House of Dark Delights (18 page)

Lili had observed these sinister preparations with commendable stoicism. It was all feigned, of course—the color had leached from her face—but that only made her display of composure more remarkable.

Retrieving her veil from the altar where he'd tossed it earlier, Turek held it wadded up over the firewood-filled brazier, doused it with turpentine, shook it out, and wrapped it around Lili's legs and torso. Enveloped by the volatile solvent and its ominous reek, she began trembling.

Her trembles turned to shudders, racking her head to toe, when he wrested one of the torches from its hole in the bedrock and brought it close.

“Having second thoughts,
liebling
?” he asked softly. “There is no shame in entertaining a change of heart, especially when one's life is at stake. No one knows that better than I.”

Lili shrank back from the torch, its flames sputtering in her huge, dark eyes.

Turek lowered the torch to the fire he'd prepared, which ignited with a
whump,
thanks to its spattering of turpentine. In no time, roaring flames leapt from the brazier, which stood less than a foot from Lili in her turpentine-soaked veil. The fire emanated a hellish heat, raising a sheen of sweat on her pallid face.

Replacing the torch, Turek retrieved the poker, hooking it around the handle of the brazier that was on the far side of Lili so as to pull it away from her a bit. “Wouldn't do to have a spark landing on you just as you're reconsidering,” he said. “You'd go up like a torch yourself.”

He stepped up onto the platform and pricked a fresh vein, this one in his left wrist. Holding it up for Lili to see the blood seeping from the tiny punctures, he said, “One drop, and you will live forever as one of my kind. Refuse this offer, and I shall move that brazier right in front of you and watch you burn to death, shrieking in agony. When the flames ebb, I shall replenish the wood. There is plenty, as you can see, to keep this fire raging all night, and that's long enough to reduce you to cinders. Surely any fate is preferable to that.”

“Nay, there's a worse one by far, and that would be to spend eternity as a murderous little maggot like you.”

With a surly thrust to his jaw, he said, “There is a limit to my patience, Lili, and you have reached it. Consider this my final invitation—and your final opportunity to spare yourself from the flames.” Bringing his wrist very close to her mouth, he said, “One drop. One flick of the tongue…”

She raised her gaze to his and, still shaking like a rabbit, said, “Go to Hell.”

“Lili, Lili…” Turek sighed in exasperation, anger, and genuine sorrow. Hooking the poker around the brazier's other handle, the one closest to Lili, he said, “I daresay you shall be there long before I am.”

Ten

G
O TO
my chamber in the cave,” Darius told Elic as he laid Charlotte on the mattress—facedown, because her back was, if not flayed, damn close to it. The wounds were open, bloody, horrific. “I've got some hartshorn drops on the shelf with my medicines. Bring that and a jar of salve.”

“Which salve? You've got—”

“The green one,” Darius said, picking one at random as he pulled the blanket up to Charlotte's waist. It didn't matter which he brought; the point was to get Elic out of here while he healed these bloody awful wounds.
“Go.”

“Should…should I bring back some sort of bandaging, or—”

“Bring back whatever the hell you want, just
go
!”

As soon as Darius heard the door slam shut, he drew in a calming breath to clear his mind, and contemplated the gashes on Charlotte's back. He'd done this to her, brutalized her in a bewildering black rage that had vanished the moment he'd realized the damage he'd wreaked. She'd fainted from shock and pain, and was still unconscious, which was all for the good. Healing those who were awake and aware provoked too many awkward questions.

Darius held his hands over the lower part of Charlotte's back, about an inch from her lacerated flesh, closed his eyes, and focused all his mental faculties. He began to tremble as his own energy, his own curative life force, funneled into Charlotte, knitting the torn flesh, closing the ghastly wounds. His hands grew warm, then hot, shaking as he strove to undo the terrible wrong he'd done to this complicated, confused woman who'd had the poor fortune to stumble upon the likes of him in this cellar full of instruments of torment. Slowly he moved his hands upward over her back, feeling the damage repair itself, the skin grow together strong and smooth.

He opened his eyes, drained and shivering but gratified to see that the lacerations he'd inflicted had all but disappeared, leaving only a network of faint pink streaks, like mild burns. Those would fade over the course of the next few days, leaving her whole and perfect once more.

Elic, despite their long acquaintance, knew nothing of Darius's ability to heal. Nor did Inigo, nor Madame des Ombres, nor any of her predecessors. If they'd given it any real thought, they might have suspected, given his compulsion to turn the wishes and desires of humans into reality. What more profound desire could there be, when one was sick or injured, than to be made well again? There wasn't a human alive who wouldn't take advantage of such a talent, for their loved ones if not for themselves, as Darius had learned all too well a long time ago. Every healing tapped into his own vital humors, leaving him exhausted, sometimes cripplingly so. He'd even been known to lapse into a coma, if the injury or illness was exceptionally severe. Incessant, indiscriminate healing, such as had once been forced upon him, left him a depleted husk in short order. Worse, it interfered with the natural balance of life and death, spawning myriad treacherous repercussions.

