Demon's Curse (Imnada Brotherhood)

by Egan, Alexa

  * * *

  “The woman knows, I’m sure of it.” Captain Mac Flannery splashed brandy into his glass before downing it in one quick gulp, letting the heat travel soothingly through him. Without any explicit invitation, the group of old friends had ended up at Gray’s town house after leaving the cemetery.

  Mac poured another, trying to wash away the grave stench clinging to his nostrils, the roof of his mouth. The memory of earth striking the coffin lid as Adam was entombed. The Imnada did not hold with enclosing their dead in the ground but released their spirits with fire, the better to send them back through the Gateway to be reunited with their ancestors. Unfortunately, Adam’s murder had garnered too much public attention to make that possible.

  Instead, he’d died as he’d lived: in exile from his clan. His kind. Only Mac’s intervention keeping him from a pauper’s lye pit with the rest of the unclaimed dead.

  “You think Adam betrayed us to an out-clan?” Gray demanded from his seat by the fire.

  Mac hadn’t seen de Coursy since the chaotic days following Waterloo. The estranged heir to the dukedom of Morieux lived a reclusive life in the north, rarely venturing to London, and even then shunning the usual Society entertainments. Some gossip blamed it on a horrible disfigurement acquired during the war. Others whispered he kept his mad wife locked in a tower. The most salacious hinted at black arts and satanic rituals carried out in the catacombs beneath his bleak Yorkshire estate.

  If only the truth were that simple.

  “Was that Bianca Parrino paying her last respects?” David St. Leger paused in shuffling a deck of cards to hold out his glass for Mac to refill.

  “Who?” Mac asked, glancing at the faces of the men he’d once soldiered with. Men who at one time had been as close as brothers. The Fey-blood’s curse had shattered that bond as it had destroyed so much in their lives.

  Friendships forged by blood and steel had frayed like ragged cloth as if each of them had hoped to flee the curse by running away from each other. They should have known their fates and Fey-blood magic had tied them too closely for escape. They were bound by darker forces than the war.

  “All work and no play, Captain Flannery.” David gave a disgusted shake of his head. “Do they have you chained to your desk over there at the Horse Guards?”

  Mac chose not to answer. This wasn’t David’s first refill.

  “She’s an actress at Covent Garden,” he continued. “All the rage this year. Audiences love her.”

  Of course. That was why the woman at Adam’s funeral had seemed so familiar. Mac had seen her penned likeness staring out at him from countless newspapers. They didn’t do her justice.

  Statuesque as any Nordic queen, she carried herself with a pride that bordered on the insolent. Hair blond as corn silk. Eyes a chilling blue. And just enough of an accent to give her an air of the exotic. But it was what she’d said more than how she’d said it that had truly rooted him to the spot. As you kept my secret, so shall I keep yours.

  Had Adam been foolish enough to trust her with the Imnada’s existence? And could this reckless confession have led to his murder?

  “They say she’s high in the instep as any duchess. Throws men into a quake with one glance from those alluring blue eyes,” David said, refilling his own glass this time. “They also say she and Adam were lovers.”

  Gray rose to toss another log on the fire. “I find that hard to believe while the Imnada are forbidden marriage outside the clans.”

  “I never said he was marrying her. I said he was swiving her,” David said with a leer.

  Gray’s face betrayed his disgust.

  “Wrinkle your princely nose all you want, de Coursy, but you know as well as I do that as long as we lay under the curse, a quick shag is all you and I are ever going to get.”

  “That may be, but some of us still wish for more than a tumble with some faceless, nameless doxy.”

  David shrugged. “Wish all you want. It won’t change the facts. Besides, what does it matter to the man they refer to as the ‘Ghost Earl’? With that tall, dark, and mysterious act, you’ve got every woman in England panting for you, ring or no ring.”

  If David’s smirk was any indication, Mac and Gray would do best to ignore him. St. Leger had always been a loose cannon. It was doubtful whether the curse had diminished his reckless ways.

  Mac stepped into the breach. “Terminology aside, if Adam and Mrs. Parrino were lovers, she might know about the Imnada. About us.”

