Demon's Curse

by Alexa Egan

  “I’ve seen close-range artillery fire do less damage,” came a solemn voice just behind her.

  Bianca spun around with a cry, colliding against a scarlet-clad chest sturdy as a tree.

  The captain put out a hand to steady her. “Calm now, lass. It’s just me. You look as if the devil were after you.”

  “How did you get in here?” she snapped, ashamed and embarrassed at her sudden, overwhelming urge to lean into his strength, let him wrap his arms around her and tell her it would be all right.

  “The same way you did. The door” was his quiet comment as he righted a broken chair, stuffing spilled like entrails across the floor.

  Alarm became anger, a more useful emotion. It allowed her to maintain a semblance of composure despite her thrashing heart and wobbly knees. “Are you following me? Is that why you’re here?”

  “I came in search of something.”

  “What kind of something?”

  “Let’s just say I’ll know it when I see it.” He took a deep breath and paced a few steps away, running his hand over a scarred tabletop. Bent to pluck a torn page from the floor by the hearth, his gaze narrowing. He shoved it into his pocket, but not before Bianca recognized the identical crescent symbol she’d noticed in Adam’s journal drawn there.

  “And why are you here?” he asked.

  “Pardon?”

  “What brings you to Adam’s house alone and taut as a cocked pistol?”

  “I suppose I hoped I’d find some clue or hint to the murderer’s identity.”

  “And have you?”

  “I found you. Does that count?”

  “It would if I’d murdered him, but I’m as innocent as you of that crime.”

  “I’m glad at least one person thinks I’m innocent.”

  “Of murder, at any rate,” he answered, a light hovering in his knife-blade stare. “The rest remains to be seen.”

  Fear and something else—something dark and forbidden—knotted her stomach and shivered like fingers up her spine. She lost her nerve and looked away, her eyes traveling over the wreckage of Adam’s belongings. “Who could have done this? Thieves looking for trinkets to pawn?”

  “Too much that could be sold remains. This was a search, plain and simple,” he answered. The captain stepped closer, his body radiating heat like a blast furnace. “Did you ever see Adam with a book? Worn leather cover. Leaves and flowers pressed within it. A bookmark of ragged blue cloth torn from an old coat lining.”

  She clutched the strap of her satchel like a lifeline, unable to move. Unable to think.

  “If you’ve seen it or might know where he kept it . . . I’d not ask if it weren’t important.”

  She stared up at the flop of unruly, raven-black hair, the slash of dark brows. Noted a tiny white scar just beside his temple. The jump of his pulse at the hollow of his jaw. “What’s so important about an old diary full of plants?” she asked, impressed at the steadiness of her voice.

  “Only my life,” he replied as he lifted a hand to her cheek, his fingers hovering bare inches above her skin. His eyes blazed a path over her face as if he might devour her, the space between them shimmering with expectation. “Un fieuyn commdedig at neira,” he whispered softly, his green-gold gaze vibrant as the sun upon the sea. “So beautiful. So cold.”

  His slow, seductive way of speaking moved like sugar through her veins. Desire jumped along her nerves. Wholly unexpected. Completely terrifying. Would he kiss her? Did she want him to?

  Pulling free before she made a fool of herself, she cleared her throat. “I have to go.”

  He raised his arm as if he might catch her sleeve, but she jerked back.

  “I’m late.” She grabbed up her skirts, wheeling away. Away from his masculine strength and his grim, sorrow-filled gaze and a grief she’d felt welling from wounds she’d long cemented over. Grief echoed in his harsh, stony expression.

  “Wait,” he called.

  She made it as far as the landing before staggering to a halt at the top of the stairs.

  Three men climbed toward her, wide and solid as tree stumps. One with flabby hound-dog jowls and a smile gappy as a pitchfork. The second with a fire-scarred face, chapped lips pulled into a permanent grimace. The third, and most terrifying, with milky-white eyes, an expression empty as death. Two gripped long, ugly knives in their meaty fists; the third clutched a deadly-looking pistol.

  “Here, now, what’s yer hurry, pet?” Hound-Dog jeered as she retreated back into the parlor.

