There were shelves lining the walls, to be sure. He saw this in the illumination from the flames surrounding Zora’s hand. But the shelves held cider jugs, ceramic canisters, and a bowl full of candle ends. No gleaming souls. Further, not only was the room
not
stone, it was plaster, and hardly big enough to accommodate Whit, let alone Zora, wedging in.
His jaw clenched, hard.
“Maybe it’s one of the other rooms,” she suggested.
He shouldered past her and pushed open the door across the hallway. All he found was a wet larder, reddish brown meat hanging from ceiling hooks like sinners in eternal torment. Flies stirred as the door opened before settling back down again in black clumps.
The final door opened into a bedchamber, where an old man started up from his bed at Whit’s entrance.
“Who’s there?” the man shrilled. “Murder! Thief!”
Before the old man could yell the house awake, Whit and Zora fled. She doused the flames around her hand as they sped down the hall and through the taproom. He slammed the bolt open and they ran off into the coming dawn, leaving shouts and confusion behind them.
Yet as Whit ran, confusion clung to him—and fury.
Damn hell bastard.
Noises of pursuit followed. Men, and a dog. As a nobleman, he could easily intimidate his way out of a situation, or offer enough financial inducement to have the constabulary look the other way. His name and title might shelter Zora, but there was always the chance that some zealous magistrate would use her to set an example, and that, Whit could not allow.
He and Zora approached a wall. He vaguely recognized it, another reminder of his youth, when the proctors had chased him from some unsavory tavern and he had needed a means of evasion. The wall stood some two feet taller than him—it had seemed higher back then. Before Zora could protest or utter any word, he clasped her waist and all but threw her over the wall. She recovered quickly, managing to control her fall down the other side. He braced his hands atop the wall, pulled himself up, and vaulted over, into a small courtyard garden behind a town house.
They both pressed their backs against the stone, panting, and waited. Men’s heavy footfalls sounded on the other side of the wall, and a dog’s frantic whine. Only when the pursuers’ angry shouts faded did Whit feel an infinitesimal easing of the tension gripping him.
The sky turned to ashes with the dawn, washing color from everything. The garden seemed made of stone plants and hedges, as cold and lifeless as the dry fountain that formed its centerpiece. Someone, whoever lived inside, had brought out a chair, but it had tipped over like an animal frozen in its death throes.
Only through force of will did he keep from stalking over to the chair and smashing it against the flagstones. Instead, he turned so that he faced the wall and beat his knuckles against the stone.
“It was there. Hell’s fire, it was
there.
”
“Another alehouse, maybe?”
“We were at the right place. I saw it. I
felt
it.”
“Perhaps the
geminus
wanted to trick us. Plant a false idea so we would chase at phantoms.”
“The vault is real.”
“Whit, your hands.” She tugged him away and made a sound of shock when she saw crimson dripping down his fingers. With a patch of her cloak, she dabbed at the raw, open flesh.
He did not want tender ministrations. Not when anger and despair turned his chest into a hot battleground. He swung away from her and paced the confines of the garden.
Damn and hell, he’d been so bloody close. With the opening of a single door, this entire nightmare might at last have begun to end. But, like everything the Devil promised, the rotten flaw consumed hope. Whit was no better than he had been the night he and the Hellraisers had found the temple. Worse. For the
geminus
had its claws in him now.
He wrenched his arm from the sleeve of his coat, then pulled at his waistcoat and shirt to reveal his shoulder and arm. In the pallid light of daybreak, he saw it. The flames that marked his flesh now engulfed his shoulder and twisted farther down his bicep, almost to his elbow. The Devil’s mark grew.
In three strides, he stood in front of Zora. He loomed over her and grabbed her wrist.
“Burn it.” He pressed her hand against his marked shoulder.
Her eyes went round. “What? No—”
“Burn it from my skin. Char my flesh.
Get this damn thing off me
.”
“It doesn’t work that way.” Her cool, steady fingers curled gently over the curve of his shoulder.
“You do not know.” He was hot and seething and her touch maddened him, yet he would not release her.
“I do know that
Wafodu guero
is not a problem with an easy solution.”
His laugh scraped his throat. “Setting oneself ablaze is not an easy solution.”
She winced. “If I thought it could truly help you, I would. I’d gladly take the torch to your skin.”
“And gain a measure of retribution.”
Her gaze turned fierce. “There are other ways I’d rather hurt you.” She pressed her fingers against him, then tried to pull free from his grip. “Let go of me.”