Having journeyed halfway around the world to escape those who would exploit his healing powers, Darius was loath to reveal them to anyone, even those closest to him. Although he tended to avoid attachments to humans in the interest of self-preservation, Elic and Inigo did not. They befriended people quite liberally, both here at Grotte Cachée and in the course of their occasional travels—always without Darius, who didn't dare risk the possibility of physical contact with humans. If Darius's fellow follets knew that he could erase the suffering of those they cared about, they would inevitably pressure him to do so. “Just this one exception,” they would implore. And then would come another exception, and another, and yet another. Those he healed, even if they were sworn to secrecy, would eventually send their own friends and family to Grotte Cachée to be healed by him…and so it would all begin again.

Darius drew the blanket up to Charlotte's shoulders and stroked her hair off her face with a tremulous hand, saying her name. She stirred, murmuring something he couldn't make out.

He reclined on his side next to her, too fatigued to sit up anymore. “How are you feeling?”

She squinted her eyes open. “Darius? Wh-what…?” Her expression shifted from bafflement to fear as she remembered what had happened, what he'd done to her. She shrank away from him, flinching when he closed a hand over her shoulder.

“I'm sorry,” he said earnestly. “I'm so sorry, Charlotte. I don't know what…” He shook his head, grimacing, for of course he did know what had come over him. It was the same thing that came over him every time he suffered passing contact with a human, the gradual displacement of his own identity with a new, unfamiliar, and entirely unpredictable Darius—not that it always ended with such savagery, thank God.

She was staring at him, as if wondering how to react to an apology from a man who'd just torn up her back with a chain whip.

“Forgive me,” he said. “Or don't forgive me, but please know that I didn't mean to hurt you, not like that. I promise nothing like that will happen again.”

She reached around beneath the blanket to touch her back, frowning in confusion. “I thought…It felt…”

“You'll be fine,” he said.

“Wh-where is Elic?”

“I sent him back to the cave for some tonic and salve.”

“The cave?”

“It's where I live, as a sort of permanent houseguest of Madame des Ombres.”

“You live in the
cave
?”

It felt good to smile. “A suitable abode for a bear such as I, wouldn't you say?”

“Madame won't give you a room in the castle?”

“I prefer the cave for its privacy,” he said. “I like being alone, just dusty old me and my dusty old books.”

“Books?”

“They're a weakness of mine. I've been gathering them for cen—for years.”

“What kind of books?”

He shrugged as he stroked her arm over the blanket. “There are a number of medical treatises, some very old. The healing arts are a special interest of mine. Quite a bit of history, philosophy, religion, some fiction—whatever appeals to my various interests.” With a devilish grin, he said, “I've got quite a few volumes of erotica, dating back to the ancient Greeks and Romans.”

“Indeed.” She rolled onto her side, gathering the blanket around herself. “My favorite of that era would be the verses of Catullus. So witty and vigorous. I never tire of reading them.”

“Which translation?”

“The original Latin, actually.” Charlotte caught his eye with a slyly sweet smile.

Darius ducked his head and rubbed the back of his neck. “I'm a blockhead.”

Charlotte laughed, happily and carelessly. Darius stared at her, astonished not only by this display of good spirits, after all they'd been through, but by how girlishly pretty it made her.

She said, “I don't suppose it will surprise you that I, myself, have amassed a rather shamefully vast collection of bawdy literature. Have you gotten yourself a copy of
Fanny Hill
yet?”

He shook his head with a quizzical frown, not having heard of it.

“Oh, but you must!” Pushing herself up onto an elbow, she said, “It's an entire novel of the most
delicious
smut, written by some poor bloke in debtor's prison who's trying to earn enough money to free himself. Do snag yourself a copy before the English Church manages to get it banned. I hear they're trying.”

“I shall write to my dealer in London on the morrow. I've learned one mustn't hesitate about these things. I did manage to acquire the complete works of Sappho before the Church burned her writings.”

“You must be older than you look, then,” observed Charlotte with a chuckle. “Weren't those burned in the Middle Ages?”

Forcing a little laugh, Darius said, “I meant they were
published
before the burnings.”
Little lies,
he thought. Even his most innocuous encounters with humans were buttressed with a framework of little lies, insignificant individually, but onerous when taken together. “I was lucky to get the Sappho. Some books that were censored are virtually lost.”

“Aretino's
Postures,
” she said.

“Precisely. The most famous—or infamous—erotic work in European history, and yet I've never been able to get my hands on a copy. What I wouldn't give for a first edition.”

