Lucifer's Crown

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  “Of course. I’ll take away the dust covers, shall I?”

  Mick pulled the door shut behind them. Coughing, Rose wrapped her arms around her torso. “Robin agrees with all that crap Mrs. S. was spouting, doesn’t he?”

  “He hinted my dad was warning me off Gupta when he said Am Fear Dubh, the Black Man. Have you seen a telephone?”

  “No. No books, either, although I guess they’re in the library. Sounds like she never goes there—and I don’t mean because of the dust covers. Look, there’s the cat.”

  This time Mick saw the beastie clearly, a gray and white cat gliding on silent paws through the shadows at the end of the hall. It watched from a safe distance as they stopped outside Rose’s door.

  She turned her bonny face up to his. “Now what?”

  Instead of being merely clapped out, now Mick was clapped out and nervy. “Let me steady myself a bit. Then we’ll decide what to do.”

  “See you in a few minutes, then, and we’ll plot.” With a quick kiss on his cheek, she unlocked her door and went inside.

  Mick waited long enough to hear her turn the key behind her, but not long enough for his cheek to stop tingling. He went into his own room, stripped off his jumper and his shirt, and had a quick wash in the basin. The room was so cold he broke out in gooseflesh.

  Next door water splashed as well, then stopped. In the sudden silence he heard the faint pulse of the sea. This place might just as well be a desert island. What the hell was he doing here? Helping his dad? No, getting himself and Rose into deeper trouble. It depended on who Robert-Robin-Fitzroy-bloody-Prince really was, and what he was about.

  Had Prince bashed Calum over the head? Hard as it was to think of Calum murdered, somehow it was worse to think of him falling, crawling into that muddy pit, and dying slow and all alone. And why? For a rock? For a legend?

  Mick remembered his mother dying, all tucked up tidy in a hospital bed. Leaving the Royal Infirmary that night he’d looked at the streets of Edinburgh as though they were Martian valleys. Now even Mars would’ve seemed more familiar than this bewildering landscape. Who, what, where—why? That was it, wasn’t it? He was here because he had to know why, and when he knew why, he wouldn’t feel so bloody helpless.

  Faintly Mick heard Rose singing No Man’s Land, a lament for a dead soldier. “I hope you died bravely, I hope you died well…”

  Her brilliant voice ripped Mick’s grief open. A sob caught his throat, and tears gushed in hot streams down his face. “God,” he moaned. He didn’t know whether he was calling his father’s God, or Rose’s, or Thomas London’s, or whether there was a God actually there, listening to him—it didn’t matter, the word came spontaneously from his soul. “God help us.”

  Rose’s voice stopped but the words hung on, invisible clouds of melancholy. For a moment Mick wallowed in it. Then he groped after his senses, this being a very bad time to lose them.

  His bedroom door opened. Gowk. He’d seen that Rose’s door was locked but forgot his own.

  “Mick?” her voice called.

  He wiped his face, even though he had nothing to be ashamed of. She wouldn’t be laughing at him, not Rose.

  She stood just inside the door, her blue eyes filled with warmth and compassion. She raised her arms toward him. From the hall beyond came a faint scraping noise.

  Mick went dizzy. He shut his eyes. When he opened them Rose’s arms were snaking around his chest, her red lips parted invitingly. She was no longer wearing a jumper, only a T-shirt, and her small, firm breasts pressed against his naked chest. Static flooded his mind. He swept her into an embrace so fierce it startled him, kissing those red lips and tasting every corner of her mouth until dark spots swam before his eyes.

  She wasn’t even breathing hard. “Mick,” she whispered, “I know what we need to do. We need to get the Stone ourselves. We owe it to your father.”

  “Eh?” he said, his mouth full of her flesh—cold flesh, that was strange—what soap had she used—its odor was sweet and thick as caramel.

  She was pushing him toward the bed. “Where’s your knife, Mick? Here, in your jacket? Show me your knife, why don’t you?”

  That was a double meaning … She pushed him down on the duvet, straddled his hips, and pulled the sgian dubh from his waistband. “Let’s get the Stone ourselves. Tell me where it is.”

  He saw her delicate hand holding the knife. He saw her eyes as dark a blue as a midsummer gloaming when the sun never quite set. He saw the canopy of the bed arching behind her and the gray cat sitting in the open doorway, its head tilted as though watching its favorite pantomime.

