Chapter 160 A Happy Party
POV: Lord Silvain Mordaunt | Blood Club, Soho
The blood club looked best at midnight, when the candlelight had softened everything and the guests had been drinking long enough that the social performance had relaxed into something more honest, which in this particular room meant more openly corrupt.
Mordaunt stood at the head of the main table and looked at the thirty people his invitation had assembled and felt the particular satisfaction of someone whose arrangements were proceeding exactly as arranged. It was a clean feeling, uncomplicated by doubt or urgency. He had not felt it often enough lately, the last year having provided more resistance than he preferred, but tonight everything was correctly positioned and the satisfaction was unqualified.
He raised his glass.
"To London's natural order," he said. "May it never change."
Around the table, thirty glasses lifted. The toast was drunk. The room settled back into its conversations.
The guests were the architecture of his influence made visible: four Parliament members who voted reliably in exchange for protection and access, three Hermetic Order senior members including Grandmaster Vane who had come down from his usual preference for secrecy in acknowledgment of how well the current arrangement was working, six wealthy vampires from old families whose social approval was itself a form of political currency, and Madame Violette at the far end managing the logistics of the evening with the expert invisibility she brought to everything she did.
The thralls moved through the room with trays of blood served in crystal glasses, warm and fresh, sourced from the club's voluntary donors who were voluntary in the sense that their voluntariness had been ensured by three doses of vampire venom over six weeks and who were currently in comfortable rooms on the floor below, resting between servings. The arrangement was technically compliant with the new feeding consent laws that Alteroni had managed to pass, which was another small pleasure, demonstrating that compliance and exploitation were not mutually exclusive when you understood the regulatory language well enough.
Fell stood near the fireplace with the particular posture of someone whose good news was better than the good news everyone else was sharing and was enjoying having it to deploy.
Mordaunt moved to him.
"The child," Mordaunt said.
"Responding well to initial assessment." Fell's voice was quiet, pitched for two people rather than the room. "The hybrid biology is more stable than projected. By which I mean, she is healthier than subjects we've worked with previously, which I attribute to the quality of care she received in the Rookeries." He said it without irony. He genuinely meant it as a compliment to Isla's work. "The first round of tests begins tomorrow. We expect strong data."
"Timeline for the Lucia implantation?"
"Eight weeks, if we locate an appropriate surrogate. The Corvino woman remains the optimal candidate. Our contact is building the introduction but she's cautious." Fell turned his glass in his hand. "Patience."
Mordaunt accepted that with a nod. Patience was the only kind of urgency he had used for six hundred years.
He moved back to the table and listened to the room's conversations, which were the conversations of people who believed themselves secure and were right to believe it. The Rookeries autonomous zone was strangled by permit delays and the new compliance regulations, its ninety day clock running. Callum Brennan was spending every resource he had on trying to find one child in a facility he didn't know the location of. Parliament's investigation into the Hermetic Order had been successfully diverted into procedural recess, which Mordaunt's allies on the committee could extend by another forty-five days with a single procedural motion at the next session.
The economic pressure was working. The legal pressure was working. The hybrid program was advancing. And Callum's grief over the child was doing what grief always did to decision-making, which was making it faster and more emotional and therefore more prone to error.
He was letting himself feel the cleanness of it when Violette appeared at his shoulder.
"The wolf crew has assembled at the shelter," she said, very quietly. "Twenty-three people. Including his brother and the spy we burned."
He processed that.
"They're moving tonight," he said.
"It appears so."
He looked at his guests, at the thirty people celebrating a situation that was about to become more complicated, and made the adjustments to his thinking that the new information required. If they moved tonight, they moved on Ash's information, which meant Ash had found a way to communicate with the outside. That was a security failure he would address separately. If they reached the facility, they would encounter the guard rotation and the ward system, which were both robust.
But the anonymous sender had known the ward keys. That suggested inside access to Order documentation that should not have been possible.
He set the concern aside for the moment. Tonight was for the celebration. Tomorrow was for consequence management.
He lifted his glass again, for himself this time rather than the room.
Below the floor, in the rooms where the voluntary donors rested between their voluntary contributions, he could hear, if he chose to listen, the sound of weeping. It was a quiet sound. It did not reach the guests.
He did not choose to listen.