Heart of Light (14 page)

Yet better he die than Emily, and he reached for the thing. “Deal with me, you monster!” he yelled through teeth clenched against a scream of pain. His voice came out high and agonized. “With me!”

“Nigel, no!” Peter said. “It's too late. You can't—”

The creature turned toward Nigel and its spectral teeth touched Nigel's face. They were icy cold and dark.

Nigel put his hands up to push the thing off, but he couldn't feel his hands nor his fingers.

Ice and darkness closed in on him from all sides.

He was lost, and Emily with him.

THE MARK OF THE HYENA

Emily woke with something cool and soft bathing her
wrists and forehead.

She had dreamed that she was small again and recovering from a fever in her room in her parents' mansion in India. The smell that surrounded her, reminiscent of feverish sweat and burnt paper or fabric, harkened back to her early years and the incense her nanny used to burn when Emily battled some childhood illness.

The longing for that warmth and love she'd known in childhood—but never since—caused her to open her eyes and say, “Ayah.”

The word died upon her lips. As her eyelids fluttered open, she saw not her nanny, but a male face, craggily handsome, with wavy dark hair and wide, startling green eyes that appeared to swirl with currents like those in a deep ocean. He smelled of tobacco and some indefinably masculine cologne.

The man sat back on his heels, looking concernedly at her as she lay on the floor. Peter Farewell. Her husband's school friend whom she had met so briefly over dinner, and whose haughty manner in dismissing her had helped anger her enough to lead her to rummaging through Nigel's trunks. What would this stranger be doing in her room? But this was not her room. Nigel's trunks still lay by her, half-open. She'd been caught trespassing upon her husband's privacy. Caught by a stranger.

Worse than that, she was now alone in a room with a strange man

As she thought this, she realized to her horror that her dress was unbuttoned at the neck and down to just above the top of her rounded breasts, exposing silky golden skin that no one but her husband should ever have seen. Heat climbed her cheeks. This man had touched her. He had unbuttoned her, as if she were a common woman of the streets. She grabbed both halves of her collar and held it closed as heat flared upon her face.

“Nigel,” she said, using her husband's name as a shield—an attempt to convince herself
and
this intruder that she was truly a virtuous married woman who loved her husband. A woman who had strayed out of nothing but excessive devotion.

Peter's eyes veiled. His gaze lost all expression and he stood up, gesturing with his head toward Emily's other side.

She looked. On the floor lay Nigel.

“Nigel.” Emily managed to pull herself up to her knees. Part of her felt a great relief. She hadn't been alone with Farewell after all. To the outside world it would appear that she'd been chaperoned by her husband. But Nigel was pale and still and cold. Was he unconscious? Why?

She crept to him. Nigel had always looked to her like an ivory statue, but never as much as he did now. His skin and hair, all pale, seemed to merge into a sameness, and his closed eyes, his still face, devoid of expression, gave credence to the illusion that he was a doll, a mannequin. Nothing human.

“Nigel,” she said. Her fingers hunted for Nigel's pulse on the smooth, cool skin. But even when she found it, beating steadily beneath her fingertips, it seemed like a distant beat. An echo of life rather than life itself.

“What happened to my husband?” she said in a ragged voice. “What have you done to him?”

“I? Done to him?” Farewell looked shocked. He gave Nigel a glance that expressed all brotherly concern and serious fear. “Tell me, rather, Mrs. Farewell, what you did to him. Nigel found you being attacked and he interposed his body between yourself and danger. Whatever was meant for you took him also. And I have some idea what it might be, but nothing that should have been here. What did you do, Mrs. Oldhall? I must know.”

“I?” She shook her head. Nothing she'd done could have caused this. She stood. Standing, she was still smaller than Farewell, but not small enough to feel like a child. She drew herself to her height while her fingers buttoned her collar by touch.

“How did you and Nigel get into this room?” she asked, her voice trying to sound as haughty, as cold, as aggrieved as his had. “I was alone. You were downstairs.”

Peter Farewell nodded. “I'm sorry, may I?” He waved a slim cigarette case midair.

Never looking away from her, he reached in his pocket and took out a slim silver lighter, with which he lit a thin cigarette scented of mint and spice. The oddly sweet smell enveloped her.

“You were indeed alone,” he said. “And no doubt you thought yourself private enough. Until you screamed, both voice and mind. And then, hearing you scream, both Nigel and I rushed headlong to your rescue.” He took a long puff on his cigarette. “Though we did not guess the nature of the threat. Even when he saw it, I don't think Nigel comprehended it. His experience is limited.” His expression seemed suddenly that of a much younger person, and sad. “Then, before I could stop him, Nigel interposed his body between you and your . . . attacker. To save you.”

Peter drew another long drag from his cigarette. The dark stone of his signet ring glinted by the light of the magelamps. “What were you doing in Nigel's room, Mrs. Oldhall? What magical object did you touch that brought on this attack?”

She shook her head, cheeks flaming. How could she tell this . . . stranger that she'd been looking through her husband's private possessions? And how could she tell him why without dying of mortification?

He raised his eyebrows. “You touched something magical. Some object that excited interest in a dangerous quarter.”

A dangerous quarter? Nigel's old lover? Who had Nigel been involved with?

She looked at her husband, still stretched on the floor and looking somehow less than real. She'd married a stranger, and not realized it till the deed was done. He wouldn't tell her anything, even if he'd been awake and aware.

