Demon's Curse (Imnada Brotherhood) (9 page)

The carriage lurched to a clattering stop, the driver shouting, “Holles Street, Cap’n!”

She sat up, a distant look in her eyes, and the moment between them passed as if it had never been.

A sticky hand clamped against his ribs, Mac opened the door for Bianca, the world reeling with more than recent discoveries. His side burned as if a torch had been held to his skin, and while the bleeding had slowed, it still seeped hot through his fingers at every movement. “You’ll be safe now.”

Bianca frowned, her lips pressed into a determined line, her hands clutching the strap of her bag. “I’ll not leave this carriage unless you come with me. You’re hurt and can barely see straight.”

“Bianca—”

“Captain Flannery, it’s that, or we order the driver to your lodgings and I’ll tend you there. Either way, I’ll not leave you until I know your wound is seen to.”

He recognized that look of female pigheadedness.
If Bianca was anything like his sister, they’d sit here all night until she got her way. And he didn’t have nearly that long. “You win.”

She smirked over her success. “I usually do.”

*   *   *

Renata paused in her letter writing to look out on the stream of people passing by her drawing room window. Was the gentleman standing on the corner a beast in man’s clothing? Did the pair of women crossing the street change shape at the light of the moon? Was that fellow chatting with the peddler on the corner a dirty shifter?

It made her skin crawl to think these creatures walked unnoticed among humanity, able to work their treachery and do their murderous will, with the world none the wiser to their secret.

The Imnada are out there, Renata. I know it. And someday we’ll prove it to the world.

Her father’s words repeated so often throughout her childhood; an unrelenting refrain in spite of the criticisms and mockery heaped upon him by professors and scholars who scorned his research and dismissed his claims. They blamed Gilles d’Espe’s mania on the tragic death of his wife, a woman Renata had never known but hated with every fiber of her being. It was this woman, long dead, who’d continued to hold her father’s heart, allowing no other to take her place. No new love to grow.

Renata had tried. Desperate to prove her devotion, she’d assisted her father in gathering his Imnada lore, searching out rare texts and uncovering forgotten references. When he’d sought to launch expeditions to
Wales and Scotland in search of the elusive creatures, it had been Renata who organized sailing schedules and lodgings, provisions and guides. Any way to stay close to him. To carve a place within his life.

None of it had mattered.

A dead wife. A dead race. These were what he loved. He was blind to the living, breathing daughter in front of him.

She grew to hate this loathsome breed with the same fury she reserved for that bitch of a wife. Both had stolen her father’s attention. And while one was naught but bones and beyond her retribution, the Imnada were not.

She dipped her pen into the inkwell, completed the last invitation in the stack. The recipients would gather for the skills of her cook and the perfection of her wine cellar. They would leave carrying the seeds of the shifters’ destruction. The questions would grow. The word would spread. The Other would finally understand the threat they faced.

Father had been right.

The Imnada were out there. She had seen them.

They would pay for all they’d done to tear her family apart. She would prove her love once and for all. She would finally make Father proud.

5

The surgeon came and went, stitching the gash in the captain’s side with much reproachful tut-tutting. “Is the gentleman staying here with you tonight?” he’d asked, his meaning clear.

“I certainly hope so or I’ll have to postpone our orgy,” Bianca snapped.

He sniffed his disdain even as he accepted her coins, but she’d already dismissed him and his small-minded contempt. Leaving his departure to Molly, she ascended the stairs to the guest chamber and tapped once before entering.

Molly had yet to clear away the remnants of the doctor’s visit. A shallow basin of bloody water still sat on the floor by the bed, rags in a heap beside it. On the table, a half-empty brandy decanter and a glass stood amid a clutter of medicines.

She’d expected Captain Flannery to be asleep or, at least, in bed. Instead, he clutched the bedpost, wearing nothing but his bloodstained breeches and a sickly gray pallor. Spots of blood seeped through the layers
of bandage wound tight across his ribs while sweat glistened on his powerful chest and shoulders and his eyes swam with pain.