  “I still don’t believe it,” Gray declared. “Adam would never have betrayed us to an out-clan. It was his very determination to keep the Imnada’s secret that led to the . . . to our . . .”

  “Say it, de Coursy,” David urged, his features rigid. “Or are you too frightened to speak of it out loud? Will the shade of our maker rise up from the grave and strike us down? Curse us again? What the hell could he do that’s worse than what we already suffer? Forcing the shift . . . renunciation by the clans . . . Death would be preferable.”

  David’s histrionics aside, Mac had to agree.

  Tainted by Fey-blood magic, the four of them had been declared mortally damaged and a blight on the clans, their bloodlines forever corrupted. Worthless. Contemptible. Abominations.

  And yet, they’d not been offered the swift mercy of a falling ax or a sharp snap of the neck. Instead, the Gather elders had pronounced a far harsher sentence of exile, severing the four of them from the protection and community of clan and holding, cutting them off from everyone they cared about, erasing them from the world they knew as if they’d never been born.

  Mac’s back twitched with the memory of the destruction the Ossine’s enforcers wreaked upon his body as they stripped him of his clan mark. His bowels loosened as he recalled the violent shredding of his mental signum, as if a great claw had ripped through his brain. Both punishments had destroyed every bond with his past, leaving him adrift and alone. He’d only survived by hardening his mind and his heart against any pain and any loss, becoming as unfeeling and remote as a speck of dirt, focusing no further than the next day, the next cycle of the moon, the next season.

  “Had your grandfather not caved to the Ossine’s commands, we’d have faced a quick end and you could have been the Ghost Earl in earnest then,” David jibed.

  “That’s enough.” Gray’s terse command was unmistakable.

  St. Leger lashed out, smashing his glass down on the tabletop, the shards spraying his hand, cutting his cheek. Blood slid down his face like a single crimson tear. “You’re not my superior officer anymore. I don’t take your orders.”

  “Did you ever?”

  David froze for a moment, his expression unreadable. His body poised as if he might throw himself on Gray and beat him to a jelly. It wouldn’t be the first time these two had come to blows. Like oil and water, they were, with Mac the inevitable peacemaker. He’d thought those days long past.

  But as quickly as David’s rage had ignited, it dissipated in a bout of laughter. “Damn, but I forgot what a right bastard you are.” He passed the palm of his hand across his cheek, wiping away the blood.

  “Feeling’s mutual,” Gray grumbled.

  Mac swallowed back his aggravation. “That woman is aware of our existence. I’d bet on it. We’re vulnerable—the Imnada are vulnerable—until we discover the extent of the danger.”

  Immediately his mind returned to Bianca Parrino. Her whispered words had set a queer pang jolting through him. Worry had taken root, and no amount of scoffing by these two chuckleheads would dissuade him.

  “You think Adam was killed because he was Imnada? None know the clans survive. The enforcers have seen to that.” David plunked himself down on a couch, dabbing at his cut with a handkerchief.

  “Would you bet your life and the lives of every man, woman, and child within the clans on that assumption, David? Would you bet the lives of your family? Your friends?” Mac argued.

  “Friends? Family? Where were they when the Gather pronoun
ced our sentence? When our clan marks were obliterated and we were cast out half-dead into the world?”

  “Not all of them wished us ill. There were those who spoke against our exile.”

  “For all the good it did us. No, Mac. We’re emnil. Outlawed and living on sufferance. I say let the clans fend for themselves.”

  “Then forget the clans and remember Adam. He was our friend. We owe him justice, if nothing else,” Mac challenged.

  “Adam was no traitor,” Gray reiterated. “He understood the allegiance owed the Imnada and the dangers in exposure to the outside world.”

  “People change,” Mac shot back.

  David’s mouth twisted to a sneer. “Every night like clockwork, eh, Flannery?”

  Mac sighed before tossing back another brandy.

  They were a company again. The three of them. The accursed.

  With his death, Adam had bound them together once more.

  * * *

  Wiping Froissart’s seed from between her thighs, Renata stepped through the curtain into the inner chamber, dropping the heavy fabric into place behind her to muffle his snores and grunts. His foul breaking of wind. The creaks of the bed as he tossed and turned.

