Testimony of Children (Alice Gray Book 2)

35

The mansion's entrance opened out onto a large foyer with a black and white chequered floor. The walls and paintwork, stark white, and the trimmings, glossy black. One large mirror with a gaudy silver frame adorned the centre of each wall. Large white marble staircases led up from the left and the right corners at the rear of the foyer.

A partition separated the main ballroom with an ornamental framed glass wall. Its large doors were open, allowing the guests to mingle between the two rooms.

A circular viewing balcony was directly above us, positioned centrally in the ceiling. Nobody was up there.

I wanted more than anything to view the room from the privacy of the balcony. To separate out all the strands of energy tangled in the atmosphere below. Down here with the crowd, the movement from all the bodies stirred the air molecules giving the magic chance to feel my proximity.

I was so screwed.

After what seemed like an hour of Roger preening in front of his admiring throng, he pulled me into the ballroom and spun me onto the dance floor. He didn't ask my permission. If he had, I would have been able to warn him that I had no experience of ballroom dancing. Or, well, any dancing for that matter. Two left feet and all that.

Mortified, I looked around for some help.

Stephen stood in the crowd watching the dancers. His face stretched into a smirk as he foresaw the probable result of this escapade. Me, on my ass.

Bastard.

I wouldn't get any help from Emily. As soon as Roger whirled me onto the floor, she and Lizzie spun onto it right behind us in a dizzying swirl of black and red blurring the lines where one finished and the other began.

In a much more mediocre display, Roger carried us round and round giving me an agility that I could only dream of on my own. As we circled the floor, my senses picked up the presence of some familiar individuals before I'd had chance to spot them in the crowd.

Thomas was the first, my power straining to connect with him when we moved to the right of the room. I pushed it down at the same time that I glanced in the direction that I knew he was. Dark, fathomless eyes met mine, void of the passion that I'd become used to seeing there. Cold dread rushed to my heart. He couldn't know about my feelings for Stephen already. Could he?

I had to fight the urge to get to him. What would I say?

Don't worry, love, there's enough of me for both of you.

I was heading straight for love-life Armageddon, and I had no idea how to stop it.

Almost immediately that my heart had sunk into my gut at that realisation, the heavy weight of James Device's power caused a massive swell of magic through my blood. Clammy sweat beaded all over my face with the effort of keeping it contained. My heart sunk to its final depths at the loss of all illusions when it came to my appearance.

Might as well have worn a tracksuit.

When Roger twirled me again, I tried to locate James. His diminutive frame and height made that impossible in the large crowd. But even if I were unable to sense his power, the large number of vampires in the vicinity would have given away James's location. He was the head honcho in London, and he had brought an entourage fit for that role.

When the slinking, greedy energy of Hazel, the leader of the Sheffield coven, probed the air around me, I stumbled. Roger scowled as I fought to regain my footing. Searching out Stephen, who was still looking amused at my predicament at the edge of the dance floor, I motioned to the area. Stephen's grin fell as he moved over to the northern witches. He locked eyes with Emily when she whirled past, and the two women moved a little closer to me, their movements mirroring mine and Roger's.

These guys were good. Four weeks ago I would have never believed how much I now valued their help.

I thought I had taken the measure of all the powerful individuals in the room by about the fifth round of the ballroom. But when Roger finally spun me around in a final flourish, bringing us to a halt, I realised I had missed something fundamental to the power dynamics in the large gathering.

Panting from the exertion, I found myself positioned directly in front of the scary as hell vampires from outside the house.

The remnants of my terror fizzled uncomfortably over my skin, raising the hairs all down my bare arms. My magic surged, desperate for release in response to the obvious threat that the two vampires represented.

I very nearly let it loose, to hell with the consequences. I'd rather deal with hundreds of horny witches, vampires and God knows what else, than allow these two to catch me vulnerable.

"Baron Knyvet, Baroness," Roger said, tipping his head in deference to the man, and taking the lady's hand, raising it to his lips for a kiss. It was a chaste act, but Roger somehow managed to make it smarmy.

That was just his style.

The lady obviously agreed, wiping the back of her hand with a delicate lace handkerchief that had miraculously appeared from somewhere in her Victorian style dress.

Her beautiful face, which was twisted into a grimace of disgust at Roger's sloppy greeting, suddenly smoothed out. Their heads shifted in unison, poised on long, refined necks at precisely the same angle. Features frozen in masks of friendly greeting, with smiles that flashed a hint of white fang, you couldn't mistake them for anything but predators.

When their nostrils flared at exactly the same time a shudder rippled through my body as my skin cooled to ice instantaneously.

Then I realised what was different.

There was no power emanating from these two at all. They had the cold absence of natural life-force that all of their kind shared. But that was it. No heavy thrum of dead energy. No surges of warped magic like the guy outside. Nothing.

Did anyone else know about their impotence problem? Probably not, if Roger's deference was anything to go by. I couldn't see him paying court to a pair of powerless vamps.

I swallowed my fear and tightened the coils of my life-force around my insides. I wouldn't be needing magic to deal with this exchange. Narrowing my eyes at them, I kept my mouth shut. Knyvet was James and Thomas's maker, and the Baroness was his wife and accomplice. They were monsters.

When I felt dense power descend over us, I wondered if I'd misjudged, and the couple had somehow been masking their potency. Then I felt its familiar vibration and I knew it was James a moment before he slipped his slim hand into mine in a gesture of intimacy that I wasn't expecting.

I turned to James in question, but his gaze was fixed on the Baroness.

"This is an unexpected pleasure."

What game is James playing now?
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