Demon's Curse (Imnada Brotherhood) (26 page)

*   *   *

Jory’s eyes, dark and angry as storm clouds, met Mac’s. “They’ve lied to us for countless ages, Flannery. We aren’t forced to marry within the clans or risk extinction. My children inherited my gifts along with my blood. And yet, they’ll never bear a clan mark nor be entered into the Ossine’s scrolls. They’ll forever be considered rogue. A target for any zealous enforcer.”

Rubbing a hand over the back of his neck, Mac paced off the perimeter of the stillroom. “Why would the Gather do that? Why, when our numbers are dwindling, would they cut off our chance to grow strong again?”

“Who can say? All I know is my son becomes more bitter and reckless with every passing year. I’ve been able to control him so far, but the day is coming when he’ll force a confrontation with the Imnada. I know it. Marianne knows it. It’s our greatest fear.”

“That’s why you sent the rebel clansman from your holding away. That’s why Marianne nearly took my head off with her cleaver.”

Jory gave a tired shrug. “Perhaps I did wrong by encouraging the children. Recounting the legends and schooling them in the laws and teachings. Perhaps it was my way of holding on to what I’d lost. Of making sure I didn’t forget.”

“You couldn’t know where it would lead.”

“No, but it’s raised the younglings with a false hope. Jamie resents this exile. He views the Gather elders and
the Ossine as his enemies. The rebels seek to take advantage of that and recruit him to their side, but I refuse to allow my son to be caught up in a war that isn’t his.”

Mac slid into a chair. “Yet, if he carries your blood and your powers, he should be recognized. Given the mark and brought into the clan. It
is
his war.”

“A war that can’t be won.”

“Jory, listen—”

“No. You listen, Mac. I’ve told you about the younglings’ powers. That’s where I end it. You can stay until St. Leger contacts you, and I’ll help with Adam’s journal, but don’t push my hospitality or my patience.”

“If that’s your wish.”

“It’s my order, and you’re a soldier,” Jory answered. “You should know how to take orders.”

“I’m very good at taking orders.” Mac smiled. “But I’m even better at waging war.”

*   *   *

He’d known he shouldn’t be there even as he’d cast off his clothes and fallen into bed beside her. His brain whirred with the reasons the two of them were a very bad idea. And yet, after a day spent studying Adam’s journal, he’d needed the comfort of her body and the reassurance of her quiet words.

He’d found both.

Now, she lay enticingly in his arms, her scent in every ragged breath he took. He glanced at the clock, though it was unnecessary. He knew what time it was. His body burned with it.

He brushed aside her hair to lay a kiss behind her ear, drawing in a last lungful of the sweet citrus smell of her skin before he rolled out of bed.

“Mac?” she said, still half-asleep as her hand smoothed over the depression in the bed where he’d just been.

“I have to go.”

She stretched, every sensual curve and dimpled hollow a source of torturous arousal. Thank the Mother of All for the chill of the bedchamber. At least he wouldn’t completely embarrass himself.

“Stay. Your secret is mine,” she said. “You’ve nothing to hide anymore.”

“Don’t I?” He pulled on his breeches and dragged a shirt over his head, feeling the sun drop in the sky with every beat of his heart. “To shift in freedom is a gift and a joy. To be forced to assume my aspect is best done in solitude. I don’t want you to see me like that, Bianca.”

“Mac—”

“Not now. Not ever.” The sun edged behind the trees, the light gray and flat, the temperature dropping. He pulled on his boots. “This is my life, Bianca. This is how it must be.”

“I hate what the curse has done to you.”

He leaned over to offer her one last kiss. “So do I.”

*   *   *

The household settled for the night, Bianca lay in bed awake and listening, every sense tuned to the world beyond the walls of her bedchamber.

Would it always be like this if she stayed with Mac? Every night lived alone in neck-tightening suspense. Every day a constant counting of hours until the curse took hold once more. A life severed in two, with both halves blighted by dark magic.

There would be nothing for the two of them as long as the curse held sway. He had not said as much, but it was there in the sorrow caught within his eyes, in the gentle distance he maintained between them despite their passion.

If only he would agree to let her travel to London for assistance from her contacts there. Among the botanists, herbalists, and apothecaries, surely one of them would be able to help. Mac worried about her safety, but what other option did they have?

Dratted, irritating, stubborn man. After all that had happened, did he still believe her incapable of taking care of herself?

She rolled over, punching her pillow into shape, and froze, heart in her throat.

Had she just heard a gunshot?

She strained to listen over the drumming of her heart.

There it was again, distant but unmistakable. Was it Squire Fruddy’s gamekeeper after poachers? Or did they hunt larger, more otherworldly game?

She sprang out of bed, wrapping a dressing gown around her against the chill. Peeled back the curtain to stare out into the night, casting prayers to any deity who would listen.

Please, don’t let it be Mac. Please let him be safe. Please let him come home.

Nothing moved, not even a breeze to stir the distant line of trees. She opened the casement a crack. A blast of cold air hit her face, chilling the sweat that lay clammy over her back. She waited, each minute ticked off in deep, steady breaths. She paced the perimeter of her rug. Counted to one hundred. Then did it again.

Finally, she latched the window and let the curtain drop. Another few minutes and she lay back down in bed to stare at the ceiling.

But the fear didn’t leave her.

As long as the curse remained, it never would.

Could she live with that?

Would Mac give her the choice?

16

The sun gilded the tops of the trees and threw long finger-like shadows out over the meadow as Mac and Bianca walked the autumn woods, enjoying the last moments alone before night and the curse parted them. Already his skin prickled, darkness crowding his vision as his tendons knotted and muscles burned. Pausing to catch his stolen breath, he squeezed his eyes shut and clamped his jaw tightly. “Bloody hell.”

