Demon's Curse

by Alexa Egan

  Marianne pasted on her best hostess smile, but the fear in her eyes gave her away. “Ah, well. It will come, but for now have a bite. You need some feeding up. You’re thin as a fence rail and pale as a prisoner.” She poured out a beer from the pitcher. “And no wonder, working in that horrid city. You need some fresh air and proper looking after.”

  “Leave off pestering the man,” Jory scolded good-naturedly. “Don’t you have enough children of your own to worry over?”

  Marianne shot her husband an imperious look. “I’m thinking Flannery would be a sight more biddable than any of my own flesh and blood. Do you know what Jamie has done now? He’s—”

  “Erythronium americanum.”

  The three of them swung their attention toward Bianca, who’d bent over to read Adam’s journal.

  “What’s that?” Jory asked.

  “Erythronium americanum. That’s the plant here.” She pointed at the page Jory had been deciphering.

  He leaned in close. “Er. Of course.”

  “Do you know what it is?” Mac asked, coming back to stand behind Bianca’s chair.

  She looked at him over her shoulder, eyes shining with knowledge. “Adder’s-tongue. It has a pale yellow flower and mottled leaves. Blooms in April and May.”

  “Now, where on earth did you learn all that?” Jory asked.

  She grinned. “My father studied botany and our housekeeper used to distill the juice from the leaves and dose me with it for all sorts of complaints. Swore it cured everything but death.”

  Marianne paused in the midst of lighting candles against the lengthening afternoon shadows, her eyes fixed on Bianca. “Are you men thinking what I’m thinking?”

  Jory flicked a cautious glance toward Mac, then pushed pen and paper across to Bianca. “She’s not a brigade, but she might be all we need.”

  14

  “He’s gone, Jory.”

  Bianca looked up from studying her notes to see Marianne’s pinched face, her hands fumbling with her apron.

  “I’ve not seen him since luncheon. I’ve combed the farm and the house. No sign of him.”

  Jory’s pen stilled, his features guarded but not afraid. “Did you ask the children?”

  Marianne sniffed her exasperation. “Tight as poacher’s traps, the lot of ’em, but I caught Sammy leaving the window ajar and Henry shoving a jacket and shirt beneath his bedcovers. He’s out there, I know it.”

  Jory’s eyes cut to the window, where dusk settled over the fields. They’d been locked inside for hours studying Adam’s journal, Bianca lost in cramped, blotted pages of genera and species. Even so, she knew the moment Mac departed, and why. The window framed the darkness like a painting.

  “It’ll be fine,” Jory said. “He knows not to pass beyond the last field and to keep free of Squire Fruddy’s park.”

  Were they speaking of Mac? Bianca’s stomach tightened.

  “But what if he doesn’t, Jory?” Marianne’s strained voice interrupted. “Jamie’s getting bolder by the minute. Last month it was for an hour or two. Now it’s been most of the day. You’ve got to go after him. Find him and bring him home. What if”—she glanced toward Bianca with a frown—“what if someone comes upon him? One of those Fey-blood following from London? Or worse, an Ossine assassin. Jamie’s still just a boy. He doesn’t understand the dangers.”

  “He’s older than I was when I first ventured out alone.”

  “That may be, but you did it among your own kind. You had the security of kin and clan around you. Jamie’s had none of those advantages.”

  “I’ve given him what guidance I could,” Jory said quietly, rising to take Marianne under the arm, guiding her firmly back toward the door.

  She didn’t go quietly, her voice high-pitched, threaded with anxiety. “It’s not enough. He thinks it’s a game. A lark.”

  The two stood at the door in low conversation. “You’re working yourself into a state, Annie. Jamie’s a clever, capable lad.”

  “So you won’t go. You’ll just let your son run wild.”

  He angled her farther into the passage, so that only the tip of her bobbing cap and a few shaking ringlets were visible to Bianca over the bulk of his shoulder. “Flannery’s abroad,” he said in a quiet voice. “He’ll look after the boy.”

  “Flannery’s not his father,” Marianne huffed. “Fine if you won’t go; I’ll get Henry. He and I will look.”

