Chapter 2
Chapter
Two
Iheld still while Sultry strapped the enormous headdress on me, her concentrated frown somehow seductive instead of ugly. I’d managed to get home on the train before the Scholar noticed I was gone. Since I’d used Sultry as my alibi, I owed her, even if she didn’t know what she’d done for me.
“I should live in the sun, with flowers. The kittens would be so much happier in the daylight where they can frolic and play,” I mused out loud. I’d left them in my quarters, and they should be happy, but I needed to check on them.
Someone cleared their throat very loudly.
I knew that throat-clear like it was my own last name.
Not that I actually had a last name, but if I did, I’d know it was the elven scholar who disapproved of the entire world.
Mr. Glade took great delight in bursting any bubbles anyone might happen to have.
He may have had a first name, but I’d never dare use it unless he invited me and delivered the invitation wrapped it in an embossed envelope.
He was probably allergic to cats and would inform the scholar that my behavior was in direct opposition to his contract, section five A.
line fifty-seven. Meticulous, he most certainly was.
“It does get tedious living eternally underground,” he said.
I turned to stare at the tall, distinguished creature. He was as pretty as a sculpture carved by people who cared about beauty and were talented to boot. “And everyone smells like stale blood.”
“Stale something,” he agreed with a slight nod. “However, as a child, you certainly can’t live on your own out in the big wide world.”
“I’m not a child.” I barely didn’t stamp my foot. You see? Self-control. The hallmark of maturity.
Sultry pinned me one last final time then stepped back to admire her work. “What do you think, Glade? Do you think that the feathers are too much? I tried to replicate the local guineas, but as they’ve been extinct for two millennia, I had to guess.”
He squinted at the feathers and then nodded. “They’ll do well enough. Have either of you seen Miss Trombull? She left her sweater in the café again.” He raised his arm and the fluffy purple thing somehow didn’t look ridiculous on his elegant arm. He could even make Trombull’s chaos look elegant.
“Oh!” I hurriedly pulled off the headdress, scattering pins and handed it to Sultry. “Sorry! I forgot! I agreed to cover Mitt’s shift this morning at the café.”
“But…” Sultry began, but I was already running.
I’d be late, and then whatever disaster happened, I’d have to clean up.
Mitt was better at encouraging good behavior from the Infernals who came into the café for their blood frothies or whatever, but I mentioned the Scholar and that tended to calm people down.
Probably because he spiked people to his wall if they didn’t behave.
One guy had been staked there a month ago for urinating in a public hallway. Werewolves could be so disgusting.
When I got to the café off the main hall of the laboratory, Mini was waiting for her order with a scowl on her green face. No one else was there. She didn’t destroy property, just people, so it was all good.
“Sorry I’m late. Did you already send in your order?” I ducked under the counter, pulled on an apron, and then opened up the computer that showed our online orders. There at the top, was indeed an order from the grumpy goblin.
“Where’s Mitt? He does my order better. You always put sprinkles on everything,” she grumbled.
I beamed at her because I’d just noticed the powdery eye shadow surrounding her glowing yellow eyes.
“I don’t put them on everything, but why wouldn’t you want sprinkles when life is so dreary down here and you could have a dash of color and happiness in your life?
Like the seaweed sprinkles are flavor enhancers and cute. Who can resist that?”
She gave me a dead look. Mini was a tiny goblin, the smallest goblin I’d ever met, and the rumor was that she was part gnome, but she had zero sun in her disposition so I think she was just short.
Short-tempered. Snicker. Still, she was wearing makeup like I’d been urging her to do for the last five years, since she started showing up so often, looking at Mitt so longingly. For a werewolf he didn’t smell too bad.
I started on her liver and bone biscuit mash, resisting the urge to top it with the pretty blend of seaweed, orange, red, green, aqua, to make the grayish brown blob look less like liver and bone-biscuits.
“Here ya go,” I said, sliding over the plate and giving her my best fanged smile. “Mitt took the entire day off. I’ll be sure to tell him how pretty you looked.”
She glowered at me, took the plate and stomped off to her usual corner, as far from the garden as she could get.
The café was all windows on the one side looking out on the laboratory’s main hall, but on the opposite wall and towards the end, there was an indoor garden with hundreds of full-spectrum bulbs, so we could grow our own micro greens and also flowers.
