Still, this language wasn’t like any she’d ever seen. It moved and flowed like water, the bold writing like the chop of waves, a splash of ink from time to time drawing her eye away, the words curling and eddying into new images and new thoughts by the time she’d refocused.
She traced the line of the writer’s pen as a way to train her mind. One word at a time. One sentence at a time. Letting the language crystallize in her mind. Harden into meaning. Her head ached with the strain of translation, the muscles of her neck and shoulders snarling into angry knots. “The word of Ercaidu is like the tongue of the serpent. Forked and flickering. The seeker of his knowledge must bear its weight. Must put aside the life he has known and become one with Ercaidu. As like him as makes no difference to the pure bloods.”
“What the hell’s that supposed to mean? And who is Ercaidu?” Kilronan interrupted, jolting Cat out of the moment. She squinted, but the words curved and shifted. Ran like rain through a brain scratchy and tight.
She slammed the diary closed. “I don’t know. I didn’t write it. But it doesn’t sound pleasant. Not if you have to walk about with a forked tongue.”
Kilronan pulled up a chair. Straddled it, resting his arms along the back. The relaxed pose at odds with a body tense with anticipation. His implacable gaze locked on hers. Again came that quicksilver slide of emotion. What was it about this man that he sparked such an answering sensation deep within her? She clamped down on the slow heat seeping up through the hard, cold layers of her suspicion. Hadn’t she learned anything from her mistake with Jeremy?
“Read on. What else does it say?”
Scattered by the blunt force of Kilronan’s stare and her reaction to it, she stumbled to find her place. Scanned the next few lines, though it cost her in a renewal of the pounding in her head. This time the text spoke of a lord named Toth. The breadth of his power. The quickness of his temper.
After he’d lopped off his tenth head, Cat blinked. Tearing her eyes from the page with great effort. She rubbed her temples, hoping to stop the bass drum behind her eyes. “Sounds a horrid sort of monster to me. Do you think he actually ate the poor man’s entrails?”
Kilronan’s mouth twitched. “Wouldn’t doubt it. Though sounds as if the fellow deserved it. Slaking his thirst with rivers of blood and smiting his enemies with that lightning strike stare of his. Poor old Toth may have just come to the end of his patience.”
Cat pursed her lips over a nervous laugh. What a nonsensical sort of conversation to be having here in this dusty, cloud-shrouded room. But for a moment as she’d been reading, the old stories had come alive. She’d seen Toth swinging his great axe. Seen his enemies struggling to flee as he cleaved his way through their falling bodies, gore streaking him like war paint.
She’d looked upon a face that for the space of two heartbeats had been the grim, blood-soaked visage of Kilronan.
“No excuses. You either have the Kilronan diary or you don’t.” Lazarus’s words cut through the babbled justifications and finger pointing like a scythe.
Immediately silence reigned as the men looked to one another before glancing fearfully, first at the arsenal strapped to his waist, then up into his face, purposefully empty of expression.
Lazarus settled his gaze on the leader. His hand twitched with murderous intent, but he concentrated on the beat of his heart. Let the slow expand and contract of his lungs bring him back from the brutal edge of no return. “What went wrong?”
“I had it in my shop. In my hands,” Quigley whined. “But Lord Kilronan wouldn’t give it up. Not even when I suggested he let me borrow it in order to find him a translator.”
Lazarus must have shown his confusion, because Quigley hurried on with his explanation. “The old earl must have wanted to keep the contents of his diary safe from prying eyes. He wrote it in a language I’ve never seen.”
“So it’s useless to Kilronan,” Lazarus surmised.
“Precisely.” Quigley smiled, but it was an anxious, half-hearted attempt not returned by Lazarus. “Mr. Smith has assured me he’ll obtain the diary. Haven’t you, Mr. Smith?” Quigley said, drawing attention off himself and on to the twitchy bear of a man loitering by the door.
Lazarus speared Smith with a look. “Does he speak truth?”
Smith broke off scratching the stretch of grimy waistcoat encasing his midsection with a startled grunt and an uneasy shifting of his eyes. “Aye,” he grumbled. “I’ll get your book. But then I want what’s owed me. Payment in full. Quigley’s promised . . . a hundred quid.”
