Demon's Curse (Imnada Brotherhood) (10 page)

He’d fucking shifted!

Mac’s heart pounded. His skin going hot, then cold, then hot all over again. The blasted interfering woman must have slipped him a triple dose of laudanum when he wasn’t looking. Clamping down on the terror igniting his blood, he listened for telltale screams or shouts or the pounding of boots up the stairs. Nothing. The house slept. The neighborhood remained silent. None had seen. None knew. Yet.

He stalked the room as he sought a way out of the trap closing around him. The mantel clock read three. If none in the household had looked in on him yet, it was doubtful whether they’d check on him now. Just a few more hours until dawn, and he’d be out of danger. One hundred and eighty minutes. Ten thousand eight hundred seconds.

He started counting. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .

A stirring of the air. A shush of a slipper against carpet. The orange spice of familiar perfume.

Bianca.

Events spun from bad to worse to infinitely horrible in the space of seconds. Drawing back into the darkest corner of the room, he curled into the shadows, his unblinking stare focused on the door, claws nervously extending and retracting, breath stilled in his chest.

The door opened, the light from her candle like a flickering spear across the floor, pointing to his hiding place. Her hair hung like a rippling silver wave on either side of her face, her robe loose to reveal the translucent linen of her nightgown.

She hovered within the doorway for what seemed an eternity. Mac’s entire body crackled with unbearable
tension. Every ache and pain was magnified to an agony. Then, as silently as she’d come, she pulled the door closed, leaving him once more alone in the dark with naught but bitter regrets and lonely hours for company.

Five . . . six . . . seven . . . eight . . .

*   *   *

Alonzo was there to hand Renata out of the carriage.

Stepping onto the flagway, she placed her gloved hand in his, pulling her shawl close around her shoulders against the pervasive dampness in the air. The flambeaux placed on either side of the entryway flickered low, and already a smear of gray across the sky signaled the coming dawn, but Renata’s fatigue lifted as she shook off the hours spent flitting between Society entertainments on Froissart’s arm.

“I have news,” Alonzo said quietly.

A footman hovering over him with an umbrella, Froissart pulled his bulk free of the carriage, grumbling over the pains in his head, his heavy losses at cards, the poor state of the London streets, and the foul English weather.

“Come inside and have your man fix you a cup of milk with a dose of laudanum to help you sleep,” Renata instructed over her shoulder to her husband before hissing under her breath, “Where have you been, Alonzo? It’s been days without word.”

Froissart spotted Alonzo, his face sharpening like a ferret’s. “What’s your cousin doing here? I don’t like him skulking around.”

Renata offered her husband a pouty frown, sliding close against him, reaching with just the lightest of mental touches to guide his mind where she wanted it.
“He’s not my cousin,
ma puce,
but he is the only family I have left. The only connection to my lost home. You wouldn’t send him away.”

“Hmph,” he snorted. “Let him stay if he amuses you. Surprised he’s here in the first place. Did that opera dancer in Soho toss him out on his ear? An expensive piece, that one.”

“I neither know nor care about his living arrangements or his . . . sexual appetites.”

“No? Maybe that was Monsieur Gerrard who told me. I can’t remember. Too much to drink, and my head hurts,” he complained, Alonzo already dismissed from his thoughts.

Successful in turning Froissart’s attentions aside, Renata eased free of his mind as they climbed the steps to the door, a servant waiting to swing it open before them. Another to take her wrap and muff. A third to hurry forward and assist Émile.

“Stop your badgering,” Froissart shouted. “Renata! Tell these fools to stop gabbling about me like a pack of old women.”

Froissart’s valet hurried in from the kitchen with a glass upon a tray, handing it over with a small bow. Froissart, loosening his cravat, tossed back the spiked milk with a heavy sigh and a belch.

In the confusion, she drew near enough to Alonzo to whisper, “Come to me in one hour.”

“I’m tired, and my head aches. Help me upstairs,” Froissart whined. “No, not you”—he waved his valet away with a halfhearted swing of his meaty hand—“I want my wife to assist me. Renata!”

