Sinner's Heart (Hellraisers)

by Archer, Zoe

  Following Colfax’s gaze, Bram saw what appeared to be a drawing of flames tracing up his wrist and curling up his thumb. Yet it wasn’t a drawing. It was the mark of the Devil.

  What had begun as a small image of fire just above his heart now encompassed the whole of his left pectoral and down his arm. The flames even traced down toward his abdomen. They grew nightly, and some day, he suspected, they would cover him entirely.

  Here then, the reason why everything changed. The Hellraisers had gained their name through their misdeeds, but one night, several months ago, they became Hellraisers in truth.

  My fault, all of this.

  Shouts sounded from the house as servants came running to aid their master.

  With a snarl, Bram released Colfax, then stalked away. He heard the marquess coughing, and the worried murmurings of the servants, wondering if they should call the constable. But Bram put Colfax behind him, and sank back into the night.

  He did not know if he chased something, or if he was the one being hunted. His body churned with restless energy, setting his every nerve aflame with no means of smothering the blaze.

  His muttered curse startled a sweep scurrying home. The boy stopped, nearly dropping his brushes. Face blackened with soot, the sweep’s round eyes appeared startlingly pure, the only part of him not coated with grime.

  “You look like an imp,” Bram said.

  The boy frowned. “What’s an imp?”

  “A little demon that stokes the fires of hell.”

  Painfully thin, clad in rags and barefoot, the sweep believed enough in divine intervention to cross himself. “Preacher says we aren’t to speak things like that. Tempts the Devil, he says.”

  “Did you know the Devil is real?”

  “A gent with horns and a tail, what lives under the ground?” The boy scratched his head. “Sounds crooked to me. But I don’t know nothing, so my master says.”

  Bram took a step toward the sweep. “What if I told you that the Devil had no horns, no tail? That he looked and dressed like a gentleman, a gentleman with crystal-white eyes, and he called himself Mr. Holliday.”

  “Funny name,” the boy said.

  “He’s a whimsical creature, the Devil. Can grant you the means to have your deepest desire, but never tells you the cost. Not until it’s too late.”

  Not so long ago, Bram would have disputed the existence of the Devil. Evil existed, yes. He’d seen it in the forests of America, heard it in the screams of the dying, smelled its rot as desecrated corpses decayed in the sun. But he’d believed that evil came from the hearts of men, not a creature that ruled a mythological underworld. He knew differently now.

  Would this little child tempt the Devil? For all the harshness of his existence, he was still just a child, metaphorically unsoiled, even if coal soot covered him from head to toe. A precious, untouched soul. The Devil hungered for just such a meal.

  “Way you speak,” the boy said, eyes round, “it’s like you know ’im.”

  Bram’s mouth twisted into a kind of smile. “We’re in business together.” He tossed the sweep a thruppence.

  The boy snatched the coin from the air, then clutched it close. “Thank’ee, my lord,” he piped. “If you got a chimney what needs sweeping—”

  “Go on home.”

  Immediately, the sweep scampered off, the darkness swallowing him. Perhaps Bram had deprived the Devil of one less soul tonight. He felt a perverse satisfaction in denying his patron.

  Alone once more. Icy sweat filmed the back of Bram’s neck, and the familiar chasm opened up within him. He pushed himself into motion, into action, his long stride eating up the streets.

  Several sedan chairmen hailed him—“Take you wherever you wish, my lord. Your pleasure”—but he needed to feel the ground beneath him, the movement of his body, driving away thought.

  The streets he traversed grew more crowded. People thronged, voices raised, mingling together in a wash of jagged sound. A crowd milled outside the opera house in degrees of finery, yet even here tension wove through the atmosphere, as though a brawl might begin at any moment. Strolling whores plucked at his sleeve and threw bold glances like discarded ribbons. He ignored them, losing himself in the city.

  “My lord, welcome back!”

