Then, in some farcical mockery of death, out came Conall’s big pink tongue, and like an excessively friendly dog, he began licking over all the flesh he had just butchered. And he kept on licking, covering Sidheag’s face and her partly open mouth, spreading lupine saliva about Lady Kingair’s gaping wounds.
I am never going to be able to perform my wifely duty with that man ever again, thought Alexia, her eyes wide and fixed on the repulsive sight. Then, entirely unexpectedly and without even knowing it was about to happen, she actually fainted. A real honest-to-goodness faint, right there, face forward into her half-eaten haggis.
Lady Maccon blinked awake to her husband’s worried, looming face. “Conall,” she said, “please do not take this the wrong way. But that may have been the most disgusting thing I have ever seen in my life.”
“Have you ever attended the birthing of a human child?”
“No, of course not. Don’t be vulgar.”
“Well, perhaps you had best wait to pass judgment, then.”
“Well?” Alexia levered herself up slightly and glanced about. She appeared to have been carried into one of the drawing rooms and put to rest upon a brocade settee of considerable age.
“Well what?”
“Did it work? Did the metamorphosis work? Is she going to survive?”
Lord Maccon sat back slightly on his haunches. “A remarkable thing, a full Alpha female. Rare even in our oral histories. Boudica was an Alpha, did you know?”
“Conall!”
The head of a wolf came into Alexia’s line of vision. It was not one she was personally familiar with: a craggy, rangy creature, graying about the muzzle but muscled and fit despite evident signs of age. Lady Maccon struggled to prop herself farther up onto the pillows.
The wolf’s neck was covered in blood, the fur matted with a dark red crust, but otherwise it showed no injury. As though the blood were not her own. Which, technically, as she had now become supernatural, it might not be anymore.
Sidheag Maccon lolled a tongue out at Alexia. Alexia wondered how the wolf would respond to a scratch about the ears and decided, given the dignity of the woman when mortal, not to risk such an approach.
She looked at her husband. At least he seemed to have changed his shirt and washed his face during her mental absence. “I take it it worked?”
He grinned hugely. “My first successful change in years, and a female Alpha at that. The howlers will cry it to the winds.”
“Somebody’s proud of himself.”
“Except that I should have remembered how distressing metamorphosis is to outsiders. I am sorry, my dear. I didna mean to upset you.”
“Oh pish tosh, it wasn’t that! I’m hardly one to be overcome by a bit of blood. It was simply a little dizzy spell.”
Lord Maccon shifted forward against her and ran a large hand down the side of her face. “Alexia, you have been entirely comatose for well over an hour. I had to send for smelling salts.”
Madame Lefoux came around the side of the couch and crouched down next to Alexia as well. “You had us very worried, my lady.”
“So what happened?”
“You fainted,” accused Lord Maccon, as though she had committed some egregious crime against him personally.
“No, with the metamorphosis. What did I miss?”
“Well,” said Madame Lefoux, “it was all very exciting. There was this crash of thunder and a bright blue light and then—”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” snapped Lord Maccon. “You sound like a novel.”
Madame Lefoux sighed. “Very well, Sidheag started to convulse and then collapsed to the floor, dead. Everyone stood around staring at her body, until all of a sudden, she began spontaneously changing into a wolf. She screamed a lot—I understand the first change is the worst. Then we realized you had collapsed. Lord Maccon threw a conniption fit, and we ended up here.”
Lady Maccon turned accusing eyes to her husband. “You didn’t, and on your granddaughter’s metamorphosis day!”
“You fainted!” he said again, disgruntled.
“Stuff and nonsense,” replied his wife sharply. “I never faint.” A bit of her old color was returning. Really, who would have suspected she could turn quite that ashen?
“There was that one incident, in the library, when you killed the vampire.”
“I was shamming and you knew it.”
“How about that time we visited the museum after hours and I trapped you in a corner behind the Elgin Marbles?”
Lady Maccon rolled her eyes. “That was an entirely different kind of passing out.”
Conall crowed. “My point exactly! Just now, you actually, positively, did faint. You never do that kind of thing; you’re not that kind of female. What’s wrong with you? Are you ill? I forbid you to be ill, wife.”
“Oh, really. Stop fussing. There is absolutely nothing wrong with me. I’m just a tad off-kilter, have been since the dirigible ride.” Alexia pushed herself more upright, trying to smooth her skirts and ignore her husband’s still-stroking hand.
“Someone could have poisoned you again.”
Alexia shook her head decisively. “As it wasn’t Angelique who tried before, and it wasn’t Madame Lefoux who stole my journal, and both occurred on board the dirigible, I believe the perpetrator never followed us to Kingair. Call it a preternatural hunch. No, I’m not being poisoned, husband. I’m just a little bit weak, that’s all.”
Madame Lefoux snorted, looking back and forth between the two of them as though they were both batty. She said, “She is just a little bit pregnant is what she is.”
“What!” Lord Maccon’s exclamation was echoed by Alexia. Lady Maccon stopped smoothing out her skirts, and Lord Maccon stopped smoothing out his wife’s face.
The French inventor looked at them, genuinely amazed. “You did not know? Neither of you knew?”
Lord Maccon recoiled away from his wife, violently, jerking to stand upright, arms stiff by his sides.
Alexia glared at Madame Lefoux. “Don’t talk piffle, madame. I cannot possibly be pregnant. That is not scientifically feasible.”
Madame Lefoux dimpled. “I was with Angelique during her confinement. You show every possible sign of a delicate condition—nausea, weakness, increased girth.”
“What!” Lady Maccon was genuinely shocked. True, she had been slightly sick to her stomach and unreasonably off some foods, but was it really possible? She supposed she might be in an indelicate condition. The scientists could be wrong, after all; there didn’t exist very many soulless females, and none of them were married to werewolves.
She turned a suddenly grinning face to her husband. “You know what this means? I am not a bad dirigible floater! It was being pregnant that made me ill on board. Fantastic.”
But her husband was not reacting in quite the manner anticipated. He was clearly angry, and not the sort of angry that made him bluster about, or shout, or change form, or any of those normal Lord Macconish kinds of things. He was quietly, white-faced, shivering angry. And it was terribly, terribly frightening.
“How?” he barked at his wife, backing away from her as though she were infected with some terrible disease.
“What do you mean, how? The how should be perfectly obvious, even to you, you impossible man!” Alexia shot back, becoming angry herself. Shouldn’t he be delighted? This was evidently a scientific miracle. Wasn’t it?
“We only call it ‘being human’ when I touch you, for lack of a better term. I’m still dead, or mostly dead. Have been for hundreds of years. No supernatural creature has ever produced an offspring. Ever. It simply isna possible.”
“You believe this can’t be your child?”