She pulled away from Alonzo, hatred barely concealed beneath a silky smile. “Coming, husband.”

Excitement tremored along her limbs, her mind alive with possibilities and plans. The diversion helped as Froissart growled and bullied his way into her bedchamber, his manner coarse, his prick hard. Fortunately, the brief encounter left him spent and snoring even without the laudanum. By the time Alonzo knocked quietly at her dressing room door, she’d changed into a quilted robe and brushed out her hair while her husband slept off his aching head and sour stomach in the room beyond.

Alonzo answered her summons, pausing only briefly to adjust to the fragmented candlelight and his many-reflected shape within the mirrored walls. “The pig sleeps?”

“Like the dead.” She placed her brush upon the table. “I hope you’ve more to show for the last few days than a case of the pox caught from that French opera dancer. If it’s the one I’m thinking of, she’s serviced every man in the embassy, including Émile. They call her the nun, she spends so much time on her knees.”

His gaze grew shuttered, almost pained, and she smiled to herself. Women must use what weapons came to hand.

He drew farther into the room, taking up position in the shadows by the fire, light dancing over his devilish features. “One of the men from the cemetery has been seen in Madame Parrino’s company and again at Mr. Kinloch’s home. It’s no coincidence. He’s one of those who murdered the chevalier. I’m sure of it.”

The words slid as painfully into her heart as they had the first time she’d heard the news. She’d vowed then and there: these creatures would suffer. She would make them bleed, listen to their pleas for mercy, watch
their eyes slowly glaze over in death, and enjoy it. It was justice. “And where is he now?”

Alonzo clenched and unclenched the hand at his side. “He eluded me.”

“You or those worthless gin-soaked thugs you paid to trail the Parrino woman? I told you not to trust in these English sons of dogs.”

Alonzo dismissed her crudity and her complaints with a jerk of his head. “It does not matter. What’s done is done, but come the new moon, he’ll be yours. Unable to shift. Vulnerable, just like the last one. It will be easy to capture him then.”

“No!” She spun around, her eyes darting toward the closed door behind which her husband snored in her bed, her bile rising with the memory of his hands upon her body, the swift, violent pounding as he took her. “I will not wait.” She forced herself to relax, rising in a slow, graceful movement to caress Alonzo’s cheek. “Once these Imnada demons are dead at my feet, I can lay my father to rest. I can move on.
We
can move on.” Her gaze flicked once more to the door. “Together.”

“What do you suggest?” he asked.

She returned to her seat, opening the collar of her robe to reveal an elaborate necklace of interlacing silver strands studded with rubies. A web of spun moonlight upon her pale skin, the stones like drops of blood. “Assist me with my necklace.”

He stepped behind her, close enough that his breath tingled against her neck. His desire lighting the deep ocean blue of his gaze. Her own passion flared, and she leaned her head back for a moment against him, closing her eyes as his hand took up the silver
necklace, his fingers on her skin sending shivers down her spine to pool wet and hot between her legs.

Their eyes met in the glass as he lowered the necklace into her open palm, understanding passing with a physical shock between them. With a smile cold as a blade, she closed her fingers around the silver links as if they might burn her, but only coolness met her fingers. “Silver. Who knew such a beautiful weapon could bring down such mighty beasts?”

6

“Is our guest awake yet, Molly?” Bianca asked, eyeing the laden tray the young woman juggled as she tapped the bedroom door behind her closed with her foot. “Don’t tell me he’s sulking. That laudanum was for his own good.”

Molly shifted from foot to foot, her eyes flickering between her mistress and the wall behind her. “No, mum. It’s not that.”

Bianca tensed. “Is he feverish? Does he need his dressing changed?” She passed Molly to see for herself. “He didn’t take his anger out on you, did he? Of all the ungrateful, self-centered—”

“He’s left, mum.”

Bianca spun round. “Gone?”

“Yes’m. The bed’s made, his clothes are gone, and he’s vanished.”

“People don’t just vanish.”

