Demon's Curse (Imnada Brotherhood) (31 page)

Recalling with perfect clarity those moments before she struck the man down, she said, “The man mentioned a chevalier. The chevalier should have killed Mac, but she would finish the job.”

Sebastian’s expression sharpened. “Are you certain? The fellow mentioned a chevalier specifically?”

“Very certain. Every moment from that horrible night has been seared into my brain. I couldn’t forget it if I tried.”

“What did you do with the book I gave you?” he asked.

“I suppose it’s still at my house. That is, if my house is still there.”

“Never mind. Wait here,” Sebastian said, leaving the salon.

His departure seemed to suck the warmth from the room. Bianca and Sarah regarded each other with a new, wary awkwardness.

“More cake?” Sarah offered shyly.

Bianca shot her a how-could-you look of exasperation.

“None of that,” Sarah scolded. “You’ll give yourself wrinkles.”

Bianca arched a brow in question.

“I did think about telling you, sweeting, really I did, but you’re so damnably rational and utterly sensible. I wasn’t certain how you’d react. You might have been accepting or you might have had me clapped in irons and packed off to an asylum.”

Conceding the truth of Sarah’s worry, Bianca took another long swallow of her brandy while continuing to cast her curious sidelong glances.

“And you can stop staring at me as if I might turn you into a toad any moment. I can’t whip up magic like Cook bakes a casserole. I don’t pop in and out of existence, and I can’t zap, poof, or otherwise zing. Quite disappointing, really, if you think about it, but our gifts don’t work like that.”

“So what can you do?”

Sebastian burst back into the salon, carrying an enormous tome beneath his arm. “Here it is. I knew I had a copy of the
Peruzzi Treatises
somewhere. It’s not his best work, but it gives you the idea.” He offered the volume to Bianca.

“What am I looking for?”

“The author.”

She read the spine, opened it to the title page. “Gilles d’Espe. The same man who wrote that book on the Imnada.”

“The very same. He began as a professor at the Conservatoire de Sauvageon in Paris, but he became obsessed with the idea that the Imnada somehow survived the ancient wars. That they were out there and still a threat. He collected every scrap of information ever written about them. Financed and led expeditions in hopes of discovering their hidden holdings, but of course he found nothing but a bout of lung fever and a swift loss of his family’s fortune. The Other discounted his scholarship as the insanity of a once-brilliant mind broken by drink and the death of his wife, but it didn’t stop him. If anything, it sharpened his desire and he grew increasingly drawn to the darker magics in an effort to prove his lunatic theories.”

Bianca flipped through the rambling chapters. “Not so lunatic after all, but what has he to do with Mac?”

“He was the
chevalier
Gilles d’Espe, and he and his household were brutally killed during the final days of the war.”

It didn’t take a genius to connect point A to point B and come up with the sickening circumstances of d’Espe’s death. “Mac, Adam, and the others,” Bianca said. “They killed him, didn’t they?”

“D’Espe must have discovered the truth somehow. They would never have allowed him to live after that.”

“I learned the truth and I’m alive.”

“You were lucky. You had two things working in your favor. One: you aren’t Other.”

“And two?”

“Captain Flannery loves you!” Sarah exclaimed.

Both Sebastian and Bianca shot her irritated looks, which she answered with a smug smile.

“So d’Espe placed the curse on the four of them?”

“Gray would never explain and I didn’t press him, but the pieces all fit. Fey-born powers don’t affect the Imnada in the normal way. Spells go awry. Mage energy bends and warps in odd and unexpected ways. He may have been trying to subdue them. Instead, he just made them very angry.”

As all Mac’s slips and enigmatic comments came into focus, her queasy feeling spread throughout her body. The curse on the four of them had been a result of warped Fey magic. A last-ditch defense from a man who’d bitten off more trouble than he could chew when he confronted the Imnada soldiers. He’d paid for his inquisitiveness with his life. In a way, so, too, had Mac and the others. Which was less painful: the quick obliteration or the slow, grinding destruction by infinite degrees?

