by Zoë Archer
Sensation tore through her. It was a magnificent devastation, molten and unstoppable. Impossible. She had no body, no way to feel or experience release. And yet she did. Through his words alone, he tore down the barriers between the spirit and the flesh.
Oh, gods, it had been an eternity.
Her climax rolled on in endless waves. As she bowed up with release, she heard his guttural moan. She managed to pry her eyes open enough to watch him spend, his head thrown back, face carved sharp. Beautiful agony.
Had she been flesh, his semen would have coated her belly and run down her thighs. But she had no body, and the droplets passed through her and onto the mattress.
He sprawled onto his back, chest heaving. After a few moments, he tucked himself back into his breeches and fastened them. He lay back, a man wrung dry.
“I never thought . . .” She struggled to find words, to gather her shattered mind. “To comprehend such marvels . . . How was that possible?”
“Because we are meant to be lovers,” he said.
Such a simple explanation, yet it felt exactly right.
He gazed at her, and she could not stop her hand from stroking along his bristled cheek, as if she could truly feel him. His eyes slowly closed. Being mortal, and a man, Bram’s breathing soon deepened and slowed. Livia lay beside him, listening to the sounds of his sleep. The blood on his face had dried. There would be more blood—his, countless others’. That was certain.
Tonight had been revelatory. Her magic drew strength when Bram fought; she was not as powerless as she had believed. And the pleasure he had given her afterward, here, in this derelict home that once housed his father’s mistress, on a bed that was shabby and worn . . . that pleasure had been a wonder. It still was, echoing through her in golden reverberations.
More than physical release. An unexpected connection as intimate as two spirits might know. What was this man? Sinner, soldier. Lover.
Her lover—for now. Each hour that passed meant another hour lost, never to be regained. She could not rely on the future. It was a fragile web, and the impending storm would tear everything to tatters.
Chapter 10
From his vantage at the window, Bram watched the street. Christ Church’s bell chimed the nine o’clock hour. The hour of business and industry—or so he’d been told, possessing neither the need to do business nor the impulse to industry. Good people walked the streets of London during the daylight hours. Silk weavers concentrated their shops here in Spitalfields, and, as the price of imported silk was exorbitant, the weavers were never idle. After all, England needed its finery.
But this morning, almost no one was on the street, walking to or from their workshops. A few men hurried past, gazes fixed on the ground, and one woman darted between two buildings, her shawl pulled over her head. Bram couldn’t hear the clicking of looms. A child cried and was quickly stifled.
Bracing his hands on either side of the cracked casement, he stared down at the avenue and felt the frown shaping a pleat between his brows.
“Something’s wrong,” he muttered.
“It often is,” answered Livia behind him.
A corner of his mouth turned up. Her mordant wit remained unchanged—yet he expected no less. A night’s pleasure would not alter the heart of her, no matter how searing that pleasure had been.
If anyone would have told him that his most intense sexual experience would involve a woman he couldn’t touch and who could not touch him, he would have laughed in disbelief and told his informant to keep drinking.
But last night . . . Nothing in the whole of his wicked, wayward life had ever equaled what he and Livia had shared. Even the thought of it now turned him molten. Sex had always been a purely physical action. With Livia, it had transformed into something far beyond himself, beyond the needs of the body, or the temporary cessation of sorrow.
Yet that pleasure couldn’t hold back the evil he could sense growing.
“It’s getting worse,” he said.
“John and the Dark One know you are no longer their ally.” Livia came to hover beside him, her radiance pale in the cold gray morning. “Of a certain, the balance continues to tip.”
His stomach growled. Smirking, he laid a hand atop his empty stomach. “The doom of the world may hang in the balance, but I need breakfast.”
She rolled her eyes. “Mortals and your appetites.” “You enjoyed those appetites last night.”
“Most assuredly.”
