Earl of Darkness

by Alix Rickloff

  Newer than the others. More personal—“beloved infant.”

  As she bent to trace the crudely wrought inscription, the air seemed to crystallize around her, an oppressive weight as threatening as the approaching storm.

  “I’ve ordered maids to have you packed and ready to leave within the hour.”

  She rose and turned in one sweeping regal gesture. Faced Aidan’s flat and unyielding gaze. A body braced for the fight he knew must come.

  “You’re sending me away?”

  “If you’re no longer able to decipher the diary, your presence is no longer required. I release you from our agreement. Jack will return you to Dublin.”

  “I don’t want to go to Dublin.”

  “I don’t believe I asked.”

  “The roads are dangerous.”

  “Belfoyle’s more so.”

  “And if I refuse to leave you here to face who knows what?”

  Anger flashed in his eyes. “I brought you to Belfoyle in bonds. You can depart the same way.”

  “You wouldn’t dare.”

  “Try me.”

  Tempting, but she decided against it. He looked more than ready to carry out any and all threats. She retreated. “Fine, but once Jack’s delivered me to the city, then what?”

  “I’ve sent him with instructions for my banker. The money will see you settled.”

  “Settled as what?”

  A storm boiled in his stare. “Any damned thing you please, Cat. Just go the hell away, and leave me be.”

  It took her like a punch to the stomach. Quick. Fierce. She fisted her hands at her sides. “Why are you doing this?” she asked quietly.

  The storm broke, his rage burning her body like lightning. His glare holding the tempest’s lash, a horrible gale fury pulsing the air. Shaking the blood in her veins.

  And then it was over. His icy control regained as if the animal had never been loosed. A glacial freeze that had her shivering despite the late spring warmth.

  “Good-bye, Miss Catriona O’Connell.”

  He spun on his heel to cross the grass, the arrow line of his shoulders, the gimp in his stride, the copper gleam of his hair etched eternally on her memory. The sleek arrogance of his body, the soul-touching thrust of his sex etched eternally on her flesh.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” she called after him. “Why are you doing this?”

  He never turned. Never slowed. But his voice drifted back to her, cold as death. “Because I love you.”

  Hugging her shaking body, she sank to her knees beside the forgotten child’s stone. Sorry she asked.

  She folded a gown. Half and then half again.

  Stupid, pigheaded, stubborn man. Sending her away like a child. Dismissing her as if she hadn’t survived two clashes with Lazarus. Wasn’t involved up to her neck.

  That wasn’t right. She shook it out. Started again. Longways. Bring the hem up.

  Did he think she could simply turn off her heart like snuffing a candle. Not worry herself sick over what she left behind?

  Blast. The sleeves—that wasn’t it either.

  Fine. She understood his reasoning. Even understood his anger. But to arrogantly brush her off onto Jack felt too much like another rebuff. Another rejection.

  She’d rejected him first, but that was beside the point.

  She crumpled the exasperating gown up and stuffed it into the traveling case with one of her father’s choicest oaths. “Bollocks the poxy gown.”

  “Is that any way to be treatin’ such fine material? They’ll be naught left at all but a ragpicker’s windfall.”

  She turned to be met with Maude’s imperious warrior bulk filling the doorway. Gapped yellow teeth. Creases within creases. And hair a frizzed hennaed horror beneath a stained mobcap, her striped yellow and red gown stretched to breaking beneath a pink apron.

  The most horrible, beautiful sight Cat had laid eyes on.

  She threw herself into the old woman’s arms. To hell with ‘take it as you find it.’ To her mind, it was bloody damn awful.

  “It’s like that, is it?” Maude snuffled into a huge handkerchief. Wiped at a suspicious speck in a corner of her eye. “You’re a great fool, Cat O’Connell. And no mistake.”

  Not exactly what she expected to hear. Not after Maude’s past advice.

  “But I can’t be his wife. And I’ll not be his mistress.”

  “Are you so full of prospects you can be turning your nose up at the idea of pleasuring the man without benefit of clergy? Not as if you haven’t been doing it thus far, is it?”

