Awaken the Curse (10 page)

“Adam was no traitor,” Gray reiterated. “He understood the allegiance owed the Imnada and the dangers in exposure to the outside world.”

“People change,” Mac shot back.

David’s mouth twisted to a sneer. “Every night like clockwork, eh, Flannery?”

Mac sighed before tossing back another brandy.

They were a company again. The three of them. The accursed.

With his death, Adam had bound them together once more.

*   *   *

Wiping Froissart’s seed from between her thighs, Renata stepped through the curtain into her dressing chamber, dropping the heavy fabric into place behind her to muffle his snores and grunts. His foul breaking of wind. The creaks of the bed as he tossed and turned.

Pitching aside the rag, she toyed with the thought of killing him. How easy it would be. How quick. None would question it. They would mourn with her—the young, grieving widow. A thought quickly dismissed. The man was a pig, but he’d served his purpose. She had succeeded where all had called her mad to try. She had tracked those who slaughtered her father to this horrid gutter of a city. After a year and a half, vengeance would finally be hers. Only then would Froissart meet his final reward. Until that moment, she would prevent what attentions she could and endure what she could not.

“Is he asleep?”

A figure stepped from the shadows. She had known he was there, had felt his arrival as a tremor in the air, a touch upon her mind. She even knew when he parted the curtains to watch as Froissart spent himself inside her, his great bulk jerking and wheezing as he came. She’d felt his eyes upon her and smiled, her husband thinking the pleasure was for his sake.

“He is.” Taking up her brush, she sat before an enormous mirror, one of four, each covering a wall of her dressing chamber.

Alonzo stepped behind her, pulling the brush gently from her hands. He slid it through her long black hair, tangle by tangle. He had always known how to soothe her. Milk-siblings, they’d shared a breast and then a nursery before he’d been packed off to the military and she to school with the priestesses of High Danu at Varennes. Until then, they’d been inseparable. As they were once again.

Tonight he smelled of tobacco and wine and leather and sex, and she felt an instant’s jealousy for the whore who’d pleasured him. Then she looked up to catch his eager gaze upon her naked body, and her envy dissipated. She had nothing to worry about. He would always be hers.

“Froissart is a pig,” he spat. “Why do you allow him to touch you?”

She laughed at the echo of her thought on his lips. They were so close, their minds flowed in tandem. Sometimes a mere flash of shared reflection. Other times, it was as a stream coming together with a river, thoughts rippling and diving and curling upon each other so there was no way to tell where one began and the other ended. So it had ever been since she’d discovered a mere skin-on-skin touch allowed her to travel into his mind—drift and spread into a corner to lie curled and watchful there. An invisible witness to all he saw and heard.

What began as a child’s game had blossomed through study and practice into a rare and extraordinary talent: the ability to touch another’s mind and, for brief flashes, to shape, influence, and even control. No longer was she constrained by actual touch: a lock of hair, fingernail parings, a drawn tooth, was all it took to open the door.

She kept these precious mementos in a case upon her dressing table, making use of them only when absolutely necessary. To indulge in such powerful magic spread her soul thin like high mares’ tails stretching wispy across a wide sky. The body she left became an empty husk. Functioning but without a will. Quiescent. Vulnerable.

“I am strong, Alonzo, but even my powers have limits,” she said. “It is easier to allow him his liberties and harbor my strength for more important business.” She shot him a smoldering, pouty look. “But perhaps you don’t ask for my sake but your own. Are you jealous, Alonzo? Do you wish to replace the toad Froissart in my bed? To possess my body as I possess your mind?” She ran the tip of her tongue across her lips. “To scream your release as you spill your seed within me?”

The answer was clear in his jealous gaze moving over her breasts, the creamy flat of her stomach, the jointure of her legs. A gaze reflected over and over within the four mirrors. Naked hunger stared out at her from every angle. His control held by a hair’s width, his lust for her like an animal clawing at his innards.

