Only You (The Mephisto Covenant Series) (26 page)

I shook my head,
only half listening. This box held a stack of photographs, a pictorial history of Jane’s life. There were many surprises. Like Jane with a twin, and Jane in a wheelchair. I’d had no idea. Then she stood next to her parents, who were seated. No sign of her twin, and there was no doubt the girl in the photograph was Jane because she wore the phoenix around her neck. There she was, standing next to a Grecian column, holding the leash of a spaniel, the one in her portrait. I wondered if Phoenix had healed her? What happened to her twin?

While I
continued obsessively pawing through Jane’s pictures, Denys said, “My favorite things have always been books. My brothers assume whenever I leave the mountain that I’ve gone to a pub or a nightclub, and they’re mostly right, but they don’t know I spend a lot of time in bookshops and libraries. I see girls there and always wish one of them would be Anabo. Someone I could bring home to show our library, and she’d stay for that and be with me.”

I heard something in his voice and glanced over my shoulder at him.
His smile was gone, and I saw abject misery in his eyes. “Why did you bring me here?”

He was intensely uncomfortable, I could tell. He’d stopped rocking and sat stiff and still. He swallowed but didn’t look away. “There’s something about you, Mariah, something I’ve never known in anyone else. It’s like . . . like you
know
.”

I considered whether to sit down, but decided he’d have an easier time with this if I remained where I was, methodically pulling out the boxes to look inside. “I do know. I don’t understand why no one else does.”

“How do you know?”

“I can see it in your eyes. I can feel all that pain rolling off of you, and no matter how many jokes you tell or how hard you laugh, it never goes away. Why, Denys?” This box held a china doll, well loved, her little
purple silk dress faded and her painted mouth all but gone, she’d been kissed so many times.

“I was in love with Jane.”

Oh, God.

Sliding the doll back onto her shelf, I read the label on the next box
:
St. Claire
Milliners, Bond Street
. Another hat. I almost didn’t reach for it, but my compulsion to look in all the boxes had me slipping it from its spot.

“Did you hear me?”

“I heard.” The lid came off and I said, “How is that possible, Denys? Zee told me the Mephisto can only be with an Anabo whose scent they know, that it’s impossible for any of you to be attracted to one who has no distinct scent.” I stared down into the box and wished so hard that Denys hadn’t brought me here. A dried posy of tiny roses. Two golden rings tied with white satin ribbon. A small Bible bound in white leather, yellowed with age. A gossamer lace veil. And in the midst of it all, a love letter from a bride to her groom on their wedding day.

Dearest Phoenix ~ I
t’s taken some time, but I realize now how barren my life would be without you.

“The night
Phoenix brought her to meet us was the first time we’d seen Jane, and he’d found her over two months earlier. I was late, and drunk, but I remember feeling like I’d been struck by lightning, she was so beautiful. I stumbled and accidentally knocked her to the floor, and while we were there, I kissed her.”

You are my dearest friend, and while it will be enormously difficult to leave this life
, I’m filled with happiness to spend eternity with you.

“Was Phoenix angry?”

“Furious. What he didn’t know, and I never told him, is that Jane kissed me back.”

Reverend Moss has agreed to marry us in the bower we love in Hyde Park at nine this evening.
It grieves me to become yours outside of a church, and the reverend was very clear that this will not be a legal union, but all of that is unimportant. We will be married before God and that is what matters.

“Did she visit again after that?”

“Yes, but I always made sure I was away from home. I couldn’t take seeing her, knowing I could never have her. I hated Phoenix so much, and while I know that’s unfair, I couldn’t help it.”

I love yo
u all the more for agreeing to exchange vows before I am with you.

“You didn’t fall in love with her after one
very brief meeting, during which you drunkenly stumbled into her, knocked her down, and stole a kiss. You went to see her, didn’t you? Behind Phoenix’s back, you visited her.”

He
sounded defensive. “I went to apologize. It was entirely innocent.”

“
Not entirely. You wanted to kiss her again, didn’t you?”

He sighed.
“I wanted to steal her away and never come back. But I didn’t, Mariah. We sat in her room and talked about books, and the world, and religion, and Eryx. I went back the next day and the day after that.”

“And never told Phoenix?”

“No,” he said solemnly. “When she died, I wanted to die too, but I could never say so, never show it. He’s spent the past one hundred years rolling around in guilt, and I’ve spent them with a broken heart.”

All the obstacles we have faced are gone now, Phoenix. We will be happy, of one accord, and I will love you all the days of my life.

“What happened that night?”

“I’ve never known for sure. None of us do. I was in a London pub and, out of the blue, I was hit with acute awareness of something different, something awry. Even halfway to drunk, I was able to concentrate enough to know it was Jane. I knew where she was. Before that night, we didn’t know about the Mephisto mark. A few hours later, Eryx abducted her, and we all knew immediately because she was in our heads. Phoenix was nowhere to be found
, had even disappeared from a mental search, which is next to impossible. We were afraid he’d been taken out by Lucifer, but couldn’t fathom why. It wasn’t until we gathered before leaving for Romania to rescue her that he showed up, beat all to hell. He wouldn’t say where he’d been or what happened.”

You say you don’t love me as you should, but I
have faith that our friendship will become more as time passes. Passion comes in all colors, and we are both committed to defeating Eryx. We will build on our bond of high regard for one another and passion will follow.

What did that mean? This read like she was trying to convince herself that this was the right thing to do.
Passion will follow? Did she mean she felt nothing for Phoenix beyond the love of a friend?

Intuition
nagged, and I had to ask Denys, “Did Jane have a particular scent?”

“Sometimes, when I was with her, I’d smell cloves. I wanted to believe it was because she was meant for me and Phoenix got it wrong, but she had a little doll that was stuffed with cloves.”

