Lord of Sin

by Susan Krinard

  “Your judgment isn’t sound. Not now.”

  “And your judgment is? I don’t even know who you are, Sinjin. You are two different men, and I understand neither.”

  “I have been wrong, Nuala. At least I am trying to make out what is happening to me. You are refusing to look into your own heart.”

  She rose abruptly, finding that she could stand without suffering an assault of vertigo. “Perhaps you ought to go home. You may still bear me a grudge because I refused—”

  “You were quite correct,” he said. “I was wrong to have asked you.”

  “Then on one point, at least, we are in accord.”

  “Damn it, Nuala…” He ran his fingers through his hair. “Listen to me. This behavior can only lead to trouble even you cannot anticipate.”

  “Trouble from whom? I have no enemies.”

  “You’ll be the one to suffer. Next time you might not be able to stop yourself.”

  “Please leave, Lord Donnington.”

  He turned his dark, unreadable gaze on her. “It can’t end like this, Nuala. I won’t permit it.”

  “You have no power to permit or not permit anything, Lord Donnington.”

  His mouth tightened, and Nuala was reminded that this was a man who could be dangerous in ways she might have yet to learn. “You are making a bad mistake, Nuala,” he said.

  “That is no longer your concern. Good night, Lord Donnington.”

  With an almost unconscious thought she chanted a brief spell, and the door at Sinjin’s back flew open. It was not easy to move him; his will was very strong. But in the end, her magic propelled him backward, forcing him to comply or fall. She slammed the door in his face.

  There. He is gone and will never trouble you again.

  Gone.

  Nausea flooded back into Nuala’s throat. She sat down again, bracing her arms on the mattress. Defiance and anger vanished between one breath and the next.

  What had come over her? She lay back and covered her eyes with her forearm. She had used her magic to attack and manipulate Sinjin as if he were a doll without volition of its own…as if he were a wretched beast like Bray. It was as if she, like him, were two persons in one body.

  But if Sinjin’s other self was cynical and cruel, even capable of violence, hers was reckless and vain and equally implacable. He had been willing to overcome his pride and darker impulses in order to help her find Deborah’s tormentor…and to point out the perilous direction her magic was taking.

  He knows nothing of magic. He had no means with which to judge what she did, or why. And yet…

  Nuala rolled her face into the pillow. Whenever they were together, it was as if the worst was aroused in each of them. But that “worst” had become something almost deadly.

  Not long ago she had considered finding a way to rid herself of those small but dangerous abilities that could so easily be used for ill. Now those abilities were no longer small. If only she had some way to purge herself of these terrible temptations…

  No!

  She pounded her fists into the pillow, struggling to silence the voice that fought to entrap her mind. You cannot live without magic. It is in your very nature. You have a right to that which has served so many.

  “But I’ve failed,” Nuala whispered. “I failed at Donbridge, and I have failed Deborah. The elders were right when they taught us that a single slip could open the Black Gate, and once we passed through…”

  As long as you work for the good, you will never fall through the Black Gate. It is your choice, and no one else’s. Your power. Only yours.

  Nuala rolled onto her back and sat up, a blanket of unnatural calm settling around her heart. For the good. There were so many things she might do now that her abilities had fully returned. First she would locate Deborah, and tell her that she was free to be with her young man. Then she would begin to seek out those hypocrites who so loudly condemned young women for any indiscretion or “moral” offense against Society when they themselves were guilty of the same behavior.

  The Forties would make an excellent start. She would begin with Melbyrne, who had clearly injured Deborah in some way before she had fled London. Then Ferrer, whom Sinjin had blamed for spreading the rumors, and Achilles Nash, who held such obvious contempt for the Widows. One by one each of the rakes, and others like them, would suffer for their treatment of the women who fell under their influence.

  Nuala rose from the bed, a great wave of magic blowing over and through her like a fierce wind. Sinjin, too, must be punished. He was ultimately responsible for Deborah’s unhappiness. He had the effrontery to think he could dictate to a witch of her blood.

