Shadow's Curse

by Alexa Egan

  Gray’s hand tightened around the head of his cane. “Things will change. They must, or the clans are doomed.”

  “Hope you’re right, Major. I surely do.”

  Gray left Breg and entered the outbuilding, placing aside his worry over the man’s revelations, to be mulled over later. This morning’s meeting was too important for distractions.

  A woman rose from her chair to meet him, the lamplight gilding her golden hair and flushing her rose and cream skin. “It’s been a long time, Gray.”

  Lady Delia Swann’s serene beauty hid many secrets, as Gray well knew; her Fey-blood magic, her alliance with his rebels, and her sexual activities with a prince of the realm, two generals, and an archbishop. She assumed she knew all his secrets as well, but there were some things he did not speak aloud. Some fears he refused to name.

  “I’ve been busy.” He bowed over the hand she held out, ignoring the glitter of conquest in her eyes.

  “As have I, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be busy together from time to time.” Her gaze traveled sensuously over him, lifting the hairs at the back of his neck. “By the looks of you, I’d guess you haven’t been to bed yet. Was it that little Nicholls girl? She practically leapt in your arms last night at the Prater’s ball. I wouldn’t think virgins were to your taste, but then you’ve always been full of surprises. And she comes with an ample dowry.”

  “I’m old enough to be her father.”

  Lady Delia laughed. “Only if you’d sired her at the ripe old age of eleven.”

  “I should have said I feel old enough to be her father.”

  “That I would believe. But if it wasn’t the Nicholls girl, it must have been Lady Bute.” She laid a finger against her full lips, gold-flecked eyes lifted in thought. “Then there’s that opera dancer they say tried to drown herself in the Thames for love of the mysterious Ghost Earl. Hmm . . . so many choices . . .”

  “Whoever came up with that damned sobriquet should have their heads boiled in oil.”

  She crossed to his side. “You should be flattered. It makes you seem dashing and dangerous and passionately gallant. A hero in a swashbuckling romance.” She cupped his face in her hands. “If they only knew the half of it, am I right?”

  He stepped back, out of her reach. “Can we move on with the reason for this meeting?”

  She gave a little half shrug. “Of course. Have you made the arrangements we spoke of? If I’m to disappear, I want to be sure all my affairs are in order and that includes the boy.”

  His hand tightened around the head of his cane, lips pinched tight. “It’s been done just as you asked.”

  “And my personal payment for services rendered?”

  Gray took a leather pouch from his coat and tossed it on a nearby table. “You can disappear quite thoroughly with what’s in there. Make a new life on the Continent or the Americas. You’ll be safe. You’ll be free.”

  “I like the sound of that. I’ve already booked passage on the packet to Calais. From there, the world is my playground.”

  “You leave so soon?”

  “You sound disappointed”—she offered him a sly smile, which he did not return—“but now that you’ve done as I asked there’s nothing holding me here.”

  “The boy is here.”

  “He’s a boy no longer. He’ll miss me for a short while, but life will rectify that quickly enough.” She shrugged, though he knew she cared more than she let on. “I’ve been asked politely by Lord Drummond to vacate my town house in favor of his latest affaire de coeur, and the family pile in Devonshire was never a home to me.” She shivered. “Too full of ghosts for my taste. My sister is welcome to it.” The leather pouch disappeared inside her voluminous cloak, and a narrow flat jeweler’s box, designs etched into its surface with an artist’s skill, was laid on the table in its place. “The last missing key of Gylferion, as promised. I believe you have the other three already?”

  “I might.” Gray opened the lid to reveal a notched copper disk, dulled green with age and bent at one corner. On one side, the crescent of the Imnada. On the other, two vertical opposing arrows within a diamond. “How did you get hold of it?”

  “Best not to ask. You might not like the answer.” She cocked her head, a frown drawing her lips into a pout. “You know, I could take your money and still sell you out to the highest bidder, Gray. The Ossine would be on your doorstep by nightfall. And if they didn’t kill you, the Other would. Your enemies are mounting.”

