Accursed (25 page)

“Helena was my oldest . . . my dearest . . .” She faltered and began to sob openly, horrible, shuddering gulps of air that caught in her throat and choked her.

Farris started toward her, a look of concern etched into his face, but Tamara gave him a small wave to indicate that she was all right, and that he should remain where he was. Any other day he might have thought John the cause of her distress, but Farris knew as well as anyone how much she had been through today. He nodded, but he crossed his arms and kept a vigilant eye upon her.

John had wrapped a strong arm around Tamara’s shoulder. She could feel his muscles taut against her, and felt oddly comforted, as though part of the weight of her grief had been lifted from her. That was all she had really wanted since the day had begun, and Frederick had brought her his terrible news.

Frederick.

“You knew her, as well,” Tamara said, composing herself as best she could. “It isn’t right, John, that such a wonderful girl, so full of light and life and talent, should be taken so violently from the world.”

“I never knew her very well, but I had the pleasure of watching her sketch several times. She was quite an artist.”

Tamara nodded, drawing slow breaths, and then she paused. She turned to face him. All the questions about Helena’s death and Frederick’s transformation mingled with her grief and became too much to contain. She needed to speak, to release some of the emotion within her.

“What is it?” John asked.

“It may be difficult for you to hear, but I believe that Frederick had something to do with his sister’s death.” Tamara gazed at him without wavering now. She had said it. Let the cards fall where they may, let him think her crazy, but at least she had said the words out loud, to someone other than William.

“I don’t think—”

“He tried to . . . hurt me, this morning,” Tamara began. She waited for him to stop her, but he didn’t. Instead he just leaned forward, listening intently.

“Go on.”

“He wasn’t himself, John. Not at all. In fact, there was something profoundly wrong with him,” she continued, watching his expression carefully. “I’ve even heard whispers of a dinner party where the earl of Claridge—”

John’s face went pale as a ghost’s, and he spoke up, interrupting her.

“Do you mean to say that Frederick tried to have his way with you? I was at the bishop’s party. I, myself, had to pull the earl away from the young woman he was—” His voice trailed off.

Tamara shook her head.

“Frederick tried, but it did not go that far. I had . . . help to fend him off.” She spoke quietly, remembering the mottled reptilian skin, the thick membrane that slid over Frederick’s eyes before he attacked her.

“It was terrible,” she said, her voice low.

John squeezed her tightly to him. She felt like a piece of Venetian glass, and hoped that he would not crack her. She could feel his heart beating against her, and at that moment it seemed as if the humanness of that heartbeat terrified her more than anything else had that day.

She pulled away, causing him to release her.

“I’m afraid I’ve been too familiar with you, Mr. Haversham. I have done us both a terrible disservice. I have . . . I . . .”

Tamara stood up abruptly. As she stood there, she was barely aware that she was swaying. Her heart raced, and she couldn’t seem to catch her breath. Her grief had flooded her completely and seemed about to boil over, so that she couldn’t construct a single coherent thought.

The darkness coalesced about her, and she fainted.

When she came to, she found herself in Farris’s thickly muscled arms. He cradled her as if she were a wee babe in swaddling clothes. His wide, worried eyes stared down at her, and she felt guilty for frightening him so.

“You went right down on the floor, you did, miss,” Farris said. He helped her to sit, but her head lolled back against his chest, too heavy for her to hold up herself.

John Haversham crouched on her other side, looking equally concerned.

“Are you feeling better, Tamara?” he asked, clasping one of her slender hands between both of his. His touch was warm and rough, his callused palms holding her gently.

She looked into his eyes—and for a moment she swore her heart stopped beating.

He was a handsome man, John Haversham. Yet there were tiny crinkled lines that curved in ellipses around his tired gray eyes. Laugh lines encircled his full mouth, and all of this made him that much more appealing to Tamara’s eye. She wanted to reach out and touch him, make sure that he was real. Instead she looked away, letting time begin to flow again.

Letting her grief back in.

T
HE CELLAR WAS
dark, but William still could make out stacks of coal lying neatly in their bins, waiting to be burned. He could smell and taste the sharp, acrid stink of burning coal coming from the topmost floors of the house, and knew that meant someone was upstairs, enjoying the light and heat.

Only moments earlier he had whispered the spell of translocation and been swept away, the whole of the tangible world disappearing from around him. The Protectors had powerful magic within them, and he and Tamara had mastered translocation soon after they had inherited the power their grandfather had wielded before them. Even so, he would never get used to the moment during the casting of that spell when he was between the point of origin and his destination. It was a single, wrenching instant in which he hurtled through a swirling maelstrom of shadows, much too quickly to make out more than glimpses of insubstantial shapes he presumed were the parts of the world he was traveling past.

Translocation always gave William a vertiginous feeling. The act itself was inherently dislocating, and attempting it without his sister’s far steadier grasp on magic to anchor him only increased the vertigo. He had once likened the experience, in conversation with Nigel Townsend, to “paddling ’cross the English Channel in a teacup after having had far too large a breakfast.”

