Aidan didn’t answer. Instead, he knelt. Rolled the man over onto his back, searching his pockets. Who was he? For that matter, what was he?
He looked human enough. More so now without the ghoulish flame flickering behind those empty black eyes. But for a moment, he’d sensed a difference about the assassin moving beyond mere Other sorcery. A savagery born at the witching hour when monsters stir. Death undone, the man had claimed.
Blood pooled beneath the body. Spread in a growing morbid circle.
Well, Annwn may have spat him back once, but Cat’s crack shot had returned him to the underworld.
Nothing came of Aidan’s search but a ticket booked on tomorrow’s packet for Wales. Not a local then. He’d been imported for the job.
Aidan pocketed the ticket before straightening.
Cat stood hunched and forlorn at his side. He led her out of the kitchen. Nudged her unresisting body toward the warmth of the library fire. Made it as far as the hall when the same arctic blast that had preceded the first attack shivered along his flesh. Bit through muscles. Sank bone-crushing fangs into the well of his powers until he cried out against the ice cold agony. Swung around to face once more an undead and unkillable killer.
“You’re wasting time, Kilronan. The diary. Now.”
The man’s voice fell like lead into the silence that had descended over the house. A horrible, enveloping silence holding an echo of the grave.
But how? She’d killed him. She knew she had. She’d heard the shot. Watched the corpse crumple to the floor. Seen the sticky, red blood crawl over the bricks.
Aidan’s grip crushed Cat’s shoulder, his body sagging against her as the mage energy tore through him, the overspill burying itself like needles in her brain.
The appropriated sword dropped to the marble floor. Followed by Aidan. Hatred edged his expression. Glittered with animal intensity in his eyes.
The man stepped forward. “Don’t make me harm your lady.”
His gaze swung to her, the triangulating stare enough to steal her breath. Hold her captive. Motionless but for the frenzied rise and fall of her chest.
“Go to hell,” Aidan cursed.
That seemed to amuse the man. The corner of his mouth curved into a smile, his hands flexing in a spasmodic jerk. “I’m already there.”
Lazarus’s curse smashed into her. An avalanche of cascading, pummeling, body-crushing battle magic trapping her beneath it. The spell’s force pushed the air from her lungs. Tore through her like a scythe. She struggled, but like a snare, the poisonous mage energy coiled and twisted itself around her. She couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t swallow. Her vision hazed and dimmed.
She tried screaming, but there was no time. No time for anything but a final reassuring thought—I’m coming for you, my son. Mama will see you soon.
Cat’s body lay curled in a ball as she attempted to shield herself from the spell’s lethal force. A tangle of hair curtaining her face. Pale arms hugging her body.
Lazarus’s jaw jumped, his body as rigid as if he suffered alongside his victim. And his gaze held a grief almost as great as Aidan’s. But then that gaze hardened to a diamond brilliance, any second thoughts eliminated through sheer force of will. He gave a regretful shake of his head. “Stay my hand, Kilronan. Give me the diary.”
“Fuck you,” Aidan snarled. His grip tightened on the sword’s hilt, but without the strength to fight, it was useless. At least he wouldn’t make it easy. If the bastard wanted the diary, he’d have to search every bloody nook and goddamned cranny of Kilronan House to find it.
“As you will.” Lazarus’s evil stare held centuries of destruction. His dark magic crude, but effective.
Aidan’s agony as the man’s curse ripped through him was like a roaring, living thing. The will and then even the ability to move were stripped from him. His body began to unravel strand by strand. Tingling and then numbness spread inward from his fingers and toes. Racing to his heart. Leaping from nerve to nerve until, all senses deadened, he collapsed. Felt death reaching for him in the bitter, frozen cold of Lazarus’s magic.
A yell came from outside. The calls grew louder. Oh gods, Jack was home. Aidan needed to shout a warning. Call him off. But he couldn’t move. Couldn’t speak. His body unresponsive, his mind clouded and sluggish.
A door slammed back on its hinges. Shouts echoed off the plastered ceilings and columned hall. Reverberated through his body with the jangling shock of a tuning fork.