“I . . . I . . . never—” stammered Quigley.
“Done,” Lazarus interrupted, already tired of this conversation. “Quigley will pay.”
The bookseller gave a mew of protest, instantly quelled by a glance from Lazarus.
Smith’s brows drew into a beetle black frown as if he realized he’d underpriced his services. But he recovered his composure with a nervous jerk of his head. A quick clearing of his throat. “Right, then, if you’re through with us, me and mine will be off to get that diary for ya.”
“Go,” he ground out.
“And when I retrieve the book, I’ll be findin’ ya here?” Smith asked.
Lazarus’s reply came as a chilling whisper. “Or I’ll find you.”
Aidan leaned back in his chair. Stared up at the portrait over the library mantel. A pastoral setting, the west façade of Belfoyle in the background. Mother with impish Brendan, one hand resting on her shoulder, his other upon the shaggy head of the family hound. Sabrina, already a little lady at four, leaning against Mother’s skirts. And he and Father side by side. The earl and his heir. Both tall. Both confident. None gazing upon the domestic scene would ever suppose how great a distance truly separated them.
They had been a young family at the height of their glory. Strong. Powerful.
Their descent had been precipitate.
A light rap upon the door drew him back from his melancholia. “Yes, Mrs. Flanagan?”
The housekeeper shifted uncomfortably, guilt-ridden dismay written all over her. “It’s about that girl, milord. She’s gone.”
Aidan lurched to his feet, his gaze automatically falling on the diary. “Damn it—”
Her face crumpled. “It’s my fault, milord, I know. I left her alone for only a moment. When I returned to the kitchen, she’d bolted.”
“Have you checked the garden? Her bedchamber?”
“I beat the bushes, milord. Scoured every room in the house, but it’s no use. She’s slunk back to whatever sewer she crawled out of.”
Her tone of voice said plainly—What did you expect from a slum doxy out of the Liberties? We’re just lucky we weren’t murdered in our beds.
“Should I call a constable?” the housekeeper asked.
His gaze moved from the diary back to the portrait, the ghosts of his broken family awaiting his decision. Cat could read the journal. So far, the only person he’d found with that ability. He refused to let her escape stymie his efforts.
He shrugged into his coat. Brushed past Mrs. Flanagan on his way out the door. “No. I’ll bring her back.”
“You, milord? How on earth will you find her?”
He bared his teeth in imitation of a smile. “Search house by goddamned house if I have to.”
Cat slipped through the filthy back lanes and mud strewn alleys of Saint Patrick’s deanery on an unerring course. She’d done it. Slid into the anonymity of the city to be swallowed unseen.
She shoved her hands deeper into her jacket pockets. Kilronan would never find her. Probably wouldn’t even look. For some reason that thought didn’t make her feel better. In fact, it made her feel worse. And how ridiculous was that? Kilronan didn’t care about Cat O’Connell. He only cared about his damned diary. He was a user. Like Jeremy. Like her stepfather. Like all men with their wily double talk and false promises. All men but Geordie.
He’d be worried sick, wondering what had happened to her. Her first real friend in the terrifying
new world she’d fallen into, he’d sheltered her in those delirious weeks when she’d been out of her head with grief and fear. Coached her in the thievery that kept food on the table and a roof over their heads. Two misfits against the world, he’d told her more than once.
He’d be disappointed at the loss of the diary’s income—the promised payment had been outrageously extravagant. But Geordie had a nonchalant outlook on life—take it as you find it. To be too up or too down meant you cared too much. Had invested too much of yourself. He’d tried instilling that same casual disregard in Cat. And to some extent succeeded. Cat wouldn’t make the same mistakes again. There would not be another Jeremy to destroy her a second time.
Fending off the overfriendly hands of a bearded man in bloody apron and rolled shirtsleeves, she rounded the corner onto Crooked Dog Lane. Clambered up the last alleyway, the boards laid across the mud bowing beneath her feet. Took the stairs two at a time.