  Pitching aside the rag, she toyed with the thought of killing him. How easy it would be. How quick. None would question it. They would mourn with her—the young, grieving widow. A thought quickly dismissed. The man was a pig, but he’d served his purpose. She had succeeded where all had called her mad to try. She had tracked those who slaughtered her father to this horrid gutter of a city. After a year and a half, vengeance would finally be hers. Only then would Froissart meet his final reward. Until that moment, she would prevent what attentions she could and endure what she could not.

  “Is he asleep?”

  A figure stepped from the shadows. She had known he was there, had felt his arrival as a tremor in the air, a touch upon her mind. She even knew when he parted the curtains to watch as Froissart spent himself inside her, his great bulk jerking and wheezing as he came. She’d felt his eyes upon her and smiled, her husband thinking the pleasure was for his sake.

  “He is.” Taking up her brush, she sat before an enormous mirror, one of four, each covering a wall of her dressing chamber.

  Alonzo stepped behind her, pulling the brush gently from her hands. He slid it through her long black hair, tangle by tangle. He had always known how to soothe her. Milk-siblings, they’d shared a breast and then a nursery before he’d been packed off to the military and she to school with the priestesses of High Danu at Varennes. Until then, they’d been inseparable. As they were once again.

  Tonight he smelled of tobacco and wine and leather and sex, and she felt an instant’s jealousy for the whore who’d pleasured him. Then she looked up to catch his eager gaze upon her naked body, and her envy dissipated. She had nothing to worry about. He would always be hers.

  “Froissart is a pig,” he spat. “Why do you allow him to touch you?”

  She laughed at the echo of her thought on his lips. They were so close, their minds flowed in tandem. Sometimes a mere flash of shared reflection. Other times, it was as a stream coming together with a river, thoughts rippling and diving and curling upon each other so there was no way to tell where one began and the other ended. So it had ever been since she’d discovered a mere skin-on-skin touch allowed her to travel into his mind—drift and spread into a corner to lie curled and watchful there. An invisible witness to all he saw and heard.

  What began as a child’s game had blossomed through study and practice into a rare and extraordinary talent: the ability to touch another’s mind and, for brief flashes, to shape, influence, and even control. No longer was she constrained by actual touch: a lock of hair, fingernail parings, a drawn tooth, was all it took to open the door.

  She kept these precious mementos in a case upon her dressing table, making use of them only when absolutely necessary. To indulge in such powerful magic spread her soul thin like high mares’ tails stretching wispy across a wide sky. The body she left became an empty husk. Functioning but without a will. Quiescent. Vulnerable.

  “I am strong, Alonzo, but even my powers have limits,” she said. “It is easier to allow him his liberties and harbor my strength for more important business.” She shot him a smoldering, pouty look. “But perhaps you don’t ask for my sake but your own. Are you jealous, Alonzo? Do you wish to replace the toad Froissart in my bed? To possess my body as I possess your mind?” She ran the tip of her tongue across her lips. “To scream your release as you spill your seed within me?”

  The answer was clear in his jealous gaze moving over her breasts, the creamy flat of her stomach, the jointure of her legs. A gaze reflected over and over within the four mirrors. Naked hunger stared out at her from every angle. His control held by a hair’s width, his lust for her like an animal clawing at his innards.

  “This pig-dog is worse than shit beneath your heel, Renata. He doesn’t know you as I do. He sees you as nothing but a furrow to plow with his pig-dog babies. I would worship you as you deserve.”

  She shivered but did not yield to the tempting images heating her blood. She had come too far to give everything up for the feel of Alonzo moving inside her, the grip of his strong, broad hands upon her flesh. “That may be, but Froissart is useful to me. He is money and position. He is power.”

  “You have a hundred times more power than this bastard abruti in your little finger.”

  “Émile’s power lies in respectability and connections. We need the cover of his embassy to shield us while we hunt. We found one, but my father’s man claimed there were four soldiers at the house that day. Four with swords and guns and death in their eyes.” She swung around, catching Alonzo by surprise. He rocked back on his heels, clutching the brush like a weapon. “Did you go to Kinloch’s residence? Did you find anything that might lead us to the others?”