He caught sight of booted feet. A tilted glimpse of Jack’s horror. The gowned figure of a mesmerizing woman.
A shimmer of color danced in front of him, the air running like water. His eyesight narrowed to a pinprick. Then the world went black.
Aidan tossed back the brandy. Poured and tossed back a second. Let the cauterizing fire slide through his insides. Calm the restless tension jumping just under his skin. It didn’t work. He poured a third.
Jack watched him from his place by the window, his expression grave but cautious. “Aidan, perhaps you—”
He flinched. Downed the brandy. “Don’t say it.”
Jack held up placating hands. Settled back into anxious silence.
Aidan ground his teeth against the throbbing pain in his leg. Kept up his impatient pacing. Lit a cheroot from a nearby candle, inhaling on a lung-soothing drag. Stubbed it out, tossing the whole into the grate. Kept pacing. His mind all for what went on upstairs. Off his last image of Cat draped in Jack’s arms, a death pallor cast over her already ivory features.
“She sleeps.”
Aidan staggered to a halt. Lifted his gaze to the woman at the door. The reason Lazarus had been prevented from gaining a final victory. The cause of his own continued survival, though it grated to admit.
A sloe-eyed beauty, Miss Helena Roseingrave was denied perfection only by the corded strength in her arms, the broad shoulders, the squared-off jut of her chin. In all other respects, she was amazing. Jack obviously agreed. His eyes ate her alive, a foolish smile hovering at the edges of his mouth.
Her gaze swept over the two of them, the usual Amhas-draoi arrogance in full view. “She’ll sleep for the next twenty-four hours. That’s normal. When she wakes, she may or may not remember what happened. That too is normal. Don’t push her. Memories will return in time.”
Aidan felt the first unclenching of his innards. The first stirring of a warmth stolen from him after the glacial freeze of Lazarus’s attack. He hadn’t lost his one chance at completing the diary’s translation. At understanding what secrets it harbored that would warrant murder.
The woman’s sphinxlike stare remained fixed upon him as if she read his thoughts. Saw his self-interested relief. His refusal to linger on any emotion softer than expediency.
He wanted to wipe that smug reproach from her face. Tell her what she could do with her disdain. Instead, he reminded himself she had saved him. Saved them. He stood in debt to the Amhas-draoi. A disturbing idea, but enough to banish the misery wrought by Cat’s lifeless body, the chalky gray of a face whose contours he’d traced only days before, the curve of a mouth his lips still remembered.
Jack crossed to the door, bowing to Miss Roseingrave as if in the presence of royalty. “Forgive my cousin. He’s stunned to speechlessness with gratitude.”
Amusement lit her dark eyes. “I see that.” She sobered. “But I understand his reluctance to accept our help. The history between his family and the brotherhood does not make for easy confidences.”
Aidan broke his stubborn silence. “If you want to gain my trust, you can begin by telling me who or what just attacked us?”
She offered a curt campaigner’s nod in return. “His name is Lazarus, just as he told you.”
“Cat killed him. I saw her do it. No human could have survived that shot.”
Miss Roseingrave’s face dropped into solemn lines. Unsettling even to one accustomed to the freedoms allowed women among his kind. Freedoms were one thing. A female who wielded magic and weapons with a soldier�
�s ease was something completely different. Again, unsettling.
“Not a normal human, no. But Lazarus isn’t a normal human. Not anymore. He’s a soldier of Domnu. One of the Domnuathi.”
Jack and Aidan exchanged mirroring expressions of confusion.
“A creature whose original humanity has been twisted into something unnatural,” she clarified. “Whose soul has been drawn back from the land of the dead to inhabit a body created from the bones of its former self. As Domnuathi, he is in thrall to his maker. Compelled to follow his commands.”
“A slave,” Jack offered as if he’d passed some kind of test.
She answered with another quick nod. “Aye. Though we’re speaking mainly in theory. None within the current order of Amhas-draoi have encountered a soldier of Domnu before. The magic it takes to create one is staggering. None have ever survived the attempt.”
