Heart of Light (15 page)

“Stop what?”

“The burning upon my wrist. And besides, even if this were a compass stone leading to the finding of great treasures, how could it have caused the dark creature to—” The burning had become unbearable. Emily set the stone down on a small table and held on to her wrist. “Please, stop.”

“It was not the compass stone that caused the hyena creature to appear. But if I'm right it was your activating of the stone that caused the creature to home in on you. Oh, it might have found you—or Nigel—in time, but it would never have fastened so tightly had you not been using a powerful magical object.”

Closing the distance between them in three decisive steps, Peter grabbed at Emily's hand before she could pull it away.

“Sir, what—” But he followed outrage with injury, tearing at her sleeve, roughly exposing her arm from wrist to elbow.

Emily yelped and struggled to get away from the madman who had obviously acquired a taste for undressing her. And then stopped. Upon the white skin of her wrist, a dark, hyena-shaped mark glowed. Like the spirit creature that had attacked her.

A shiver went down Emily's spine, and she shook her head as air seemed to rush out of her lungs. “What is that?” she asked. “What does it mean?”

“That,” Farewell said, frowing distastefully at her arm, “is the mark of the Hyena Men. They have put a magical bind on you!”

A GENTLEMAN'S DUTY

Nigel became aware of his body, lying flat on the
thick rug of his hotel room in Cairo. He knew where he was from the residual smell of spices in the air, and the feel of the air on his skin—moist and too warm, like a lustful kiss. His shoulder hurt where he'd fallen, and the memory returned. He'd interposed himself between Emily and the thing attacking her.

Urgent concern for his wife's safety forced Nigel to claw his way up, step by step, toward consciousness. Pushing himself to control his limbs and possess his senses, he became aware of voices in the room. Familiar voices. Emily and Peter. For a moment the voices were audible but the words weren't. It was like listening to a conversation late at night on a public thoroughfare. You passed by in your carriage and you heard your name, but were never quite sure what it meant or even if it referred to you or just someone of the same name. A small, insistent sound joined the words. A sniffing and whimpering.

“Good God, madam,” Peter said. “You cannot be crying. You must have known the danger you were in.”

“Oh, but I have undertaken nothing but my honeymoon,” Emily said, her voice small and brittle, like silver bells superimposed on the roar of a stormy night. “Nothing at all.”

Sobs followed.

“Nigel didn't tell you?” Peter sounded shocked

“Nigel? What . . . What should he have told me?”

“Why, what you are searching for. And the dangers attending it.”

Nigel tried to move, but it felt as though a great weight sat upon his chest, holding him still. And no matter how he tried, his body would not move. Yet the sound of Emily's sobs, and Peter's voice, rallied him to himself, and he drew his will up through his body, forcing himself up, forcing himself to wake. And as suddenly as he'd fallen senseless, he was awake, sitting up. The whole room seemed to gyrate dizzily about him and his stomach clenched in nausea, but he fought through it to speak.

“Here,” he said. “What nonsense is this? Leave off, Peter. She knows nothing.”

Emily and Peter both jumped and turned and stared at Nigel. Nigel closed his eyes, but he still felt the room spin. He opened his eyes again and flinched and glared. Both intensified his discomfort and the way in which the room appeared to spin around him.

Emily's eyes were red, and she clutched a little lacy square of handkerchief in her hand. Peter looked pale, waxy, like a man in the grip of a great fear. He came toward Nigel, his voice anxious, his movements abrupt. “Good God, Nigel. Good God.” Forced laughter. “You gave me quite a turn. I thought you dead.”

Nigel shook his head. He did not stretch his hands to meet the hands that Peter extended to help him up.

“You were asking Emily some nonsense about Hyena Men? Some damned African cult?” Nigel spoke gruffly, all too aware that the cult's involvement in this must be related to his secret mission. Peter had tried to get Emily to confess what their mission truly was, but she didn't know.

Fresh guilt stabbed Nigel's conscience at the thought that he had brought Emily to Africa as innocent and unaware as a lamb to the slaughter.

“Oh,” Peter said. He straightened. He paced away from Nigel, then back again. “The creature she was fighting was a spirit hyena, obviously sent by the Hyena Men. A . . . a secret African organization. And she has taken their brand. They attacked her when she activated the compass stone from your luggage.”

“The compass stone?” Nigel repeated, sure he sounded like an idiot, just repeating everything Peter said. “She activated the compass stone?”

He stared at his sobbing wife with open-mouth wonder. Even the operatives of the magical secret service, trained in magic, great in power, did not know how to activate such a thing. They'd given it to Nigel with the vague hope that between his contacts in Cairo, his training and Emily's strong magical power they might manage something. Carew had known how to do it, but he was lost. They hoped something in the blood knew how to activate it. When Lord Widefield's men had recovered it—through what means, Nigel had never been deemed worthy of knowing—it had been back to its dormant state.

“How, Emily?” he asked. She looked away from him. “And why?” He made his voice very gentle, but at the same time sought to speak more formally. He did not wish to have a marital argument in front of Peter.

Emily blinked. She looked very red—the sort of blush that was like a fever, with great pallor lurking just beneath. She shrugged. “I don't know,” she said. A few tears dripped from her eyes, but she seemed quite unaware of them. “I thought it was a love token. From some great love from your past.”

