Dominic's Nemesis

by D. Alyce Domain

  “That’s a myth. Nothing more.”

  “Uncle does not concur.”

  “Do you?” He tore his gaze from the splendor below and pinned the man beside him.

  “Truthfully, Dominic…” After an age, his brother returned a resigned expression. “The rumors have endured too long to be completely baseless. I believe there is a mystery to be solved. Whether or not the answer to the fourth century riddle is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is arguable.”

  Chapter 32

  Her head throbbed to the rhythm of a waltz. Her throat felt like someone had shoved a wad of mildewed cotton into her mouth and forced her to swallow. Eden stretched a hand for the vat of ice chips positioned on the nightstand. When Nell had first banged on the chamber door and then promptly dropped the tray upon nearing the bed, she’d wanted to strangle the mousey nuisance. But now cursed with dry mouth, thirst, and nausea, she could kiss her for her thoughtfulness.

  “Drat.”

  Her senses reeled with even the minimal movement needed to grasp a handful of ice and bring it to her mouth. She relaxed back against the pillows, repositioned the cold compress atop her temple and suckled…letting her lids drift closed.

  She’d scarcely gotten comfortable when the chamber’s adjoining door opened. Ugh! Not more visitors.

  “Canna say I like her hair dat-a-way. As if she’s graying, only in reverse.”

  “Kathleen.”

  “Alright, I’m on me best behavior.”

  Eden opened her eyes to find husband and wife ambling into the room, Dr. Raine with his medical bag in tow.

  “Ahh, you’re awake.” The doctor smiled at her.

  “Yes.” She moved the compress off to the side with a grimace. Putting a hand to the braid pinned atop her head, she struggled to sit up properly. Sometime during the night the gown Stephan had given her had become twisted around her legs. “What…did you mean, before, about my hair?”

  They exchanged a glance.

  Kathleen crossed the room quickly, made a seat next to her and put an arm around her shoulders. “‘Tis nothing, lass. No need ta worry. Never seen a more luxurious mane in all me days.”

  Eden frowned. It was not like her friend to lie. “Nell dropped the tray when she first saw me.”

  “Nervous Nellie?” Kathleen dismissed the issue. “Tha lass probably faints at her own shadow.”

  “How are we feeling, Eden?” The doctor bumped aside the pail of ice with his medical bag on the opposite side of the bed, pivoting to train his discerning eye on her.

  “Dreadful.” No point in lying, she probably looked every bit as vile as she felt.

  “Well, let’s see what we can do about that.” Dr. Raine leaned in and placed his palm to her temple. “First the headache.”

  Relief was not immediate, but rather a gradual seeping of ease, as if his skin were a balm transferring its healing influence to her. The once pounding beat in her head lessened to an occasional twinge of discomfort. Her nausea winkled out of existence altogether.

  “The thirst I cannot lessen, I’m afraid.” He blessed her with a rueful smile.

  Just then a knock sounded from the outside door of the bedchamber. Her bedchamber, she noted for the first time. Stephan must have brought her here last night, after…The evening’s events were a tad fuzzy. She distinctly remembered being cast into the wine vault, rescued by Kathleen and the brothers…But then that was when things started to go hazy. Had she dreamed the wonderful visit from Dominic? And had that dream then turned into a nightmare when the entity materialized?

  “Morning Eden, Kathleen.” Stephan’s greeting wrenched her from her thoughts. She focused on his face and found him his usual subdued self.

  Ethan straightened. “If you’ve come to inquire after the patient, I can assure you she is resting comfortably.”

  “I need to speak with you.” His warm honey eyes crystallized to hard, faceted amber.

  The doctor gave them a departing gesture and slipped out with the Sphinx.

  Kathleen turned an arched brow on her. “What do ya suppose dat is about?”

  “Me.” She said with absolute certainty, flinging the covers aside. It was time she saw just why everyone kept gawking at her. No longer hampered by pain and nausea, she had her plait half-unbound by the time she stepped within view of the vanity mirror. Her hands stilled above the braid half-cascaded over her left shoulder. Hair, that had all her life been a pale, ash blond was now threaded liberally with ebony. The scattering of dark strands she’d noticed before seemed to have coalesced and produced a wide ebony stripe just off the center of her head.

