Earl of Darkness

by Alix Rickloff

  “Thank you.” He staggered to his feet. Held out a hand to her.

  She slipped her fingers into his grasp. Met his eyes, and this time the charged rush of sensation had naught to do with magic. Everything to do with the warm, callused grip of the man holding her. She swallowed. Pulled away. She’d burned that bridge. There’d be no going back. “What were you doing?”

  The color slowly returned to his face, though he held his side stiffly. “Practicing.”

  “To kill yourself?”

  “No. To protect you,” he snapped, jolting both of them into an awkward silence. Aidan quickly sought to mend the fence. “And the diary. When—not if—Lazarus returns, I need to be ready for him.”

  “But just then, you—”

  He went rigid, the nobleman’s arrogance in full view from the darkling light in his eye to the grim jaw. “Failed? Is that what you’re trying to say? Don’t bother pointing out the obvious. It’s not the first time I’ve bolloxed up a spell. It’s just a wonder I haven’t incinerated myself yet.”

  This bitterness carried the weight of years. A lifetime’s shortcomings in the acid tones and harsh admission of defeat. How did she combat a statement like that? Should she even try? Perhaps it would be best to simply walk away. Leave him to his self-pity without a backward glance. She took a few dragging steps before reluctantly turning back, her words pulled from some hidden corner of her soul. “We all have flaws, Aidan. That doesn’t make us any less worthy.”

  “Or any less treasured,” he murmured in agreement, his stare trapping her in place.

  Was this his way of telling her he didn’t hold Jeremy against her? Didn’t despise her? Or think any less of her? She focused on a bird perched on a branch beyond his right shoulder. It kept her from having to look him in the eye. Experience the pull of that scorching bronze gaze. Succumb to the growing ridiculous need to carve herself some small place in his life that didn’t revolve around the diary.

  “I’ll leave you to it then.” She swept past him, her body alive to his presence, her skin prickling and gooseflesh springing up her arms.

  “Perhaps I should have done as Jack suggested and let the Amhas-draoi have the diary. At least they don’t suffer from ridiculous seizures every time they use their powers.”

  She turned, catching the rueful twist of his mouth. Bit her lip as she sought to find words to soothe, knowing she’d never been good at conciliatory speeches. “The Amhas-draoi are the best of the best. Warriors and mages of the highest order. That’s what they do. Who they are. You can’t compare yourself to them.”

  Aidan limped to a log. Sank down on it, kneading his thigh, wincing as he worked. “Brendan could have been one. He even asked Father once to send him to Skye to train with Scathach. Father refused. Brendan sulked for a month.”

  She leaned back against a tree. Used the rough dig of the bark to counteract the dangerous quicksand feeling his candidness elicited. This was suddenly Aidan and Catriona speaking. Not the Earl of Kilronan and Cat the thief.

  “Did you ever want to go to join them?” she asked, knowing she’d waded in over her head. Risked being dragged under by emotions that didn’t make sense. Could never be allowed to emerge.

  “Join the brotherhood? Me?” Surprise flitted across his face. “No. As the heir to the earldom, I knew my future. And thankfully my awkward reaction to mage energy didn’t alter that inheritance.”

  His easy answer emboldened her—that and a desire to seize this brief intimacy. Be the one asking the questions for a change. “Have you always been affected this way?”

  He shrugged. Snapped off a dead branch. Swiped at the shrubbery. “More or less. Father declared it was all in my head. Assured me training would correct it. I just wasn’t working hard enough. It was always a bone of contention between us.”

  A well-traveled argument. Familiar to her, though in a different form. Her mother had used it whenever Cat and her stepfather argued. She was imagining things. Mr. Weston was a good and respectable gentleman. Cat was being difficult. Stubborn. Not trying.

  “It wasn’t in your head though, was it?” A cloud crossed the sun, throwing the glade into shadow. Cat hugged her arms to her body. Gritted her teeth against the ache of betrayal. Why hadn’t her mother believed her? Why hadn’t she listened? Why hadn’t she cared?

  Had she truly loved her new husband so much? Or had it been that she loved Cat so little?

