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"Wel , Lord Akeldama? You do know, don’t you? Otherwise none of this would have happened"

"You o back to Roman times, and there is mention of only one similar child"

"Go on"

"And, of course, in this case she was the child of a soul-sucker and a vampire--not a olf"

Professor Lyal chewed his lip How could the howlers not have known of this? They were the keepers of history; they were supposed to know about everything

"Go on!"

"The kindest e had for that creature was soul-stealer"

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Ladybugs to the Rescue

Alexia fought hard It took so to convince the Gerht kind of logic

"I am bored"

"This does not troublewith, you realize?"

"Ya, so?"

"I believe ityou and the Templars have missed"

No response

"I can read Latin"

He pressed down on her stomach

"Can you? My, my, you are well educated"

"For a female?"

"For a soul ess Templar records hold that the devil spawn are not ht spot so"

The little German pul ed out an ear tube from his case and listened to her bel y attentively

"I a you, I have excel ent research skil s"

"Wil it keep you quiet?"

Alexia nodded enthusiastical y

"I shal see what I can do, ya?"

Later that day, two nervous young Te scrol s and a bucket of lead tablets They must have been under orders to oversee the security of these ite, they locked the cel door and then sat--on the floor, s, and proceeded to embroider red crosses onto handkerchiefs while she read Alexia wondered if this were some kind of punishment, or if embroidery hat the Teeneral prevalence of embroidered red crosses everywhere Lord Akeldama, of course, had warned her Sil y to realize it now that it was far too late

She bypassed the scrol s in favor of thelead squares They had Latin incised into them and were, she believed, curse tablets Her Latin was rather rusty, and she could have used a vocabulary reference book of soed to decipher the first tablet after some time and the others cahosts and were designed to either curse sohost or exorcize a poltergeist that was already haunting a house Alexia surmised that the tablets, in either case, would be entirely ineffective, but there certainly were a large nue-Wilsdorf entered her cel with a new battery of tests

"Ah," she said, "Good afternoon Thank you for arranging for me to look at this remarkable col ection I did not realize curse tablets were so focused on the supernatural I had read that they cal ed upon the wrath of iods, but not the real supernatural Very interesting, indeed"

"Anything useful, Fee "So far, they al have to do with hauntings

Very concerned with ghosts, the Romans"

"Mmm Ya I had read of this inthe next tablet

Having col ected a sample of her blood, the German abandoned her onceTe the next tablet, Alexia knew she wasn’t going to tel Mr Lange-Wilsdorf about it It was a smal one, and the boxy Latin letters were exceptional y tiny and painful y neat, covering both sides Where al the previous tablets had been dedicated to daemons or to the spirits of the netherworld, this one was markedly different

"I cal upon you, Stalker of Skins and Stealer of Souls, child of a Breaker of Curses, whoever you are, and ask that froht, from this moment, you steal from and weaken the vampire Primulus of Carisius I hand over to you, if you have any power, this Sucker of Blood, for only you may take what he values most Stealer of Souls, I consecrate to you his co, his speed, his breath, his fangs, his grip, his power, his soul Stealer of Souls, if I see hi away in his human skin, I swear I wil offer a sacrifice to you every year"

Alexia surmised that the term "Breaker of Curses" must correlate to the olf moniker for a preternatural, "curse-breaker," whichupon the child of a preternatural for aid It was the first mention she had yet run across, however minor, of either soul ess or a child of a soul ess She placed a hand upon her stomach and looked down at it "Wel , hel o there, little Stalker of Skins" She felt a brief fluttering inside her wo stil ed "I see,it over again, wishing it ive her more of a clue as to what such a creature could do and how it came into existence She supposed it was possible that this being was just as nonexistent as the gods of the netherworld that the other tablets cal ed upon Then again, it could be as real as the ghosts or vaainst It e to have lived in, so ful of superstition and y, to be ruled by the Caesar’s e line of incestuous vampires