Awaken the Curse Page 9

  Perhaps a clue rested in the uniformed crispness of one, his hat tucked beneath his arm, a sword hanging loosely from his hip. Bianca knew that Adam had served for years in the army, selling out after the emperor’s final defeat at Waterloo the summer before last. Could these men be former brothers in arms?

  They looked up as one when she swept forward to stand unapologetically beside them. She sensed a slow-burning appraisal from the golden-haired Adonis to her left, greatcoat hanging elegantly from his wide shoulders, cravat tied in careless perfection. A gentleman with the looks and—if she read him right—the knowledge of his own power to attract.

  A regal gentleman at the foot of the grave eyed her down his straight aristocratic nose, lips pursing ever so slightly, hand tightening on the knob of his cane. It didn’t take a mind reader to interpret his disapproval.

  Only the officer spared her no more than a glance before returning his attention to the minister reading from his Bible.

  Dismissing the three men with a jerk of her chin, she focused on the reason she was here. Adam Kinloch. A true friend and gentleman when so many others of her acquaintance wanted something from her. Her talent. Her favors. Her body.

  Adam had never asked for more than her friendship. And in offering his in return, he’d reminded her of the life she’d lost when Papa died and Lawrence had swept her from the gardens and greenhouses outside Baltimore to the clogged and cluttered streets of London.

  What sort of monster would have killed him in such a horrible, shocking way? Would leave him naked and gutted, abandoned like so much refuse to be scavenged by dogs and beggars?

  Tears pricked the corners of her eyes, her stare burning to hold them back. No doubt these cold-eyed men assumed, like everyone else, that she and Adam had been lovers. She’d always let people believe what they wished. Better that than discovering the far more disturbing truth.

  As if sensing her thoughts, the uniformed man met her watery gaze. His strange almond-shaped eyes were a pale green-gold, long-lashed and deeply set. His lips were full and sensuous. Smiling, he would have been devastating. But he didn’t look as if he smiled often, if at all. In fact, he could have been carved from stone. From across Adam’s grave, he watched her steadily as if he could see right into her heart. She knuckled her hands together, refusing to look away first. He wanted to stare? Fine. He could stare all he liked. She was used to eyes on her.

  As the service concluded, the others drifted away, leaving her alone with the gravediggers clutching their spades.

  She dropped the small nosegay she’d purchased from a flower seller into the grave. “I’ll not forget you, my friend,” she whispered. “And never fear, as you kept my secret, so shall I keep yours. You have my promise.”

  As the first scoop of earth thudded against the coffin’s lid, the heavens opened, the autumn rain falling in a chilling drench that immediately drooped her ribbons and soaked through the expensive wool to her gown beneath.

  Shielding her head as best she could with her reticule, she turned, almost knocking into the officer, who had lingered behind.

  “Pardon,” he said, his voice a gruff rumble, his gaze doubly intense at a distance of inches. He opened his mouth as if he might say more, but she dodged past him in her haste to leave this awful, forlorn, hopeless place.

  The crowds had dispersed in the downpour. The sidewalk was empty but for a knife grinder hurrying for shelter and a man selling meat pies to a dripping-wet customer.

  She lifted a hand to hail a hackney before remembering she had no fare. Instead she hastened east down Piccadilly on foot, all the while feeling a gaze leveled at her back, tickling her shoulder blades. She would not turn around, but her steps came faster until, cowardly as it made her feel, she was almost running.

  * * *

  “The woman knows, I’m sure of it.” Captain Mac Flannery splashed brandy into his glass before downing it in one quick gulp, letting the heat travel soothingly through him. Without any explicit invitation, the group of old friends had ended up at Gray’s town house after leaving the cemetery.

  Mac poured another, trying to wash away the grave stench clinging to his nostrils, the roof of his mouth. The memory of earth striking the coffin lid as Adam was entombed. The Imnada did not hold with enclosing their dead in the ground but released their spirits with fire, the better to send them back through the Gateway to be reunited with their ancestors. Unfortunately, Adam’s murder had garnered too much public attention to make that possible.