William hadn’t wanted to translocate at all tonight, but Bodicea had insisted that hailing a hansom cab would only waste precious time. He and the ghostly queen had agreed that it was best for her to remain behind to guard the thing that had once been David Carstairs. Then William had set off to begin tracking down the buyers who had purchased the artifacts that Carstairs had smuggled from India. The statuettes appeared to be a part of the bizarre curse that was transforming men into monstrosities, and the faster they gathered up those artifacts, the more lives they might save. The first name he had come across in Carstairs’s records was that of Ernest P. Widly. Now he stood in the cellar of the building where Widly had his rooms and took several long breaths, trying to steady himself. Whispering the same protection spell he had used before, he steeled himself and moved with as much stealth as he was able toward the stairs and whatever awaited him above. He took another deep breath, fighting residual nausea, and threw himself upward, taking the stairs two at a time.

Blue flame curled and eddied around his fingers as he approached the door of the flat that was his destination, and he cast a quick spell, making short work of the iron bolt on the other side. He stepped through and into the kitchen, then slowly eased the door shut behind him. Remembering how stupidly he had blundered into Carstairs’s rooms earlier in the evening, he was determined to keep the element of surprise with him now.

The kitchen was a mess, flour and rotten meat from the cupboard spread all over the floor and counters. It looked as though someone had ransacked the cupboard without finding anything to their liking. William’s stomach gave another lurch, but he managed to swallow back the delicious pudding he had eaten earlier. He picked his way through the foul-smelling bits of a raw rack of lamb, and crossed the threshold into the living area.

With Carstairs’s sales slips tucked safely in his pocket, William moved through the dining room, pausing outside a closed door. Inside, he could hear someone speaking in a harsh, guttural dialect. Part of him wanted to flee, but against all reason, he took a deep breath and opened the door.

The room was Widly’s study. Four men in various states of dress were huddled around the fireplace, staring at the firelight. The coal hood had been upturned, and someone had tried to eat several pieces of coal before realizing that it made much better tinder than food.

As one, they turned and stared at him, their eyes bulging so enormously that they seemed about to burst from the sides of their skulls. Their skin was mottled and had the rough texture of scales. It gleamed in the firelight.

On the floor was the half-eaten corpse of an elderly woman. From what he could tell, she wore the uniform of a household servant.

William had seen death before, but the butchery with which this old woman had been dispatched made his blood run cold. Half the flesh on her face had been stripped away, baring bone and muscle. One of her arms was missing, presumably being digested by the same stomach that had enjoyed her face.

The creatures hadn’t moved a muscle. They just crouched, staring at him.

He took a step backward, bumping into the door frame. His motion seemed their cue to act. The monster farthest into its transformation flopped toward him, long toadlike tongue hanging wet and flaccid almost to the floor. The twisted changeling tensed its hind legs, preparing to pounce, even as William fled into the corridor and toward the parlor. He needed room to fight.

The accursed creatures all burst into activity then, and scrambled after him, their odd croaking rasps unnerving William. He found a spot that placed his back safely to the wall and turned to face them. Crouching, they shambled from side to side as they moved in on him, but this time he was ready.

His command of magic was by no means complete, nor as acute as his sister’s, but there existed an array of spells he had rehearsed over and over. Now he contorted his fingers into arcane symbols and muttered under his breath.

The things leaped at him.

The last words issued from William’s mouth, and the reptile men froze in midleap, their malformed bodies hanging almost obscenely in the air. One by one, they dropped like stones and began to shrink until each was roughly the size of a hazelnut. William jogged to the sideboard in the nearby dining room and grabbed an empty bottle of wine and its stopper.

With the bottle in his hand, he reached down, picked up each of the twice-cursed miscreants, and dropped it through the mouth of the bottle. He forced the stopper back onto the bottle and chanted a simple yet powerful spell to seal it. The glass took on a subtle red glow, then slowly returned to its natural state.

“Well done, William,” he whispered to himself. Someone had to appreciate his ingenuity, after all.

He put the wine bottle down on the large rectangular dining room table and went back to the study in search of the Indian statuary that had led these men to their abominable fates.

In the study, William snatched a throw rug from the back of a love seat that faced the fireplace and covered the corpse on the floor. With the woman’s ravaged face out of view, he paused to admire the library her employer had amassed. The bookshelves had been lovingly carved from a rich, dark oak that glowed almost auburn in the firelight. They bore a beautiful design of intertwined grapevines. The small, pointed leaves looked so real that William had to resist the urge to reach out and pluck one of them.

From the many languages that graced the spines of the books, and the artifacts that sat in niches throughout, he discerned that Ernest P. Widly was a man of admirably eclectic tastes. William found himself hoping that he and Tamara could find a way to transform the man back to his normal state when this crisis was over. For now, though, he would have to remain content knowing Widly was secure at the bottom of a wine bottle.

Combing the shelves for any sign of an Indian artifact, William found that one of Widly’s pieces was newly missing. It had sat in a small niche above the mantelpiece until very recently, for the mantel had a light covering of dust, save on the spot where the object had rested.

William stared at the empty space for a long moment, questions swirling in his mind. He took a breath, and then began again, thoroughly searching the flat in the hope of finding the missing piece. It made no sense. The only reason he could think of for the creatures to be there was that they also sought the accursed figurine, but he had arrived while they were still there. That meant it had been missing before they had paid their visit. It was possible, he supposed, that Widly had gotten rid of the artifact himself, but William thought it highly unlikely. What he had seen thus far of the influence the objects had on their owners made him believe Widly would not have had the moral strength to dispose of it.

Which meant someone else had removed it.

The idea troubled William deeply. If someone else was on the same trail as he was, he felt the odds were against the thief having some benevolent purpose. No, if someone had stolen the accursed thing, there must be some sinister purpose behind the theft.