“Must have been during the night or first thing this morn. I let Mrs. Skelton into the kitchens at half six to begin breakfast and didn’t see nothing then.”

“That can’t be.”

“I didn’t want to bother him in case he was sleeping, so I never checked on him until just now. I’m sorry. I know I should have done it sooner, but Mrs. Skelton needed me—”

“It’s all right, Molly. Not your fault our bird has flown his coop.” Bianca entered the room as if expecting Molly’s story to be just that. Bed neatly made, extra quilts folded at the foot. No clothes draped upon the chair. Adam’s journal gone.

She pulled the door closed again. “I should have known. Good-bye it is,” she whispered to no one.

*   *   *

By the time Mac returned to his lodging house, the throbbing in his side matched the throbbing in his head. All he wanted to do was sleep a few hours before he tackled Adam’s journal. Instead he met David lounging outside the door to his rooms.

“Mother of All, Mac. What in blazes happened to you?”

“Bit of a run-in with Spitalfields’ finest.” Mac tried and failed at a reassuring smile as he ushered his guest into his apartment.

David gave the small, shabby rooms a cursory once-over. “What a dumpy flat.”

“So it’s not Brighton Pavilion,” Mac answered.

“It’s barely Brighton barracks,” David shot back.

For the first time, Mac viewed the place through another’s eyes. Scrupulously clean. Ruthlessly barren. No pictures on the wall. No knickknacks or childhood mementos. Nothing he couldn’t fit into his campaign haversack and take with him at a moment’s notice. Nothing he cared about losing.

“I don’t need much. I’m only here when I have to be.”

A silent understanding passed between them before David turned away to rummage among the liquor, pouring himself a tall whiskey. Another for Mac. “So, what happened? Footpads?”

“It was an ambush. At Adam’s house.”

David stiffened. “What were you doing there?”

“Mrs. Parrino and I—”

“Hold on. The actress Bianca Parrino? What the hell were . . . you’re still on about his murder, aren’t you? After Gray and I told you to leave it alone, you went ahead and poked your nose in anyway.”

“Adam’s murder wasn’t a random killing. The attack on me yesterday proves it. Someone knows about the Imnada. Someone who wants us dead. The clans could be in danger.”

“He’s gone, Mac. Unmourned. Unshriven. And who from the clans showed at his service? None. To them, we’re no different from the dirt filling Adam’s grave.
Emnil
. Nothing.”

Mac felt David’s anguish like a frozen piece of his own heart, but he said nothing. Sympathy wouldn’t assuage David’s bitter resentment. The Gather had spoken. Their word was final, but mayhap if he knew . . .

“What would you say if I told you Adam had found a way to break the curse?”

Even as he spoke, Mac wished to take the words back. The wild flash of hope in David’s eyes was almost heartbreaking. And then, just as quickly, it was gone. Replaced by his usual heavy-lidded cynicism.

“I’d say you received a knock to the head as well as that gash in your side.”

“But if it’s true, it could mean a lifting of our exile. We could go home, David. Think on it.”

“I’ve better things to do than entertain crazy pipe dreams. Face it, Mac. We’ve exhausted every avenue. The Fey-blood’s curse is forever. When will you finally surrender to the inevitable?”

“When I stop breathing. Here. Look at this.” Mac handed David the journal. “Adam hid it with Bianca the night he disappeared. It’s his diary, David. He never went anywhere without it. Remember? And there’s more. Bianca saw Adam after sundown. She thought I was mad to press her about it, but she saw him. More than once.”

“She couldn’t have.”

“Unless he broke the curse. Unless he found the answer. And if he did, maybe he wrote it down in here,” he said, jabbing at the book.

“Well, did he or didn’t he?”

“I haven’t had a chance to go through it yet.”

“All right, so let’s just assume Adam did break the curse, and there’s the ghost of a chance we may discover how he did it and reclaim our place within the clans. A big assumption, by the way, but I’ll humor the man who looks as if he’s been pummeled with bags of wet cement and say it’s all plausible. What do you need from me?”