Demon's Curse (Imnada Brotherhood) (15 page)

Fury and desperation scalded her throat, and she gripped the bedclothes as if she would shred them in a shrieking rage. For the first time since she was a little girl, she allowed bitter tears to fall, her pain sharp as the blade Alonzo had used upon the Imnada.

Then, emotions mastered once more, she rose from bed, retreating to the privacy of her dressing room to do what she’d learned to do best and yet hated with all her heart: wait.

9

The sound of the door opening skittered along Bianca’s shredded nerves. The creak of hinges threw her back four years to her darkest days. She went limp, pretending to be unconscious. A ruse that had always worked with Lawrence.

Slow, heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs, accompanied by the
thud-thud-thud
of something being dragged.

Unfortunately, Bianca knew exactly what that something was.

She’d tried turning off her mind to the sounds of violence coming from the floor above her. The scrape and crash of bodies. The painful grunts and curses. And finally the screams cut off almost as soon as they began, leaving an even more ominous silence in their place. She’d whispered to herself lines from plays, great long soliloquies, even stage directions. Anything to keep her mind from imagining, her thoughts from flying into a million broken pieces.

Now, as she feigned sleep, her chair rocked back
and forth, the man dumping and then securing his load in a chair back to back with hers. As her shoulders were yanked and the ropes at her wrists tightened, she bit her lip to stifle any whisper of a breath that might give her away.

A few minutes of this, a final tug on her bonds, and the footsteps retreated back up the stairs, followed by the slamming of the door.

Alone once more, she opened her eyes, stretching to look over her shoulder. Mac hung lifeless against his bonds, his face shielded by his blood and sweat-matted hair.

“Mac?” she whispered. “Can you hear me?”

The slightest movement of his fingers against hers. A shallow breath that became a strangled moan.

“It’s going to be all right,” she lied, her gaze drawn unwillingly to the narrow window set beneath the raftered ceiling. She wouldn’t look at it. Wouldn’t think about it. That would only bring on the panic, and she already hung by the thinnest of threads. “Say something so I know you can hear me.”

She felt his body pulling against the ropes that lashed her wrists. His breath came quick and painful. And when he spoke, his voice was threaded with pain and hoarse from shouting. “The clans are safe, Father. I told him nothing.”

*   *   *

“Let us out! Someone—anyone—help us! Please!”

Mac struggled up from a thick, soupy blackness to Bianca’s frightened voice bouncing against his egg-fragile skull. Every inch of him hurt, but his left shoulder throbbed with an agony unlike he’d ever
experienced, not even at the worst of the curse’s onset. He vomited at the pain eating its way up through his flesh, stomach muscles convulsing, throat raw.

“Can anyone hear me?” Bianca called again. “Dear God, let us out!”

“Stop,” he muttered. “Please stop yelling.”

“Mac? You’re awake. You’re alive.”

“Debatable.” He cracked open his swollen eyes to a dank, mildew-smeared cellar. A few broken bits of furniture stood in a corner beside a set of rickety steps. At the opposite end, an enormous black fireplace gaped like a mouth, a few dusty, cobwebbed tools scattered on the cold hearth bricks. So the Fey-blood had moved them from Bianca’s house to a more secure location. Somewhere close to the river, from the smells blowing through the crumbling brickwork, the wind chilling his sweat-drenched body.

The silver net that had trapped him had been replaced. Now, wrapped round and round his neck, hung thin silver chains as if he’d rifled twenty women’s jewelry cases. The freezing burn of the poisonous metal against his bare skin sent needles of fire chewing through his spasming muscles. Blood slicked his chest and arms, slid cold down his legs. Straining against the restraints holding him into a chair, he nearly passed out as his shoulder exploded, the pain numbing his arm, throwing splashes of light across his vision. He clawed back a scream at the cost of another round of retching that left him heaving for breath and weak as a kitten.

“I’ve tried. They don’t budge,” Bianca said, her voice trembling.

He looked up at the window. Was the light dimming? “How long have I been unconscious?”

