Earl of Darkness

by Alix Rickloff

She recognized the words. She’d stumbled over them earlier, her mind frantically scrambling for a hold upon their slick black sounds. But they remained infuriatingly elusive. Not even her Other abilities granting her a window into the harsh vowels and rasping consonants.

  But now on Aidan’s tongue, their meaning seemed all too clear.

  “Skeua hesh flamsk gwruth dea.”

  “Aidan, don’t. Please.”

  He lifted his head, his gaze turned inward upon some image only he could see. He bore a quiet intensity, eyes alive with an inner fire turning the dark brown orbs gold as suns. But this wasn’t the stare he’d given her moments earlier. Instead it was as if the man within had been shunted aside by another. A creature of razor-edged cruelty. A being who fought tooth and claw to emerge.

  “Drot peuth a galloea esh a dewik lya.”

  “Stop, Aidan!” She clapped her hands over her ears, her head threatening to split with the sudden pain, stomach rolling in sour waves, throat closing around a cold knot of fear. Terror had Cat out of her seat and across the room before conscious thought kicked in. She grabbed his arm. Sought to shake him back to awareness. He tore free of her. Shoved her away, sending her sprawling over a stool. Her elbow banged the floor, her wrist twisted painfully beneath her.

  “Drot peuth a pystrot esh a dewik spyrysoa.”

  The creature gained supremacy. Aidan’s grave, pensive features giving way to a violent evil. A blood thrill lit his eyes, a leer of greedy defiance twisting his face into a mask of hate.

  She scrambled to her knees. “Aidan! What are you doing? For the love of the gods, stop!”

  As the spell reached its crescendo, the air within the library thickened to a greasy haze, the fire leaping from its grate to claw at the hearth rug. Within the smoky miasma, a form emerged. A squat, muscled torso with a wrestler’s low-slung gravity. A face that might pass for human should it remain hidden by twilight or shadow.

  It craned its short, thick neck as it surveyed this new plane. Settled a milky, opaque gaze on Cat, its mouth peeling back in a snarl before latching its eyes on the man who’d summoned it.

  It approached the earl, Aidan meeting the unblinking malevolence of the monster with no sign of fear upon his face.

  Cat watched horrified as the beast slid one fist and then another into the earl, his flesh parting then sealing around the monster’s limbs.

  Aidan flinched but made no move to fight back. Instead, he almost seemed to welcome the monster’s possession. His features sharpened over the angular bones of his face, even as his skin faded gray as death.

  She’d one final hope to break the possession before Aidan was lost to the Unseelie demon.

  On her feet, dashing for the desk, Cat snatched up the page Aidan had been reading. Tossed it onto the fire.

  Both the creature and Aidan screamed their agony as smoke thickened around them. Keening ripped through her skull like claws across a thousand slates. Her eyes burned with a sickly yellow fog. It clogged her throat. Filled her ears.

  The house rocked upon its foundation, a grinding of stone and plaster, a shattering of glass, the shrieks of frightened maids and the housekeeper’s bellow for order.

  And the monster disappeared.

  The library door burst open. “What the bloody hell?” Jack shouted. “Are you trying to bring the house down around us?”

  His puzzled gaze took in the dissipating fog, the tumbled books and scattered portfolios, the globe upended in its stand, the floor dirtied with chunks of frescoed ceiling, and Aidan slumped on the floor, gray-faced and shaky.

  He shot Cat an accusatory glance as he shouldered Aidan upright and helped him to a chair. “Damn it. Can I not leave you alone for a few hours without worrying you’ll try to kill yourself? Again?”

  “It was incredible, Jack,” Aidan muttered.

  Incredible? Try incredibly horrible.

  Jack looked from Aidan to Cat. “Will one of you please explain what happened?”

  Cat shook her head, pointing at the space where the creature had stood only moments before. “Something. Something stepped through.”

  “Something stepped through what?”

  Aidan straightened, the man once again in control, though his eyes still glowed with success. “A spell from the book. It . . . it worked. I made it work.”

  Jack’s grim features moved over Aidan as if seeing him for the first time. Flashed Cat a silent question.