“Well, Mrs. Oldhall, I assure you I know something else is going on beneath this honeymoon, if that's what stops you from telling me more.” Peter Farewell graced her with a cool, evaluating gaze.

Emily blushed. Had Nigel told Farewell what had transpired, or not, on their honeymoon? Had he so forgotten himself?

The thought that Peter Farewell—mocking, ironic Peter Farewell, practically a stranger—might have been treated to Emily's rambling about the lives of farm animals made Emily not only speechless, but unable to think of words.

Peter looked imploring. “Only I must know what you touched or did. Else you'll be risking Nigel's strength, his sanity, perhaps his very life. I know you performed some magic. I'd dearly love to know what.”

“What I touched,” she said, feeling the flame of embarrassment burning on her cheeks, “was only a love token. Nothing more.”

“A love token?” A dark eyebrow rose quizzically up the straight forehead. “Nigel's love token to you?”

Emily sighed. This was not going to be easy to explain. “No. I thought . . . I judged from a certain reserve I noticed in my husband's character that his affections might have been otherwise engaged before he swore his love to me. I thought that perhaps there had been another woman of whom he was fond and from whom his parents judged it best to separate him.”

She looked up at Peter Farewell. He nodded to her. “And on this suspicion you presumed to search your husband's room? And you presumed to interfere with some magic or some spell of his that he kept among his private things?”

Emily felt the harshness of his unspoken judgment, but struggled on. “The truth is,” she said, “that in novels, such unhappy love affairs often leave behind them love tokens, or poems or letters, or such things by which a woman in doubt can discern if her suspicions are correct.”

“Novels?” Peter Farewell echoed in disbelief, his eyebrows arched and lifted.

“I found a rough stone, a common field stone, wrapped in fine silk, and I thought this was the sure proof of all my suspicions.” She looked up at Farewell to see the extent to which her revelations shocked him. But instead of shock or disgust, his classically handsome features showed . . . hunger. It was as though his whole face had sharpened and strained toward her words, intensely interested, eager, almost starving for revelation. An animal look.

“What did you do then?” he asked. “What did you do with that stone?”

“Nothing. I did nothing with it.”

“You must have done something,” Farewell looked toward Nigel. “Such attacks as the one you suffered are not brought about by nothing.”

“I unwrapped it,” Emily said. “I held it. It felt warm and alive to the touch, as such bespelled objects often do.”

The intentness in Farewell's look intensified. “So you unlocked the spell,” he said. “What did you use to unlock it?”

“In novels,” she said, her voice sounding small and childish to her own ears, “such love tokens are activated by being touched. I did nothing else. I did not know how to do anything else.”

Peter Farewell frowned. Then his look of sharp curiosity returned. “And where is it?” he asked. “This love token you claim to have found?”

Emily shook her head. “I don't believe it was a love token, really. Not any longer. It—”

“Where is it?” Farewell asked. He looked as if at any moment he might lose his temper.

“I had it in my hands,” she said. “And then . . . the thing . . .” She swallowed hard, against the remembered touch of the unholy spirit creature, the remembered stench of rotting flesh in her nostrils. She shook her head. “And then I don't know.” Bewildered, she looked about her, half expecting it to be at her feet, or somehow caught in her clothing. “Perhaps it vanished. Some spells do when they activate. But why would Nigel keep such a foul thing in his luggage? Was it a defense, you think? A—”

Farewell growled, a sound that came deep from within his throat and didn't sound quite human. Alarmed, Emily stepped back and away from him. But she could not step away quite fast enough. His arm brushed her skirt as he dove past her and toward the foot of the bed. There she saw something glowing bright red, like an ill-extinguished fire amid the fringes of the velvet bedspread.

Farewell grabbed at the glow and straightened with another growl. In his hands was the same round rock that Emily had found in Nigel's trunk. It had stopped glowing.

“The compass stone,” Farewell said, his voice still echoing his annoyance. “The compass stone. And you activated it, attuned it to yourself.”

“I beg your pardon?” Emily asked.

He held the stone in front of her face, waving it within inches of her bewildered eyes. “This, madam, if you truly don't know it, is a compass stone. It shows the way to something: some secret treasure, some secret hideout . . . Something that doubtless you and your husband know far more about than I. By touching it and by being . . . of whatever bend of mind it was attuned to select for, you bonded it to your magical power. It will show
you
the way to what you're searching for.”

“But I am searching no—”

“And only you.” Farewell dropped the stone and Emily instinctively had to grab at it to prevent it from crushing her toes.

As her hands closed around it, the sense of a small being clinging to her for dear life engulfed her again, and something else, a sense of belonging and being loved, such as she hadn't felt since her mother's death. Was this why, then, she had dreamed of her childhood in India?

The red glow formed again upon the stone, though it remained quite cool to the touch—a red glow filled with mists of belonging and acceptance. And then it coalesced into the glow of an arrow pointing west and south.

“And whatever you're searching for lies southwest from us,” Peter Farewell said. “As does most of the African continent, of course.”

“But I'm not searching for anything.” Emily protested again, just as she realized that perhaps Nigel was. But what could he be seeking?

As Emily held the stone, she became conscious of a burning feeling on her arm, just at her wrist. It increased steadily. “You may stop that,” she told Peter, annoyed, thinking only that he was punishing her for meddling in Nigel's affairs.