“A few hours. I don’t know.” She struggled against the ropes. “There’s no air in here, Mac. I can’t breathe. We’re trapped.” With every sentence, her voice rose an octave. “Let us out!” she screamed before dropping to a half-sobbing whimper. “Please, I’ll do as you ask, Lawrence. I swear.”

There was obviously more to Bianca’s terror than the current disaster, bad as it was, but he’d leave those questions for later—if there was a later.

“Deep breaths,” Mac said, using the same easy tone he’d mastered while breaking colts for his father and later calming raw soldiers in the minutes before battle. “In through your nose and out through your mouth. Steady, even breaths.”

He felt the tension in her body lessen slightly as she did as he instructed, but each moment he used to pull her back from collapse brought him one step closer. There was no telling how long he had until the Fey-blood returned. Until the sun set. Until the silver killed him.

“I’m sorry, Mac. I . . . I hate small spaces and locked rooms. When Lawrence . . .” She swallowed back whatever she’d been about to say. “Molly always tells me I’ll catch a cold sleeping with the window open. My head knows it’s foolish, but I can’t help how I feel.”

“I suppose we’ll have to find a way out of here, then.” Though how he proposed to do that, he had no idea. Every moment the silver leached further into his system. Every second the poison moved like acid through his veins.

Outside, the rain had turned to sleet. The tapping and rattling against the window beat against his pounding head, making it almost impossible to focus his scattered mind or harbor his waning strength.

“He wants Adam’s journal, doesn’t he?” Bianca asked, the brittle edge gone from her voice, though he sensed the tenuous control behind her quiet words. “That’s what this is about.”

His mind rolled back to the incessant pounding of the Fey-blood’s questions, the torturously slow devastation he wrought with fists and boots and knife. Over and over until Mac’s mind shut down, his body curled against the attacks. He’d given nothing away, but he’d emerged with answers. Answers that both reassured and terrified. “No, Bianca. It’s me he wants.”

“But—”

The secret of the Imnada had been discovered—that much had been demonstrated with dreadful certainty. But how far had it spread? How great was the danger? And could the threat be stopped?

“How much does Lord Deane know about the Imnada?” he asked.

“Sebastian has nothing to do with this. He wouldn’t—”

“Murder an innocent man in cold blood? Why are you defending him? He’s sold you to the dogs as well.”

“I’m not defending him. I don’t know anything about Fey-bloods or Other or any of the things you keep asking me. Sebastian caught me doodling the symbol I found in Adam’s journal and asked me about it. Then he showed me the book and told me a story about a shifter warlord who betrayed King Arthur to his death. That’s all.”

“Did Deane and Adam ever meet?”

“No. He wanted to after he learned Adam had helped me pick out his birthday gift, but by then it was . . . by then Adam had—”

“Adam picked out a book for Lord Deane? What was it?”

There was a long pause when he thought Bianca might not answer. He sensed her desperation rising once more to the surface. It was obvious in the tension of the ropes, the shallowness of her breathing. “Think, Bianca. What book?”

“It was by Thistlewood or Thistlethwaite. I can’t remember. Adam swore it would suit someone like Deane perfectly.”

Someone like Deane. Adam must have recognized that the earl was Fey-blood. And in sending him the sorcerer Thistlewood’s book he had tipped the earl off. Had Adam been that witless? Or had he had another motive for sending a message? One Mac couldn’t begin to fathom.

He shot another glance at the window. Yes, the light definitely grew dimmer.

Jaw clamped against the blasts of pain ripping through his shattered shoulder, he worked at the ropes holding his wrists. If he could free a finger—hell, a fingertip—he might be able to loosen the knots enough to work his way out. But every excruciating movement pushed more of the silver’s poison into his bloodstream. Already, his eyesight grew fuzzy. Darkness crept in around the edges as his muscles twitched with a tingly numbness. “Bianca, I can’t. It’s up to you. Try working loose.”

“I’ll hurt you.”

“Do it anyway.”