Mitt was also always stealing the poison lab’s frogs and sticking them in there, because dissection was cruel.
But any time an ogre came in, those frogs would disappear, because they were food.
I started cleaning, humming my favorite princess cleaning song when a silver bullet came towards me.
If I didn’t catch it the bullet would hit the glass blood dispenser behind me, and that would explode glass and blood in a mess that would take forever to clean up.
But if I caught it with my right hand, I wouldn’t be able to use it well for a week. Bullets burned your fingers terribly.
My thoughts blurred along with my body as I turned, caught the bullet with my left hand and then threw it back at the intruder, a man in a long dark coat, with an unkempt goatee. The bullet went through his eye, lodged in his brain, and then he fell back, hitting the floor with an ominous thud.
I stared at the fallen body while my heart beat too fast and black spots filled my vision. I needed more blood before I passed out. I tended towards anemia if I didn’t keep up my blood drinking, and I honestly hated it. It was disgusting and the opposite of cute.
I filled a pretty martini glass from the silver spigot at the bottom of the blood dispenser, then added some mint-flavored silver sprinkles to the top. I sipped while Mini went over to the body, crouching over it and sniffing.
“Is he dead?” I asked, although what did dead even mean in the Scholar’s Laboratory? Maybe he could use him for parts.
“You should call the Scholar,” she said, frowning at him. “He’ll need to stick him on the wall when he comes to.”
“He’ll regenerate?”
She sniffed a few times and then looked up at me with a nod. “I think so. Unless you want to chop off his head, but that’ll make a mess, and maybe multiple heads will grow back.”
I pulled out my phone and texted the Scholar. I didn’t want to deal with trying to keep something dead if it was so determined to live. Determination was a wonderful thing!
The Scholar was there in three blinks, just in time to grab the man’s throat as the silver ball plinked to the ground, pushed out by his healing power.
The Scholar stood, looking like death, holding the man by the throat, my guardian much taller than he usually looked, surrounded by an evocative mist that smelled like orange blossoms.
He frowned at the man, but spoke to me. “Are you injured, Katriana?”
I looked at my left hand. The burn on my thumb and first finger was blackened, maybe because it had been a silver ball. “Not particularly.”
“Silver poisoning is very serious,” he said, tightening his hand on the man’s throat. “You’ll have to go to the Healery and have Anna look at it.”
I tried not to sigh, but sometimes he acted like I was still a baby. “After my shift. Mitt’s gone to his grandmother’s for her two hundredth birthday.”
He gave me a sharp look before returning his focus on the man. He released his throat, but had a firm grasp on his mind, so the man just stood there, a slight red glaze over his still-healing goopy left eye.
“You shot this person. Why?” he demanded of the goateed assassin
The man twitched and then said, “For the bounty. The price for the Vampire Princess’s head is too high to wait for someone else to hit first.”
“A bounty on the Vampire Princess’s head?” The Scholar raised a dark brow and glowered. “Who placed the bounty?” There was a dangerously silky growl that meant his dragon was stirring. Maybe he’d eat him instead of putting him on the wall.
The guy’s voice was a raspy monotone. “Unknown. But the offer’s been placed on every respectable assassin’s board, so it must be legit.”
Ha. Like there was a respectable assassin. Other than Libby, but she was an ex assassin, so…
“Katriana, have you told someone that you were a vampire princess?” the Scholar asked, not looking away from the man, probably rifling through his brain for any clues as to who put out a call for my death.
I tried not to look guilty. I’d told him that I was staying with Sultry when I took a train to Apple City two days before. There had been a lot of phones pointed at me when the harpy and Herald confronted me. “Ah…”
He turned and put the full weight of his gaze on me, and it weighed me down like a truck full of wet cement. “Who did you tell?”
“Well, I was saying that I was the pastel princess, you know, on my social media account, but then this harpy was mad at me for the kittens and the noisy taffeta, and Herald stepped in.” I smiled brightly, but I definitely didn’t feel it.
“Herald? The Vampire King’s herald?”
I shrugged. “But I meant pastel princess, not vampire princess. I was wearing pink taffeta. I did not look like a vampire princess. You know, they’re always gothic. And I’m blonde. Blonde vampires always look a little sallow undead.”