  “It’s not that. But—”

  “Go on. Spill it, child. I’m no namby-pamby milquetoast what can’t be hit with a hard truth without wilting.”

  “I won’t share him, Maude. I can’t. Not with another woman. I want all of him. All or none.”

  “You’d cut off your nose to spite your face.”

  “I can’t separate my life into pieces. A part with him. A part without him.”

  “Fair enough. And probably smarter than me. I should have done the same years ago. But I’m an easy woman, and it’s been too long, and I don’t take to change at all. Can’t just leave at my age, can I? No.” She sighed. “Ahern needs me. Needs a strong hand and a sound mind when he’s gone wandering.”

  “Is Mr. Ahern all right?”

  “As right as ever. Downstairs with His Lordship and Mr. O’Gara. Kilronan sent us to Dublin to stay at his town house, but we got there to find—no house. Couldn’t go back to Knockniry. Couldn’t stay in Dublin. Ahern started going a bit bats with all the hustle and worry. So we come here.”

  “No house? What are you talking about?”

  “Whole place naught but a whopping charred hole in the ground.”

  “Lazarus,” Cat breathed. Had to be. “Did Aidan say anything about what he’ll do? Where he’ll go?”

  “To my way of thinking, that would be a question for your asking.”

  Cat picked up the next gown in the stack, counting the tiny pearl buttons. Running a finger over the side seam. Pulling free a loose thread at the neck. Tiny pointless motions as she breathed past the weight upon her chest. Struggled through it to find the warrior within. The one who wouldn’t be sent on her way without a fight. “It’s none of my concern, is it? He’s sending me away.”

  Maude pulled the gown from Cat’s unresisting fingers. “Perhaps he feels he’s doing what you want.”

  “Oh, Maude. That’s just it. I don’t even know what I want.”

  “Then how is he to know?”

  She ran him to earth in the dim chill of the old chapel, staring up at the woven rendering of parting lovers. A solemn Sir Archibald receiving a final gift. The woman’s icy perfection not complete enough to hide the sorrow upon her frozen features.

  An idyll at an end.

  She stepped forward, her boots loud upon the stone floor. “Jack’s ready to leave.”

  Aidan turned, a new oaken strength to his features. A new flinty hardness steeling the warmth of his gaze. “We’ve said our farewells.”

  “Please, Aidan. Let me stay. I know I can—”

  “It’s over, Cat.” He stood carved and expressionless as the busts lining Belfoyle’s south drawing room. There would be no return to the nuzzled spooning of bodies, the whispered endearments in the dark.

  “But—” she tried one last time.

  This time his face twisted into a mask of animal rage. Frightening. Furious. “What don’t you comprehend? There’s no reason for you to stay. Every reason for you to get out before this place goes up like a damned crate of explosives. We’ve made our decisions,” he snarled. “We have to live with them. That means good-bye.”

  He was right. She fumbled her way back toward the staircase, blood pounding in her ears, mouth dry.

  A strangled moan followed her up the curl of stairs. Killing her slowly.

  A desire to be with him. To stay here forever and the world be damned sank its way past all her strongest defenses.
Her steps dragged.

  Beg. Plead. Persuade. Call me back and refuse to let me go. Make me see past my fears. Make me stay, Aidan. Tell me now before it’s too late.

  He opened his mouth to call out. Swallowed the plea before it left his lips. She’d made up her mind. He sank down upon the stone floor. Cast his eyes to the lovers’ grief. Strength of mind replacing the broken shards of his heart.

  Let her go, Aidan. Let her go before it’s too late.

  The storm that had threatened all day caught up with them a mile beyond Belfoyle’s walled boundary. Slowing the coach. Turning bad roads impassable. Twice they were required to get out and walk while the coachman alternately scolded and cajoled the team through rim-high mud.

  By nightfall they’d only managed another four sloppy miles with the coachman complaining the horses were exhausted. Light was gone. The road ahead steeped in danger for a lone coach with only one armed groom upon the box.

  Jack raised his eyes heavenward. Stretched his long legs in front of him as he checked his watch. “Seven-thirty.” Shoved it back into his waistcoat pocket. “We could have walked to Kilfenora quicker than it’s taken us to drive there.”

