Deathstalker 04 - Deathstalker Honor

just ask you to deal with Finlay as a price for their support.”
    “Deal with Finlay? What the hell could I do? He’s not going to listen to anything I might say, and even if he did accept me as head of the Clan, I doubt very much he’d accept my authority over him. And I am certainly not stupid enough to try to deal with him myself. Owen Deathstalker might be able to handle him, or Kid Death, but I wouldn’t last five minutes against him.” “There are ways,” said Adrienne, not looking at him. “In the end, all that matters is the good of the Clan. One man can’t be allowed to undermine everything we’re hoping to achieve.”
    “For God’s sake, Adrienne, he’s your husband. The father of your children. Don’t you have any feelings for him?”
    “I don’t know him anymore. Sometimes I wonder if I ever did.”
    Robert Campbell sat extremely upright on an antique chair, holding a full cup of tea in one hand and a large chocolate pastry on a plate in the other, and wondered how the hell he was supposed to get either
    one of them anywhere near his mouth without losing the other. Also, his new coat was uncomfortably tight across the shoulders, his cravat was half strangling him, and his trousers were pinching him in places he didn’t even know he had. All in all, this was shaping up to be one hell of a first social call.
    His hostess, Constance Wolfe, had the top floor in Tower Wolfe all to herself, and had outfitted it to her personal taste. Which meant thick rugs on the floor, the very latest fashions in furniture, and stuffed, fluffy animals lying everywhere there was a space. Robert felt he could have coped with all that. It was the frankly pornographic murals on the walls that kept throwing him. He’d never seen anything like some of them, and he’d been in the Navy for years. He also had a terrible suspicion that Constance had posed for at least three of them. In which case, she was not only very beautiful but incredibly limber as well. She looked very smart in black, still in mourning for her husband, and every inch the head of her Clan. Robert stared determinedly down at his tea and pastry, and tried to beam telepathic appeals for help to Baxter, before remembering that Constance had banished him from the room, along with all her servants, so he and Constance could speak privately. He hoped she wasn’t going to jump on him. He’d always been rather shy about such things.
    There’d been a lot of guards too, but Constance had dismissed them too as a sign of good faith. The two of them were alone together. Robert supposed he ought to get a few guards himself, if only for show.
    Constance leaned forward in her chair facing him, and he jumped slightly in spite of himself. Tea jumped out of his cup and into the saucer.
    “You don’t have to eat the pastry if you don’t want it,” said Constance, smiling. “Or drink the tea. One of the first things you have to learn in social gatherings is the art of saying no gracefully. Otherwise they’ll load you down with food till your arms ache. People do so love to show off their chefs.” Robert smiled gratefully, looked around for a nearby table or empty surface, realized there wasn’t one, and finally settled for putting cup and plate down on the floor beside his chair. He straightened up, tried surreptitiously to ease his coat and trousers without much success, and smiled slightly desperately at Constance.
    “I like your room. It’s very… comfortable.”
    “One of the few joys of living alone is that you don’t have to compromise on your personal ideas of comfort,” said Constance. “Jacob would have had a fit if I’d done this to his living room while he was still alive. But after he died, I got rid of most of his things as quickly as was decent. Otherwise, everything I saw would have reminded me of him. So I replaced it all with new things, to remind me that I had to make a new life without him. All I kept were a few portraits of him. I keep them in my bedroom, next to my bed, so his face can be the last thing I see at night. That way sometimes I get to dream of him. He was the only man I ever loved, you see, and we only had such a short time together. You understand.
    You lost someone too, didn’t you?”
    “Yes,” said Robert. “I understand.”
    “His ghost came back to me once,” said Constance, her voice calm and even. “At Court. But it was just a Ghost Warrior. Just his body. Not my Jacob. Poor Daniel went off looking