  “Get behind me.” Flannery pressed granite-hard against her back, breath warm upon the chilled flesh of her neck.

  When she remained frozen, he put hands upon her shoulders, guiding her unresponsive body. “Now,” he said firmly as the men bellied into the room.

  Hound-Dog smirked, kicking aside a broken drawer. Stomping on the chipped edge of a bowl until it smashed as he herded the captain and Bianca ahead of him. “Bludge, Snips, and I want to know what a pretty bit like you is doing nosing about in a dead man’s house with a fella like this one.”

  “Why not let the lady leave and we can settle this between ourselves.” Flannery’s steel gaze flicked between the three, a focused intensity in the coiled way he held himself. Violence rising off him like smoke. Here, then, was the battle-blooded soldier, the ancient warrior come to startling life. Just as breathtaking and twice as terrifying as she’d imagined.

  In nervous agitation, the men closed ranks, gazes watchful as they eyed their adversary. Finally the man with the ruined face shoved to the front, brandishing his blade. “Nice try, lover boy, but mebbe we’ll ask you the same thing. What’s yer business here?”

  Bianca jumped as Mac’s lips brushed her cheek. “There’s a carriage outside,” he whispered. “When I say go, you run. Don’t look back. Don’t stop.”

  “Quit your muttering afore I cut out your tongue,” Hound-Dog barked just before he sprang.

  Mac reacted in a blur of movement that ended with Hound-Dog’s knife in Mac’s possession, the villain howling at a bloody slash running down one arm. Another movement too quick to follow, and he dropped like a rag doll beneath a fist to the jaw.

  Bludge screamed and lunged, his blade whipping wildly.

  Mac jumped aside, shoving Bianca clear before he stepped into the attack, knives meeting in a steely clash.

  Now was her chance. Heart slamming into her throat, she inched along the wall toward the doorway leading to the stairs, cringing at each grunting curse, each smashing blow. Focusing on the cool, smooth wood of the chair rail beneath her fingers, she shimmied in tiny, agonizing increments, hoping all eyes were on the fight and off her escape.

  The men dodged and struck back and forth across the ruin of Adam’s tiny parlor, Mac always one step faster, his movements fluid as a dancer’s. His face brilliant and stark and frightening in its cruelty. It was only when he avoided the obvious killing stroke for a deft and clever parry that she realized he was toying with them. The fight some sort of deadly game he played.

  Another complicated maneuver straight out of Angelo’s Fencing Academy, a sweeping lunge, and Mac’s blade bit deep into the other man’s thigh.

  Clutching his leg, Bludge collapsed at Bianca’s feet with a strangled scream, his face a sickly shade of green.

  For a split second Mac’s gaze found hers, his eyes ablaze with a lethal ferocity, a brutal smile lighting his dark features. Then a shot roared in the close space. The acrid smell of black powder and blood singed her nostrils and made her eyes water. Her ears rang with the echo of the explosion.

  Mac reared back. “Run!” he yelled.

  She blundered through the haze toward the door and down the stairs. There were shouts. A man’s shrieking. She thought she heard her name called, and then she was through. Out in the street.

  Before she caught her breath, arms wrapped around her midsection. Plucked her from the ground as if she were naught more than air. Tossed her into a carriage, the door slamming behind her.

 
; “Holles Street,” Mac ordered the driver, pressing his hand against a blossoming red stain on his side, bright against the darker crimson of his tunic.

  “You’ve been shot.” She gulped for air, praying she didn’t faint. “Captain, you’re hurt.”

  Eyes glazed with pain, he gave a slight shake of his head. “Looks worse than it is,” he said, though his jaw remained tight, teeth clamped in a stubborn grimace.

  She sat back against the musty seat, hoping the lurch and sway of the hackney would soothe her, but the looming, twisted grimace of Snips remained imprinted upon her mind before merging into another face: narrower, longer, eyes alight with the madness that always came over him with the drink. Slurred accusations of infidelity followed by vicious threats.