  Fire danced on Nuala’s fingertips. She closed her eyes. With a gesture she set the bed alight. Flames rose, but did not touch her. She could not be hurt. Never again.

  Her triumph shattered at the sound of someone pounding at her door.

  “Your ladyship!” Harold burst through the door, staring in horror at the burning bed. He raced to Nuala, seizing her arm.

  She flicked a finger. He cried out and snapped back his hand, staring in bewilderment at the red marks that banded his fingers.

  Nuala blinked. “Harold?”

  The footman recovered and bravely put his hand on her arm again. “We must go, your ladyship!”

  She turned to stare at the fire she had created in her moment of insanity. In seconds it would spread to the walls and other furniture, and then quickly to the rest of the house. Someone might be hurt. Booth, Mrs. Addison, Jacques, Ginny…

  Resisting Harold’s tug, she reached again for her magic. The fire began to devour itself, shrinking inward until it was once more confined to the bed. Another word and it sputtered out, leaving the bedstead a blackened skeleton.

  “Cor blimey,” Harold whispered.

  Nuala pushed past him and ran down the stairs. She rushed into the drawing room, snatched her portrait from behind the chair and threw it on the carpet.

  When she was finished, all that remained of the portrait was a charred, twisted skeleton.

  THE GHOST HAD BEEN RIGHT.

  Sinjin walked blindly in the direction of his house, neglecting to tip his hat to the ladies and gentlemen he passed along the way.

  She is poison.

  He tripped over a bit of uneven pavement, clumsy as an infant. It was as if Nuala’s spell still clung to him, forcing him to move against his will, robbing him of the last shreds of peace he possessed.

  She will steal your soul.

  A laugh died in his chest. Why else would he have been driven to pursue her, even after the apparition’s warnings? Because he still hadn’t completely believed. It had seemed so much fantasy, with no more substance than the spirit himself.

  Now his doubts were all but vanquished. And yet…

  The creature hates Nuala. He meant to injure her when she and I were together.

  And how did that fact change anything? Whatever the spirit may have done, Nuala had used her powers, not for good, but to harm…and not only to harm, but to come near to destroying a human life, however despicable that life might be.

  And then she’d turned her powers on him, driving him before her as a wolf drives a sheep. Rejecting him completely, in every way.

  You are cursed, Sinjin Ware.

  The earth wobbled under Sinjin’s shoes. He considered summoning a cab, but the thought of a bumpy ride through the congested London streets set his head to spinning.

  He had to decide what to do. Nuala had been correct; he hadn’t the strength to stop her if she chose to continue on her present course. Would she graduate to greater mischiefs? If she would go so far to protect a friend, how might she punish anyone she perceived as an enemy to others for whom she held affection?

  If he could not influence her with logic or an appeal to her better nature…

  The spirit will know.

  Needles of ice pierced Sinjin’s spine. The apparition was not yet done with him. It hated Nuala, to be sure. It could not
be trusted. But it might provide Sinjin with valuable information, information that might enable him to find an answer to a problem for which he had found no solution.

  Knowing at last what he must do, Sinjin made his way home. His butler examined him in alarm. His valet clearly wished to smother him with concern over his state of dishevelment, but Sinjin dismissed him. There was only one kind of help he needed now, and no mortal man could supply it.

  He undressed, lay down on his bed and reached inside himself for the other. It was well past midnight when he felt the bone-deep chill settle over his skin. He sat up, threw off the sheets and stood naked in the middle of the room, listening. Gooseflesh covered his arms, and he knew he was no longer alone.

  “I trust I have not disturbed you?”

  Sinjin held his ground, though every human instinct recoiled in horror. The mist congealed before him, a formless cloud that gradually took on the shape he had seen in Mrs. Summerhayes’s parlor.

  “Of course I have not,” the apparition said in a deep, mocking voice. “Can it be that you require my assistance?”

