“Is she a dog?”
“No. Dogs mind.”
“I’m a werewolf,” Charlotte growled bluntly and with a bit of pride.
Young Victoria curiously regarded Charlotte’s long-nosed countenance and smiled. “You are very brave.”
Kate knew if it were possible, Charlotte would have blushed. Instead the werewolf gave a low keening whine and pressed her hairy head against Kate’s forearm. Kate retrieved her empty pistol and reached out her hand to Victoria. “Come with us, Your Highness.”
Victoria glanced at the dead silverback ape quivering on the shattered remains of the table. “Are there more of those?”
“Possibly. But we will deal with them.”
“I’ll eat them if there are!” Charlotte announced.
“You will not,” scolded Kate. “No eating anyone.”
Charlotte’s head drooped. “I was only joking.” She looked up with her expressive eyebrows shifting rapidly up and down. “I would never eat anyone! Unless they were really, really bad?”
“No. Not even then.”
Charlotte sighed, but then smiled a toothy grin pointing at the dead animal. “I don’t even know what that is.”
“It’s never wise to eat anything you don’t recognize,” Victoria replied.
The two girls giggled. Kate rolled her eyes at their antics. Had she ever been that young and preposterous? Holding each one’s hand, they moved to the door. “Come on, you two. And that creature is called a gorilla.”
“What’s a gorilla?” asked Charlotte.
“Like a giant monkey.”
“Are they evil?”
“Only if evil is done to them.”
The two girls quickly began to chatter away about the ape, but Kate’s attention was already focused at what they might be facing outside. She could only hope that any danger had been dealt with.
That hope was dashed as they came out onto the Broad Sanctuary, a wide thoroughfare leading from Parliament Square to the southwest, named for a place where once the unfortunate were protected from the civil power by the sacred character of the Abbey. Sadly, that was not the case today. The area was a disaster.
The late-summer day was chilly and dreary, rain had fallen heavily through the night, and dark clouds crossed the sky. Crowds had remained undeterred by drenching showers, and vast numbers had lined the streets for the coronation. Now they found themselves in the midst of terror. A mechanized ape was crushing an overturned carriage and tossing soldiers left and right. Two other gorillas lay dead, their heads crushed.
“Imogen!” Kate shouted, looking wildly about the chaotic grounds for her sister, who had been told to hold her station here. Kate had feared Imogen wasn’t ready for such a violent mission.
“Here,” answered a deep masculine voice. Kate’s manservant, Hogarth, stepped out of the shadows. In his hands he carried a massive iron and bloodied mace. Beside him stood a specter-thin figure draped in black silk mourning clothes with an opaque veil over her face that hid her peculiar eyes, one milky white and the other mechanical. Curiously, only her right arm was bared, revealing opal white skin.
“Imogen.” Kate breathed a sigh of relief. “You’re both all right?”
“Yes, Miss Kate,” Hogarth replied confidently.
Charlotte bounded over, jumping about the two of them with unrestrained energy. “I bit a big monkey!”
Imogen lifted her milky right arm, which bristled with long hairlike quills, and motioned to one of the apes lying in the gutter. Its huge body was punctured with the same filaments that graced Imogen’s arm.
“Marvelous,” Charlotte decreed. She pointed to the girl on the other side of Kate. “I met the princess! Princess, this is Imogen. She’s afflicted too.”
Kate interrupted the impromptu introductions. “Hogarth, you and Imogen take Her Highness to safety.”
“Of course,” said the manservant. “Come with me if you please, Your Highness.”
The young heir did not hesitate to go with the towering man and his mournful companion, especially since Charlotte was nodding encouragement.