“Geordie? I’m back,” she shouted. “It’s me. Cat.”
No answer.
She slowed her steps, a slithering apprehension curling up her spine. “Geordie?” Her voice came low and uneasy.
Reaching the landing, she pushed the door wide.
“Cat! Run!”
Geordie’s warning shattered the unnatural stillness, leaving Cat but a moment to take in the scene—the glowering features of Smith and another man, Geordie lying prone on the rug, his undersized, misshapen body no match for their bearlike strength.
“Go!” he screamed again just before a meaty fist struck him a knockout blow to the side of the head.
Cat spun on her heel, tearing back down the stairs. The heavy booted feet of her pursuers matching beat for beat the pound of her terrified heart. She swallowed back the panic coating her throat like bile. Making her yearn for the first time in years for the claustrophobic security of her stepfather’s town house in Ely Place.
Smith’s threats echoed off the walls of the narrow, crooked passage. Dogged her heels. Slipping, she fell to her knees, allowing them to gain ground. She scrambled back to her feet, expecting any moment for a hand to clutch her collar. Snake around her neck.
Even as she ran she conjured the confusion of the spyrel visouth. Used the spell to disguise her hair. Her clothes. Prayed it would be enough to lose herself among the throngs clogging the streets.
She tore back onto Canon Street. Doubled back down a covered close, ducking laundry lines and dodging market stalls. A stitch cramped her side, and blisters already stung from her ill-fitting boots.
And then they were there. One in front. One behind. Closing the gap from either direction.
What had she gotten herself into? What was so blasted important about that damn book? And where was Kilronan with his bloody great pistol now?
Where the hell was she? Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, she’d said. Cat had been instructed to leave the diary at the cathedral, the epicenter of his search. He’d crisscrossed the streets leading away in every direction. Tramped up and down for hours, braving suspicious glances and outright hostility. Only boneheaded stubbornness kept him searching when every other instinct told him to give up and go home. He’d found one person who could read the diary, he could find another. Unfortunately a louder voice chided that, in point of fact, Cat had found him.
He kept at it.
Tobacconist. Warehouse. Knacker’s yard. Tenement. Tenement. Stables. Alehouse. All achingly familiar. They ought to be. He’d passed them at least four times already.
Bloody Patrick bloody Street again.
Once more he strolled up the street, his gaze passing over the pinched, desperate faces. Hoping to recognize Cat’s dark hair and clever features. Hoping she wasn’t using the glamorie’s enchantment to hide in plain view. On a whim, he whispered the nix. The burst of released mage energy was like a struck note at the base of his brain, the scream that followed dropping him into a flat run.
He’d found her.
It must be how a snake felt shedding its skin. Exposed. Defenseless. With a jolt like a body-wide static shock, Cat’s blurred, indistinct features dissolved. So too did Smith’s final hesitation. The man lunged for her, his burly fist clutching air where she’d been only a moment before. He cursed but kept his patience. His accomplice had her cut off. She’d nowhere to run, and they all knew it.
Cat’s frantic gaze took in the suddenly empty alley, the dead end stairs, the locked doors.
“Look at the pretty bit, Neddie. What do you think she looks like out of them clothes?” Smith jeered. “You and your partner thinkin’ we’re a couple of gulls? We showed him we meant business. Now it’s your turn unless you hand over that book.”
Oh gods. Geordie. Be all right. Please, be all right.
“I haven’t got it,” she stammered.
Smith stepped forward, flashing a knife. “No more tricks, girl. The book. Now.”
Cat took a step back for every ominous movement made in her direction. “I tried. I did. It wasn’t any use. Lord Kilronan had the place guarded. Tighter than a tick.”
“Our employer isn’t wantin’ excuses. He’s wantin’ the Kilronan diary. Now.”
“And who would your employer be?” From the shadows to her left came a familiar deep voice, dripping with patrician arrogance and the calm assurance of easy authority.
Cat’s puddling relief came tempered with butterfly nervousness. Not exactly a rescue. More like exchanging one pursuer for another.
