Ethan glanced at Shelly’s intent, listening expression. “Is now the time for this? Do you want her to know, too?”
Shelly bristled, about to retort, but the earl said softly, “Ms. Holmes has the right to know exactly what she’s investigating, especially if there’s some strange connection between the attacks now and then.”
Ethan came around the table and pulled Arielle to her feet. “There’s no way to sugar coat this. Isis grew increasingly wild and distant. I had formed a great affection for her as a long time friend of Rupert’s only, and unlike your father, I had some experience with the arcane world. I believed the source of her ailment to be a psychic link Isis had not sought, but was, in some strange way, forced upon her.” Ethan’s hands gripped tighter than he obviously intended, but Arielle scarcely felt it, so hard was her heart beating.
The truth will set you free…the truth will set you free…She’s always believed that, but she dreaded the words that came in a soft, confused rush from a man who was never confused.
“I followed her that last night and saw, and saw…” Ethan swallowed. “A cat creature. A beautiful feline I’ve seen only in pictures that supposedly habits only the Himalayas and mountainous areas. White and powerful.”
A flashing image streaked past Arielle’s consciousness, a lithe creature of thick white fur spotted with dark, inky dots. Enormous feet like snowshoes. She closed her eyes, denying the image. Lies. Why were they lying to her?
“I believe it’s called a snow leopard,” Shelly said calmly. “And what was the creature doing?”
Ethan gritted his teeth but admitted, “Killing a girl from the neighboring village. Strangling her with its fangs. And she was being taught how to kill by a massive lion.”
“How do you know it was my mother?” Arielle demanded.
He brushed a tender fingertip under her eyes. “Her eyes were yours, Arielle. And when she finally returned near dawn, she had blood around her mouth and under her fingernails.”
Arielle swallowed. “That proves nothing. Perhaps it was her own blood.”
The earl hurried to finish, as if now the tale was out, he had to complete it to its grisly end. “It’s true, Arielle. It cost me a fortune to hush it up. I paid the family a stipend I maintain to this day, not that there is ever any recompense for the loss of a human life. And that is when I locked Isis up, for all the good it did.”
The rest Arielle knew. The increasing bouts of madness, the marks that appeared all over Isis’s body, and finally, her suicide to escape the pain. Only now did she know that her mother killed herself not only because she was mad, but to spare her husband and daughter any more notoriety..and to stop herself from killing again. If she were to believe this fantastical tale.
She looked at the two men who had been most influential in her life, and did not know whether to trust them, much less give them credence. Were they trying to scare her into compliance with their petty tyranies?
The earl brought his daughter to his bosom. “That is why we must be so vigilant. Keep your windows locked, and master these strange dreams, and we will keep you safe.”
Arielle straightened and pushed her father away. “I am not my mother. They are only dreams. I feel no urge whatever to kill anyone. And you should have told me all this many years ago rather than expect me to accept such nonsense now as an adult.” She marched to the door, her limp scarcely evident. “Now please excuse me. I am fatigued.”
When she was gone, Shelly leveled her most dispassionate look upon the two men. “Why do you not hit her over the head with a club just to get her attention? Was that the best way to tell her such a tragic tale, over dinner when she is already susceptible to nightmares? Of course she rejects believing something so awful.”
“She can’t be healed until she admits she has a problem, and every word we said was the truth” Ethan retorted.
“And she’ll never admit she has a problem with such direct coercion. Of course she doesn’t believe she’s prey to the same impulses, and frankly, I’m not sure I do either. She has quite a logical mind, and even if Isis became a cat who liked to kill, Arielle has a deal of common sense.”
“I see. So one is susceptible to the powers of the arcane only when one is weak minded?. I’ll remember that for future reference,” Ethan muttered as Shelly rose to follow Arielle to the door. She turned upon him at the inference.
“Future reference, my dear sir? You’ve already practiced a unique blend of male coercion upon me to try to wrest my investigation from me. But I am not your typical simpering miss, and I am no more susceptible to the ‘arcane’ world than I am to male blandishments. Neither your height, nor your wit, nor your wealth impress me in the slightest.”
“You’ve yet to see my best attributes. But that will come. No coercion needed.”
Telling herself she simply would not grind her teeth, she simply would not, Shelly turned back to the distressed earl, her flinty gray gaze softening to goose down with sympathy for him. “Sir, there is one thing you must understand about the unique character of astral projection and shape shifting. Unlike so many of the psychic phenomena, wherein the victim is forced with a bite or a curse into a way of life that is anathema, these two abilities, especially when they go hand in hand, may seem like maladies to the rational world, but to the sufferer, they are a gift. The afflicted person chooses to project, or chooses to shift–and they must choose to resist. This is by far the hardest psychic ailment to cure. I can promise you nothing, but I shall give you my all in the attempt.” Shelly swept out, unaware how impassioned she’d become as she spoke, as if this were not merely a truth she voiced, but a reality she lived.
She left a very thoughtful Ethan Perot in her wake, staring after her.
