Hexbound: Book 2 of The Dark Arts Series

by Bec McMaster

  A wave of nervousness swept through her. It was easy to smile and flirt, especially with Bishop, because he always made her feel safe. Sometimes her smiles were little more than a means to protect herself, because if she controlled the interaction, then she was the one in control. She couldn't get hurt, because she wouldn't allow it.

  But she didn't feel safe at all tonight.

  She felt like her eyes had just opened to a terrifying truth: this man could break her. Crack her heart right open and obliterate her. She was vulnerable to him in a way that she'd never felt vulnerable before.

  Verity pushed away, clearing her throat. "You do know how to take all of the fun out of the room, don't you?"

  Bishop offered her the cue, but she shook her head, gathering her thoughts.

  "Your game," she told him, and smiled fleetingly before she wished him a good night and fled the room.

  Chapter 16

  'The Sclavus Collar was invented in 1789 by John Davis and Genevieve Huston. When Mrs. Huston set the collar on Mr. Davis, she discovered that she could bend his will to hers via the collar. To test its limits Davis refused to submit and Huston's use of the collar brought him to his knees with pain. He could not remove the device. Nor could he stand against its hold. It was then that both sorcerers realized what they had wrought and destroyed the collar. After their deaths, an avaricious nephew found Huston's notes. He sold them on the occult market, leading to some appalling situations. This was when the Order was forced to investigate and ban the collar. A despicable thing, truly....'

  * * *

  –Musings on the Order of the Dawn Star, by Thaddeus O'Rourke

  * * *

  THE CHAINS HELD him.

  Blinded by a strip of tight linen, Sebastian hung against the wall, trying to focus on his breathing. Something was broken. His ribs, perhaps. It didn't matter. Pain was an old friend and if his mother thought that would chain him down, then she didn't know him very well.

  Despair came close to filling him. He'd been so close to escaping Morgana forever. He'd thought her dead after he and Cleo fled the collapsing house.

  You knew it was too good to be true.

  Days passed. His body ached, and the silence became deafening. Nobody had been to feed him, or to clean the filth from his body. His knees were shaking now, desperate for respite, but the chains forced him to stand. Either that, or tear his shoulders from their joints.

  Alone. Alone, and trapped, and full of despair. Sebastian clenched both his fists, trying to force heat and circulation back into starved extremities. It was starting to get to him.

  But somehow, on the third day, there was a whisper in the dark, a brush of something against his psychic senses.

  "There you are…." It felt like a hand reached out toward him in the darkness, though it was only a psychic touch.

  Sebastian instantly jerked away from the reach, not trusting it. Sweat sprang up against his spine and he thought that he'd imagined it, but almost a minute later, it came again.

  "Please. I've been searching for you for days."

  Sebastian hesitated. Why would someone search for him? Nobody knew he was here, rotting in this dungeon, nobody except Cleo. Had she found someone to help him? Hope made his breath catch, but then he shook it away. Maybe that was what this stranger wanted him to think?

  Don't be a fool.

  Nobody cared about him. Nobody ever had. Except perhaps Cleo, and his mother had shown him that caring for his wife only gave him one more weakness she could exploit.

  "Sebastian...." A man. It was definitely a male, and a powerful telepath at that. The urging whisper filled his mind. "Open up to me."

  If he wasn't so alone, then he might have held back, but even this brief encounter made him hunger for contact. Something. Anything. Tentatively, he reached back, not quite certain what he was doing, but brushing up against that dark whisper in his head. The touch firmed, but he was fairly certain that was due to the other entity's grip on him. "Who are you? What do you want?"

  "I want to help you."

  "Why?"

  "Because I'm your father."

  Sebastian severed the connection. Drake de Wynter, the Prime. In his head he saw the man's face again as Drake reached out toward him, then glanced back at his other son.

  And chose to save Rathbourne.

  He was no friend to Sebastian.

  This time, when the touch trailed fingertips down his mind, Sebastian held himself firmly walled away. His mother had taught him the value of trust when he was a child. He wasn't about to repeat the experience.

