by Nancy Holder
Laurent, Duc de Deveraux, had declared that he was as intrigued by Marie-Claire Cathers-Anderson as his descendent was, and together they had consulted with various demons and oracles to find out more about her. Michael had asked Jer’s help in searching the Net for information on genealogy, heraldry, and French peerage, for he felt certain that the Cathers family had once been noble. It was in her bearing and speech—even, it seemed to him, in her very scent.
Now he walked over to her, looked down at her. He bent, ran one fingernail up the side of her neck, tracing the large vein that he could feel pulsing slowly just beneath her skin. He smiled.
For over a year Michael had investigated this mysterious woman, whose appearance was striking in much the same way as his—ebony hair, black-brown eyes, her face a perfect oval, her skin seashell-smooth and pearly. She was tall and graceful, like the Deveraux men who lived in Lower Queen Anne. Indeed, for a time he wondered if she were a Deveraux herself, the family name perhaps lost through marriage at some point in the past.
During that year—those thirteen moons of the Coventry calendar—Michael had spied on Marie-Claire, had watched her with her daughters and her husband. He sent falcons to circle their gabled rooftop, observing from afar through their eyes with a scrying stone. On his visits to their mansion he had hidden glasses of cursed water in various rooms, through which he could eavesdrop on the family’s conversations. He felt he knew them intimately . . . and he wanted to know Marie-Claire even better. And when Michael Deveraux wanted a woman, he usually got her.
Then had come the revelation: After that year, Laurent had told Michael the story of the Cahors and the Deveraux, informing his descendent that he had known before Michael had even met her that Marie-Claire’s maiden name, Cathers, was what had become of the ancient French name Cahors. Through time and forgotten family history, the “Cathers” had no idea that they had once been the Cahors, one of the noblest witchly houses in medieval France, and the bitterest enemies of the House of Deveraux.
All the research and spying had been a test to see if Michael could learn the truth for himself. Michael had been embarrassed by his failure, but delighted to discover that Marie-Claire was a bona fide witch. That she had no idea of her powers was obvious, although she proved them time and again—by “knowing” who was going to call on the phone; by being in the right time and the right place in many instances. She found things people lost, and she had incredible magnetism toward money and good fortune. And she aged with extreme grace and beauty.
It was said that warlocks and witches together could create astonishingly powerful magics—and though Laurent had warned Michael not to go near Marie-Claire, he had promised himself he would have her . . . when the time was right.
I didn’t know then that he could spy on me. I thought he would never find out.
Michael had bided his time . . . for thirteen long years. During those years he tried another tack—encouraging his two sons to get involved with the Anderson daughters. Marie-Claire’s girls were twins named Amanda and Nicole. Like her mother, Nicole possessed an interior, if unrecognized, spark of magical ability, but Amanda appeared to be a blank—as mousy and passive as her father, Richard Anderson.
Eli had launched himself at Nicole, who, barely fourteen, had not been able to resist his allure. Eli was four years older than she, and when Marie-Claire demanded she put an end to their relationship, Nicole had taken it underground. Maybe the girl sensed the power that swirled just beneath the surface of Elias Alain Deveraux. Maybe being constantly expelled and jailed a couple of times made him exciting and forbidden. Back in the day, all his “crimes” would have been seen for what they were—high spirits and hot blood. But in these times, these overly civilized, unbelievably dull times, Eli had been classified as a “juvenile delinquent.”
Now seventeen, Nicole still saw Eli every chance she got.
Michael knew that his son’s dubious reputation only added to his own attractiveness—poor Michael Deveraux, a hot-looking, rich, single father whose wife had left him, now trying so hard to manage his career as a very successful architect while providing a home for his boys. It was a challenge to women who imagined themselves becoming his angel of mercy, taking on those motherless kids and spending all that money. . . .
