Biffy lashed out with his tail, slamming the door closed behind them.
Professor Lyall changed form, standing before the furious she-wolf. “Lady Kingair, don’t you think we might talk about this civilly, just this once?”
The rangy wolf sat back on her haunches, as though considering this proposition, and then, after a moment, the graying fur of her coat retreated, and she stood before Lyall.
Sidheag Kingair was a fine figure of a woman for all she had been converted later in life. She crossed her arms, utterly unself-conscious. “Professor, I dinna want tae be civil. If that man killed my Beta, ’tis my right tae take his blood.”
“If.”
She looked at Biffy, now sitting back on his haunches, tongue out and panting after such a run. “But I heard him say that—”
“You heard him speculate. Nothing has been proven.”
“That dinna sound like speculation tae me.”
Biffy wondered if he, too, should change his form, or if such a thing would be wasted on the Alpha’s rage. He wanted to have some input, however, aside from wagging his tail and twitching his ears, so he sought out his reserves of courage, faced the pain, and shifted.
“We need to act within the confines of British law, Lady Kingair, as well as pack protocol. The first thing to do is confront the man and inquire further.”
Lady Kingair’s lip curled. “Inquire? If you insist.”
Professor Lyall turned to Biffy. “If you would like to lead the way?”
Biffy would not like, but he did as he was told by his Beta, moving with a certain amount of embarrassed poise through the house in full view of half the servants.
Thus they trooped down to the wine cellar—to find the door slightly open with no sign of being forced and the cellar itself completely empty.
Floote was gone.
Lady Kingair erupted into immediate fury. “He’s escaped!”
Professor Lyall shook his head. “Not possible. We secured this room to hold werewolves.”
“Then someone must have let him out. Or not locked the room down properly.” She snarled at Biffy.
Biffy was affronted. “I assure you, it was securely locked, and I searched his person for tools.”
“You must have missed something, pup!”
“Perhaps I missed the utterly ridiculous idea that a butler could pick locks!”
“Perhaps you did, you little—”
Professor Lyall stepped in. “Now wait just a moment, Lady Kingair. Did you search Floote’s room just now when you were looking for him?”
The Alpha shrugged, the long fall of her thick hair shifting against her naked breasts. She still glared at Biffy.
Unashamed, knowing he had done all that could be asked of someone in his position, Biffy pretended to examine his manicure. For some reason, shifting forms played hell on the cuticles.
Lyall continued his questioning. “Had he taken his belongings?”
Lady Kingair wasn’t interested in figuring out the minutiae of Floote’s disappearance. She was interested in blaming someone for it—Biffy.
Biffy turned away to poke about the cellar, trying to find any clues that might represent Floote’s ability to escape a heretofore impenetrable wine cellar.
He did not see her shifting forms. The only warning he got was Lyall’s shout.
Afterward, Biffy was never quite certain what he did or why it happened. He reacted out of instinct, but there were two instincts in place—the werewolf one that wanted to shift forms out of self-preservation and the Biffy one that hated the pain of shifting more than anything, more than a badly cut jacket or a loose cravat. Those two instincts went to battle against each other as the great vicious she-wolf charged toward him.
He shifted.
He simply didn’t quite manage to shift everything.
Only his head went over.
That action stopped Lady Kingair in a way that nothing else possibly could. She halted her charge, stood on four legs stiffed in surprise, and stared at him.
Biffy didn’t understand what was going on. He still felt like himself, and there was very little pain, but his head felt swollen and heavy, as though he had caught a cold, and his senses were suddenly far more acute.
Professor Lyall moved forward, brushed past Lady Kingair, and stood quietly in front of him. The Beta’s mouth was open ever so slightly in shock, not an expression Biffy had ever thought to see on his lover’s face.
He tried to ask, “What’s going on?” But all he could manage was a bit of a whine and a small bark.
“Biffy,” said Professor Lyall softly. “Did you know you had an Anubis form?”
Biffy barked at him again. He was beginning to shake slightly. It was from the fear and the stress, not from being naked in a cellar. Werewolves rarely felt cold even in human skin. Or half-human skin.
Lady Kingair shifted back into her fully human guise. She was still looking angry and impatient, but she also seemed far less inclined to fight him than she had mere moments before.
“He dinna act like an Alpha.”
All Lyall’s attention was on Biffy; he barely glanced at the Kingair Alpha. “He does in some areas,” he replied.
Biffy argued he must look beyond ridiculous. The head of a wolf, all fuzzy and yellow-eyed, on the lean pale body of a dandy. I don’t want to be an Alpha, he cried out internally. I don’t want to spend half my time fighting challengers. I don’t want to have the responsibility of a pack. I don’t want to die early or go mad. Make it go away!
But again, all he could do was whine.
“It’s all right, pup,” soothed Lyall. “You simply shift it back. At least I think that’s how it works.” He frowned to himself. “I’ve served several Alphas and I never thought to ask if Anubis worked any differently than full wolf fur. Some professor I am.”
Biffy only whined again. He was trying. He was reaching for that place deep inside that could force the shift, that tingling pressure of bones re-forming. It wasn’t working. He couldn’t go either direction, couldn’t return to wolf or human. He was trapped in the in-between of Anubis state.
“Oh, dear. Are you stuck?” asked Lyall.
Smart man. Biffy nodded his shaggy head vigorously.
“Och, I’ve nae time for this! We must catch that blighter Floote.” Lady Kingair was at her limit. Clearly Biffy’s predicament was merely an added insult to her evening.
She went up the stairs. Preparing, no doubt, to chase after Floote into the night. “Where would he go?” she shouted back at the two werewolves.
