Earl of Darkness

by Alix Rickloff

  The fight receded in a tumble and rush of boots upon stairs. A scream and a string of furious swearing. And through it all the prickly rush of expelled mage energy bathed in the nausea-inducing miasma of the Unseelie.

  A slam of bodies. And from the lawn, another blue white flash turning night to day as it expanded in wave after wave of rolling magic.

  Aidan’s triumph sounded animalistic and wild like a blooded animal crowing over a fresh kill. Then came silence as thick and brimstone filled as the air of the underworld.

  Cat fingered the doorknob. Flinched from a heat bursting up her arm before it dissipated.

  Ignoring the unsettling sensation, she wrenched open the door. Stumbled down the stairs. Past the broken and hanging furniture, the spilled blood, the crush and splinters of destruction. Out the back to stand upon the terrace stairs.

  Below, in the pallid light of a setting moon, Aidan crouched over a body upon the grass.

  “Is he dead?” she called.

  He straightened and turned toward her. And his eyes shone like pits of fire. “Not yet,” he hissed.

  The man upon the grass moaned and stirred, reaching for a dagger just out of range. And Cat sucked her breath in over a tongue swollen with horror.

  Not Lazarus. Of the dead-eyed Domnuathi, there was no sign at all.

  This was Aidan.

  Battered. Bleeding. And about to be murdered by—himself.

  Aidan touched the dagger’s hilt, the cool steel grazing the pads of his fingers. Reality amid a battering nightmare of sensations and images flooding his bruised and exhausted mind. Weakened by his fight with Lazarus, he had no strength left to struggle against the Unseelie’s domination. The long, excruciating consumption of his existence into the body of the creature standing over him.

  Thoughts came slowly. Action slower. The air around him grew heavy upon his chest. Sight came through a prism of flame and smoke and cinders.

  He reached for the dagger. Closed his hand around it.

  There came a muffled shout from somewhere to his right, the monster’s attention momentarily diverted.

  With almost the last of his strength, Aidan lurched upward, the blade plunging deep into the monster’s chest. Interrupting the parasitic drain with a crackling infernal roar even as it opened a long, jagged wound. Black blood spurted, burning Aidan’s exposed flesh, the dagger disintegrating on a sour wind.

  The Unseelie reared back in surprise and pain, its eyes wide and terrible, Aidan seeing his death mirrored in the crazed fury of the animal.

  Surrender would be easy. Let the Unseelie have him. Let this struggle end now. He’d no hope of winning against such strength. Yet sheer cussedness kept him fighting.

  Father thought he’d never be good enough? Well, he’d be damned if the old man would be proven right.

  “Dehwelea dh’agaa bya!” The shouted words from the stair above stung Cat to life. Daz’s sturdy warmth. His musty old-book and sour-wine smell. His voice, no longer shivery and ancient, but bold. Confident. Forcing the Unseelie away from Aidan’s prone body. “Moa hath ankresyesh not nesh fellesh!”

  It eyed them with a viciousness Cat felt all the way to her bones. Here was evil hiding beneath the cloak of the familiar. The same tousled auburn hair, the same aristocratic bearing, the same large, work-hardened hands ornamented with that heavy emerald chunk. Only this stranger-Aidan remained gray as ash, with a body coarse and stocky and unlike lover-Aidan’s long, lean frame.

  She shuddered so hard her knees knocked, and she felt she might slump to the bricks beneath her feet if the Unseelie didn’t turn its gaze elsewhere. But then Maude appeared, her matronly bulk offering reassurance. “Come, child. Strength is needed tonight.”

  “Dehwelana dhe’n gwagvesh, dewik spyrya. Dehwelana dhe’a flammsk hesh moth esh ankoest!” His knobby hand still clutching her shoulder, Daz shouted again. Battering the enemy with his curse. Keeping it from feeding upon its host.

  Together the three of them descended the steps.

  The monster lurched but remained upright, his tongue running over lips peeled back in a triumphant grin.

  Aidan moaned, his fingers scrabbling desperately in the grass. Faded and shrunken. Bones held together by a wrapping of skin pulled until it threatened to split. Spill his spirit upon the ground to be devoured by this creature of the void. Every second Aidan became more insubstantial, like mist struck by sunlight. Even as the Unseelie seemed to grow more solid. More confident.

