XXV

I scrambled for my phone, kicking the door shut with my heel. I felt sick, my body was racked with tremors, so I gripped the hall table till they passed, and then I rang Pam.
She picked up on the second ring. "I'm on my way!" she cried and hung up. I wondered briefly how she knew, then remembered that a maker could summon his offspring telepathically – presumably Eric had called her. That was a good sign: he was still alive.

I scrolled through my phone, punched a few buttons and then shoved the door of Eric's office open. I sat down at his desk, no longer caring about the niceties of his privacy, yanking drawers open and rifling through his papers. My phone rang, once, twice, three times. I listened to the steady ring, praying for someone to pick up.
"Hello?" said my grandmother.
"I need to talk to Grandda," I said. "Please, Gran, please get him now!"
"It's happened, hasn't it?" she said in an odd voice.
"Yes, it has," I said, even though I wasn't entirely sure what it was.
I heard Pamela at the door, scrabbling to get her key in the lock.
"In here!" I called.
"Where is he?" she shrieked. "What has happened?"
I put my hand up to silence her as my grandfather came on the line.
"Well?" was his greeting.
"Tell me what you know about Eric Northman," I demanded. "Tell me whatever rumours you heard."
"What's happened?"
"A bunch of vampires from Texas crossed the border and arrested him on behalf of their king. They said he'd been conspiring to unseat the Louisiana Queen in their territory. They've accused him of treason and taken him away with them, presumably to Dallas."
Pam wailed, an almost animalistic cry that made the hair on my neck stand on end.

"To Austin," my grandfather corrected. "The king's seat is in Austin."
Then he was silent. Pam shot behind me, trying to press her ear to the phone. I pushed her back and pressed the button to put Grandda on speakerphone. But he continued to say nothing.
"Grandda?" I prompted. "What did you hear?"
He sighed. "I have a friend in New York, an old vampire friend called Mr Sutton. He's a lawyer, has been for centuries. If anyone needs any advice about anything, he's the one to give it. He contacted me to tell me that he'd been paid a visit by a young lady with a Southern accent, who wanted to know what the legal implications would be if a Queen was dethroned by one of her subjects."
"Did she give any names?"
"Not that Mr Sutton cared to mention – client confidentiality and all of that."
"What made you think that vampire was Eric, if no names were mentioned?" I said.
My grandfather paused again. "Because up until now the only way a vampire could dethrone his liege lord was to kill him, and even then there was no guarantee that the other subjects would accept him as their leader. Under the new charter, American vampires will be able to depose their leaders if they can prove sworn fealty from the majority of the other sheriffs in their state and get the backing of three other monarchs. According to the little Southern belle, this rogue vampire has New York, California and the Islands."
The Islands. Eric had the support of the King of the Islands. I looked at Pam, but she wouldn't meet my eye.
"So apparently this vampire had his progeny check if he could use the summit to make a move on his Queen and to what extent this takeover would be legal. And if Moya's charter is passed, even in the butchered version favoured by Queen Catherine, he most certainly will be able to make a move to dethrone her."
So the charter – or whatever was left of the original proposals brought to the summit by our Empress and her legal team – would be passed and immediately tested with a hostile takeover.
Plucky.
"But, still," I insisted, "why did you assume it was Northman?"
My grandfather's voice grew cold, "Because, Magdalena, this vampire's trump card, the ace up his sleeve, was not just the fact that he'd been allying himself with American vampires left, right and centre, but that he'd managed to snare himself a nice little consort, one with connections to the right people in the right places and the kind of name that every vampire of a certain age knows."
My throat went dry.
"Me?" I croaked.
"You," he confirmed. "You were to be Queen Magdalena of Louisiana."

I excused myself, warning my grandfather not to hang up, and pressed the mute button on the phone.
"Did you know about this?" I demanded of Pam.
"I … I … he…," she said and tears trickled down her face. "I told him not to, but he said he was being careful. He said no one knew, no one could prove anything. For all intents and purposes, he was simply presenting his new consort to his people, to his friends."
"Like the King of the Islands?" I sneered. "You think no one noticed one of the world's most powerful vampires sitting on stage in your grotty little bar, with his mother? And one of Queen Catherine's entourage, to boot?"
"They've been some of Eric's strongest supporters and they count among his oldest friends," Pamela said, a tad too slick for my liking.
"I'd believe you," I muttered, "but millions wouldn't."

I pressed the mute button again.
"Are you there?" I said.
"What are you going to do now, Maggie?" my grandfather said. "Will you come home now and just leave that bunch of bloodsuckers to sort out their own mess?"
"No," I said. Then, more resolutely, "No, I won't."
"Maggie – "
"No," I snapped. "I'm going to get him back."
"You are not," my grandfather roared, causing Pamela to jump. "I forbid you! I forbid you to get involved in this! By the old rule of law, Northman has committed treason, he'll meet the True Death and if you know what's good for you, you get out of there before someone decides it would be best if your car drove off a bridge or into oncoming traffic."
"I'm going to get him," I hissed. "And I'm going to do it whether I get your support or not. But we both know my chances of getting back to Dublin alive are a lot greater if you bloody well help me."
"Madgalena – " my grandfather said in a threatening tone.
"This is happening," I said. "The only way you can stop is to get on a plane and fly over here. Feel free to do it, Grandda, but in the twelve hours it'll take you to get here, I'll already be in the middle of something very bad. What's it going to be?"
My grandfather said some very rude words and was immediately scolded by my grandmother, obviously hovering in the background.
"Fine," he said, resigned. "Fine. Listen carefully then, because what I'm about to tell you, I'll only tell you once."
So I listened.