Aidan kept up his mad pacing as his mind grappled with this new scenario. “So how do you kill something already dead?”
Her gaze flicked to the sideboard, Jack jumping to fill her a restorative glass. Aidan watching the interplay with an eye roll and impatient drumming of his fingers.
She let out a resigned sigh at the first sip of claret. “He’s not dead. He’s as alive in his own way as you or me. Just in an altered state.”
“That’s not an answer to my question. How do we kill him?”
Jack shot him a pained glance, but Aidan’s impatience grew. His thigh and his head hurt. His body ached. Cat lay insensible upstairs. And he was no closer than before to discovering what all this had to do with the diary or his father.
“If I can’t kill him, what’s to stop him from returning and trying again? Do I have to watch my back from now on? Jump at every shadow? Are you planning on camping out in my drawing room?”
This time it was Jack and Miss Roseingrave who exchanged pointed looks. She straightened, a stance one took when meeting an enemy head on. “Give us the diary, Lord Kilronan. Give it to the Amhas-draoi, and Lazarus will have no reason to return. That’s what he wants. That’s his directive.”
Her words landed like stones on his chest. Tore the answer from his mouth in a chain of sailor’s swearing even Jack winced against. “Who told you about—” the red haze of his vision landed square on “—Jack?”
His cousin leapt to his own defense. “I warned you that book would lead to trouble. And I was right. Only Miss Roseingrave’s arrival drove that hell spawn away. Only her abilities kept you and Cat from death tonight.”
“I can handle it.”
“What more needs to happen? This fellow, Lazarus. The Unseelie summoning. Hell, the damned brawl in that alley. Your father’s obsession is threatening to pull you in just as deep.”
“Enough!” Aidan’s barked command stunned Jack to silence. He turned to the Amhas-draoi. “If I’d risk death to keep the diary from him, why would I hand it over to you?”
“You may despise our actions, but you know we act in good faith and for the good of all Other.”
“You do what’s advantageous to your cause. Having the diary locked away serves you. Not me. My family’s future is tied to that book. To learning what really happened.” He met her stare for stare. “To knowing the whole truth.”
“And if I offer you truth, would you believe?”
“Try me.”
“Lazarus is a slave to his creator. Do you wonder who that man might be? Who has the power and the motivation to capture your father’s diary for himself? Who would eliminate anyone standing between himself and gaining the knowledge therein?”
Aidan sat in silent fume, refusing to surrender an inch. He’d been trapped into this confrontation. Hated every minute of it.
Miss Roseingrave speared him with another unnerving Amhas-draoi stare that burned with brandy intensity. “Lord Kilronan, what do you know of your brother’s recent movements?
She woke, remembering.
Not where she was or how she’d come to be lying muffled beneath quilts in a bed large enough to fit ten of her. Instead she recalled the tight, searching pucker of her son’s mouth, the wispy black hair, the clean baby smell of him. Even things she’d since forgotten were newly etched on her waking consciousness with indelible clarity. The way he had of patting her breast as he suckled, the incalculable wisdom in his newborn eyes. For one glistening moment she’d traveled back in time, and he remained a soft weight against her heart.
She lay completely still, hoping to cage these recaptured memories before they faded, but already shadows clouded the perfection of the images. Gaps punctuated the picture she’d conjured, leaving her with naught but sensations of helplessness, grief, and a loss as great as when they’d torn her dead son from her arms.
Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. Slid down her cheeks to drop salt bitter past her lips.
She slept.
Brendan was alive. That was Aidan’s first and overriding thought.
Father hadn’t gone through with it. His brother hadn’t been led like a lamb to slaughter.
Somewhere out there, Brendan was alive.
Aidan stood within the shadowed bedchamber. Surveyed the stripped bed frame, the furniture swathed in Holland covers, the yawning, cold hearth. He’d not been in here for years. Not out of any childish sentimentality. Simply because a lack of guests meant a lack of need to open extra rooms.