  But she couldn’t answer. What would she say that would make sense to anyone who hadn’t watched the change in Aidan as he read those horrible words? Who hadn’t witnessed a creature surfacing behind his eyes? Dragging Aidan toward a possession. A domination.

  Yet something of what she’d seen must have been evident in her face. Jack nodded as if he understood. She wished she did.

  “Aidan, listen to me. You need the Amhas-draoi,” Jack said.

  “We’ve had this discussion. I’m fine.”

  “This is magic beyond your ability. You have to see that.”

  Aidan’s expression hardened to stubborn anger. “Thank you for pointing out my deficiencies—”

  “Aidan, that’s not what I meant. But your father was meddling with dark magic he shouldn’t have touched. And in the end it killed him.”

  “No!” Aidan slammed his hand against the desk. “The Amhas-draoi killed him. And I’m not going to crawl to them for help. That’s final.”

  “Then if you’re intent on destroying yourself, can you at least refrain from spells that threaten to destroy the house and terrify the servants?” Jack pleaded. “I’m having the devil of a time trying to convince them it was an extremely localized earthquake. Dublin isn’t exactly known for its tremors.”

  Aidan waved him off with a dismissive gesture of agreement, though even now he seemed only half-aware of his surroundings. “No more fireworks, I promise. Cat will keep me honest. Won’t you, Cat?”

  Startled at being addressed, she flashed a worried nod in Aidan’s direction, but her eyes held Jack’s for long moments after.

  He answered with a half nod. A decisive look in his cousin’s direction. Tense lines tightened his mouth. “I begin to pray for your sake, she does.”

  Lazarus collared a man stepping from a hackney. In the light of the lamps, the man’s supercilious gaze melted into bewilderment then fear.

  “Kilronan House?” Lazarus growled.

  The man pointed back up the street. “North of the river. Henry Street. You can’t miss it.”

  The coachman shouted down from his box. “Here now! What ya on about pesterin’ folks?”

  Lazarus settled his grave stare on the coachman. Felt the unnerving ripple of mage energy like the stirring of a serpent within him. It slithered from its resting place. Glided with deathly intent along limbs that had once stalked the forests of Gwynedd. Fired blood that had once pounded in battle allegiance to Prince Hywel. Sustained a body that, but for the Great One’s black magics, would have remained buried and forgotten.

  The mage energy charged the air. Crackled with a heat and light only he could see, but all could feel.

  Frozen in stupefied horror, the gentleman at his shoulder and the coachman upon his box could do nothing but watch the creature in front of them and wait for their destruction.

  It never came.

  Lazarus fed the evil before it overpowered him. Turned it inward to feast upon his few tattered yet precious memories. And sated, it retreated to sleep.

  But only for a time. When it woke it would be angry. Starved for destruction. For killing. He’d not be able to deny it a second time. Didn’t want to. He had few memories left. He clung to them with the strength of two lifetimes.

  Lazarus released his captive with a shove, sending the man stumbling back into the sanctuary of the hackney. Even before the door slammed shut, the horses had been set to. The coachman barreling down the street as if pursued by the devil.

  He let them go. And with a steady, unerring tread, made his way toward Henry Street.r />
  Kilronan would feel the strike of deadly force. Fall beneath the foul weight of Lazarus’s mage energy.

  Nothing would stay his hand this time.

  No memory would be enough.

  Everything hurt. Down to his hair. His mouth felt as fuzzy as his brain, wine sour and gritty. And even the faded smell of the evening’s cooking was enough to roll his stomach. To combat the nausea, he sat with a cup of black coffee. Dry toast. More black coffee.

  Hunched over the kitchen’s scrubbed worktable, head resting in his hands, he heard the swish of skirts. The drawing back of a chair.

  “Jack told me I’d find you down here. And he was right. You do look like death on a mop head.”

  Aidan looked up into Cat’s solemn green eyes. “As usual, Jack’s choice of phrase is so complimentary.” He winced as his voice reverberated through his paper skull “Spot on, nonetheless.” He sipped at the coffee in front of him. “You couldn’t sleep either?”