“This pig-dog is worse than shit beneath your heel, Renata. He doesn’t know you as I do. He sees you as nothing but a furrow to plow with his pig-dog babies. I would worship you as you deserve.”

She shivered but did not yield to the tempting images heating her blood. She had come too far to give everything up for the feel of Alonzo moving inside her, the grip of his strong, broad hands upon her flesh. “That may be, but Froissart is useful to me. He is money and position. He is power.”

“You have a hundred times more power than this bastard
abruti
has in your little finger.”

“Émile’s power lies in respectability and connections. We need the cover of his embassy to shield us while we hunt. We found
one
, but my father’s man claimed there were four soldiers at the house that day. Four with swords and guns and death in their eyes.” She swung around, catching Alonzo by surprise. He rocked back on his heels, clutching the brush like a weapon. “Did you go to Kinloch’s residence? Did you find anything that might lead us to the others?”

“I searched his house but came away empty-handed. Just books on plants and flowers. Pretty drawings. Jars and bowls, coils of wire. The man was naught but a gardener.”

She turned away in disgust. So close they’d come. So close to finding them all. And Alonzo had bungled it. Allowing the man time to conceal. Time to run. Though they’d caught him in the end. His time finally ran out.

“I will have the men who slaughtered my father. I will have them on their knees and at my mercy. A mercy I shall not give.”

“All’s not lost. I went to the funeral. Watched to see who attended.”

Her eyes flashed up to meet Alonzo’s hungry gaze within the mirror. “And?”

“There were three men there, though no way to know who or what they are.”

She rose from her chair, catching up a silk robe to cover her nakedness. “You risk coming to my rooms to tell me this? That you may or may not have learned something? That you may or may not have found the treacherous Imnada vermin?”

“Are you so certain these men are Imnada? That race is naught but dust and stories. The Other saw to that centuries ago.”

“We’ve had this argument before. My father’s servant swears the chevalier trapped one of them. Forced the monster to shift. All those years my father’s theories were correct. Somehow the Imnada survived when we all thought them extinct. The beasts live among us still and remain as treacherous as ever.”

“Then let us tell what we know. Go to the warriors of Scathach or the priestesses of High Danu; those with the power to root them out and destroy them once and for all.”

“No!”

Rage bubbled up through her and, unthinking, she grabbed Alonzo’s empty hand. Immediately the depthless black sea stretched out before her, ribbons of smoke twining about her, pulling her out of her own body and into his. For a moment she saw herself through his eyes. The long, rippling flow of black hair parted to hang on either side of shoulders pale as milk. Small, firm breasts, the dusky rose of her nipples visible beneath the diaphanous silk of her robe. The perfectly formed oval of a face; long, narrow cheekbones, lips parted, eyes shimmering gold with excitement.

“Renata,” Alonzo groaned, making a small raspy sound deep in his throat. He shifted uncomfortably, and she was back. Hands at her sides. Alonzo’s mind closed to her.

A whistling, grunty snore and a squeak of mattress ropes drew the two of them close in the dark.

“Trust me, Alonzo. I will reveal all in the end, but my own vengeance comes first. I have waited too long and sacrificed too much.”

“As you will it.” He nodded. “There was another at the churchyard. That actress everyone is talking about. Madame Parrino.”

“Kinloch’s slut? Interesting,” she purred, tapping a finger to her lips. “I wonder . . .” She closed her eyes, turning thoughts over to see what might lie beneath before once more facing Alonzo, brisk and commanding. “Follow her. Watch her house. See if any of those men come or go.”

“Already done.”

“I am relying on you. Do not fail me, old friend,” she said, her voice pitched low, words slippery as the silk of her bed hangings.

He nodded once more before falling back into the shadows. Leaving her alone in the room with her thoughts—and her husband.

C
LICK
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 by Alexa Egan

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ISBN 978-1-4516-9531-1