Devil’s Kiss

by Zoë Archer

  “And you were great friends right away.” The muslin in her hand darkened as it swabbed away crusts of blood. Bram’s rapier had made that wound. It was deep enough to leave a scar.

  Yet it could have been much worse. Bram’s skill with a blade could not be matched by any of the professional maestros in London. Not for the first time in the past few hours, Whit wondered if Bram had truly fought as hard and ruthlessly as he could.

  “The first time we met, I teased him about his shoes. One of the buckles was loose, and it jingled when he walked, so I called him a cow. A cow in the field. He punched me in the stomach. Whenever we saw each other—in the refectory, at lessons, on the football pitch—we beat each other bloody. A month that went on.”

  “Something changed.” She peered closer at the wound, her breath feathering over him.

  He forced his concentration on the stream rather than her head bent low, or her braided hair brushing the tops of his thighs. “There was another boy, a liar and bully. Bram and I beat him bloody one day. And then we were friends.”

  Her chuckle curled over the flesh of his abdomen. “Nothing strengthens friendship like a shared beating.”

  “After that, we were inseparable. But when I went to university, he bought a commission. Saw each other often enough when he had leave. Cutting a swath through the assemblies of London—a young earl and an officer in His Majesty’s Army.”

  “What gorgie could resist?”

  Few did, but he was not much inclined to tell her that. “He was different back then. So was I. That’s the callowness of youth and privilege. He went to the Colonies to fight the French, and came back ... changed. Wilder than ever. I couldn’t even attempt to keep up with him. He seldom talked about what happened over there. It left him profoundly altered. Almost ... broken. It ... hurt to see.”

  “Did you ever speak to him of your concerns?”

  He looked at her, raising his brows. “Have you no knowledge of men?”

  Her smile was rueful, and she dipped her head in acknowledgment. “Despite your silence, you stayed friends.” Satisfied with the cleanliness of the wound, she reached for a broad leaf. A grassy, herbaceous scent rose up, slightly astringent, as she dabbed a green paste over the injury. Saint John’s wort, she had said as she had gathered the plants and ground them into a salve.

  It was a double sensation: the stinging of the wound, and the gentle press of her fingers. Yet that was how it played out between them, in the intermingling of pain and pleasure. He enjoyed the edge. Everything else seemed too soft now, too pale and enfeebled.

  “I met John and Edmund at university, and Leo much later, in London. If there were founding members of the Hellraisers, they would be Bram and me.”

  “Prestigious.” She wrapped more strips of muslin over the wound, her movements deft and practiced.

  He scoffed. “A dubious distinction. Yet it’s who we are.” H quickly corrected, “Were. Now ...”

  She tucked in the ends of the muslin to secure the dressing. Satisfied, she looked up and held his gaze with her own. In the darkness, nothing possessed the depth of her eyes, black and as rich as velvet. “Now you must learn yourself all over again.”

  He found that he could not hold her gaze, and his own moved restlessly over the moon-glazed field, touching briefly on the mercury gleam of the stream, the slivers of grass ruffling in the cold breeze—anything to distract him from the truth he now faced. None of it worked.

  In a kind of daze, he spoke. “I keep seeing them, the burning ruins of my life. Whole edifices charred and collapsing in the wake of my entanglement with Mr. Holliday.” Shaking his head, he amended, “No, that’s not entirely true. There had been foundations, but the structures themselves were built of nothing more than diversion and dissipation. Hardly the sturdy materials in which one could take shelter. If I now stand upon a scorched wasteland, I have only to blame the architect: myself.”

  Ahead lay shadows and yet more uncertainty. He had only two forces guiding him: the black chains binding him to the geminus, and Zora.

  Bram had been his closest friend. Yet, for all their shared experiences, for all the long nights they had spent with cigars and brandy in hand, speaking of everything and nothing, not once had Whit confided in Bram as he now did in Zora.