  * * *

  The door to the cell opened.

  Sebastian turned his head toward the sound, sweat rolling down his spine. So... she'd finally come.

  What was it to be today? More pain? More blood? He almost didn't care. He was so hungry and thirsty he felt stretched to breaking point.

  A hand reached out to rip his blindfold down and light suddenly burst into being, making Sebastian cringe. Days.... Days since he'd been able to see. Of the slow, silent torment of hanging here, the lack of sight had perhaps been the worst, for it made him feel alone in a way that he'd never experienced before.

  How did Cleo do it, all those years?

  That stopped him in his tracks. Don't think of her. You can't afford a weakness. Not now.

  When he'd finally blinked away the light flares that had initially blinded him, Sebastian realized that Noah Guthrie was the one who'd torn his blindfold away.

  The young man's hair had been cropped into a stylish man-about-town haircut, and the scruff along his jaw was gone, revealing smooth, lean cheeks.

  Sebastian eyed him. Something felt wrong. Noah had been a street lad plucked out of the Hex by his mother. Noah had always been nervous, and though they'd had little to do with each other, he nevertheless knew the man.

  This wasn't Noah Guthrie, even though they looked the same. Whoever this was they showed none of Noah's tics and nerves, nor the faint blurred haze of an opium addiction that had made Noah stare into space for long hours. No. These green eyes were cool, calculating.

  And frighteningly unemotional.

  "Who are you?" Illusion was one of his mother's greatest abilities, but Sebastian didn't think that was the case here, and he'd never heard of anyone able to shift into someone else's skin.

  Not-Noah's head tilted to the side as the stranger considered him. There was a rash ringing the stranger's throat, barely hidden by his collar. "Perhaps a friend." Those shrewd eyes thinned. "How did you know I was not Noah?"

  Sebastian's skin cringed. Wrong. This all felt wrong. "Noah was never in control of himself. He always looked distracted, or nervous."

  Not-Noah didn't blink, and a knot began to tighten in Sebastian's stomach.

  "What are you?" Sebastian asked quietly, and a cold pit of fear began to grow within his belly as suspicion took hold.

  There was one way another being could assume someone's shape—or perhaps the correct word was to possess another's shape. His mother had been trying to control a demon, after all, when she stole the Blade of Altarrh a month ago, and despite the fact he'd dropped a house on top of her, she'd somehow survived.

  Morgana was a well-trained sorceress, but even she would have had to have help to survive that. "Is Noah still in there?"

  "You're cleverer than she suspected."

  "Who? My mother?"

  The demon who wore Noah smiled, a thin, faintly menacing shape. With his hands clasped behind his back, he paced, eyeing Sebastian like a tasty morsel. "Noah's inside me, locked up nice and tight. I'm kind to him, Sebastian. He graciously agreed to host me in his body and such can be rewarded."

  "I'll bet."

  The demon cocked its head again. "What reason do I have to lie?"

  "What reason do you have to tell the truth?"

  Those eyes were frighteningly intelligent. "Ah," Not-Noah said. "It's like that, is it?" With an odd blink, his expression shifted. Noah swam to the surface in bits and piece
s, his brow slackening and his mouth softening. That hazy look was back—perhaps it had never been the opium, but the man itself.

  "It's all right, Bastian," Noah said, smiling his slightly crooked grin. "It's not like I'm locked in here. And he takes the cravings away, makes it a little easier to deal with. Let's me out whenever I want a girl, or an ale, or a night on the town."

  The face shifted sideways. That was the only way to explain it. Not-Noah was back, and Sebastian felt ill.

  "What do you want with me?" he rasped.

  An eyebrow cocked, but it almost seemed as though the gesture was a deliberate act: like the demon knew how it should react and produced the motion, but didn't precisely feel it. "I'll speak plainly then, as you're clearly a man who cannot be fooled. I want the same thing that you want."

  "My mother dead?" he sneered.

  "Precisely."

  Sebastian froze, his heartbeat ticking in the silence. "I thought she was working for you?"

