bent heads. His words stopped Garrett's heartbeat in her throat. "So is the Prince."
* * *
The burgeoning moon had long drifted into slumber, the sun was
well-risen and Sebastien had fled the morning hours before Abigail Irene, exhausted, managed to return to her townhouse. Her servant Mary snored in the chair by the door, and did not awaken at Garrett's key in the lock. Mary wore yesterday's apron and her wiry coils of hair had frizzed free of her bun. Garrett was reaching out a hand to shake Mary awake when she
realized that her dustmop terrier, Mike, was nowhere in evidence. A reflexive check of her wards told her no-one had entered the house uninvited,
but revealed a presence upstairs.
Garrett's carpetbag lay in the front hall closet beside her umbrella,
but her wand was in her boot, and from there quickly in her hand.
Without wakening Mary, she first checked the lower level and then crept
up the stairs to her bedroom door. She was about to turn the smooth,
hard doorknob stealthily when the scent of oranges and musk tickled her
memory.
She opened the door. Her bedroom drapes were drawn to muffle any sunlight, and Mike came bounding to her from the corner by the fire where she kept two leather-covered chairs. She scooped the patchwork dog up and held him tight to her breast, unmindful of the green silk of her gown. "Your Highness," Garrett said into the darkened room. "We've been tearing the city apart." Henry. What ever possessed you. . ..
"I imagined you would think your wampyr awaited you." The tall black-haired Prince came out of the shadows towards her, and she saw that he had slept—if at all—in snatches. The darkness under his eyes lay as hollow and black as that rimming her own.
"I recognized your cologne." She shut the door behind her and threw the bolt. "Henry—"
"I know." He closed the space between them. She turned away and laid her wand on the French-waxed half-round table by the wall, still holding Mike close. The wallpaper in her bedroom had a narrow silver stripe and subtle traceries of wisteria; she studied it as he spoke. "I vanished. New
Amsterdam is in an uproar. I had a reason—"
"Let me see your hands."
"Pardon?"
She set Mike down by her feet. He gamboled around her ankles for a moment, and then went to sniff the gleaming shoes of his long-absent friend the Prince. "Let me see your hands, Henry."
Wordlessly, he held them out to her, and she took them in her own—her left one clad in kidskin, the right one bare. She'd forgotten her glove after all. Henry had bourbon on his breath—not much, a trace, from the decanter on her washstand—and as she examined his manicured nails he leaned close as if to breathe the perfume from her hair. "How have you been, Abby Irene? Really?"
His hands were clean, undamaged. She let them fall. Mike whined by her ankle and Henry crouched to tousle his fur, like brown-and-cream milkweed fluff across those capable fingers. A breeze stirred the draperies and a shaft of morning sunlight glittered on the pirate gemstone in the Prince's ear. "I've been well," she said. She took two steps back and sat down on the edge of her bed, patchwork counterpane dimpling where her hands clenched. "Well enough. I—I like the earring."
"A royal gift from our Aztec friends. Phillip had a fit." Same eyes, same smile. The creases a little deeper.
"Phillip will put up with it unless he gets a son."
A low chuckle trickled out of his mouth. "He will at that. He's had no luck yet. Fortunately, I have three. The sorcerer-midwife tells Elaine it will be a daughter at last, this time."
"Your wife must be pleased." She made herself stop twisting the counterpane before it tore. "Why did you leave the ball?"
"I was told my life was in danger, and—" He stood, boots silent on
her thick, layered carpets as he measured and re-measured a path from bed to wall.
"And."
"—not mine alone, if I stayed. This was the safest place I could think of. I've not been in New Amsterdam before."
It twisted her strings to think he would come to her for protection. After everything. After she had come to America when his mother, the Iron Queen, died and he became heir, when their relationship became a potential embarrassment. She was a Crown Investigator, beholden—only—to the Crown. She had gone to King Phillip without telling Henry.
She had gone without saying goodbye. "Not your danger alone if you