“There will be more.” Moving away from the window, he stepped close to her. If she had been flesh, at this nearness he would have felt the heat of her body, smelled the fragrance of her skin. “I will give you pleasure to rival the gods.”
“An audacious boast,” she said, tipping up her chin. Yet her eyes darkened further and she ran her tongue over her bottom lip.
He’d happily burn down half of London just to kiss her.
“Not a boast, but the truth,” he answered. “Whatever you experienced in your mortal life, any other lovers you may have had—I’ll make you forget them all. You’ll know only me.”
She stared at him for a moment, her lips parted. “I want nothing more.”
He reached for her, yet his hand passed through the curve of her neck. Acrid frustration welled.
Unconcerned with the demands of his heart, his stomach gave another complaining rumble. The last meal he had eaten had been a hastily bolted chop sometime yesterday afternoon.
“Go,” Livia said, smiling. “Attend to your quotidian needs.”
A thorough inspection revealed that nothing edible remained in the pantry. He’d have to go out to obtain something to eat.
“If I step out of doors in this,” he said, plucking at his torn and bloody clothes, “I’ll be dragged to Newgate as a suspected murderer.”
“The law may show leniency if you tell them you only killed demons.”
“Never mind Newgate. I’ll be hauled to Bedlam and be lucky if the visitors pelt me only with rotten vegetables.”
A search revealed a large chest shoved into the corner of a tiny room adjoining the bedchamber. Bram hefted the chest out of this small room. Setting the trunk on the floor of the bedchamber, he rattled the lid, and discovered it was locked tight.
“Could be empty,” he muttered, “or simply hold bedclothes. Though I could wear a sheet as a toga.”
Livia sniffed. “It takes more than a length of linen to wear a toga. However,” she added with an appreciative leer, “if you strip down to your smallclothes, you’d make a fine gladiator.”
He discovered he rather enjoyed being ogled. A thread of shadow worked its way through him, however. Once, he’d been a kind of gladiator, and gained scars both visible and unseen.
“I’ve a way to discover what’s inside,” she continued, kneeling down beside the chest. Seeing her on her knees brought to mind far too many distracting ideas and images—none of which could ever come to pass.
As he watched, Livia stuck her head inside the heavy wooden box, disappearing up to her shoulders. She reemerged a second later. “Clothing,” she announced.
“If I were a housebreaker,” he said, “you would be extremely useful. I’d avoid all the empty coffers and plunder only those replete with treasure.”
She started when he rammed the heel of his boot against the lock. After a few solid kicks, the metal broke apart.
“Magic could have opened the lock more readily,” she said dryly.
“My way is more satisfying.” He lifted the lid of the chest then pulled out its contents. A man’s velvet coat and waistcoat, both musty, the embroidery along the cuffs and lapels frayed. Holding up the coat, he studied it with a frown.
“This was my father’s.”
“You and he were of a size,” Livia noted.
“He always seemed so big to me.” Yet, after Bram slipped off his torn coat and waistcoat and donned his father’s clothing, he discovered they fit. He strode into the other chamber, Livia right behind him. There, in the
cracked mirror propped against the wall, he considered his shattered reflection.
“He’d wear this to church,” Bram said, staring at himself.
“Baron Rothwell always made an impressive figure, even when supposedly honoring a higher power. I’d look back and forth between him and my brother as we sat in our pew. Arthur seemed so small next to Father.” Bram shook his head. “That poor sod—I never envied him.”
“But Arthur was the heir, the favored one.”
He snorted. “Even better for me. I didn’t want to have to wear the responsibility and decorum of the title. All I wanted was to pursue my own desires.” He tugged on the sleeve of the coat. “Now I’m Baron Rothwell. Not the heir my father had wanted.”
The coat was of an old-fashioned style, its skirt fuller than the current mode, its cuffs wider, and the waistcoat was longer than modern fashion dictated. Aside from an odor of must and cedar and the unraveling embroidery, the coat remained in decent condition. His father had always demanded the finest quality.