  He closed the box and slid it into his coat pocket.“You could, but you won’t.”

  “What makes you so certain? I’d sell my own mother if it gained me a profit.”

  This time it was he who reached out and touched her cheek. “You say these things, but I know you better.”

  “You always did.” She sighed. “Probably why we never got along.” Her eyes grew troubled. “Be careful, Gray. In my line of work, I hear the whispers. You’re being watched by my kind as well as yours. There are wagers about who’ll move first to eliminate you. Perhaps you should think of joining me in Calais.”

  He rubbed a thumb across his scarred palm, the myriad pale lines crisscrossing the roughened skin like a tangled skein of threads. Each day brought a new cut and a new scar as he worked the magic that kept him whole and the black curse at bay. A magic that had become an addiction. He could not stop. He could not continue. Either choice brought sickness and then death. “If I can’t break the Fey-blood’s curse, neither side will have to worry over me for long. I’ll be dead and the Ghost Earl shall be ghost in truth.”

  * * *

  The mouse squeezed its way into the narrow crack between street and foundation, glancing back once to make sure it had not been followed. No sign of pursuit. The way was clear. Wriggling through the maze of lathing and plaster, it followed its clever rodent nose past the kitchens, now quiet this late at night, and upward to the ground floor. The study was dark, the dining room empty, but the mouse expected that. It was the perfect time to explore unseen, and the perfect form to do so unnoticed. What was one mouse among a colony of such? A nuisance, but hardly worth more than a stiff whisk with a broom. Better that than a sword in the gut, which might be the reaction should Gray discover the real identity of the rodent creeping along his wainscoting.

  Sliding under a broken slat, the mouse moved through the walls with purpose, assessing the town house’s layout should quick escape be necessary, searching rooms as it went. No guests resided in the empty chambers. Only half a handful of servants lay sleeping in the attics. Of guards, she saw no sign. He was alone and unprotected. Didn’t he understand the danger?

  Reaching a small room at the back of the second floor, the mouse paused at the flicker of candlelight coming through a gap in the chair rail. Following the dim glow, it sniffed and pushed its beady-eyed head out through the hole. A bedchamber. His bedchamber, by the lived-in, cluttered look to it.

  A shocking thought followed close upon this observation. A shocking, unnerving thought that had the mouse shoving its way out through the hole into the room to rise on its hind legs, whiskers twitching. Did that heap of blankets in the bed move? Was someone sleeping? Was it two someones and were they sleeping at all? What if they were in the middle of . . .

  So focused was the little creature on determining whether the four-poster in the corner contained one or two people, it never saw the descending glass until the crystal walls surrounded it, held in place by an enormous hand.

  A face leaned close, studying the mouse, searching for answers. Older now. Harder. The gentle rounded features and sweet innocence of youth had been stripped bare and scraped raw until it seemed honed like a knife blade, no softness to dull the glittering edge. No tenderness to moderate the harsh austerity. But the same icy blue eyes shone from beneath dark winged brows, the same tiny scar remained at the edge of a strong uncompromising mouth. The same long aristocratic nose flared now with suspicion and doubt.

  Scooping up glass and mouse both, the man lifted
them to eye level. “Eagles eat mice, you know.”

  * * *

  Meeryn Munro was the last person Gray had expected to visit him—in his bedchamber—in the middle of the night . . . alone. Yet here she was, shed of her mouse’s skin and seated on the edge of his bed in nothing but his borrowed robe. At this point, he would have preferred her covered in fur. It was far less revealing. Far less apt to make his thoughts wander away from what her unexpected arrival meant.

  “You’ve changed—grown up.” A trite and pointless comment. Of course she’d changed. It had been almost ten years since he’d seen her last.

  “Age happens to the best of us, I’m told,” she answered with a wry smile.

  “Yes, but . . .” He waved a hand in her general direction. “The curls are gone”—replaced by soft waves of honey colored hair—“and your figure has matured”—the gawky flat-chested girl of his memories was now a woman of luscious, feminine curves and long elegant limbs—“and you used to have . . . I mean there were the . . . the . . .”