  She offered him an are-you-insane stare, and he glanced to where her hands rested on the closed cover of a slim, leather-bound volume. Raised a curious brow, but waited for her to initiate.

  “Not exactly easy to drift off after tonight’s events . . .” Her words trailed off into an accusatory silence.

  Aidan nibbled the crust of his toast. Tasteless and burnt on one edge, but at least it stayed down. “I told you before, I was excited. And perhaps a bit too self-confident, but the spell worked. Did you see it? The summoning brought—”

  “A demon. Here.” Her hands and her voice convulsed before she brought both under control once again. “You pulled an Unseelie across the divide, Aidan. You almost joined with it. Let the creature take over your skin. Inhabit your flesh.”

  “It would never have gone that far,” he said quietly. A sharp knot wedged in his throat. He’d blame the toast, but he knew for a fact it was something more. The same thing that had kept him awake most of the night. Memories of Father had battered him hour after hour. The daring sportsman who’d taught him to climb the sheer, rocky cliffs around Belfoyle. The caring parent who’d read to his children from a great book of stories, transforming the night nursery into a fabulous wonderland spun with words. The professorial academic who’d tried to instill a love of learning and a pride in being Other in his offspring. He’d been stern at times. Demanding when it counted. But never before had Aidan questioned his motives or his morality.

  The diary had opened a window on a different man. A complete stranger. A ruthless Other.

  Cat blurted, “Your father toyed with dangerous magic.”

  Aidan’s face went stiff; the knot in his throat grew. Threatened to choke him. “Father was a dedicated mage and scholar with a desire to learn. To stretch boundaries. To push his mind and his magic as far as they could reach.” He could barely get the words out.

  “Summoning Unseelie? Sacrificing his own child? That’s not pushing boundaries. That’s sailing right off the edge of the map.”

  “You don’t know anything about it.” His chest ached as the knot expanded. Sank into every part of him until the lancing pain of tonight returned a hundredfold. “You weren’t there. You didn’t know him . . . before . . .”

  He sounded like a child standing up to the schoolyard bully. Shaking. Scared.

  “Neither did you apparently. But the Amhas-draoi must have. They executed him. They must have known he was abusing his powers. Look. Just read this.” She pushed the book across the table at him.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a treatise on the nature of Unseelie.”

  He flipped through the book, though his eye barely registered the flicker of passing words.

  “It documents everything,” Cat explained. “Or as much as the author knew or could surmise from the limited contact between the Unseelie void and the mortal world. Though it would seem by some of the footnotes that the contact was more than anyone had dared before. The author had opened the door. Not once or twice. But dozens of times. Maybe hundreds. He talks about the summoning. The fatal possession. Unseelie can’t survive on this plane. Not without a host.” She paused, letting the import of those words sink in. “It’s a temporary bond. Death is certain. The fragile human shell can’t handle that kind of parasitic power. And live.”

  He looked up. “Are you going to tell me my father wrote this book? He wasn’t like—”

  “No, Aidan. Not your father. A man by the name of Máelodor.”

  Bloody hell! The elusive M.

  Unable to read any more, Aidan closed the book, queasiness souring his stomach. If half the pages he’d read were true, the author had been a master mage of incredible power and charisma as well as immense brutality. Along with being a nutter of the first order. His writings hovered somewhere between brilliance and madness. His hypotheses reached so far into the realm of impossibility, Aidan would have discounted them if he hadn’t seen the Unseelie take shape before his own eyes. Sensed the elusive vastness of eternity hovering just out of reach as the creature attempted to merge with him. Akin to a death experience or a birth experience. A total and irreversible passing from one form into another.

  “Well?” Cat prodded.

  “What do we know about Máelodor? Did you find anything else?”

  She shrugged. “A book of essays recounting obscure Other history. Another of natural philosophy that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. But nothing that revealed more about Máelodor than his contempt for the Duinedon world and an overweening desire to return to—in his words—‘the last Golden Age of Other.’ ”

  Aidan didn’t get as far as answering. Instead, mage energy cruised his skin like ice. A moment later the ice plunged like a frozen knife into his gut. Doubled him over with the force of a sucker punch. Congealed the blood in his narrowed veins until his limbs went numb.