So while he worked his way through the married women of Seattle and coveted the prize of Marie-Claire, mousy little Amanda had gotten the hots for Jeraud. Michael knew it from his constant spying, but Jer was oblivious to her pining. Jer had found passion elsewhere, with that nosy grad student Kari Hardwicke at the university. Michael couldn’t stand her. She wanted magical knowledge; she was after power. Besides, she was a slut.
But Jeraud-Luc could not be told what to do, even when it was in his best interests to obey. So he stayed with his grad student while Eli continued to see Nicole, just as Michael wanted him to. Though Eli was far wilder than his little brother, at least he saw the wisdom in doing what Dad said, if it could get him what he wanted.
And Michael saw to it that it always did get Eli what he wanted. Eli stayed controlled. But Jer . . .
Et bien, as Laurent likes to say. All that’ll be over as soon as Jer realizes I finally have the secret of the Black Fire. Then there’ll be no stopping the House of Deveraux.
The Cathers witch mother would die tonight, and the girls soon after. Michael’s experiment with uniting the two families was over, and the Cathers would soon prove more useful to him as sacrifices to the Dark Ones than as magical helpmates.
So, it’s time.
He bent to put on his elaborate hunter-green robe, decorated with eclipsed moons and bloodred falcon’s claws. There was power in the velvet and satin, and as he lowered the hood over his hair, his scalp tingled. Surges of what felt like electric shocks skittered from his forehead to his toes and back again. He flicked his fingers, sending luminescent green sparks into the air. An almost subsonic hum enveloped him, a bass backbeat to the driving rain outside. Then he turned to face Marie-Claire.
She and he, the two illicit lovers, had planned this night for almost a month. Her dull, weak husband was out of town and her daughters were both at a sleepover. The fact that the coast was clear was more evidence to him that this was going to be an especially memorable Lammas.
Not that she knew it was Lammas; he had never shared his magic use with her. He had simply tried to draw power from their sexual encounters. It had not worked very well. He had been surprised and disappointed. . . . It was said that in each generation of witches and warlocks, one of each family was the strongest. None of the combinations he had pursued and encouraged—himself with Marie-Claire; Eli and Nicole; Jer and anybody—had yielded a harvest worth cultivating. Michael wondered if, along with forgetting their legacy, the Cathers-Cahors magic had lain dormant for so long that its power had been significantly diminished.
But this night had augured well for bringing forth the Black Fire . . . if he, Michael, presented the God with suitable sacrifices. A witch, no matter how weak, was always a prize. Her soul would certainly be worth something in the underworld. . . .
Warding his Porsche Boxer so that no one saw him drive to her home, he’d listened to the Grateful Dead, drumming his fingers on the dash, loving the irony of “Dead Man’s Party”—“walkin’ with a dead man over my shoulder”—figuring Laurent was somewhere with him, in spirit if not manifestation.
Once through Marie-Claire’s front door, he’d swept her into her bedroom—she had had no scruples about the fact that this was her marriage bed—feeling, somewhat to his surprise, remarkably tender toward her. This was their last time, although she didn’t realize it. She was going to be dead in a matter of hours, and he wanted to give her something to remember him by as her soul went screaming down into Hell, the home of all unrepentant adulterers.
He’d suggested they go into the living room, and she would have gone anywhere with him by then, even outside into the pouring rain. I’m that good. She loved cabernet; he’d drugged her glass of vi
ntage wine while she wasn’t looking rather than bother with a spell. If tonight was going to work, he needed to save every bit of magical power he had. He hadn’t yet decided if he would let Marie-Claire die unconscious, or if he would wake her up so that she could feel the flames. Laurent would want her to suffer, of course—he could make points with the old boy that way.
Nobody can hold a grudge like my ancestor.
Now, as the storm slammed her house and the angels wept over her morals, he stared at her, stirred deeply by her loveliness. Then resolutely he opened his briefcase and pulled out his athame, handling the dagger with reverence and caution. The double blades were jagged and rough but very, very sharp, and they bore the stains of an enormous number of sacrifices. If the walls of my spell chamber could scream, that thunder outside would be a whisper in comparison.