And here was wonder that passed all wonders. Where did Emily expect him to have found such a love? In his cloistered childhood in his parents' home, or in his days in Cambridge, in almost exclusively masculine company? “But . . .” he said, confused. He opened his hands, as if to show that he held no weapons. “I never loved anyone but you.”

At this, she, too, seemed confused, and stared at him with a surprised look that cut him to the heart.

“Very nice,” Peter said. “But the truth remains that between the two of you, you've managed to attract the attention of the Hyena Men. You need not tell me why, now that you are awake, but you should know the extent of the predicament in which you find yourselves.”

Peter stepped toward Emily, then seemed to think better of it, as she whimpered and recoiled. “Mrs. Oldhall has been stained with the spirit mark of the Hyena Men upon her wrist. That means they've placed a bind upon her. They'll always know where she is. And if you seek to obfuscate them, they can reach for her power. If they access her power three times, she will be mind-blanked—their mindless slave to do with as they please.”

“Slave? Emily,” Nigel heard the tender reproach in his own voice, and thought himself a fool.

Emily answered sullenly. “I didn't know. How could I know? What is the stone? To what does it show the way?”

She crossed her arms on her chest and seemed to grow two feet taller. She suddenly looked very different—an Emily Nigel had never known: a reserved, remote matron. Her eyes were still red, her skin still pale. She looked lovely though in no way soft or intimidated. Instead, she seemed as full of righteous authority as Nigel's own mother. “Why are we in Africa, Mr. Oldhall? What is this charade? It is obvious there is more to this trip than simply our honeymoon.”

Nigel looked from Emily's demanding expression to Peter's inquisitive one.

Peter stubbed his cigarette hard upon the ashtray. “I think you'd better fess up, old man,” Peter said, and again extended his hand to Nigel.

Nigel stretched his own hand to meet it, to help himself up, and in doing it, as his sleeve slid up, he noticed upon his wrist a dark mark in the shape of a hyena. He knew enough of dark magic—academically if not in practice—to know this was a spirit mark, like the one Peter said Emily had received.

Shocked, he stared at his wrist in disbelief.

Peter pulled him up, jarring him from his reverie, and Nigel stood, seemingly through no effort of his own.

“The mark,” he said, and held on to his wrist with his other hand, disbelieving. His wrist felt normal, nothing strange about it. But the dark patch remained there, visible between the pale, elongated fingers of his other hand. “They put a mark upon me, also? Will they also make me their mind-slave?”

“Undoubtedly,” Peter said. “If they have occasion to reach for your mind three more times. Nigel, I'm not asking what your business is in Africa. I know what it is. I know it's not . . . a long-lost love of some sort. However, I have to warn you that you are in grave danger, from which nothing can save you except maybe leaving Africa right now. I'd return to London and look up a good enchanter of the kind that can treat ills of the spirit and the magical power. And I'd pray that my path never crosses that of the Hyena Men again.”

Nigel backed up under the gaze of his observers, toward an armchair, into which he fell like an ill-filled sandbag. Sweat beaded his forehead, dripped into his eyes. But Emily had recovered and turned to Peter.

“How do you know of this organization, Mr. Farewell?” she asked, her newfound poise lending her authority. “You ask what we're doing in Africa—but what are
you
doing here? How do you know about these men?”

Peter looked at Emily and smiled in wry amusement. “I've been here and there,” he drawled. “Done this and that. The Hyena Men are a secret society in the sense that, though the governments of the world know very well they exist, they don't know all their workings nor where any of their members are at any moment. Though it's not a subject that would come out in an English drawing room, one hears about them . . . when one is experienced and travels the world enough.”

Nigel chewed his lower lip as he thought of possible solutions for the enigma his old friend had become. Peter was exaggerating the ease of acquiring the knowledge he possessed, Nigel knew that. Unlike Emily, Nigel's life hadn't been completely sheltered, nor his experience circumscribed to the safe realm of the drawing room. Oh, he'd not traveled that much, but he'd talked to people who had. In Cambridge he'd met fellows who had lived abroad. Yet none of them had been well versed in secret African organizations, nor in the mechanics of empire. Nor even in the dark magic like the mark now blotting Nigel's wrist. He himself only knew about such things because Lord Widefield had briefed him on them.

Nigel reached for a kerchief from his jacket pocket and patted at his face. The whole added up to an alarming picture. Peter was undoubtedly in the secret service. Her Majesty's secret service.

And he'd been sent here to test Nigel. Nothing else explained his probing comments about the British right to be in Africa or his knowledge of secret organizations and dark magic. He'd desired to know for sure where Nigel's loyalty lay.

But why would the organization test Nigel?

Well . . . why not? Obviously, Nigel was an unknown quantity, chosen primarily because he had been Carew's younger brother. Of the same blood, they'd said. As likely to impress the compass stone as Carew, they'd said. And then there had been treason done; the burned-out safe house was an eloquent enough proof of that betrayal.

Who else should the secret service suspect of treason but Nigel, the stranger in their midst?

Peter had probably been elsewhere in Africa on some mission and been called here suddenly when the safe house had been lost. That explained why Peter had been so evasive about his means of travel. He'd been here all along.

Yes, it all made perfect sense. It was the only way to explain Peter's oddness. Had he suspected Nigel of the attack on the safe house? Or of having betrayed its location? For a moment Nigel was stung by the thought that his old friend—smoking impassively a few steps away—had suspected him of murder.