Earl of Darkness

by Alix Rickloff

Neddie never reached her.

  Kilronan had fumbled himself up onto his feet and crushed Neddie a blow to his side, punching the wind out of the man. Sending him reeling.

  Straightening, he faced the men down. Eyes feral bright in a face carved of stone. “Who sent you?”

  Neddie, clutching his side, splashed back up the alley while Smith, a hand clamped on his bloodied wrist, wavered. Cast Kilronan and then Cat a long, fuming look. Plunged past them to fade into the market crowds.

  Cat’s limbs shook, a woozy feeling in the pit of her stomach. Though because of the blow from Neddie or because of the man standing stiff with fury before her, she couldn’t say.

  “I can explain—” she began, the sheepish pleading sounding ridiculous to her own ears. What could she explain? The naive, romantical notions that had triggered her avalanche fall from a life of respectability? The blood and the pain and the terror as her child entered the world? The crushing weight of grief as he departed?

  His gaze flicked over her, and she knew none of it would matter to him. He would judge her as the others had. Nothing she said in response would matter.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  She straightened in surprise. “But . . . Geordie . . . he . . .”

  He blinked, pain replacing the impenetrable, bronze brown stare. Pushed aside his coat. Touched a hand to the spreading stain across his waistcoat, his fingers coming away tipped in red. “Save your arguments, Cat, unless you wish to carry me back to Henry Street.”

  “Oh gods,” she squeaked.

  “My thoughts exactly,” he said, his voice unsteady. Almost surprised. “I don’t feel so well.”

  Cat caught him before he stumbled, his weight almost burying her. His face white, his breathing shallow and rapid. She glanced over her shoulder. Geordie was just a few streets away. Had those men . . . had Geordie . . . should she. . . .

  “Cat?”

  Biting her lip, she turned back. “You’re going to be all right. I’ll get you home, Kilronan,” she murmured as if she spoke to a child.

  For a moment, clarity sharpened his unfocused gaze, and a smile twitched the corner of his mouth. “Aidan works well enough.”

  Blake fussed around Aidan like an old woman, murmurings of infection and pending death an incessant melody to the bass line throbbing in his side. To be fair, his valet was more at home starching cravats and polishing boots, but his whimpering was beginning to grate.

  “Stop your god-awful weeping, and send for the bloody surgeon,” Aidan finally barked.

  Blake obeyed, relief at being cast out of the sickroom evident in his rapid withdrawal.

  Aidan shifted, wincing against the agony slashing up his rib cage. Tears springing to his eyes. “Great bloody goddamn,” he swore through clenched teeth. “I hope you appreciate this. It hurts like the very devil.”

  Cat started with a guilty flush from where she’d been hovering by the doorway, trying to be invisible. “I didn’t think—”

  “I heard you slink in? I’m starting to sense your presence. Like an approaching thunderstorm.” He touched a tentative hand to the shiner adorning his right eye, compliments of Smith’s well-aimed shoe. “Next time I’ll step back and let the lightning strike someone else.”

  She crossed her arms in a huff. “I saved your life, thank you very much.”

  “Yes, but only after I saved yours.”

  Her chin came up, her jaw thrust forward. “Your spell casting almost got us both killed.”

  She had a point, but damned if he’d admit it. He returned fire. “Well, I wouldn’t have had to cast a spell if you hadn’t run away.”

  Her scar stood out white against the creeping stain of her cheeks, her eyes hot as green fire. No telling what thoughts flitted behind that belligerent mask. Finally, “I didn’t ask you to come after me.”

  “We had a deal.”

  “There’s a difference between a deal and a threat.” She looked away. Turned back, her face rigid with fury and something else . . . something resembling startled bewilderment. Somewhere along the way, he’d not acted according to her plan. “If you’d just let me go—”

  “You’d be floating in the Liffey right now.”

  That sank beneath her veneer of swagger. She bit off whatever mulish comment she’d been about to make. Instead, ducked her head, shrugging deeper into her jacket. “You’ve no right to keep me here.”

  “I have every right.” He inhaled on a sharp breath against the pain. By tomorrow he’d be black, blue, and every shade in between. “Someone’s willing to kill to get their hands on my father’s diary, Cat. I want to know who. And why. We’ll start with who hired you.”