  Instead, he’d died as he’d lived: in exile from his clan. His kind. Only Mac’s intervention keeping him from a pauper’s lye pit with the rest of the unclaimed dead.

  “You think Adam betrayed us to an out-clan?” Gray demanded from his seat by the fire.

  Mac hadn’t seen de Coursy since the chaotic days following Waterloo. The estranged heir to the dukedom of Morieux lived a reclusive life in the north, rarely venturing to London, and even then shunning the usual Society entertainments. Some gossip blamed it on a horrible disfigurement acquired during the war. Others whispered he kept his mad wife locked in a tower. The most salacious hinted at black arts and satanic rituals carried out in the catacombs beneath his bleak north country estate.

  If only the truth were that simple.

  “Was that Bianca Parrino paying her last respects?” David St. Leger paused in shuffling a deck of cards to hold out his glass for Mac to refill.

  “Who?” Mac asked, glancing at the faces of the men he’d once soldiered with. Men who at one time had been as close as brothers. The Fey-blood’s curse had shattered that bond as it had destroyed so much in their lives.

  Friendships forged by blood and steel had frayed like ragged cloth as if each of them had hoped to flee the curse by running away from each other. They should have known their fates and Fey-blood magic had tied them too closely for escape. They were bound by darker forces than the war.

  “All work and no play, Captain Flannery.” David gave a disgusted shake of his head. “Do they have you chained to your desk over there at the Horse Guards?”

  Mac chose not to answer. This wasn’t David’s first refill.

  “She’s an actress at Covent Garden,” he continued. “All the rage this year. Audiences love her.”

  Of course. That was why the woman at Adam’s funeral had seemed so familiar. Mac had seen her penned likeness staring out at him from countless newspapers. They didn’t do her justice.

  Statuesque as any Nordic queen, she carried herself with a pride that bordered on the insolent. Hair blond as corn silk. Eyes a chilling blue. And just enough of an accent to give her an air of the exotic. But it was what she’d said more than how she’d said it that had truly rooted him to the spot. As you kept my secret, so shall I keep yours.

  Had Adam been foolish enough to trust her with the Imnada’s existence? And could this reckless confession have led to his murder?

  “They say she’s high in the instep as any duchess. Throws men into a quake with one glance from those alluring blue eyes,” David said, refilling his own glass this time. “They also say she and Adam were lovers.”

  Gray rose to toss another log on the fire. “I find that hard to believe while the Imnada are forbidden marriage outside the clans.”

  “I never said he was marrying her. I said he was swiving her,” David said with a leer.

  Gray’s face betrayed his disgust.

  “Wrinkle your princely nose all you want, de Coursy, but you know as well as I do that as long as we lay under the curse, a quick shag is all you and I are ever going to get.”

  “That may be, but some of us still wish for more than a tumble with some faceless, nameless doxy.”

  David shrugged. “Wish all you want. It won’t change the facts. Besides, what does it matter to the man they refer to as the ‘Ghost Earl’? With that tall, dark, and mysterious act, you’ve got every woman in England panting for you, ring or no ring.”

  If David’s smirk was any indication, Mac and Gray w
ould do best to ignore him. St. Leger had always been a loose cannon. It was doubtful whether the curse had diminished his reckless ways.

  Mac stepped into the breach. “Terminology aside, if Adam and Mrs. Parrino were lovers, she might know about the Imnada. About us.”

  “I still don’t believe it,” Gray declared. “Adam would never have betrayed us to an out-clan. It was his very determination to keep the Imnada’s secret that led to the . . . to our . . .”

  “Say it, de Coursy,” David urged, his features rigid. “Or are you too frightened to speak of it out loud? Will the shade of our maker rise up from the grave and strike us down? Curse us again? What the hell could he do that’s worse than what we already suffer? Forcing the shift . . . renunciation by the clans . . . Death would be preferable.”

  David’s histrionics aside, Mac had to agree.