  “Mick, where is the Stone?” Her lips smiled, but her eyes narrowed. Her voice grated oddly and her accent had changed into a parody. “Don’t you want to help your father? After you let him get hurt?”

  A chill slithered up Mick’s spine and sunk sharp teeth into his mind. No time to be losing his senses? Hah! “Get away!” He threw her—it—aside and seized the knife. Ripping it from its sheath he swept it across the duvet. Feathers exploded into the air. “The Cross of Christ be with me!”

  The image vanished. It was there and then it wasn’t. Like magic. The bed curtains fluttered and fell still. The cat’s tail twitched.

  If Mick had had the Stone he’d have given it to Prince right enough, between the eyes. The man had made that image, somehow. More than image. Mick had felt it, his body had responded to it, he’d seized it like an animal. Nothing personal, he thought toward the cat, but Rose deserved better of him.

  Rose! Mick leaped up, ran into the hall, and rained blows on her door. “Rose!” No answer. He tried his own key. It turned. Inside, her things lay on the bed but she was gone. She wouldn’t have gone with Prince alone, Mick told himself. If he’d forced her she’d have struggled and shouted out. Unless he’d used an illusion on her, too.

  Mick raced back into his own room. He threw on his clothes, packed his rucksack, then ran into Rose’s room and packed hers. They were leaving this place, now, Prince and Soulis and his own muddled head be damned.

  Clutching their belongings in his left arm, he took the sgian dubh in his right hand and walked down the hall as though he knew where he was going. The cat was waiting for him at the top of the stairs, and led him into the darkness.

  Chapter Twenty

  Rose had washed her face and hands when they first arrived. Now she washed them again, and brushed her teeth clean. The food had tasted good at the time, but now the lingering flavor of the cloyingly sweet jam reminded her of the stench of death.

  Her fantasies had never included a dead body. A dead body that walked and talked. But that hadn’t been Calum. That had been an illusion, like the ghosts and the figure on horseback.

  Her fantasies seemed weak and thin compared to the real thing. The real thing was glamorous. Magic. Not rabbit out of a hat magic, but something both dangerous and seductive. Robin was seductive. But even if he didn’t have anything to do with Calum’s death, let alone the illusions—and Rose wasn’t betting the farm on either—he was sure dangerous. It was Mick who was alluring, beguiling, charming … Rose suddenly realized she was singing “No Man’s Land.” Good God, he could probably hear her. Nothing like total insensitivity.

  Making sure the miraculous medal was still hanging like a warm tear drop next to her skin, she unlocked her door. The hall was darker, puddled with shadow. Some of lights had gone out. She knocked on the next door. “Mick?” The push of her hand opened it. Go figure, he was all protective of her and forgot about himself. “Mick?”

  He was wearing only his jeans. The corners of his mouth were soft and the light sparkled on his cheeks. He’d been crying.

  Rose’s heart melted. She opened her arms, wanting to comfort him, to feel his skin beneath her hands … A noise echoed from the far end of the hall. Robin was coming to get them. He’d laugh at Mick for crying. She had to protect him. Putting her fingertip to her lips, partly gesturing silence, partly blowing a kiss, Rose turned away from the
door.

  No one was there. Playing games? she asked herself. Okay, she could do that, too. She’d try a little eavesdropping while Mick pulled himself together, then go back and get him.

  Rose tiptoed down the stairs. The entry hall was empty. So was the gallery. In the dining room ashes littered the hearth and crumbs the tablecloth. Except for the gleam of a couple of digital displays, the kitchen was dark. The library? She didn’t know where that was.

  A slight draft tickled the back of her neck. She spun around. Mick was standing just behind her. “You scared the hell out of me!” she wheezed.

  “Sorry, lass. I didna want you going about by yourself.”

  “Yeah, Robin could be lurking anywhere.”

  “Oh aye.” Mick’s lips were tight, his eyes shadowed. Taking her elbow, he steered her into a dim back hallway. “Let’s have us a recce, eh?” They stopped in front of a carved wooden door, its top not a Gothic pointed arch but a Norman round one. Mick pushed it open. It protested with a long, atmospheric squeal.

