“They are, but outweighed by the rest of the company. Not that you had to suffer most of the conversation. How did you do that?”
“What?” said Stephen innocently.
“You were hiding. I saw you.”
“How could you see me if I was hiding?”
“I watched you. I didn’t find it at all hard to concentrate on you, even if everyone else did.”
“Oh. Well, I thought I’d rather not be noticed.”
“You’re good at that,” Crane said. “You’re a very unobtrusive, nondescript little man.”
“Er—”
“Except for those eyes of yours,” Crane went on musingly. “And those incredible hands. And that foxy smile. You don’t let it out much, do you? Everything under cover. And then you stop hiding yourself for a moment, and your whole face lights up, and suddenly I can see just how you’ll look when I fuck you.”
Stephen’s eyes widened in the dark. He knew he was blushing fiercely and felt distantly amazed he had any blood to spare from his groin.
“I came to a conclusion,” Crane went on conversationally. “I want a great deal more of you and I intend to have it. I suggest we get away from this hole and start afresh. As it happens I own a hunting box in Northamptonshire—no live-in staff, simple, isolated. A few days a very long way from here, you show me what those hands can do, and I’ll show you how we do things in Shanghai.”
Stephen swallowed. “How is that?”
“Slowly,” Crane said. “It’s hot there. Very slowly, very thoroughly, inch by inch. You’ll need a great deal of patience, or you might find yourself begging. I think you will, in fact. I’d like to hear you beg.”
“Make me,” said Stephen hoarsely, and grabbed for Crane as the other dropped the reins and reached for him. The taller man’s mouth came down hard on his, long fingers in his hair pulling his head round, tongue flickering against his lips, perfectly shaven chin rubbing against his. Stephen brought his hand up to Crane’s face, felt him jolt, realised he wasn’t wearing his gloves, and jerked away, but Crane pulled him back.
He ran his hand down Stephen’s chest and slipped a finger inside his shirt. Stephen gasped in Crane’s mouth at the touch on his skin. Crane tweaked a nipple, hard. Stephen gave a little yelp and felt the other’s mouth curve against his.
“Did you know,” Crane murmured, “your hands fizz more when you’re excited? That’s going to be fun. No, keep them there. I want to feel this. I want to feel what you like.” His hand was inside Stephen’s waistband now, fingers playing and stroking. Stephen could feel he was leaking already, whimpered, an indistinct plea. “Oh, yes, you love that, don’t you? Eager little thing. Jesus, your hands. I want them round my cock.”
“It might sting a bit,” Stephen muttered, but moved his hands down, then froze. “There’s someone coming!”
“This bloody place.” Crane released him and picked up the fallen reins again to encourage the semi-dozing horse back into a walk. Stephen jerked his jacket into place with trembling hands. He had the distinct sensation that his lips were bruised, and his cock throbbed painfully with frustration.
“We’re not finished,” Crane said softly. “And I want to feel those hands of yours all over my skin when I have you, feel what they do when I make you come. Christ, you’re incredible.”
“Shut up,” Stephen hissed, as the approaching horse ambled into sight. It was ridden by a severely dressed man who doffed his hat as he went by, shooting a look at Stephen, who ducked his head, glancing away. Apparently completely unembarrassed, Crane gave a salute in greeting.
“That was the churchwarden,” he said as the man passed. “I hope he finds Haining more use than I do. Where were we?”
“About to cause a public nuisance. This isn’t safe, not out here.”
“I suppose not,” Crane said. “Will you come to bed with me?”
Stephen took a deep breath. “Not in Piper.”
“Northamptonshire, then?”
“Yes. Or London.” He looked at Crane, gave up the last shreds of control, and went on, “Or on the train down to London, or up against a wall in the nearest alley to the station, or anywhere else you like. Just not in Lychdale. Too many ghosts.”
Crane paused, nodded. “Fair enough. First train to London tomorrow?”
“Lady Thwaite. Hector.”
“Bugger them both.”
“I’m not coming here twice. But…I could see Lady Thwaite early and get someone else to deal with Hector?”
“And we can get the midday train out of here. Right. Here’s the turning.”
