And something shattered at the front of the house.
Miss de Court screamed, her garnet glinting on her finger as she covered her mouth. Sebastien reached for her as she fainted, but David was closer and caught her before she fell. She lolled in his arms, eyelashes fluttering. Sebastien was not distracted.
Abby Irene calmly slipped her ebony wand into her hand.
The doorway to the parlor filled with men. Uniformed patrolmen, and a detective inspector, at least two ranks behind the first and all of them armed. He took in the scene with a scathing glance and shook his head, his lips pursed in disgust above stubborn jowls.
"D.I. Pyle," Abby Irene said, leaving even Sebastien uncertain if her tone of disdain was feigned.
"I should have known I'd find you here," he said. "Bad enough you protected this creature in New Amsterdam, Lady Abigail. If we should find that you knew he was involved in these deaths, it will go ill for you."
One of the patrolmen leaned down to speak in the Detective Inspector's ear. He shook his head. "No," he said. "She's a peer; I won't arrest her without a warrant."
He stared straight at Abby Irene when he said it. Her nod was tiny,
but definite.
He could not more plainly have told her to get out of town if he'd sent a telegram. A decent man, Sebastien judged. But weak, as men were.
D.I. Pyle rubbed his hands together, gave Abby Irene a moment of polite silence, as if waiting for her to protest, and turned away from her.
"Don Sebastien de Ulloa," he said, "alias David Bull. You are under
arrest for the crime of vampirism, and for the murders of Grant Nelson, Roger Abernathy, and Alexander Dabree. Please come quietly to the test;
it's broad daylight and you've nowhere to run."
Sebastien heard Abby Irene's squeak of protest, Jack's indrawn breath. David, of course, made no sound. He simply stared at Sebastien, hard, half-smiling, and then set Miss de Courten down on the divan.
"Of course," David said, and Sebastien realized with a sickening sense of reversal that the inspector was looking at David, not at him. "A fight would endanger my court, wouldn't it? You'd just burn the house, in the end." He stepped around Miss de Courten's outflung skirts and came to the police inspector, wrists extended. More patrolmen filled the doorway, and behind Jack, Sebastien heard steps in the back hall.
"Wait—" Sebastien said. He stepped forward, two quick steps, and then froze where he stood.
Not willingly. He'd seen the flick of Abby Irene's wand. David, chin high, gave him a pitying glance as the manacles closed on his thin wrists. "John," David said, "it's over now. Let me go. If you fight them, they will hurt you."
Sebastien could neither speak nor move. The wand carried a spell that paralyzed the target in a kind of stasis, a forensic sorcerer's tool of arrest and self-defense. Sebastien had always presumed, with—he now understood—inadequate evidence—that it left the target insensible.
He wished it had been so.
"Was it Chouchou?" David asked, standing meekly while they draped his ankles, also, in chains.
"Roger Abernathy, you mean? I shan't reveal who gave us your name, sir."
But of course he already had. Chouchou, protecting his patron. The patron, protecting his son. The Colonial police, corrupt to the core with their secret mission—to protect the aristocracy at all costs.
That was what this was. Refusal to surrender to it, to the great machine of politics that protected the great at any cost to the small. The machine that had driven Abby Irene from her service. The machine Sebastien had thought he could ignore with impunity.
D.I. Pyle took hold of the chains between David's wrists. Sebastien thought that only he saw the quick, sideways glance at the window, the daylight glowing behind the curtain. They would put him to the test; the crime was vampirism, and the test was the sentence as well.
Wampyr only died by burning.
If they could be said to die at all.
"Are you ready, sir?"
David nodded, and now Pyle seemed to treat him with respect. The solemnity due a condemned man, perhaps.
A patrolman in his midnight blue took David's elbow. David looked like a child, his hair still stuck all askew from the coffin. Sebastien thought Phoebe might turn her face into Jack's shoulder as the long train of officers left the room, David walking stolidly in their midst, his chains rattling. In the front room, they paused and attached a long chain to his manacles, to drag him if