Charlotte studied his eyes for a moment, looked down, picked at the blanket. She seemed about to say something, but hesitated, as if rethinking it. Finally she said, “You…you're not at all the man I'd thought you were when…I first came down here.”

“I wasn't myself,” he said quietly, stroking a stray tendril of hair off her forehead. “You seem different, as well.”

“Because you realize I'm not some illiterate little hoyden?” she asked with a smile. “That I am, in fact, a rather erudite little hoyden?”

“I confess, it didn't occur to me that there was much of anything beneath your highly polished, if somewhat brittle surface—not even a past. I, er, I apologize for making you talk about your son. That was callous of me. I knew you didn't want to drag motherhood and all that down into this den of sin—why would you? I'm sure you're an excellent mother, very loving. What I said about him being inconvenient, and your packing him off to boarding school—”

“Nat isn't in boarding school,” she said in a soft, strained voice, her gaze on the mattress.

“Ah. Well, it was never any of my—”

“He died five years ago.”

“Oh.” Darius moved closer, gathering her in his arms and tucking her head against his chest. “I'm sorry, Charlotte. God,
so
sorry,” he added, sick at the memory of how he'd taunted her about her son.

“I killed him,” she said, “the same as if I'd thrown him under those carriage wheels myself.”

“I…I'm sure you didn't—”

“I did,” she said into his chest. “I don't why I'm telling you. I've never told anybody. You might think I'm immune to shame, someone like me, but
this
…It's hard enough to live with, much less talk about.”

And yet, Darius realized, because she was curled in his embrace and couldn't hide her raw need, she felt compelled to talk about it now. To him. This, then—the part she'd played in her son's death—was the sin for which Charlotte had sought punishment at his hands, however dimly she recognized it. A doomed endeavor, of course, but perhaps not completely futile if it impelled her, for the first time in five years, to want to unburden herself.

“Tell me,” he said.

She was silent for so long that he thought perhaps she'd had second thoughts, but then she said, very softly, “Somerhurst—my husband—he…he didn't want me after Nat came. Didn't want me in his bed, I mean. He said now that I was a mother, he didn't see me the same way. For the longest time, I tried to change his mind. I tried to be pretty, alluring. I stole in to his bed one night. He bloodied my nose, called me a hussy.”

Darius let out a little huff of disgust.

“After that”—she lifted her shoulders—“he spent most of his time in London and left me to the estate in Cambridgeshire. He had no interest in his son, except as an heir—avoided him when he could, and ignored him when he was forced into his presence. He had his whores and his mistresses, and I had Nat. I had the better end of the bargain, to my way of thinking. I adored Nat, he was the world to me. He was a real boy, daring, adventurous, but a cuddler, too. He—” Her voice cracked.

“It's all right,” murmured Darius as he held her closer. “It's all right.”

“For four years, I had Nat and nothing else—no one else.”

“Were you lonely?” Darius asked. “For adult companionship, I mean.”

“I had a few friends, not many—but of course, I hadn't been touched by a man since I'd told my husband I was in the family way. My sister Livy used to write to me, urging me to take a lover, but that seemed so unsavory, and anyway, I had Nat, and he needed me. But then…”

She lapsed into silence again.

“Who was he?” Darius asked.

“Hugh Stapleton, heir to the Viscount of Granthorpe, and a horse grenadier. Very dashing, very charming, but not like so many of the rest of them, those privileged youngbloods who only care about whoring and drinking. He was a real gentleman in the very best sense—warm, kind. I met him at Livy's home in the Cotswolds. Hugh was her husband's brother's army chum. He was…God, he swept me off my feet. Nothing happened between us during that visit—well, one brief, stolen kiss—because I had Nat with me, and I still didn't think it would do to let things go too far. But then, after I came home, I was lonelier than ever, having had what little I'd had with Hugh. I hadn't realized how terribly I'd missed just being…cared about.”

“Of course you did. It is what all humans most desire.”

“Hugh wrote me the most moving letter, tender but so impassioned. I actually wept when I read it. Livy was due to come spend a fortnight with me, and he asked if he might come along. He said he'd pose as a coachman so as not to arouse suspicions. Livy urged me to let him come, said he'd been pining for me horribly—so I agreed. I wanted to be free to spend time with him, and I'd already resolved to share my bed with him, so of course I had to make other arrangements for Nat, who slept in the nursery right next door. I asked my husband to take him on a two-week visit to London.”

“And he agreed to that?”

“He was appalled by the idea. For that matter, so was Nat. He'd been to London and hated it, said it smelled like smoke and dung. But I pressed the matter like a bulldog, and off they went. Of course, Nat needed someone to look after him, so I sent along his nursemaid, Carrie, not thinking about the consequences in my zeal to be alone with Hugh. Carrie, you see, was very young, very comely, and not at all conversant in the ways of the world—just the way Somerhurst liked them.”