  Bram started, realizing that he’d taken himself without thinking to the Snake and Sextant. Smoke choked the tavern, both from the fire blazing in the hearth as well as the numerous pipes of its patrons. It smelled of beef, tobacco, beer and horsehair—the scents of a man’s haven. Customers crowded the heavy tables, bent over their chops and ale, jostling elbows, loud with the evening’s attempt at cheer.

  But the laughter now was harsh, forced, and the patrons eyed one another with mistrust over the rims of their tankards.

  Once, this place had been his refuge. Even it had become corrupted.

  The tavern keeper came forward, wiping his hands on his apron, his jowls folded up into an anxious, welcoming smile. “Been too long, my lord.”

  “Has it?” Bram’s answer was distracted, his gaze moving over the tavern in restless perusal.

  “Aye. At least a month. Mayhap more. Began to worry, I did. My most esteemed patrons all vanish, as if they’d been spirited away.” The tavern keeper coerced a chuckle. “Folly, of course, and here you are now! There’s some blokes in your usual table, but I can shoo ’em off like flies from a carcass.”

  Bram looked past the tavern keeper, toward the table where he and the other Hellraisers used to take their meals. The habit had been long-standing. A meal at the Snake, fortifying them for the night’s exploits, and then the exploits themselves: the theater, pleasure gardens, gaming hells, bordellos. The Hellraisers indulged in every privilege, even Leo, who was of common birth. The five of them had been inseparable. Had been.

  Other men crowded the Hellraisers’ table tonight. Their clothing was less fine, their manners more coarse, yet, if Bram allowed the smoke to blur his sight, he could almost picture his friends seated there, and trick his ears into hearing them. John would be holding forth on some political invective, only to be calmed by even-tempered Edmund. Leo would divulge all the latest intelligence from the coffee houses—whose fortunes were up, whose were down—and Whit would lay bets on anything, even when a drop of ale might fall from the rim on one’s mug. And Bram would try to coax all of them to join him for a night’s debauch. It never took much to tempt them.

  “I imagine your friends will be joining you shortly, my lord,” the tavern keeper continued, “so I’ll just clear those other lads out.”

  “Don’t.”

  The tavern keeper raised his brows. “My lord? It is your table, after all—”

  “They won’t be joining me.”

  “Ah, well, gentlemen will have their quarrels.” The man gave another forced laugh. “It will all set itself to rights, my lord. You wait and see. In the meantime, I’ve got a lovely place right here for you, all nice by the fire.” He waved toward one of the settles nearest the hearth.

  Bram felt like the wood burning in the fireplace—black and blistered on the outside, inside carved away by flame. His familiar haunt only reminded him of privation.

  “My lord?”

  The tavern keeper’s voice followed Bram as he turned and left. Whit and Leo had disappeared from London, but Bram was the one in exile.

  How did she come to this place? Valeria Livia Corva could not feel her body, was merely a shade, yet she was dragged through one man’s consciousness, as if her foot had caught in the stirrup of a runaway horse. She was jostled, careening, his thoughts as vivid to her as her own memories.

  Time held no meaning, nor notions of space. This was the swirling vortex of one history, and she spun through the currents, without means of fixing herself in place.

  Even her own memories were fragments. Temples, rites. An ever-present hunger for more and more power. The summoning of a great and terrible evil. A frightful battle, and then . . .

  A millennium of darkness, t
rapped in the nebulous boundary between life and death. Madness. That had been her punishment—she remembered that much.

  But she was suddenly wrenched from her recollection of the shadow realms. Now she drifted in a room full of leather-bound books, with undulating green hills and mist outside the tall windows. Two men were here, one old, one young. The young one resembled the older, same hawkish profile, same piercing blue eyes. The older one wore a wig, powdered and long. The younger had tied his black hair back, and in the smooth lines of his face, the narrowness of his shoulders, she saw he was a youth just emerging into manhood. He looked familiar to her.

  “The commission is a good one,” the older man said. He sat behind a large, heavy desk, its legs carved into the forms of mythical beasts. “A lieutenant in the Royal Regiment of Foot.”

  “I wanted a captaincy.” The youth crossed his arms over his chest, more a peevish child than a man.

  “And you’ll get it, but it must be earned.”

