The Curse Behind The Mask (Dirty Heroes Collection Book 6)

by Holly J Gill

  He knelt over to me and placed his mouth to my left ear. “I love you so damn much and I wish you to become my Queen… The curse behind her mask this time has failed,” he added. He moved away and winked as I gawped surprised at him.

  “May I have a few words,” he yelled at the top of his voice. I saw the Queen lift her brows. “I have been very clever Queen…Since you were stupid enough to place a curse on me and open the box which now is closed. I have done some research myself…” I watch as the guards move behind the Queen.

  Elijah ambled to the Queen.

  “I, my Queen have had a curse placed on me…to stop you from cursing me again. You…cannot harm me. You cannot make me kill or hurt another woman again. This means I am free of you and your wickedness.” He remarked. The Queen formed her fists together and snarled narrowing her dangerous eyes at Elijah.

  Her eyes fell to mine, and I saw something in it for the first time, fear.

  “Take her away, where she can rot for all I care…?” He walked closer to her. “You’re a monster. You are pathetic and deserve nothing. Take her away,” he shouted at the guards.

  In seconds the guards had hold of her and dragged her out the room. All I could hear was her screaming.

  I did not care…she was getting what she deserved.

  I turned my head to Elijah as he stared at me.

  “Release her,” he shouted.

  Seconds later I was released to find Elijah, swooping me up and placed me on his knee.

  His arms wrapped around me rightly as I snuggled into him.

  “I will be your prince charming, and you will never witness a dark day again.” He kissed me on the temple as warmth filled me.

  “No more curses?” I asked.

  “That I can’t promise.”

  THE END!

  Clockwork Stalker - Sneak Peek

  What if the storybook hero becomes the villain?

  She is my arch enemy's niece.

  I am an arrogant, controlling bastard, an excellent detective, and women are turning up dead and bound with strange marks on their bodies.

  This is the least appropriate time for me to fall in lust with the enemy.

  Obsession is the sign of a man who is losing control.

  Be punctual for this appointment, Miss Moriarty.

  I have things I need to do. Filthy, perverted things.

  Note: This is a standalone Dark Romance. The Dirty Heroes in this series are all cursed to act on their most deviant desires but the stories are not connected in any other way.

  Chapter 1

  The Trapdoor

  The corridor seemed to shift, as if something had picked up the world, twisted it inside out, then put it down again. Which was impossible. It left the improbable as a likely cause—either he was hallucinating, the airship truly had moved but in a very strange way, or he was suffering from damage to the lobes of his brain. Since he, Sherlock Holmes, was far too young to be ill from most brain diseases, it left the former, or something quite eldritch as the cause.

  Otherworldly won out.

  Still impossible.

  He shelved this quandary. They were on the Case of the Missing Wife, who had boarded a similar airship to this one a few weeks prior, and were travelling across the English Channel to London after departing from an airfield outside Paris.

  On the passenger list was an individual with the name of Wilhelmina Moriarty. Nothing spiked his interest quite like the name Moriarty. A niece, research had informed him. Young, recently from Russia as well as various countries in between, and probably as well versed in criminal deeds as her uncle.

  He and Watson strolled nearer to the door that was their target—a door with a bald monolith standing before it. Sherlock slipped his hand from his coat pocket.

  The blow from his cosh took down the stocky guard, with only the thud then the noise of the body sliding down the wall to warn anyone within. Sherlock paused, checking for signs that someone had noticed the scuffle.

  When he turned to Dr. Watson, the man was clearly distraught—his cheeks were flushed and his gaze was directed at the guard, where he lay on the rivetted metal floor. “He is still breathing.”

  “Yes, I will check—”

  “No. Don’t. He will survive.” At that he turned the knob on the door. The airship lurched slightly, and he waited for their flight to steady before opening the door an inch. A scent wafted out. He’d never smelled this before.