His thick black hair gleaming, Seth Taub leaned back in his chair and blew tobacco smoke up at the ceiling. He tried to keep his tone mild as he disagreed with the Marquis’ appraisal of the female kind. “Women, my dear fellow, are more than brood mares or chatelaines of a gentleman’s household.”
“Yes. They are also bed warmers and decorate a man’s arm quite nicely at a ball,” retorted Samuel Hathaway, Marquis of Brackton, taking another long pull at his brandy.
This brought laughter from some quarters at the surrounding card tables, but frowns from others. Lamb’s Card Room and Smoking Club was situated in a quiet, out of the way corner of Mayfair. While no expansive view of Hyde Park could be seen from this nondescript townhouse in a row of them, there was no picture window to display one. In Queen Victoria’s London, a man’s appetites could still be satisfied, but only discreetly.
And discretion was Mr. Cyrus Lamb’s specialty.
He hovered at a discreet distance, close enough to listen but too far away for the gentlemen who frequented his establishment to feel his presence obtrusively. His pug nosed face had the battered but compelling look of a boxer who’d lost his share of fights but still lived to better himself--and those to whom he offered his loyalty.
Seth glanced over at him with the barest flick of his eyes. Cyrus disappeared and returned with a flamboyant black velvet cape lined in burgundy silk over one arm and an ebony gold headed cane in the other hand.
Pocketing the substantial number of coins in the middle of the table, Seth rose. The politic veneer he’d forced upon himself evaporated as he shrugged into his cloak, looking down at the Marquis. “Sir, unlike you, I find in myself the greatest sympathy for the female kind.” Putting his top hat on at a rakish angle, he finished quietly, “Most especially for your wife.”
The Marquis sputtered his brandy back into his snifter and leaped to his feet, hands clenched. “Why you scoundrel, you reek of anonymity despite your airs. No one knows anything about you and yet you criticize a man with ten generations of blue bloods running in his veins?” This won some hear-hears from other quarters.
Cyrus quietly approached. His hands were not clenched.
But they didn’t need to be. The look on his face made the Marquis sink back into h
is chair. He blustered, “Show your face in my presence again and by God you’ll hear from my seconds.”
Seth’s full mouth quirked into a smile. “Pistols at dawn? How quaint. I should think we were past that, in this so civilized company.”
“Or swords. I haven’t skewered any vermin lately. But then I make no doubt you don’t know the gentlemanly art of fencing.”
Seth’s smile faded. His honey brown eyes took on a strange glow that gave them a golden tinge. Several of the men near him scooted their chairs slightly away. Taking the cane from Cyrus, Seth gave a quick turn and pull at the gold head. A wicked sword hissed with lethal menace as it came free. It was long and thin and gilded, slightly triangular in shape. It was so sharp the sides glanced with light, as if even the candles danced away in alarm..
Now the men didn’t just scoot their chairs away; they scattered, all but bleating.
Even the Marquis had gone pasty. To his credit he stayed put even when Seth whipped the blade from side to side as if testing its heft and straightness, his dexterity ruffling the Marquis’ hair slightly as he stirred up the still air.
Cyrus growled, “Sir, ye needs must keep yer temper or–”
As quickly as it was withdrawn, the blade was resheathed. “Forgive me, Cyrus. But Sheba gets restive when she’s neglected too long. I was merely showing her off.”
As the Marquis’ face returned to a normal color, he barked a harsh laugh. “Leave it to a…a…foreigner to do something so bloody stupid as to name a sword.”
Cyrus put his considerable bulk between the two men, but Seth’s lip only curled slightly. “After, I might point out, a woman. And that, sir, defines the difference between us to my satisfaction: respect for those weaker. Luckily for you.”
With that last insult and a swirl of cape, Seth was gone, the gold handled cane firmly in his grip.
“Did you see it roar?” asked one of the men at Seth’s table after he was safely out of earshot.
The Marquis blinked in confusion, shoving the dregs of his brandy aside. “What in tarnation are you nattering on about?”
“The head of the cane. It was carved of pure gold into a snarling lion’s head. I suspect you had a lucky escape, Hathaway.”
“I say, have you all heard the rumors about those three girls they found in the Thames a few weeks apart?” inserted a pimply-faced young fellow at a different table.
Cyrus frowned, but he could hardly forbid the gossip that was as much the coin of the realm in his club as the pound notes littering the table.
The Marquis grew thoughtful as he stared after Seth. “Yes, I did. And the bodies were…” He had delicacy enough not to finish.
The brash young man didn’t even blush as he nodded eagerly. “Incised, they were. With strange markings some compare to Egyptian hieroglyphs. So deep and clear they had to be made with something confoundedly sharp. And tooth marks. Like…fangs. Pierced the carotid in each case and ah, sucked at the blood. Or so it’s rumored. Probably nonsense.”
The Marquis nodded absently, still staring at the door where Seth exited. “A lion headed cane, you say? Interesting.”
Feeling stronger than she had in ages, if still depressed over the horrid fate of the mother she didn’t remember, Arielle combed her hair before her dressing table. Sitting as she was, her lawn night rail falling half off her shoulders, she could pretend she was what she longed to be: beautiful, passionately involved with a man she adored, a child on the way, and, most importantly–whole.
