by Alexa Egan
A hand rested lightly upon his arm. “Should we return to the house?”
He opened his eyes. Apprehension dimmed Bianca’s summer clear gaze, her face pale but composed.
With a determined shake of his head, he straightened, taking her in his arms. “There’s time yet. And I would spend what I have holding you.”
She lifted a hand to push his hair from his brow, pressed a kiss upon his lips. “Don’t you mean arguing with me?”
“There’s no argument. You’re not going.”
She pulled out of his embrace, a subtle movement that didn’t feel like the cold shoulder but had definite icy tones about it. Perhaps forbidding her was the wrong way to end the discussion, but they’d been over the same furrow so many times in the past weeks, and he’d run out of tactful ways of saying that over his dead body would she travel alone to London in search of the last plant listed in Adam’s notes.
Aquameniustis.
He never thought he could hate a word, but just saying each irritating syllable made him grit his teeth to keep the oaths from flying. Jory hadn’t recognized the name. Nor had Bianca. Neither had the local apothecaries they’d asked, the farmers they’d conferred with. Not even an old gypsy they’d met on the side of the road outside the farm gates who swore her herbal lore came straight from the queen of the faeries herself. An idle boast, as it turned out.
None had heard of the blasted plant.
But there it remained, clear as day in Adam’s journal. Or at least, as clear as any of the writing in Adam’s journal was. The pages devoted to his last and greatest research project were also the messiest, as if he’d written them in haste or as inspiration struck, his mind speeding along, his hand desperate to keep up.
The ink was smudged in places, blotted in others, the words running together so that individual letters were barely discernible, and only after hours of patient work did they manage to decipher the bits they had succeeded in recovering.
“So you’re simply giving up?” Bianca asked, bending to grab up a stick, which she swung against the tall meadow grass as if decapitating marauders.
“Of course not.”
She gave a particularly nasty swipe of her stick, snapping its tip against a tree. “Mac, we’ve done as much as we can without outside assistance. We need to consult experts, scholars whose botanical knowledge isn’t ten years out of date and whose research techniques aren’t rusty as an old rake.”
“Agreed.”
“Then you agree that traveling to London makes sense. The Horticultural Society is there. Kew Gardens. The Royal Society. Someone’s bound to recognize Adam’s mystery plant.”
“Agreed again.”
“Then I’ll leave in the morning. The mail coach comes through on its way from Brighton every day.”
“We’ll leave in the morning,” he amended.
She spun around, her stick coming perilously close to his head. “You can’t go.”
“No, what I can’t do is allow you to jaunt off to London by yourself. It’s not safe.”
She seemed to consider this for a moment. “Easily solved: I have friends I can stay with.”
“If by friends you mean Lord Deane, the answer is no again. Even if he’s not involved in Adam’s murder, what could you possibly tell him that won’t raise more questions than it answers?”
“I’m an actress. Dissembling is my bread and butter. I’ll think of a plausible explanation.” She laid her hand on her hip, eyes sparking. “You know it makes sense. You just don’t want to admit it. It’s the perfect solution. No one could get to me behind the walls of Deane House.”
“But you won’t be behind the walls of Deane House,” he pointed out rationally. “You’ll be traipsing about London, looking for a damned plant and landing in who knows what kinds of danger. No, Bianca. We go to London together or we find another way.”
“Fine.” She chucked her stick away. “Suit yourself, but you know I always get my way in the end.”
He grabbed her hand, refusing to relinquish it. Instead, he pulled her close, tipping her chin to his. “So you keep informing me.”
He lowered his mouth to hers, letting the fullness of her lips, the tease of her tongue, and the heat of her body ease his frustration even as new urges throbbed painfully. He nuzzled the column of her throat as he cupped her breasts, rubbing a thumb over her taut nipples. She moaned, leaning into his touch, sparking a wild arousal along his limbs to rival the curse’s fire.
Despite what the papers said, Bianca Parrino was no ice queen. Instead, she resembled a diamond. A stone of a million facets. Ever changing. Always alight with a brilliance undimmed by circumstance. It’s what he admired about her. What he began to adore.
