Demon's Curse (Imnada Brotherhood) (2 page)

So had this Fey-blood Other really triggered Adam’s shift through his magic? A terrifying thought.

Mac scanned the book, his mind churning with every new entry. “These pages are full of references to the Imnada. Somehow this Other must have discovered Adam was of the five clans. Adam did what he had to.”

“But slaughtering the entire household?” Gray protested.

“You know the laws,” Mac answered. “It was them or us. What would you have done?”

Gray scanned the room once more, his gaze coming to rest on the body of the Fey-blood. “There must be another way,” he mumbled, his frustration clear.

“What now?” David asked. “We’re due back to camp by dawn.” His face pressed into harsh weary lines. Which one of them wasn’t exhausted? Surviving
on a knife edge? They’d been scouting for weeks, hoping to ascertain the disposition of French troops. It was only now, so close to Morderoth, that they’d completed their mission and begun the march toward Brussels, where Wellington’s staff remained billeted.

Gray straightened, shoulders back, head up, as if sensing an answer on the evening breeze. But it was not the major who spoke.

The corpse on the carpet moved in a sudden gurgling breath. “You’ll pay for your crimes.”

Mac slammed the book closed. “He lives.”

“Imnada . . . treacherous . . . demons . . .” the man gasped, his agonized gaze passing from soldier to soldier. “My family . . . Where . . .”

David’s gaze flickered, his jaw clamped shut.

“Dead . . . you killed them . . . so shall you all be punished for the crime of one . . .”

“We murdered no one,” David cried in defense, but Gray held up a hand. As the highest-ranking officer, Major de Coursy still held sway, and David fell silent, though Mac felt resentment in the younger man’s thoughts.

“
Mest gelweth an’a noa pystrot a’gan’a mamsk hath an’a kollyesh esh a’na cronil,
” the Other whispered, his body shuddering in pain.

The gibberish meant nothing to the three of them. Not until Adam straightened, the coat sliding from his shoulders to the floor. “Stop him!” he shouted.

But the strange language came faster and stronger now, as if all the dying Other’s remaining life were poured into the hellish words. “
Imnadesh Prytsk. Owgsk mollothegh. Dydhweytsk dea. D’wosk’ an’a goedhvith. Dhiwortsk nana bya.”

Adam fell, trembling. The rest of them remained transfixed as the Other spat his curse to the wind. The curtains billowed. The final candle was snuffed out, leaving the room in darkness. But a light burned blue and silver within the man’s dying face as if his spirit hovered beneath his skin.

“Get out!” Mac shouted, a premonition of evil vising his chest. The air grew heavy. He couldn’t breathe. Every hair stood at attention as if he were caught within the heart of a lightning storm. “Grab Adam! Now!”

Gray lunged for Adam. David scrambled for the door, Mac urging his friends onward, but the curse rode on swifter wings, and there was no escaping. Not the room. Not their fate.

Blue fire engulfed them. Unearthly wails, high and shrieking, beat against Mac’s brain, breaking through every mental shield he threw up. The Other’s curse sank into his blood, into the marrow of his bones. The taint moved through him like venom.

His limbs transformed, his body shifted, the change overtaking him even as he struggled against it. He could not control it. Could not stop it.

His companions fared no better. As the fireball burned without heat, without smoke, it crackled over fur and feather. It rippled in silver and aquamarine over beak and claw. And as the last red rim of the sun sank below the trees, it was wolf and panther, lynx and eagle, that emerged from the farmhouse to scatter like hunted beasts into the forest.

1

ST. JAMES’S PICCADILLY CHURCHYARD, LONDON

OCTOBER 1816

Bianca paid off the hackney with the last shilling she’d tucked in her reticule that morning. She could only hope the rain that had threatened all day would hold off a few hours more. She didn’t relish a long, soggy trudge, especially since she’d stupidly worn her newest bonnet and a lovely pelisse in violet merino wool she could barely afford. She pinched her lips together. Actually, she hadn’t been able to afford it at all, but Adam insisted the color became her perfectly. Like a graceful purple
Iris ensata,
he’d raved. Rain or no rain, it seemed fitting to wear the outfit to say good-bye to her dearest friend.