  He was a gambler. He kept everything close, revealed nothing of himself, by either design or habit. Yet, when he was with this woman, words came from him as if from a cask finally tapped. The wine within had turned acrid and bitter, and it needed out.

  Instinct guided him. If there was anyone who walked this blighted earth to whom he could reveal himself, who could see his weaknesses and doubts without using them against him, that person was she.

  “I’ve spent my life doing exactly as I pleased. Hardly a word of contradiction spoken against me.”

  “Until you met me,” she said.

  He discovered he was smiling. He looked down at the wound beneath his ribs, the bandages pale against his skin. “Broken he may be,” he murmured, his smile fading, “but I envy Bram. He went to war, proved himself.”

  “You aren’t going to fail,” said Zora, heated. “We aren’t.” Hers was a spirit that could not be crushed or extinguished. Stronger than fire.

  Yet she needed to understand that nothing was certain, especially where he was concerned. “Shall I tell you stories? The kind told around a campfire? Stories where the handsome prince defeats the wicked beast.”

  “I have seen those plays, as true as the pasteboard dragon.”

  “Gambler I may be, but I don’t lie. At the end of this, there is no happy ending.” His words were brutal, yet he knew that their brutality did not target her. He had to remind himself that as heroes in tales went he would never be what was required. Heroes did not have monstrous hungers clawing them from the inside out. They had noble hearts, pure intentions. He possessed neither.

  The flames marking his skin twisted their way down to just above his wrist. An inexorable devouring. How long did he have left before they covered him entirely?

  She studied the hand-shaped burn on his shoulder. Softly, she traced its perimeter. The pain of it branched out like thick vines of heat, filling him with fire-laced pleasure.

  “Every tale changes with each telling.” She blew lightly over his singed flesh, cooling him. “You can’t foresee how this will end.”

  She dabbed more of the slick and aromatic herbal paste upon his shoulder, then applied it upon his injured hand. She took more fabric and wound it around his shoulder, covering the burn and the paste, and wrapped his hand, as well. Each brush of her fingers jolted through him.

  He shoved his clothing back on but could not find the wherewithal to redo the lacings and buttons. As he stood, his waistcoat and coat gaped. His open shirt revealed his chest, his stomach. A man undone. He had nothing to hide behind, not his wealth, not his title, and certainly not his deeds.

  “You deserve better.”

  “I think we deserve each other.” She smiled up at him.

  His laugh felt hard in his throat. “So we are both being punished.”

  She shot to her feet, and her lush mouth was tight with anger. “You set too low a value on yourself. This is the time we prove ourselves. This is when we show who we are. You say your life is in ruins? Then rebuild it. However you want. Stone by stone. Brick by brick.” She laid her palm across his jaw, and her touch was steady and sure. “You’re strong enough.”

  All he could do was stare at her in wonder. He had bared himself to her in many ways, trusted her as he’d never trusted another. He had gambled the most valuable stake he had ever pledged. Not money or possessions, but the core of himself.

  In games of chance, someone won, and someone lost. One player had everything, and the other walked away with nothing.

  Not this time. He had taken his biggest risk, and both he and Zora were all the richer for it.

  Lights from the assembly hall spilled out onto the walkways. Inside, townsfolk danced to the m
usic made by fiddle and viol. Local gentry, landowners, prosperous shopkeepers, the parson. The town was small, yet sizeable enough to support its own elite. In London, such folk would hardly get past the front door of the humblest aristocratic gathering. But the world did not revolve around London—shocking as the idea might seem.

  Whit and Zora rode past the assembly hall, watching the patterns made by the dancers. Circles and lines. Back and forth. The music was merry. The people were not. All of them wore tight, distant expressions. They clasped each others’ hands overlong, or barely touched. Their eyes spoke of mistrust, caution, fear. None of them wanted to be there, sweating beneath their powder and finery, chandeliers dripping wax upon their self-dressed hair. A girl wearing yellow watered silk cried in the corner, yet no one noticed, no one cared. Those men who did not dance paced up and down the length of the hall eyeing one another mistrustfully.