  And then Aidan was there. His body warm and solid, the beat of his heart steady beneath her ear. She tensed, but only for a moment before accepting the embrace. Relaxed into the feel of him pressed against her, the hard-muscled strength of him cradling her.

  “No, Cat,” he answered, the rumble of his baritone rippling along nerves raw with an overload of emotions. “What I feel is not all in my head.”

  “Oh, excuse me. I didn’t know anyone was in here.”

  Cat began to back out of the room, but Daz Ahern stopped her with a raised hand. A watery smile from behind thick spectacles. “No one but me, Miss O’Connell. Come in, come in.”

  In a moth-nibbled coat with elaborate gold-trimmed cuffs, breakfast-stained silk knee breeches, and his hair pulled back neatly with a velvet ribbon, he almost looked presentable. Just so long as you didn’t notice the high-heeled yellow pump paired with a black leather dancing slipper. “Actually, I’ve been hoping to have a word with you.”

  That sounded ominous.

  “Just make yourself at home while I finish looking for a volume I’ve mislaid. I filed it away, I’m sure of it. I just have to remember where.”

  She cast a skeptical glance at the heaped stacks and paper-filled crates before lifting her eyes to the overflowing shelves. Filed? There was a system behind this clutter? This she had to see to believe.

  As she watched, he scanned the shelves first. “It’s not under authors I know, nor authors I think I know.” He dropped to rummage through a box. “Nor under authors I detest—an especially large category, by the way.”

  He straightened, casting one more puzzled look around the room. “Perhaps it’s filed under authors as insane as myself.” He tapped a thoughtful finger to his chin. “That’s a definite possibility.”

  Cat bit her lip, torn between amusement and distress. Aidan really expected this man to be of help? “Perhaps I should leave you to your search.” She started for the door.

  “No, please stay, Miss O’Connell.”

  She subsided onto a lumpy sofa. Folded her hands in her lap before raising a passive face to her inquisitor.

  “Aidan related how he met you. Quite extraordinary. A female thief. And a jolly good one the way Aidan told the story.” He adjusted his spectacles, examining her through great bug eyes. “Yet you speak and act with the elegance of an aristocrat. I saw it myself as soon as I met you. Told Maude even, ‘that is a young woman of breeding, that is.’ Ask her, she’ll tell you. So how is it you came to be lurking about in Aidan’s library with malicious intent?”

  “Circumstance can make anyone act in unexpected ways. And desperate circumstances call for desperate acts.”

  “Yes, yes. Very true,” he muttered as he fumbled in his coat pocket. “But surely you regret your criminal activity.” A somber note crept into his voice. “It presses upon your soul with the weight of chains.” Out came a marble. “Haunts your dreams.” A pair of dice. “A guilty stain that never washes away.” A chicken bone.

  Her hands clenched to fists as she fought outrage. “I do what I must to survive in a world all too quick to condemn a young woman’s folly while admiring that same inclination in a man.”

  His brows rose into his wrinkled, liver-spotted forehead as he considered her words before nodding as if in agreement. Dropping his eyes to study his left shoe. “One moment’s weakness changes everything. There’s no going back. We bear our guilt forever. And only our victims can give us the absolution we seek.”

  Her victim? She hoped he wasn’t referring to Jeremy. Anyone less victimized she couldn’t imagi
ne. He’d gotten everything he wanted. And with little inconvenience.

  But perhaps he referred to someone else. Someone completely innocent of any wrongdoing, whose only fault was being born to a stupid, weak girl who’d loved both unwisely and too well.

  Cat put aside the diary with a sigh. Massaged her throbbing temples in a vain attempt to ease the blinding headache. Obviously Aidan’s father had used the impenetrability of the language as well as the unappealing side effects to keep snoopers away. And for good cause, as Cat found with every fresh entry. Spells ranging from innocuous to lethal riddled the margins. Potions an apothecary would run from shrieking in horror. And descriptions of creatures whose existence seemed conjured from nightmare. These, coupled with the day-to-day entries of a man more than slightly fanatical about the close-knit circle of scholars under his titular head, made for dense reading. Denser translation.