A few inches in any direction. A few seconds slower in reaction time.

Bianca swallowed around the fear rising in her throat. “You claimed it was just a scratch. Look at you: barely able to stand.”

“I can stand.” He straightened. Immediately the color drained from his face, his mouth taut in a grimace. He slumped, letting out his held breath, hand resting against his side. “It’s standing straight I have a problem with.”

What was it about men and their stubborn need to appear invincible? They’d rather die than accept that they might be in pain or ill or, worse than worse, need a woman’s assistance.

“How foolish can you be? That was no scratch to be fixed with sticking-plaster and basilicum powder. Ah, but I forgot: you’re a soldier, impervious to pain.”

“I wouldn’t go so far as to say ‘impervious.’ ” The ghastly pallor of sickness left his face, and he laughed. Or at least, that was what it sounded like. It came harsh and creaky. As if it had been a long time since he’d indulged. “Perhaps ‘thick-skinned’ would be more precise.”

“ ‘Thickheaded’ would be more precise.”

“Just when I think I have you figured out, Bianca Parrino, you surprise me.” He reached out, his hand enfolding her own. His clean, wintry outdoor scent so different from the pomaded and perfumed men of her acquaintance. “I expect a tongue-lashing, and instead you’re worrying over me.”

“This
is
a tongue-lashing, and I am
not
worrying.” She snatched her hand from his before he took her concern for more. “Merely stating the obvious, Captain. Denials aside, it’s clear you’re unwell.”

“Say my name.”

“Pardon?”

“Say my name, Bianca.”

“Captain Flannery, I—”

Hunching his shoulders, he gave a snort of disgust.

“Cormac Cúchulainn Flannery,” she said, enunciating each syllable with painful precision.

“Ouch. Low blow.” His gaze seemed to shimmer like foxfire as a headache thumped behind her eyes.

“Mac,” she said quietly.

A smile stole like a thief across his face. “Knew you had it in you.”

She retreated from his unnerving warmth, looking for space to breathe and time to calm the uncomfortable buzz tingling her insides.

He dropped his hand to his side with something like regret in his eyes. “I have to go, Bianca.”

“Go? You’re in no condition to walk out of here. You have to rest.”

Settling onto the edge of the bed, he fumbled with his boots, wincing as he bent to pull the first one on. “I can’t stay. There are things I must do. People I must speak with.”

“Then you’ll come back and tell me who those men were, what’s going on?”

He paused, second boot in hand, his stare seeming to pierce her to her core. “I don’t want you mixed up in this. It’s too dangerous.”

“And your leaving is going to keep me safe? What
happened to the man who complained about my lack of protection? My mousy maid? This concerns me as much as anyone. While the stories linking me to Adam’s death are running rampant, I’m without a job. I don’t even want to think about what will happen if the stories grow to actual suspicions. Weren’t you the one who offered to be an ally if things got sticky?”

“I was.”

“Well, Captain, we’re up to our necks in sticky, wouldn’t you agree?”

He plowed a hand through his hair, exhaustion dogging his posture, sapping his words of their strength. “How is my spending the night here with you alone going to do anything but throw raw meat to the gossips?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they’ll be so distracted by my shameless behavior in taking a new bedmate, they’ll stop dwelling on Adam’s murder.”

“More likely, they’ll decide we’re both guilty of conspiring to rid you of an unwanted lover. Lord Braemer thought as much, and with less cause than my sleeping in your bed.”

“You’ll be sleeping in my guest room.”

“Semantics.”

Mac had a definite point about the potential for disaster, but he spoiled it by rising from bed, stoop-shouldered and spine bowed as if it pained him to straighten. A stiff wind would blow the man over, and he wanted to charge back into the fray? He’d not stand a chance if those men returned. And she’d go from one very reluctant ally to no defender at all.