  Tainted by Fey-blood magic, the four of them had been declared mortally damaged and a blight on the clans, their bloodlines forever corrupted. Worthless. Contemptible. Abominations.

  And yet, they’d not been offered the swift mercy of a falling ax or a sharp snap of the neck. Instead, the Gather elders had pronounced a far harsher sentence of exile, severing the four of them from the protection and community of clan and holding, cutting them off from everyone they cared about, erasing them from the world they knew as if they’d never been born.

  Mac’s back twitched with the memory of the destruction the Ossine’s enforcers wreaked upon his body as they stripped him of his clan mark. His bowels loosened as he recalled the violent shredding of his mental signum, as if a great claw had ripped through his brain. Both punishments had destroyed every bond with his past, leaving him adrift and alone. He’d only survived by hardening his mind and his heart against any pain and any loss, becoming as unfeeling and remote as a speck of dirt, focusing no further than the next day, the next cycle of the moon, the next season.

  “Had your grandfather not caved to the Ossine’s commands, we’d have faced a quick end and you could have been the Ghost Earl in earnest then,” David jibed.

  “That’s enough.” Gray’s terse command was unmistakable.

  St. Leger lashed out, smashing his glass down on the tabletop, the shards spraying his hand, cutting his cheek. Blood slid down his face like a single crimson tear. “You’re not my superior officer anymore. I don’t take your orders.”

  “Did you ever?”

  David froze for a moment, his expression unreadable. His body poised as if he might throw himself on Gray and beat him to a jelly. It wouldn’t be the first time these two had come to blows. Like oil and water, they were, with Mac the inevitable peacemaker. He’d thought those days long past.

  But as quickly as David’s rage had ignited, it dissipated in a bout of laughter. “Damn, but I forgot what a right bastard you are.” He passed the palm of his hand across his cheek, wiping away the blood.

  “Feeling’s mutual,” Gray grumbled.

  Mac swallowed back his aggravation. “That woman is aware of our existence. I’d bet on it. We’re vulnerable—the Imnada are vulnerable—until we discover the extent of the danger.”

  Immediately his mind returned to Bianca Parrino. Her whispered words had set a queer pang jolting through him. Worry had taken root, and no amount of scoffing by these two chuckleheads would dissuade him.

  “You think Adam was killed because he was Imnada? None know the clans survive. The enforcers have seen to that.” David plunked himself down on a couch, dabbing at his cut with a handkerchief.

  “Would you bet your life and the lives of every man, woman, and child within the clans on that assumption, David? Would you bet the lives of your family? Your friends?” Mac argued.

  “Friends? Family? Where were they when the Gather pronounced our sentence? When our clan marks were obliterated and we were cast out half-dead into the world?”

  “Not all of them wished us ill. There were those who spoke against our exile.”

  “For all the good it did us. No, Mac. We’re emnil. Outlawed and living on sufferance. I say let the clans fend for themselves.”

  “Then forget the clans and remember Adam. He was our friend. We owe him justice, if nothing else,” Mac challenged.

  “Adam was no traitor,” Gray reiterated. “He understood the allegiance owed the Imnada and the dangers in exposure to the outside world.”

  “People change,” Mac shot back.

  David’s mouth twisted to a sneer. “Every night like clockwork, eh, Flannery?”

  Mac sighed before tossing back another brandy.

  They were a company again. The three of them. The accursed.

  With his death, Adam had bound them together once more.

  * * *

  Wiping Froissart’s seed from between her thighs, Renata stepped through the curtain into her dressing chamber, dropping the heavy fabric into place behind her to muffle his snores and grunts. His foul breaking of wind. The creaks of the bed as he tossed and turned.

  Pitching aside the rag, she toyed with the thought of killing him. How easy it would be. How quick. None would question it. They would mourn with her—the young, grieving widow. A thought quickly dismissed. The man was a pig, but he’d served his purpose. She had succeeded where all had called her mad to try. She had tracked those who slaughtered her father to this horrid gutter of a city. After a year and a half, vengeance would finally be hers. Only then would Froissart meet his final reward. Until that moment, she would prevent what attentions she could and endure what she could not.