  Eden scarcely recognized the peculiar visage staring at her through the looking glass. She resembled a character from one of Poe’s horrids. What was happening to her? Frantic eyes collided with Kathleen over the shoulder of her reflection.

  “Now, lass, ‘tis not as bad as all dat.” The older woman came forward to lay a calming hand to the shock of ebony.

  “I’ll have to powder it. Otherwise people will gawk.” She inclined her head to the chamber door. “That’s what they are out there discussing right now, isn’t it? What’s to be done with me…now that I look the madwoman they all expect I am.”

  “No, I’d wager they’re trying ta figure out what did happen an’ how ta prevent it ‘appening again. Tha boys like ya…if for no other reason than tha positive changes you’ve wrought in their brother.”

  She cringed as a new thought occurred to her. “What will Dominic think when he sees me?”

  Kathleen scoffed. “Dominic would no’ care if ya hair were streaked wit violet.”

  “How the devil would you know?!” She snapped the words out, but she had not idea where they’d came from. The voice sounded harsh…and not wholly her own. Frightened, her eyes jerked back around to the looking glass. Instead of her own bizarre reflection, she spied a raven-haired goddess snarling at her, with the vehemence of a jilted mistress. Eden recoiled from the venom those black eyes spewed, stumbling out of the vanity chair and bumbled into the Scotswoman.

  “Oh, pardon…I don’t know what’s come over me.”

  Kathleen frowned at her. “Aye, you’re overwrought.”

  She snatched at the explanation, desperate for a rational basis for her own erratic behavior. “Yes, yes, that must be it.” She needed help. The fact could no longer be denied. Her first thought was Dominic, but she dismissed him. He still had lingering doubts about her sanity and she’d give him no new cause for worry. Though she liked both the doctors, they were men of science, and by virtue, more willing to accept a simple medical diagnosis…insanity. But the Sphinx. He was free-thinking and open-minded as well as sympathetic to her plight. He would not condemn her outright. She’d tell him and see what he thought of her new reflection.

  “Stephan, I wish to speak with him.” Her request paused Kathleen in the chamber’s threshold. “Could you let him know please?”

  “Aye.” And she was gone. Leaving Eden alone…with the scowling reflection.

  “He’s mine! You cannot have him.”

  Scared to face the vanity, knowing what she would see there, Eden turned her back on the looking glass and stalked for the bed. She just needed to rest, like Kathleen said, and then the voice would go away. The image in the mirror would once again be her own.

  “It was his choice to leave. He could have sent one of the others, but he left anyway. Abandoned you to me.”

  Eyes squeezed tight shut, Eden curled up on the bed with her knees to her chest and hands plastered flat over her ears.

  “Shut up, damn you!”

  The voice, sinister, sensual, and serpentine, reverberated within the walls of her mind, eating away her confidence, her hope, her rationale. Until soon, the words were all she heard. Fear all she felt. Dread and torment, plagued her to no end.

  “Dominic doesn’t love you. He’s never coming back.”

  She had to get away from that voice, to some place safe. Eden bounded up and off the bed, t
he drafty floor felt cold against her bare feet despite a toasty fire in the hearth. She crossed the room, not bothering to don her dressing gown.

  The vanity loomed from the corner. A dark force within compelled her forth to it. Wielding a pull so strong she could not break from its thrall. Though she’d risen in haste intending to quit the room, she found herself trembling before the cursed looking glass. Eyes squeezed tight shut. Did she dare?

  “Eden…come with me. I miss you.”

  The voice differed. Softer, less menacing and…familiar. Her eyes popped open, and there trapped in the vanity, smiling and beckoning was a vision of Millie. Without realizing, she stepped forward. Reached out. Wait, her quivering hand stilled a fraction of an inch from the glass…how could she be seeing her cousin Millie?…her very dead cousin Millie.

  “It’s lovely here…no pain, no worries, no death.”