  “Of course. You are as well versed at medicine and surgery as I, Holmes.” The irony in his tone was obvious.

  Watson was unhappy but he had no patience with niceties. This morning, the game was not merely afoot but a-flight and growing ever more surreal.

  He’d trained himself over many years to identify all manner of aromas, but detecting the scent of a nubile woman through a mostly closed door was beyond his usual.

  Logic ticked by.

  As indeed was coshing a guard when a distraction might have had the same final effect. The act was callous. Though a distracted guard might have returned and found them breaking in—with a rough probability of fifty to thirty percent depending upon the distraction. It was the reason he’d struck him instead. Still…

  Sherlock let his logic have the reins, drawing on facts from his past actions and also his past thoughts. His mind had somehow been altered. Losing his mind was his greatest fear. This had all begun with that strange shift of the corridor.

  Yet he pushed the door further open with the toe of his shoe, with Watson nudging in at his left shoulder and the revolver in his assistant’s hand prodding forward. Indubitably, that scent was what drew him onward.

  He pressed on Watson’s hand and mouthed a no.

  A projectile might cause terrible damage to the skin or air sacs of the airship. A knife was more sensible, or a fist. He’d rely on his own boxing and martial skills. From the ship’s plan, the room would likely hold only one person.

  The door glided open on well-oiled hinges, and a slim desk was revealed, running along the right wall. The room was barely large enough for the desk and the sleeping woman sitting in a chair at the desk. Squeezing past her and a second door to the left, he found before him a section of floor that was bare except for a circular, brass-reinforced trapdoor. With his boot he levered at the wheel atop the trapdoor. The trapdoor didn’t budge.

  First things first. He exhaled slowly then turned to the woman… girl? He judged her to be approximately twenty-five.

  She lay on the desk’s leather blotter with her head cradled on her forearms. Her petite black boots were laced up and low-heeled. Practical footwear for an airship. The skirt of her dress reached mid-calf level which was less modest than some wore but about the height of the current rebellious female fashion. His eyebrows rose at the sight of a dagger hilt projecting from one boot.

  The Boer War in Africa had caused women to become employed as factory workers, assembling the new war machines, such as the armored, stilt-walking tanks that’d dominated the countryside and helped Britain. Factory work had led to strange female fashions and freedoms. Some even wore trousers.

  He didn’t quite approve.

  Beneath her arms was a fanned-out raft of papers. The shape of the header on one pamphlet was familiar, and he recognized the curlicue emblem of the coming World’s Fair. Beneath that was a hand-drawn graph of malignant energy versus time, headed with the label: AIRSHIP MEASUREMENTS.

  Her pretty red hair was mostly contained within a bun, but curled wisps had escaped at the sides and drifted across her ear. Now and then the draft from the rectangular grate at ceiling height riffled the papers and stirred those curls.

  The airship lurched again, Watson stumbled, and something made a loud clank. Her sweet lips released a small moan before she adjusted her position, turned her head away from him toward Watson, and began to snore. A lady-sized snore but still a snore.

  His balls chose then to tighten and his manhood throbbed. His reaction startled him. He used harlots when necessary
and did not, ever, lust after random women. Sherlock paced nearer until he stood behind her chair.

  “Oh, dear,” Dr. Watson whispered.

  “Laudanum. We needn’t fear her waking.”

  “Yes. She is a user, and the health authorities are clamping down on its sale.”

  He leaned closer, then closer again to place his face near hers, and Sherlock inhaled. The bottle had been neatly placed aside and plugged with a stopper. The label was in French and turned outward—an old label, printed prior to the French banning idle usage. She smelled delicious.

  He imagined biting her on the part of her neck that showed, naked, above the frilly white collar of her corseted red dress. Sherlock suppressed a shudder of distaste and straightened. This was far too carnal.

  “Not for sleeping, Doctor. And she isn’t an addict, or not quite yet. Not enough drops taken from the old level in the bottle. Her breath has only a faint alcoholic scent, yet she took the dose recently. She’s too… precise.”

