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has to merely keep a stiff upper lip.”
    “My dear Lord A, you keep stiff whatever you wish—you always do.”
    “Doesn’t it hurt her?” Lady Kingair asked rather wistfully as Alexia exited the vampire’s house down the front stoop to stand next to her, watching as the massive wolf chased the tiny cub.
    “Not that we can tell.”
    “And how long will this last?” Sidheag made a gesture up and down her own body, indicating her altered state.
    “Until sunrise. Unless I intervene.”
    Sidheag held a naked arm out at Lady Maccon hopefully.
    “Oh, no, not you. The preternatural touch has no effect on you anymore. You’re mortal. No, I have to touch my daughter. Then immortality, sort of, well, reverberates back to you. Difficult to explain. I wish we understood more.”
    Professor Lyall stood off to one side, a tiny smile on his face, watching the chaos in the street.
    Prudence tried to hide behind a pile of delivery crates stacked on one side of the road. Lord Maccon went after her, knocking the crates to the ground with a tremendous clatter. The wolf cub went for the steam-powered monowheel propped against the stone wall of the Colindrikal-Bumbcruncher’s front yard. Mr. Colindrikal-Bumbcruncher was particularly fond of his monowheel. He had it specially commissioned from Germany at prodigious expense.
    Prudence took refuge behind the spokes of the center area. Lord Maccon was having none of it. He wiggled one mighty paw through to get at her. The spokes bent slightly, Lord Maccon got stuck, and Prudence dodged out, pelting once more down the street. Her tail wagged even more enthusiastically at the delightful game.
    Lord Maccon extracted himself from the monowheel, shaking loose and causing the beautiful contraption to crash over with an ominous crunch. Lady Maccon made a mental note to send a card of apology around to their neighbors as soon as possible. The unfortunate Colindrikal-Bumbcrunchers had suffered great travails over the past two years. The town house had been in Mr. Colindrikal-Bumbcruncher’s family for generations. Its proximity to a rove vampire was well known and tolerated, if not exactly accepted. Just as all the best castles had poltergeists, so all the best neighborhoods had vampires. But the addition of werewolves to their quiet corner of London was
outside of enough
. Mrs. Colindrikal-Bumbcruncher had recently snubbed Lady Maccon in the park, and frankly, Alexia couldn’t fault her for it.
    She squinted at the Colindrikal-Bumbcruncher house, trying to see if an inquisitive face at a window might have observed Conall’s transformation in Lord Akeldama’s hallway. That would require an even more profound apology, and a gift.
Fruitcake, perhaps
. Then again, perhaps the sight of Lord Maccon’s backside might warrant less of an apology, depending on Mrs. Colindrikal-Bumbcruncher’s preferences. Lady Maccon was distractedfrom this line of thinking by Professor Lyall’s shout of amazement.
    “Great ghosts, would you look at that?”
    Alexia could not recall Professor Lyall ever raising his voice. She whirled about and looked.
    Prudence had reached a good distance away, near to the end of the street, where an orange-tinted lamp cast a weak glow on the corner. There she had turned abruptly back into a squalling, naked infant. It was very embarrassing for all concerned. Particularly, if her screams of outrage were to be believed, Prudence.
    “Well, my goodness,” said Alexia. “That’s never happened before.”
    Professor Lyall became quite professorial. “Has she ever gotten that far away from one of her victims before?”
    Lady Maccon was slightly offended. “Must we use that word?
Victim
?”
    Professor Lyall gave her an expressive look.
    She acquiesced. “Quite right, it
is
unfortunately apt. Not that I know of.” She turned to look at Lord Akeldama. “My lord?”
    “My darling
sweet pea
, had I known that if we simply let her run a little distance she would work herself out, I