Sebastian’s gaze darkened, a troubled look passing over his stony features.

“There’s more, isn’t there?” Bianca asked.

“The chevalier’s daughter is here, in London. She’s the wife of a wealthy munitions merchant attached to the French embassy. Or should I say ‘the widow’: he died of a heart seizure a few days ago. They plan on shipping his body back to France for burial, but . . .”

“But what?”

“Madame Froissart has chosen to remain in London.”

Bianca rose in a rush of heavy skirts, hands tightening to fists. “I need to warn Mac. He needs to know. To be on his guard.”

“I thought you and Flannery had concluded your business, darling. All obligations at an end,” Sarah said.

“So I should just let him be killed and do nothing to warn him? Don’t be preposterous,” Bianca snapped, nerves winding tight, heart racing.

“The turtle finally emerges,” Sarah muttered.

“Perhaps a message sent to the Horse Guards,” Sebastian suggested. “And I’ll send word to de Coursy.”

His offers faded into the angry buzz of Bianca’s thoughts. Where could Mac be? How could she find him? She straightened, the answer like the sudden blaze of a newly lit candle. Concentrating her thoughts as if she were physically reaching for him, she pictured the scarlet of his uniform and the gold of his braid, the sheen of his dark hair and the intensity in his gaze.
Mac. Mac, where are you? Please, if you’re out there, answer me.

Nothing.

Mac, Madame Froissart is the chevalier’s daughter. She’s the one. She murdered Adam and now she’s after you.

No answer. No way to know if he’d heard her. But for the barest of moments, the hairs along her arms lifted and she felt a prickling sensation between her shoulder blades. Someone listened.

Madame Froissart, Mac. She’s the one.

*   *   *

With a cry, Renata broke contact, retreating back into her body, leaving behind the ember-streaked void and the voices that called to her from the infinite pillars of rippling, lung-choking smoke. Doubling over into a chair, she clutched her skull, pain ripping through her brain, spotting her vision, turning her stomach. “Bianca Parrino is here. In London.”

“You touched her mind?” Alonzo asked, mouth folded into a grim line, eyes alight with recent passion.

“For a moment only. Wherever she is, it’s warded against magic. The protections too strong. They prevented me from fully bonding with her.”

“Then we’ve failed.”

Her body felt clammy with cold sweat as she pushed her hair off her face, placing the remaining two golden strands of hair back into a tiny ormolu box. “No. This is a perfect solution, and it was clever of you to think of retrieving them from the Parrino town house. Very clever.” Opening her jewelry case, she placed the ormolu box within. “Once we have her, we have Flannery.”

She stretched, letting the silken robe she’d donned upon rising from bed slither from her naked body. She studied herself in the mirrors, caressing the round pertness of her breasts, pinching the taut, dusky nipples still bruised from Alonzo’s lovemaking before
running her hands down the slope of her rib cage to the flare of her hips, brushing the hair between her legs, her quim wet and throbbing. Alonzo’s hungry gaze followed her every movement, his tongue running over his lips, his cock hard once more.

“London’s enormous. It could take forever to find her,” he said, his voice raspy.

She met his eyes within the mirror, rising from her seat with a smile of invitation on her kiss-swollen lips. “Do you think so? She cannot stay warded away from my powers forever. And when I find her, I will control her. You wait, Alonzo. I shall have Flannery on his knees before me within week. And before I kill him, he shall watch as I take away all that is most dear to him. He shall watch and understand my pain.”

20

At the familiar polished vowels and public school consonants coming from the corridor, Mac lifted his head from the report on his desk. If he was lucky, the always-churlish sergeant on duty would send the unwanted visitor on his way. Mac was in no mood for guests. Instead there was a short burst of “Yes, sirs” and “No, sirs” before Gray de Coursy appeared in the doorway, a valet’s dream from the top of his stylishly cut head of golden hair to the tips of his champagne-polished boots. The bloody sod looked as if he’d just stepped from the pages of a gentleman’s magazine.