  “. . . devilish fog this autumn. Heard of a fellow got lost. Walked right into the Thames . . .” Mac’s deep, lilting baritone broke into the endless spin of her thoughts. The crush of old fear. “. . . touch and go when the pickets were close. Never sure whether you’d be shot by your own sentries . . .” Sweat sheening his forehead, he sat stiff in the seat across from her. “. . . fields so green it makes your heart ache. A sky awash in clouds. There’s a lake. Cold as the devil’s heart, but it never stopped me from swimming . . .”

  The yearning in his voice tugged at her own heart. His usual arrogance stripped away for a revealing moment. “You should go home for a visit,” she said gently.

  Lines bit deep at either side of his mouth. “Impossible.”

  Mac leaned his head against the side of the carriage, and silence descended but for the rattle and squeak of the wheels.

  No. His name was Flannery. Captain Flannery. She needed to stop thinking of him as Mac.

  She sneaked a peek at the grave angle of his profile. Long, straight nose. Strong jaw. Stubborn mouth rimed in bitterness. A thin, bloody slash down his cheek. She dropped her gaze to his side and the spreading wound there.

  “Are you certain you don’t need a surgeon?” she tried again.

  “I’m not one for doctors.” He offered her a sheepish shrug before leaning back in his seat and closing his eyes. “They, uh . . . they frighten me.”

  “But—”

  “Trust me, Bianca.”

  Before she could doubt her decision, she reached into her satchel, her fingers closing around Adam’s journal. “You know, Mac Flannery? I’m beginning to think I can.”

  * * *

  An entry about a scouting mission outside Orthez. Another relating an episode with a surgeon near Bayonne after a bloody skirmish. “Where did you get this?” Mac asked, still not quite believing he was holding Adam’s fucking journal.

  The last time Mac had seen it had been in Hainaut, when he and Adam shared a stew of cabbage and gristle, Adam scribbling away as usual until their fire burned to ash.

  “Adam must have slipped it into my bag the night he went missing. I found it a few days ago.”

  Mac’s skull heaved with desperate fear and desperate hope, his nerves scraped thin. “Have you read it?”

  “There’s more.” She handed him a folded piece of paper. “I think this man killed Adam or knows who did.”

  Mac scanned the pencil sketch. It had been years, but there was no mistaking the slight upward slant to the eyes. The long patrician nose. The cynical twist of thin lips.

  Jory Wallace.

  An emnil. An Imnada outcast and rogue like Mac. Like the others.

  His offense? Flouting tradition and Gather law by marrying an out-clan.

  Mac had been a lad of ten when Jory’s sentence was pronounced, but he recalled the incident as if it had happened yesterday: the long journey to Cornwall in company with his father. The great assembly in the hall at Deepings, seat of the Duke of Morieux, hereditary head of the ruling Gather, overlord of the five clans, and Gray de Coursy’s grandfather. The ceremony and then the horror had impressed itself on Mac’s young mind: the circle of angry faces, the calls for Wallace’s immediate death, and the man’s silent stoicism as they’d burned away his clan mark, his life forfeit if he ever dared attempt to pass through the Palings and return to the clans.

  “You saw Adam with this man?” he asked, shaking off the bitter emptiness yawning before him. “When?”

  “About six months ago. They were . . . together.” Dread and embarrassment rose from Bianca’s body to mix with the cinnamon-orange scent of her perfume.

  “ ‘Together’?”

  “Adam was . . . that is, he preferred . . . he and this man were . . .” Scarlet burned in her cheeks as she straightened, a spark of defiance lighting her gaze. “Adam and this man were lovers.”

  Mac nearly choked, the pain in his side flaring into his brain. “Lovers? That’s ridiculous!”

  Sparks became flames. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you. I knew you would react in this way. But I thought if it would help catch Adam’s killer—if it would bring him justice while quieting the rumors making me out to be a murderous black widow—it would be worth it.”

  “You of all people shouldn’t believe such malicious gossip.”

  “I wish that’s all it was, but I was there. I saw them together. Adam lay naked on the floor, and this man . . . he was with him.”

  “So the rumors linking you and Adam . . .”

  She shot him a scathing glare. “Were just that. The distance between actress and whore is measured in inches, Captain. People wanted to believe Adam and I were lovers, and since the pretense kept him safe, I never refuted it. But he’s dead. No one can hurt him now.”

