Wicked

by Shannon Drake

  “Down here, Alex!” she cried. She kept backing away from Hunter. Alex came down. He had on a work suit and carried a little bag. He was ready to go home, she realized. He was well enough, and they were all being expelled from the castle.

  She found herself between the two men. Alex waited curiously on the stairs. She turned from him to Hunter, who had slipped the cobra behind his back.

  “Alex,” she said, feeling ill, “call for Corwin, please!”

  Hunter frowned.

  “Alex!”

  She turned to push past him and run up the stairs herself. But Alex blocked the way.

  “Camille! Get away from him!” Hunter warned.

  And Alex smiled. “Ah, yes! The great adventurer, the explorer, the ever charming Sir Hunter MacDonald! How convenient that you’re here.”

  Shocked, Camille did as Hunter had suggested, she began to back away.

  “Alex, I always knew that you were pathetic. I just didn’t know how very sad, wretched and lethal you were!” Hunter returned.

  “Lethal, my good and valiant, knighted friend!” Alex spat out. “I see you’ve found my treasure for me, Camille. Hunter, hand it over.”

  “Alex, if you don’t get out of the way right now,” Hunter warned, “I’ll tear your heart right out of your chest.”

  “Will you?”

  In a split second, Alex had caught Camille by the hair, wrenching her to him. At the same time, he dropped the bag he carried, spilling its living contents.

  Asps, a dozen of them, slithered and hissed on the floor, right at Camille’s feet. She cried as he dragged her with him, stooping down, securing one of the creatures and bringing the gaping fangs of the furious creature nearly to her throat.

  “I’ll take the treasure, Hunter,” he said. “Toss it over! I’ll throw this one down, and then leave the two of you here with a fighting chance, at least.”

  Hunter threw the bejeweled cobra. Alex had to drop the snake to snatch it out of the air. He shoved Camille. She screamed, plowing forward through the field of asps.

  BRIAN HAD ESCHEWED the carriage, taking one of Lord Wimbly’s fine riding horses instead and giving Shelby instructions. He raced the poor animal the entire distance back to Carlyle Castle. As he neared it, he damned his ancestors. Walled, gated at one time, surrounded by a trench! Oil could have been poured down upon the heads of their enemies. But the castle had been made vulnerable.

  At the gates he reined in long enough to speak to the police officer on duty there.

  “Has my man left with Miss Montgomery yet?”

  “No, Lord Stirling. But Sir Hunter MacDonald is at the castle. I told him you were out. He said that it was important, and he would wait.”

  Brian said nothing more to the man, but raced the soaked and panting steed along the path through the forest, over the drawbridge and to the house.

  SOMEHOW, SHE STUMBLED past the snakes and came around the mummy cartons to stand with Hunter. Then they heard the shouting.

  “Camille!”

  Alex stopped where he stood on the stairs and smiled. “Stirling!” he shouted. “Stirling! Help, help us! It’s Hunter. He’s gone insane. He’s trying to kill us!”

  “No!” Camille screamed. “Brian, don’t come down—”

  Too late. He was at the top of the stairs, past Alex…Stopping when he saw the asps writhing on the floor.

  “KILL HIM! Kill Hunter!” Alex cried out.

  “Brian, watch him!” Camille screamed.

  Behind him, Alex was preparing to shove him down the rest of the stairs. Her scream didn’t stop Alex. Yet Brian didn’t topple. He prepared for the assault that came his way. Alex had assumed that he could easily offset the balance of the larger, stronger man, but Brian was braced. He wrenched Alex from the stairs, hurtling him toward the floor. But Alex wasn’t going down alone. He caught hold of Brian’s lapels, and the larger man crashed down the last few steps with him.

  “Dear God! Get something!” she cried to Hunter.

  “What?”

  She reached into the nearest carton, ripping free a mummy calf and foot. Amazingly, so far, the snakes had slithered away from the fighting men. They would be gone in seconds, hidden in cartons, beneath desks…. Or else, they would begin to attack.

  Alex, weaker though he might be, was desperate. He struggled to reach into a pocket as Brian labored to subdue him. Alex produced a knife, brandished it beneath Brian’s throat. They were locked in a fierce battle, Brian’s fingers wired around Alex’s wrist. One of the cobras slipped toward them, then rose in a defensive gesture.

