by Alexa Egan
“Your sources have failed you, Sarah. That’s not why he came. We had some unfinished business, now concluded. That’s all.”
Sarah plunked her teacup down with a noisy rattle of the saucer, a motherly scold forming in the creases of her brow and the stubborn lines around her mouth. “ ‘Unfinished business, now concluded’—you make it sound as if he were balancing your accounts. Men don’t come rushing to a woman’s side before breakfast without a very good—and non-businesslike—reason.” She folded her arms over her chest and stared sternly down her nose. “You chased him away, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t chase anyone,” Bianca said, nibbling on a biscuit.
“You did. That’s exactly what happened. Let me guess. You channeled that ‘Gloriana meets Attila the Hun’ personality you’ve perfected and, like any sane man, he ran for the hills.”
“I don’t do that.”
“You do. You’ve been playing that fearsome empress of the world role for as long as I’ve known you, and why not? It works. The men you don’t terrorize outright end up worshipping at your feet like a passel of overawed eunuchs.”
“Now you’re being ridiculous.” Bianca rose with a sudden urge to exchange her tea for something stronger. A double dose of sherry might do it. Ignoring the disapproving stares from countless generations of Sebastian’s forbears, she poured a glass from a sideboard decanter, downing it like a sailor with his daily grog ration.
Sarah observed her over the top of her china cup. “So . . . will you tell me what happened between you and the captain or must I guess?”
The sherry hadn’t helped. Perhaps some cake. Three or four slices ought to do it. “Why should I bother? You seem to have my personal life well in hand.”
Sarah dismissed her waspishness with a wave of her ringed hand. “All I know is that you’ve been stomping about, looking dark as a thundercloud, since you arrived and now you’re swilling sherry like a maiden aunt. If those aren’t the signs of man trouble, I’ll eat my best bonnet.”
Man trouble? That would allow that Mac was a man. But he was so much more than that, and while Bianca had shoved that one simple fact aside, in the end the truth was undeniable and insurmountable. While he remained trapped within the curse’s power, he would never allow himself to love her. And if he broke free of the dark spell, he would leave her and return to his clan.
Easier and less painful to leave him first.
At least, it was supposed to be.
“Bianca, dear heart,” Sarah interrupted, “you’re murdering that poor slice of cake. Come and sit down before you maim any more of the food.”
“What?” Serving knife clutched in her fist like a dagger, Bianca looked up from her mangled dessert. “Oh, right. Sorry.”
“Remind me not to annoy you” was Sarah’s skeptical response.
Bianca sat back in her seat, fortifying herself with another quick dose of sherry and the mutilated remains of her cake.
Sarah turned her attention to her tea, though she shot concerned glances at Bianca between sips. “You can’t just crawl back in your shell, my dear. Not if you want a chance at getting the happy-ever-after. Take it from me: sometimes you have to fight tooth and claw for it.”
“Who says I want to fight for it? Or that it’s worth fighting for?”
“I do. You think marriage to Sebastian hasn’t got me terrified? Or that I wouldn’t shed this gilded monstrosity”—she waved her hand to indicate the salon—“in a heartbeat if I could? You don’t think Seb hasn’t endured a crippling loss of reputation and prominence for marrying a lowly actress? Alone, the two of us were safe. We risked nothing.”
“So why did you marry? You had your career and social standing. He had his.”
“Because we loved one another, you twit. Because we were better together than we were apart. And sometimes that’s all it takes.”
“And sometimes not even love is enough.” Bianca shoved the unfinished cake aside, her throat tight, her mouth dry. “I appreciate the advice, and I know you mean well, but it’s just not . . . even if Mac and I wanted to . . . and our lives allowed us . . .” She gave a rueful chuckle as she twisted her napkin round and round. “Let’s just say it’s not possible, for reasons too complicated to go into. You and Sebastian are simply the exception that proves the rule.” She rose, placing her plate on a side table. “Thank you for the refreshments and the conversation, but I think I’ll return to my rooms.”