  “Daz! Look to Aidan! He’s dying! Disappearing!”

  But Daz ignored Cat’s pleas. Remained focused upon the monster, his words weaving a cage about the Unseelie.

  The creature twisted, its misshapen limbs jerking, its jaw wide and snapping as it struggled against the bonds of mage energy holding it fast. Unable to complete the take-over of this host body. Unable to retreat into the safety of the abyss.

  The words streamed in an endless rhythm. A background noise like the wind or the scrape of the trees or the drip of a broken gutter.

  Aidan’s back arched, hands grabbing at the turf as if he might hold himself in this world by digging deep into the earth.

  “Go to him, child,” Maude shouted over the cacophony. “Perhaps you can hold him.”

  Cat ran down the final stairs. Crossed the open lawn, though as she passed the Unseelie, she forced her eyes to look at Aidan, not the creature, certain its gaze held the power to burn her to ash. Instead, she dropped to her knees beside Aidan. Took up one hand, linking her fingers with his.

  No noise came from his open mouth. No light brightened eyes blind to everything but the horror awaiting any mortal who dared switch places with a creature of the Dark Court. His chest rose and fell, his throat worked as he swallowed. His flesh as unsubstantial as cobwebs, veins and arteries, tendons and muscles all clear beneath the ethereal shine of translucent skin.

  He turned his unseeing eyes upon her, his grip tightening upon her fingers. His breath coming slower, as if he sensed her presence and was calmed by it.

  And like a door flung wide on a candlelit room or a thousand torches being set alight, the night seemed bathed in a fiery green glow. Thunder rolled across a slick, yellow sky empty of stars as the ground heaved and shook, toppling trees and sending slates tumbling from the roof in a violent cascade.

  Smoke and dust settled, revealing a void where the Unseelie had stood. A fading stench soon blown away by the incessant wind. An oily smear upon the lawn washed away in the tempests that followed.

  “Carry him this way. Careful now. That’s it.”

  Arms hooked him by the oxters and under his knees. Lifted him in a dizzying swoop of screaming muscles that left him retching. Jostled him indoors with battlefield tenderness.

  “Blighter’s dead if’n yer ask me.”

  “Naw, he’s breathing, see? Leastways for now, he is.”

  A doubtful snort followed this maudlin opinion, then a curse as someone’s hold slipped, sending pain shooting along every charred nerve.

  Blessed unconsciousness hung like a treasure just beyond reach, and he begged for it, though the sounds he made resembled words only in his own mind.

  “That’s it. A little farther now, boys.”

  His shoulder struck a wall, drawing a moan from cracked and bleeding lips.

  “Gently, you dolts. Gently. He’s had a bad fall.”

  A whispered snicker met this comment. And no wonder. The cosmic event surrounding the Unseelie’s banishment had hardly been subtle.

  There followed the soft give of a mattress beneath him. A muttered thanks and coins being handed over.

  “Aidan, my boy? Are you with us still?”

  He looked toward Daz’s voice. Saw nothing beyond a rising sheet of green flame. Swallowing his panic, he squeezed his eyes shut. “I’ve—” he took a breath laced with the stab of fever—“been better.”

  A hand rested upon his shoulder. “And will be again, my boy.” His voice came raspy with emotion and age. “Methinks he’d have bee
n proud.”

  His body withered, his limbs hung weighted and useless. Voices spoke to him in the twilight. Hands reached out. But ghost and flesh became indistinguishable and reality and dream entwined. The bed grew to become the cliff edge below Belfoyle. The walls expanded into a dark, moonless night, a silver cream marking the offshore shoals.

  “You won’t fall, Aidan. I’ve got you.” Father’s voice. And there he was. Smiling his reassurance from a handhold just above, harness clipped to a rope disappearing over the cliff edge, where it had been securely anchored.

  Following instructions, Aidan checked his footing before making his next move. The ever-present wind buffeted him as he slowly ascended.

  “That’s it, son. Slow and steady.”

  He remembered this day. It was June. He’d turned fifteen the week before. His birthday a celebration of laughter and parties and gifts from friends and family alike. But this had been Father’s present. A day spent together. A hike north toward the rocky beaches, culminating in a dangerous cliff ascent—something Aidan had been forbidden to do until this year.