  Sinjin stared into the spirit’s hollow eyes. He could make out more detail now: the deep lines bracketing the spirit’s mouth and creasing his forehead, marking him as a man of middle age; the reddish glint reflected in the hard, metallic gray eyes; the sharply cut bones that gave his cheeks and jaw a skeletal cast.

  “Who are you?” Sinjin demanded.

  “I am Martin Makepeace, and I was the first of the Wares, two hundred and forty-four years ago.”

  It seemed unlikely that anything could be quite so absurd as a ghost in his bedchamber, but the spirit’s pronouncement left Sinjin almost breathless with laughter.

  “The first of the Wares?” he repeated when he could breathe again.

  The apparition—Martin Makepeace—stared at Sinjin in cold appraisal. “Yes,” he said. “It was the name I chose to give my son when I had no further need of my own. And I have been watching over my family for those two hundred and forty years. Watching for one who will finally bring an end to my long quest.”

  Sinjin grabbed his dressing gown from the chair near the armoire and shrugged it over his shoulders. “You are a ghost. A spirit of the dead.”

  “If you like.”

  “And you’ve come to haunt me because I’m your descendant?” Sinjin found an unused cigar on a table and rolled it between his fingers. “I presume I am to feel honored by your attention.”

  The razor Sinjin had laid on the table beside the washstand suddenly flew from its place and clattered to the carpet inches from his bare foot.

  “Do not mock me,” Makepeace said softly. “I have but one purpose, and it will be fulfilled.”

  Sinjin bent to pick up the razor and turned it about in his hand. “And what would that be?” he asked with equal softness.

  “To ensure the punishment of the witch Nuala, known to your world as Lady Charles.”

  “Punish her for what? Am I to infer that she has done you some personal injury?”

  “I warn you, boy…”

  “How can she have hurt a man who lived more then two centuries ago?”

  “Ah.” Makepeace closed his eyes, and his shape became more solid, until it seemed as if another living man stood in the room. “I told you it was not a story to be related in a moment.”

  Sinjin set down both razor and cigar, found a chair and dropped into it. “I surmise that you won’t leave me alone until you have told it.”

  “Very astute, boy. As it was astute of you to discover the witch’s true nature.”

  “How in God’s name do you know what I’ve discovered?”

  “Did I not say I was watching you?”

  Sinjin gripped the arms of the chair. “How long?”

  “Since you were a boy. As I watched your father, and your brother before you. The brother she killed.”

  “No.” Sinjin started up, but that invisible force slammed him back into the chair. “Whatever she may have done to earn your hatred, she was no more responsible for Giles’s death than I.”

  The apparition smiled. “Has she bewitched you so completely?” The windows rattled as if at a ferocious wind. “A few more days and I fear there would have been no saving you.”

  “I don’t need saving.”

  “Then why have you summoned me?” Makepeace stroked the fine black wool of his doublet with a slender aesthetic’s hand. “You believe yourself free, but you are not. She controls you, boy. I shall give you a chance to truly be rid of her.”

  Was that what Sinjin wanted? To be rid of her? Rid of the responsibility he felt for her actions, of the lust that could not be driven away by even the most rigorous discipline?

  “What do you want of me?” he asked.

  “Very good. We have made a beginning.” Makepeace glanced about, selected a chair and sat, his half-translucent body blending with the chair’s upholstery. “You shall be my instrument of justice.”

  “I’m no one’s instrument. You’ve used me before, but that ends now.”

  “I did not use you in any way that did not reflect your own desires.”

  “Liar. You would have had me abuse her.”

  “As you, in your unbridled lust, would never have done.”

  “No. It was you. Only you.”

  There was something like approval in Makepeace’s hooded gaze. “I see that your will is so much stronger than any of the others. That is why we shall succeed.”

  Sinjin leaned back in the chair, clenching his teeth to keep them from chattering. “We go no further until you explain why you wish to punish Nuala.”

  “That is a very simple matter, boy. I shall show you.”

  The room darkened. Sinjin braced himself.