  She wrinkled her nose. “Spots. I know, they were positively horrid, but thankfully long gone. Lemon juice and Gower’s Lotion every evening before bed. But surely, I haven’t changed that much.”

  “No, not exactly.” His gaze traveled over her from head to foot and back. The ghost of the old Meeryn lingered in the narrow elfin face, pert chin, and full coral lips, but there was a shrewdness in her eyes and a severity to her jaw that had never been present in the laughing playmate of his youth. “And then again—yes.”

  “Well, you haven’t. You look just as you always did.”

  His smile came laced with bitterness. “That’s the first lie I’ve caught you in tonight.”

  “It’s true. You do look the same. A bit longer in the tooth and leaner in the face, of course, but that’s to be expected after . . . well . . . after all you’ve been through.”

  She couldn’t say the words. He didn’t blame her. It had taken months before he could speak of his sentencing without vomiting his guts until his throat and stomach were raw. He rubbed his scarred palm without even thinking. Dropped his hand to his side when he caught her watching him.

  “I heard rumors that you’d lifted the curse,” she said.

  “Contained . . . not lifted.”

  “But it’s night”—her gaze cut to the window—“the sun is down and you’re still . . . they said when the sun left the sky, you were forced to become your animal aspect. Forced from man to beast against your will. That’s what I was told.”

  “There are ways to hold the spell at bay and keep to the form I choose, but it comes at a price.” He poured and handed her a glass of restorative brandy from the decanter permanently set beside his bed for those nights he couldn’t sleep.

  “Things never change, do they, Professor Gray? Still got your nose caught in a dusty old book,” she commented with a nod of her head toward his cluttered desk.

  “That’s where the answers are,” he answered. Realizing he stared, he quickly busied himself with clearing away the various manuscripts he’d been studying, arranging his pencils in a row, pocketing the four ancient metal disks.

  Laughter danced in her eyes. “Your response hasn’t changed in ten years either.”

  Ten years—the blink of an eye. An eternity. They’d grown up together; Duke’s grandson and Duke’s ward. Close as siblings—closer even. His sibling had been seven years his senior and barely noticed Gray except as a nuisance to be shed at the first possible opportunity. Meeryn had filled that slot, becoming his boon companion in all things from illicit raids on the Deepings kitchens and nasty pranks on the string of tutors and governesses when they were young to illicit raids on the Deepings wine cellar and midnight forays beyond the protections of Deepings’s walls as they grew older.

  As a child, he’d foolishly imagined their friendship would last forever. Time, distance, and circumstance had ended that dream long ago. Yet she’d remained a bright memory among so much he’d tried to put behind him when he’d been condemned to exile. Was that memory, like so many other things in his life, about to be irrevocably shattered?

  “What are you doing here, Meeryn? And why come sneaking in via mousehole? Was knocking at the front door too plebeian for your tastes?”

  She offered him a flippant roll of her eyes. “Would you have welcomed me in if I had?”

  “Not while Pryor and his enforcers scour London, hunting anyone they think might be in league with me.” He poured himself a brandy.

  “But, you see, it was Pryor who sent me.”

  He froze with the glass halfway to his lips, but there was no hint of mockery in her placid expression. She was dead serious. “Did he? This visit grows more interesting by the moment.”

  “I know what you’re thinking, Gray, but you can relax. I’m not here to kill you. I’m here to bring you home.”

  “I am home,” he replied just as solemnly, placing his still-full glass on a nearby table. This conversation called for stone cold sobriety.

  “Don’t be clever. You know what I mean—home to Deepings.”

  “And why would I want to do that? Despite what people might think, I’m not looking for a quick death, even less a slow and gruesome one.”

  “What if coming with me meant preventing more bloodshed among the clans? What if it meant saving the Imnada?”

  “Dromon was clever in sending you as his emissary. Anyone else would have been shown the door . . . or the end of my sword. You have five minutes to explain, then you leave.”

  Defiance lit her unflinching stare. “The Duke is dying.”