He ran a casual finger over the dusty mantel, a corner of his mouth twitching at the stain above where an errant thrown egg had marred the expensive Chinese wallpaper. All right, six thrown eggs, but Brendan had deserved it for swiping Aidan’s birthday half crown. Father had summoned him to the library where a dripping, eggy Brendan had run to tattle. Aidan had been given a sharp lecture on the nature of self-restraint. But now that he thought about it, he never had gotten that half crown back from his little brother.
Aidan hadn’t thought about that incident in years, yet the Amhas-draoi’s insinuations had stirred all sorts of similar slights and strange oddities to the surface—Brendan’s tight-lipped silence whenever questioned about the meetings with Father and his friends, his unexpected fury at catching Aidan in his rooms unaccompanied, his dismissive rebuff of Aidan’s invitation to join him in London. That last one still stung. He’d not realized at the time it would be the final letter he’d receive from his brother.
But did those things alone point to the menacing conclusions drawn about him? Hardly.
“Aidan?” came a tentative voice from behind.
“What do you want?” he answered, startled by the renewed sense of loss these memories dredged up. Brendan’s absence had been a grief long healed over. Or so he’d thought until the discovery of his father’s damned diary. The resurrection of numerous buried hurts.
“I came to make sure you were all right.”
Aidan finally turned to face his cousin, the pathetic hangdog expression on his face almost humorous. Or it would have been had Aidan not been in his current black temper. “As well as can be expected.” He jerked his head in the direction of downstairs. “Has she gone?”
“Aye.” Jack’s own troubled gaze circled the room before coming to rest on Aidan. “I know you said to keep the Amhas-draoi out of it, but you have to admit if I hadn’t—”
Aidan offered a chilly, humorless smile. “If you hadn’t, you’d even now be preparing to pack to make way for the new earl.”
Jack shuddered. “Bite your tongue.”
“And loath as I am to admit it, you saved my sorry backside with your bungling interference. Thank you.”
“So all’s forgiven?”
“On that score, yes.” Aidan took a stiff and painful turn about the room, his thigh one big knotted ache throbbing all the way to the bone. Pausing at the window, he twitched back the blinds. Looked out on the garden as if he could pierce the gloom. See what lurked beyond the meager light of his taper.
The night breathed like a great animal. And he shivered, imagining the creature Lazarus. The hollow, pitiless stare
as he struck, but for that split second’s regret.
What sort of devil would create a man from the dust of his former life? And what sort of hell would that existence be for one who found himself enslaved beneath a madman’s spell?
“Have you reconsidered Helena’s advice? Will you entrust the diary to the Amhas-draoi?”
Aidan smirked. “Helena is it?” Resolve stiffened his mouth into a grim line. “No. The diary stays with me.”
Jack joined him at the window. “That creature is still out there, Aidan. And you heard her, it won’t give up. Besides, you don’t know what more harm that bloody book will do before it’s all over. There must be a good reason Brendan wants it so badly.”
“Not Brendan!” Aidan snarled.
“You heard her—”
“I heard her offer a convincing argument, yes. But not convincing enough to change my mind. Brendan’s no black sorcerer conjuring living nightmares from dead bodies.”
“I know you don’t want to believe it,” Jack argued. “But it does make sense. His disappearance right before your father’s murder. His continued absence after so many years. And who else would know your father kept a diary?”
Aidan had already battled his way through those arguments within his own mind. Come to conclusions he sought now to explain to his skeptical cousin. “If he’d wanted the diary, why didn’t he simply take it with him when he vanished? Why wait six years to come after it? Or why not come himself and ask for it? He’s my brother, not some stranger. He should know I’d let him look his fill. He doesn’t have to kill to gain it.” He shook his head. “Someone else is behind this. It has to be.”
Jack shrugged his grudging acceptance of Aidan’s persuasions.
“No, I keep the diary. Cat and I have barely scratched the surface.”
“And how do you plan on remaining alive long enough to finish the translation?”
Aidan had already figured that one out. “By leaving,” he replied. “Kilronan House is all yours.”
“So I’m left to fend off your unwanted and undead visitor?” Jack offered a grim twist of his lips. “I’ll try to contain my enthusiasm.”
Earl of Darkness Page 10
