Raine: The Lords of Satyr (10 page)

Tucking her hair under the more sedate hat of the two, she studied her reflection. “I look damned good.”

Her companion’s bark of laughter drew her eyes to his image in the mirror behind her.

“Spoken like a true lady,” he said.

She stared in surprise. His eyes were twinkling and one side of his mouth had lifted to form the slightest of dimples in his cheek. It was the first true amusement she’d seen on his face. It transformed him from merely handsome to gloriously, magnificently handsome.

“Damned right,” she told him. She was surprised at how easily a flirtatious grin settled on her lips. Perhaps feminine wiles would not be so difficult to affect, now that she looked the part of a woman.

At her lengthy stare, he seemed to come back to himself. The dimple disappeared and the taciturn man of early last night returned.

“However, the mask detracts from the overall look,” he told her pointedly. “And it could bring trouble when we venture back to Venice since the Austrians have outlawed Carnivale and anything associated with it.”

Jordan touched her bauta with uncertain fingers. She hadn’t yet decided if she’d go with him to Tuscany. But she would go with him to Venice at least. And there, she could not wear the mask by day without attracting unwanted attention.

Watching his reflection, she slowly untied it and then let it drop to the floor.

“Well?” she asked, fidgeting when he said nothing.

He shrugged. “Well what? You’re beautiful, but I’m sure you’re aware of that fact.”

Beautiful. He’d called her beautiful. Another precious treasure to store in that mental trove that she’d begun since meeting him.

“Naturally,” she told him, lifting her chin. “But I never tire of hearing it.” Smoothing the sides of the gown over her cinched waist, Jordan surveyed her reflection. She could only imagine her mother’s shock when they met later this morning.
If
they met.

When he went downstairs to make arrangements for their transport to Venice, she scribbled a note.

She would let fate decide whether she’d remain in Venice. Once Raine departed the gondola upon their arrival there, she would go on her own to the rear entrance of her home off the alley and assess the climate within the household.

If Salerno was in residence, she would anonymously deliver the note to a servant and depart Venice with her companion, never having made her presence known to her mother.

If it turned out that Salerno wasn’t there, she would simply remove her hat, cover her gown as best she could with the crumpled cloak, and sneak up to her bedchamber. The servants were used to her wild ways and her comings and goings at all hours and would likely think little of this new escapade.

Raine would no doubt have gone to ring at the front entrance of her home. Once upstairs, she’d change into trousers and await his departure. Not knowing where to find her when he returned to his gondola, he would have no choice but to quit Venice without her.

Her lover returned, and in the mirror his lips moved, forming words. What had he said? Hastily folding the note, she turned and raised her brows in question.

“What have you decided?” he repeated. “Will you accompany me on my errand?”

She nodded. “I’ll go with you. And I’ll take the clothes as payment for last night. But that’s all I promise for now.”

He inclined his head in acceptance of her terms and held out his arm. “Come then.”

T
he morning was bright and sunny and the trip across the lagoon too quick. Nervous, Jordan filled the cabin with conversation, drawing her companion out with her teasing. She later couldn’t recall what subjects they’d discussed, but the time had slipped by and the trip had rarely been so swift.

They both grew quiet as they approached the city, each hardly noticing or wondering at the other’s reasons for introspection.

When the boatmen took a wrong turn along the canal, Jordan wanted to tell them there was a quicker way to the Cietta home. But of course she didn’t. The boat ultimately found its way and docked alongside the piazza that led to her residence.

“I’ll wait in the gondola,” she told Raine, “while you tend to your business.”

“Come with me,” he countered, holding out his arm. “I’m dismissing the gondola. We’ll travel on from Venice by carriage.”

She hadn’t considered this eventuality. Having no other choice, she took his arm, fully intending to give him the slip at some point.

Side by side they walked across the piazza. With each sway of her skirt, chilly morning air wafted under it, forming goosebumps on her legs. The ribbons of her bonnet chafed under her chin. The lace at her bosom scratched. She relished every single annoyance. For this uniform was the outward evidence that announced to passersby that she was female.

