Demon's Curse

by Alexa Egan

  For him there would be no home or family to replace the one stripped from him. No wife or lover to replace the beautiful Lina, who’d spurned him for the freak he had become.

  Unless . . .

  He stretched, loosening the pent-up swarm of excitement tightening his muscles.

  . . . unless he broke the curse.

  If Adam had been able to find a way to do it, so could Mac.

  The moon had barely moved in the sky before the door opened. Even concealed beneath a heavy cloak, Mac recognized her. The velvety spice of her perfume, the slight musky scent of her creamy skin. The gleam of her shimmering hair.

  Coming up on his haunches, Mac growled low in his throat.

  Bianca spun around, eyes darting from shadow to shadow.

  Pulling himself together, Mac sank back. Stupid mistake. He should know better. Did know better. He’d spent six years being professionally invisible for Wellington’s army in the field. Now barely a year shuffling papers at the Horse Guards and he was losing his edge.

  Bianca stood for a moment haloed by the light within until someone inside the theater called to her. Then she turned, illuminating the curve of one pale cheek and the sweep of dark lashes, the slender column of her throat and the dimple kissing her chin. If he weren’t positive that she had no idea he was watching, he’d have sworn the pose was for his benefit. Sultry and yet uncontrived. A woman who knew her sexual power and took pleasure in it.

  She remained thus for the barest of moments. Then a change in the light, a shift of her body, and her icy radiance became the chalky pallor of exhaustion. The deep wells of her eyes turned to shadows. The regal pose more closely resembled a woman bracing for a painful blow.

  “I’ve changed my mind, Martha. I think I’ll just go home to bed.” Even her voice held a weary, forlorn air.

  She headed toward Bow Street, Mac sliding from his alley hiding place to follow, one more shadow among the dark. Sometimes he wished his aspect had been sewer rat. Inconspicuous would have been a hell of a lot safer.

  As she passed the front of theater, Mac caught movement out of the corner of his eye. A figure stood hidden behind one of the four portico columns, the pinprick light of his cheroot giving him away.

  Mac paused as the stranger stepped out behind Bianca, his steps slow but certain.

  Dread and frustration settled like a brick in Mac’s gut. Did this stranger have anything to do with Adam’s death, or was he merely a random footpad bent on an easy score?

  The stranger’s pace sped up. Mac closed in pursuit, the hair rising on his back as excitement warred with anticipation, his tail lashing in growing anger.

  Bianca crossed over Russell Street, still unaware of the danger behind her.

  The footpad stank of sweat, cheap gin, and cruelty. Mac lengthened his stride, muscles strung taut, body alive with a feral bloodlust.

  Intent on his target, he never sensed the dogs until they launched themselves at him with furious growls and teeth like razors.

  Behind you, Bianca! Run!

  The blast of his pathing was all he had time for before the pack struck.

  * * *

  Bianca lay in bed, a damp, chilly breeze from her open window lifting the curtains. Raising gooseflesh on her arms. Rolling over, she burrowed deeper beneath the blankets. Turned back with a hefty sigh. Stared up at the ceiling. Examined her nails. Punched her pillow a few times.

  Nothing. She was bone tired, her body screaming for much-needed sleep. And yet her brain whirred like a top.

  Adam’s murder . . . Captain Flannery’s visit . . . Sarah’s chiding . . . and the coup de grâce—her sacking by Harris. It all buzzed round in her head like gadflies.

  Overwhelmed only by the last and strangest experience of the evening—a voice.

  She’d heard it in her head. Loud. Insistent.

  Too shocked to do anything but obey, she’d scampered the last few feet to the safety of the hackney stand and thrown herself into the closest carriage. Glancing back, she’d spotted a large man in greasy coat and battered hat. And then the hackney rounded the corner, and she could breathe again.

  That’s when she questioned herself—and her sanity. Was she hearing voices now? Not even in her worst days after Lawrence’s death, when she’d been jumping at every shadow, had she heard any voice but her own, reassuring her she would be all right. He couldn’t hurt her again.

  Tonight’s voice had not been hers.