  “No.” Jory grabbed her by the wrist as she turned to go. “Annie, please. Let the boy be. Dragging him back will only make him worse.”

  She wrenched away, departing in an agitated swish of ruffled skirts.

  Bianca grabbed up the closest book, diving into it as Jory returned to stir up the fire with a crackle of sparking embers. “You’ll have to forgive my wife,” he said. “Since that Ossine’s arrival, she’s been a bag of raw nerves. She’s sure the clans are looking to make trouble for us.”

  She looked up from the page, eyes wide with innocent confusion. “I’m sorry. Did you say something?”

  His lips curled into the same glitter-eyed smile she remembered from Adam’s house. “I’ve read of your acting abilities, but never imagined I’d get a front-row viewing without traveling up to London Town.”

  Her features remained placidly unconcerned, slightly bewildered.

  “Your book, Mrs. Parrino.” Jory pointed. “It’s easier read right side up.”

  Her own smile glimmered with the flash of a dimple as she closed her ridiculous prop with a thump of dusty pages. “I should be the one to apologize. I’d no right to listen in on a private conversation.”

  Jory stabbed at the embers, though the fire already danced merrily. “Hmph. With Marianne, an argument’s not a private conversation. It’s a knock-down, drag-you-over-the-coals fight. She’s fearless where her bairns are concerned.”

  “So Jamie’s gone missing?”

  He stared into the flames, his gaze grown serious. “Aye, the lad’s eighteen going on thirty. Thinks he knows it all.”

  “I remember being young and confident. Seems a lifetime ago now.”

  He snuck her a look over his shoulder. “I’ll wager your father wanted to lock you in your room and throw away the key until you were too old for such mischief.”

  “He used to threaten me with the convent as a joke. Then I met my husband and the jokes stopped.”

  “Your father didn’t approve?”

  Bianca shrugged. “Like your wife, he thought I was too young and naïve. That I would end being hurt.”

  “But you married anyway.”

  “Oh, yes. Like Jamie, I knew everything. An old man’s warnings counted as nothing to me. Lawrence was what I wanted, and my father had never been able to deny me anything.” She shifted the notes that were spread on the table, though her attention wasn’t on them. Instead, she recalled a very similar conversation with Mac. They had both paid dearly for the folly of their youths. “It must be hard seeing your children grow and know they’ll soon be off on their own.”

  “You want to keep them wrapped in swaddling forever, but if they’re to learn to stand on their own, you must nudge them from the nest and let them try their wings, even when it scares your hair white.”

  She looked to the night beyond the window. “And if they come to harm? Or make a mistake? How do you know if they’re ready to fly free? Or if the risk is too great?”

  Jory’s gaze returned to the flames, the light hollowing the toughened angles and lines, making his eyes glow dull. “Life is risk. Play it too safe and it’s no longer living, just surviving.”

  That was exactly what she’d been doing: playing it safe while life passed her by. But dare she take Jory’s advice and risk more?

  Dare she place her hand back in the fire?

  * * *

  The animals hustled and shoved each other in an attempt to shelter within the safety of the sheds and byres and away from the predator in their midst. Only the farm’s bull ox stood his ground, slamming against the fen
ce boards, small, dark eyes lit with fury. A lamp burned in the kitchen window, but no one came to the door or plucked back a curtain. They knew who walked tonight.

  He skirted the barn at the edge of the orchard, picking through the gloom with little problem, his eyes catching and holding the thin, pallid light of the goddess moon as he leapt to the top of the stone wall, lifting his head to the wind, inhaling the scents of woodsmoke, cut hay, wet earth, and animal dung.

  No clutter of buildings or crush of humanity. No maze of cobbled streets beneath his paws or lamplight to avoid. No fear of discovery.

  As he gave himself up fully to his aspect, he shed the despair that ate at him with the destructiveness of silver, ignored the Fey-blood threat stalking him like a shadow, and reveled in the uncomplicated joy of simply being alive.

  Dropping lightly to the ground beyond, he followed the wall until he came to the edge of the coppice, the trees rising up like sentinels before him. He swung his head to the east, where lights from the village danced like fireflies. A dog barked. Laughter sounded. The human world. A world forever barred to him as long as the curse held sway. A world where Bianca lay waiting, perfumed silken flesh amid tumbled sheets.