  “No life either.” Eden countered, instinctively knowing that something was off about her cousin. Millie was gone. “There’s no life where you are, and no death because everyone there is already dead.”

  Her cousin’s image flashed and writhing as if in pain, and then gave way to her raven-haired tormentor. She snatched her hand back. Even if she hadn’t been staring at her, she’d recognized that malevolent cackle and the chilling crawl of her voice ever time she encountered it. This was the thing, the evil entity that plagued her. It finally had a face. And it was time, pastime she faced her demon.

  “I don’t know what you want with me, but leave my cousin out of it.” She put steel behind the words and planted her feet, more to brace her nerves than anything else.

  “Ahh, the kitten grows claws…”

  The sharp voice slashed across the delicate fabric of her mind, cutting deep gashes in her subconscious. Eden tried to stitch up the holes, but she could not keep up with the entity’s destructive power. Soon, the grotesque thing pounded at the door of her conscious mind. Whisperings and hushed suggestions bombarded her.

  “Get out of my head.”

  The raven beauty let her head dropped back in full-scale malice. Her too-sharp teeth gleamed sinister. Her tongue somehow seemed pointy and over-long. Serpent-like.

  When she finished the creepy excuse for a laugh, she impaled Eden with white-less eyes, an eerie speckled black…and bottomless, like the astral realm Dominic had once described to her.

  “Give me back what’s mine.”

  “Stop it!” Eden went a little crazy then. Panic from the creeping possession of her mind rallied her and she struck a physical blow at the evil in the silvery surface. The glass splintered on impact. She flinched from the sharp slice of pain that screamed at her wrist even as her head snapped sideways to avoid the flying shards.

  Standing amid a sea of glass, the ruined mirror a wooden hull before her, crimson leaking in a steady dribble from her palm and wrist…Eden felt her head turn, saw herself surveying the chamber as if she were seeing it for the first time. Disjointed images, not her own, flitted through her mind, of a remote residence and foreign-speaking people she did not recognize. She had the sensation of being an observer instead of a participant in the events. The same stifling fog overtook her, like at Lady Haversdale’s disastrous table turn.

  That’s when she knew she had lost the battle. The evil thing had control of her. Had somehow possessed her like that lost spirit she helped conjure nearly two months ago. Her legs moved, stepping around the glass and she wondered where the thing was taking her. Or rather them. Her mind and body was now occupied by two warring beings. The entity had the upper hand at the moment.

  Eden felt her body sway. The evil-thing felt it too because their head glanced down at the bloody mess and shifted direction to the nightstand. Dr. Raine’s medical bag. At least she was logical.

  Logical, but incompetent, Eden surmised a time later. The evil-thing’s attempt at bandaging veered just left of useless. She did not apply pressure to stop the bleeding, nor did she make any effort to clean or close the wound. But merely looped a wad of gauze over the end of the arm and mixed a concoction from powder-packets Eden surmised were laudanum. Blood continued to ooze through the loose wrapping leaving a macabre trail as the entity exited them from the room.

  * * *

  “I must return today. At dust.” Dominic forsook the pedestrian view from his brother’s windows. After the magnificence of Château Ambrosia’s panoramic valley, all other scenery paled.

  “Gabriel has not yet awakened.” His brother made the statement in a bald voice Dominic recognized as disapproval. Gideon did not like leaving things unfinished, he knew.

  “He’s improved. His essence is more at peace.” Dominic gestured across the room to where the man in question lay still as stone, the ever-present feline sleeping at his side. “I don’t believe he’s dreaming anymore, merely asleep. You know yourself it is not odd for Gabriel to recover for extended periods after a disturbing premonition.”

  “What of Muse?”

  “Send for me when he awakens and I’ll speak with him about the cat.”

  “And if I am dead by then?”

  “Then I shall attend the services and speak with Gabriel after!” His rarely-seen temper flared at his brother’s flippant macabre attitude. Only Gideon could accept death with such a serene affect, not even bested by Cael. Cael’s extraordinary poise, while unnerving at times, could also be calm and reassuring, but Gideon’s fatalistic indifference evoked a chilling sort of unease that Dominic had never grown used to. If not for Gabriel, Dom worried at the person Gideon would become.

