Immortals After Dark 12 - Lothaire

trusted with his Endgame. She’d foreseen his Bride and had told him how to find her. She’d made sure Elizabeth’s body was safeguarded during her imprisonment.
    For years, Hag had guarded his secrets. . . .
    Her home’s shutters were closed against the last of the day’s sun. The oracle had been expecting him.
    As Elizabeth surveyed the open living and cooking areas, Lothaire tried to see this place through her eyes.
    Bat wings and skeins of herbs hung from the ceiling to dry. Animal carcasses lay on a butcher block in various states of slaughter.
    Hag’s bubbling concoctions brewed on a modern gas stove, while lengthy work benches held an assortment of flasks on burners.
    Her collection of demon skulls decorated a top shelf—they looked human except for the protruding horns and fangs. Ghoul heads lined another shelf, their putrid green faces frozen in horror. Preserved centaur phalli filled jars.
    “Hag,” he called. The oracle was actually a young-looking fey who’d been transformed into a powerless crone for a few centuries before recently returning to her true form—that of a comely, pointed-eared brunette.
    Balery was her real name, but he liked Hag better. Lothaire wanted to remind the fey of her be-croned past as often as possible.
    Because he was the one who’d saved her from it. Another name in my book.
    Hag emerged from a back room. “Lothaire, I can’t say this is a surprise.” She wiped her blood-soaked hands on a stained apron.
    Though she wore modern clothes under the apron—a short skirt, boots, a T-shirt—she had a decidedly un modern black pouch of seer bones affixed to her belt.
    Aside from her talents as an oracle—which had weakened from involuntary disuse—Hag was also a concoctioness, specializing in poisons and potions.
    Elizabeth gaped at the fey’s bloody hands, sidling closer to him as if for protection. The vampire who intended to destroy her very soul.
    He heard her whispering to herself, “Open mind, open mind,” and thought she had her finger curled through one of his belt loops.
    “Staying close to the bloodsucker now?” Elizabeth’s fear was so mortal, so unqueenly . Another example of how inferior she was to courageous Saroya.
    Elizabeth’s attempted blaze of glory five years ago? Her joining him in the shadows earlier? Mere feeblemindedness, Lothaire decided.
    “At present, I’m figuring you’re the lesser of two evils.”
    He gave a mirthless laugh. “You couldn’t be more mistaken.”
    “She’s the hag ?” Elizabeth murmured. “She doesn’t look like one. Does she turn into one at night or something?”
    Hag sighed at her ignorance. In a disdainful tone, she said, “And you brought human company.”
    “My enemies already know she’s in my keeping.”
    “Within mere hours?”
    “Nïx.” He didn’t need to say more.
    “We should update our encryption keys every hour.”
    He nodded.
    The fey circled Elizabeth, her pointed ears twitching. “She’s even prettier than in my visions.”
    “Did you expect anything less from my Bride?”
    “Visions?” Elizabeth’s timid stance disappeared, and she pushed away from him to glare at Hag. “You’re the one who told this freak how to find me?”
    Hag ignored her as she might a yapping dog. “Her body will breed well, even after you turn her,” she remarked to Lothaire.
    He’d been so preoccupied with the act of breeding that he’d never thought about the result.
    What would his offspring be like, when gotten upon this body? Though vampires reproduced sparingly, he pictured numerous towheaded children with determined gray eyes. “I’ll require many heirs.”
    Comprehension—and horror—dawned in Elizabeth’s expression.
    How bizarre to realize that one’s body would go on, Lothaire mused, would produce young for others.
    “ My children.” Elizabeth balled her fists. “Raised by you and your disgusting bitch.” If she struck him as she so longed to do, she’d break the bones in her hand.
    When Hag gave an assessing squeeze of Elizabeth’s hip, the girl whirledaround, swinging one of those fists. He traced between them, catching it with his palm. “Never touch this fey. Never. Her skin is poisonous.”
    Hag was a Venefican , a poisoned lady. As a girl, she’d been fed small amounts of poison until her skin had grown permanently lethal. She’d also been trained as a courtesan—put those traits together, and she was a perfect weapon.
    “And before you get any suicidal