  "She does," the demon replied, pacing slowly in front of him. "I need her services for a little longer, whilst I deal with... a slight problem."

  A problem? Sebastian's mind raced, then the answer appeared. What else could his mother want but to cast down the Prime? "You want my father killed."

  "Did you know that they once thought to control me?" The demon mused. "The Prime, his friend Tremayne, and your mother. They made relics to bind me tight and force me to their will. And then when your father realized how dangerous I was, he forced me back into another world. I have been waiting a long time to have my revenge on them."

  "You're working with Tremayne and my mother," he pointed out.

  "Drake's powerful," the demon admitted, its lids obscuring its eyes thoughtfully. "When I tried to come back last year, he trapped me within the recesses of the Earl of Rathbourne's mind. There is a possibility that I could defeat Drake—not in this body, certainly—but perhaps...." The way the demon was looking at him made him feel ill again.

  "Over my dead body." It was the only thing that had ever, in some ways, belonged to him, and even then, not often. Not with the controlling sclavus collar around his throat.

  But the idea of giving himself up completely....

  "No. Not you. You and I do not match very well. It pleases me to take another."

  "What about Noah? And who?"

  "Noah is weak. His body can scarcely hold me and my presence is... eating him up from the inside. That's not fair to poor Noah, and nor does it suit me either. I want what was promised to me."

  "Rathbourne?"

  The demon smiled. "We are already linked, he and I, and he holds the power to sustain me. Kill his soul-bound companion, and he is putty in my hands."

  "What happens to Noah?"

  "He gets his body back, without the issue of the addiction. It has paled by now."

  "Then why do you need me?"

  Blink. "Because you are powerful, Sebastian. You are the one person who can go up against your father and survive, because he does not care to kill one of his sons."

  Sebastian wasn't entirely certain about that. The Prime had chosen Rathbourne over him as the house collapsed, and left him bleeding on the floor.

  "Think about it," the demon mused. "I bear no grudge against you. Indeed, we could find ourselves allies, if you wanted to accept my bargain." It smiled. "Neither your mother nor your father have done very well by you either, after all."

  Sebastian's mouth felt dry.

  "I'll come again," the demon said, and reached for the door. "When you've had time to think."

  Chapter 17

  FINDING ELIJAH HORROWAY was easier said than done.

  The necromancer wasn't at Balthazar's Labyrinth, where he could usually be found. Indeed, Marius Hastings, Horroway's one true friend, hadn't seen him in over two weeks.

  But he did have something that belonged to Horroway; a ring that he'd once given to a long-ago lover, according to Marius.

  "And with this," Verity announced, as she and Bishop left the Labyrinth, "I can find him anywhere." She twirled in a circle, dancing a little jig. "We're getting closer! Now we have the means to track him."

  "Is it more difficult to find people rather than things?" Bishop asked, using his body to protect her from the onslaught of a herd of tweed-bedecked businessmen trotting to work on the pavement.

  Verity grew a little nervous at the proximity of his body. Neither of them had mentioned last night, or the way she'd taken flight. And I'm certainly not going to bring it up. She shot him a meaningless smile. "Sometimes. People change all the time, whereas objects don't. Sometimes people change enough that they no longer 'match' the psychic imprint that they've left on the object."

  "A little like how the police are using fingerprints these days to identify criminals," he mused. "Every person has their own 'imprint.'"

  "Somewhat. I don't think I could prove the ring belongs to a specific someone in a court of law, however."

  "I'm certain if you put your mind to it, you should stand a fair chance."

  Verity paused and looked up at the stern line of his jaw and those firm lips. "Was that a compliment? Or a critique of my tenacious nature?"

  Lazy brown eyes twinkled as he glanced down. His voice softened. "Merely a comment that you can be a force of nature when you wish to be. Now stop stalling. Find me Elijah Horroway."

  "As my master commands, I serve and obey." She rolled her eyes, but obliged.

