Chapter 151 The Masquerade
POV: Callum | Parliament Annual Ball, West End
The invitation used the word mandatory, which was at least honest.
He wore a borrowed mask and a jacket that fit well enough to pass and walked into the Parliament Ball beside Valentina, who moved through the entrance hall like she had been doing this her whole life, which in some sense she had, the half of her life that was vampire rather than hunter. She had explained the event to him on the walk over in the practical tone she used for things that made her uncomfortable: annual gathering, everyone attended, the masks were tradition rather than anonymity because everyone knew who everyone was, the point was the performance of civility rather than actual civility.
The hall was extraordinary in the way that spaces built to demonstrate power were extraordinary, every surface deliberate, the light engineered to be flattering and the scale engineered to be humbling. Two hundred supernaturals in formal wear and elaborate masks moved through it with the specific ease of people who had practiced this particular social performance for decades or centuries.
Callum had practiced it for approximately forty minutes on the walk over.
He stayed close to Valentina and kept his expression neutral behind the mask and watched the room the way prison had taught him to watch rooms, tracking exits, reading body language, identifying who was talking to whom and with what quality of attention.
He found Cormac twenty minutes in.
His twin was across the hall, mask pushed slightly up on his forehead in the way of someone who had forgotten it was there, talking to a wolf from one of the other London packs. Cormac looked up at the same moment Callum found him, the twin thing that had never stopped working regardless of everything else. Their eyes met across the hall.
Neither of them moved toward the other. Neither of them looked away first. After a moment Cormac turned back to his conversation and Callum turned back to Valentina and that was the entirety of it, which was better than most of what had passed between them in the last two years.
The evening moved the way these evenings moved. Conversations that were actually negotiations. Compliments that were actually assessments. The masks made everyone look slightly unreal, features obscured, expressions harder to read, which created the odd effect of making the room feel more honest rather than less, as though the pretense of disguise had freed everyone from the pretense of naturalness.
Valentina navigated it well. She introduced him to three vampires who were worth knowing, steered him away from two who were Mordaunt's reliable allies, and translated the subtext of three separate conversations with brief murmured commentary that he filed away for later.
He spotted Sarah at eleven-thirty.
Not immediately, not the way he would have if Silas hadn't told him. He spotted her because he was looking for her, had been looking for her all evening with the part of his attention he'd kept separate for exactly that purpose. She was on the far side of the room in a deep blue mask, talking to a vampire he didn't recognize, and the body language between them was the body language of people who knew each other well rather than people meeting for the first time.
He watched.
The vampire touched her arm once, briefly, in the way of someone confirming instructions rather than making social contact. Sarah nodded. The vampire moved away.
And then the vampire passed through a gap in the crowd and the light caught him from a different angle and Callum saw his face clearly above the half-mask.
Mordaunt.
Sarah was watching Mordaunt cross the room. Her posture had the quality of a person who had just received information they needed and was processing what to do with it next. She had not looked comfortable. She had looked exactly like what she was, which was an operative at work.
Callum took one step toward her.
The lights went out.
Not dimmed. Cut, completely, the entire hall dropping into a darkness that was absolute for the three seconds it took supernatural eyes to adjust and human servants to begin shouting. In those three seconds the room was chaos, two hundred people in darkness, masks and formal wear suddenly useless, the performance of civility stripped away by the simple fact of not being able to see.
The screaming started before the lights came back.
Not from the hall. From outside it, from the direction of the street, from somewhere in the network of communication that moved between supernaturals even through Parliament's event ward, the ward apparently not proof against the kind of distress that was pushing through it now.
The lights returned. The hall resolved itself out of chaos back into form, two hundred people in various states of alarm, masks askew, composure fractured.
Callum was already looking at Valentina. She had her phone in her hand and her face had gone to the expression it went to when something had happened that could not be taken back.
She turned the screen so he could read the message.
It was from Isla. Three words.
She's gone. Eastern shelter.
He looked across the room. Mordaunt was standing near the far wall with his mask in his hand, watching Callum with the expression of someone who had just watched something he had arranged go exactly as planned.
Callum felt something settle in his chest, cold and very clear, the thing that happened when grief and fury combined into something past both of them.
"This means war," he said.