  Cat had kept silent through most of the afternoon, staring out the window at the bleak spring rain, the stripped branches, the muddy, beaten fields. Now she focused on her companion. Noted for the first time his own strained patience, a frustration that had not all to do with their lack of progress.

  “He’s not alone. Mr. Ahern is there,” she offered, though she’d told herself this a thousand times already and it certainly hadn’t made her feel any better.

  Jack seemed to be of the same mind, if the skeptical twist of his mouth was any indication. “And that’s supposed to console me?”

  “Looks can be deceiving. Ahern saved him once already.”

  Jack’s glower remained unwavering. “He shouldn’t need saving. He shouldn’t be mixed up in this business at all. He’s no bloody warrior. Lazarus will have him for breakfast. Make bloody sausage of him.”

  She threaded her hands in her lap to keep them from around Jack’s neck. “Thank you. I didn’t think it was possible, but you’ve actually made me feel worse.”

  He flashed her a disarming O’Gara smile. “It’s a gift.”

  Cat opened her mouth to parry that contention when the coach lurched wildly. Jack fell against the door, jarring his shoulder, which he grasped with a grunt of pain. Cat was tossed from her seat in a tangle of skirts.

  The coach lurched again and, with a crack of breaking lumber, came to a stop, the rear wheels in a ditch, a heavy hedge pressed against the glass.

  Jack threw himself out the door, a pistol held tight to his body. Cat right behind. The coachman was cutting the left leader free from a tangle of harness, swearing as he did so. Of the groom there was no sign.

  “What happened?”

  “I couldn’t say, sir. I were barely moving when a great shape slunk among the trees. Appeared in the road afearing the horses. They bolted with nary a thing I could do to stop them. Took the turn too sharp.”

  “Where’s our friend with his musket?”

  The coachman scanned the wreckage. “Don’t know. He was here a moment ago.”

  In answer, a shot sounded from the woods. Then a silence pregnant with possibilities. All of them horrible.

  “Cat,” Jack barked, “get back inside. No arguments.”

  By now he and the coachman were nervously searching the trees.

  “Your man speaks sense, my lady.” A dark shape. A shiver of drawn steel. “Useless though it is.”

  A voice she recognized from nightmare. The deep throaty rasp as if words came difficult. The scorn underlying that hateful title by which he insisted on addressing her.

  She fumbled uselessly with the door handle.

  The shape moved into the meager light from the coach’s lamps, standing astride the road like a black colossus. His face in shadow, only the wicked gleam of his eyes alive within the darkness.

  Jack’s pistol rose, steadied, and erupted with a sharp report and a flare lighting up the heavy lines of Lazarus’s face.

  Thirty feet away. No way Jack could miss.

  But Lazarus’s movements came fluid and unerring. He dodged with a feint that had him at Jack’s throat, his dagger slammed hilt deep into the slighter man’s stomach.

  Cat screamed. The coachman swore. And Jack crumpled to the ground, his face registering shock as blood spread over his waistcoat. Dripped from between his fingers.

  Lazarus never even spared a glance for his victim. Instead his empty stare fell on her. “We’ve a meeting to keep.” He swung her unresisting body over his shoulder. Strode back into the wood.

  Grief snapped her free of her daze. Shrieking and cursing and pummeling and kicking, she struggled. His steps never slowed, his body absorbing her blows without a mark. Finally the woods closed around them, cutting off her view of the broken coach, of Jack’s sprawled, bleeding body.

  “You killed him,” she cried.

  Lazarus’s grip around her tightened. “Lucky man.”

  “Damn.” Aidan crushed the note in his fist. Eased himself back from the brink of complete and unrecoverable panic. That would get him nowhere except killed that much faster. He needed to think. Plan. Work the scenarios. But time stood against him.

  One hour. The message delivered to his door by a terrified peasant boy warned Aidan he had one bloody hour to bring the diary to the gatehouse. Exchange it for Cat. He tried not to dwell on the “or else.” Lazarus had left that to his vivid imagination. And what it conjured only made him more desperate.