  As weeks and months passed under her thumb, the diary’s tone grew angrier. Hostility and resentment filled the pages, coinciding with more sinister magics. A spell that could devour a man from the inside out. An experiment in reanimation that begat a walking, stinking corpse that had to be hastily unreanimated. She still gagged over that one. An entry detailing a meeting where someone was “disciplined.” She’d mentally added the quotation marks after she’d read two entries later about the second experiment in reanimation. Also a failure, thank goodness.

  Through it all, the network of mages grew. Stretching like spider legs out from Belfoyle to places as far reaching as Dublin, London, Edinburgh, Paris. Surely they didn’t simply gather to complain about Other persecution and experiment with dark mage energy. Men didn’t collect conspirators without a purpose. So why?

  Tonight she and Aidan had been working through an entry that spoke of the High King’s final resting place and the unearthing of the Sh’vad Tual, describing the stone as the final key. Though the key to what was left decidedly vague.

  She rolled her neck. Stretched to relieve the knots in her shoulders. Wished she could untangle the knots jumbling her insides as easily. Aidan’s careless gesture of comfort in the garden had lit fires she’d hoped long since extinguished.

  It was Jeremy all over again. A handsome man. The desire to belong. The need to be loved. She’d read this book before. She knew how the story turned out. A weak woman. A willing man. Heartbreak to follow.

  But would it? After that one veiled comment, Aidan had never again referred to her shocking ruination. And though she’d studied him covertly at every opportunity, he never showed the slightest discomfort or embarrassment in her company. As if he didn’t care. As if it truly didn’t matter to him. A thought only adding to the wild roundabout of emotions.

  “It doesn’t make sense. The words tease at a reason, but they don’t explain anything.” Aidan broke her from the useless circle of her thoughts. Pacing the room like a frantic automaton, hand tapping a rapid beat against his leg, he’d long since discarded his coat. Loosened his neck cloth. “What was my father doing?”

  She cupped her chin in her hand. “You knew him. Was he always so secretive?”

  He threw up his hands in frustration. “He was a scholar with a scholar’s amazement that what he found easy might in fact be bloody incomprehensible.” His words grew harsh with long-held anger. “No doubt Brendan would understand Father’s riddles. Brendan had the same Byzantine personality. Wheels within wheels. But Brendan’s gone. And I’m left to figure out what the man was trying to get at.”

  “So that would be . . . yes,” she replied, keeping her tone light. Doing her best to ignore the undercurrents of old pain and remembered betrayal.

  He caught her attempt at lightheartedness. Offered her an apologetic laugh. “Aye, a definite yes.” He rubbed a thoughtful hand over his chin. “And you’re sure that’s what those last paragraphs say?”

  Cat nodded. Wished she hadn’t. “Take my word or don’t. I’m not reading it again. Feeling like I’ve had my innards stirred with a stick wasn’t part of our deal.”

  Rubbing the back of his neck, he cast her a compassionate look. “It does take some getting used to.”

  “I don’t want to get used to it,” she grumbled, wrapping her arms more firmly around her torso, wishing she could go to bed. Make up for the hours she’d missed last night.

  “The letter mentioned a stone too,” Aidan said. “That must be the Sh’vad Tual referred to here. And Daz spoke of the High King. He said Father and the others promised Arthur would return.”

  “As in King Arthur? As in Knights of the Round Table? Excalibur? Camelot?”

  “As in all of the above.”

  “I hate to throw cold water on your theory, but Arthur’s a legend. He’s just stories to pass a winter’s evening.” She faltered under Aidan’s solemn gaze. “Please say he’s just stories to pass a winter’s evening.”

  He shrugged. “Some believe he existed. That in fact Arthur was the last in a line of great kings of Other. Ruling over a world that not only accepted the Fey-born powers of our race, but admired them. That once upon a time our kind walked this earth without fear of persecution. Without the shadow of superstition clinging to our every breath.”

  Did he know his eyes lit up with pride when he spoke like this? A new, razor-sharp arrogance crept over his features? A battle brilliance emerging with each lengthening stride?