  Her gaze shifted to the windows, where a drizzly rain grayed the skies, then settled back on him, the piercing green of her eyes dulled with sorrow. “The man’s name is Smith. Or at least that’s the name he gave Geordie.”

  All right. Now they were getting somewhere. “Who’s Geordie?”

  She hesitated before finally answering, “A friend. He and I have rooms off Saint Patrick’s Close.”

  She pursed her lips, clearly waiting for his appalled reaction to such an arrangement, but he kept his silence. It was nothing to do with him. She was a thief. Why not a light heel as well? But he didn’t really believe it. Her grace held none of the rehearsed air of the practiced courtesan. Too artless. Too unaware.

  He watched her stalk his room like a caged animal in those goddamned formfitting trousers.

  Too disconcerting.

  “They didn’t tell Geordie why they wanted the diary,” she continued, “only that it was worth a fortune, and he’d be paid well. Then at the last, he sprained his ankle and couldn’t manage. I volunteered to go instead.”

  Now that he had her talking, he didn’t want to give her time to collect her thoughts. “And you disappeared this morning because?”

  “Why do you think?” She gave a shuddering breath, her eyes bright with angry tears. “But Smith was there. Waiting for me. And he—if I’d succeeded, Geordie wouldn’t have suffered. Those men would have left us alone.”

  “And the diary would be in their hands, not mine.”

  Her face hardened. “I don’t care about your damned diary. It’s nothing to do with me.”

  He held his temper, though it took much grinding of teeth and internal blaspheming. “You’re involved whether you like it or not. Those men won’t stop searching for you. And as long as you’re the only one who can figure out what’s so important about my father’s diary that people are willing to kill for it, you don’t leave this house without me glued to your side.”

  She folded her arms over her chest in a last-ditch attempt at defiance. “And if I refuse?”

  He offered her an acid stare. Or at least the best one he could muster through a rapidly swelling eye. “You’re smarter than that. You won’t.”

  She bit her lip, the open rebellion bleeding out of her with each passing second, but her words when they came seemed to be choked out of her. “You win, Kilronan. I’ll stay.”

  “It’s Aidan. Remember?”

  Her mouth rounded in a moue of surprise. “But you and I—you didn’t mean it.”

  “Unlike some I could mention, I don’t say what I don’t mean.”

  Firelight and the lavender scent of perfume, or blood loss and the beginning of fever—Aidan couldn’t be sure, but the result had him captured within the depths of Cat’s jade gaze. And while his brain still seethed, the rest of him responded with a sweep of heat and a bone-deep ache that made him shift uncomfortably. What the hell was it about this damn woman that had him randy as a tom on the prowl?

  “Very well . . . Aidan,” she said, her voice low and uncertain. She stepped forward, the air charged with all the potential of a summer storm. Just as he’d thought, the woman was a walking thundercloud. She held out a hand. “Whether you meant to or not, you saved my life. Thank you.”

  He didn’t want to be thanked. Not with a handshake. Not even with a chivalrou
s graze of her knuckles. Not now. His traitorous body craved more. His gaze raked the long slenderness of her, the coral pink of her lips, the graceful column of her throat where her pulse fluttered, begging to be kissed.

  What the hell was such a woman doing wallowing about in the back alleys of Dublin? And why did he suddenly want to punch Geordie in the nose?

  He forced his lust back into a dirty little corner of his mind. Imprisoned it as if chaining a rabid animal.

  “Don’t thank me yet. Before it’s over you may wish I’d left you to Smith,” he snarled, hating this unintended reaction to her closeness. She was trouble with a capital “T.” If he wanted a quick bang, he’d find another. He gave a bark of nonlaughter. Professional, unemotional ecstasy. That was his usual approach. He flashed her a menacing glare. “Send me Blake.” His gaze scoured her. “And for my sanity’s sake, get out of those bloody trousers and into something decent.”

  She backed away before darting like a harried rabbit from the room.

  And just like that, exhaustion undermined his guilty burst of anger. Closing his eyes, he sighed back against the chair. Concentrated on the steady pain in his side to exorcize the sudden pain in his heart.