A hand rested lightly upon his arm. “Should we return to the house?”

He opened his eyes. Apprehension dimmed Bianca’s summer clear gaze, her face pale but composed.

With a determined shake of his head, he straightened, taking her in his arms. “There’s time yet. And I would spend what I have holding you.”

She lifted a hand to push his hair from his brow, pressed a kiss upon his lips. “Don’t you mean arguing with me?”

“There’s no argument. You’re not going.”

She pulled out of his embrace, a subtle movement
that didn’t feel like the cold shoulder but had definite icy tones about it. Perhaps forbidding her was the wrong way to end the discussion, but they’d been over the same furrow so many times in the past weeks, and he’d run out of tactful ways of saying that over his dead body would she travel alone to London in search of the last plant listed in Adam’s notes.

Aquameniustis.

He never thought he could hate a word, but just saying each irritating syllable made him grit his teeth to keep the oaths from flying. Jory hadn’t recognized the name. Nor had Bianca. Neither had the local apothecaries they’d asked, the farmers they’d conferred with. Not even an old gypsy they’d met on the side of the road outside the farm gates who swore her herbal lore came straight from the queen of the faeries herself. An idle boast, as it turned out.

None had heard of the blasted plant.

But there it remained, clear as day in Adam’s journal. Or at least, as clear as any of the writing in Adam’s journal was. The pages devoted to his last and greatest research project were also the messiest, as if he’d written them in haste or as inspiration struck, his mind speeding along, his hand desperate to keep up.

The ink was smudged in places, blotted in others, the words running together so that individual letters were barely discernible, and only after hours of patient work did they manage to decipher the bits they had succeeded in recovering.

“So you’re simply giving up?” Bianca asked, bending to grab up a stick, which she swung against the tall meadow grass as if decapitating marauders.

“Of course not.”

She gave a particularly nasty swipe of her stick, snapping its tip against a tree. “Mac, we’ve done as much as we can without outside assistance. We need to consult experts, scholars whose botanical knowledge isn’t ten years out of date and whose research techniques aren’t rusty as an old rake.”

“Agreed.”

“Then you agree that traveling to London makes sense. The Horticultural Society is there. Kew Gardens. The Royal Society. Someone’s bound to recognize Adam’s mystery plant.”

“Agreed again.”

“Then I’ll leave in the morning. The mail coach comes through on its way from Brighton every day.”

“
We’ll
leave in the morning,” he amended.

She spun around, her stick coming perilously close to his head. “You can’t go.”

“No, what I can’t do is allow you to jaunt off to London by yourself. It’s not safe.”

She seemed to consider this for a moment. “Easily solved: I have friends I can stay with.”

“If by friends you mean Lord Deane, the answer is no again. Even if he’s not involved in Adam’s murder, what could you possibly tell him that won’t raise more questions than it answers?”

“I’m an actress. Dissembling is my bread and butter. I’ll think of a plausible explanation.” She laid her hand on her hip, eyes sparking. “You know it makes sense. You just don’t want to admit it. It’s the perfect solution. No one could get to me behind the walls of Deane House.”

“But you won’t
be
behind the walls of Deane House,” he pointed out rationally. “You’ll be traipsing
about London, looking for a damned plant and landing in who knows what kinds of danger. No, Bianca. We go to London together or we find another way.”

“Fine.” She chucked her stick away. “Suit yourself, but you know I always get my way in the end.”

He grabbed her hand, refusing to relinquish it. Instead, he pulled her close, tipping her chin to his. “So you keep informing me.”

He lowered his mouth to hers, letting the fullness of her lips, the tease of her tongue, and the heat of her body ease his frustration even as new urges throbbed painfully. He nuzzled the column of her throat as he cupped her breasts, rubbing a thumb over her taut nipples. She moaned, leaning into his touch, sparking a wild arousal along his limbs to rival the curse’s fire.

Despite what the papers said, Bianca Parrino was no ice queen. Instead, she resembled a diamond. A stone of a million facets. Ever changing. Always alight with a brilliance undimmed by circumstance. It’s what he admired about her. What he began to adore.

“I never knew . . . it was never . . .” she murmured between soft gasps.

“Don’t think about him, Bianca. Don’t allow his ghost to hold you captive.” He sucked in a sharp breath as her hand burrowed under his jacket to untuck his shirt.

His heart thundered, his breathing came quick and shuddering with every slow caress of her fingertips. He would take Bianca here. He would defy the curse and make love to her upon a soft blanket of bracken beneath a scarlet and orange sky, the scents of earth and wind mingling with the spicy notes of her perfume. But even as he loosened her gown to taste her
flesh—even as her fingers glided over his skin, leaving a ripple of yearning in its wake, his member pulsing with raw need—another sensation sang like steel over the surface of his mind or like a woman’s nails across his back. A curving, curling, tentative touch, but one he recognized.

His
krythos
was lost no longer.

He reached out to understand the intruder seeking entry to his thoughts, using all his skills to follow the mental connection back to its origins and the mysterious woman at its heart. The
krythos
sang to him, drawing him further and deeper into the current until on the very edge of his mind hovered an image, a glimpse of his enemy. He sought to imprint her upon his memory when the bond between them shattered, an explosion ripping through his skull like shrapnel, dropping him to his knees, pulling him into a fetal ball, his throat raspy with his own screams.

*   *   *

Blood dripped from the cut on her cheek to fall upon the virginal white of her gown, a broken glass edge all that was left of the Imnada’s far-seeing disk.

Renata closed her fist around the jagged shard, the pain acting like a drug on her flooded senses, the void’s spiraling smoke and cinders still dancing across her vision. “He was there, Alonzo. I felt his power. His mind. It roared in my head like a raging beast.”

Alonzo’s eyes gleamed. “Did you discover where he hides?”