  Surrendering to the inevitable, she threw back the covers with a groan and, wrapping herself in a dressing gown, crossed to the window to look down on the rainy street below. A few lamps still flickered, but dawn lurked as a faint smudge in the east. Already the coal man was out with his sack, and there came the hollow rattle of a barrow as a dustman passed. Beyond that, the view was gray and misty. The houses across the way bleak and cheerless, their windows empty of life.

  A movement caught her eye. A figure bundled in an oversized coat and wide-brimmed hat stepped out of the alleyway opposite and hurried, head down, toward Oxford Street.

  Had he been watching her house? Spying on her?

  Behind him, a second shape emerged, long and black and silent. Enormous as no alley cat she’d ever seen. Its intense gaze sought her out in her darkened window, eyes reflecting palest yellow-green in the light from a street lamp.

  She yanked the drapes closed to a drumming heartbeat. Rubbed her eyes.

  First hearing voices. Now seeing imaginary creatures. Perhaps Harris’s suggestion had merit. Perhaps some time off was exactly what she needed. She’d been working too hard and sleeping too little. A few hours’ reading should calm her nerves and weight her eyelids.

  Her bag lay on the cabinet where she’d tossed it upon coming home. The great leather multi-pocketed satchel, which had belonged to her father, was one of the few things she possessed of his. A treasure despite its age and the sour, old-dog smell that clung to it. She could picture him even now, walking stick in hand as he tramped the high meadows behind their house, the bag slung over his shoulder. Calling out when he found a specimen that struck his interest. Fumbling with his field journal and a pencil, eyes bright as a starling’s.

  Smiling around the ache while rummaging in the depths for her brand-new copy of Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion, she pulled out two small bouquets left for her with the watchman, now sadly wilted; a book of poems inscribed “To the goddess Artemis from her Actaeon” (yuck!); a beaded purse; a length of apple-green ribbon; a pair of leather gloves; and—wait a moment . . . now, that was odd . . . an old, weather-beaten leather-bound book with a guinea-sized divet in the center of the cover.

  The things some people sent as symbols of their devotion made absolutely no sense to her.

  In search of a note or an inscription, she cracked the book open, a shower of white petals falling into her lap from a dried stalk of ox-eye daisy, the leaves crackling to dust. Scott forgotten, she took a seat by her open window. Inhaling a shuddery, frightened breath of smoky, moist wind, she opened the book once again.

  She turned to a random page near the front, a small curled fern pressed in the gutter. The handwriting was atrocious, tiny and close, the letters spilling one into another, words cramped tight into the pages. And very familiar.

  Adam!

  But how? When?

  It must have been that last night at the theater. He’d stayed for just a few agitated moments, but certainly long enough to stash this journal among her things. Was this what his killer had been searching for?

  Studying the book more closely, she returned to the front cover. Inside, a heavy piece of parchment had been glued on three sides to form a pocket decorated with an odd crescent symbol. Running her fingers over the pocket, she felt a hard circular outline within. Barely one finger fit within the tight space between parchment and book, but enough for her to touch the edge of a smooth object hidden inside. Slowly, carefully, she eased the object loose a little at a time until it slid the rest of the way out.

  A g
lass disk in a beautiful lapis blue, perhaps three inches in diameter, with four deep notches spaced evenly around the edge. She turned it this way and that. What on earth was it? She’d never seen the like.

  She pushed the disk carefully back into the pocket. Whatever function it served, it had been important enough to hide. Perhaps answers would be found in the journal itself.

  She flipped back through the pages. With much study, she made out:

  Three miles northeast of San Millán. Few losses. Maucune’s division escaped across the mountains. Flannery, St. Leger, and I share a barn. De Coursy arrived after dark. Good thing. I’d have hated to explain Gray’s death to His Grace.

  She pictured the severe, sharp-eyed captain hunched over a billet fire, sharing stolen poultry and cussing his superiors. Difficult to do. Far easier was imagining Captain Flannery hiking the hidden mountain tracks and lonely hillside forests of Spain in pursuit of the French army. He was a man bred for wars of old. Broad-shouldered. Iron-muscled. The past caught like amber in his long beryl-green gaze.