“Bianca, dear heart, listen to me—”
“No,” Bianca retorted, refusing to be drawn further into conversation. Her head throbbed and the cake she’d eaten sat like a brick in her stomach. “You don’t and you can’t understand. Not this time.”
Sarah’s normally cheerful gaze turned solemn, her gray eyes sparkling with strange glints of gold. She tilted her head, sizing Bianca up with guilty chagrin. “Sit down, Bianca. You’re not alone, and I understand far more than you could possibly know.”
* * *
“Both of you? As in ‘you’ ”—Bianca’s goggle-eyed stare moved from Sebastian to Sarah while her mind raced headlong in a thousand directions—“ ‘and her’? As in ‘the two of you’? Together?”
“You make it sound as if we’ve confessed to stealing the crown jewels or kidnapping the prince regent,” Sarah blurted, only slightly shame-faced. “It’s not nearly that exciting, I can assure you.”
“No? Discovering your best friend is a magic-wielding sorceress? I’d say it rates pretty high as a topic of interest with me.”
“Here. This might help.” Sebastian pushed a drink under her nose.
Accepting the glass, Bianca looked up to meet his somber gaze. “And that story you told me, the book you let me borrow, and all the questions—you weren’t trying to finagle information out of me. You already knew the Imnada existed. You knew because you were in league with them.” She tipped the glass to her lips, welcoming the brandy’s warmth, still trying to grasp the whirling thoughts as they passed through her consciousness. “At least I wasn’t wrong. You weren’t involved in Adam’s death. You aren’t the cold-blooded murderer they claimed.”
“I’m glad to know you came to my defense. I only wish you’d approached me sooner. I might have been able to help.”
“Mac didn’t trust you.”
“He still doesn’t, and with good reason if indeed Other are targeting Imnada. But I still don’t see how it can be one of us. Only a handful are aware of their existence. A handful of men and women I would vouch for with my life.”
“Could one of them have changed his mind and decided the only good shifter is a dead shifter?” Bianca asked.
“I thought of that,” Sebastian replied, “but our group is small, and none among us fits Captain Flannery’s description of your murderous Frenchman.”
Recalling with perfect clarity those moments before she struck the man down, she said, “The man mentioned a chevalier. The chevalier should have killed Mac, but she would finish the job.”
Sebastian’s expression sharpened. “Are you certain? The fellow mentioned a chevalier specifically?”
“Very certain. Every moment from that horrible night has been seared into my brain. I couldn’t forget it if I tried.”
“What did you do with the book I gave you?” he asked.
“I suppose it’s still at my house. That is, if my house is still there.”
“Never mind. Wait here,” Sebastian said, leaving the salon.
His departure seemed to suck the warmth from the room. Bianca and Sarah regarded each other with a new, wary awkwardness.
“More cake?” Sarah offered shyly.
Bianca shot her a how-could-you look of exasperation.
“None of that,” Sarah scolded. “You’ll give yourself wrinkles.”
Bianca arched a brow in question.
“I did think about telling you, sweeting, really I did, but you’re so damnably rational and utterly sensible. I wasn’t certain how you’d react. You might have been accepting or y
ou might have had me clapped in irons and packed off to an asylum.”
Conceding the truth of Sarah’s worry, Bianca took another long swallow of her brandy while continuing to cast her curious sidelong glances.
“And you can stop staring at me as if I might turn you into a toad any moment. I can’t whip up magic like Cook bakes a casserole. I don’t pop in and out of existence, and I can’t zap, poof, or otherwise zing. Quite disappointing, really, if you think about it, but our gifts don’t work like that.”
“So what can you do?”
Sebastian burst back into the salon, carrying an enormous tome beneath his arm. “Here it is. I knew I had a copy of the Peruzzi Treatises somewhere. It’s not his best work, but it gives you the idea.” He offered the volume to Bianca.
“What am I looking for?”
“The author.”
She read the spine, opened it to the title page. “Gilles d’Espe. The same man who wrote that book on the Imnada.”