“There’s a resemblance, as well,” said Livia. “Between you and your sire.”
“I don’t see it.” Father had been a formidable man who expected utter filial obedience. Bram remembered how cold his father’s blue eyes could look when he was defied—and Bram had seen them cold many times. In the rare moments when Bram had seen Father without a wig, his close-shorn hair had been black as night. Black as Bram’s own hair.
The mirror reflected him in jagged shards, a piecemeal man. A broken distortion of his father’s successor.
He turned away from the mirror.
“My belly is empty,” he said.
When he ventured out into the street, with Livia an invisible presence beside him, he realized it did not matter what he wore. No one looked at him, too busy hurrying to their destinations. An abrasive cold covered the city, the cobblestones treacherous and slick, people’s breath coming in white puffs as they hurried in and out of buildings.
Bram himself walked quickly down the street, making sure that no suspicious characters lurked in alleys or trailed behind him.
Is it possible John would know where you might be? Livia asked.
Doubtful. Even I’ve never been to the Spitalfields house until yesterday. Just knew its direction from correspondence. Can’t be too cautious, however.
Not anymore, she answered.
At a pie shop, Bram purchased two meat pies purported to be made of mutton. The pinch-faced shopkeeper wrapped up Bram’s food in old broadsheets, looking nervously at the street all the while.
The pies weren’t quite the fare Bram was accustomed to, but he’d eaten meat laced with maggots during a long siege in the Colonies. Suspect pie hardly bothered him.
“You’re my first customer today, my lord,” the pieman said. “Thinking of closing up shop after you.”
“Not a soul?” Bram asked.
The shopkeeper shook his head. “Hardly anyone out these days. Been an ill feeling in the city for a long while, but it gets worse by the hour.”
Bram muttered something inconsequential to the shopkeeper and set a handful of coins down on the counter. After buying a flagon of cider from a nearly empty tavern, he hurried back to the vacant house. Possibly John had eyes throughout the city, keeping watch, and Bram didn’t want to risk being seen in public.
In the bare parlor, he ate his meal quickly, crouched on the floor like a scavenger. Livia made troubled circles as she drifted around the chamber.
“John’s power grows,” she said, voice taut. “I feel it like a web spreading over the city, and beyond. The barrier between the underworld and this realm weakens. He’ll open the gate, and soon.”
His food consumed, Bram crumpled the grease-stained papers and threw them into the corner. A rat emerged from a hole in the baseboard, sniffing, then grabbed the paper and scuttled back into its den.
“We tried to find him at Wimbledon, but he sent his minions instead. Perhaps a more direct assault is necessary. I’ll go to his home.” Bram rose to standing. “Persuade my way inside. Then put this”—he gripped the hilt of his sword—“into his heart.”
Livia drifted close, her lips pressed tight. “We saw what John sent to dispatch his rivals. Imagine what guards his own home. Should you make it past his front steps, a host of demons will bar you further entrance. Your own gift won’t work against them.” She clenched her hands into fists. “Our joined magic isn’t reliable enough to take on someone as strong as John.”
“If you were flesh—”
“I’m not and never will be again.”
“But if you were,” he pressed, “would you have enough power to break John’s curse, bring the other Hellraisers to London? You had the power to raise the Devil when you were flesh—this should be nothing to you.”
“My magic draws its strength from living energy. Of which I have none.” She growled in frustration. “These are meaningless pursuits, these hypothetical questions. My body is lost to me, and so is the full strength of my magic. There’s nothing to be done. The task is impossible.”
“A dangerous word to say to me, impossible.” He stalked the chamber, keeping pace with his racing thoughts. “Where is your physical body?”
“Long since turned to dust.”
He wheeled back to face her. “I saw your memories. When you imprisoned the Devil, you stepped on the other side of the door to close it. You didn’t leave behind a corpse. The only bones the Hellraisers found in the temple belonged to a Roman soldier. But your body is out there, trapped somewhere. Between the realm of the living and the dead.”
