My Wicked Marquess by Gaelen Foley Page B

open ahead with a mournful creak, and there stood Mr. Gray, who had been the butler at Dante House for time immemorial.
    The tall, gaunt butler—who looked like something the resurrection men had dug up—had always possessed uncanny timing. Standing aside, he bowed gravely as Max strode in.
    â€œGood evening, Marquess.”
    â€œEvening, Gray.” He stepped into the foyer. “I understand we have cause tonight for celebration.”
    â€œIndubitably, sir.” Gray closed the door behind Max just as a few of the Order’s hellhounds came bounding forth to greet him.
    Great black-and-tan dogs of German origin, tamed demons, all gleaming fangs, sleek speed, and rangy motion, they danced around Max, tails wagging, their big canine grins at odds with their fierce looks and spiked collars. “Sit!” Max held up his hand to silence their raucous greeting.
    The guard dogs immediately dropped to their haunches. One large pup-in-training licked its nose nervously and stared at him with a small whine. “Good boy.” Max gave the dog a pat on the head just as Virgil joined them.
    To this day, Max was not sure if that was really his handler’s name.
    The gruff, giant Highlander had always filled Max with a certain degree of awe, ever since that day so long ago when Virgil had arrived at the Rotherstones’ dilapidated country house in his role as Seeker.
    The first time Max had met him, himself only a boy, Virgil had been wearing the kilt of his clan. Though he wore ordinary clothes in Town, he still had the air of a mighty laird. In his fifties now, he had a good deal of gray mixed in with the reddish-gold of his wild hair. His impressive orange mustache, which Max had so envied as a lad, was shot through with salt-and-pepper grays. But he was still formidable, a grizzled warrior of a man, with all the scars to prove his lifelong loyalty to the Order.
    Rather than mellowing him, the years had only seemedto harden the Scot. After thirty-five years spent in the Order’s struggle against their Promethean enemies—slightly more time than Max had even been alive—Virgil was now the head of the Order in London. Who Virgil’s superiors in the government were, that was information Max was not privy to.
    As the Link for his team, however, he knew of other cells in great cities throughout the Continent, wherever the Promethean Council had been gaining too much sway.
    To be sure, the Promethean Council had had tentacles in every court in Europe. They planned not in years, but in decades, in centuries, driven by their endless lust for power over mankind. From time to time, they rose to threaten humanity, but never before in all their history had the Prometheans come so close to their aims as they had in the past twenty years, by infiltrating the structure of empire Napoleon had built.
    Parasites that they were, it was their way was to creep in unobtrusively, gaining the trust of the powerful by degrees, extending their own dark influence ever deeper in the guise of trusted advisors, seasoned generals, longtime friends; patiently, quietly, always deniably, they spread their corruption, taking over slowly from the inside like a cancerous disease.
    This time, they might have succeeded. But when Napoleon was finally vanquished at Waterloo about three months ago, the Promethean overlords’ fondest dreams of destiny had also come crashing down.
    If Napoleon had won that battle, Max mused, the future of the world would have looked very different. But Bonaparte had been defeated, and now the nations of the earth might know another fifty years of rest before the Promethean enemy rose again in some new, ruthless incarnation.
    Of course, the Council had succeeded in delivering one last, cruel parting blow before going down in defeat.
    A Promethean spy had delivered false news to London about the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo. In the early morning hours, someone had spread the word that