Demon's Curse (Imnada Brotherhood) (38 page)

Before Bianca could react or recover, a girl entered the room to kneel beside the body of Mr. Ringrose. Almost boyishly thin, with a crop of short, black curls and eyes as shiny as beads, she wore nothing but a trailing cloak of black feathers, while her skin where it peeked through her garment glowed with an almost deathly pallor.

“Badb? But you’re a . . . were a . . . crow.”

Catching sight of Bianca’s shocked stare, the girl smiled, eyes dancing, mouth curved impishly at the corners. “Aye, among an infinite number of things, but we’ve no time to discuss it now. The sun has set. He’ll be at his weakest this night.” Before straightening, she took a dagger from a sheath on Ringrose’s belt.

Was this a trap? Another of Madame Froissart’s manipulations? A dream?

“No dream and certainly no conjuring of hers.” The girl’s brows drew into a pouty frown as she handed the dagger to Bianca.

“But I saw you attack Mac,” Bianca stammered even as her fingers curled around the blade’s handle with a grateful squeeze. “I saw him strike you down.”

The girl’s feather cloak ruffled as if annoyed. “Make a decision. I’ve not much time. Come with me or stay here and await your fate.”

Bianca hesitated, glancing again at Ringrose’s unconscious form. “We can’t just leave him behind.”

The girl grinned, though no warmth reached the jet sparkle in her black eyes as she bent to touch Ringrose on his forehead. “There. He will return to the shop. Wake and be as irascible as ever. Satisfied?”

As Bianca watched, the body on the floor took on a translucent rainbow glow, pinks flowing into reds, which in turn flowed into purples and blues. With every changing shade, Ringrose—or what had been Ringrose—faded until there was nothing but specks of dazzling color bursting against the darkness. Then even the bursts died away, leaving only the gloom of a moonless night and no body at all.

“Come on.” Grabbing Bianca’s hand, Badb pulled her from the room into a narrow, whitewashed corridor, locked doors to either side. The corridor led to a kitchen. Spotless, organized, and empty of life. No glowing stove or bustling of servants. It echoed with the sound of their footsteps on the tiles, the rasp of their breathing.

The girl took the lead, Bianca following as they crept up the stairs to the main house, pausing at the green baize door. “He’s being held in her bedchamber upstairs.”

“How do you know?”

Badb threw her a look of disgust. “Because I do,
that’s all. But it’s late and he hasn’t much time.” Bianca started forward, but the girl grabbed her sleeve. “They will seek to use you against him as they did before. Do not allow Renata Froissart entry into your mind.”

“How can I keep her out? I’m not one of you. I don’t have any powers. I can’t change into a bird or a lion. I don’t have a wand I can wave. I’m improvising here.”

“You’re doing fine.” The girl reached up to tap Bianca’s forehead with a tip of her finger.

Light flared, washing the inky stairwell a brilliant silver before it faded, leaving a faint halo burning at the backs of Bianca’s eyelids.

“My wards will protect you,” the girl explained, “but they will not last long. You will have to move quickly.”

“Can’t you just do what you did to Mr. Ringrose and carry us all out of here?”

“I’m afraid not.” Her curls bobbed as she shook her head. “Bartholomew is a Realing. Disrupt the magic holding him together, and he will return to his source back at the shop.”

Bianca wished even a word of her explanation made sense.

The girl seemed to understand, for she threw Bianca another, almost sisterly grin. “It’s not important. Just know that Bartholomew is safe, I can’t carry anyone anywhere, and you need to hurry.”

“Aren’t you coming with me? Strength in numbers and all that?”

“I can’t. I’m not allowed. Get you out: those were my instructions. I’ve done more than I should already.”

“Who gave you those instructions? Who sent you? Was it Lord Deane? Gray de Coursy?”

But even as she spoke, the feathers of the girl’s cloak seemed to curve and ruffle up around her face, the trailing end whipping around her body until all of it was a moving, shifting curtain of black growing smaller until it was no larger than a crow. But instead of taking flight, the bird itself took on the same prismatic glow as Ringrose, body fragmenting as it moved from violet to indigo to blue and continuing down through the color spectrum in a sparkling cloud of multihued light.

“Wait,” Bianca rasped. “You can’t leave me.”

But the brilliance of the flashes had already dimmed, fading until they resembled dust motes caught by the sun before disappearing completely.

