by Alexa Egan
Mother’s letter had been returned a week after the funeral.
Every time Callista walked into death, the urge to summon her mother’s spirit almost overcame her. And yet, she held back. Refused to trace the symbols that would bind her mother to her. Callista couldn’t bear to let her see how far her only daughter had fallen, trading her power for coins like a huckster at the village fair alongside the dog-faced boy and the bearded lady. To her mother, the gift of necromancy had been a sacred trust. To Callista, it had become a trickster’s ploy.
The door behind Callista opened, a breeze stirring the hair at the back of her neck, raising gooseflesh over her arms. As she slid the packet of correspondence back into the desk drawer, she felt Branston’s thunderous stare bore into her, his fury like a shimmer of red behind her eyelids.
“Running away again, sister dear? You should know by now, Mr. Corey has eyes and ears all over London. There’s nothing happens in this town he doesn’t know about.”
Callista shuddered with loathing for her half brother’s new business partner but wisely kept her opinion to herself.
“I almost wish his men hadn’t found you in time for your appointment,” he said. “Better to postpone the summoning than have poor Mrs. Dixon’s hopes dashed so cruelly.”
“Your concern for the grieving mother is touching,” Callista answered wearily. “I’d not have taken you for a sentimentalist.”
“What I am is a businessman and you, my dear, are the business. A fact you keep forgetting.”
She rose to confront Branston. His small, washed-out blue eyes narrowed, his nostrils flared as if he smelled something rank. “That’s where you’re wrong. I know it all too well. You haven’t let me forget for one moment in the past seven years.”
His hands flexed and curled into fists, his well-fed body wired with tension. “Is that what your sulks are about? Your feelings are hurt? You don’t feel appreciated? Is that why you decided to dash a grieving mother’s hopes by telling her you were unable to speak to little Jonny?”
“It’s not right to take these people’s money without offering them comfort in return.”
Shoving his hands in his pockets, Branston shrugged away from her. “We offer solace. Reassurance. Hope. Worth it at double the price,” he said, in the same tone he used to hawk her skills during their years traveling town to town and fair to fair. “We’re the only link to their loved ones beyond the grave, to the infinite knowledge of the future the spirits can offer us.”
“Yes, if I’m able to find the spirit they seek and the client’s questions are answered. But I never found that woman’s son. I walked as far as I dared into death. I tried every path I knew. I couldn’t lie to her.”
“Perhaps you need to delve farther? Walk paths you’ve yet to explore?”
“I’m not trained for the deeper reaches. Mother died before she could teach me those lessons, and without the proper instruction, it’s too dangerous to attempt.”
“I don’t bloody care.” He spun around, jaw clenched. Brotherly concern, obviously a pose too difficult to maintain. Not that he’d ever tried very hard. Perhaps if they’d been closer in age or she’d been born a boy or if he’d not been an ill-tempered, spiteful, good-for-nothing sod.
“Do what you need to do to satisfy the customer, Callista. If you won’t risk it, then lie. If you’d done that tonight, the old cow would have left here pleased as punch, thinking little Jonny was with dear old Dad doing ring-the-rosy in heaven. She’d have been happy to be comforted in her time of grief. I’d have been happy to relieve her of her money.”
“We’ve only begun to recover after the fiasco in Manchester. Do you want to be arrested this time? Or worse? Mother always said—”
“What I want, Callista”—he slammed his hand upon the table—“is for you to do as you’re told. I don’t give a damn about your bloody bells or your Fey-born gift or your sainted mother. She’s long dead, and if it weren’t for me, the only gift keeping you from starvation would be the one between your legs. So, you’ll tell these sniveling, drippy, hand-wringing women with their sob stories whatever they want to hear, because if you don’t”—he shoved his face close enough for her to smell the whisky on his breath—“I’ll make you very, very sorry.”
She refused to cower before him, though she knew it only made him angrier. Instead she locked her knees, forced her shoulders square, and met him glare for glare. “You’re no longer my guardian, and I won’t be forced to act as your circus sideshow any longer.”
