearly in very different ways. “You wish for me to help you find him. And how can my gifts do such a thing? I am not a true psychic, I