She regretted coming as soon as she descended onto the flagway. A mob thronged the area around St. James’s. What did they imagine? That they might catch sight of Adam’s naked, ravaged body? That he might rise from the grave to point an accusing finger? Expose his murderer to the world?

Whispers swirled around her.

“. . . recognize her from Covent Garden . . . Viola
last spring . . . beautiful . . . no better than she should be . . . foreigner . . . actress . . . dead man’s whore . . . murderess . . .”

A shiver raced up her spine, but as if she were preparing her entrance onstage, she firmed her shoulders, straightened her back, and lifted her chin, eyes sparking. Adam had been her friend. He hadn’t deserved to die as he had, and she owed him a final farewell. Crowds and their ugly slander be damned!

Bianca passed through the churchyard to the grave site. Once beyond the ghoulish sightseers, she found herself almost alone in her grief. A minister presided over a trio of men standing awkwardly, their faces arranged in expressions of mourning, though she questioned their sincerity. After all, she’d never seen any of them before. Not once in all the time she’d known Adam.

Perhaps a clue rested in the uniformed crispness of one, his hat tucked beneath his arm, a sword hanging loosely from his hip. Bianca knew that Adam had served for years in the army, selling out after the emperor’s final defeat at Waterloo the summer before last. Could these men be former brothers in arms?

They looked up as one when she swept forward to stand unapologetically beside them. She sensed a slow-burning appraisal from the golden-haired Adonis to her left, greatcoat hanging elegantly from his wide shoulders, cravat tied in careless perfection. A gentleman with the looks and—if she read him right—the knowledge of his own power to attract.

A regal gentleman at the foot of the grave eyed her down his straight aristocratic nose, lips pursing ever so slightly, hand tightening on the knob of his cane. It didn’t take a mind reader to interpret his disapproval.

Only the officer spared her no more than a glance before returning his attention to the minister reading from his Bible.

Dismissing the three men with a jerk of her chin, she focused on the reason she was here. Adam Kinloch. A true friend and gentleman when so many others of her acquaintance wanted something from her. Her talent. Her favors. Her body.

Adam had never asked for more than her friendship. And in offering his in return. he’d reminded her of the life she’d lost when Papa died and Lawrence had swept her from the gardens and greenhouses outside Baltimore to the clogged and cluttered streets of London.

What sort of monster would have killed him in such a horrible, shocking way? Would leave him naked and gutted, abandoned like so much refuse to be scavenged by dogs and beggars?

Tears pricked the corners of her eyes, her stare burning to hold them back. No doubt these cold-eyed men assumed, like everyone else, that she and Adam had been lovers. She’d always let people believe what they wished. Better that than discovering the far more disturbing truth.

As if sensing her thoughts, the uniformed man met her watery gaze. His strange almond-shaped eyes were a pale green-gold, long-lashed and deeply set. His lips were full and sensuous. Smiling, he would have been devastating. But he didn’t look as if he smiled often, if at all. In fact, he could have been carved from stone. From across Adam’s grave, he watched her steadily as if he could see right into her heart. She knuckled her hands together, refusing to look away first. He wanted
to stare? Fine. He could stare all he liked. She was used to eyes on her.

As the service concluded, the others drifted away, leaving her alone with the gravediggers clutching their spades.

She dropped the small nosegay she’d purchased from a flower seller into the grave. “I’ll not forget you, my friend,” she whispered. “And never fear, as you kept my secret, so shall I keep yours. You have my promise.”

As the first scoop of earth thudded against the coffin’s lid, the heavens opened, the autumn rain falling in a chilling drench that immediately drooped her ribbons and soaked through the expensive wool to her gown beneath.

Shielding her head as best she could with her reticule, she turned, almost knocking into the officer, who had lingered behind.

