Mabel Dair ran to her mistress, knelt at her feet, and buried her face in the vampire’s full skirts. Her hands were trembling where they gripped the fine taffeta material.

Alexia was tempted to clap. Spectacular performance!

The queen set one perfect white hand atop Miss Dair’s cascading blond curls and looked to her hive. “Dr. Caedes, report! What is the octomaton’s armament? Is it standard to the earlier model?”

“No, my queen, it seems to have been modified.”

“Fire?”

“Yes, but only one tentacle. And the customary wooden blades. But a third seems to be able to shoot stakes. And the fourth has bullets.”

“Go on. That’s only four.”

“It hasn’t yet used any of the others yet.”

“If this is Madame Lefoux we are dealing with, she’ll have armed every single tentacle with something deadly. That’s how she thinks.”

Alexia couldn’t help but agree. Genevieve was like that about her gadgets—the more uses the better.

The wall on the opposite side of the room shook. They heard a horrible, wrenching, tearing, crashing noise. It was the sound of metal and wood and brick colliding. The entire wall before them was ripped asunder. Once the dust settled, the domed head of the octomaton became visible, balanced atop its many tentacles. The creature scrabbled for purchase within the rubble of what had once been one of London’s most stylish residences. The silver light of the moon and the bright gas of the streetlamps lit up the gleaming metal hide of the mechanical creature. Alexia could just see the fleeing forms of the countess’s party guests in the street below.

Alexia raised her parasol and stood. She pointed the frilly accessory at the octomaton accusingly. “Genevieve, I do hope you didn’t kill anyone.”

But if Madame Lefoux was in there, guiding the creature, she did not acknowledge Lady Maccon. She had one intended target and one target only—Countess Nadasdy.

A gigantic tentacle wormed its way up into the room and hit out at the vampire queen, trying to crush her. Alexia preferred to lead with an airborne offensive, but Madame Lefoux was opting for hand-to-hand—or was that hand-to-tentacle?—combat. Possibly to protect as many innocents as she could.

The queen, supernatural in speed and cunning, simply dodged out of the way of the massive metal thing. But she was well and truly trapped, for there were no other doors out of that room, and half of her house was now destroyed.

Felicity let out another scream and then did the most sensible thing she could do under the circumstances—she fainted. At which point, everyone else did an equally sensible thing and ignored her.

Lord Ambrose charged. Alexia had no idea what he intended to do or how he intended to do it, but he seemed bent on something. He leaped, impossibly fast and high, landing atop the head of the creature, where he began trying to scrabble for a way inside. Ah, going for the brains of the operation.

Lady Maccon figured that was a pretty intelligent plan, but the vampire was thwarted in his attempts to pull off the hatch of the dome. He tried to punch through the helmetlike mantle, but Madame Lefoux was a master worker in such matters. The head was practically seamless, with no possible way of getting in from the outside, not even for a vampire. She had given herself slits to see out of, but those slits were just big enough to peer through; they were not sufficiently large for a vampire to get his fingers inside and pry open the casing.