“Most red-blooded males in your shoes would be panting at the chance to spend a night with me.”
Explaining away her deception as necessary and for his own good, she furtively moved to shield the table with her body, unstoppering a bottle of laudanum to slosh an enormous dose into a glass of brandy.

“I’m not like most men.”

Turning back with a smile, she held out the glass. “Oh, so you
don’t
want to spend the night with me?” she teased, in a bid to distract him from her purpose.

“Is that a trick question?”

She offered him a practiced look of coy seduction. “Just a question.”

He accepted the drink, tossing it back in one swallow. “Good-bye, Bianca.”

She smiled in triumph. “Good night, Mac.”

*   *   *

“If you outstay the time, upon mine honour, And in the greatness of my word, you die.”

“O my poor Rosalind, whither wilt thou go? . . .”

“Alas, what danger will it be to us, Maids as we are, to travel forth so far! Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold . . . Now go we in content, To liberty, and not to banishment.”

Tonight Shakespeare’s words carried more of truth than Bianca would have liked. A woman fleeing for her life in the face of dangerous men. At least poor Rosalind had a sympathetic Celia as companion. Bianca’s narrow escape had been in company with a grim-faced soldier whose roughened edges, beneath his pristine uniform, threw her into a tongue-tied frazzle. Something she wasn’t used to—not in recent years.

She played the game, but it never touched her personally. She’d become an actress on and off the stage.

But not with Mac.

With every encounter, he managed to sneak beneath her props and costumes to the woman she was—or, rather, the woman she might have been had her life taken a different course.

And that was a complication she didn’t need.

A jab to the ribs by the woman playing Celia refocused Bianca on the stage, the audience, the theater—a world that meant security and encouragement and admiration. A world where playing a role was all they ever asked of her, and the fantasy was everything. But all that might be lost now.

She took what might be her final bows to a drumming rain of applause and cheers, though scattered among the adoration were hints of darker emotions. A few hisses and catcalls from the lower benches. A spearing of hard-eyed disapproval from the upper boxes that chilled her bones like a cold wind. And just as the curtain closed, a half-eaten apple landed on the stage at her feet.

Was Mr. Harris right? Were her admirers so fickle that just the hint of a lurid story was enough to make them turn on her?

As she made her way backstage, fear and doubt and a lingering sour taste of panic left by this afternoon’s attack pressed once more against a heart already weighted with grief. Not even her dresser’s usual chatter was enough to soothe Bianca’s nerves as she changed out of costume and wiped clean her face for the last time until who knew when. Even as she closed the lid on her cosmetics box, slid the last bit of costume jewelry away in a drawer, and tidied away the ribbons and combs and pins scattered across the top
of her dressing table, the knowledge that this could be her last performance wasn’t enough to erase the waxy gray of Mac’s face. Instead, the memory of his fingers, sticky and red with blood, burned hot against the backs of her eyelids, and the vision of his ruthless, feral excitement as he fought still squirmed the pit of her stomach.

Normally she’d push aside the horrid events of the day with seven covers at table and non-stop champagne. Inoculate herself against the deafening quiet of the night with laughter and sparkle and conversation. Those ploys had always worked when memories of Lawrence’s rage-filled violence surfaced and nightmares of the pain and humiliation suffered under his domination clustered close within the shadows.

But not tonight. Not when the rumors flew like barbs and she was uncertain of her welcome. Not when the only man who seemed to believe in her innocence lay recovering from a bullet wound in her house. Captain Mac Flannery had burst into her life like a rabbit from a conjurer’s hat, but what role would he take on now that he’d arrived?

Ally? Maybe.

Enigma? Definitely.

*   *   *

Mac woke to darkness leavened only by the smoldering of a low-banked fire. For a moment, he had no idea where he was or what had happened. Then memories flooded back, and he clawed himself free of the entangling covers, paws skidding on the polished wood floor. Tail lashing the air like a flag.