  She gave herself a mental slap. Stupid woman. No dewy-eyed dream spinning for her, no sir. Both feet on the ground. Heart firmly locked away. Forget her resolve for a moment, and she had no one to blame but herself for the consequences.

  She flipped ahead, discovering a long, flat-bladed leaf—perhaps an aster’s. A small blue flower—gentian? larkspur? A sprig of some piney-scented herb—definitely, possibly wild thyme.

  It had been too long since her days cataloguing beside her father. She’d forgotten too much since leaving America behind as Lawrence’s bride.

  Aire-sur-l’Adour. New moon of Morderoth. Shift impossible.

  The fire flickered and burnt low as she read entries on the war years. Notes on scouting missions. Another mention of Captain Flannery. References to St. Leger and de Coursy.

  By the time she skipped further along to a page bookmarked with a wilted primrose, petals brown, stem withered, she could barely make out the blur of shadowy pages, and the handwriting had gone from atrocious to nearly illegible.

  She squinted to make out the plants listed by genus and species. Some common—willow, hemlock, vervain. Others less so, like marsh fern and burr medic. Measurements had been penned beside each one as well as suggestions on which part of each plant should be used—root, leaf, or stalk. Farther down the page followed a procedure for preparation with normal details like cooking times and temperature veering into outlandish instructions, like “Should be completed during the new moon or bury for a day and a night tied with a scarlet ribbon.”

  What on earth? Bianca flipped through the next pages, but nothing else had been penned, the last few pages still waiting to be filled.

  Rising to stir the fire, a paper fluttered free to drift across the carpet. She bent to retrieve it, catching back a gasp of astonishment at the face staring back at her—the same shaggy head of hair, the same wide-set, mocking eyes.

  Adam’s lover.

  4

  Mac tried focusing on the ordnance supply lists in front of him, to no avail. The amount of black powder in storage at the depot in Kinsale and the whereabouts of a lost shipment of carbines on the road between Portsmouth and Plymouth held little allure this morning. Instead, his head remained full of questions, mind leaping from thought to thought like a tennis ball.

  The man at the theater. The man outside Bianca’s house. Who was so interested in the actress that they stalked her? And why?

  He rubbed a finger between his brows, his mind returning to that one instant when he’d looked back at Bianca’s darkened town house and caught sight of her face in an upstairs window. Pale as the moon. Hair a loose ribbon of silver over a shoulder bare but for the thinnest of chemises. His own imagination had filled in the rest: delectable curves, creamy-soft skin, lips that could wring a hallelujah chorus from any man with a pulse.

  He tried shaking himself free of the groin-tightening images. Bianca Parrino had been Adam’s mistress. She was off-limits.

  And yet, their eyes had locked for a split second before he’d melted back into the alley, and he’d been struck by the infinite sadness in her gaze. He never should have pathed her that warning last night. It had been an instant’s panic when common sense failed him. He’d seen the danger, understood the menace, and—damn it—he’d been unable to stop himself.

  He only prayed he hadn’t revealed too much with his heedless actions.

  He tried easing his worry with the knowledge that when confronted with incidents out of the bounds of their understanding, most humans chose to ignore the truth and live on in ignorant bliss, never believing in the fantastical realms existing side by side with their own.

  He prayed to the goddess it remained thus. He prayed—

  “Captain Flannery, sir?” A pimply faced ensign hovered at the doorway, a sheaf of letters in his hand. “Captain Stockbridge just found these. They’d been mixed in among his mail.”

  Mac accepted the post from the young man, who started to say something else before Mac’s forbidding expression had the fellow jerking a salute and making himself scarce. But his whispered comments back and forth with the sergeant on duty in the outer anteroom about worn-out old Flannery seemed to reverberate through the cramped office.

  “. . . queer duck. Not right in the head . . .”

  “. . . scout during the war . . . battle sick . . .”

  “. . . makes love to his requisition forms . . . useless . . .”