  Laudanum was a common sleeping drug, but this woman used it for other purposes. Pain relief?

  One of the papers under her hands had slid further aside at her movement. This was a form to apply to be an exhibitor at London’s next World Fair.

  W. Moriarty was signed in exuberant swirls at the bottom.

  Exhibit: A machine that measures Malignant Energy that may facilitate the detection of criminals and similar activity. Research papers supporting my invention are enclosed.

  Entry fee of fifty pounds sterling: To be arranged on delivery of this form.

  “Hmmm.” With his fist he squeezed the timber back of the chair. Poor enough that fifty pounds was a problem but smart and rich enough to travel by airship from Paris and develop new machinery?

  Miss Wilhelmina was a great curiosity all wrapped up in one pretty package.

  He leaned over her again and stayed there far longer than he needed to—observing the faint parting of her full lips as she breathed, the movement of her eyes beneath her eyelids, the curve of her long lashes, the scent of her. Her position squashed her chest and forced a large portion of her breasts above the neckline of the bodice. With some difficulty, he removed his focus from those ample assets and her cleavage.

  He was close enough to see every flaw on her skin.

  A Moriarty? My god, his arch enemy’s niece had turned out to possess a most desirable form. Perhaps she barely knew her uncle?

  And trees were not green, and the English Channel was only knee-deep.

  “Damn you,” he said quietly. Watson would not have heard the curse.

  The attraction of doing nefarious things to her… and that was so very wrong. It stirred the equivalent of an earthquake in his brain. Had she somehow done something to him? Had Moriarty used her as bait and induced a psychosis in him? Any second now he’d be cackling and twirling a moustache. Both those theories were located on the impossible end of his Scale of the Possible.

  With his index finger, he moved a lock of her burnished bright hair from where it draped over her right eye. Her mouth twitched as if tickled, and he smiled thinly.

  “Holmes?”

  He straightened, erected one finger to inform Watson he’d heard his alarm, and moved quickly to the trapdoor, where he kneeled and began to turn the metal wheel. The mechanism creaked but gave.

  He swung open the heavy trapdoor, leaving it resting against the floor. “Stay there. I’ll return soon.”

  “Yes, that would be best. The guard might wake even if this one is away with the opium fairies.”

  Below was the answer to their investigation or a key clue to solving it. He knew this already because he knew what he would find. His nose had told him, and his hearing, and the glimpse he already had of a cage and a delicate, naked foot. His newly sensitive nose detected no male scents. Making as little noise as possible, Sherlock descended the metal ladder then planted both boots squarely on the floor while he surveyed this long room. He stood at one end of an aisle. From the far end, a blank wall, came the steady purr of the rear Pratney and Winston engines.

  They were already flying over England, but they’d land short of London to avoid the authorities. He and Watson had boarded under false names. While this cargo was disembarked at an unlicensed airfield, the passengers would surely be locked away in cabins by stewards under the pretense of safety?

  Because this cargo was never going to be legal.

  If this was how his client’s wife had entered England, it was going to be a devilish job tracking her down, and she’d be damaged mentally by her torments.

  To the right of the aisle was a row of cages. Though cloth covered many, he could see the contents of the others—pale-skinned women, mostly naked, with some clad in flimsy, French-style lingerie. Their necks were collared, and chains hung about their ankles. None of them had cried out at his appearance. They were obviously drugged. A small table to his right held vials and hypodermic syringes. A glance at the labels told him what he needed to know—the drug was a known inducer of amnesia and also highly efficient at causing a stupor that last several hours. When woken, these women would be confused and easily led.

  Whoever aimed to buy them were without scruples and the most vile of men. Yet lustful impulses tormented him.

  The nearest of the cages held a fair-haired maiden, a naked beauty, her hair long and thick, her fine legs tucked up as she lay on her side, asleep on a thin mattress. She faced away from him, her chest rising and falling gently, and between her thighs was clearly visible the line of her sex.