  Aidan leaned heavily against the corner of the house, trying not to double over. Perhaps Blake had been right. Perhaps he should have listened to the surgeon and waited to rise from his bed until tomorrow. But tomorrow might be too late. He needed to act now, stitches and multiple contusions be damned. His work was almost finished. One more laying of the ward, and he could crawl out of the drizzly rain and back to his mattress. Until then, he inhaled through his teeth in shallow pants. Kept his voice to an even, uninterrupted tempo as he released the spell. “Dor. Ebrenn. Dowr.”

  The power speared him with a wrenching violence. Seared nerves already raw. Punched him with a breath-stealing whiplash that had tears collecting in the corners of his eyes. Mage energy had always claimed him in this way. A blistering volcanic burst of power seeming to suck the very essence from him. He’d learned to control it—no Douglas would be a prisoner of his Fey inheritance—but every draw upon his magic brought with it a moment’s unreasonable fear that this would be the spell to finally send him up in flames.

  “Tanyow. Menhir. Junya.” He closed his eyes, focusing only on the words. On the need driving him to complete the house’s perimeter warding.

  Whoever sought the diary knew it for what it was. A window into his father’s life and work. Into the secretive circle of mages who’d clung to the family’s seat at Belfoyle like malignant satellites. That had to mean he was dealing with Other. And to barricade himself against the magic of his own kind meant more than locked doors and primed pistols.

  Mage energy flared in a chain of green and yellow light before dissolving into the early dusk. And Aidan slumped rain soaked and shivering against the house’s foundation. The remnants of his power curled back along his veins inch by fiery inch toward his heart. He lifted his face to the sky, hoping to cool the fevered burn, but the heat lay too deep within him. Only time and rest would calm the tempest boil.

  “You know better than to fiddle about with magic while you’re ill,” a familiar voice scolded. An arm braced him upright.

  “I’m fine, Jack,” Aidan answered through chattering teeth.

  His cousin cocked an unconvinced eyebrow. “Well, let’s be fine in our bed, shall we?”

  Aidan set his jaw against the clash of warring agonies as Jack helped him up the steps and into the house. “You’re treating me like a child.”

  “And you’re acting like one.”

  Aidan’s strangled laugh smothered the stream of swearing that followed. “That’s always been my line.”

  Jack flicked him a sardonic glance. “Which says what about this situation?”

  Trapped, Aidan knew better than to answer.

  Jack folded his arms across his chest, eying Aidan with a scolding big brother air that set his chattering teeth on edge. This was wrong. All wrong. Not only was his wastrel cousin younger by a full three weeks, but giving unwanted advice was Aidan’s job. Ignoring it was Jack’s. Anything else felt unnatural.

  “Well?” Aidan growled. “Say whatever it is you want to say and be done with it. Or were you planning on simply glowering your displeasure?”

  Jack huffed his annoyance. “You want me to say it? Fine. I’ll be quick and concise. Are you trying to get yourself lynched? What if a neighbor saw you casting spells out there?”

  “Is that all?” Aidan lay back, wrapping himself deeper in his blankets in a vain attempt to get warm. “No one saw me, Jack. Give me credit for a bit of sense.”

  “I would if I thought you hadn’t had every bit of it knocked out of you by those ruffians. That in itself should have warned you it’s not safe to be flaunting your powers.”

  He was ill. He was exhausted. His wound hurt like the very devil. Did Jack have to pick now to rake him over the coals? “So I should have simply let them kill me?”

  “No, but—” Jack ran a tired hand down his face. “All I’m saying is that times are uneasy. People are nervous and looking for a scapegoat. Don’t give them a reason to make it you.”

  That caught Aidan’s attention. He gritted his teeth as he struggled to sit up. “Have you heard something?”

  “Nothing specific, but rumors abound. An old woman in Kildare was burned out of her home after her daughter-in-law denounced her as a witch. A family living near Rathnure simply disappeared. Neighbors not saying a word, but the stories talk of strange doings by the son and daughter catching the attention of the village leaders. The devil’s work and all that.”

  Almost Smith’s exact words. “Bloody hell,” he muttered.