“The very same. He began as a professor at the Conservatoire de Sauvageon in Paris, but he became obsessed with the idea that the Imnada somehow survived the ancient wars. That they were out there and still a threat. He collected every scrap of information ever written about them. Financed and led expeditions in hopes of discovering their hidden holdings, but of course he found nothing but a bout of lung fever and a swift loss of his family’s fortune. The Other discounted his scholarship as the insanity of a once-brilliant mind broken by drink and the death of his wife, but it didn’t stop him. If anything, it sharpened his desire and he grew increasingly drawn to the darker magics in an effort to prove his lunatic theories.”
Bianca flipped through the rambling chapters. “Not so lunatic after all, but what has he to do with Mac?”
“He was the chevalier Gilles d’Espe, and he and his household were brutally killed during the final days of the war.”
It didn’t take a genius to connect point A to point B and come up with the sickening circumstances of d’Espe’s death. “Mac, Adam, and the others,” Bianca said. “They killed him, didn’t they?”
“D’Espe must have discovered the truth somehow. They would never have allowed him to live after that.”
“I learned the truth and I’m alive.”
“You were lucky. You had two things working in your favor. One: you aren’t Other.”
“And two?”
“Captain Flannery loves you!” Sarah exclaimed.
Both Sebastian and Bianca shot her irritated looks, which she answered with a smug smile.
“So d’Espe placed the curse on the four of them?”
“Gray would never explain and I didn’t press him, but the pieces all fit. Fey-born powers don’t affect the Imnada in the normal way. Spells go awry. Mage energy bends and warps in odd and unexpected ways. He may have been trying to subdue them. Instead, he just made them very angry.”
As all Mac’s slips and enigmatic comments came into focus, her queasy feeling spread throughout her body. The curse on the four of them had been a result of warped Fey magic. A last-ditch defense from a man who’d bitten off more trouble than he could chew when he confronted the Imnada soldiers. He’d paid for his inquisitiveness with his life. In a way, so, too, had Mac and the others. Which was less painful: the quick obliteration or the slow, grinding destruction by infinite degrees?
Sebastian’s gaze darkened, a troubled look passing over his stony features.
“There’s more, isn’t there?” Bianca asked.
“The chevalier’s daughter is here, in London. She’s the wife of a wealthy munitions merchant attached to the French embassy. Or should I say ‘the widow’: he died of a heart seizure a few days ago. They plan on shipping his body back to France for burial, but . . .”
“But what?”
“Madame Froissart has chosen to remain in London.”
Bianca rose in a rush of heavy skirts, hands tightening to fists. “I need to warn Mac. He needs to know. To be on his guard.”
“I thought you and Flannery had concluded your business, darling. All obligations at an end,” Sarah said.
“So I should just let him be killed and do nothing to warn him? Don’t be preposterous,” Bianca snapped, nerves winding tight, heart racing.
“The turtle finally emerges,” Sarah muttered.
“Perhaps a message sent to the Horse Guards,” Sebastian suggested. “And I’ll send word to de Coursy.”
His offers faded into the angry buzz of Bianca’s thoughts. Where could Mac be? How could she find him? She straightened, the answer like the sudden blaze of a newly lit candle. Concentrating her thoughts as if she were physically reaching for him, she pictured the scarlet of his uniform and the gold of his braid, the sheen of his dark hair and the intensity in his gaze. Mac. Mac, where are you? Please, if you’re out there, answer me.
Nothing.
Mac, Madame Froissart is the chevalier’s daughter. She’s the one. She murdered Adam and now she’s after you.
No answer. No way to know if he’d heard her. But for the barest of moments, the hairs along her arms lifted and she felt a prickling sensation between her shoulder blades. Someone listened.
Madame Froissart, Mac. She’s the one.
* * *
With a cry, Renata broke contact, retreating back into her body, leaving behind the ember-streaked void and the voices that called to her from the infinite pillars of rippling, lung-choking smoke. Doubling over into a chair, she clutched her skull, pain ripping through her brain, spotting her vision, turning her stomach. “Bianca Parrino is here. In London.”