  Oh, this is the old priory, Rose told herself. Cool!

  Very cool. Once across the hollowed stone sill she was engulfed by a cold that made the rest of the house seem toasty. The air smelled like wet dog—mold, probably. An anemic white light gleamed beyond a double row of massive pillars. Ignoring the creeping sensation between her shoulder blades—it was okay, Mick was with her—she walked toward the light.

  A hurricane lamp, holding a colorless candle, sat on a small table to one side of the chancel. In the center stood a massive altar, a slab of rosy gray rock with rough-cut sides. The cross on its top seemed sad and lonely, and cast no shadow on the wall. In front of the altar—oh no! Shards of the same rock lay across the floor. Some of the pieces were large enough Rose could make out the incised shapes of horsemen and dragons. Ancient pre-Christian carvings, she guessed, and maybe newer ones, a devout medieval mason adding his own stories to a sculptured rock. A megalith. A holy stone.

  A vandal had hacked away all the carved pictures. Rose looked at Mick. “How could anyone do this?”

  “If it was like one of those Pictish stones it was all heathen images.”

  “No, look there—you can just see the top of a crucifix.”

  “Popish pictures, then. Not the sort of things for a proper church.”

  Rose’s brows tightened. Mick had admitted he wasn’t a churchgoer. But he’d spoken so feelingly of his great-grandfather’s stories. He’d known “St. Patrick’s Breastplate.” How could he shrug away meaningless destruction?

  Lydia Soulis and some other Foundation members had had themselves a sledgehammer party. They hadn’t made the chapel holier. They’d profaned it. Destroying a work of art and history went right along with Lydia’s hateful words, perverting faith into something ugly. That wasn’t as bad as killing people in the name of faith, Rose supposed, but still it outraged her. “Like cutting off your nose to spite your face,” she said.

  “Eh?” asked Mick.

  Shaking her head in disgust, Rose turned toward the door and stepped on what had once been a white tile labyrinth. She could make out the paths, inky black gouges in the gray stone of the floor. Bits of tile lay scattered like broken teeth. The vandals hadn’t even bothered to pick up after themselves, leaving the broken bits lying around like trophies. “Mick, what if Robin wants to destroy the Stone? Maybe he thinks it’s sacrilegious.”

  Mick smiled. It wasn’t the smile she remembered—his mouth curved but his eyes stayed cool. His fingertips brushed the hair away from her temple, sending a tremor through her body. “All this disna matter, does it? Just scraps of rock. Just a filthy old room, not near as nice as our rooms upstairs. Mine has a fireplace and a canopied bed. Has yours?”

  Yes, it did, although the fireplace was cold and empty. But while Mick was the best candidate for the right guy with the right attitude she’d ever met, this was absolutely the wrong time and the wrong place.

  “Let’s go upstairs, lass. No one’s about, no need to be timid. Or are you timid for another reason? I dinna mind that you’ve no experience. I’ve enough for the both of us.” Beneath the Scottish burr his voice was soft as silk. Seductive didn’t begin to describe it.

  Maybe Mick isn’t the right guy after all, Rose told herself with a stab of disappointment … They’d talked about a lot of things last night, but she’d never told him about her bed and fireplace fantasy. And she’d sure never told him she was a virgin.

  His smile grew into a grin so wide his teeth gleamed moistly, as though he was going to go for her throat. Oh, shit! This wasn’t Mick. She should have realized that five minutes ago.

  In one sinuous movement he reached behind her neck, opened the clasp of her necklace, and pulled it from beneath her sweater. “Hey!” Her voice echoed harshly from the vaulted ceiling.

  He held the medal before his face, the gold and blue winking in the sickly light. “You dinna believe in this foolishness, do you? It’s only cheap metal and paint, not even decent artwork.”

  “I believe in what it symbolizes.” She grabbed for the necklace.

  “And you so intelligent, too.” He tossed it toward the dank crater at the center of the broken labyrinth.

  “I’m intelligent enough to recognize that you’re not Mick!” She turned to get the necklace and smacked face-first into an invisible barrier, a sheet of vapor so cold goose bumps broke out on her arms.

  The smooth voice behind her, no longer burred, said, “Well done, Rose. You’ve caught me out, haven’t you?”

  Double shit. She turned slowly back around.

