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interrogate the lad.”
She extracted a thick calling card from her waistcoat pocket. "Oh, and I
found this pushed under your door."
    Elijah snatched the card from Percy's hand and groaned at the short,
terse note, and the single name embossed in glossy sepia typeface beneath it.
    Llewellyn House. Noon. Brightlingsea .
    He crushed the card in his hand and sent it flying across the room.
Couldn't the man use a bloody wireless tickertext like the rest of the modern
world?
    Percy quirked her brow at his show of temper. "Care to tell me why
the Duke of Brightlingsea is sliding calling cards under your door?"
    "No," he said tersely.
    "Surely it's not the Duke of Brightlingsea. The famed Hero of
Sevastopol himself. Didn't he die years ago?" she asked, undeterred,
trailing him towards the door to his flat.
    "It's a son or nephew or something," he answered. Though it
wasn't. It was the Duke of Brightlingsea. Who also happened to be the
damned leader of the Elders, and the scariest, craziest son of a bitch Elijah
had ever encountered. Whatever had brought the immortal leader back to London
from his Welsh lair couldn't be good.
    Elijah just prayed that the Duke hadn't found out that Lady Christiana
had been the one to turn him. Brightlingsea had let Elijah live when they'd
parted ways over half a year ago, after they'd both helped track and kill the
psychopath who'd kidnapped Romanov's wife. The Duke had seen the value in
having Elijah under his thumb, cleaning out the nest of feral vampires –
O’Connor’s cast-offs – infesting London's streets. It meant the Duke
didn't have to lift a finger himself.
    Lazy git.
    But Brightlingsea had made it more than clear that the Bonded who'd
betrayed the Council's sacred vows and turned Elijah would have to die, so
Elijah had said his maker was already dead. Rowan hadn’t contradicted this. But
that didn't mean Rowan, who'd always been scrupulous to a fault, hadn't decided
to come clean to his cousin and blood brother, despite his bond with Lady
Christiana.
    "Well, are you going to tell me what the Duke wants, and why you're
meeting him at Llewellyn House?" Percy demanded.
    "No. It's nothing to do with you."
    "It never is when you visit your nob friends," she muttered.
    "They aren't my friends ," he growled. What was Percy's
problem this morning?
    "Not even her Ladyship?" Percy inquired in a too innocent
voice.
    Elijah stopped at the door to his flat, gripping the doorknob so tightly
he could feel the brass warping under his fingers. "What are you implying,
Percy?"
    "I'm not implying anything. I've just seen the way you look
at each other."
    "Have you been spying on me again?" he demanded.
    Percy shrugged nonchalantly, though her turbulent silver-gray eyes
betrayed her. Why Percy should be so obsessed with a woman she'd never even met
was beyond his powers of deduction.
    He threw open the door to his flat and made the long, steep descent through
the squalid, half-abandoned building in the darkest corner of eastern
Whitechapel. Percy followed behind him, careful not to touch the grimy walls
with her pristine clothes.
    They had to step over something dead at the ground level before reaching
the front entrance. Percy wretched in a perfumed handkerchief ... or, rather, Percival
Parminter did. Percy always went into character the moment she stepped out into
the world, even if there was no one around to appreciate the act. Her reasoning
was that one never knew who was watching or listening ... which was probably
one of the reasons why she'd fooled the world for so long. She never let down
her guard.
    "Lud, but you live in a pit. No wonder you're so broody," Percy
remarked in her gentleman's lazy drawl once they reached the street, which was
not much of an improvement over the hovel they'd left behind.
    Elijah's choice of neighborhood was as sordid as London got. The narrow,
mud-packed, and nameless side street he called home was lined with tall, cheap
wood and brick buildings as timeworn and