Accursed (17 page)

Tamara looked up into his eyes and they were alight now, with a ghastly yellow gleam. She had not imagined it before. His face was no longer papery. A sheen of some sort covered it. He blinked at her and she saw again that second set of lids, the nictitating membranes that covered his eyes.

“Holy God,” Tamara cried, and she forced herself to her feet, trying to yank her arm away.

Frederick gave a wet, throaty laugh, and tugged back. His strength was that of a madman. It was so great that he easily pulled her down onto his lap. The greenish tint to his flesh deepened as he grinned, face stretching, and he began to paw at her.

His hand closed upon her left breast and quickly found her nipple through the soft fabric, pinching her hard enough to make her whimper, pain shooting through her. Under normal circumstances Tamara could have destroyed him with a simple spell, but her focus was lost. And her mind was a tumult of conflict. This was Frederick Martin. Freddy, the half brother of her childhood friend. A boy she had teased, hiding her giggles behind a girlish hand.

For all her suspicion, when the reality became clear, her mind wasn’t prepared to meet it. This simply could not be.

She gasped as he dropped his hand and grasped her leg. His touch on her bare flesh was moist and cold, almost sticky. He dragged his fingers up her inner thigh toward a more intimate destination.

Nausea roiled in her gut and she tried to force his hand away, kicking out, struggling to escape his grasp. In all her life she had never felt such crippling horror, the chill of the idea, of what those fingers might do.

But that wasn’t what drove her over the edge.

It was his tongue.

Frederick shot out a thin tongue that must have been eleven or twelve inches long. Where he licked her face and her mouth, his tongue
stuck
for a moment, before retracting back into his throat. Pain throbbed where her breast had been bruised and twisted. She felt his fingers forcing her legs apart, but it was this sickening abomination that finally broke her.

Tamara opened her mouth then, and screamed. Her shriek echoed through the sitting room, and she was sure through the entire house, as well.

Heavy footfalls sounded, and Farris burst into the room. She felt a swell of love for the man as she saw his gentlemanly reserve shatter, and the fury that swept like a storm across his face. His big hands clenched into fists, and he ran across the room toward the settee.

Frederick laughed and threw her aside like a sack of rags. Tamara struck the chair in which she’d sat, then tumbled to the floor. She pulled herself up just in time to see Helena’s brother—or whatever he was becoming—take two blows in the face without flinching. He only grinned and clouted the butler on the side of the head.

Farris crumpled to the ground, either stunned or unconscious.

Then the hideous man, whose features seemed less and less human with every passing moment, smiled a jagged smile and shot out that toad’s tongue. That’s what he seemed to her now. A reptile. A toad. The clammy, greenish flesh and those eyes, that tongue . . . this wasn’t Frederick Martin anymore.

Tamara felt shame rise up inside her. She was a Protector of Albion, and had faced far more powerful evils than this. With William at her side, she had faced down one of the Lords of Hell. But Helena was dead, and Frederick was ruined somehow, and it was all too close to her. Tamara’s heart had been vulnerable, and it had made her weak.

Even as it now made her strong.

An errant wind blew up around her, magic coursing through her body and her hair swirling around her. The gust was so powerful it whipped at her nightdress, but she ignored the salacious gaze of the monster that slinked before her.

Tamara threw both hands up into the air, fingers contorted as though she were conducting a mad symphony.

“Malleus attonitum!”
she cried.

A rush of power swept around her and she hurled it across the room. The space that separated them seemed to waver with the force of the magic that went passing through it. The spell struck the twisted man like a cannonball, throwing him across the room and hammering him into the wall. Wooden beams cracked, Frederick’s head struck hard, and then he fell to the ground, perhaps eight feet from where Farris lay groaning.

Even as she marched toward her attacker, she wondered what had happened. Had Frederick been possessed, like her father was? Had he killed Helena, or had whatever killed her now decided to torment him in this way? Too many questions. But Tamara Swift would have answers.

“Miss?” Farris rasped, drawing himself up to his knees. Blood trickled down the side of his head, but he seemed clear-eyed enough. He smoothed his gray hair and attempted to comport himself with dignity.

“You’re all right?” she asked.

“Not by half, Miss Tamara,” the butler said gravely. “But I shall be.”

Tamara smiled.

As she moved cautiously toward the unmoving form of Frederick Martin, she heard a familiar sound, like fingers run roughshod over the strings of a violin. She glanced over and saw the ceiling begin to shimmer. The ghost of Queen Bodicea dropped into the room as though she had leaped from the sky. She fell to the floor, crouching instantly into a battle stance, spear at the ready.

“
Tamara!
Where is the danger, girl?” the specter snarled.

Even in the sunshine, when she was little more than a glimmer of a presence, her appearance was fearsome. Her face and bare breasts and belly were streaked with the war paint of her people, and there was death in her eyes.

“It has passed, Majesty.” Tamara gestured to her fallen attacker. “But many questions remain.”

Even as she spoke, she heard Frederick stirring. She saw the alarm on Farris’s face and the warning on Bodicea’s lips even before the long-dead barbarian queen had shouted her name.

“Tamara!”

But the sorceress had already spun, even as the twisted creature that had been Frederick Martin lunged at her from the floor, that long tongue striking at her face as though he meant to suck the eyes from her skull.

Bodicea’s phantom spear whistled past her ear, and Tamara watched it impale Frederick Martin, punching through his chest and slamming him back against the cracked wall. Despite all she had seen, she gasped aloud. The weapon itself was a ghost, and useful only against supernatural creatures.

The thing that had been Frederick screamed, shrieking incoherently as he tried to pull himself off the spear. And as he screamed, he
changed.
Within seconds, where a semblance of a man had once stood, only a beast remained. A monster.