Thinking of oranges, I asked, “When you find your Anabo, I wonder if you’ll have a certain scent to her?”

“I don’t know. Jane told me once that I smelled like laundry, like freshly washed sheets drying on the line in the sun. We laughed because can you see me doing laundry?”

No, but I could see him with Jane. “When you went to Romania, was she . . . had Eryx already—”

“No.
He waited for us. The fucker knew we’d come after her, and as soon as we appeared, he cut her throat. Phoenix ran for her, caught her before she hit the floor, and tried to bring her back, but she never responded. He took her to her home, to her room, and laid her on her bed for her parents to find. Her father hired Pinkertons to investigate, but of course they found no suspect. The morning of her funeral, without telling us, Key took her body from the casket and replaced it with stones. Her parents buried a weighted coffin in the churchyard, in holy ground, at the same time Key and a group of Luminas buried her in a plot close to our home in Yorkshire.”

That
choked me up. Key knew how important it was to visit the dead, to have a place to grieve. He did it for Phoenix. Key was a hard guy, quiet and serious, but his love for his brothers and his commitment to his leadership of the Mephisto was obvious in everything he did. I thought all over again that he and Viorica were perfect for one another. And I remembered what Zee had said about God never sending an Anabo who wouldn’t be compatible.

Phoenix’s list of things he’d like in a girl came back to me
:
She’d go with me to out-of-the-way places to see unusual, beautiful things, and try different foods, and meet interesting people, and sail and surf and ski and hike Everest and ride bikes across Mexico.

Everything I’d seen in Jane’s boxes indicated a homebody, a woman who loved to read and write and p
lay the piano and have tea with close friends in the cozy comfort of her morning room. I knew from the handbills and newspaper clippings I’d seen in the boxes that she was passionate about social change in England; helping the poor and saving women who’d been forced into prostitution in order to feed their children. She’d been handicapped, which would have affected her interests, but in all I’d seen, in every box, and I was close to the end of them, there wasn’t anything to indicate she had the slightest curiosity of anything like climbing Everest or visiting unusual places. Even after she was healed, she was content to be home. She was not the adventurer Phoenix wanted.

So w
hy would God send a girl like Jane to him?

I was terribly afraid he had not, that Jane was intended for Denys and by some twist of fate, some awful screw-up in the cosmos, a tragic mistake had been made.

“Do you visit her grave, Denys?”

“Sometimes.
Mostly when I’m positive Phoenix won’t be there. I hate myself for feeling this way, Mariah. You have to believe that. As much as I get pissed off at Phoenix, and think he’s carried on the guilt trip for way too long, and resent that Jane was his, he’s my brother. I’d never do anything to hurt him, and if he knew how I felt, and still feel, about Jane, it’d kill him.”

I began to wonder if Phoenix knew, if he figured out that Jane wasn’t for him. If so, was it any wonder he could never escape the guilt? Not only had she died because he wasn’t on top of things, he’d taken a girl meant for his brother. And she died.

It was all purely conjecture, of course, but I knew there would come a time when I’d have to ask Phoenix for the truth about Jane. If I could open up and tell him about Emilian, he could tell me about her and the night she died.

For the moment, I reminded myself that Denys
didn’t know I was aware that I was Anabo, or that I was intended for Phoenix. Maybe that’s better, I decided. He’d be more open and honest because he’d assume I had no vested interest in Phoenix or his past. “Why couldn’t he bring her back?”

“Eryx claimed he’d replaced Phoenix’s mark with his own, and
we assumed that was why, that if an Anabo is marked, she can only be brought back by the one who marked her.”

Maybe she could only be brought back by the one who was her intended. I imagined how it had been,
learning Eryx had raped her, the horror of seeing her murdered right in front of them, Phoenix’s desperation to bring her back, and her dying in his arms. Had he known then? Was it too late for him to see which brother was her intended, to see if he could bring her back? Or had he known in that moment that it would never be right if another of his brothers brought back the woman who loved him? And she did love him, I didn’t doubt for a second. It was a sweet, deep love, not one of strong desire and passion, but Jane was still young, and totally innocent.

How had she felt about Denys? He said she kissed him back. Had she
wanted to kiss him again when he came to visit?

I would never know.

And perhaps in the grand scheme of things, it didn’t matter. She was gone, and it was time for Phoenix to let go of her death. I would confront him with all I’d learned, and make him face it, make him talk about it. Not for me, and not for what might come to pass between us, but for him. He needed to let go of this crushing burden he’d carried around for more than a century.

And for Denys. Turning away from the shelves with all the boxes that held another woman’s life, I watched him stare up at the sheep picture, his hands clenched around the armrests of the
rocker.

Out of nowhere, I remembered the night I met Phoenix, when he came to my room to apologize. He’d stared at me with that strange yearning I didn’t understand, but it spoke to something in me and there was a connection. I understood now. Maybe it was instinct, maybe it was a divine promise, or maybe it was simply fate, but a bond
was formed between us that night, and nothing in the days following had done anything but build on it. I trusted him, and for me that was huge. I didn’t trust anyone, even those closest to me, like Gustav.

Yet, in a very short period of time, I’d grown close to Phoenix, had slept in the same bed with him, had show
n him what I kept in the boxes inside my head.

Had this been what happened between Denys and Jane? One moment, one look, one unspoken connection
. Not love, because love was so much more – but an indefinable tie that couldn’t be broken by time or another person or even death.

My heart broke for him. As difficult as it had been for Phoenix, it was
in some ways worse for Denys. He’d been unable to grieve openly, had kept all of it inside. Until now. I went to him and stroked his hair. “Let’s get out of here. We’ll go somewhere and talk. You can tell me all about Jane, and maybe you’ll feel better.”