The drained, deathly atmosphere of the house hit Stephen as they descended from the dogcart but Crane gave him no time to consider it. He swept Merrick up as he answered the door and bore them both into the drawing room.
“We deserve a drink,” he said firmly, unstoppering the decanter. “The jack is dealt with, the Thwaite is thwarted—”
“Graham took the evening off,” Merrick offered.
“And all’s well with the world. Port or brandy, Stephen?”
“Don’t touch the port, sir,” said Merrick helpfully. “Graham waters it.”
“Brandy, then. Thanks.”
“I spoke to Haining,” Crane told Merrick, returning to get a drink for himself. “He was—” He stopped, and gave a short, dry cough. “He was entirely—” He broke off again, coughed harder. “Blast this—” He made a hacking noise in his throat. Then another. His face convulsed and his hands came up to his neck.
“My lord?” said Merrick.
“Crane?” said Stephen.
Crane was gripping his throat with both hands, shaking his head, his skin suddenly white. He made an appalling retching sound and doubled over. His face distorted with horror, he gave an awful choking cough and opened his mouth, and Stephen saw that a mass of pale hair was bulging out up from his throat and between his teeth.
“Christ.” Merrick stared with disbelieving terror.
Stephen was up from his chair and over, skidding to his knees, grabbing Crane’s head with both hands and pulling him to the floor. “Lock the door, Mr. Merrick,” he said calmly. “Don’t panic, Lucien. Breathe through your nose. Can you breathe through your nose?”
Crane sucked in a half-stifled breath through his nostrils. It whistled horribly. He made another dreadful retching choke and shook his head frantically under Stephen’s rapidly moving, searching hands.
“Keep still. Try not to panic.”
Crane heaved, and a matted double handful of hair spilled out of his mouth. His face was a dark, mottled colour now.
“Fucking do something!” said Merrick savagely.
“I…am.” Stephen’s hands were over Crane’s skull, fingers wide and clawed, digging in. “In five, Lucien. Three, two, one.”
Crane convulsed, spine snapping back, tearing his head away from the painful grip. Stephen lunged after him and grabbed his shoulder. “It’s over, it’s over, let me get this out—stay still, I don’t want to hurt your throat. Here.” He started pulling the hair out of Crane’s mouth, movements precise and gentle, as they knelt on the floor opposite one another and the shaking man sucked in deep desperate breaths through his nose. “Steady. It’s all right, I’ve stopped it. Sit down. Mr. Merrick, he’ll need a drink.”
“Him and me both,” said Merrick. “What the fuck was that? Sir.”
“Attempted murder,” said Stephen. “Keep still, Lucien. It’s nearly over.”
Crane kept still, as instructed, fighting the urge to vomit. He could still feel the dry scrape of hair inside his throat, and worse, though Stephen’s prickling fingertips were only just inside Crane’s open mouth, he could distinctly feel the sensation of gentle movements deep down inside his throat, scooping out the last of the hair. He closed his eyes and tried not to gag.
After a moment, whatever Stephen was doing in his throat melted away. “I think that’s all.”
Crane wiped the back of his hand across his face, began to speak, c
ouldn’t command his voice. He gulped from the glass Merrick handed him and tried again. “That was disgusting.” The skin of his throat felt raw and scraped, and his voice was hoarse and shaking. “What the hell happened?”
Stephen poked the saliva-matted tangle of hair on the floor with disgust. His face was grim.
“Not to state the obvious, you’ve got an enemy,” he said. “That was a calculated—hellfire!”
Crane looked at him in alarm that rapidly turned to paralysing terror as he felt the awful tangle of hair fill his throat again. He tried to call out but it was coming faster and harder this time, he could feel it thrusting and pulsing like some malevolent growth, blocking his airways, pushing down as well as up now. He opened his mouth to scream and felt the choking hair roll forward over his tongue.
Stephen seized his head again but almost immediately let go. The expression on his face was no longer one of calm professionalism. It was alive with rage.
“Candle,” he snapped, holding out an imperative hand, taking hold of Crane’s neck with his other hand as if to throttle him.