  “A wonder any of them bothered to come,” murmured Zora.

  “They seem ... compelled.” Pushed by invisible hands, tugged on by unseen strings, like toys or marionettes.

  Much like himself, following the geminus. The creature’s presence in this town filmed the cobbled roads, gathered in the oily puddles, and clung to the mistrustful faces of the townsfolk. In a town where the greatest unrest came from squabbles over who sat in which pew on Sunday, a deep, cancerous anger now ate at its soul.

  They had no direction but the dark binds around Whit’s heart. He did act as their bearing compass, leading them down roads, through towns and villages, following what he could of geminus’s course. Which wasn’t a course at all. The damned thing didn’t travel as humans did, upon roads, linearly moving from here to there. It appeared and disappeared at will, alighting like some damned predatory bird.

  Wherever they rode, evidence of the creature blighted the landscape. Broken windows, raised voices, angry throngs massing in streets and squares regardless of the hour, or, as it was here, an assembly on the verge of collapsing into diseased chaos.

  Whit had investigated each town, but he knew with a growing instinct that the geminus remained always ahead of them. It had been in this town, that much was certain.

  “The geminus is gone,” he clipped as they rode away from the assembly hall.

  She had her own impressive vocabulary of curse words, most of them in the Gypsy tongue, and she used them now. He knew the words were low and vulgar, and yet, in spite of, or perhaps because of that, his blood heated. No one would ever confuse her with one of the pastel silk–wearing girls who haunted the corners of assembly halls.

  “It leaves this ... coating ... in the air,” he said when she had run through her litany of Gypsy oaths. “Like ash after a fire.”

  “We need to see what will burn, not what has burned.” She glanced at the darkened windows around them and had to wonder, just as he did, if more shadowed shapes lurked just on the other side of the shutters.

  He guided his horse close to hers, then pushed up the cuff of his coat and shirt, revealing his hand. Her gaze widened. The flame markings covered his hand, trailing up his fingers, and curving around to snake across his palm. The marks obscured the lines on his palm, making them impossible to read. Only hours before, his hand had been bare of everything but his rings.

  “The thing that continues to burn is me.”

  The rest of the night’s journey proved fruitless.

  He surveyed the latest village, where a group of men were too busy accusing one another of offenses both real and imaginary to notice Whit and Zora slowly riding past. On a nearby hill, a farm outbuilding burned. The predawn sky glowed red.

  It must stop. It had to stop. He submerged himself in the dark, sharp greed coiled around his heart, followed it. Sentient to nothing else, yet feeling the edges of danger on every side, and the tendrils of flame that grew over his body, claiming him.

  Something pulled at his awareness: a buried memory rising up like a ghoul.

  He looked about him, turning in the saddle. The sun had cleared the eastern horizon, revealing that the land had grown rockier, sharply undulating. The bent humps of limestone hills rose up, with the road being little more than an attempt to scratch a path between mountains, and dawn light could not penetrate the shadowy dales.

  “I know this place. There.” He pointed to a peak half a mile away. “It marks the southernmost boundary of Whitney holdings.”

  “Derbyshire.” She gazed at the rolling hills, dotted with gorse and ash.

  A thrush burst from the hawthorn scrub in a tiny explosion of wing beats. The bird darted away, until it disappeared into a stand of alders atop a hill.

  Whit’s heart beat as fast as the bird’s wings. Chill sweat filmed his back. “My family’s estate.” The geminus had been here. What did it want? What would it take from him on his ancestral lands?

  He urged his tired horse into a trot. They reached the crest of the peak, affording them a view of the hills, faded to paleness with the advance of autumn. Crofts huddled in the vales, and sheep formed white specks as they grazed. In the still of early morning, their bleats carried all the way to Whit and Zora.

  After the chaos they had encountered over the past few days, everything seemed remarkably peaceful. But Whit wasn’t comforted. He felt the echo of the creature’s presence like burning ice.

  “Whitston Hall is that pile of stone by the lake.”