“I never knew . . . it was never . . .” she murmured between soft gasps.
“Don’t think about him, Bianca. Don’t allow his ghost to hold you captive.” He sucked in a sharp breath as her hand burrowed under his jacket to untuck his shirt.
His heart thundered, his breathing came quick and shuddering with every slow caress of her fingertips. He would take Bianca here. He would defy the curse and make love to her upon a soft blanket of bracken beneath a scarlet and orange sky, the scents of earth and wind mingling with the spicy notes of her perfume. But even as he loosened her gown to taste her flesh—even as her fingers glided over his skin, leaving a ripple of yearning in its wake, his member pulsing with raw need—another sensation sang like steel over the surface of his mind or like a woman’s nails across his back. A curving, curling, tentative touch, but one he recognized.
His krythos was lost no longer.
He reached out to understand the intruder seeking entry to his thoughts, using all his skills to follow the mental connection back to its origins and the mysterious woman at its heart. The krythos sang to him, drawing him further and deeper into the current until on the very edge of his mind hovered an image, a glimpse of his enemy. He sought to imprint her upon his memory when the bond between them shattered, an explosion ripping through his skull like shrapnel, dropping him to his knees, pulling him into a fetal ball, his throat raspy with his own screams.
* * *
Blood dripped from the cut on her cheek to fall upon the virginal white of her gown, a broken glass edge all that was left of the Imnada’s far-seeing disk.
Renata closed her fist around the jagged shard, the pain acting like a drug on her flooded senses, the void’s spiraling smoke and cinders still dancing across her vision. “He was there, Alonzo. I felt his power. His mind. It roared in my head like a raging beast.”
Alonzo’s eyes gleamed. “Did you discover where he hides?”
“No, but he lives and he lusts. I felt his desire as my own. So sharp, it dampens my loins and fires my need.”
Hunger narrowed Alonzo’s dark gaze. A fierce, brutal desire amplified by the surrounding mirrors and her own stolen yearning. And this time she did not deny him.
It was only as Alonzo plowed her like a spring field that she sensed someone watching their joining. A brush of voyeuristic prurience tempered with confusion and then rage. She turned her head on the pillow in time to spot Émile standing dumbly within the doorway, eyes bulging, face three shades of scarlet.
A tiny hitch in her plans, but one she had long prepared for. Playing to her audience, she lifted her hips to take Alonzo more deeply as he thrust himself inside her. Parted her lips in a cruel serpent’s smile. “Welcome home, husband. Or should I say farewell?”
With a shift of his arms and a twist of his pelvis that had Renata pinned safely beneath him, Alonzo released a powerful blast of mage energy.
Émile Froissart, with his greasy bourgeois body and his peasant’s manners, never knew what hit him.
* * *
Mac lay upon the grass, staring up at Bianca, her eyes shining with unshed tears, her hand gripping his sleeve as he tried to sit up.
“My krythos,” he croaked, his throat scraped raw. “The Fey-blood has it in her possession. For a heartbeat, I
sensed the touch of her mind upon my own.”
The temperature dropped as the sun sank lower toward the horizon. His body cramped, his nerves aflame with the curse’s blue fire. Every breath came laced with glass. Every movement pushed the needling, searing agony closer to his heart.
“Let me help you,” Bianca urged. “If you lean on me, we can get you back to the house. Jory can—”
“Leave,” he answered. “Leave now and don’t turn around. Not for any reason.”
“I can’t. What if she returns? What if something happens?” She grabbed him under the arm in an effort to hoist him up. “It’s a short walk. We can make it.”
He clamped his jaw against a scream, his weight too much for her as he slithered back to the ground. “Please, Bianca. If you . . . if you care for me, just go.”
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“Bianca, I . . .”
Too late.
Swallowed by the curve of the earth, the sun’s golden edge disappeared, the curse boiling up through him like lava, nerves flayed raw. With a roar of fury and despair, he stripped off his clothes even as the flames consumed him in a blue-white inferno. He toppled back to the turf as lightning arced through him, corrupting his body, spearing his brain.