  “No!” Camille screamed, and she rushed forward, striking at the creature with the mummified foot.

  The knife fell from Alex’s hand. Brian got to his feet, dragging Alex up with him. When Alex would have lunged for the blade, Brian shoved him. Alex fell backward against the wall, slammed hard against it, sank downward. Right beside one of the cobras. It hissed and struck, catching him in the neck. He almost started to smile. But then another struck him, and another. He let out a piercing scream. And fell silent.

  Camille could only watch in horror.

  “Camille!”

  Hunter came to her side, whacking away at something precariously close to her legs.

  “Get out, now!” Brian shouted, drawing a gun, shooting one of the snakes, then taking aim at another.

  The gunfire roared. A path was cleared. Camille started up the stairs, Hunter behind her. As she started to round the first curve, she stopped, causing Hunter to crash into her.

  “Brian!” she cried.

  Gunfire exploded again. A minute later, he was behind her, pushing her up the rest of the stairs. And yelling!

  “When in God’s name will you ever learn to listen to me!” he demanded.

  “I was listening!” she shouted back. “An hour…Corwin gave me an hour. I was just using my hour, and…oh, God!” She fell into his arms.

  “How the hell did you know not to kill me?” Hunter demanded.

  “It’s a long story. And I’m afraid of what we may find in the rest of the house,” Brian said wearily. “We’ve got to find the others. Then we’ll talk.”

  BRIAN’S SENSE OF URGENCY awakened new dread and anguish in Camille. With Hunter close behind her, she raced up the stairs to the living quarters.

  She heard the thundering against the door as she neared Tristan’s room. Someone was trying to break it down, apparently hammering it with a chair. And Tristan was shouting, hoarsely now, calling for help in one breath and damning Evelyn as a traitorous bitch in the next—language he would not customarily use.

  Hunter pulled the ancient wooden bolt from across the door, and Tristan and Ralph tumbled out, Tristan trying to balance the chair he had used as a battering ram.

  “Where is she? She locked us in, I know she locked us in!”

  “I did not lock you in, you idiot man!” Evelyn Prior announced, coming down the hall in great disarray. She was furious, her eyes snapping. “I have spent the last hour in a linen closet, I’ll have you know!”

  Brian, still looking desperately worried, followed behind her. “Corwin remains missing,” he said.

  “The stables?” Hunter suggested.

  Brian nodded grimly and started down the stairs. They all followed. Brian began to run. The barn, too, had been latched from the outside. Brian threw it open and went in, looking around. They heard a groaning sound.

  “Alive!” Evelyn breathed with gratitude. Following Brian, she ran for the bales of hay from which the groan had come.

  There was Corwin, trying to sit up. He saw Brian and shook his head, seeming to be in more mental anguish than physical. “I failed you. I was in the loft…getting new tackle…and he came from behind…pushed me. I’d be dead now if it weren’t for the hay. Oh, Jesu and Mary!” he cried, trying to stagger to his feet. “I failed you, the girl…”

  His voice trailed as he stared at Camille. “You didn’t stay in your room, did you.”

  “She has a v
ery stubborn way of never listening,” Brian said.

  “Yes, and a lovely thing! She’s quite a fitting lady for a Lord Stirling,” Evelyn said, causing Camille to spin around with surprise. Evelyn smiled at Camille. “You would have truly loved Abigail, my dear. She was stubborn to a fault, too.”

  Camille felt a rush of guilt. She smiled in return, and almost informed Evelyn that Lord Stirling really had no intention of actually marrying a commoner, but it didn’t seem the right time to do so. She shook her head. “I still can’t…grasp this. Alex did all this? But he’d been bitten himself? He was ill, living in the house. Where did he get the asps? How did he do all this?”

  “We may never have all the answers, but I have a few,” Brian told her. “We need to get the officer at the gate to ride in to London and get Detective Clancy out here. Evy, we need to do something about poor Corwin’s head.”

  “I’ll take a ride down to the gate,” Corwin said.

  “No, you won’t,” Hunter told him. “I will. You’re lucky you’re in one piece, man.”

  “And you’re lucky, as well,” Brian told Hunter. It took him a moment, but then he added, “Thank you. I don’t know what the hell you’re doing here, but you definitely came to the defense. Thank you.”