  She stood up in her stirrups to get a better look, then sat back down on the saddle. “Maybe someone there has seen the geminus.”

  “There’s only the steward in residence, and a skeleton staff. No one else. I’m seldom here.”

  “Is it here now, the geminus?”

  He reached through the dark haze, searching. “I can’t feel its presence,” he said after a moment. “Not anywhere. But I do know that it has been here. And the Devil only knows what destruction it has wreaked.”

  Chapter 14

  They could not urge their weary horses to go any faster than a walk. Whit had no idea what they would find once they reached Whitston, and apprehension gnawed at him in relentless, slow bites.

  Unanticipated memories sifted into his mind the closer they came to Whitston. Playing knights with his brother, Michael, on the heather-laced hills. Laying Michael to rest in the funerary chapel after the fever took him. Returning to the chapel to entomb his mother, and then his father. His sister, Sarah, weeping into an embroidered handkerchief. Walking back from the chapel, hat in hand, as his father’s man of business explained that the title belonged to him, and all the privileges and responsibilities that came with being an earl.

  He had accepted the privileges, but not much of the responsibility. He’d seen Sarah married, and well, with a substantial dowry. She’d born four children, three of them still living. The last he had heard, she was increasing again. So her marriage turned out as well as anyone could hope—though he supposed he was the last person she would confide in. In one of her more recent letters, she upbraided him for his wild living, his life at the gaming tables.

  Was their family’s home now a ruin? The agonizing, slow pace of the horses would not allow him to know, not soon enough.

  Wearily, Whit and Zora’s horses plodded up the winding lane leading to the Hall. He tried to distract himself by studying the lands. The pastures and hills looked well cared for, and the farmers he passed raised their hats in respectful greeting. The laborers stared at him with wary awe—several of them did not know who he was, until informed by others—yet they had robust health, full cheeks rather than gaunt. Some comfort there, knowing his tenants prospered, even in the shade of his benign neglect. He had Mr. Reynolds, his steward, to thank for their prosperity. His correspondence about the estate came regularly, and when Whit bothered to read it, what he found bespoke careful stewardship.

  The farmers stared more guardedly at Zora. As always, a Gypsy attracted mistrust. Yet more than a few of the laborers looked at her with something else besides suspicion: admiration. She sat in the saddle, straight and proud, dar
k, windblown hair coming loose from its braid, unconcerned by the attention she attracted. There was no denying her exotic beauty.

  One young, hale man leaned upon his scythe and gazed at her with open desire. He tried to catch her eye, and puffed out his chest to draw her attention.

  Thick, pungent rage poured through Whit.

  Mine.

  He wanted to leap off his horse and beat the man. He would not even use the scythe, but wanted the pleasure of the swain’s blood on his hands rather than a blade.

  Mine.

  If he could, he would forbid the sun from shining upon her, so that he and he alone could have the pleasure of seeing her.

  Tension knotted his shoulders, his body. It must be the geminus’s influence, this black, possessive fury. He had to keep tight restraint on himself. The effort singed him from the inside out, making him ache even more than days and days in the saddle.

  Past the outlying fields, he and Zora rounded a bend and emerged from a copse of birch trees. Zora audibly gasped.

  “That can’t belong to you,” she said.

  “It belongs to the current Earl of Whitney. For now, the earl is me.” And if he produced no male offspring, one of Sarah’s sons would assume the title, the lands, and everything else.

  Given Whit’s chances of surviving the near future, it seemed more and more likely that one of his nephews would one day be known as Lord Whitney. At least he could see that no external damage had been done to the Hall.

  “You cannot live there alone,” Zora said.

  “I hardly live there at all.” He didn’t know how many servants were in residence during his long absences. Half a dozen? A dozen? Mr. Reynolds saw to those details.

  Whit searched for the geminus’s presence. Nothing. It hadn’t been here. Gratitude flooded him.

  “It didn’t reach the Hall,” he said.

  Zora exhaled, mirroring his relief.