  Mac had heard it all and worse over the last year he’d been assigned to the army’s headquarters. He felt his fellow officers’ grudges and suspicions like a buzzing at the base of his skull, along with their disapproval and, in more than one instance, out-and-out dislike. They thought him a cold, emotionless bastard. A man who held himself aloof and above all others.

  They blamed the war. Said it had changed him.

  They didn’t know how right they were.

  Stuffing the letters unread and unremarked in his coat pocket, he turned back to his mountain of supply ledgers, the columns of inventory making his eyes cross and his head ache. How had it come to this? How had he become a cheese-paring, stoop-shouldered pen nibbler? On campaign, he’d always scoffed at Adam’s constant scribbling in that damned book of his, the way he recorded every little tidbit as if how many times the four of them pissed between Tolosa and Vic-en-Bigorre mattered.

  The ink from Mac’s poised pen spread over the forgotten page, his idea bursting forth like a live shell. Of course! Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Adam wrote everything down. He treated that battle-scarred book of his like a Bible. If the answers Mac sought were anywhere, they would be there.

  Throwing himself to his feet, he ignored the tottering pile of requisition requests, consigned the damned pages of damned lists to the devil.

  “Makes love to his requisition forms”? He’d feed them to the flames if he could. But what would be left to him then? Soldiering had become his life. Duty and honor had become wife and child to him. The only family he would ever know unless he changed fate and shattered the Fey-blood’s life-destroying curse.

  He pulled on his coat, grabbed his hat from the rack. Surprised the duty sergeant in the midst of picking his teeth. The man scrambled to his feet, casting Mac a faintly sneering side look. “Need somethin’, Captain?”

  “I’m going out.”

  “Where to, sir?”

  He flashed the man a snarling whip slash of a smile. “This ‘queer duck’ has a mind to do some reading.”

  * * *

  Stepping down from the hackney a few streets over from Spitalfields Market, Bianca scanned her surroundings with a wary eye. Downtrodden men hung about useless upon the corner. A hedge whore flirted with a sailor, her eyes devoid of emotion as she led her cull into a nearby alley. A gang of boys taunted a beggar. A man shoved a drunk from a dingy wineshop, where he fell face-first into the gutter. Scenes all too familiar from the final years of her marriage, when the money had run out and they’d ta
ken two shabby rooms in Whitechapel, Lawrence spending his days drunk on cheap gin and sour wine.

  Ignoring the angry shouting from an upper apartment and the scarlet-rouged bawds hawking their wares at the brothel down the street, she made her way to Adam’s house.

  She’d only visited here once. A few crushingly embarrassing moments she’d as soon forget. Flush with success in her first leading role and drunk on champagne and adoration, she’d come straight from a lavish midnight supper that had lasted till dawn. No one answered her knock, but upon spying the lit windows, and arrogantly confident of her welcome, she’d walked blithely in.

  She’d discovered them in Adam’s tiny parlor. The impression flashing through her brain like the flare of a lightning strike. Adam curled nude upon the floor. A shirtless man kneeling beside him, his shock of red hair alight with the fire’s brilliant scarlet and silver glow, a tender hand resting upon Adam’s shoulder. Words too low to hear between them.

  She’d backed away, but the red-haired man caught sight of her. She still remembered the brutal glare of his eyes. The curl of his mocking smile.

  She’d fled the house. Never returned. Never spoke of what she’d seen. Buried the memory away at the bottom of her mind. Adam’s secret became her secret, an explanation for so much she’d never understood about his life.

  Today the latch turned smoothly beneath her hand. Afternoon sun giving way to a dark and empty interior.

  So much for locks and constables.

  She stepped inside, shutting the door behind her. Took a moment to let her eyes adjust to the gloom. And drew in a breath of quick and painful fear.

  Captain Flannery spoke the truth. The place was an absolute wreck.

  Cupboard doors hung open. Drawers had been pulled out and overturned. Books and papers lay strewn across the floor in a blizzard of pages to mix with the smashed glass of cold frames, plants crushed and broken, their scent hanging like death in the air. As she passed through the cramped and tiny rooms, fear splashed clammy over her shoulders and squirmed in her stomach.