  Robin was no longer dressed in his dark suit and striped tie. He was wearing tall boots, snug leather pants, a white silk shirt and a green cloak embroidered with gold thread in serpentine Celtic interlace. His smile was sardonic. His eyes glittered green in the pale light.

  “Who are you really?” Rose asked, trying to be mad rather than scared.

  “I told you the truth. My name is Robert. Affectionately nicknamed Robin. And I am a prince.”

  “Yeah, right.” She tried to back away, but the cold held her immobile, as though she were locked in a stone sarcophagus. Cold oozed from the floor, deadening her legs, her back, the nape of her neck. She glanced toward her medal, a tiny glint of gold and blue beside the jagged black hole.

  When she looked back Robin was wearing a brass crown rimmed with green stones. One setting, the one above his forehead, was empty. “My father’s crown. From time to time I try it on for size.” He took a step closer. Rose’s nostrils filled with a musky, moldy odor, rotting roses and gardenia with a bitter afterglow of sulfur. “You want adventure, don’t you? You want romance. But you’ll never have either until you break free of that faith which has failed you.”

  “My faith drove away the ghosts at Housesteads.”

  Robin laughed. “No, I sent them away, to show you that I care for you. A lovely young woman like you deserves better than a naive boy like Mick.”

  “No.” Her lips and tongue were so cold she could hardly speak. She pressed against the barrier. It didn’t yield.

  “Why do you cling to your so-called purity? Because of a worthless old story? Don’t you realize how far behind you are? All your friends are enjoying life and you’re sitting alone. I can be your adventure, Rose.”

  Some of her friends were pretty darn sorry they’d rushed into “enjoying life.” But yes, she did feel left out. Just last summer she’d broken it off with a guy she liked, but who thought waiting was dumb … Her thoughts whirled away like snowflakes. “M-Mick’s upstairs.”

  “I’m not selfish. I sent him someone to amuse him. Did he think of you? No. He leapt on her as soon as she walked in the door, no questions, no discussions, just that friction of flesh against flesh that is the natural inclination of human beings. The birthright of us all.”

  Rose shook her head. Not Mick. No. She grasped at another snowflake. “Thomas and Maggie are coming after us.”

  “You led them straight to the Sto
ne, didn’t you? I warned you they were up to no good, Rose. And now you’ve helped them.”

  She writhed. That wasn’t quite right, but it wasn’t wrong, either.

  “I am the man of your dreams, Rose. Lancelot to your Guinevere. Uther to your Igraine. The spirit who fathered Merlin on a princess of Wales. The Holy Ghost to your Mary.” His hands cupped her upper arms, his thumbs teasing the roots of her breasts. “You want me, Rose. You want to learn what I can teach you. You don’t want to cling to a faith that demands sacrifice and shame when what you deserve is pleasure.”

  Chills trickled down her back, teasing, caressing, even though his fingers felt like icicles. She wondered if his other body parts were icy as well—that’s what the old witches said when they were bullied into confessing they’d slept with the … Suddenly she heard Thomas’s voice: … the emerald that fell from the crown of Lucifer when he was cast out of heaven.

  Every fiber of her body trembled with more than cold. With terrifying knowledge. With soul-deep horror. With desire so strong her spirit melted and ran like candle wax, blistering her senses and then congealing.

  His hands kept her from sagging to the floor. His odor seeped into her chest. His cold breath stirred her hair and the frosty aura of his body radiated through her clothes. She saw the vaults beyond his head and a light moving across the windows and the tiny cross insignificant against the dishonored stone. The warm vapor of her breath rose before her eyes and then dissipated, as though it had frozen, too.

  Robin’s lips on her cheek were so cold they were hot. His tongue probed the corner of her mouth. Prickles of electricity raced through her body and she shuddered. But it wasn’t a shudder of cold or of revulsion. It was a shudder of delight. Somewhere deep in her gut a small flame, like a pilot light, licked toward him. That flame was capable of warming even him. That’s what he wanted. He wanted her to want him.

  She did want him. And if she took him, then every belief she held would be a lie.

  Rose couldn’t move her body, but she could turn her face away from those lips and that sharp-edged tongue. “No,” she whispered. “It doesn’t matter whether I want you. It matters whether I want my integrity. Whether I choose my faith.”