Free Dark Ascension: A Generation V Novel by M.L. Brennan Page B

relocated themselves across the country to
Nevada
—”
    “Oh, my turtledove, that part is quite true.” Madeline spoke for the first time in this meeting, with breezy confidence.
    There was a long pause while we all turned our heads to stare at her. Prudence’s jaw had even managed to slacken a bit, a sight that I tried to burn into my memory for later enjoyment. Madeline glanced up from the meeting handout, her brilliant blue eyes blinking in surprise. “I never mentioned that, dear hearts? I’m sure I did.”
    “Not to my recollection, Mother,” Chivalry said carefully. “Would you mind perhaps . . . repeating . . . this information?”
    She sighed and let her binder slip down onto her lap. “How tiresome. Well, it’s quite simple, really. Maximilián closed his borders about two months ago and cleared his entire territory. That included Miami, so the skinwalkers would’ve been casting about for a new area to live.”
    We all blinked a bit. The name sounded familiar, and I asked cautiously, “Maximilián is the vampire who holds Florida and most of the Keys, right?” After spending most of my life trying to pretend that the supernatural didn’t have anything to do with me, I’d been on a steep learning curve in the last few months. I’d mostly been trying to catch up with the basic knowledge of our territory, but I’d always known that my family weren’t the only vampires in the New World. However, everyone had always downplayed the other vampires on our continent as being so beneath notice that I supposed that I’d absorbed their prejudice without really thinking it over. Certainly this was one of only a handful of times that I could even remember us mentioning one of the other vampires by name.
    “Florida, the Keys, and a small slice of southern Alabama,” Chivalry acknowledged. Then, probably because he’d gotten so used to being my walking Wikipedia over the last few months, he continued. “Maximilián came over from Europe in 1886, and Mother allowed him to establish and hold that territory.”
    “I felt terribly for the poor dear,” Madeline put in. “Really, so unprepossessing. In his late three hundreds, but so depressingly lacking in power. His original territory was in the Slovakian area of Europe—don’t even ask me what they were calling his country at the time he came begging, because the maps change so often in that area of the world that I didn’t even bother to ask—but when his father died unexpectedly, there was just no way that Maximilián was going to be able to hold his borders against the Nests around him. And it is a crowded area of the world for our kind, with plenty of other vampires who were interested in helping their offspring set up territory.”
    “Oh. That was kind of nice of you to let him have Florida,” I said.
    Prudence snorted. “Mother drew a circle on the map in a spot where she had no intention of ever going to, was far enough away from us that she couldn’t imagine him ever being a bother, and where she couldn’t conceive of anything of real value ever emerging.”
    “He hasn’t done too badly,” Chivalry said. “I mean, that deal he made with Walt Disney certainly worked out well. Plus, air-conditioning really turned things around down there.”
    I held up a hand before they got started on that tangent. The delights of climate-controlled living were a favorite conversational topic with my family, challenged only by the thrills of window screens and refrigerators. I’d heard more maggoty food stories than anyone outside the range of a Ken Burns special. “Okay, with background now thoroughly established, why would this guy suddenly clear his territory?”
    “Living the dream?” Prudence muttered.
    “Be serious,” Chivalry chided her. “Fort has actually brought up a decent point.”
    “It’s because he Brooded his first offspring,” Madeline said absently as she adjusted her blankets and reached for her cup of tea. At our