Merrick leapt to the side table, grabbed a candelabra and thrust it towards the magician. Stephen wrenched a lit candle out of it. He glanced down at the floor, up at the choking man whose throat he gripped. His pupils were so dilated that the tawny iris was all but invisible, leaving his eyes as black holes in his head.
“Don’t move at all,” he said, with stiff lips. “Choke—on—this.”
He turned the candle over. Crane had just time to register that the flame continued to burn straight and tall and downward before Stephen stabbed it savagely into the mass of wet hair on the floor in front of him.
Crane gave a desperate, shrieking gasp for breath, and inhaled again, more easily, as the hair in his throat shrivelled away to nothing. Stephen’s left hand was gripping his neck firmly but not painfully. His right hand was white-knuckled on the candle. The flame burned downwards into the hair, licking out to all sides around the wax cylinder. The hair wasn’t burning.
Merrick’s eyes flicked to Crane’s and down to the candle. Crane followed his gaze and saw that Stephen’s nails were outlined with thin lines of red. As they watched, the blood seeped out and spread in a thin film across his nails and finger ends.
Stephen was frozen still, his whole body tense and concentrated. His eyes were black holes that looked at nothing, and the blood was gathering into drops on his nails. The air seemed shimmery, as though in a heat haze. Quite suddenly, all the candle flames in the room bent inwards at once, the flames streaming towards Stephen, and Crane felt the hairs on his arms and chest and head stir as if pulled in the same direction.
Blood drops were splashing onto the carpet from Stephen’s fingers now, faster and faster, and Crane could feel a warm wetness on his own neck where Stephen’s fingers dug in. He was arching backwards as though his spine was contracting, and there was a distinct red tinge to the light in the room that was starting to hurt Crane’s eyes. The candles were all burning down at incredible speed, wax melting visibly. Crane saw Merrick’s white-faced terror, realised that his own body was shaking violently, and belatedly knew that he was holding himself rigid to prevent himself from leaping up and running.
The mat of hair leapt into sudden bright flame. Stephen jerked forward, releasing Crane and dropping the candle, and the light snapped back to normality as Crane spasmed away from him.
Merrick stamped on the smouldering candle end, sat down abruptly on the floor and put his head between his legs. Crane wiped a shaking hand across his throat, and wasn’t surprised to see the red stain on his hand or feel that his own skin was intact.
“Can you breathe clearly?” Stephen demanded, sitting back on his knees. “Anything at all happening now?”
Crane shook his head, lips clamped together. Stephen looked around the room, bloody hands stretched out to feel whatever strange currents he could pick up. He pulled a stained handkerchief out of his pocket with two delicate fingers, carefully wiped his nails, wiped the floor of any stray drops of blood, returned the handkerchief to his pocket, folded his arms to stuff his hands under his armpits, and only then keeled forward, hissing, “Ow ow ow, blast it, hellfire.”
“Are you all right?” said Crane. His throat didn’t hurt as much as he’d feared.
“Fine. Fine. Stings a bit.” Stephen did some deep breathing, in and out.
Crane got up on the second try, poured himself a very large brandy, spilling quite a lot, knocked it back in a single, painful gulp, sat on the floor again and began to swear. He swore fluently, inventively and with spectacular obscenity in Shanghainese until he ran out of epithets, switched to English, and started at the beginning again.
“You’re feeling more yourself, then,” said Merrick, when Crane reached an impressively foul climax.
“No, I am not. What the fuck, what the fucking, bloody devil-shit, what in the name of Satan’s swollen cock was that?”
“Do you speak in the House of Lords with that mouth?” Stephen uncoiled his arms and shook his hands out. “Ouch. Can someone pass me the port please?”
“The brandy’s better.”
“The port’s sweeter.” He shook his head as Merrick started to pour him a glass. “Just the decanter please.”
Merrick handed Stephen the cut-glass bottle, which he drank, gulp after gulp, from the neck, red liquid running down his chin. He downed the entire bottle’s worth of port, took a very deep breath, and said, “Watered.”
“You did that thing,” Crane said. “Stripped yourself.”