  Gray closed his eyes briefly on a silent prayer, though for what he couldn’t say. For some reason, he’d always just assumed the old man would live forever; a craggy irascible rock upon which the world crashed and broke. His presence solid and eternal as the cliffs below Deepings.

  “He’s been ill since you . . . since the summer you were sent away,” Meeryn continued. “Then this past spring he took a turn for the worse. It’s his heart. They don’t expect him to last more than a few weeks.”

  “And if I said good riddance to the old bastard?”

  Candlelight flickered over her face, glinting in her auburn hair, flames reflecting in her deep brown eyes. “You don’t mean that. He’s the only family you have left. When he dies, you’ll be—”

  “Duke of Morieux,” he finished her sentence.

  “Leader of the five clans,” she amended.

  Neither role had been his by birth—a fact his grandfather had never ceased to remind him of even as Gray struggled to fill his dead brother’s shoes. He’d finally escaped into the military, unsure by then whether he hoped to win honor in battle or a quick death. There he’d found the praise he’d sought, in the letters that arrived from home. A pride that ended in the Gather’s circle with the flames charring the clan mark from his back.

  “Sir Dromon Pryor is leader in all but name.” He stood at the hearth, a hand upon the mantel as he stared into the cold expanse, wishing he might glimpse the future, but seeing only the past.

  “His grip on power isn’t as secure as he wants you to believe and it will only worsen if the Duke dies without an heir in place,” Meeryn explained. “Rumors spread as your rebellious Imnada grow in numbers. The Gather elders chafe under his heavy-handed authority and the brutality of his Ossine enforcers. Summary executions of clan members on the mere suspicion of sedition are becoming common. Even the Palings begin to fail, the mists thinning dangerously in some places. Now that the Fey-bloods know we’ve survived the Fealla Mhòr, it’s only a matter of time before they discover a way through the wards and the slaughter begins in earnest.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way.”

  “So you say, but can you speak for all the Fey-bloods? Can you guarantee us our safety?”

  “Can Pryor?”

  “The clans won’t survive an attack from without while they are beset from within. Pryor concedes this and wants to talk.”

&
nbsp; “Pryor’s tongue is as crooked as his brain. Why should I trust him?” Gray asked coolly.

  “Don’t trust him. Trust me.” She smiled, her eyes alight with mischief. “As N’thuil, I can guarantee you safe passage on holding lands. So long as you’re with me, you’re protected.”

  She spoke. He saw her lips move, but he heard nothing after the bit about Meeryn being named N’thuil. Voice of Jai Idrish. Living vessel of the Mother Goddess.

  She dragged the robe from her shoulders and twisted around so her back faced him. There, high upon her back, was the crescent of the Imnada, a whorl of black against her golden skin. And just to the right of it, still pink at the edges, was the smaller circlet that signified her ascension to the seat of N’thuil.

  Unthinking, his fingers traced the needle’s narrow marking as it curved up over her shoulder blade to the base of her neck. She shivered and cast him an arch look, the laughter dying in her eyes to be replaced with something uncertain and almost shy. His finger became his hand. The skin of her back was like silk beneath his palm as he caressed downward along her spine to the point where her hips flared and the robe and his own ragged self-control stopped him from descending further. Her lips parted, and he sensed the suspension of her breath, the tremors running beneath her feverish skin. Her eyes darkened within the thick fringe of her lashes. Was it longing he saw? Excitement?

  His heart thrashed against his ribs, and sweat splashed hot and cold over his skin. He wanted to tempt Meeryn further; an inch lower, a breath nearer. Then a breeze teased the candle’s thin flame. Her look vanished as if it had never been, and he surfaced from the lecherous swirl of his desire just before he made an utter ass of himself.

  “When did this happen?” Thankfully, his voice emerged only slightly raspy.

  Meeryn yanked the robe up to her neck, her body rigid, her gaze fierce. “A month ago. I’m surprised you didn’t hear.” Her voice trembled, though the emotion behind it was difficult to decipher. “Sir Dromon accuses you of having spies in every household and knowing our secrets before we speak them.”