I hung up on my grandfather and twirled around in Eric's big chair to face Pamela, who was pacing up and down in front of his desk, her face in her hands. It was funny: when my husband left me, and left me in an entirely mundane way, his wheelie suitcase rattling over the cobble-locked driveway on the way to the waiting taxi, I fell to pieces. I wailed for days; I fell onto my sofa and slept there for two nights because I didn't have the energy, physical or mental, to crawl up the stairs. Now I had just witnessed a kind of violence I was entirely unfamiliar with: I'd seen the man I'd woken up beside that evening bundled off in a van, bleeding from deep wounds around his neck and arms, and yet I wasn't sobbing or howling. Instead, I was filled with a kind of ice-cold intent, a sense of focus, an iron purpose. I didn't want to cry, I wanted to get on the next plane to wherever the King of Texas resided and stick a wooden stake through his eye.

I continued to rifle through Eric's desk while Pam sobbed.
"What are you doing?" she said as I rattled a locked drawer.
"I need his address book, his diary," I said. "I need numbers of people, of other vampires who've pledged him their support. I know he has a mobile phone, but he strikes me as the type of guy who would write stuff down. Are you any good at picking locks?"
Pamela stared at me. Her mascara had run, creating black rings around her eyes.
"Yes, I am," she answered surprisingly. "I was a whore in my human life; every good whore can pick a lock."
Who was I to argue? She dropped to her knees in front of the drawer and pulled a bobby pin out of her elaborate hair-do. She twisted it back and forth, then inserted it into the lock. We both waited with baited breath as she wriggled the pin around. Nothing happened. She wriggled a little more, frowning in concentration.
"There!" she said triumphantly, pulling the drawer open.

It was full of money. Wads of it, tightly wound into rolls and kept in place with rubber bands. I had no idea how much was in it: I picked up one and looked at it more carefully. There were hundred dollar bills – a hundred of them, at a conservative guess. Which was … I did the mental math: $10,000. And the drawer was jammed full of them.
"Holy shit," I said, dumping them on the desk. "Holy cow. Holy macaroni."
Pamela was unimpressed by the money. "He has an address book, an old book. It's leather bound. He's had it for decades, for as long as I've known him."
The drawer was empty, except for a sheaf of handwritten documents in Latin and another language I couldn't read. They looked very old, like contracts.
I felt around inside, trying to find a false compartment. I knew how the Northman mind worked – and I was right. My fingers found a knot in the wood and when I pushed it, the bottom of the drawer wobbled ever so slightly. I pulled the drawer out as far as I could and removed the wood on the bottom. Underneath it was the leather-bound book and a collection of gold rings. I touched one with my fingertip, saw a name engraved on the inside: Amélie. They were wedding rings. I counted them - fourteen. Fourteen wedding rings, in various shades of gold but all the same size, big enough to fit a very large vampire finger. I dropped the false bottom back into place and shoved it closed before Pamela could see what I'd found.

"I've got it," I said, holding it up. She nodded and I started flicking through the pages. The first half of the book was written in ink, the latter half was written in ballpoint pen: pages of names, short notes, telephone numbers and – in the last few pages – email addresses. I recognized Eric's writing, a scrawling mix of lowercase and uppercase letters, showing evidence of several centuries' worth of handwriting styles.

"I'm going to start by phoning Pierre Sauvant, the King of the Islands," I said. "While I'm doing that, I want you to find out where the King of Texas lives or resides or whatever the fuck that undead bastard does, and I want you to figure out a way to get us there as soon as possible. If we have to travel by day, then you'd better make sure your coffin is light-tight. Is that clear? Then you start phoning every other sheriff that Eric has been in contact with, anyone he mentioned that swore him fealty, okay? Tell them what has happened and tell them they'd better be prepared to show their colours or I, Maggie Kennick, will personally hunt them down and make a necklace of their fangs."
Pam nodded. "Very well," she said and she managed a wobbly smile. She seemed relieved that I was taking charge and I barely stopped to think how odd it was that our roles had been reversed. Ever since I'd met her, Pam had taken particular delight in bossing me around.

"One more thing," I said, "were you the one who went to see the vampire lawyer, Sutton, in New York?"
Pam shook her head. "It wasn't me," she said. "It must have been – "
She was interrupted by a frenzied banging on the door, a cacophony of doorbell-ringing.
"It must have been her," she said, nodding at the hall. "His other progeny. The southern belle."

I opened the front door but I didn't even get a chance to see who it was, so fast did the vampire move. She whirled by me, a mass of black hair and red nails.
"Where is he?" she hissed, fangs extended. "Where is my maker? He's calling me, I can feel it."
"Magdalena, Willa," Pam said, "Willa, Magdalena."
We eyed each other.
"Who are you?" she demanded.
"Who are you?" I replied.
"Willa is Eric's progeny," Pam said. "Willa, this is Eric's … wife. Your stepmom, in a manner of speaking."
I knew she took great pleasure in saying that, even in her state of distress, it made her mouth twist up into an impish smile. I rolled my eyes, pushing past my vampire stepchildren, back into Eric's office where I flipped his book open, trying to read his dreadful handwriting to see who I could phone next. From the hall I heard the sound of Pam filling Willa in on what had happened, heard her start to cry when Pam said he'd been arrested for treason. Meantime, I found Pierre Sauvant's number and dialed it, not knowing whether I was calling his mobile number or his private number at his residence in the Caribbean. I listened to the line click-clicking as it connected, then put the rolls of cash back into the desk drawer we'd taken them from. Then I removed a couple and stuck them in my pockets. Where we were going, a wad of cash was sure to come in useful.

I listened as the phone started to ring; I tried to gather my thoughts to figure out what I was going to say. Ice-cold intent. Sense of focus. Iron purpose. I was Magdalena Maria Kennick, I was the progeny of a long line of vampire killers, and no one, King or not, was going to take my Northman.