His gaze grew icy, a wicked smile dancing over his mouth. “The next time you leave, I’ve told Mr. Corey he can return you in any condition he chooses. I’m sure he’d be more than willing, and, knowing him, any struggle on your part will only increase his ardor. You suppose that high-flown aunt of yours you’re always running on about will take you in once you’re ruined and stuffed with a bastard child?”
“You wouldn’t dare.” Cold fear splashed across Callista’s back, nearly buckling her knees. Aunt Deirdre, her mother’s elder sister, resided in Scotland as a priestess of High Danu. Callista had never met her, but for seven years, she’d dreamed of traveling to the convent at Dunsgathaic. Of finding a home with her long-lost relative. Of finally escaping Branston.
“Wouldn’t I?” Branston grabbed her, his fingers digging into her upper arms until tears burned in her eyes. “You’ll do as I say. No more arguments. No more running. Do I make myself clear?”
“Completely,” she answered, forcing a calm she did not feel.
He released her to pat her cheek, an unpleasant smile stretching his wide mouth. “You make it so much harder than it needs to be. I’m only looking out for your best interests. Haven’t I always been there to take care of you, unlike those high and mighty relatives of your mother’s?”
She crossed her arms over her chest, eyeing him like the disease he was. “Your persuasive abilities continue to amaze me. It’s no wonder none of your schemes pay off.”
Annoyance flickered in his gaze. “Get some rest. We’ve two appointments tomorrow, and I want you at your best. I’m going out. Mrs. Thursby will be here if you need anything.”
Hardly a comfort. The old bawd acting as Branston’s housekeeper was another of Mr. Corey’s associates. Since they set up shop in London six months ago, their household had slowly been taken over by the ruthless gang lord and his underlings. But why? What really lay behind his continued and growing interest in them?
“Where are you going?” she asked.
Branston chucked her chin as if she were ten years old. “Worried for me? Don’t be, dear sister. I’ll always be here to look after you. Always.”
She crossed to the hearth, though no warmth touched her frozen, shivering skin. Always was what she most feared.
* * *
No matter how many times he did it, David St. Leger always hated this part.
With held breath and steady hand, he eased the silver-bladed knife across his opposite palm, wincing as blood welled behind the thin cut. Holding his hand above the glass he’d prepared earlier, he waited as three large drops fell into the viscous slime-green liquid, then snatched up a napkin to wrap around his wound. The initial sting became a steady throb as the silver’s poison moved up his arm into his head until spots bounced in front of his eyes and his stomach squirmed ominously.
Swirling the liquid around as if he were appreciating a fine brandy, he raised the glass to his lips, closed his eyes, and downed the vile, greasy brew in one shuddering swallow. It had been almost two years since the dying Fey-blood had spat his evil curse over him. A few months since the discovery of the draught that prevented his unnatural shift from man to beast with each setting of the sun.
David wasn’t sure which was worse—the cure or the curse.
Leaving the glass on a nearby table, he sank into an armchair, leaning his head back against the cushions, until t
he dizziness passed and the potion took hold. The clock struck the hour. A log in the grate fell apart in a shower of sparks. Rain pattered against the window.
And then there were the sounds that didn’t belong. A far-off click of a latch. The brush of a boot against carpet. A rattle of a knob. Not a servant. He’d sent the last one to bed on his arrival home an hour ago.
Taking up his knife once more, David waited—and listened. He’d take no chances. Not with the Imnada’s brutal Ossine enforcers searching for any shapechanger suspected of going against tradition to seek an alliance with the Fey-bloods. The rebels claimed it was their only chance to save the race from extinction. The Ossine called it treason.
David might be innocent of insurrection, but he was still emnil, exiled from his clan and labeled a dangerous rogue. That was an engraved invitation to any enforcer who sought to cleanse the clan once and for all of his corrupted bloodline. None would question his death . . . after all, within a wolf pack, the crippled and the sickly were the first to be eliminated. Within the five clans of Imnada, those same laws applied.