  Hunter nodded. “Let me go talk to that officer. I think that I will expire myself with curiosity soon.”

  “Ask him to see that Sir John is brought out here, as well,” Brian said.

  “Sir John is dead,” Camille reminded him. “I imagine you mean Lord Wimbly.”

  “No,” Brian said, “Lord Wimbly is dead. Sir John is actually alive. And I’ll explain it all soon enough. Corwin, lean on my shoulder. We’ll get you to the house.”

  He helped Corwin to his feet. For a moment, his eyes touched Camille’s. He smiled with so much tenderness and promise in his eyes. She hesitated, then reached out, pulling at the tie on his mask.

  “You really don’t need it anymore,” she said. “I’m still completely confused, but it seems that beasts are no longer needed to keep guard at Carlyle Castle. I believe the curse has been broken.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “WHAT I DON’T UNDERSTAND is how Alex managed all this,” Camille said, sipping Evelyn’s delicious tea laced with brandy, feeling the warmth of the fire in the hall, and that of those gathered there. “And who was he whispering to in the crypts when he first attacked me?”

  “You don’t see that yet?” Sir John asked her, a wry smile curling his lips.

  “Lord Wimbly?” she asked.

  “We’ll never know the whole truth,” Brian said, standing by the hearth, an arm resting upon the mantel. “Both Lord Wimbly and Alex are now dead. And though I’d heard the story a dozen times from a dozen sources, I didn’t really put the pieces together before this morning, when I was talking with Sir John.”

  “I helped you? This morning?”

  “It was your reference to the fact that Alex had been ill. I’d seen mention of that before, in one of my mother’s journal pages,” he explained.

  “You’re not making any sense,” Sir John said.

  In silence, Camille agreed.

  “Alex was ill, I believe, because that’s when he suffered his first bite. He might even have begun experimenting with asps after that. That’s why he dared allow the asp to bite him at the fund-raiser. He knew that there were enough people present who would know to slash the bite and suck out most of the venom. He might have gambled a little, but he was right on one count. Our suspicions centered on others because Alex, the poor workingman who’d tried to save the day, had nearly died for his pains.”

  “But how did he manage to bring in the asps today?” Camille asked, still at a loss.

  “He procured them last night,” Brian said.

  “Last night! But he was here.”

  “Was he? There was a great deal of confusion and commotion going on. You had fled into the woods. Hunter and I were at one another’s throats,” Brian said.

  “Alex! Who would have imagined,” Hunter murmured.

  “But he wasn’t alone,” Camille said. “He was working with Lord Wimbly. Yet why would Lord Wimbly have killed your parents when he was peer himself?”

  “Titles don’t keep one from falling into horrendous debt,” Tristan supplied. “He was a gambler, is that it, Brian?”

  Brian inclined his head toward the detective. “Detective Clancy started looking into a number of records after Green was shot in the square.”

  “Who was Green?” Camille demanded.

  “A no-good cad and a hard-core criminal!” Tristan supplied. “Ralph and I helped in that one!” he said proudly.

  A slow smile curved Brian’s lips and he inclined his head toward Tristan. “Indeed, you did.”

  “What?” Camille demanded. She stared at Tristan. “You were too ill to leave the castle! When did you become involved in all this? And Brian! How could you risk Tristan’s life—?”

  “My dear lass!” Tristan interrupted. “I am a man well grown, having served in Her Majesty’s forces. Ralph and I can handle ourselves quite well, thank you.”

  “I never realized I’d be putting him in danger,” Brian said, looking at Camille. He shrugged. “But he’s a lot like you, apparently, unable to keep himself out of it!”

  “Perhaps we should go back to the beginning,” Aubrey said, clearing his throat. “Lord Wimbly would argue with your father now and then, Brian. Something that didn’t seem to mean much, since we all argued over what should go where, how something should be excavated, how to deal with the Egyptian authorities and antiquarians, the French influence…many things. It was natural. No expedition exists without that kind of discussion going on.”

  “I argued with your father,” Hunter admitted to Brian. “It was my belief that he was far too concerned with preserving Egyptian history for the Egyptians.”

  “Imagine,” Camille murmured dryly.

