Long Live the Queen (The Immortal Empire) by Kate Locke Read Free Book Online Page A

attention lately as he lobbied for peace between humans and those of plagued blood. He was very well-spoken, and presented a much kinder face to the public on behalf of the aristos than that of his mother, who was perceived as a cold bitch.
    If they wanted to persuade humans to like us, they should hire a couple of actors from the US to put a pretty face and spin on things.
    I understood that Bertie was considered handsome amongstthe aristocracy, but I’d always suspected that applied more to his money and power than to his face. He lacked a certain ruggedness, or robustness, that humans seemed to find attractive. It wasn’t that he was ugly, just that his face was… soft – except for a sharp nose. He was fairly lean and wore his brown hair in a very current style, but his clothing – at least while at court – favoured the more late-1800s sensibilities preferred by his mother.
    In fact, my snug velvet trousers and blood-red frock coat made me more of a peacock than him.
    I wondered if he knew his mother had offered him to me as a potential husband some time ago.
That
was how much she wanted to keep an eye on me. Offered up her firstborn like a fluffy little lamb. Enemies closer than friends and all that.
    “Lady Xandra,” Bertie greeted me, “it is a pleasure to see you again, despite the tragic circumstances of our meeting.” His voice was pleasant, and when he smiled I could see why he was rumoured to have bedded every woman with even a hint of plagued blood in her. He was charming, and had a way of making a girl feel as though she was the only one in the room.
    I bowed my head to him. I was a bloody queen, so I wasn’t about to curtsy. Still, etiquette and proper address had been part of my training. “Thank you, Your Royal Highness. It is good to see you as well.”
    Niceties were exchanged as quickly and with as little formality as possible. Still, I was a little twitchy; aristos did everything so bloody slowly.
    William brought digital footage of the creature. This was no surprise to any of us. Goblins were like the old women that used to run the switchboards – they knew everything that wenton in the city because they were unapologetically nosy. They were tapped into security cameras all over London, and had even installed some of their own. They didn’t have footage from the actual raid, but only because the lab had done something to render nearby cams useless. Regardless, they’d picked up the escaped subject on several feeds afterward.
    “Thought it was our lady at first,” William said as he popped another video cylinder into the playback machine. “So wrong was your prince.” That was directed at me rather than Victoria. William considered her nothing more than a bloodsucker – beneath him. And she treated him like he ought to be in a zoo, or better still, laid out as a rug in her den.
    A somewhat grainy image appeared on the screen of the fifty-odd-inch box in the family room of Buckingham Palace. Victoria never struck me as the type to sit down and watch VBC 1 with her children, but this room definitely had more of a lived-in feel than the others I’d seen. There was a box of Cadbury’s chocolates on the tea table, next to a battered Wilkie Collins paperback novel. This decor was a far cry from the black-draped gothic nightmare I would have conjured for her.
    We all looked at the screen. The lab had been located in Notting Hill, which was part of the Greater London area known collectively as the North End. The district name was Windsor, but few people called it that. The area surrounding the laboratory was nicknamed “Mostly”, as it was mostly made up of human relatives of noble families, those born aristo who didn’t carry the plague – rare, but it happened – and retired courtesans. Everyone there was “mostly” human, but important enough to the Crown to warrant their own neighbourhood and close proximity to Mayfair.
    I spotted the creature as soon as she appeared on