  Glancing up, he judged his next foothold. Committed to it with a lurch, taking him out of the safety of the cliff edge and into the wind. It screamed and whistled past him in a ban-sidhe shriek. Curled like smoke into a monstrous form—blind white eyes, terrible smile.

  “Father!” he shouted in his panic.

  But his father’s face melted into a grimace of stony hatred. Impossible evil. Reaching over, he slid his knife from its sheath.

  “I’m sorry, son. You’ve failed me,” he said, sawing through the rope.

  Aidan grappled for a hold, but it was useless. He fell and fell without end, the void swallowing him, the wind’s shriek becoming his father’s triumphant laughter.

  Just before he knew his bones must shatter, he jerked awake. The dream faded into the walls of his room. The folds of his bed curtains. Only the pulse-pounding terror lingered. Only that proved real.

  Aidan’s chest burned, and jagged razors of pain slashed their way up his throat even as inner visions savaged his mind and tore through him like an illness. He couldn’t think. Suffocated under the weight of his agony. And understood now why Daz chose madness. It was easier.

  The Unseelie lurked. He couldn’t see it but knew it remained. Waited for its chance to feast upon his soul. End what he’d started with his unthinking summoning. He felt its empty stare as he slept. Heard its slithery, blood-chilling words.

  Sometimes it stood within Belfoyle’s great hall. Stretched its neck as it surveyed its new home.

  Sometimes Aidan found himself racing Brendan neck-and-neck down Belfoyle’s avenue, only to discover he raced an unbeatable nemesis, its steed a red-eyed monster with a serpent’s hide and blood-dripping fangs.

  And other times, it spoke to him in Father’s voice. Explaining. Cajoling. Trying to make him understand.

  Those visions were the worst. Those cut close to a wound still raw and bleeding. A past seeming as imaginary to him now as one of Father’s fantastical bedtime stories.

  The nightmare ended on a scream of terror as a man plunged earthward before being lost among mist-shrouded rocks. Cat woke, heart racing, skin clammy. The deadly rocks disappeared, the falling man faded into memory, but the screams continued. Horrible, furious cries of pain and fear and rage. She pressed her hands to her ears, trying desperately to drown them out. Trying frantically to forget the battle raging in the room down the corridor. The ongoing fight for a man’s soul.

  Daz had tried warning her. He’d told her to harden herself to all that went on behind that locked door. To ignore the heartrending pleas and choked weeping, the shrieks of animal fury, ominous threats, and fiendish curses.

  “It’s not him, Miss O’Connell,” he’d sought to explain. “The beast’s domination was almost complete. To heal Aidan fully, we must draw the evil like drawing poison from a wound. The withdrawal of such a malignant force leaves a great, horrible emptiness in a person. And like an opium eater remains addicted to the drug, so does Aidan remain addicted to the unholy force. Craves to be reunited with the Unseelie demon. We must wean him from that dependence slowly.”

  Cat started at a shattering of glass and a shouting pounding cry. “Let me out, damn you! You can’t hold me forever! Daz, you thrice-cursed bastard, let me out!” His voice held a foreignness in its slippery self-assurance, a haughty scorn that had never been characteristic of the Aidan she knew.

  How long would this go on? How long before his strength gave out? The last episode had continued for hours before subsiding into dry, gulping sobs that tore at Cat’s heart.

  “I know you’re out there! I know you can hear me. Cat? Please! I need to get out, goddamn it. I can’t take it anymore! Please, Cat!” A crash of thrown furniture. Another earsplitting shatter. “Damn you, bitch! Release me! Get me the hell out of here!”

  She threw herself onto her stomach. Pressed the pillow over her head. No use. Even muffled, the tortured struggle carried through. She bit her lip, stifled her own sobs, tried blocking out Ahern’s last somber words. “He’ll recover, or he’ll break. And then there is but one merciful end.”

  She didn’t ask. She already knew. She’d seen the pistol.

  “Cat?” he forced out.

  Maude pursed her lips. “She’s sleeping, milord.”

  “Send her to me when she wakes,” he muttered as he sank back. “Tell her I’m sorry.”

  “Men are born sorry,” was the last thing he heard before he fell into the sweet oblivion of sleep.