  “I believe,” Sir John said, “that your father had bailed Lord Wimbly out of debt a few times. The day before they died, Lady Abigail had been excited about something she thought she’d read in one of the wall texts.”

  “Something about a golden cobra?” Camille asked.

  “I didn’t know it at the time, but now, in hindsight, of course. And Alex must have been with her when she read it. Therefore, he knew that it existed—and that it hadn’t been catalogued. All he had to do was search long and hard, and he was convinced that he’d find it,” Sir John said. “And the rest of us…we just didn’t see any of this!” He shook his head. “Sadly, we didn’t see the handwriting on the wall.”

  “Throughout the last year,” Detective Clancy told them, “Alex has been managing to get little pieces to Monsieur Lacroisse, with the promise that an incredible find was coming. Lord Wimbly was pushing him hard. You see, Lord Wimbly was the one with the contacts in the Queen’s social and international circles.”

  “But—”

  “Right, I know what you’re about to say,” Detective Clancy told her. “How would Lord Wimbly manage all this? He didn’t. He made the contacts, Alex made the finds, and they’d hired the man killed in the square, Green, to be their go-between.”

  “Wait a minute!” Tristan protested. “Who shot Green?”

  “Lord Wimbly himself,” Clancy said.

  “I still don’t understand how Alex could have left here last night, gotten back to London and procured all those asps!” Camille said.

  “He didn’t have to go all the way back to London,” Brian told her. “Neither of us followed the main tunnel from the crypts. It’s a very long and narrow path, but I would assume, once a person has gotten accustomed to crawling its length, it is quite easily managed. We haven’t sent anyone through yet, but I believe that we’ll discover the tunnel leads out to a road, and that there will be cottages on that road. Alex Mittleman had most probably rented one of them and used it for his base of operations.” He was quiet for a minute. “I believe he tortured my parents for any bit of in
formation before they died.”

  Tristan looked at Evelyn. “So…you weren’t out to smother Alex in the middle of the night!”

  “No, and how dare you!” Evelyn said tartly.

  “I have to admit, I grew suspicious of you myself,” Camille told her.

  “You were the one to discover the Stirlings, Evelyn,” Hunter reminded her.

  “Yes, and I suppose I did keep my secrets,” Evelyn said. She looked at Brian apologetically. “They were alive when I reached them. Just barely. And there was truly nothing I could do. I was terrified, of course, afraid that the asps were still about.”

  “Aubrey, you were definitely under suspicion, being the one who handled the cobra at the museum,” Brian said.

  Aubrey groaned. “What about you! I had no idea myself that you were Arboc!”

  Evelyn turned to Detective Clancy. “What about the Frenchman, Lacroisse? It’s absolutely infuriating! He had to know that the objects being sold to him were obtained illegally.” She was totally indignant.

  Clancy sighed. “I’d like to see him rotting away in prison for the rest of his life. I believe he knew that lives were lost in all these quests. But the best I have managed is to see that every bit of information on him has been delivered to both the Queen and Lord Salisbury. He’ll be expelled from the country. But that’s about all we can do.”

  “I just can’t believe it all,” Evelyn said.

  “An amazing conspiracy,” Detective Clancy said. “And all of us working from different directions. From what I understand, Lord Stirling, the Queen did have tremendous respect for your parents. And you must have had an audience with her regarding all this, because she informed all her police agencies that they must be on guard for such illegal activities. It’s just…well, we were searching for such a needle in a haystack!”

  “And I’m afraid that I doubted the ability of the police to make discoveries when I was doing so poorly myself,” Brian apologized.

  “Excuse me!” Camille said, shaking her head. “But how did Lord Wimbly die?”

  “Ah…well, my good friend will perform an autopsy, but I have a suspicion that Alex had begun to mistrust his partner. After all, Lord Wimbly was reaping all the benefits thus far while Alex was sneaking around the museum, trying to get his job done, and spending all his nights looking for the entry to the tunnel so he could comb through the cartons here as well as at the museum. There was a lot of money to be made in small pieces, and I believe we’ll discover, once a thorough investigation has been done, that there are pieces missing from both the castle and the museum—catalogued pieces. But the cobra, both Lord Wimbly and Alex were certain, was the one treasure that would ease Lord Wimbly from his debt and give Alex an entirely new life,” Brian said.