“Pardon,” he said, his voice a gruff rumble, his gaze doubly intense at a distance of inches. He opened his mouth as if he might say more, but she dodged past him in her haste to leave this awful, forlorn, hopeless place.

The crowds had dispersed in the downpour. The sidewalk was empty but for a knife grinder hurrying for shelter and a man selling meat pies to a dripping-wet customer.

She lifted a hand to hail a hackney before remembering she had no fare. Instead she hastened east down Piccadilly on foot, all the while feeling a gaze leveled at her back, tickling her shoulder blades. She would not turn around, but her steps came faster until, cowardly as it made her feel, she was almost running.

*   *   *

“The woman knows, I’m sure of it.” Captain Mac Flannery splashed brandy into his glass before downing it in one quick gulp, letting the heat travel soothingly through him. Without any explicit invitation, the group of old friends had ended up at Gray’s town house after leaving the cemetery.

Mac poured another, trying to wash away the grave stench clinging to his nostrils, the roof of his mouth. The memory of earth striking the coffin lid as Adam was entombed. The Imnada did not hold with enclosing their dead in the ground but released their spirits with fire, the better to send them back through the Gateway to be reunited with their ancestors. Unfortunately, Adam’s murder had garnered too much public attention to make that possible.

Instead, he’d died as he’d lived: in exile from his clan. His kind. Only Mac’s intervention keeping him from a pauper’s lye pit with the rest of the unclaimed dead.

“You think Adam betrayed us to an out-clan?” Gray demanded from his seat by the fire.

Mac hadn’t seen de Coursy since the chaotic days following Waterloo. The estranged heir to the dukedom of Morieux lived a reclusive life in the north, rarely venturing to London, and even then shunning the usual Society entertainments. Some gossip blamed it on a horrible disfigurement acquired during the war. Others whispered he kept his mad wife locked in a tower. The most salacious hinted at black arts and satanic rituals carried out in the catacombs beneath his bleak Yorkshire estate.

If only the truth were that simple.

“Was that Bianca Parrino paying her last respects?” David St. Leger paused in shuffling a deck of cards to hold out his glass for Mac to refill.

“Who?” Mac asked, glancing at the faces of the men he’d once soldiered with. Men who at one time had been as close as brothers. The Fey-blood’s curse had shattered that bond as it had destroyed so much in their lives.

Friendships forged by blood and steel had frayed like ragged cloth as if each of them had hoped to flee the curse by running away from each other. They should have known their fates and Fey-blood magic had tied them too closely for escape. They were bound by darker forces than the war.

“All work and no play, Captain Flannery.” David gave a disgusted shake of his head. “Do they have you chained to your desk over there at the Horse Guards?”

Mac chose not to answer. This wasn’t David’s first refill.

“She’s an actress at Covent Garden,” he continued. “All the rage this year. Audiences love her.”

Of course. That was why the woman at Adam’s funeral had seemed so familiar. Mac had seen her penned likeness staring out at him from countless newspapers. They didn’t do her justice.

Statuesque as any Nordic queen, she carried herself with a pride that bordered on the insolent. Hair blond as corn silk. Eyes a chilling blue. And just enough of an accent to give her an air of the exotic. But it was what she’d said more than how she’d said it that had truly rooted him to the spot.
As you kept my secret, so shall I keep yours.

Had Adam been foolish enough to trust her with the Imnada’s existence? And could this reckless confession have led to his murder?

“They say she’s high in the instep as any duchess. Throws men into a quake with one glance from those alluring blue eyes,” David said, refilling his own glass this time. “They also say she and Adam were lovers.”

Gray rose to toss another log on the fire. “I find that hard to believe while the Imnada are forbidden marriage outside the clans.”

“I never said he was marrying her. I said he was swiving her,” David said with a leer.

Gray’s face betrayed his disgust.

“Wrinkle your princely nose all you want, de Coursy, but you know as well as I do that as long as we lay under the curse, a quick shag is all you and I are ever going to get.”