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Supernatural creatures, be they vampires, werewolves, or ghosts, owed their existence to an overabundance of soul, an excess that refused to die.
Then he fell backward onto the much-abused plate of treacle tart, flopping in a limp-overcooked-asparagus kind of way.
flopping in a limp-overcooked-asparagus kind of way.
called this end of the vampire life cycle dissanimation
dissanimation.
What young men of such dress were doing in a library was anyone’s guess.
Regardless, their presence forced her to pretend that she, too, had just discovered the dead vampire. With a resigned shrug, she screamed and collapsed into a faint. She stayed resolutely fainted, despite the liberal application of smelling salts, which made her eyes water most tremendously, a cramp in the back of one knee, and the fact that her new ball gown was getting most awfully wrinkled.
“Mark my words, I will use something much, much stronger than smelling salts,” came a growl in Miss Tarabotti’s left ear. The voice was low and tinged with a hint of Scotland. It would have caused Alexia to shiver and think primal monkey thoughts about moons and running far and fast, if she’d had a soul. Instead it caused her to sigh in exasperation and sit up.
She was prone to wearing yellow and engaging in bouts of hysteria.
She was not undead, mind you; she was a living, breathing human but was simply… lacking.
she was a living, breathing human but was simply… lacking.
After all, the earl’s purported specialty was accomplishing several impossible things before dawn.
there was a lot to be said for a man who sported such well-tailored jackets—even if he did change into a ferocious beast once a month.
Lord Akeldama liked perfumed handkerchiefs and pink neckties, but he also liked to know things.
He also seemed to speak predominantly in italics.
his attire was so consistently absurd.
Alexia tried to explain that the vampire’s supposed inability to enter private residences uninvited was a myth based upon their collective obsession with proper social etiquette, but her mother refused to believe her.
“a vampire, like a lady, never reveals his true age.”
Professor Randolph Lyall was a professor of nothing in particular and several subjects in broad detail.
His animal form was nondescript but tidy, rather like his favorite waistcoat:
He was not very big, mostly because he was not a very big human, and the basic principles of conservation of mass still applied whether supernatural or not. Werewolves had to obey the laws of physics just like everyone else.
The BUR agent ran a hand distractedly down his large sideburns, as if checking to ensure they were still affixed to his face.
A man Professor Lyall had never met before but who smelled of fur and wet nights.
What this man seemed most in need of was a good sharp prod to the nether regions.
It is only that their memories are longer than their tempers.”
Here was a man who watched the world without blinking, yet somehow refrained from looking directly at anything.
He grinned a slow lazy grin that crept across his waxy face the way oil spreads over water.
Alexia was not given to bouts of hysterics. However, she was also not one to stay quiet when circumstances warranted volume.
He liked a bit of meat on the female form, more to grab on to—and more to chew off.
Anubis
peregrinations.
Highland werewolves had a reputation for doing atrocious and highly unwarranted things, like wearing smoking jackets to the dinner table.
Lord Maccon stood up very straight. He would have towered over his second even if Lyall were not sitting down. “I am not a groveler!” “It is possible to learn many new and interesting skills in one lifetime,” advised Professor Lyall, unimpressed by the posturing.
The Earl of Woolsey wore a suit of dark chocolate, a cravat of caramel silk, and an air of ill-disguised impatience.
The tongue phenomenon occurred once again.
she was damp in places she was tolerably certain unmarried gentlewomen were not supposed to be damp in.
“You are wearing entirely too much clothing,” she complained.
He tore his eyes away from the tops of those remarkable breasts of hers and tried to think unpleasant thoughts of particularly horrible things, like overcooked vegetables and cut-rate wine.
Then, she added, because Alexia never stayed silent when she ought, “These feelings you engender in me, my lord, are most indelicate. You should stop causing them immediately.”
“Well, proud Mary’s fat arse!” said the earl eloquently.
But when he smiled. Oh dear, it was most inconvenient to deal with.
Mrs. Loontwill did what any well-prepared mother would do upon finding her unmarried daughter in the arms of a gentleman werewolf: she had very decorous, and extremely loud, hysterics.
“To be wise, one might never leave one’s room at all,” quoted Miss Tarabotti.
He is also not altogether compos mentis in the daylight sense of the term.”
“we vampires tend to have an unfettered approach to the concept of mental health.” He twiddled his fingers in the air. “One’s moral clarity goes a little fuzzy after the first two centuries or so.”
The noise they made was the rampaging death-lust cry of the damned.
Miss Tarabotti, who had developed rather unladylike homicidal tendencies toward the repulsive wax-faced thing, asked eagerly, “How?”
She shifted, sighed, and stared up at the ceiling, trying to think about anything but Lord Maccon, her current predicament, or Lord Akeldama’s safety. Which meant she could do nothing but reflect on the complex plight of her mama’s most recent embroidery project. This, in itself, was a worse torture than any her captors could devise.
The Earl of Woolsey was indeed completely nude. He did not seem particularly perturbed by this fact, but Miss Tarabotti felt the sudden need to close her eyes tight and think about asparagus or something equally mundane.
Miss Tarabotti was most disgruntled, partly because she had not been informed and partly because Lord Maccon’s hair was so very silky.