  “I searched his house but came away empty-handed. Just books on plants and flowers. Pretty drawings. Jars and bowls, coils of wire. The man was naught but a gardener.”

  She turned away in disgust. So close they’d come. So close to finding them all. And Alonzo had bungled it. Allowing the man time to conceal. Time to run. Though they’d caught him in the end. His time finally ran out.

  “I will have the men who slaughtered my father. I will have them on their knees and at my mercy. A mercy I shall not give.”

  “All’s not lost. I went to the funeral. Watched to see who attended.”

  Her eyes flashed up to meet Alonzo’s hungry gaze within the mirror. “And?”

  “There were three men there, though no way to know who or what they are.”

  She rose from her chair, catching up a silk robe to cover her nakedness. “You risk coming to my rooms to tell me this? That you may or may not have learned something? That you may or may not have found the treacherous Imnada vermin?”

  “Are you so certain these men are Imnada? That race is naught but dust and stories. The Other saw to that centuries ago.”

  “We’ve had this argument before. My father’s servant swears the chevalier trapped one of them. Forced the monster to shift. All those years my father’s theories were correct. Somehow the Imnada survived when we all thought them extinct. The beasts live among us still and remain as treacherous as ever.”

  “Then let us tell what we know. Go to the warriors of Scathach or the priestesses of High Danu; those with the power to root them out and destroy them once and for all.”

  “No!”

  Rage bubbled up through her and, unthinking, she grabbed Alonzo’s empty hand. Immediately the depthless black sea stretched out before her, ribbons of smoke twining about her, pulling her out of her own body and into his. For a moment she saw herself through his eyes. The long, rippling flow of black hair parted to hang on either side of shoulders pale as milk. Small, firm breasts, the dusky rose of her nipples visible beneath the diaphanous silk of her robe. The perfectly formed oval of a face; long, narrow cheekbones,
lips parted, eyes shimmering gold with excitement.

  “Renata,” Alonzo groaned, making a small raspy sound deep in his throat. He shifted uncomfortably, and she was back. Hands at her sides. Alonzo’s mind closed to her.

  A whistling, grunty snore and a squeak of mattress ropes drew the two of them close in the dark.

  “Trust me, Alonzo. I will reveal all in the end, but my own vengeance comes first. I have waited too long and sacrificed too much.”

  “As you will it.” He nodded. “There was another at the churchyard. That actress everyone is talking about. Madame Parrino.”

  “Kinloch’s slut? Interesting,” she purred, tapping a finger to her lips. “I wonder . . .” She closed her eyes, turning thoughts over to see what might lie beneath before once more facing Alonzo, brisk and commanding. “Follow her. Watch her house. See if any of those men come or go.”

  “Already done.”

  “I am relying on you. Do not fail me, old friend,” she said, her voice pitched low, words slippery as the silk of her bed hangings.

  He nodded once more before falling back into the shadows. Leaving her alone in the room with her thoughts—and her husband.

  2

  Mac scanned the newspaper. A mysterious killing in the St. Giles stews, a woman who claimed she’d spoken to the spirit of the late Duke of Hargreaves, a dangerous beast escaped from Exeter Exchange. He paced off the dimensions of the sitting room—again. He checked his watch for the third time. That couldn’t be right. He couldn’t possibly have waited for Mrs. Parrino for a full hour—he checked the door—and counting. What the hell was she doing up there, weaving the damn dress herself? He hadn’t even seen the maid since she’d disappeared up the stairs to announce him.

  He snapped the watch case closed, stuffing it back into his pocket. Counted the dots in the drapes for a second time—still four hundred and fifty-three. The flowers in the sofa upholstery—twenty-seven.

  Why was he surprised? His sister, Siobhan, had spent hours in front of her mirror, while cathedrals had been built in less time than Lina took to ready herself for the day. He drew a short sharp breath as if in pain. Banished his ex-betrothed back to a cobwebby corner of his mind. He’d more important worries than the shallow, unfaithful heart of a beautiful woman.