Her Majesty Would Like a Word

Mr. Greaves fires you in four sentences.

"You have embarrassed this house in front of its most important client. You have insulted a man who could buy this building out of his pocket change. Clear your desk. Do not come back."

"The portrait was fake," you say.

"I don't care if it was painted with ketchup, Ethan. Get out."

So you get out, with a cardboard box holding a loupe, a dying succulent and a mug that says WORLD'S OKAYEST APPRAISER, which Meera bought you as a joke and which now feels like a prophecy.

It's nearly two in the morning. The rain hasn't let up. Halden at this hour is wet stone and sodium lights and the foghorn groaning out in the harbor like something in pain. Your apartment is twenty minutes on foot. You could call a cab. You don't, because you're too angry to sit still.

You keep seeing the mirror. Empty chairs. Candles burning in nothing.

There's an explanation. Old glass. Bad angle. Adrenaline. You're an appraiser; you know how easily the eye lies when it wants something.

You cut down Tanner's Lane because it saves five minutes.

That's your mistake.

There are two of them, and they're waiting.

They peel off the wall at the far end of the alley, big shapes in dark jackets. Mortal, you think, and then wonder why that word came to you. One has a cigarette. The other has his hands loose at his sides in a way that tells you he's done this before.

"Lord Mordaunt sends his regards," says the cigarette.

You back up. Behind you, a third man steps out of a doorway and blocks the street.

"Tell Lord Mordaunt," you say, and your voice comes out steadier than you feel, "that he should get a better supplier."

"Funny." The cigarette flicks into a puddle and hisses out. "He said you were funny. He said to fix that."

You drop the box. The mug shatters. You get your keys between your fingers like your father taught you, which is about the only legal thing he ever taught you, and you think very clearly: this is going to hurt.

"Stop."

One word. Quiet. From somewhere above.

All three men stop.

Not stop like they've decided to. Stop like puppets with the strings pulled taut. The one nearest you has his hand halfway raised and it stays there, trembling, frozen in the rain.

She's standing on the fire escape over your head.

Grey dress. Black rose. Not a drop of rain on her, though it's coming down in sheets. She steps off the iron railing and drops twelve feet into the alley and lands without a sound, like the ground is an inconvenience she has agreed to tolerate.

"Go home," she tells the men. "Forget this street. Forget this face. Tell Lord Mordaunt the Queen sends her regards."

They turn and walk away. Calmly. In step. Like they've just remembered somewhere they need to be.

You realize your mouth is open. You close it.

She looks at the broken mug in the puddle, reads WORLD'S OKAYEST APPRAISER, and her lips twitch.

Up close, under the alley's one bad light, she's even worse. Worse meaning better. Worse meaning you forget for a full second that three men just tried to break your bones.

"I disagree," she says. "There's a car at the end of the lane. Her Majesty would like a word."

"You're Her Majesty."

"I am."

"Of what?"

She considers you. Rain runs down your face. None of it touches her.

"Get in the car, Ethan, and I'll tell you."

The car is long and black and smells of leather and something like cold roses. The driver is enormous and silent and doesn't look at you once. She sits across from you with her hands folded in her lap.

"You saw the mirror," she says.

It isn't a question. You nod anyway.

"Then I'll skip the part where you tell me I'm being dramatic." She watches the city slide past the tinted glass. "My name is Isolde Vane. I have been Queen of the court in Halden since 1891. The people in that room tonight were my court. We are what you think we are, and we are not what the films think we are, and I'd prefer you didn't make me list the differences tonight. I'm tired."

"Vampires," you say. The word sounds ridiculous in the leather quiet of the car.

"Yes."

"You drink blood."

"Donated. Bottled. Paid for. I am two hundred and thirty years old and I have excellent manners." She glances at you. "Mostly."

You should be screaming. You should be trying the door handle. Instead you hear yourself ask, "Why didn't you have a reflection?"

"Silver backing in old mirrors. It refuses us. Modern mirrors are worse." A faint, dry smile. "I haven't seen my own face since the Directory fell in Paris. I'm told I've held up."

The car climbs. Cinder Hill rises out of the fog, all old money and iron gates, and at the very top, behind a wall of black stone, a house like something out of a nightmare a rich person would have. Towers. Spires. A bell tower with no bell. Every window lit.

"Vesper House," Isolde says. "My home. Someone has been robbing it."

"Robbing it?"

"Replacing things. Paintings. Letters. Jewels. One at a time, over many years, with copies good enough to fool my staff and my court." The grey eyes turn back to you. "Not good enough to fool you. You saw through Lysander's portrait in a candlelit room from thirty feet away."

"That portrait was of you."

"It was of me in 1795. The original hung in my bedroom for two centuries. I noticed it was gone eleven days ago." Her voice doesn't change but something in the car gets colder. "Someone took a thing I loved from the room where I sleep, sold it to Lysander Mordaunt, and then let him try to sell it back to me. That is not theft. That is a message."

"So you want me to..."

"Find every fake in my house. Tell me which ones. Help me find who's doing it." She tilts her head. "I'll pay you ten times what that little man at the auction house did."

"He fired me twenty minutes ago."

"Then I'll pay you ten times nothing, plus a salary." The car stops in a courtyard of wet black cobbles. "And I'll keep Lysander from killing you, which he will try to do again. He's very proud and not very clever. That's a dangerous combination."

The driver opens your door. Rain. Torches. A great carved doorway with a six-petaled black rose over the arch.

"Come inside," Isolde says. "I want you to meet them."

Them is the court.

They're waiting in a ballroom the size of a cathedral, under chandeliers that hold real flame. Forty from the auction. Eighty more. Silk and velvet and pale beautiful faces, all of them turning as Isolde walks in with you a step behind her, rain-soaked, clutching a loupe in one hand because it's the only thing you managed to save from the puddle.

Lysander Mordaunt is there, by a pillar. His face goes dark when he sees you.

A gorgeous woman in red beside him stops smiling.

Isolde climbs three marble steps to a chair that is very obviously a throne. She doesn't sit. She turns, and the whole ballroom goes still.

"This is Ethan," she says. "Who saw tonight what none of you did."

A murmur. Cold. Hostile.

Isolde lets it die. Then she says, clearly, so it reaches every corner of that enormous room:

"As of this hour, Ethan is my Favorite."

The woman in red drops her glass.

It shatters on the marble, and nobody moves to clean it up, because every immortal in the room is staring at you like you've just stolen something from each of them personally.