Mac fought down the overwhelming urge to beat the shit out of him.

“Working hard?” Gray asked, scanning Mac’s overflowing desk as he closed the door behind him.

“If you must know, I’m trying to complete a report due to General Burrell. My unexpected trip out of town has me trying to catch up.”

Gray’s gaze settled on the blank piece of paper beneath Mac’s hand with a slight lifting of his eyebrows.

“All right,” Mac growled, “so I’ll settle for starting the bloody report.”

Mac had been here since this morning and he’d yet to write one word. Work was not the solace it had once been. His reports had lost their luster, his ledgers no longer enticed with their brain-numbing columns and rows, and his office walls closed in like the jaws of a trap.

And now the cherry on top of his horrible day was settling himself on the only other chair in the room and regarding Mac as if he were a particular tasty bit of prey.

“Did you come to offer me more of your justifications?” Mac asked. “Or are you hoping to convince me not to turn you and your associates into the Ossine once I’m reinstated into the clans?”

“What makes you believe you will be?”

“This.” Mac pulled the journal from a drawer and slammed it down on the desk between them. “Adam broke the curse before he died. I plan on following his notes and doing the same. I’m this close.” He pressed his finger and thumb together.

“And you assume once you’re no longer tainted by the Fey-blood’s dark magic, you’ll be welcomed home with open arms. The pronouncement of
emnil
reversed.”

“That’s the plan.”

Gray leaned forward in his chair, resting a ringed hand upon the top of his cane. “You’d really return to Concullum and pretend the last two years never occurred? Have you forgotten the agony as they stripped the clan mark from your body and the signum from your soul? Can you forgive them their deafness as you
pleaded for your life and they did nothing while you lay bleeding and broken?”

“Is that what this is about, Gray? Revenge? You’d destroy the clans to get back at your grandfather?”

For a moment Gray’s eyes gleamed with some hidden emotion, but the expression was gone so quickly, Mac couldn’t be certain he had seen it, and when Gray spoke, there was nothing in his voice to betray he might be less than in perfect control. “What of Bianca Parrino? Is it so easy to leave her behind?” he asked.

Mac gritted his teeth against Gray’s dispassionate reserve, the man’s placid gaze boring into him like the point of a dagger until Mac’s fury erupted. “You want to know how easy it is? It’s like I’ve taken a bullet to the gut, every damned second an agony. Does that make you happy? Is that what you wanted to hear?” He brought his fist down hard on the desk, the pain jolting up through his arm driving away the despair, but only for a moment before it roared back.

“No, it’s not what I wanted to hear.” Once more, Gray rubbed the eagle’s head decorating the head of his cane. “Does she know this?”

“After yesterday, she thinks me the biggest son of a bastard to ever walk the earth, and I can’t blame her. I missed my chance.”

“Did you
want
the chance?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Gray shrugged as he flicked a nonexistent speck from his breeches. “It’s none of my business—”

“You’re right. It’s not.”

“—but it seems to me if you cared for the woman as much as you claim, you’d tell her so.”

“It’s complicated.”

Gray continued to eye him with the same bland expression that made Mac want to grind his teeth to nubs. “Can we talk about something else? Mayhap the betrayal of the clans by the heir to the leader of us all? The threat of an attack by the Ossine? Or how about the treachery of your Fey-blood conspirators?”

Gray remained unfazed. “I’m aware of the difficulties.”

“That’s the understatement of the century.”

“Did you ever think our accursedness was meant to be, Mac? That perhaps the mother goddess set these events in motion to compel us out of the well-worn paths of our forefathers? To make us chart a different future from the one we’d always imagined?”

“Destiny?” Mac snarled. “That’s your argument?”

“We need fighters like you. Men who’ve stood in the ranks. Who don’t run when the firing starts. Who can inspire loyalty among our friends and fear in our enemies.” Gone was the even-tempered stoicism, replaced by a zealot’s enthusiasm.