True to her word, she did not leave. Blind to all but the river of flame, still he sensed her presence like a rock upon which he might anchor himself. An oasis of calm where all else was a fiery whirlwind.
“ ‘By night I sought him whom my soul loveth: I sought him, but I found him not,’ ” she quoted as night overtook them both.
As oblivion claimed him, he answered her, his lips curled back over extended fangs, a rumble deep in his pounding chest. My mistress with a monster is in love.
* * *
Aquameniustis. The last plant on the list. Underlined twice. But nothing else. No other clue to its identity. Was this its common name? A variant? Did it bloom in the spring or fall? Was it found in England? Abroad? Bianca had never heard of it, and none of the references in her encyclopedias and compendiums yielded any clues.
Papers strewn around her, notes written and crossed through and written again, she toiled long into the night. Using context and her own botanical knowledge, she worked around the worst of the handwriting and ink splotches, but even that wasn’t enough in some instances. Still, she labored on. A cup of tea and a bowl of stew had been her supper. A worried look and a whispered discussion had been her cue to slip free of the house and come here to Adam’s stillroom.
She found most of the ingredients listed amid the abandoned jars and discarded boxes, the shelves of dried plants and the bundled aromatic herbals hanging from the ceiling. These she placed in a special compartmented container, each separated and marked.
The methodical, exacting work was just what she needed to pull her mind out of the worn rut of her endless spinning thoughts, the frightening images of Mac’s transformation.
Engulfed in a coil of blue fire, his body lost within a vortex that wove and spun and turned upon itself. A creature emerging like a butterfly from a caterpillar’s cocoon. A panther, sleek and lean and dangerous in its beauty. A panther that bore the body and soul of the man she loved.
Her stomach shriveled into a hard little knot, and she fought back the urge to bang her head against the desk. What had happened to the haughty, remote, self-reliant Bianca? The one who held herself above, aloof, and apart? The one who had trained herself not to care? The one who did not go around telling men she loved them?
She bent over until her forehead rested on the desk. She didn’t know. Cared less. Like a moth drawn to the flame, she wanted Mac, and to hell with being burned.
She rubbed her hands over her face, willing her exhaustion and her embarrassment away. Rolled her shoulders and shifted on her seat to bring some feeling back to her numb posterior before refocusing her gaze on the dancing squiggles in front of her itching eyes. She would concentrate on her immediate problems: the notes and the draught Mac would use to break the curse. The rest would fall as it would with or without her fretting.
Unfortunately, her immediate problem brought her right back to the dratted Aquameniustis and Mac’s stubborn refusal to let her pursue answers in London without him tagging along like a honking great bull’s-eye for the Fey-bloods to aim at. Tonight only underscored the tightening circle, the growing danger. There had been no word from St. Leger, and while Mac said nothing about the man’s continued silence, she knew he worried. Had the Fey-bloods discovered and eliminated him? Had he been caught by an Ossine enforcer?
The soldier in Mac chafed at the slow, deliberate unfolding of Adam’s notes, the methodical precision, the careful trial and error. She felt it in the mounting tension running like a fast current just beneath his skin, in the nights she entered his room to find him gone, hunting beneath the crescent moon. In the mornings when he took her with a fierce hunger, his wild passion pulling her along until she matched his unchecked need with her own.
Much longer, and she knew he would do something foolish, if only because he saw no other way. Wasn’t a cornered animal the most likely to lash out?
But where he found the slow process of the scientist irritating, she enjoyed it. Her mind sharpened and cleared with every clue she followed and every hypothesis she put to the test. This she could do. This she could offer him—his life in return for hers. A life free of the haunting pains left by her marriage, wounds finally cleansed of so many years of hopeless bitterness.
The acrid smell of pipe smoke made her raise her head from her notebooks to see Jory, weary and careworn, at the threshold of the stillroom.