  “Gideon, something has happened. When we astraled back, I sort out Eden. She was disturbed. I would not cut my visit short otherwise.”

  “This woman is that important to you?” Standing with his back to the wall of windows, the taller man twined his fingers behind him. The question echoed curiosity more than resentment.

  “Gabriel is out of danger and he has you to oversee the remainder of his recovery. And she is not the only reason.” He sighed, as he thought of the myriad of troubles that awaited him back home. “Stephan did not look altogether calm. If he too is disturbed then it is imperative that I return. His ability is volatile and he is not in full control of it. We cannot afford another incident. The talk will not be so easily quelled outside the University walls. Gossip travels fast, especially damning gossip.”

  “Very well, then. I shall speak with the solicitor about your ‘change of heart’ concerning the management of the legacy.” His brother shot him a sardonic smile. “Nonna will be ecstatic.”

  Dominic groaned. One thing about Gideon, he did have a sense of humor, albeit macabre. “Please endeavor to contain her euphoria within the Italian borders. The estate is full-up at the moment.”

  * * *

  The lacquered grand pitched sideways, throwing an already unsteady gait into further peril. The influx of alien memories and distorted perceptions assailing her caged mind did not help the situation. She careened through decayed settings and murky hallways with rank odors. Witnessed bizarre scenes of screaming and crying. In one particularly disturbing visualization she watched a woman being held down by pawing men on crisp sheets…which seemed more like freakish love-play, than a forced act. Flashes of the same woman slashing her forearm and thighs with a knife came at her, sickening her.

  Strange figures, some shroud in hooded capes, paraded around intoning words that she couldn’t make sense of, that seemed somehow sinister in their repetition. She wished she could shut her eyes tight to somehow close them out, or raise her hands and pound the visions from her head with the heels of her palms. When she made the effort, only a flailing uncoordinated movement resulted.

  “They think you’re a lunatic, you and I both.”

  She could scarcely keep her thoughts clear of the bombardment of images. Horror played in her mind like a phonograph on infinite loop. The thoughts and events she saw must belong to the evil thing taking over her body. If this was what the entity’s mental process looked like, then
Eden agreed…the evil-thing was mad, and herself too by virtue of housing the spirit of a madwoman inside her mind. She must get free somehow, and this time, retain control of her facilities. It took a great deal of mental fortitude, but she was able to shove the ceaseless visions to an alcove at the back of her mind. Only then was she at liberty to try her hand at dislodging the intruder. Flexing all her inner energies and her will, she pushed against the presence.

  “Worrisome bitch!”

  One realization encouraged her. The entity could not sustain absolute control of her body. Instead of a steady walking movement, against Eden’s concentrated mental resistance the thing could only maneuver an undulating shuffle much like a crippled or a hunchback. Or, she considered bitterly, it could be that the wound at her wrist bled too profusely for her to hold a proper stance. By then, the wad of gauze was soaked through with crimson.

  Bobbing and weaving on scissored legs and a twisted psyche, the entity brought them to a chamber door. Dominic’s chamber door. Her hand slipped in smeared blood as the entity fumbled with the metal knob. After six successive tries she was successful.

  “There is more amiss than Dominic knows…”

  This time the voices did not originate from inside her head. They drifted in from the adjoining room, the door of which lay ajar.

  “It must be dealt with, any threat to…”

  She only caught snatches of the conversation, not able to summon further strength to ambled past the bedpost. The entity coiled her good arm around the carved cedar armoire and slumped over. Blood lost, the strain of keeping her thoughts clear of the mental garbage, and the energy she extended trying to evict her unwanted visitor finally toppled them both. Her consciousness blurred. The fine line between them, Eden’s psyche and the entity’s also blurred. Unwanted feelings and remembrances attacked her like so many vampire bats in a feeding frenzy. Her last rational thought was of Dominic and how grateful she felt that he was still in Italy so that at least he wouldn’t be the one to find her bloody, stripe-haired corpse.