But David would not be taken down without a fight. The Ossine enforcers would not lay their hands on him again.
Ever.
The sounds came closer. David hung back, the knife ready, every muscle tensed for the attack. The door opened and a shadow fell across the floor. Unhesitating, he lunged, his arm sweeping out to catch the intruder. A shout erupted. Glass shattered. A knife flashed. The intruder’s neck ended trapped in the crook of David’s elbow, his back arched against the silver blade pressed to his kidneys.
“Are you barking mad, St. Leger?” the man growled from between clenched teeth.
David closed his eyes on a string of profanity. Dropped his arm and his blade.
Captain Mac Flannery.
“Is this how you greet all your guests?” Mac snarled, his cat-slanted green eyes narrowed in fury.
“Only those who sneak in like thieves,” David quipped with a smile, despite the renewed rush of dizziness spinning his head. He tossed the knife with a clatter onto a nearby table.
“I knocked, but I expect your housekeeper’s retired for the night.”
David cast a glance at the mantel clock. “It’s two in the morning. Of course she’s retired.” He poured himself a drink. On an afterthought, poured one for Mac, who was straightening his waistcoat. “What the hell are you doing here at this godforsaken time of night anyway? Shouldn’t you be home making mad passionate love to your new bride?”
“I wish. I came to let you know there’s an enforcer skulking around London.”
“Let him skulk. I’m not up to my neck in traitorous revolution like some I could name.” David settled into a chair. It felt good after the busy night he’d had. He tossed back the whisky, feeling the burn all the way to his toes. “Much as I appreciate the warning, couldn’t it have waited until morning?”
“I didn’t want an audience for my arrival . . . just in case.”
“Does Gray know about this meddlesome Ossine?”
“Gray’s gone north to Addershiels. I haven’t heard from him in weeks. I’m starting to worry.”
“And well you should. If the enforcers discover his involvement with the rebel Imnada and their Fey-blood conspirators, he’ll end in pieces and us right alongside him.”
Mac rubbed his temples as if staunching a headache. “I know, but Gray doesn’t listen. I think this whole uprising is his way of getting back at his grandfather.”
Among British society, the Duke of Morieux was known as a shrewd and cunning aristocrat with the wealth to buy a nation and the influence to rule it, though he chose to spend most of his time and attention on his vast Cornish estate.
Among the Imnada, the heavyset bear of a man with his shock of white hair and the ice-blue eyes of a hawk was known simply as the Morieux, hereditary leader of the five clans, whose word was law.
David simply called him a fucking mealymouthed cocksucker.
“Do you blame Gray?” David asked. “His grandfather could have saved him. He could have saved all of us. But if Gray wants revenge, a nice blade between dear Grandpapa’s ribs would be a hell of a lot easier than a revolution.”
A tense silence sprang up though neither strove to break it. The three friends had reached a tacit agreement. They never spoke of the last chaotic days of war and a dying Fey-blood’s vicious spell that had trapped them all within the prison of the curse. Nor did they talk of the cure that fast became a deadly addiction. They could not stop; they could not continue. Either choice brought sickness and finally death. In their struggle to free themselves of the spell, they’d ended trapped and tainted by the magic of the Fey—again.
Mac found solace from his pain in love; Gray in revenge.
David found it at the bottom of a whisky bottle.
“Your message has been delivered, Captain. Care for a drink—or three?” He started to rise.
“There’s another . . . small matter.”
David sighed, dropping back into his chair. “There always is.”
A shuffling step sounded from just outside the door, followed by the click of a heel on the parquet. David snatched up his blade and was halfway to the door before Mac grabbed him. “Wait.”
David swung around, eyes wild. “What the hell—”
“Caleb!” Mac called. “Show yourself. It’s all right.”
A thin man with a long, pockmarked face and dingy brown hair stepped into the study. His eyes darted around the room as if gauging safety.
“St. Leger won’t harm you. Will you, David?”
