Chapter 204 Ravensworth Hall
POV: Mordaunt | Kensington estate, war council
The estate has been in my family for two hundred and forty years and in that time it has hosted the kinds of meetings that do not appear in any official record and which have shaped the direction of British supernatural governance more reliably than any official session of Parliament, because official sessions are theater and the rooms in this estate are where the actual decisions happen.
Tonight the actual decision is about survival.
I sit at the head of the table in my study, which has the quality all rooms in this house have, the quality of permanence accumulated through decades of careful maintenance, and I look at the seven people I have called here and I understand, with the specific clarity of someone who has been in power for a long time and who can read the room, that the ground has shifted significantly and that the ground is going to shift further.
The foreign invasion is three days away. The Covenant forces and the American packs have both issued timelines. The coalition that formed in Aldgate, the uncomfortable alliance of Parliament vampires and Rookeries wolves and fae and dragon intermediaries, is real and it is organized and it is better positioned than I would have liked, which means the window for consolidating power before the foreign forces arrive is narrower than I planned for.
"We eliminate the resistance's core before the foreigners arrive," I say. The table has the quality of a room waiting for this sentence, which is the specific quality that means everyone present already understood this was the conclusion and was waiting for me to say it. "A divided London walking into foreign invasion is a London that cannot negotiate from strength. We need to show the Covenant and the Americans that we are capable of governing ourselves. That means Parliament governing."
"The wolves won't accept that framing," says Cassel, who has been in this room at every meeting for thirty years and who offers the counterargument at every meeting with the specific reliability of a person who believes the counterargument is useful even when he does not believe it himself.
"The wolves don't have to accept the framing," I say. "The foreigners do. When the Covenant's legion arrives, what they see is Crimson Parliament executing its legal authority over the supernatural community. Not a packless wolf playing coalition politics. Authority. Order." I set my hands on the table. "One action produces that perception."
The table understands the one action.
Valentina Corvino became a full vampire when she completed the transition eighteen months ago, which placed her under Parliament's jurisdiction in the specific legal sense that dhampirs are not subject to. As a dhampir she was technically outside our authority, which is why the hunters we sent after her operated in the grey area of enforcement rather than the clear light of law. As a full vampire, she is subject to Parliament's authority completely, and she has committed crimes under that authority, real crimes with documentation, hunters killed during escapes, defiance of summoning orders, species treason for allying formally with wolf packs.
The law, in this case, is not a fiction I am constructing. The law is the law. I am simply choosing to enforce it now, when enforcing it is strategically necessary, which is how law has always worked in rooms like this one.
"Fell is requesting Parliament protection," I say, and I move to the second item with the efficiency of someone who has planned the sequencing and wants to move through it. "He has the Lucia embryo. He has two months of viable gestation remaining. His request is that Parliament formally recognize his work and provide him security against the Rookeries coalition."
The table absorbs this differently than it absorbed the first item.
Fell is not a comfortable subject in this room, because the people in this room know what the facilities were and what happened in them and some of them have varying degrees of culpability for it. The difference between acknowledging that privately and extending formal Parliamentary protection to the man who ran the program is not a small difference.
"Two birds," I say. "Protect Fell, execute the dhampir. Show strength. The Covenant arrives and finds Parliament functioning, its authority intact, its laws enforced, its research program under protection. That is not a community that needs foreign management. That is a community that governs itself."
I look around the table. I look at the faces that are doing the calculation I need them to do, the weighing of cost against benefit, the specific arithmetic of power.
"Call the session," I say. "Emergency Parliament. Execute Valentina Corvino for crimes against vampire authority. Tomorrow."