  Mother of All! Of course! She’d witnessed Adam’s shift and taken it for an illicit assignation. Mac wasn’t certain whether to laugh or weep. Hell, had she arrived a few minutes earlier, there’d have been stranger things than a naked man upon the floor for her to see.

  “Don’t judge him too harshly, Mac.”

  She’d said his name. She’d said his name, and Adam had not been her lover.

  Unthinking, unbidden, and too stupid with unexpected relief to know better, he leaned forward and pressed his lips to hers. Her mouth beneath his was cool and soft and sherry-sweet. Once the kiss was over, the taste of her lingered. A wild buzz crackling beneath his skin. Arousal leaping like wildfire through his veins.

  He waited for an eruption of temper that never came. Instead she offered him a strange look, eyes dark and inscrutable. Her hand rose as if she would bid him back to her.

  The carriage lurched to a clattering stop, the driver shouting, “Holles Street, Cap’n!”

  She sat up, a distant look in her eyes, and the moment between them passed as if it had never been.

  A sticky hand clamped against his ribs, Mac opened the door for Bianca, the world reeling with more than recent discoveries. His side burned as if a torch had been held to his skin, and while the bleeding had slowed, it still seeped hot through his fingers at every movement. “You’ll be safe now.”

  Bianca frowned, her lips pressed into a determined line, her hands clutching the strap of her bag. “I’ll not leave this carriage unless you come with me. You’re hurt and can barely see straight.”

  “Bianca—”

  “Captain Flannery, it’s that, or we order the driver to your lodgings and I’ll tend you there. Either way, I’ll not leave you until I know your wound is seen to.”

  He recognized that look of female pigheadedness. If Bianca was anything like his sister, they’d sit here all night until she got her way. And he didn’t have nearly that long. “You win.”

  She smirked over her success. “I usually do.”

  * * *

  Renata paused in her letter writing to look out on the stream of people passing by her drawing room window. Was the gentleman standing on the corner a beast in man’s clothing? Did the pair of women crossing the street change shape at the light of the moon? Was that fellow chatting with the peddler on the corner a dirty shifter?

  It made her skin crawl to think these creatures walked unnoticed among humanity, able to work their treachery
and do their murderous will, with the world none the wiser to their secret.

  The Imnada are out there, Renata. I know it. And someday we’ll prove it to the world.

  Her father’s words repeated so often throughout her childhood; an unrelenting refrain in spite of the criticisms and mockery heaped upon him by professors and scholars who scorned his research and dismissed his claims. They blamed Gilles d’Espe’s mania on the tragic death of his wife, a woman Renata had never known but hated with every fiber of her being. It was this woman, long dead, who’d continued to hold her father’s heart, allowing no other to take her place. No new love to grow.

  Renata had tried. Desperate to prove her devotion, she’d assisted her father in gathering his Imnada lore, searching out rare texts and uncovering forgotten references. When he’d sought to launch expeditions to Wales and Scotland in search of the elusive creatures, it had been Renata who organized sailing schedules and lodgings, provisions and guides. Any way to stay close to him. To carve a place within his life.

  None of it had mattered.

  A dead wife. A dead race. These were what he loved. He was blind to the living, breathing daughter in front of him.

  She grew to hate this loathsome breed with the same fury she reserved for that bitch of a wife. Both had stolen her father’s attention. And while one was naught but bones and beyond her retribution, the Imnada were not.

  She dipped her pen into the inkwell, completed the last invitation in the stack. The recipients would gather for the skills of her cook and the perfection of her wine cellar. They would leave carrying the seeds of the shifters’ destruction. The questions would grow. The word would spread. The Other would finally understand the threat they faced.

  Father had been right.

  The Imnada were out there. She had seen them.

  They would pay for all they’d done to tear her family apart. She would prove her love once and for all. She would finally make Father proud.

  5

  The surgeon came and went, stitching the gash in the captain’s side with much reproachful tut-tutting. “Is the gentleman staying here with you tonight?” he’d asked, his meaning clear.