“That depends on who the devil he is.” He turned once more to the sideboard. Mother of All, but he needed another drink.
“This is Caleb Kineally,” Mac began. “He’s—”
“Imnada.” David finished Mac’s sentence at the first mental brush of shapechanger magic against his mind. “I take it he’s one of Gray’s rebels.”
Mac ran a hand over his haggard face, and for the first time David noticed the waxen pallor of his friend’s features, the smudges hollowing his eyes. “Aye. He needs to lay low while the enforcers are close. I want you to look after him.”
“Me?”
“While Gray’s away, you’re the only one I trust. Bianca’s been through enough. I can’t place her in danger again. Not with a baby on the way.”
David’s resolve wavered at mention of Mac’s outclan bride, but he shoved his better nature aside. Mac had asked for trouble when he’d bought into Gray’s mutinous rhetoric. It wasn’t David’s problem nor his cause.
“Just until things quiet down,” Mac pleaded.
“You and Gray are deluding yourselves if you believe you’ll make our lives better by defying the Ossine. You’ll end up dead. But you won’t take me with you.”
“We’re dead either way, though, aren’t we?” Mac answered. The simple truth of those words hit David like a kick to the stomach.
So much for delusions.
“Please, David.”
He’d never heard Mac beg. Not in Charleroi with battle looming and the Fey-blood’s spell singeing their veins like acid. Not when he’d been brought in chains before the stern-faced clan Gather to have the sentence of emnil pronounced. And not even when they’d burned away his clan mark, leaving his back a charred wreck and making death seem like mercy. Mac did not beg. He suffered. He endured. It was what David had always admired about his friend.
“You once told me the dead were the only ones who might make a difference,” Mac said. “You once believed in the cause as much as any of us.”
“Did I? Must have been drunk at the time.” David tossed back his whisky. Was this his third or his fourth? He’d lost count.
Mac eyed him over the glass with a last-throw-of-the-dice look on his face. “The Ossine on Kineally’s trail is a man by the name of Beskin.”
David’s back twitched with remembered pain, the whisky turning sour in his gut. Eudo Beskin remained in his head as a brutal nightmare from which there was no waking. If keeping Kineally safe thwarted the dead-hearted bastard, David would do it gladly, but he glared at Mac for playing his trump. “He can stay. But that doesn’t make me one of you.”
Mac smiled his success as he placed his glass upon a sideboard. “Scoff all you like, St. Leger.” He tossed a newspaper on the sofa open to the headline “Monster of the Mews Prevents Malicious Murder.” “But you’re one of us whether you admit it or not.”
* * *
The man sat at his usual corner table, his plate emptied of dinner, a brandy before him. Those in the crowded chophouse who noticed him at all dismissed him without a second glance. Just as he’d planned it when he set the spell in motion that repelled eyes and minds, allowing him to disappear while remaining in plain sight. A useful gift. In his early days on the street, it had kept him alive in the brutality and chaos of London’s fetid alleys and dank winding passages, when finding food had been his primary goal. But as his skills grew, so did his ambitions. After all, why be given such a talent if it wasn’t to be used?
“. . . big as a bear with teeth like a lion and claws like the barber’s razor. Seen it myself . . .”
“. . . this before or after you’d spent your week’s pay on blue ruin . . .”
“. . . found old Moseby last week, gutted like a mackerel in an alley near the steelyard . . .”
“. . . wager his old woman did him in rather than some slavering monster . . .”
The nearby conversation grated on his already strained temper. He’d not come to hear gossip from two red-nosed drunken knaves with less in their heads than they had in their pockets. He checked his watch, sipped sparingly at his drink. Half his success came as a result of keeping a clear head among a rabble of half-soused alley scum.
The door opened and Branston Hawthorne scrambled in as if he had a constable on his tail. Out of breath, he darted his suspicious eyes round the room before sidling over to slide into the seat opposite. “So sorry,” he wheezed. “A group of us were meeting to discuss these rumors about the Imnada. Hope you weren’t waiting long.”