Bianca touched her forehead, feeling once more the faint buzz of whatever safeguards had been offered to her. And with a deep breath and a swift prayer to any and all gods out there, she stepped through the green baize door.

*   *   *

A touch on his shoulder jerked Mac awake to struggle uselessly against his bonds, the silver cutting into his wrists and ankles until he moaned in agony. He cracked his eyes open against a candle held close to his face, every muscle tensed, waiting for the blow of a fist or the searing pain of the knife.

“Dear God in heaven, what have they done to you?”

Mac let out a suspended breath, his relief mixed with terror. “Bianca, love. Is it you? I was dreaming of a girl in a cloak all of feathers.”

She kissed him, her tears spilling onto his face, her sobs uncontrollable. “I’m so sorry, Mac. Renata was in my head. I couldn’t . . . couldn’t . . .”

He tried to smile around the pain engulfing his body, the constant fire burning under his skin. “ ’Tis all right,
alanna
. I know her powers. She would use you to destroy me, body and soul. Which is why you need to run before they find you here.”

“You’re coming with me.” A sharp tug, and he had to bite back a scream. His wrists were free. Another, and his ankles were no longer bound. “They’re busy downstairs. If we hurry, we can escape before they ever know we’re missing.”

She draped his arm around her shoulder, hoisting him against her. The flames within him leapt and snarled, his knees almost buckling.

“Can you walk?” she asked, struggling to keep him upright.

“I can,” he said, forcing one foot in front of the other in a somewhat straight line, every shuffling step tearing at muscles cramped with fever and reopening the jagged cuts imparted by the Frenchman’s blade.

“The sun’s down, Mac, and you haven’t changed. Does that mean—”

Already Mac felt Bianca weakening, his weight bearing down on her. They’d never make it to freedom. Not like this. She hitched him farther onto her shoulder, her breath coming in quick pants.

“The curse remains. It’s Morderoth, the night the goddess moon hides her face. Shifting’s impossible, so I suffer in the torture of between.”

She reached for the doorhandle with her free hand, her other arm wrapped around his midsection. He could feel his broken ribs grating under her hand, blood trickling over his torn flesh and drenching her gown.

The corridor beyond lay in darkness but for a single candle upon a table at the top of the landing. Mac focused on the flickering light to keep the anguish from overwhelming him.

“Just a bit farther,” Bianca hissed under her breath as he flagged halfway down the corridor.

He nodded now that speech took too much effort. Counted silently in his head Ten steps to the stairs. Another twenty to the first floor. Then another landing. Another set of stairs. An entrance hall. A street. Too far to travel and too many opportunities to be caught.

By now he heard Renata and the Frenchman locked in heated conversation, perhaps an argument. As their voices rose up the stairs, Mac and Bianca caught a word here and there.

“. . . Amhas-draoi should know . . . Scathach’s army . . . steps to eliminate . . .”

“. . . will make him talk . . . others pay . . .”

“. . . kill or be killed . . . them or us . . .”

Mac’s sentiments almost exactly. Fey-blood and shapechanger. All Gray’s efforts would be for naught. There was too much hatred and too many years of suspicion to be overcome by a few idealists. War would come. To the death this time, for when the shielding power of the Palings was breached, no Imnada holding would be safe from Fey-blood attack.

By now the pain had overtaken him until it filled every cell in his body, but with it came an unnatural calm and a purpose that sent him, not toward the second set of stairs and escape, but toward the closed door.

Gray was right. The four of them had been
offered a chance to break free of the hidebound traditions chaining them. Mac had been given love with a woman whose courage, loyalty, wit, and beauty constantly amazed him. He’d found a truth kept hidden from his kind for centuries—a truth that could spell their ultimate survival. But only if those who would begin a new Fealla Mhòr were stopped.

“What are you doing?” Bianca said as he dragged himself free of her supporting arm to stand wobbly but upright.

“Following my destiny, Bianca.”

*   *   *

She fought to hold him, to slow him. They were so close. The unguarded front door lay a mere twenty paces away. But whereas before he’d clung to her, hunched and battered, now he stood on his own. His blade-like gaze scythed the darkness of the corridor, his body as bristling with energy as a summer storm. She sensed a difference in him, a wildness, a power as raw as the surging of the ocean, as if he’d shed his humanity. This, then, was the otherworldly Imnada. This was the fantasy creature come to life.