  “Is he asleep?”

  A figure stepped from the shadows. She had known he was there, had felt his arrival as a tremor in the air, a touch upon her mind. She even knew when he parted the curtains to watch as Froissart spent himself inside her, his great bulk jerking and wheezing as he came. She’d felt his eyes upon her and smiled, her husband thinking the pleasure was for his sake.

  “He is.” Taking up her brush, she sat before an enormous mirror, one of four, each covering a wall of her dressing chamber.

  Alonzo stepped behind her, pulling the brush gently from her hands. He slid it through her long black hair, tangle by tangle. He had always known how to soothe her. Milk-siblings, they’d shared a breast and then a nursery before he’d been packed off to the military and she to school with the priestesses of High Danu at Varennes. Until then, they’d been inseparable. As they were once again.

  Tonight he smelled of tobacco and wine and leather and sex, and she felt an instant’s jealousy for the whore who’d pleasured him. Then she looked up to catch his eager gaze upon her naked body, and her envy dissipated. She had nothing to worry about. He would always be hers.

  “Froissart is a pig,” he spat. “Why do you allow him to touch you?”

  She laughed at the echo of her thought on his lips. They were so close, their minds flowed in tandem. Sometimes a mere flash of shared reflection. Other times, it was as a stream coming together with a river, thoughts rippling and diving and curling upon each other so there was no way to tell where one began and the other ended. So it had ever been since she’d discovered a mere skin-on-skin touch allowed her to travel into his mind—drift and spread into a corner to lie curled and watchful there. An invisible witness to all he saw and heard.

  What began as a child’s game had blossomed through study and practice into a rare and extraordinary talent: the ability to touch another’s mind and, for brief flashes, to shape, influence, and even control. No longer was she constrained by actual touch: a lock of hair, fingernail parings, a drawn tooth, was all it took to open the door.

  She kept these precious mementos in a case upon her dressing table, making use of them only when absolutely necessary. To indulge in such powerful magic spread her soul thin like high mares’ tails stretching wispy across a wide sky. The body she left became an empty husk. Functioning but without a will. Quiescent. Vulnerable.

  “I am strong, Alonzo, but even my powers have limits,” she said. “It is easier to allow him his liberti
es and harbor my strength for more important business.” She shot him a smoldering, pouty look. “But perhaps you don’t ask for my sake but your own. Are you jealous, Alonzo? Do you wish to replace the toad Froissart in my bed? To possess my body as I possess your mind?” She ran the tip of her tongue across her lips. “To scream your release as you spill your seed within me?”

  The answer was clear in his jealous gaze moving over her breasts, the creamy flat of her stomach, the jointure of her legs. A gaze reflected over and over within the four mirrors. Naked hunger stared out at her from every angle. His control held by a hair’s width, his lust for her like an animal clawing at his innards.

  “This pig-dog is worse than shit beneath your heel, Renata. He doesn’t know you as I do. He sees you as nothing but a furrow to plow with his pig-dog babies. I would worship you as you deserve.”

  She shivered but did not yield to the tempting images heating her blood. She had come too far to give everything up for the feel of Alonzo moving inside her, the grip of his strong, broad hands upon her flesh. “That may be, but Froissart is useful to me. He is money and position. He is power.”

  “You have a hundred times more power than this bastard abruti has in your little finger.”

  “Émile’s power lies in respectability and connections. We need the cover of his embassy to shield us while we hunt. We found one, but my father’s man claimed there were four soldiers at the house that day. Four with swords and guns and death in their eyes.” She swung around, catching Alonzo by surprise. He rocked back on his heels, clutching the brush like a weapon. “Did you go to Kinloch’s residence? Did you find anything that might lead us to the others?”

  “I searched his house but came away empty-handed. Just books on plants and flowers. Pretty drawings. Jars and bowls, coils of wire. The man was naught but a gardener.”