  The youth snorted.

  “Two options are open to you.” The older man planted his hands upon the desk and stood. He wore the confidence belonging to a man of consequence, the pride that arose from careful, selective breeding. The old, esteemed families of Rome carried themselves in just such a way—in her life, she had been one of their number.

  “Join the clergy?” The youth affected a sneer, yet beneath his aggressive self-importance, he feared and loved the man who stood on the other side of the desk. She was both an observer of the scene, and within the youth, his emotions twined around her own heart. “I’ll not rot away, trapped in a rural parish and delivering sermons to drunk farmers.”

  “Then you shall take the lieutenancy, and be glad of it. Perhaps you will surprise us all and find yourself suited for a soldier. You brawl well enough at school.”

  A bolt of hot shame coursed through the boy. “If the tutors taught us anything worthwhile, I mightn’t resort to fighting. School is so deuced boring.”

  “No one ever thought you a scholar, Bram. Leave the thinking to Arthur.”

  The one with value. Bram had been conceived as a contingency, but that left him with greater freedom.

  I know him, Livia thought. He was one of the five men who had freed the Dark One from his prison, liberating her, as well.

  “Will I go to war, Father?” He might prove himself on the battlefield, show himself to be a great hero.

  The older man came around the desk, hale and handsome in a settled, prosperous way, though he’d thickened with age. At one time, he had been a sportsman, and a portrait of him hung upstairs, showing him astride a sleek horse with an alert hound quivering at attention nearby. The youth hoped to emulate his father, even though he could never have the significance of his older brother.

  “Oh, my boy, ’tis unlikely. But don’t look so crestfallen. For you will cut a fine figure in your uniform, and ladies do enjoy the sight of a man in gold braid and scarlet.”

  The boy brightened. He did like ladies. Greatly. He tried to envision himself in the uniform, striding down a London street with the regard of everyone flung in his path like roses.

  Won’t Whit be jealous, when he sees me looking so fine?

  Yes, she knew Whit. He’d been the first of the five men to turn away from the Dark One. She needed to reach him, and his woman. They were her allies.

  Yet when she reached out, trying to pierce the mists between the living and the dead, she was flung back into Bram’s memories. Time splintered again, scattering images.

  She was in a field at the edge of a forest. All around the field were thick-trunked trees, bare limbs stretching up toward a metallic winter sky. Scents of rotting vegetation rose up from the mud. And the sharp smell of blood, which could not be dulled by the cold wind rattling the branches. Bodies lay in the bent, brown grasses, their red jackets garish. Men with dark copper skin advanced, heavy war clubs in their hands.

  “Fall back!”

  It was the youth, but not so young now. Bram had become a man, his shoulders filling the bright red coat, his legs sturdy in tall black boots. Mud spattered the uniform he had coveted years earlier, and grime coated his now angular face. He raised a sword and shouted again to the remaining troops.

  “Make for the cover of the woods.”

  “But, sir, orders are—”

  “Major Townsend is dead, Corporal, and if we stand and fight the Indians, we’ll be joining the Major.” Now is not the time for fear. Don’t think of the Major with half his head beaten in, and his brains showing.

  “Sir?”

  “Now, Corporal.”

  The troops obeyed, and they slogged back through the sucking mud, finding shelter in the forest. They were not followed, and he led them over miles, his legs aching, his body weary. Yet he forced himself to walk upright, for he was their leader now, and must get them back to the safety of the fort.

  So few of us now. Half the men killed, the other half sick and wounded. I cannot fail them. What if I do? I cannot. I am in command now.

  Time fragmented again, jagged as strewn pottery shards, each with images of different moments, different places. She felt herself pulled through them, and they tore at her mind.

  Now she saw ornately carved walls and a gleaming wooden floor. The chamber itself stretched out on every side, a vast chasm of a room. Music and heat saturated the air. Women in wide, silken skirts tittered behind fans, and men in equally bright silk postured and paraded before them.