Smith’s eyes traveled between Cat and Kilronan as if weighing this new development. “This isn’t any of your concern. Just a cheating street rat what needs to be taught a lesson.”
Kilronan stepped around Cat and into the field of battle, his eyes never straying from the weapon-wielding attacker as if he could sway him with the power of his gaze alone. “I’ll ask you once again, who wants the diary?”
Understanding finally lit Smith’s face. “Kilronan,” he spat.
The earl inclined his head. “Neither the diary nor the girl are your concern any longer.”
“The hell they aren’t.” Smith lunged, his knife coming within inches of Kilronan’s ribs.
Kilronan answered with a quick dance sideways and a follow-up fist to the jaw.
“Neddie! Get him from behind!” Smith hollered between dodging feints.
The earl closed in, clamping down on Smith’s weapon hand, and with a quick twist tore the dagger free. It spun with a clang across the alleyway.
Smith sought to dive for the loose blade, but Kilronan punished him with a fist to the jaw before swaying under a blow to his stomach. Another to his ribs. He responded with a move that had Smith back on his heels. At least for the moment.
What Kilronan possessed in training and finesse, Smith made up for in street fighter cunning. Fists. Feet. Teeth. He used them all to hold the earl at bay while Neddie advanced, murder in his piggy eyes. The deciding factor in this up-to-now evenly matched life-and-death struggle.
Cat jumped into the fray. Caught Neddie’s arm to drag him away from the pair still locked in a tit-for-tat rain of blows.
He shrugged her off with the ease of swatting away a fly. Followed it up with an open-handed slap knocking her flat into the alley’s quagmire, ears ringing.
“Kilronan. Watch out!” she squawked, spitting blood.
The earl spun and ducked just as Neddie sought to stab him in the neck, but his feet slid from under him, his body falling sideways into a stack of boxes.
Neddie and Smith took the opportunity to end it, but it was Kilronan who struck first.
The spell he uttered came fast and furious. A vicious swathe of mage energy catching even Cat in its riptide. She clutched her stomach, her breakfast in her throat while Smith and Neddie doubled over, the sour odor of fear and then vomit rising from their grubby clothes, their eyes rolling to spear the earl with twin gazes of hate and horror.
“Holy Mary, Joseph, and John. ’E’s a devil, he is,” Smith spat. “Workin’ Satan’s evil.”
C
limbing to his feet, Kilronan snatched her hand. Dragged her away, ignoring the curses following them up the alley. They made it as far as the next doorway before Kilronan swayed, his body convulsing in a jerk of broken magic that had him stumbling against the frame.
“Damn, that’s done it,” he muttered as the spell dissolved and the men recovered.
Smith uncurled, pounding toward them. Neddie close behind.
They bulled into Kilronan, dropping him to his knees. Raining blows and kicks until the earl could do little but suffer through the attack. Curling his body into a protective ball. Protecting his kidneys. His head.
Cat shouted. Tried pulling them off, but they smacked her aside, their original purpose forgotten amid their need to destroy what they didn’t understand.
Frantically she searched the alley for a weapon—a brick, a broken piece of wood, anything.
There.
In the doorway they’d only just passed.
A gleam of metal. A bent wooden handle.
Smith’s knife.
Cat dove. Grabbed the blade up, holding it before her as if it might bite. Shouted to be heard over the curses and the sickening thud of fists on flesh. “Get off him!”
They paused as she took a reckless step into the fray. Pricked Neddie in the ribs.
“Now,” she hissed.
His eye fell to the knife, and he gave a rough snarl of laughter. Moved to wrestle it from her hand.
She lashed out with a wild thrust that bit deep into his arm. Followed it up with another that grazed his ribs as he yelped, backing out of range.
Smith, too, had abandoned his thrashing of Kilronan and now watched her with a leery eye. “Careful, bitch, afore ya hurt yourself.”
“Your concern’s touching.” She followed Smith’s movements while trying to keep one eye on Neddie.
Smith lunged while Neddie sought to attack from behind. She sliced Smith hard on his wrist, squirming at the feel of his flesh parting and crunching under her cut. He screamed, yanking his arm away.
Earl of Darkness Page 4