  It was a display he was unused to. For a long, agonizing moment, he imagined someone opening that cage and doing illegal and hair-raising things to her that nevertheless aroused him instantly. His mind ticked over into logic mode.

  This was a trade, a clearly profitable trade indulging the lecherous whims of men. The female sex was being sold for high-enough prices that the organizers could afford guards, airships, and subterfuge, could afford to steal away wives from husbands. In the hands of someone as intelligent as he was, a man with a keen understanding of the slimy underhand world of the cities—where men grew fat on crime and paid little attention to morals or the Rule of Law—in hands like his, this could be made into a juggernaut of an empire.

  Watson would be a hindrance and must be disposed of first. That man was incorruptible, unblemished, if a little dense at times.

  Where had that monstrous idea come from? Heavens!

  He cursed several times. After pocketing a syringe and a vial from the table, he climbed the ladder to the room, where he strode past the slumbering Wilhelmina then past his assistant.

  “We must be prepared to depart using the new parachutes in extra quick time, Watson.”

  Before he left the room, he returned to slide a Sherlock Holmes card beneath the girl’s hand.

  He closed the door slowly, finding he needed to catch a last glimpse of her, and his heartbeat slowed as he did so, as if to also slow time. Then the door was shut.

  Watson was waiting for him. At his feet, the guard stirred, coughed.

  The parachutes were a moderately new invention, meant to be used as a last resort if he and Watson were discovered.

  “Too bad,” he muttered. “Evil deeds require desperate measures.”

  Sherlock woke up in bed. Not his bed. Not the one Mrs. Hudson renewed with fresh sheets once a week. The mattress or the bedding beneath him stank. The ceiling was filthy, and the room, when he managed to shakily sit up and arrange his legs over the edge, was dimly lit by a flickering oil lamp. Primitive, and he smelled pigs.

  On a small circular table beside the bed was laid out one of his business cards with writing on it, a used hypodermic and partially used vial, as well as his revolver in its holster and sundry other items he normally kept in his pockets.

  The door opened, and early morning sunlight washed past the short man with the grubby trousers and suspenders, and the thinly haired scalp. The hour, he calculated, was earlier than it had been on the airship
, so this was a whole new day. Hopefully the following one and not a week later. The drug vial on the table and small red pinprick ache on his left arm meant he’d been given an intravenous injection.

  “Yes?” He retrieved the card and stared at the writing until it turned into letters. “What do you want?”

  The man at the door was far too cheerful and farmer-like to be his captor, and the door wasn’t locked. A breeze from the window at his back also said he was no prisoner.

  The card? This was his own handwriting.

  He read it and looked up. “You’re a pig farmer?”

  “Yes, sir. I am that. Horace Windle is the name.” He ducked his head. “You asked me to tell you when you woke—and I heard you stirring, sir—to tell you that you did this to yourself and to read the card. But I see—”

  “Yes. I already did. Thank you.” He waved the man away. His head needed time to settle. The ache between his temples and this horrifying feeling that he’d lost control was bothering him.

  “I also tried to order the steamcab for you, sir, down at the village, but it ain’t to be. They won’t come here. But I have prepared my cart. Providing there is a monetary reward?”

  “Oh. Hmmm. Yes.” Sherlock massaged his forehead. It seemed he’d thought ahead and had known he’d be groggy. He must trust himself. “That will do then. Thirty minutes to wash and so on. Then we’ll go.”

  “Of course, sir. It’ll be only…ohhh… two hours to the outskirts of London where you can catch a cab to your rooms.”

  “Yes.” Once more, he stared at the writing on the card. The door clicked shut.

  One. I injected myself for a good reason.

  Two. Watson is gone. Forget him for the moment.

  Three. Remember Miss Wilhelmina. Her machine she’s taking to the World’s Fair may be important.