“You will always have a place here. And it’s not like you’ll be far away. Arland pops over any time he pleases. If you give Arland a chance, he will take care of you and of her. You need someone to take care of you, Maud, whether you want to admit it or not.”

“I want more than that.” She bit her lip.

“I know.” I had no questions as to why Arland threw himself at that flower. He did it for me and Sean and all the others, but most of all he did it for Maud and Helen.

Maud stared away. I glanced in the direction of her gaze and saw Arland. He was looking back at her, and his eyes were warm and wistful. He never looked at me like that.

“It’s going to be difficult,” she said. “I’ll be an outcast again. I bring no money, no alliances, and no benefits. Only me and Helen. It would be Melizard all over again, with having to prove my worth. His family never did accept me. It would take a lot of work to win over another vampire House.”

“You will roll over them like a bulldozer. By the end of this year, they will be eating out of your hand. Lord Soren is already making plans.”

“What? How do you know?”

I thought of telling her about our conversation on the subject of family military service and genetic abnormalities and decided it would be more fun to leave it a surprise. “Just a feeling I have.”

She squinted at me. “What are you not telling me?”

“You should go and try it,” I told her. “Gertrude Hunt isn’t going anywhere. You can always come back. Once I figure out where to start looking for Mom and Dad, I’ll reach out.”

Her face turned grim. “Sebastien North.”

“Yes.”

“Do you know who that it? What that is?”

I shook my head. “No. But I will find out.”

“Maybe I’ll track down Klaus,” Maud said. “He should be told.”

“Good luck,” I told her. “I’ve tried. If you find him, punch him for me for disappearing.”

She hugged me. “I’m off to shop.”

“Go!” I told her. “Time is short. Tomorrow is Christmas Day.”

She grinned and took off.

A presence entered the inn. A moment later Tony stumbled into the ballroom, his face worried. “Did I miss dinner?”

“No.” I grinned at him. “An ad-hal, huh?”

He shrugged. “Sorry about that. You know how it is. We can do nothing without a directive from the Assembly. I would’ve come sooner if they’d let me.”

“Thank you for showing up.”

He sighed. “The Hiru attained space flight long before the Draziri. The best we can determine is that the Hiru, in their exploration of the galaxy, stopped on the Draziri planet. Somehow the early Draziri saw them in their natural form. Concerned that they were unduly influencing an emerging civilization, the Hiru had withdrawn from the Draziri planet. They are pacifists by nature and 99.999% of the planets in our galaxy are lethal to them. They couldn’t survive without their suits, which they hate, so there was no reason for them to stay. But the Draziri had never forgotten them. Over the years, the Draziri developed their religion right along the lines of the typical religions of early emerging civilizations: a creator god who sits in judgment and sends people to heaven or hell and they modeled this god on the image of the Hiru, a beautiful being who was a legend. The religion grew into a planetwide theocracy.”

“Then the Draziri developed space flight and stumbled on the Hiru,” I guessed. “Which proved that their religion was a lie. There was no creator god. There was just an alien species.”

“If that fact became public, their entire social structure would have collapsed,” Tony said.

“And the Draziri priests wanted to keep their power.”

“That too. They destroyed the planet before the general population could learn that the Hiru existed and then declared a holy extermination of all Hiru. At first, the Hiru didn’t understand why, then when they did finally figure it out, some committed suicide to show the Draziri who they were killing. When they succeeded, the temple guards would destroy everyone who witnessed the Hiru’s true form and then blame the deaths on the Hiru. People do horrible things in the name of keeping things just the way they are.”

“Where did you take Mrak?”

“There is a little planet in the corner of the galaxy,” he said. “Its sun is dying.”

“I thought suns took billions of years to die.”

“Not this one. It and the entire star system are slowly transitioning out of our dimension. The change has killed most of the biosphere and now the planet has entered the in-between stage, where it exists neither in our space-time nor in the new one. It’s a ghost of a planet. I left him there. He no longer needs to eat or to breathe. He can’t kill himself. All he can do is exist alone among the barren rocks on the shore of an empty ocean, watching the sun grow dimmer every day.”

I shivered. “How long…”

“Not too long. Maybe another twenty years or so. A mind can only take so much.”

“What then? Will he just sit in the dark forever?”

“No. I will get him before the sun dies and end it. If he goes mad before then, I’ll end it sooner. Imprisoning a mad creature would be cruel.”

And that’s why seeing an ad-hal was never a good thing. I had to change the subject.

“Do you know anything about Sebastien North?”