Like all good—or evil—practitioners of the Art, he had forged his athame himself. Once it had been created, he had fed it his own blood. Marie-Claire had cried out in shock when she’d first seen the scars on his chest and upper thighs, never dreaming they had not been caused by falling through a plate-glass window when he was seventeen—which was what he’d told her—but by giving this magical knife the taste for rituals of torture and death.
In medieval French, he murmured, “I open this Rite with Deveraux blood,” and ran the left blade of the athame across his left palm. He hissed, drawing in his breath. He didn’t like pain, and he had never gotten used to how much pain the dagger could elicit when it was properly used.
As a zigzag of scarlet formed across the lifeline in his hand, a bolt of brilliant lightning lit up the room. Thunder crashed immediately thereafter, shaking the mansion to its foundations. The nightfire clearly illuminated each corner of the large room, showing the fine antiques that Marie-Claire loved to shop for, polishing her cheekbones with a golden sheen as she lay unmoving on the couch. As if she’d been X-rayed, each bone in her skull glowed through her skin. Her fingers became sticks of bone. At the arch of her graceful neck, the vertebrae sat one on top of another, clearly visible.
It’s a portent of her death, Michael thought. The Horned One is accepting her as my sacrifice.
“Do you see that, Laurent?” he murmured. “We’ve got the big guns on our side for this.”
With his unbleeding right hand, he pulled an ornate wooden box from his briefcase. Demonic faces with outstretched tongues glared at him from the centers of pentagrams, one per side. The Deveraux falcon was carved on top, holding a clutch of ivy in its mouth. Ivy was the living symbol of the Green Man, and of the warlocks who worshiped the Lord in all his guises. Let witches have their Lady, their Goddess. It was a fact of nature that the male was always stronger, always prevailed, no matter the battleground.
Michael carried the box to the empty fireplace—he had had some trouble talking Marie-Claire out of laying a fire, when the night clearly called for one—and knelt. He bowed his head and closed his eyes, silently marshaling his occult strength for what lay ahead.
Behind the bricks and mortar of the fireplace, the body of the falcon he had walled up alive three months ago rustled and stirred. Michael Deveraux was renowned for his tireless efforts to locate and preserve the grand old buildings of Seattle, and of his meticulous attention to period detail when he restored them. Indeed, he had proven to be a marvelous help to the Anderson family when they had decided to tear out the old forties’ fireplace that had defaced their Victorian home and return it to its earlier grandeur.
Seizing the opportunity—which he had, after all, helped to create with a few well-dropped hints about enhancing the original charm of their lovely home—Michael had offered to do the work himself. Richard Anderson had promised him a copy of his latest software in return. Michael had pretended to be happy with the exchange, although he couldn’t have cared less about data compression or whatever the hell it was Richard’s firm bought and sold. But as a result of their bartering, the number of charms and sacrifices Michael had installed inside that fireplace would astound most warlocks if they knew of it.
And Michael’s cleverness had certainly impressed Laurent.
Ever since Laurent had told him the story of the Deveraux and the Cahors, Michael had tried to conjure the Black Fire. It was said that the secret of the Fire had died with Laurent’s son, Jean, and that if ever the Deveraux retrieved it they would rule all of Coventry, as was their cursed right. Laurent was as eager as Michael to draw forth the secret weapon; they had simply disagreed on the best way to go about it. Michael had been certain that allying their House with Marie-Claire’s family once more would unlock the shadowed spells. Laurent, hating whatever remnant of the Cahors the lady and her girls represented, would have none of that. In fact, he was certain that allowing the three women to exist could only hamper success.
We’ll find out soon if Laurent was right, Michael thought.
“I call upon my forbears and their powers,” he chanted in old French, placing his bleeding left hand over his mouth. “I call upon the Darkness. I call upon the Hunting Hounds to aid me in the chase. Avantes, mes chiens.”
The distant moaning of a tempest wind echoed through the room. The tip of the mound of ashes in the fireplace shifted very slightly. Michael continued to kneel, tasting his blood on his lips, and waited.