She gazed boldly at a group of gentlemen who passed and read the surprise in their eyes. A woman’s gaze should be more timid, she realized. Used to the freedoms allotted to men, would she find such new restrictions too constraining? Would she be a woman long enough to find out?

Her home and twenty others stood like pastel pillars encircling the piazza. In front of her door, there was no sign of Salerno’s carriage. Instead, a horse had been reined there. When they drew closer, she saw its saddle bore a constable’s insignia.

All thoughts of her plan flew from her mind. Alarmed, she darted up the front steps, ignored the knocker, and opened the front door.

Raine followed her up the steps. Eyeing the doors’ handles, which were shaped like some metalworker’s idea of what a faerie looked like, he said, “Haven’t you ever heard of knocking?”

Jordan caught herself up and sent him a guilty look. “I didn’t think. The constable. Aren’t you curious to know what’s going on?”

She dashed ahead, her slippers tapping across the polished wooden floor.

However Raine came to a halt the moment he stepped into the house. Everywhere his glance fell, it found faeries, nymphs, flying cupids, elves, pixies, and sprites. They frolicked, flew, and flitted, gracing every swag, every drape, every candelabra, every chandelier, every everything. Stunned into silence by the plethora of winged decorations, he could only stare.

His nostrils flared, catching the scent of other living presences in the house. The closest one was male.

And swift upon the heels of these warm, living scents came another, colder odor. That of death. Of a Human woman dead only a few hours. He lifted his eyes to the top of the stairs.

“Damndest thing, isn’t it?” a nasal voice inquired.

Raine’s attention snapped from his thoughts to see a constable not ten feet away studying the room’s décor. The man rubbed the bronzed breast of a winged nymph, shaking his bald head. “Someone in this house loves the wee folk, wouldn’t you say? They’re even molded into the brass of the chamber pots. It’s bizarre.”

Jordan could have told them why. Her mother had had a dream on the night her only child had been conceived. A dream that she’d been visited by the king of the Faeries. She’d told Jordan the story from the time she was a baby.

On a special night when her father had been far from home and her mother had slumbered alone in her bed, this Faerie king had delivered a very special gift—Jordan. Or so the tale went. The dream had been a vivid one, and Jordan had loved to hear it. But it had become her mother’s obsession, and the decoration of their house had suffered as a result.

“Lord Raine Satyr with business for Signora Celia Cietta,” Raine announced in a clipped voice. “And you are?”

Recognition of the Satyr name and all it entailed straightened the constable’s spine. “Constable Maci. May I inquire as to what sort of business?” His tone had become deferential, telling Jordan that her companion wielded more power than she’d realized.

“The private sort,” Raine replied.

“I see. And this is…?” the constable asked, nodding toward Jordan. He slid a pen and a notebook from his pocket.

“A relative,” Raine told him. It was true in a sense. They both had ElseWorld blood.

“Yes, of course.” Constable Maci eyed Jordan slyly, quickly discerning their true relationship. “Your name?” He dipped his pen into her mother’s crystal inkwell as he directed the sharp question to Jordan, then waited with his writing instrument poised above his book.

“Signor…Signorina Alessandro,” Jordan fibbed. “May I ask why you’re here?”

He scribbled the information before answering obliquely. “An investigation.”

“Of what kind?” Jordan persisted.

The constable glanced between the two of them. “I’ll get to that in a moment. First, were either of you acquainted with the Cietta family?”

“Not at all,” said Raine.

“Yet you just entered this home without knocking?”

“That was my fault,” said Jordan. “I saw your horse outside and I was curious. Has there been some sort of crime here?”

“Patience, patience. For now, it is important that you answer my questions. Now, precisely how do you know the Cietta family?”

“As I’ve already explained, we don’t,” Raine said irritably.

The constable sighed, then tapped his quill pen on his upper lip, considering him. “Very well. Come with me.”

Jordan turned to follow him to the second floor.

Raine grasped her wrist. “Wait down here.”

She shook her head, causing her inexpertly arranged hairdo to slip a bit sideways. “No, I’m coming.”