“Only a bit,” Stephen said. “There’s no power in this house.” He wiped his hand across his mouth, replacing the trails of port with a smear of blood. “How do you feel?”
“Fine. Unhappy. You?”
“Angry.” His voice rang with fury. “That was a vicious attack which was intended to be lethal. I will not tolerate it.”
“What, exactly, just happened?”
“Someone got hold of some of your hair. They set up an equivalency, a…connection through the air, as it were, from the hair they hold, back to you. And they used the equivalency to multiply what they had, to create the hair that was choking you. I suppose you noticed it was identical to yours.”
“Someone wanted to choke me to death on my own hair?”
“Someone wanted to kill you in a way that would be very hard to stop. It’s a very old and powerful technique. The first attack would probably have killed you, but as it happens, I am good at equivalencies, so I broke it, and that should have been that. Except they set it up again in less than a minute, and they did it better and stronger and much harder the second time. And that’s very bad.”
“Why?”
“They have access to a lot of power,” said Stephen. “They are strong. They were able to use a quite different technique. I couldn’t even try to break the second channel as I did the first.”
“But you did break it?”
“No, I used it. Sent the flame back up the other way. Burned the hair they held, for a start. I really need to eat something.”
Merrick whisked out of the room. Crane put his clammy head in his hands. “What the hell is going on? Was that Lady Thwaite? Miss Bell?”
“If it was Miss Bell she is going to regret it very deeply, but not for very long. Or Aunt Annie— No. Lady Thwaite didn’t seem to have anything to offer when I got in her way earlier, and there was real skill behind that attack, but it could have been her. Goodness knows you upset her. Did anyone pick hair off you that you noticed?”
“I honestly couldn’t say.”
“No matter. I can just find out whose house burned down.”
Crane stared at him. “Are you serious?”
“Possibly. I did my level best to incinerate anyone at the other end of the channel. They were good but there will be evidence. Anything from scorched hair to a smouldering heap of wreckage.”
Merrick hurried in with a plate of Mrs. Mitching’s fruitcake. Stephen grimaced with
resignation, but grabbed a thick slice and sank his teeth into it. After a few mouthfuls, he said, “You need to sleep. I am going to set up some wards round you, keep you safe. I’ll keep watch—”
“You need to sleep more than I do,” Crane pointed out.
“I’m going to. We are going to get through the night, and in the morning we are taking the first train back to London, where you are going to stay under the eyes of some friends of mine, while I come back here with a team of justiciars and tear this place apart. Mr. Merrick, I am going to need a lot of candles.”
Chapter Fifteen
He set up the wards around Crane’s bed. To the unskilled eye, it looked simply like a ring of lit candlesticks, until Stephen suddenly looked up from five minutes’ intense concentration and all the flames simultaneously bent sideways, streaming out, as though in a circle of moving air.
“I’ll sleep in the chair,” he said.
“Your bed’s in the next room.” Crane was sitting up in bed, elbows on bent knees and head propped in hands, naked to the waist, magpies spread across his chest.
“There is no power in this house.” Stephen tested the single armchair. It was predictably uncomfortable. “I want to be here.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” Crane said. “Although when I planned for you to spend the night in my bedroom, this was not what I envisaged.”
Stephen laughed, without much amusement. “This is definitely more what I’m used to. Try to sleep.”
“I’m too scared to sleep,” said Crane baldly. “I’m sorry to be a coward, but that was horrible. The thought it might happen again—”
“It won’t,” Stephen interrupted. “I’ve put up wards. They’ll keep you safe.”
“Candles. What do they do?”
“They’ll keep off any etheric movement for a while. Not completely, not as long or as effectively as they would if I had access to power, which is why I’m staying here, but long enough that I’ll be able to get to you before they break, if something starts.”
“Get to me? You’re six feet away,” Crane said. “How long exactly—”
“Enough. I’m sorry, it’s all I can do given I have nothing to work with, but it doesn’t matter anyway. I’m here, and I’m not leaving you, and anyone who comes after you will have to get past me first. Yes?”
The Magpie Lord Page 12