“You touched her mind?” Alonzo asked, mouth folded into a grim line, eyes alight with recent passion.
“For a moment only. Wherever she is, it’s warded against magic. The protections too strong. They prevented me from fully bonding with her.”
“Then we’ve failed.”
Her body felt clammy with cold sweat as she pushed her hair off her face, placing the remaining two golden strands of hair back into a tiny ormolu box. “No. This is a perfect solution, and it was clever of you to think of retrieving them from the Parrino town house. Very clever.” Opening her jewelry case, she placed the ormolu box within. “Once we have her, we have Flannery.”
She stretched, letting the silken robe she’d donned upon rising from bed slither from her naked body. She studied herself in the mirrors, caressing the round pertness of her breasts, pinching the taut, dusky nipples still bruised from Alonzo’s lovemaking before running her hands down the slope of her rib cage to the flare of her hips, brushing the hair between her legs, her quim wet and throbbing. Alonzo’s hungry gaze followed her every movement, his tongue running over his lips, his cock hard once more.
“London’s enormous. It could take forever to find her,” he said, his voice raspy.
She met his eyes within the mirror, rising from her seat with a smile of invitation on her kiss-swollen lips. “Do you think so? She cannot stay warded away from my powers forever. And when I find her, I will control her. You wait, Alonzo. I shall have Flannery on his knees before me within week. And before I kill him, he shall watch as I take away all that is most dear to him. He shall watch and understand my pain.”
20
At the familiar polished vowels and public school consonants coming from the corridor, Mac lifted his head from the report on his desk. If he was lucky, the always-churlish sergeant on duty would send the unwanted visitor on his way. Mac was in no mood for guests. Instead there was a short burst of “Yes, sirs” and “No, sirs” before Gray de Coursy appeared in the doorway, a valet’s dream from the top of his stylishly cut head of golden hair to the tips of his champagne-polished boots. The bloody sod looked as if he’d just stepped from the pages of a gentleman’s magazine.
Mac fought down the overwhelming urge to beat the shit out of him.
“Working hard?” Gray asked, scanning Mac’s overflowing desk as he closed the door behind him.
“If you must know, I’m trying to c
omplete a report due to General Burrell. My unexpected trip out of town has me trying to catch up.”
Gray’s gaze settled on the blank piece of paper beneath Mac’s hand with a slight lifting of his eyebrows.
“All right,” Mac growled, “so I’ll settle for starting the bloody report.”
Mac had been here since this morning and he’d yet to write one word. Work was not the solace it had once been. His reports had lost their luster, his ledgers no longer enticed with their brain-numbing columns and rows, and his office walls closed in like the jaws of a trap.
And now the cherry on top of his horrible day was settling himself on the only other chair in the room and regarding Mac as if he were a particular tasty bit of prey.
“Did you come to offer me more of your justifications?” Mac asked. “Or are you hoping to convince me not to turn you and your associates into the Ossine once I’m reinstated into the clans?”
“What makes you believe you will be?”
“This.” Mac pulled the journal from a drawer and slammed it down on the desk between them. “Adam broke the curse before he died. I plan on following his notes and doing the same. I’m this close.” He pressed his finger and thumb together.
“And you assume once you’re no longer tainted by the Fey-blood’s dark magic, you’ll be welcomed home with open arms. The pronouncement of emnil reversed.”
“That’s the plan.”
Gray leaned forward in his chair, resting a ringed hand upon the top of his cane. “You’d really return to Concullum and pretend the last two years never occurred? Have you forgotten the agony as they stripped the clan mark from your body and the signum from your soul? Can you forgive them their deafness as you pleaded for your life and they did nothing while you lay bleeding and broken?”
“Is that what this is about, Gray? Revenge? You’d destroy the clans to get back at your grandfather?”
For a moment Gray’s eyes gleamed with some hidden emotion, but the expression was gone so quickly, Mac couldn’t be certain he had seen it, and when Gray spoke, there was nothing in his voice to betray he might be less than in perfect control. “What of Bianca Parrino? Is it so easy to leave her behind?” he asked.