  What had happened to Jack? Did he still live, or had Lazarus already claimed his first victim? And how did Cat fare? Alone? Afraid? As terrified as he was?

  “You can’t let that scoundrel have the diary, Aidan.” Daz sat sunk in an armchair, huge gnarled hands clutching a shawl to his stooped shoulders, up to his ankles in a steaming bucket of salt water. A moth-eaten cap perched atop his wispy, balding head. Only his eyes shone stern with determination. “Not if what you suspect is true and Máelodor seeks the tapestry and stone. I knew the man once, and I don’t expect he’s improved with age.”

  Aidan lit a nerve-steadying cheroot. Dragged on the thick tobacco flavor, hoping it would calm his shaking hands. Ease the tension threading his body like coiled wire. It didn’t. He tossed it on the grate with another oath.

  “If I don’t, Cat dies.” Hated the fear quivering the edges of his voice.

  “For all you know she may already be dead, and this just a bluff to flush you from Belfoyle’s protections.”

  Please don’t let it be so. Please don’t let his last image of Cat be grief-stricken resignation as he’d shoved her out of his life. What he’d give for one more chance—

  “Even if she lives still and you surrender the Kilronan diary to Lazarus, do you truly think he’ll allow either of you to remain alive? She’s dead either way.”

  “Not if I win.”

  Daz’s features grew ferret sharp. “And how do you think you’ll manage that? I didn’t save you from the Unseelie once so you could try again, boy.”

  “If I can defeat Máelodor’s Domnuathi—even if I can delay him—the Amhas-draoi will arrive. They’ll take control of the diary. See that Máelodor never gets his hands on it.”

  “And lose yourself in the process?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  His hand went to his chest where his scar prickled with a frozen burn. The vessels surrounding the buried Unseelie splinter pulsing like a second heart.

  His only hope for success lay in summoning the dark force stirring within him. Drawing on it to combat Máelodor’s unstoppable killer. Manipulating the violent flow of mage energy without being consumed by it. Avoiding complete conflagration.

  Simple.

  Lazarus stood just inside the door to the gatehouse, a ramshackle building empty save for a nest of mice whose droppings could be seen strewn across the dusty f
loors and piled in untidy heaps by the wainscoting. The walled front garden held almost as much discarded refuse. Overgrown bracken cleared and never removed. A broken barrel. An old set of lumber left to rot in the weather by some former tenant.

  Cat watched her captor as he watched for Aidan. He rested at his ease on the door’s porch, but she sensed he was neither resting nor at ease. Once or twice his hand strayed to the scabbard at his waist, to the pommel of the well-used sword, his fingers stroking the rounded knob ornamenting the hilt. A few barely whispered words hanging on a breath: “Roedd hi’n noson fel hwn.”

  It was a night like this one.

  Did he know she understood Welsh? Was it meant for her ears or simply thought given voice?

  He’d not tied her. No doubt assuming she’d be too terrified to run. Too weak to make trouble.

  He was right on both counts. Add to that nauseous, cotton mouthed, and heartbroken.

  Old sorrows.

  Her family. Jeremy. Her son.

  Fresh tragedies.

  Geordie. And now Jack.

  They mingled in her mind like so much flotsam. Broke against the edges of her awareness. Piling one upon another until she drowned beneath them all. Silent, unbidden tears wet her cheeks.

  Wind rattled the window, and she glanced out to search the night. Strained for the sound of an approaching rider. Yearning for it. Dreading it.

  Would Aidan fall to Jack’s same sudden fate? Would he wear a look of surprise as his life drained away? Would Lazarus’s gaze as his blade slammed home remain as empty as an open grave? His Domnuathi’s ruthless composure creating stone where once a real heart beat?

  “What happens if Lord Kilronan refuses to agree to your terms?” she brazened.

  Did she really want to know? Not by the look Lazarus settled on her.

  “If he refuses, my lady, he’s not worth your tears.”

  Unable to tolerate the solemn, heavy stare another second, she turned away. Her fingers finding the cool glass of a window pane. Tracing a final message in the dust.

  I love you too.