Immediately, the ropes tightened, cutting into his skin, sawing back and forth until he gritted his teeth against the burn, blood sliding hot down his palms.
Bianca’s every breath came punctuated by a panicked sob, but she never paused, never tired as the minutes dragged on for what seemed an eternity. As the sun dipped ever lower in the sky.

Taking his own advice, Mac tried breathing deeply to stave off his own terror. By now, the humming burn along his bones was not completely due to the silver but to the coming sunset. A premonition of onrushing disaster jangled at the base of his brain. If Bianca was hanging by a thread now, what would seeing him shift do to her sanity? If she was like the rest of humanity, it would be a mixture of horror, loathing, and disgust. He would lose her forever. “Hurry.”

She huffed as the ropes dug into his blood-slicked flesh. “I’ve . . . almost . . . almost got it.”

A numbing, vicious tug on his hands sent a shooting, tearing pain up his arms and into his shoulder, but Bianca was free.

Scrambling out of her ropes, she knelt in front of him, her gaze locked on the wreckage that his body had become. “Dear God, Mac, what did he do to you?”

“Can you loosen the knots?”

She tugged at the cords binding his chest, struggled with those at his ankles. “They won’t come. They’re too tight.”

“The silver, Bianca. Remove the necklaces,” he gasped, a fiery burn licking up through his body.

By now his vision had become a blue sheet of flame, signaling the onset of the curse.

She leaned forward, lifting the anchoring weight of the chains from his neck, her scent and the warmth of her body like a drop of heaven amid the needling blast of agony. Freed of the silver, he lifted his head.
A choice lay before him: Did Bianca speak the truth? Was she ignorant of the Imnada and Lord Deane’s perfidy? Or would he be setting free the woman who had betrayed Adam to his death?

Did he trust her or didn’t he?

She fought with the ropes at his wrists, her fingers slipping on knots damp and slick with his blood. “Damn it, I can’t get . . . just a little bit—”

His decision made, he nudged her away. “Go, Bianca. It’s me they want.”

She stepped back, the inches between them yawning wide as a canyon. “I can’t abandon you.”

“Go to the village of Bear Green. Find Jory Wallace. Tell him Mac sent you. Tell him to warn St. Leger and de Coursy. He’ll understand.” Nausea rolled his gut, a wash of cold sweat drenching his body.

“Mac, I—”

“By the Mother of All,” he snarled. “Get the hell out!”

She touched his shoulder, the gentlest contact enough to make him moan, jaw locked, teeth clenched. “I’ll do it, but against my will.”

“Just go.”

He heard the scrape of her chair being pulled across the stone floor. The screech of rusty hinges as she forced open the narrow window, followed by a blast of cold, damp wind against his face, the soft hush of snowfall. Bianca’s grunts and rustles as she snaked her way out into the yard beyond.

“I’ll find Jory Wallace. You can trust me.”

He smiled through cracked lips. “I’m beginning to think I can.”

She gave a hard bark of laughter. Then silence but
for the slosh and gurgle of drains, a steady drip from a leak in the roof, and a banging in his skull like musket fire. Or was that the jump and squeeze of his heart as the Fey-blood’s curse pushed its way through him like an unstoppable rising tide?

Sagging against the ropes, he dropped his head onto his chest. Sensed the sun’s final drop below the horizon like a grenade exploding in his chest, his mind ripped open in one horrific blast of dark Fey magic like a dagger to the brain.

He squeezed his eyes shut, tensed against his body’s internal incineration, and waited. One . . . two . . . three . . . four . . .

Behind the black-bellied clouds, the earth turned on its axis. Day became night.

Man gave way to panther once more.

*   *   *

Outside, the temperature dropped with the onset of dusk. Snow swirled and billowed in a stiff wind, stinging Bianca’s face, stealing her breath. Already the ground lay beneath a blanket of dirty white, and the normal street sounds bounced and echoed, oddly muffled by this blast of early winter weather.

She stumbled as a voice roared in her head. A shout of pain and rage and fear, but nothing like the terror driving her onward into the storm.