  Tucked against his shoulder, Verity let her vision glaze and her senses lock around the ring. It was faint, but it was there. A tingle pulled her to the east. "This way," she said, darting past him and waving a hand at a hackney that was clopping along. "I've got him now."

  The bewildered hackney driver agreed to ferry them, though the lack of a firm direction made one of his eyebrows arch. "Quid's on you," he finally said with a shrug, and Bishop handed her up into the hackney.

  "What did you use to track me?" Bishop asked, settling in across the carriage from her, his long legs eating up the space.

  "Some of your hair."

  "My hair?" He touched his skull. "How on earth did you...?"

  Verity arched a brow. "You probably don't want to know."

  "Try me."

  "You were on Bond Street, arguing with another sorcerer about a book you wanted to buy. You didn't even see me in the crowd." Flipping her knife out of her sleeve, she made a quick slashing movement, then vanished the knife and grinned. "So much for your impressive powers of observation."

  Bishop scowled.

  "You get very focused when it comes to books," she mused. "For someone who thinks his only talent is killing, you have a very strong interest in reading, and in creating strange magical inventions. One would almost suspect you had scientific leanings."

  "I'm only curious, and I like books." He glanced out the window. "After my mother died and I was sent to Burma, they were the only things I had to console me for a long time."

  Curiosity itched at her. "What was it like to travel the world?"

  His face closed over. "I was no explorer, Verity. I had a particular talent and the Order saw a use for it. They saddled me with Major Richard Winthrop for a master, and he was a Servant of the Empire who knew the Grave Arts. I'm sure it made sense at the time, but the second we were on the ship I learned he wasn't the type of man he portrayed in Society, or in the Order. He cared nothing for my grief, nor for teaching me. I'm certain the only reason he accepted my apprenticeship was because he knew who'd fathered me and hoped to ingratiate himself there.

  "Winthrop was the only Servant of the Empire sent in with the British Imperial forces in Burma. His major gift was the art of illusions, and the official company line went that we were removing the Burmese king, Thibaw, in favor of his elder half-brother, Nyaungyan, who had escaped Thibaw's earlier massacre of his brothers and sisters when he inherited the crown. The problem was that Nyaungyan—who had lived in British India in exile—was dead. So Winthrop was called upon to disguise a young man as
the king's brother, to present to the locals on the way to Mandalay. Some of them even cheered when they saw him, as the king was not well liked in some circles. We weren't to occupy the country for very long... it was all a bunch of lies concocted to make the occupation run smoothly." Bishop drew a breath. "Ugly times. It certainly opened my eyes to the world, and to human nature."

  "What happened?"

  "There was something Winthrop wanted me to do. I refused."

  Verity curled her knees up to her chest as the carriage rocked. "He wanted you to kill someone," she said, with some certainty.

  "Some locals who were protesting British rule." Bishop's shrug was loose and uncaring, but she saw the tension about his eyes. "They were just... trying to protect their homes, and he wanted me to obliterate them like they were naught more than insects. And the last thing I needed at the time was to kill someone else. I'm sure Winthrop would have killed me if we didn't have witnesses—if my father wasn't who he was—but instead he shipped me back home in disgrace, where I was brought before the Order Triad Council for blatant refusal to do my duties and endangering the cause of the Empire. And Agatha was one of the Councilors."

  Someone else.... Verity was dangerously curious about his first kill but to satisfy her curiosity right now would only come with the cost of his grief. Instead, she simply reached out and held his hand, giving it a small squeeze. "You're no killer, are you?"

  "I'm an assassin." He looked down.

  "Yes, but at heart, if you had the choice, you'd never take another life again, would you?"

  "Verity...." He let go of her hand and turned his face away from her, revealing the scars that lined his jaw and temple. He was usually more careful than that. "Sometimes we don't get that choice. I know I will kill again. I know... that a part of me will like it."

  She nibbled on her nail. The steady tug of the leash was veering to her right. "Give me a moment. The location's changing. Horroway's on the move." Sticking her head through the window, she pointed out the new direction to the driver, who shook his head but turned the carriage.