The keening grew louder. A chill breeze ruffled the hair at the back of Michael’s neck, and he smiled with anticipation. The Hunting Hounds had unleashed themselves.
“Mes chiens, mes fréres du diable,” he said boldly, calling to them. “Aides-moi.”
Then he lifted his hand from his mouth and held it up, much as one would raise the right hand to swear to tell the truth in court. The faint whistle became the fierce belling of huge canines, animals with devilish cunning and dark senses; were-creatures that sniffed out souls and light and devoured them whole, ripping to shreds any protective wards or talismans designed to prevent Michael’s ritual from achieving his aim.
A sigh escaped Marie-Claire. To his shock, she shifted on the couch, as if seeking a more comfortable sleeping position.
She shouldn’t be able to move at all.
“Marie-Claire?” he asked softly, carefully. She didn’t answer, but lay as pale and still as death. He wondered if he’d imagined the whole thing. “Laurent?” Michael called. “Is that you?”
Marie-Claire moved again. Definitely moved.
“Aides-moi!” Michael whispered beneath the supernatural howling, which then erupted into frenzied barking. As he gazed at the unconscious woman, the invisible hounds howled triumphantly. They had picked up the scent of something opposing him and weakening his focus, and they screamed with demonic glee as they coursed the hidden forests of his realm of power. Obstacles had presented themselves before, of course, especially during other spells. No warlock alive was without his enemies, and Michael, being ambitious, had many, many enemies.
Has Sir William heard of the plan to overthrow him? Has one of my allies in the Supreme Coven turned on me?
He would leave trespassers and invaders to the Hounds for now. If they caught something, he would deal with it then. In the meantime, he would try to continue as best he could, to outpace anyone or anything that was trying to stop him. The forces were in alignment now, and it wasn’t possible to change them.
He scowled in concentration as he held his wounded hand over the ashes. His rich, red blood dripped steadily and his heart caught up the rhythm as he began to chant in the ancient tongue of his ancestors. In his mind, he translated the potent words: I call up the Black Fire of the Deveraux, I conjure the Burning Night. It is our Hour. It is our Will.
It is my Destiny.
The paws of the dogs clattered over the freshly waxed wood floors of the Cathers mansion. They began to take form and shape. Vague, blurry shadows darted across the boards, racing through the furniture, pawing at the wallpaper. The elaborate crystal chandelier above the sofa swung back and forth like a buoy on Elliott Bay.
The dogs were definitely
after something, and it was leading them on a wild hunt. Whatever it was, it was drawing near. Any moment now, it might materialize in this room.
Michael opened his eyes very wide and pressed his forefinger against the whites, opening his Sight with his blood. His vision swam with viscous pink, and beneath the mounting cacophony he heard the rustle of the dead falcon he had walled up in the Andersons’ chimney as it sought to join the fray.
He thought he saw the faint outline of a human figure, but he could not be sure. He squinted hard through the blood as the Hounds tore around the shimmering form, baying and shrieking like banshees. From his hand, his blood dripped steadily onto the wooden floor.
“Get thee from my sight,” he said, holding out his hand. “I banish thee. I send thee hence. I abjure thee, by the Hunting Lord.”
The figure raised its arms, and new, cold wind shot through the room.
Instinctively, Michael turned protectively toward the pile of ash on the fireplace, shielding it with his hands.
And in that moment, Laurent, Duc de Deveraux, appeared in his advanced state of decay at Michael’s side.
The empty sockets bore down on him; the slack mouth hung open in a grimace of fury. The phantom raised one bony arm and struck Michael across the cheek, the fragments of its brittle fingertips slicing open his cheek.
Michael fell back, more shocked than hurt, staring up at the Duke as the latter reached into the fireplace and grabbed up the handful of ash. The ancient nobleman cradled it against his rib cage, where his desiccated heart hung like a deflated gray beach ball, and shook his other fist at the man on the floor.