“A place beyond the Ambitus,” she said, “making it irretrievable.”
“You don’t know that for certain.”
“I know that one cannot jaunt back and forth between this mortal world and the underworld. To regain my body, to bring it back—that is hopeless.”
A thought had begun to grow, spreading its roots through his mind, his heart. The very idea of it whetted him to a knife’s point. He felt sharp and thin as a blade, but expansive as imagination itself.
“There’s no hope for our fight if you stay this way.” He waved at the translucency of her form.
“We might battle,” she admitted with a scowl, “but never win.”
“And the world would go up in flames.”
Tense, silent, she nodded.
He understood now. What had been the smallest granules of possibility became tempered steel. He thought he might feel fear, or doubt. Yet the more he considered it, the more he understood its rightness.
This was who he had been before going to war. When he’d had purpose, and a belief in something larger than himself. Only now, he had lost his infantile optimism. He knew the world, now. It was a merciless place. Only savagery thrived.
He could be brutal. Brutality was part of him—he embraced it now.
Calm and purpose enveloped him. He felt a peace hitherto unknown.
Everything in his life had been leading him to this point. “I can secure our victory.” He took several steps back. His gaze never leaving hers, he said, “Veni, geminus.”
* * *
“You cannot,” Livia cried, but she spoke too late. The words had been said.
The smell of burning paper thickened the air. The light within the derelict chamber dimmed, as though a bank of clouds obscured the sun. Shadows congealed and then—
There stood the geminus. Bram’s double.
“What a hideous bastard,” Bram said.
The geminus glowered at him. “My master is displeased by your perfidy.”
“I don’t care,” Bram answered.
The creature opened its mouth to speak, then espied Livia. Its features tightened, fearful and angry. “Her. She has poisoned you, turned you against us.”
“Leave the ghost out of this,” said Bram before Livia could snap back a reply. “Disappear if you want, go slinking back to your master with tales of my whereabouts. But, stay, only a moment. I’ve a theory I want to
test.”
In a movement too quick to see, Bram drew his sword and cut it across the geminus’s face.
The creature shouted, bringing its hand up to cover its wounded cheek. At the same time, Bram gave a small hiss. A slash of red had appeared on his face, precisely where he’d injured the geminus.
“It’s true, then,” Bram said with a grim smile. “Any wound you sustain also injures me.”
The geminus sneered. “Your Hellraiser friends learned the same. There is no harm that befalls me that will not also hurt you. A scratch, a bruise. To wound me is to wound yourself, whilst my master possesses your soul. Which he most assuredly does.”
“Excellent,” said Bram, baring his teeth.
He plunged his sword right into the geminus’s heart. Livia stared in horror. No sound came from her mouth. She could not move, could do nothing but look on, appalled and terror-struck, as Bram sank his blade deeper into the geminus’s chest. The moment his sword had pierced the creature’s flesh, both he and the geminus gasped aloud. A wound immediately appeared on Bram’s chest, directly over his heart. It spread crimson and dark, staining the velvet of his waistcoat.
The creature gaped at the sword deep in its breast. It turned wide, stunned eyes up at Bram. “What . . . ? But you . . .”
“Yes,” said Bram tightly.
He hissed as he withdrew his sword from the geminus. Blood seeped faster, both from him and his double. Ashen, the geminus stumbled, then sank to its knees. It pressed its hands to its chest. More blood oozed from between its fingers. A mortal wound.
Bram swayed on his feet. His chest was bathed in scarlet, yet he wore a fierce look of triumph.
Livia rushed to him and tried to place her hands against the wound, but they passed right through him. She fought to locate her magic, seeking its radiance within that she might work some spell, any spell, to help. Yet the more she searched, the less she found, only a growing darkness. Fear unlike any she had ever known shredded her.
“Gods, what have you done?” she cried.
“What I . . . had to.” His face white, he listed, then went down hard on one knee.