  It watched him from the end of his bed. A crouched and waiting figure with a milk white, paralyzing gaze. It knew he’d never withstand the agony of withdrawal. Already a clawing ache strained Aidan’s stomach and twisted his bowels. His hands shook as if palsy stricken, and thirst parched his desert-dry mouth.

  He leaned over the bed as spasms ripped through him. Heaved until he tasted the iron tang of blood in his mouth and on his lips. Flopping back against the pillows, he narrowed his stare upon the patient watcher. Focused every ounce of strength left in him on banishing the creature back to the void. The Unseelie merely smiled its intent, as if expecting a pleasant show as the sickness tore Aidan apart from the inside out.

  “If you think I’m scared of you, think again,” he brazened.

  The Unseelie’s mouth widened, displaying rows and rows of needle teeth.

  “I’ve bested you once already.”

  Scorn dripped off it as it worked its jaw, its tongue darting in and out. “Erelth, merweth,” it hissed.

  Other. Die.

  Uncurling from its place at the foot of Aidan’s bed, it hovered above him, placing its bony hands upon his chest. Its fingers dipping within his flesh as if proving to Aidan how easily he would succumb.

  Aidan flinched as frozen fire singed him outward from the point of contact.

  “Erelth. Skoa.”

  Soon.

  He moaned, coming awake with a start. Staring round him with disbelieving eyes. Same cluttered bedchamber. Same pitcher and glass on a table beside him. Same sputtering fire upon the grate. The gut-wrenching, muscle-seizing illness remained. So too did the pressing sensation of death delayed. But no Unseelie lurked. No monster threatened. He was alone.

  “Aidan?” Cat’s voice, tired and anxious, came from a corner of the room beyond the reach of the candlelight. “Are you awake?”

  She swung into his view, hair bundled loosely off her face, mouth pulled into a worried frown. “Do you know who I am?”

  “The angel of death?” He tried smiling. Failed miserably.

  She sniffed. “I suppose if you can joke, you must be on the mend.” She placed a hand upon his forehead. Tsk-ed. “Yesterday you called me Miss Osborne. I nearly sent you to the grave for that insult.”

  Talk about a slip of ill-starred proportions. He winced. “Sorry.”

  She shrugged, trying to show her indifference, but he saw the hurt and the desolation before she turned away. Even out
of his head, he managed to cock things up between them. “Cat, if you’ll let me—”

  She drowned him out. “The day before was worse. You called me a demon temptress and it took three of us to wrestle you back to bed.”

  He sought to shift himself farther up the pillows. Fell back with a gasp as muscles cramped and seized. “Cat—”

  Again she refused to let him finish. “You’ve been like this for almost two weeks.”

  Dear gods. An entire fortnight lost to the endless stretch of nightmare and sickness.

  “We weren’t sure you’d recover. It was”—she shuddered—“closely run.”

  “I’m too stupid to know when I’m beaten.”

  “Or too stubborn.”

  He gave a bark of cynical laughter. Rubbed at his throat.

  “Daz has been fabulous,” she offered, a false jauntiness in her voice. “I don’t think he’s had an episode since that night.”

  “And you?”

  She looked away, her profile tipped in rose and gold from the candlelight. The sorrowful curve of her lips and that pale silver slash a reminder of words he wished with all his heart he could take back.

  “Cat, what happened that night—”

  She swung back to face him, the momentary weakness shuttered behind a stony façade. “Should never have occurred.” She took a deep breath. “You have a future waiting. You belong to Miss Osborne. I knew that and ignored it at my own risk.”

  “What if it’s a future I don’t want anymore? What then?”

  She offered him a humorless smile. “I’d say you’re hallucinating again.”

  The kitchen lay wreathed in dim shadows, the flickering light from the banked stove and the single taper upon the table her only illumination. She’d retreated here for a quick restorative cup of tea and a slice of cake, but had remained lost in the jumbled round-and-round that was her twisted relationship with Aidan.

  He’d called her Miss Osborne.

  He may have been out of his head. Fevered and delirious. Pumped full to the brim with Daz’s medicinal concoctions, but the truth had been revealed like a crack across the face, reminding her he’d a future she couldn’t be a part of no matter how much she pleasured him. A woman waiting for him who hadn’t made the monumental mistake of trusting the slick whispers of a fly-by-night lover.