  “The Duinedon are nervous, Aidan, and the Other, at least those who understand the warning signs, are lying low. It’s well to watch your back under the circumstances.”

  Rain smacked against the windows in a renewal of the earlier downpour. The room thrown into a gray half light. Cold. Gloomy. A sudden yearning for Belfoyle set him shuddering. It had been too long since he’d ridden his fields. Stood at the edge of the Burren’s rippling barrenness, feeling the pass of invisible Fey, hearing the chime of faery bells. A magical world just beyond the limits of his vision.

  Aidan touched the tightly wrapped bandage round his ribs. “Do you think it will ever be easy between us, Jack? Other and Duinedon, I mean.”

  His cousin dipped a shoulder in a noncommittal shrug. “I’d not wager on it.”

  And for Jack, that was saying something.

  Cat sat at the drawing room window. The passing rain shower had been replaced by a pale, milky sun and a stiff breeze hurrying the people down Henry Street like a chivying hand.

  She scoured their faces as they passed. No Smith among them. In fact, no one she recognized at all. As if in the three years she’d been gone, the world had moved on. Left her behind. The Miss Catriona O’Connell they knew expunged from the record. A fallen woman. A whispered warning for other young debs at their coming out. Be careful or you’ll end like her.

  But had they truly known her?

  Had she known herself?

  Did she now?

  She’d reinvented herself so often she didn’t know who Cat O’Connell was anymore. And now she was being asked to do it again. But could she? Or in slipping so casually from one form to the other had she finally lost her core? That part of her that remained unchanging and eternal? Was she as much a spirit as any wraith doomed to Annwn’s underworld?

  Thoughts of death drove her to Geordie. Had Smith taken his frustrations out on the dwarf? Or did he live to question and worry over Cat’s survival? She hated not knowing. Dreaded certainty even more.

  So many people important to her had come and gone in her life. Her father had been the first to vanish. Swallowed by the sea in a gale off Gibraltar. Then Jeremy with his silver tongue and laughing eyes, who chose duty to another over devotion to her. Her child, whose existence could be measured in days yet whose p
ale face haunted her dreams with unfailing regularity. Now Geordie. All lost to her as she tumbled from one life to another like some jumbled piece of flotsam.

  Unable to sit any longer with naught but the tangle of her thoughts for company, Cat rose and left the room. Climbed the stairs, the upper corridors dimly lit and chilly. Paused in front of the first closed door, its brass knob a shining temptation. Her hand reached for it. Turned it. The door opening a crack. Wide enough for the warmth of a stoked fire to heat her face. For the faint tang of cheroot smoke and bay rum to tease her nose. For the slow, easy breathing of the man in the bed to assure her that despite her stupidity she’d not killed him. This man had yet to disappear.

  Even swimming in a laudanum haze, Aidan sensed Cat’s presence. A quiver of the air. A pensive, weighted silence. Storms brooding on the horizon. He felt her stare in the prickling of his skin and a sweep of heat separate from the spiking fever. He pictured her flashing green eyes. The sleek polish of her hair. The flush of her pearl skin. He wanted to reassure her. Tell her everything would be all right. But his drugged mind had divorced itself from his body. He could only lie there. Feign sleep.

  And even long after she withdrew, dreams plagued him with visions of Cat, not as the thief he’d hired, but as a woman brilliant and courageous and vivid as a queen. A woman to understand him. A woman to love.

  Cat sat surrounded by parcels. Some opened for inspection. Others still wrapped in string and brown paper. Aidan’s barked sickroom command becoming reality within days. Apparently a perquisite of being an earl. Even one hanging to his wealth by his fingertips.

  She’d long since given up combing through the packages, much to Mrs. Flanagan’s grudging surprise. For some reason, the abundance hadn’t lightened Cat’s heart. Rather, the display of Kilronan’s patronage hung like a stone around her neck. A weight pinning her to this place and this man when common sense told her to run.

  She trailed a bored hand over the empty tables. Picking up then discarding the few magazines tossed about. With Aidan laid up, she’d nothing to fill the empty hours and had forgotten how to be idle with any kind of composure. Having nothing to do and nowhere to go was downright dull.