With a shrug, Lyall and Biffy followed.
The Beta said, “If he was still working for Sandy, and if he was operating under that agenda all along, we must assume that it is an antisupernatural agenda. Sandy promised me…” The Beta winced slightly at this, an old lie only now uncovered. “Never mind what he promised. If the plan all along was to expand the plague, then it may be that even I couldn’t change his mind.”
Lady Kingair concurred. “I guess you weren’t as alluring as you thought, Beta. So where would he go?”
Biffy came to stand close behind Lyall, placing a supportive hand on the man’s shoulder. He wanted to reassure Lyall that he found him alluring, but he could only growl in annoyance.
Biffy knew what he would do were he in Floote’s situation. Were he a mortal man with werewolves on his tail, there was only one truly safe place—the air. And Floote, loyal to the last, would try to get to Lady Maccon to explain his actions to her. To see that she was safe, as that, too, was part of Alessandro Tarabotti’s mandate. Biffy might have said all these things, but he had no proper mouth and his neck was part wolf as well, including, apparently the voice box. Good Lord, he thought, what if I’m permanently stuck like this? I’ll never be able to carry off a pointed collar again! Then he realized with relief that Anubis was wolf form, at least in part, and wolf form would not survive the sunrise. Only a few more hours, then.
Lyall had reached the same conclusion as Biffy regarding Floote’s probable course of action. “He’ll head to the nearest dirigible.”
Lady Kingair dashed off.
Biffy whined and gestured with his wolf head at the stairs. The stairs that led to the second-story hallway that ended in a balcony that had a secret drawbridge to Lord Akeldama’s house. If Floote wanted to take to the air quickly, he’d go for Dandelion Fluff Upon a Spoon. After all, he’d used Lord Akeldama’s private dirigible before.
Lyall concurred, but he didn’t try to stop Lady Kingair. He allowed her to rush off into the night, presumably toward the ticket stations of the larger public dirigibles at the green. She was not a woman accustomed to London and its extravagances. It had not even occurred to her that there might be a private dirigible nearby.
The Beta began making his way upstairs to cross over into the vampire’s abode.
Biffy held back.
“Don’t you want to see if you’re correct? See if he did manage to steal Lord Akeldama’s dirigible a second time?” Lyall goaded him gently.
Biffy gestured down at his naked body and furry head with one fine white hand.
Professor Lyall understood perfectly. “You’re embarrassed?”
Biffy nodded.
“Don’t be foolish. This is something to be proud of—very few werewolves boast Anubis form, not even all Alphas. And it’s highly unusual in a pup so young as you. Generally, it takes a decade or more to manifest. This is brilliant.”
Biffy whined in a sarcastic manner.
“Don’t be silly. It really is.”
Biffy gave a huffy bark that he hoped sounded like a snort of derision.
“Trust me, my dandy, this is a good thing. Now, do come along.”
With a sigh, Biffy did as ordered and followed his Beta across the small drawbridge and into his former master’s house.
Only three years earlier, all would have been chaos at the sight of two naked men, one of them with a wolf head, wandering the halls of Lord Akeldama’s domicile. Several of the drones, possibly Biffy included, might even have had the vapors.
It was not that Lord Akeldama and his boys objected to nudity; in fact, all were coolly in favor of it—in the boxing ring, for example, or the bedroom. But wandering the hallways underdressed, let alone undressed, was frowned upon unless cursed by extreme inebriation or emotional instability. And a werewolf was not to be tolerated in the house of a vampire except when socially mandated. All that had shifted when Lady Maccon installed herself in Lord Akeldama’s closet. For where Lady Maccon went, Lord Maccon was soon to follow, and that good gentleman had somewhat improved the general outlook of Lord Akeldama’s household on the subject of nudity and wolves, particularly in combination.
It was universally held among the drones that Lord Maccon had a particularly fine physique, and there had been quite the scuffle over who would be allowed to dress him in the evenings. After Floote assumed that role, it became a trickster’s challenge to ascertain who among the boys could arrange such little incidences as would cause the London Alpha to bluster out into the hallway in the altogether of an afternoon.
As a result, the entire Akeldama household was markedly tolerant of Lyall’s and Biffy’s unexpected appearance and absent attire, although they did give Biffy some odd looks. Many of them had never seen Anubis form. Biffy took great solace in the fact that, as his head was that of a wolf, none of them knew it was him. Until, of course, they ran smack dab into Lord Akeldama, coming out of his aethographor chamber as they were making their way up onto the roof.
The vampire was dressed in an outfit that most closely resembled the waters of some tropical island, varying shades of turquoise, teal, and blue, accessorized with pearls and white gold. His effeminate features were screwed up in concentration over some small scrap of paper on which was scribbled, no doubt, an aetheric message of grave political, social, or fashionable import.
Lord Akeldama took a long look at Professor Lyall’s physique and then gave him a little nod of academic approval. Then he directed an even longer look at Biffy.
Finally he said, “Biffy, my darling boy, what have you done to your hair? Something new for the evening?”
Biffy inclined his wolf head, dreadfully mortified. Of course, there was no chance of Lord Akeldama needing to see his face to recognize him; the vampire had a long, and somewhat inconvenient, memory for body parts.
Lord Akeldama smiled ever so slightly, the hint of a fang peeking out one corner of his mouth. “Now, my dear Dolly, did you know this would happen? You are a fortunate werewolf as well as a fortune man, now, are you not? Anubis form could be the solution to all your problems given some patience and a few well-placed suggestions.”
Professor Lyall only inclined his head.
“But of course, you would have known that the moment he manifested.”