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“I see. Maybe she should call back when she feels better.”
He lowered his voice, whispering quickly. “Is it true that Jeanne Dauphine is dead?”
“Yes.”
“Oh dear. Yes, Her Majesty will call you back at a more suitable time. Unless you… uh… I mean…”
I decided to put the poor man out of his misery. He was Kevin’s grandfather after all. “I have no intention of coming to Rome any time soon.”
“Of course, of course. It’s just… You see…”
I sighed. “If Marne Ceresa hasn’t committed any crimes for which she needs to be penitent, then she has nothing to worry about.”
Silence.
That’s what I fucking thought. No fucking surprise there.
I made my voice as pleasant as possible. “As I said, Byrnes, I have no immediate plans to come to Rome. Now if you’ll forgive me, we have a lot of business to discuss here.”
Besides, if I really wanted to kill her…
I wouldn’t have to go to Rome to do so. Though I didn’t admit that to her consiliarius.
I hung up and gave the phone back to Kevin.
“I’m so sorry, Your Majesty.”
I gave him a wry smile. “Not your fault at all. If Rome tries to call us again in the next twenty-four hours, our phones aren’t working. Agreed?”
“Agreed,” Kevin and Gina said at the same time.
The other two Skolos queens stood on the hill overlooking the beach, waiting for me to join them. Our Blood were busy cleaning up the many Gorgos bodies. Without my bonds, I hadn’t been able to see what happened outside the nest while we were bound to the table, but Rik had given me a quick rundown. Thanks to Huitzilopochtli, my Blood had known something was seriously wrong with the Gorgos Blood, even though they didn’t smell like taint.
Itztli had been fully prepared to take them all on single handedly.
But there hadn’t been a fight. At all.
The Dauphine hadn’t given a shit about them. She’d left them standing frozen, unable to move. Even after she died, they’d stood frozen like statues, waiting to fall to our blades.
“Evidently, most of them really were Basilia’s Blood,” Undina said, shaking her head. “Do you know how the Dauphine controlled them?”
I didn’t care to explain why the Aztec god of sun and war had given my Blood intel, so I simply said, “When I tried to heal Thierry, I found giant black eel-like things in him.” They still made me shudder. “The first thing he asked me was if I’d gotten the leeches out.”
“No eel or leech would have done such a thing,” Undina replied. “No natural animal wishes to ruin and rot a body like that. Even maggots serve a purpose, but these… things… don’t even decompose correctly.”
Guillaume used the curved, heavy kukri to hack another head off and tossed it into a burning pile that Frank blasted with his flamethrower. Sure, the dragon or phoenix could have done the job, but he loved having something to do.
Luckily for me, the leech eels the Dauphine had planted in them were still localized in their brains, which was probably why Huitzilopochtli had told Itztli we needed to burn the heads. At least I didn’t have to go around pulling stuck spirits out of all the corpses. The thought of this nasty power living inside of me made me want to hurl.
“You could have taken the Speaker position,” Undina said without looking at me.
I shrugged. “I’m Triskeles. Skolos is your table. I just helped you complete it.”
“We should meet regularly to discuss Triune business. All Triune business.”
“I agree.” I nodded. “I’d also like to learn more about the Screaming Madness you mentioned once before. None of my Blood know what that is.”
“I don’t know much more than them, but I’ll tell you what I know.”
