Semua Bab Alpha VS Omega' Twin VS Twin (A Dark Werewolf Romance): Bab 201 - Bab 210

POV: Dante | London, Rookeries approachI find London the way I find everything, which is by following a thread until it runs out and then finding the next thread, and the thread that led me here started in Rome eight months ago when a contact in the Vatican's supernatural registry mentioned, in passing, that a dhampir named Valentina Corvino had been flagged in the British Parliament's watch list.Which was impossible, because Valentina Corvino died six years ago in a facility fire outside Palermo that I attended the aftermath of and which I have been living with the specific weight of ever since.So either my contact was wrong, which he has never been in the fourteen years I have worked with him, or the fire was not what it appeared to be, which means six years of grief has been sitting on top of a lie, which is a different kind of weight entirely.I am twenty-five years old and I have been a vampire hunter since I was sixteen, trained by the same network that trained Valentina befo

POV: Mordaunt | Kensington estate, war councilThe estate has been in my family for two hundred and forty years and in that time it has hosted the kinds of meetings that do not appear in any official record and which have shaped the direction of British supernatural governance more reliably than any official session of Parliament, because official sessions are theater and the rooms in this estate are where the actual decisions happen.Tonight the actual decision is about survival.I sit at the head of the table in my study, which has the quality all rooms in this house have, the quality of permanence accumulated through decades of careful maintenance, and I look at the seven people I have called here and I understand, with the specific clarity of someone who has been in power for a long time and who can read the room, that the ground has shifted significantly and that the ground is going to shift further.The foreign invasion is three days away. The Covenant forces and the American pa

POV: Mordaunt | Parliament chambers, breakfast sessionThe breakfast before a trial is a Parliamentary tradition that dates back four hundred years and which has the specific quality of all very old traditions, which is that it continues because it has always continued, the original purpose having been absorbed into ritual so thoroughly that the ritual is now the purpose.In its original form the breakfast was practical: ancient vampires who had traveled to Parliament from distant territories required feeding and rest before conducting business. The feeding was discreet, the thralls trained and well-compensated, the blood delivered at the correct temperature in the correct vessels. The rest was less literal for vampires than it would be for humans but the principle was the same, the need for something that looked like ordinary life before conducting something that was not.Today the breakfast is theater. Twelve Ancients in a room with food most of them do not eat, performing civility

POV: Callum | The Feral Den, war roomTwo hours.Isolde's message arrives through a chain of three people and it is eleven words and it is the most important eleven words I have received in three years and I stand in the war room with Tom and Isla and Cormac and Dante and I read it aloud once and then I put it on the table and I look at the people around it.Dante has been in London for three days and he has the quality of someone who has compressed three days of context into the focused operational understanding of a trained hunter, which is to say he is already thinking about this in the same terms the rest of us are thinking about it, which is as a problem with a solution we have not yet found."Parliament building," I say. "Execution at noon. Two-hour delay gives us until two o'clock. What do we know about the building?"Tom has been building the file for six hours. He puts it on the table beside the message. "Three entrances. Main, service, and the underground access which Mordau

POV: Administrator Crane | Parliament processing officeMy name is Gerald Crane and I have been the Parliamentary Processing Administrator for eleven years and in those eleven years I have developed a philosophy about my work which is that the work is the work and the people it concerns are not my business, because the moment you make the people your business in a job like mine you have introduced a variable that the job cannot accommodate.The work is documentation. Summons processed, trials scheduled, verdicts recorded, sentences executed. All of it moves through my office in the form of paperwork and all of the paperwork moves through my office in the form of procedure, and procedure is the thing that allows eleven years of this work to be done without what I understand to be the alternative, which is thinking about each individual case as though it concerns an individual, which it does, technically, but which cannot be accommodated at the processing level without the whole system