The thing wasn’t exactly a reptile, but it bore a resemblance to several. There was something of the lizard in its fingers and scaly, clammy flesh, and the rows of teeth in its mouth, but its bulbous, rheumy, jaundiced eyes and sagging features and that thrusting tongue all spoke of a frog or toad. Hideous.

The thing sprang away from the wall, refusing to be stopped, tearing itself off the end of that spear with such suddenness that Tamara staggered back. The demon toad dropped into a crouch and lunged in a mighty leap across the room, to land in front of the tall windows. Farris was shouting, and Bodicea darted in a spectral wisp toward it, even as it tensed to spring again.

“Malleus attonitum!”
Tamara shouted again.

The spell erupted from her hands and struck the creature, knocking it backward with such force that it crashed out through the windows, showering broken glass onto the lawn. But even as it landed upon the grass it sprang up, turned, and fled across the grounds.

Queen Bodicea paused in front of the shattered windows. “Shall I give chase?”

Tamara almost consented, remembering the feel of those terrible hands upon her, and the way that tongue had stuck to her cheek and lips. The monster was wounded. How difficult would it be to run down?

Yet . . .

“No. There’s no way to know where the thing might lead us. Or if it serves some greater master. We’ll need to see William, first. He ought to know what’s happened. Then we’ll decide upon our next step.” She glanced at the butler, who used a handkerchief to dab at the trail of blood that still ran down his cheek. “Farris, locate Lord Byron and inform him that I’ve asked him to stand watch over my fath . . . over Oblis, until Bodicea and I return.”

With that, the distaff Protector of Albion marched out of the sitting room, with Bodicea close upon her heels. Tamara had stripped off her robe before she had reached the third stair.

“Do you really mean for me to believe that you haven’t already decided upon your next step?” the queen inquired.

“There’s safety in numbers. Should anything happen to me, I’ll want William to know, so we go to him first. We’ll translocate. He must be told what’s happened here.

“Then, I think, Your Majesty, that no matter how deeply it grieves me, I must visit the scene of Helena’s murder.”

T
HE CARRIAGE RUMBLED
slowly south along High Street. Too slowly. The windows were curtained, and only a dim light filtered in. William sat stiffly on the cushioned seat, Sophia directly across from him. Her hazel eyes seemed alight with silent, giddy laughter, and the corners of her perfect bow lips were lifted in amusement.

William used one finger to draw the window curtain back. They were passing Cromwell House, and beyond its grand façade he saw that the sky had begun to darken with the promise of rain. This momentary distraction did nothing to slow his racing pulse.

He swallowed, his throat dry and constricted.

“Is it that difficult to look at me?” Sophia asked.

He did as she asked, and found those lips formed into a fetching pout, so that his breath hitched in his chest. Her dress and bodice were a deep gold with a hint of scarlet, and against such rich color the lace frill of her cuffs and the visible hem of her petticoat were a temptation all their own.

“Your lady’s maid should be riding in the carriage with us, not up on the high seat with your driver,” William chided her. He felt the heat in his face, and knew he was flushed, but couldn’t decide if it was the awkwardness of having to admonish her, or the thrill of the intimacy of their situation.

Sophia shook her head. “William, darling.” She reached up and pushed tendrils of her hair away from her face, those hazel eyes burning into him. “I’ve told you before that Elvira can be counted upon for her discretion. And my driver, Mr. Milford, has been with the family for twenty-seven years.”

The mischievous gleam in her eyes quickened his pulse even further, and he licked his lips, not realizing he was doing it until it was too late.

As if it were the most natural thing in the world—as if she had only her comfort in mind—Sophia slid down a bit on the cushioned seat, and her skirts rode up toward her knees. Above the tops of her boots lay naked flesh, and William felt his eyes magnetically drawn toward the sight of that pale skin, the curve of her calves.

Sophia uncrossed her legs, moving her knees apart.

William could see nothing but shadow beneath her skirts, but his fertile imagination was enough. The lewdness of her action and the images in his mind ignited wild desire in him. He shifted upon his seat, his trousers suddenly far too confining.

Sophia noticed; she seemed to take great delight in the effect she was having upon him.

“I see we’re beginning to understand each other.”

His face was aflame now with the heat of embarrassment and yearning.

Sophia curled her fingers around the bottom of her skirts and quite deliberately drew them upward, a curtain all their own. She raised them halfway up her thighs.

William shuddered, his breath coming in short gasps, his erection almost painful. The carriage bumped over a stone in the road and jostled them both, and he thought perhaps it jostled some sense into him, for he forced himself to look away.

Purposefully, trying to get hold of himself, he looked out the window again. They had gained very little ground. He might have gone as fast had he chosen to walk into London, and felt certain that his darling had instructed her driver to maintain this snail’s pace until otherwise advised. In the distance he could see Whittington College, and on the breeze he had the scent of London town, the filthy odors of her industry and her offal.

Silently he urged the coachman to snap the reins, to speed the horses on their way.

In the intimate closeness of the carriage’s interior, Sophia Winchell sighed. “William Swift, you vex me so.”

He let the curtain drop, but steeled himself before he could look at her again. His arousal was still painful, and far too obvious, but he made no effort to disguise it, knowing it would only be more conspicuous.

“I vex you?” he asked, perplexed. “What on Earth are you talking about, Sophia? It seems to me that it should be the other way around. Indeed, it’s clear that you understand exactly what sort of effect you have upon me. But for propriety’s sake, for your
own
sake—”

“Propriety be damned.” Her breasts rose with the passion of her words, and her eyes narrowed. Her expression was eager, and she shook her head, fingers tracing the curves of her body. “I want your hands on me. That and so much more. Don’t you want the same?”