There just had to be an outside door through here. The queen wouldn't leave herself bottled up. She'd have a way to get outside. And if I was remembering the orientation of the building, I needed to walk straight ahead to reach the correct wall.
I gathered myself and decided I'd just stride right on through. No more of this skulking around the wall. The hell with it.
And to my surprise, it worked, up to a point. I went through one room - a sitting room, I figured - before I ended up in what must have been the queen's bedroom. A whisper of movement in the room retriggered my fear switch, and I fumbled along the wall for the light. When I flipped it, I found I was in the room with Peter Threadgill. He was facing Andre. A bed was between them, and on the bed was the queen, who had been badly wounded. Andre didn't have his sword, but then neither did Peter Threadgill. Andre did have a gun, and when I turned on the light, he shot the king right in the face. Twice.
There was a door beyond the body of Peter Threadgill. It had to lead to the grounds. I began to sidle around the room, my back pressed against the wall. No one paid a bit of attention to me.
"Andre, if you kill him," the queen said quite calmly, "I'll have to pay a huge fine." She had a hand pressed to her side, and her beautiful orange dress was dark and wet with her blood.
"But wouldn't it be worth it, lady?"
There was a thoughtful silence on the queen's part, while I unlocked about six locks.
"On the whole, yes," Sophie-Anne said. "After all, money isn't everything."
"Oh, good" Andre said happily, and raised the gun. He had a stake in the other hand, I saw. I didn't stick around to see how Andre did the deed.
I set off across the lawn in my green evening shoes. Amazingly, the evening shoes were still intact. In fact, they were in better shape than my ankle, which Jade Flower had hurt pretty badly. I was limping by the time I'd taken ten steps. "Watch out for the lion," called the queen, and I looked behind me to see that Andre was carrying her out of the building. I wondered whose side the lion was on.
Then the big cat appeared right in front of me. One minute my escape route was clear, and the next it was filled by a lion. The outside security lights were off, and in the moonlight the beast looked so beautiful and so deadly that fear pulled the air right out of my lungs.
The lion made a low, guttural sound.
"Go away," I said. I had absolutely nothing to fight a lion with, and I was at the end of my rope. "Go away!" I yelled. "Get out of here!"
And it slunk into the bushes.
I don't think that is typical lion behavior. Maybe it smelled the tiger coming, because a second or two later, Quinn appeared, moving like a huge silent dream across the grass. Quinn rubbed his big head against me, and we went over to the wall together. Andre laid down his queen and leaped up on top with grace and ease. For his queen, he pulled apart the razor wire with hands just barely cushioned with his torn coat. Then down he came and carefully lifted Sophie-Anne. He gathered himself and cleared the wall in a bound.
"Well, I can't do that," I said, and even to my own ears, I sounded grumpy. "Can I stand on your back? I'll take my heels off." Quinn snugged up to the wall, and I ran my arm through the sandal straps. I didn't want to hurt the tiger by putting a lot of weight on his back, but I also wanted to get out of there more than I've wanted anything, just about. So, trying to think light thoughts, I balanced on the tiger's back and managed to pull myself, finally, to the top of the wall. I looked down, and it seemed like a very long way to the sidewalk.
After all I'd faced this evening, it seemed stupid to balk at falling a few feet. But I sat on the wall, telling myself I was an idiot, for several long moments. Then I managed to flip over onto my stomach, let myself down as far as I could reach, and said out loud, "One, two, three!" Then I fell.
For a couple of minutes I just lay there, stunned at how the evening had turned out.
Here I was, lying on a sidewalk in historical New Orleans, with my boobs hanging out of my dress, my hair coming down, my sandals on my arm, and a large tiger licking my face. Quinn had bounded over with relative ease.
"Do you think it would be better to walk back as a tiger, or as a large naked man?" I asked the tiger. "Because either way, you might attract some attention. I think you stand a better chance of getting shot if you're a tiger, myself."
"That will not be necessary," said a voice, and Andre loomed above me. "I am here with the queen in her car, and we will take you where you need to go."
"That's mighty nice of you," I said, as Quinn began to change back.
"Her Majesty feels that she owes you," Andre said.
"I don't see it that way," I said. Why was I being so frank, now? Couldn't I just keep my mouth shut? "After all, if I hadn't found the bracelet and given it back, the king would have..."
"Started the war tonight anyway," Andre said, helping me to my feet. He reached out and quite impersonally pushed my right breast under the scanty lime-green fabric. "He would have accused the queen of breaking her side of the contract, which held that all gifts must be held in honor as tokens of the marriage. He would have brought suit against the queen, and she would have lost almost everything and been dishonored. He was ready to go either way, but when the queen was wearing the second bracelet, he had to go with violence. Ra Shawn set it off by beheading Wybert for bumping against him." Ra Shawn had been Dreadlock's name, I assumed.
I wasn't sure I got all that, but I was equally sure Quinn could explain it to me at a time when I had more brain cells to spare for the information.
"He was so disappointed when he saw she had the bracelet! And it was the right one!" Andre said merrily. He was turning into a babbling brook, that Andre. He helped me into the car. "Where was it?" asked the queen, who was stretched across one of the seats. Her bleeding had stopped, and only the way she was holding her lips indicated what pain she was in.
"It was in the can of coffee that looked sealed," I said. "Hadley was real good with arts and crafts, and she'd opened the can real carefully, popped the bracelet inside, and resealed it with a glue gun." There was a lot more to explain, about Mr. Cataliades and Gladiola and Jade Flower, but I was too tired to volunteer information.
"How'd you get it past the search?" the queen asked. "I'm sure the searchers were checking for it."
"I had the bracelet part on under my bandage," I said. "The diamond stood out too far, though, so I had to prize it out. I put it in a tampon holder. The vampire who did the searching didn't think of pulling out the tampon, and she didn't really know how it was supposed to look, since she hadn't had a period in centuries."