  And the fire came. It began at Sinjin’s feet, eating through to bone, and licked up his legs. His dressing gown caught fire, but he was unaware of anything save the agony of his immolation.

  “Feel it,” Makepeace’s distant voice intoned. “Feel what it is like to die.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  SINJIN FELT HIS BODY give way. The room vanished in a pall of acrid smoke.

  “Do you feel what it was like for my father?” Makepeace said. “What it was like for him to burn, for his very organs to catch fire and be consumed within him while he yet lived?”

  Unable to think, to see, to move his tongue, Sinjin could not answer. His lungs were white-hot coals in his chest, his heart a seething mass of melting tissue.

  “She did this,” Makepeace said, so close that he must surely be burning, as well. “Your witch used her foul sorcery to contrive the most terrible death any man could imagine.”

  “No,” Sinjin croaked.

  “How can you deny it, when you now suffer the very fate to which my father was condemned?”

  “This…” Sinjin’s felt his lips crack and peel away. “This is not real.”

  “So you said of me.”

  “You have…no power.”

  “Do I not?”

  The already unbearable pain intensified. Sinjin’s legs were naked bone now, and his ribs had begun to collapse into the empty cavity of his chest.

  “You are right, Sinjin,” Makepeace’s voice murmured. “I have not the power to kill you here and now. Nor would I.”

  In an instant the flames vanished. The smoke lifted and was gone. The agony receded, and Sinjin felt the air seep back into his lungs, the frantic rhythm of his heart begin to slow. Carefully, he moved his arms, lifting his hands to his face.

  It was whole. So were his legs, his chest, every part of him that had burned. Even his dressing gown was untouched.

  He tried to focus on the figure that reclined so easily in his chair.

  “Damn you,” Sinjin whispered.

  “Perhaps,” Makepeace said. “But if I fall into the Pit, so shall she.”

  Sinjin dashed the sweat from his eyes. “Why?” he rasped. “Why have you done this?”

  “To make you understand what she is capable
of. Why she must be stopped.”

  “Nuala…Nuala would never—”

  “You have seen what she can do.” He leaned forward, staring into Sinjin’s aching eyes. “Do you think I would be here in this world of sorrow if it were not necessary to preserve it against such evil as the witch can inflict?”

  Sinjin bent his head. The memory of pain was still very fresh. But now that he could think again, he remembered seeing a face amid the smoke…a face he knew as well as his own.

  Nuala.

  “Yes,” Makepeace said. “My father, Comfort Makepeace, was the witch’s first victim.”

  “Her first victim? She is, at most, five-and-twenty. How do you propose that she achieved this…miracle?”

  “Because she is not five-and-twenty. She is as old as I.”

  How many times, since the events at Donbridge four years ago, had Sinjin scoffed at fantastical proclamations such as these?

  And how often had they proved to be true?

  “Rubbish,” he snapped.

  Makepeace sighed. “Did she tell you of her tragic past? Of her brave, innocent people who were driven into exile?”

  Sinjin’s memories of his and Nuala’s conversation at the garden party were very clear. “She said nothing about exile.”

  “Then she did not tell you why she was among the children of Satan when they were rightfully driven out for the most vile and wicked sorcery?”

  “‘Children of Satan?’ You’re mad.”

  “She killed my father because he would have prevented her and her kind from corrupting and destroying England.”

  “Destroying England?” Sinjin gathered his legs to rise. “I’ve heard enough.”

  “Sit yourself down!” A great weight ground into Sinjin’s shoulders. He fought it, and fell from the chair. The weight pressed him into the carpet as if he were a beetle being crushed under an enormous foot.

  “They are not human!” Makepeace roared. “They have always despised our kind, and intended to rule us all in Satan’s name. Had they succeeded, they would have begun a reign of terror surpassing the worst in human history!”

  With a grunt of effort, Sinjin pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. “Three centuries ago,” he grated, “people like you believed in demons and unicor—” He stopped, stunned by his own idiocy. Three hundred years ago, people had believed in unicorns. And fairies.