  “Aidan!”

  Cat’s frightened scream bounced through his skull. But he’d passed beyond words of reassurance. Whoever just breached his house wards had the power of lethal sorcery behind him. A power Aidan could never match.

  He speared Cat with a grim stare. Choked out one hissed word. “Run.” And clutching the table for support against the menacing weight of panic and mage energy, straightened to meet the attack.

  The door burst in on a wet draft of air, rain puddling on the threshold, the familiar city smells of coal fires and damp stone overlaid with a brimstone burn rising off the man towering before him.

  A colossus in black. Black hair. Black eyes. A face black of purpose. And a blade glittering with wicked, obsidian light.

  He stepped through the door, slamming it closed behind him. The world of Other and Fey crashing into Aidan’s carefully constructed Duinedon persona with deathly violence.

  His gaze searched the room, head up as if scenting a trail. “It’s here. I feel it.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Aidan choked through a throat gone tight and dry.

  The man offered a nod of mock solemnity. A chivalrous gesture in an otherwise cold-blooded killer. “The Great One names me Lazarus. I am death undone.” The man raised his sword, the tip grazing Aidan’s jugular. “The diary. Now.”

  The prick of the blade acted like a goad to Aidan’s numbed senses. His own powers flooded him with a thawing heat. Sparked along his nerves. “Not in a million years.”

  Lazarus’s gaze narrowed, and if Aidan had thought the man’s eyes black, he now saw he’d been mistaken. They glowed with a hell-born, inhuman light. Death reflected back on his victim a thousand times. “I have a million years, Kilronan. You don’t.”

  The neat sweep of the blade had been meant to sever Aidan’s head from his neck. But Lazarus hadn’t counted on Aidan’s bad leg buckling beneath him. Dropping him to the floor. The sword’s keen edge whistling over him. Sweeping the table clean in a crash of china.

  With the instincts of the survivor, Aidan twisted and jinked, using the close confines of the kitchen to dodge the follow-up attack. Lazarus’s frustrated curses sounding like t
he fevered screams of a million lost souls.

  Rolling to his feet, Aidan blindly grabbed anything and everything that came to hand. Pots, pans, trivets, and utensils. They bounced off the man’s chest. Clattered across the floor in a silver shower of cookware. Less a threat than an irritation.

  Aidan found himself backed against a shelf. Reaching behind him, his hand found the knife box. Gripped a handle. Turned and threw. Again and again. Paring. Chopping. Cleaver. The smaller knives did little more than nick Lazarus’s war-toughened hide. A boning knife bit into his arm. Another sliced him a wicked wound across his thigh. He never faltered. Beyond pain. Beyond fear.

  Aidan risked a glance, but the knife box was empty. He’d run out of arsenal.

  Lazarus’s mouth gaped in a sadistic smile. “And now the diary.”

  “Get away from him!”

  The crack of a gunshot shivered the smoke-blackened air. Felled the man with spine-shattering accuracy. His sword clanged and spun across the bricks, coming up against Aidan’s boot.

  Aidan reached down, his fingers fisting around the pommel. Falling into the worn ridges as if he’d been born to it. Leveraged himself up against the grinding of screaming tendons.

  “I told you, Cat,” he growled, “to get out. You—” Stopped himself with a disgusted snort. Was he really going to argue with her over saving his life? Again? This was getting to be a habit with her.

  Cat lowered the pistol, her gaze riveted to the body. Her face wore a blank sheen of terror, but her eyes gleamed with a ruthless ferocity. He’d caught that look in cornered animals. Convicted felons. Those pushed dangerously close to the edge.

  “I came across the gun in your desk a few days ago.” Her voice came hollow of emotion. Weak and fluttery. “I wasn’t sure it was loaded.”

  Aidan pulled it from her lax fingers. Tossed it on the worktable. “I put it there on a hunch.” Nudging the body with the toe of his boot, he swallowed against an instant gag reflex. “One that proved correct.”

  As if pulling herself back from the brink, Cat took a deep cleansing breath. Her shoulders squaring. Her face losing that pasty, vacant expression. “He came for the diary, didn’t he?”