“You’ll be killed,” she pleaded, though she knew before she spoke that her words would be turned aside by the aura of invincibility he wore like impregnable chain mail. “You’ll be killed and I’ll . . . I’ll be left alone. I can’t go back, Mac. I’ve felt too much. You’ve made me feel too much.” She hated the whine underpinning her words, but the truth was indisputable.

He brushed his lips over her brow, the girl’s magic mingling with the power of his kiss. “Then I’ll just have to win, won’t I?”

Sliding the knife free of her grip, he flashed her a last killer smile before moving toward the murmur of conversation, then turned to face her at the very last moment. “Go, Bianca. This is not your fight. It never was.”

Before she could argue, he placed a hand on the door, adjusted the grip on his knife, squared his bloodied shoulder, and slammed like an army unleashed into the room.

*   *   *

Bianca had always imagined battle to be a glorious affair of snapping banners and rattling drums. Brightly plumed officers upon prancing horses and heroic last stands amid the roar of cannon. A clash of chaotic, noisy thousands over scarred and sacred ground.

This struggle was dirty and bloody and fierce—and oddly silent. No shouted commands or inspirational battle cries, just a street scrum over broken furniture and a bloodstained rug. The air crackled with the same summer heaviness of a coming storm, and a taste of metal coated the back of her mouth.

Renata lay beside an overturned chair, a torn ribbon, jewel-bright gold against the ebony cascade of her hair. Her skirts sodden with blood but for a few inches of untouched hem that retained the delicate pale stitching of woodland flowers.

Locked together, Mac and the Frenchman exchanged cruel and wicked blows, Mac already a mess of bruises, blood streaking his face and arms, slicking his bare back. Which blood was the Frenchman’s and which flowed from wounds already sustained by Mac in the torture of long hours? Bianca couldn’t tell.

Unlike the fight at Adam’s house, there was no brutal joy or wild excitement. Mac fought with grim-faced purpose. Each ring of knife on knife made her stomach tremble. Each grunt and snarl and swiftly drawn breath threw her heart into her throat as she waited for the feint that would end it. The parry that would be turned to an attack. The point where Mac’s broken body could no longer endure.

She scrambled in search of a weapon. A book? A paperweight? A broken china figurine? But they fought too close to allow for any interference. Any intrusion could be the second the Frenchman needed to press his advantage. Already Mac slipped, his knee giving out, his arm falling to his side, ripped open by a blade’s jagged edge.

Transfixed, Bianca watched, hands gripping the doorframe. Eyes focused on the man she loved bleeding out before her.

Pinned back, Alonzo reached into the hearth, dragging out a flaming log, striking Mac across his scarred back in a shower of embers and sparks that spun and fell to the carpet or flew upward onto the drapes.

Mac reared back in a cry of rage, eyes wide, the irises vertical slits in a face that bore nothing of the human in its ruthless savagery or chilling brutality.

“Alonzo!” The scream tore the air like the lash of a whip.

Bianca’s head whipped around to stare at the risen shape of the woman, hair trailing wildly over her shoulders, a hand clutching a single glittering strand like thread or the silk from a spider.

End it!

The order slid into Bianca’s mind like a creeping
tide, a whisper filling the cracks left by her doubt and her fear. End it now and she would no longer need to fear Mac and the predator that hovered at the back of his gaze, the monster that could rend her limb from limb if he chose or spill her blood with the ease of instinct.

Smoke curled and thickened as sparks ignited and flames crept unguarded over the floor. Then Renata was at her side, pressing a pistol into her hand. This time Bianca would not miss. She would center the bullet in Mac’s chest. She would kill him, and he would look into her eyes and know she had won.

No. Bianca shook her head, but the power of the voice would not be dislodged. It clung like the smoke that clawed at her lungs and stung her eyes.

A stumbling, off-balance lurch, and Mac’s knife flashed in a quick thrust, punching deep into Alonzo’s gut.

The man dropped to his knees on the blazing rug, his face drained of color, his hands grasping the handle of the blade lodged in his stomach as if uncertain how it had gotten there.

End it now!

The command tumbled and turned her like a stone upon a beach until Bianca saw no choice but to agree. To end the fight and destroy the creature that would destroy her if he had the chance.