  Livia drifted amongst the people. Their powdered faces became the faces of her own past. Mother, father, shaking their heads over her machinations. The head priestess, who saw in Livia an unquenchable demand for greater power—a need that had taken her to the farthest reaches of the Empire. Yet these people did not wear tunicas and togas. They garbed themselves in stiff, glittering fashions, and instead of mosaics, gilded wood and polished mirrors covered the chamber in which they displayed themselves.

  Conversation stilled as five men strode into the chamber, all gazes turning toward them like flowers following the sun’s progress across the sky. These men shone with the absence of light, a brilliant darkness, and the possibility that they might do anything, and no one could stop them.

  A murmur rose up from somewhere in the crowd. “Hellraisers, the lot of them.” Yet the words were spoken half in fear, half in admiration.

  Bram stood at the front of the group, leading the charge. The intervening years had hardened him. He was carved obsidian. Evening clothes had replaced his grimy uniform, and the sword at his side was meant for show, not killing. Shadows haunted his eyes and thoughts. She heard them, felt them.

  What shall I take this evening? The dreams won’t leave me, but I can beat them back. Who will it be tonight?

  Women swayed nearer. He might choose from any of them. More than a few had already filled his bed, if only for the night, but he sought something new, for his need never left him, nor did the black images that crept forward in quiet moments.

  “Rothwell!”

  A red-faced man stalked toward him. Collingwood. The guests stepped back to give him room, watching in scandalized fascination as he shoved closer. Then he stood before Bram, glaring up at him.

  “You are a rogue and a villain,” spat Collingwood.

  The crowd gasped at this insult, thrown so publicly.

  “I own to both titles,” Bram answered.

  “Have you no respect for the vows between a husband and wife?”

  “Your wife does not, clearly. For she abandoned them with an extraordinary enthusiasm.”

  Gazes turned to the wife in question, who stood at the other end of the chamber. Her hands covered her mouth, and her eyes were perfect circles of mortification.

  Collingwood purpled. “You will give me satisfaction at dawn.”

  Before Bram could speak, Whit drawled, “He already has his second.”

  “And third,” added Leo.

  “I advise you to spend the intervening hours with your fencing master,” Jo
hn said.

  As Collingwood paled, Bram smiled, his hand resting lightly on the pommel of his sword. It wasn’t properly balanced for dueling, but there would be enough time to return home and fetch his favorite Italian-made blade.

  Collingwood stormed from the chamber. A cry rose up from the end of the room, and Collingwood’s wife was borne away, hanging limply from supporting arms. Excited words filled the ballroom, everyone eager to spread the news of scandal.

  “Should we also retire?” Edmund murmured.

  “There is considerable time from now until the sun rises,” said Bram. “And we’ve only just arrived.”

  Edmund shook his head, but his smile was wry. Together, the five men moved further into the assembly, wearing their wicked reputations like cloaks of scarlet. Yet none of the other guests turned away. Their smiles came wider, the women’s glances more flirtatious.

  Truly, we have whatever we desire. Yet it never satisfies.

  The opulent chamber broke apart, and memories came so thick and fast that Livia could not separate them, lost in a tempest of one man’s history. Images and emotions. Faces, voices. Anger. Sensuality. Despair.

  Wasn’t it torment enough that she must have her own memories of life? Now she was lost within the remembrances of a dissolute scoundrel, thick tendrils of sorrow knotted about his heart.

  He prowled the streets now, troubled and restive, with Livia dragged along in his wake.

  The Dark One had him in a stranglehold. Yet she felt Bram’s heart as though it overlaid her own. He was damaged but surviving. Not lost, not yet.

  Though if he gave himself fully to the Dark One, then evil’s strength would grow a hundredfold. More. That could not happen.

  She must fight the Dark One’s hold on Bram. Every passing moment he stalked closer and closer to ruination. Once he crossed that boundary, he would be an unstoppable force of evil, tipping the balance into darkness.

  His former friends might aid her. They could help pull him back from that chasm. She needed out of Bram’s memories, needed to reach the few mortals who were her allies.

  Furious, desperate, she clawed her way free. She had to disentangle herself from him, even if the price was a return to madness.