“He’s slipped out again?” she asked.
“Aye. Marianne is up and pacing, and I’ll not get a wink if I don’t go looking for him.”
“Mac will keep Jamie safe.”
“Is that what you think? Mac brings the danger. He doesn’t solve it.”
She stiffened in her chair, chin lifted in anger. “That’s not fair. Mac’s counting on you. How can you turn your back on him when he needs you most?”
“Simple,” Jory answered. “I’ve a wife and children to worry over. They come before anyone else. I’ve allowed you to stay, I’ve assisted as I could, but things grow complicated. Damn it, you’ve Fey-bloods after you. What if they track you here?”
“What if they do? Or what if that Ossine fellow who threatened you returns? Who’ll stand with you against them? Jamie? The younger children? It’s as your wife said: you’ve no clan or kin to help you now.”
“And you think Flannery will be able to stand up to them? Alone?”
“Not alone. There are others. St. Leger. De Coursy. All four of you are Imnada and all four of you share a similar exile.” Warming to her argument, she felt the blood tingle through her body as she spoke, the words flowing like wine, her tone imposing but not arrogant, as if she stood upon the stage before a rapt audience. “They would stand with you. They would be clan and kin and family to you if you let them.”
Jory’s shoulders hunched, his bright eyes dimmed. “You’re quite an orator, Mrs. Parrino.”
“It’s my profession, Mr. Wallace.”
He shook his head, his voice a growl of frustration. “For eighteen years I’ve managed to live without interference or trouble. I’ve married, raised children, worked this farm. None questioned who I was or where I came from. Now, in less than a year, all of it hangs in the balance.”
“No,” she answered sharply, “for eighteen years, you hid away, pretending to be something you weren’t. I know all about hiding the truth behind a mask. And, like you, I needed Adam to remind me who I was. And Mac to force me to remember. I’ll not go back to those dark and lonely days. Will you?”
17
“Are you certain you want to do this?” Marianne asked, offering Bianca a cup of coffee, which she gracefully declined. “Surely, the captain will have a few choice words when he discovers you’ve gone.”
“I’d wager more than a few, but that’s
beside the point.”
A dim morning sun barely speared the parlor windows; the farmyard beyond wrapped in fingers of trailing mist. It had still been dark when Bianca dragged herself out of the warm nest of her quilts to wash and dress. Tiptoeing down the stairs into the kitchen, she’d been met by Marianne in wrapper and slippers, hair still in rags, face bearing the sagging smudges of someone who’d been pulled from her bed too early.
Bianca sympathized.
She’d been up all night formulating her plan to leave Bear Green for London. Only when she woke with a page of notes on the tannins associated with Anthemis nobilis stuck to her ink-smeared cheek had she decided she’d better retire for a few hours’ sleep. Waking before dawn, she reviewed her decision inch by inch, looking for a way that did not include going behind Mac’s back, but always came to the same conclusion.
“He may be furious, but he’ll thank me for it in the end,” Bianca explained.
Marianne cast her the doubtful look of a woman long familiar with the male mind. “I don’t know about that. Men get ill-tempered when women claim they act for their menfolk’s good. They take it as an insult to their masculine privilege.”
Marianne’s words of caution took root for a moment, giving Bianca pause. “Be that as it may, to London I go. Stall Mac as long as you can. Tell him I’ve gone into the village with the girls or I’m walking with Sammy over the hill toward Culler’s Down. Anything, so long as he doesn’t ask questions.”
Marianne folded her arms over her chest. “And when you don’t come back? What then?”
“By the time he realizes what’s happened, it’ll be too late in the day for him to travel.”
Marianne sniffed. “Either that or he’ll go haring off after you, come shift or no, and risk being set upon by hounds or a poacher. Or shot at by some lunatic who thinks he’s seeing monsters.”
The idea slid cold and shivery up Bianca’s spine, but she shook it off, clasping her valise with a pronounced snap. “If I worry about every little thing that could go wrong, I’ll never leave.”
“You must care very much for the man to do this for him.”