She rubbed her aching leg, trying not to think again of that awful night Ethan had depicted so vividly, to see her mother transformed into a cat. Automatically, she reached for the amulet at her neck before she remembered it wasn’t there. With a petulant frown that made her look like the miniature of her mother on the fireplace mantel, she rose, intending to find her dressing robe so she could march to Miss Holmes’ room and demand it back.
This time she wouldn’t take no for an answer. The heavy weight of the amulet made her feel grounded, her mother’s daughter, linked to her by more than face and name. And she needed that sense of belonging, needed it with increasing desperation because with every night that passed filled with dreams of lion gods who seduced her, she felt more alienated from the father she used to adore and was increasingly resenting.
No matter the face he put upon it, that ludicrous tale made it sound as if her mother had been a venal, blood thirsty creature, and she simply did not believe it. The woman she saw in her heart and dreams was nothing like that.
She was about to shrug into her robe when there was a scratching at her window. She looked over at it, starting back in alarm. An enormous shadow of a rampant lion, reared upward on its hind legs, its full mane tossing as it flung its head back in a roar, loomed huge against the wall. But as she blinked in disbelief, when she looked again, the shadow had shrunk to the size of a house cat, rubbing itself against the bars.
A meowing filtered to her on the night breeze coming through the window and wooden portals the housemaid had left open just a crack. Telling herself she was a silly goose, she really must quit being so imaginative lest her nightly dreams start haunting her by day, she went to the window and raised it enough for the supple feline to wend through the bars. It sat on the sill, looking up at her expectantly.
Tentatively, she reached out her hand for the cat to sniff, wondering if it was wild. It was a golden tabby color with green eyes, eyeing her with that ineffable cat wisdom that had made the creatures beloved companions of mortals since time immemorial. Why, her own mother was rumored to have a treasured tabby that never left her side, and several cats were inscribed on her tomb in the family crypt.
Bast had been the protector of the household, and her image, snug around her neck on her mother’s amulet, had always given Arielle comfort. Perhaps the odd bond she had with cats had drawn this pretty little creature?
The moment she touched the soft fur, the cat began to purr, rubbing against her hand. “You little darling,” she cooed, picking up the cat to cradle it against her bosom.
It rubbed its head into the vee exposed between her breasts by the loose night rail. It licked her there, the roughness of its tongue sending a thrill of pleasure through her. If only…
Wondering at the strange eroticism of her own thoughts, and the flashing image she had of this creature as a golden haired man in a lion mask nuzzling her in the same spot, she set the cat down at her feet. She was still enough of her father’s daughter to realize this growing obsession she had for cats had its unhealthy side. Sometimes she felt literally torn in twain between the pedantic half of her English father and the mystical half of her Egyptian mother.
Immediately the tabby began to rub against her legs, side to side, as if it were famished for human contact. It looked up at her with those slanted eyes. Was it her imagination, or did they glow even in the bright candlelight? It gave a husky meow, as if it were hungry, but when she poured her nightly warm milk into a saucer, the cat only sniffed at the milk. It looked back up at her, and this time there was no mistaking that gaze. Like her, it was hungry. But not for food.
The unblinking green eyes were mesmerizing. “Hold me, touch me, and I will succor you forever. Come with me into the night in your true form.”
Arielle heard the words clearly in her head.
In a male voice.
In a male voice she recognized, that of the golden one of her dreams. The one whose face she could never see beyond the gleam of green eyes.
The pedantic half resisted. The dreams she understood for they took her away from the unpleasant reality of her inadequacies to a place of magic where all things were possible. There she could be whole, and loved, and part of something born of her mother’s blood.
But this was no dream. And this was no normal cat. Feeling both fascinated and repelled, Arielle stood teetering in place, longing to touch that winsome, seductive creature and feel its warmth and softness again, yet instinctively knowing if she did so she served its
purposes. And what were those?
Fear overwhelmed fascination. Backing another step, Arielle picked up the poker beside the fireplace, retreating as the feline approached. “Go away!” The sound of her own voice, stronger than she felt, gave Arielle courage even when the feline’s shadow grew again against the wall.
A lion’s ruff began to form, the chest became massive, and the paws grew as big as plates. But when she looked, the cat was sitting calmly on its haunches, watching her with that hypnotic gaze that pulled at something deep within Arielle, something that was the source of her strength–and her nightmares.
“What do you want from me?” Arielle cried. The poker had sagged point down to the floor in her loose grip, for she knew she could not hit the tabby, no matter how afraid she was of its alter ego.
The shadow grew larger on the wall, the lion now fully formed. The dark, forbidding shape began to stalk her as the cat moved toward her again. It was odd the way corporeal and incorporeal moved in syncopation. A small tabby striped foot moved forward. So did the plate sized paw seen only in shadow.
Arielle bumped up against the wall, unable to retreat further. Still she couldn’t raise the poker to defend herself, even when the tabby crouched, still staring up at her, tail swishing.
“Come with me, transform to your true self. Let me show you the night as we were both meant to see it.” The lion crouched, too, and glanced outside.
Catspell Page 4