  She had looked upon him as both man and beast and had not shrunk in horror. Amusement curled his lips. Well, perhaps a bit of horror at first. But over and over she had shown herself to own the courage of the clans as well as a gentle vulnerability that touched a chord deep within him: shared secrets and shared danger. It made him dare to dream when he knew he shouldn’t. Not if he wanted to return to the clans. To Concullum. To his life as Imnada.

  Defiantly turning his back on the tangle of conflicting desires, he plunged into the wood, the dark welcoming him like a brother.

  * * *

  Bianca opened the kitchen door and squinted into the dark. Behind her, a clock chimed the small hour of two in the morn. Ahead, a pinprick of light and the comforting smell of pipe smoke drew her from the house to join the man standing alone by the well, his gaze upon the belt of trees beyond the meadow.

  “I’m sure Jamie will be home soon,” she said, as much to reassure herself as to comfort a worried father.

  “A boy on the cusp of manhood can find plenty of trouble if he’s of a mind to.” In the glow from his pipe, Jory’s gaze flickered demon red, his craggy features hollowed and skull-like.

  Gooseflesh raised the hairs on Bianca’s arms. Her stomach clenched with a sudden unreasonable fright as wild fancies conjured the Frenchman’s granite visage from the fog that hung heavily in the air.

  “Mac’s out there, too, isn’t he?” she asked, rubbing warmth into her arms, drawing her heavy woolen cloak closer about her hunched shoulders.

  “Aye,” Jory answered around his pipe stem.

  “Do you ever . . . I mean, it must be hard not to indulge when you get the chance.”

  “It’s dangerous. Being unmarked and emnil makes it doubly so.”

  “But Mac risks it.”

  “He does. Once in a while, it’s worth any risk to assume your aspect for pleasure rather than in shame. To become one with all the creatures the goddess touches in her travels across the heavens.”

  “Adam came here for the same reason, didn’t he? To walk out under the night sky without fear of being discovered. To forget the curse and his exile for a little while.”

  “Aye. He loved the city, said the bustle kept him from thinking overmuch or too deeply on things he couldn’t change, but it was a two-edged blade. Crowds can distract for a time, but they can also make a soul feel lonelier than a ghost.”

  The pain of Adam’s death returned a hundredfold. Especially now that she realized how little she truly knew about him, how many secrets he’d held back. Surely, if she’d been a true friend she would have recognized his loneliness. But then, had Adam ever seen it reflected in her own eyes? Or had they both dissembled for so long that no stray emotions escaped their rock-hard exteriors? She certainly would never have admitted that she had not been completely and perfectly content in her whirlwind life onstage and in Society.

  Not even to herself.

  Not back then.

  Only in the short space of days since Mac had swooped into her drawing room like an avenging angel had the quiet hours preyed on her mind with their might-have-beens and their worthless regrets. And only since leaving the bustle of her familiar London haunts had the infinite spinning heavens made her feel like the tiniest grain of sand upon a beach, vulnerable to the first in-rushing wave, easily lost to the vastness of the sea without someone’s comforting hand to steady her.

  She scanned the far-off line of trees once more, looking for that someone even as she chided herself for a sentimental fool who deserved any grief that grew out of such a ridiculous hope.

  “A good friend, Adam was,” Wallace said quietly, holding his pipe between his teeth. “To live apart from your own is a hard thing for any man, Mrs. Parrino. I’d not go back and change what happened, the Gather and their blasted rulings be damned. But time and again it’s pleasant to speak of home with one who shares your memories and understands your loss.”

  “Did Adam ever mention me?”

  Another brilliant flare as Jory inhaled. “Aye, he did.”

  A lump formed in her throat. “Did he count me as a true friend?”

  Jory’s mouth curved in a queer smile. “He did. He said the papers called you the ice queen, but that one day you’d meet someone to crack that frozen rime, and when you did, he wanted to be there to see it.”