“Stay behind me then. Something is off here,” he warned.

Her eyes searched his, growing worried. As she had the night before on the dock, she slipped a hand in his, too trusting. This time he didn’t rebuff her, but only folded his fingers around hers.

The stench of death grew more powerful in Raine’s nostrils as the constable led them upstairs, then along a hallway. Suddenly, he flung a door open and extended an arm, beckoning them inside. Raine stepped into the bedchamber, but Jordan’s hand slipped from his and she hung back in the corridor.

The faeries, nymphs, and putti were more prolific here, their gaiety contrasting ghoulishly with the pale woman on the bed. The others would see that the body lying atop the feather mattress was that of a Human woman. But only Raine could scent the coagulating blood that pooled in her cavities now that her heart no longer pumped it through the canals within her. Only he detected the sickly sweet tang of death that mingled with the feminine smells of soap, perfume, and powder to hang over the room like a shroud. The odors clotted his lungs, overwhelming him.

But nowhere in this house, nor in this room, did he scent the man who’d raised him to age thirteen. If his EarthWorld father had ever had an amorous relationship with this woman, he had not visited her here in this house. Ever.

Having become somewhat inured to death because of his occupation, the constable gazed about the room, seeming more perplexed by its frivolous décor than by the dead woman within it. “This is her son’s room. Can you imagine?”

Behind them, Jordan gasped.

Time stilled, as frozen as the breath in Jordan’s chest, as she took in the scene in her own bedroom. Her mother looked abnormally peaceful lying there with her blond hair curling about her fragile features.

It struck her like a scene from Perrault’s faerie tale of Sleeping Beauty. Only Celia wasn’t sleeping.

Any minute, Jordan expected her mother’s blue eyes to open, bright and flirtatious. Her mobile lips would trill with frivolous, gay chatter.

Instead, her eyes stayed closed and her lips remained pale and still as she languished on her back atop the coverlet.

Ethereally beautiful, she was dressed in one of her favorite costumes, a long filmy gown made with many layers of white tulle. It was the dress of Titania, the Faerie Queen of Shakespeare’s play. White wings constructed from feathers of the rare albino peacocks of Isola Bella arched high from her shoulders. They spanned the entire width of the mattress on either side of her, swooping down past her hips to end in points on either side of her knees.

A gilt-edged copy of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
lay in the crook of one of her folded arms. Its binding was ribbed and costly, and Jordan had always loved the creak and smell of its leather. Her mother had read to her from it every night until she’d grown too old for such things.

Jordan stepped closer to the bed. Her hand reached out to her mother, wanting to shake her awake. “Mm—?”

“That’s right. Murder,” said the constable, rocking on his heels, then his toes, and down again. “I believe Celia Cietta was murdered last night.”

Jordan froze. She’d forgotten he and Raine were in the room. Both men were staring at her. She snatched her hand back, her panicked thoughts flying helter-skelter.

“M-murder?” Someone had killed her mother? While she’d been fornicating the night away, her mother had been here in her bedchamber? Dying?

Before her eyes, her surroundings began to shimmer. She clutched her midsection and felt only the stiff corset underlying her gown. She couldn’t breathe. Her entire body was choking.

She turned and rushed into the hallway, then down the steps, desperate to get outside. To air. She stumbled, gripping the stair rail.

Her mother’s chambermaid hovered anxiously on the landing halfway down. “Are you all right, signorina?” Several other servants lurked below in the rotunda. Why were they calling her signorina? Didn’t they recognize her?

“Air,” Jordan gasped, pushing past them. “I need air.”

Finally, she was in the entryway, heading for a door that seemed a mile away. The servants stared with expressions varying between curiosity and alarm, but none seemed to know her. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.

Her mother—her beautiful, delightful, conniving mother—was upstairs. Dead. Dead.
Dead.

“Are you ill?” The sound of Raine’s voice came to her as though from the depths of a well.

She wheeled on him, her eyes huge in her face. “My corset,” she gasped, scrabbling her fingers at her waist. “It’s too—”

And then, for the first time in her life, she fainted.