  “During the Lost Days, the walls between the faery kingdom of Ynys Avalenn and the mortal realm remained open with both sides able to pass as needed. Blood ties strengthened between Other and Fey as a result. There have even been theories the mage Merlin was the product of one such liaison between a mortal woman and her Fey lover.”

  “So what happened to end the idyll?”

  “Arthur’s death. Some say with his passing, that bright age ended, and magic fell into the shadows to be hidden and feared.”

  “Some?”

  “My father believed.” His gaze focused inward, his words coming faster now. “He used to regale us with stories of Arthur’s court. But he treated them like history. Our history. Making sure we understood where we’d come from while explaining how modern writers had twisted the truth to suit their slanted agendas. The incestuous coupling between Arthur and his half sister, the adultery of Guinevere, even Arthur’s bastard conception—all of it was designed to blacken the High King and cast darkness on a time of Other dominance.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Because to them, we’re naught more than devils. You heard those men in the alley in Dublin.” Anger deepened his voice. “The Duinedon have always feared what they don’t understand. They’re frightened and envious of what we can do. Of what we are. And so they seek to destroy us. Or at least drive us so far into obscurity we’ll never recover.”

  His features hardened, his eyes burning with a fearsome energy as he stalked the room in ever more agitated circles.

  “My father was proud of his Other heritage to the point where to be Duinedon was a failing in his eyes. As if Fey blood and mage energy alone made you more of a person. To him, Arthur’s world must have seemed like the embodiment of everything he dreamed. A world that accepted you for who you are. Not who they think you are.”

  The yearning in his voice pushed through Cat’s exhaustion. Did Aidan seek such a world? It sounded too good to be true. A place where the people accepted you without comment. Without restrictions. Loved you no matter what you’d done. What so-called sins you committed.

  She threaded her fingers together to stop them from shaking. Focused on Aidan. And off the rush of her own yearning for such a dream existence where she could speak of her son. Where her memories of him would no longer be colored with her own shame.

  “So your father collected a stone and a tapestry,” she said, hating the shaky vibrato in her voice. “For what purpose? What do they have to do with King Arthur?”

  He plowed a hand through his hair. Gave a frustrated shake of his head. “Daz said they promised the High King’s return . . . Art
hur’s return . . . they promised—” he stopped. She could almost see the gears turning. “Could they have actually wanted to restore Arthur? Begin a new reign of Other?”

  She straightened. “By bringing Arthur back to life?”

  “Daz said he’d always imagined Brendan as Arthur.”

  “Could that be why he’s after the diary?”

  “It’s not Brendan,” Aidan insisted. “Besides, the letter says Brendan knows where the stone is. He doesn’t need the diary.”

  “You don’t know what else is in here. There could be any number of things Brendan might need.”

  “I won’t believe it. They promised his return. Not a new Arthur, but Arthur’s return.”

  “You can’t bring people back from the dead,” she argued.

  Green eyes met brown. And Cat knew exactly what Aidan was thinking. Because she was thinking it too.

  The Domnuathi. Lazarus.

  Aidan finally broke the heavy silence. “Can’t you?”

  Snapping the half-cocked pistol’s frizzen in place, Aidan wiped his hands on a cloth. Carried the loaded weapon to the hall, casting his eye about for a convenient hiding place. The chest of drawers tucked under the lower landing looked a perfect spot. Near the front entrance, yet out of the way of nosy housemaids.

  Successful, he returned to the library. Lit a cheroot to stave off exhaustion. Stalked the room as he inhaled on an energizing drag before stubbing it out. Tossing it into the fire. Settling himself once again with notes and diary.

  He’d sent Cat to bed, but the lavender scent of her lingered. Teased him with ungallant thoughts. Lusty imaginings. He shifted in his seat. Fought to concentrate on the collection of transcripts she’d left and ignore the pair of spring green eyes and the reed-supple body alive with anticipation. What would have happened if he’d ignored his good angel and done what he’d wanted this afternoon? If he’d freed the long-suppressed seducer who, if given a chance, could not only drive the memory of Jeremy away, but obliterate it completely?