  It was her turn to scan the fog-shrouded distance like a sailor’s widow, tears standing upon her lashes as she sought an impossible glimpse of Mac amid the black-on-black shadows. “I don’t know how he did it, but I think he has. I’m terrified and ecstatic, and oh, how I wish Adam could be here to tell me ‘I told you so.’ ”

  * * *

  Threading between rowan and holly, elm and oak, Mac’s heightened Imnada senses took in the panicked scramble of a rabbit as it fled before his predator’s scent, the hush of an owl’s wings in the trees above, and the scratch of a field mouse down among the rocks.

  Breaking into a small clearing where a spring escaped a rocky outcropping, Mac knelt to drink, ears flicking back and forth, attuned to the slightest quiver in the wind, the softest footstep. He and Bianca might have shed their pursuers, but he had no doubt they were tracking them with every Fey-blood trick they could summon.

  The wind shifted to the south. Immediately, Mac froze, water dripping from his muzzle, eyes slashing the dark to where a shape huddled low amid the brush.

  Mac’s brain prickled. His heart sped up. His chest tightened.

  Imnada. One of his own kind.

  Jory? Is that you?

  The shape moved a fraction of an inch, but enough for Mac to catch a glimpse of the mottled reddish gray fur and black-tipped ears. A lynx. Mac’s heart stopped, his breath clogging his lungs. It couldn’t be, could it?

  Adam! Mac’s pathing sliced the air between them.

  The animal rose from the cover of the brush, darting into the trees.

  Wait! Adam, come back!

  Mac blasted his thoughts with a cannon’s force as he leapt after, his ground-eating strides carrying him through the wood, his senses attuned to the veriest sign of the lynx’s passing. The snap of a broken twig. A vine moving without the aid of a breeze. The crunch and scrabble of claws upon bark.

  The animal moved with the speed of one familiar with the wood, but Mac had years of tracking skills on his side. They broke from the tree line at the same moment, the lynx twenty yards to Mac’s right. It veered toward the hedge guarding the Wallace orchards, barely visible against the dappled shadows.

  Mac cut the corner, bringing himself within a body length, and with one great leap slammed the smaller animal to the ground, where it lay hard on its side, ribs heaving.

  Even knowing it was impossible, disappointment raged. Not Adam at all, or even his ghost. The animal was too small, the ruff about its n
eck a dirty white, its coloring more gold-brown, whereas Adam’s fur had been almost silver-gray.

  Was this an Ossine enforcer sent to watch the farm? Was Jory more involved with the rebel Imnada group than he let on?

  What’s your business here? Who sent you?

  No answer, though Mac felt the animal’s fury and fear in the drumming of its heart and the pounding of its blood hot and fast beneath its skin.

  Recovered fully from his first foolish hope, Mac studied the shapechanger. No more than three stone, it retained the spotted winter coat and slight build of a youngling. He opened his mind, probing deeper, hoping to discover some inner clue to this stranger’s identity.

  The answer shocked him. No clan mark. No holding signum imprinted upon its mind.

  An emnil like himself. Like Jory.

  Who are you?

  Again no answer, though Mac felt a push back against his mind like fingers brushing lightly over his skin. A half-forgotten comment from Jory jogged a memory: Adam and Jory hailed from the same holding—Kilbanif, in the high northern mountains of Scotland, where the winds raged down from the arctic and few dared leave the deer trails to cross into the small glen where the Imnada sheltered.

  The same holding.

  The same clan.

  The same aspect.

  In the instant Mac’s hold eased, the lynx scrambled to its feet and bounded away like a ghost in the night, its direction confirming what its stubborn silence had not, for it headed straight for the barn buildings and the safety of the Wallace farm.

  Mac regarded the youngling with the first stirrings of a wild thought, one that was surely impossible. Jamie Wallace? Is that you?

  15

  He came to her as the sun speared the sky with the first shafts of morning light. For one terrifying moment, she knew only the weight upon the bed, the smoky, masculine scent of bare skin, a hand caressing her hip. Then a cool wind shredded her darker dreams to ragged streamers, and she recognized the callused hand and the bronzed skin’s spicy smells of wood and field, and finally welcomed the gentle weight as he pressed her into the warm curve of his side.