She scowled at him when he did not release her, and tugged harder. Still, he wouldn’t relent. They stared at one another, gazes locked.
“This will solve nothing,” she said.
“Fire with fire.”
She tightened her mouth. He thought she would refuse, but then the cool skin of her hand warmed, growing hotter and hotter. His shoulder blazed with pain, as did his hand grasping her wrist. Yet he continued to hold her tightly. The pain traveled in searing currents through his body. An extraordinary transformation from hurt into something else, something ... pleasurable ... playing upon his senses in a strange alchemy. Lead into gold. Pain into pleasure.
Heat of another kind pulsed within him. His cock thickened. She caught the shift from pain to arousal, and her breathing hitched, coming in shallow gasps.
Cinnamon stained her cheeks, and her lips parted. Here was another surprise: she was as excited as he. They continued to hold each other’s gaze, a contest of wills and a prelude to desire.
The thrill of risk heated him as much as her burning hand, if not more. A gamble, and his gamester’s blood craved it. How far would they take this? Who would submit first?
The acrid scent of his flesh burning drifted up.
“Whit ...” Her voice urged him to be cautious, yet her hand did not cool.
He let her go. They gasped at the release. She took a small step back, slowly lowering her hand. Their gazes broke apart as they studied his shoulder.
The flames marring his skin still twisted over his shoulder and down his arm.
Damn.
Yet a deep red mark remained, as well: the shape of Zora’s hand. She had branded him.
Only vicious restraint kept him from spending there and then like a boy with no control. Her mark on his flesh. Nothing had ever been as erotic as that darkening handprint.
He stared down at the hand-shaped mark. “If a sinner like me can pray, then I pray this scars.”
Her eyes flashed. She curled her hand in the folds of her cloak, as if sheathing a weapon.
Slowly, wincing a little from the pain, he righted his clothing, layer by layer. Until everything was as it should be, save for the sun of pain that glowed and throbbed within his shoulder.
A crash sounded nearby. He moved Zora to the wall, and they crouched behind it.
“Where is she?! Where’s that damned slut?!” A woman’s voice, shrieking. More crashes reverberated, the sounds of shattering ceramics and metal objects falling to the floor. “Out of my way! I don’t care what hour it is. That trollop is here.”
Whit stood and stretched up to peer over the edge of the wall. He did not see anyone on the street, but the noise continued. He glanced toward the town house, yet it, too, was still. Another smash resounded. It was close by, but where? He moved carefully to the side of the garden and looked over the wall that separated the yard from its next-door neighbor.
There was no one in the adjacent garden, but when he looked toward the town house, he finally saw the source of the commotion: the neighbors’ home.
Zora appeared at his side, yet she wasn’t tall enough to look over the wall. He wrapped his arms around her slender waist and lifted her just enough to see. Windows gave them a perfect proscenium for watching the scene unfold.
A woman of middle age forced her way into a bedchamber. The furnishings of the home and the disordered clothing of the women were of good quality—this was not the home of a fishmonger, nor was the female intruder a ballad-seller. A girl in servant’s drab tried to pull the intruder from the chamber, but she was too small to do anything but tug ineffectively on the woman’s waist.
The woman stalked to the bed and shoved the curtains open. The man and lady within, clad only in their nightgowns and caps, screamed.
“Vile whore!” the intruder shouted. She grabbed the woman in the bed by her hair and dragged her out. Screams the likes of which Whit had never heard from human or animal came from the nightgown-wearing lady as she clawed to free herself. “You may be in bed with your husband here, but it’s
my
husband you preyed upon, and in
my
bed.”
“Help me, Christopher!”
Her husband only looked on in terror, clutching the sheets to himself.
“Have you no shame, Arabella?!” the intruder screeched. “Are you so unsatisfied with Christopher that you must turn your filthy wiles on Philip?” She shook Arabella by her hair.
“A mistake, Maria. I never—”
“Deny it? Is this not your garter? And did I not find it in my husband’s bedclothes?” She flung a scrap of ribbon in Arabella’s face.
“It is mine, but ... but I have no idea how ...” She screamed as Maria shook her again. More shouting came from inside the house, the sounds of either manservants or a constable. Or perhaps Arabella’s errant husband, Philip.
Zora wriggled in Whit’s grasp. He obliged by releasing her, and the slide of her down his body was delicious. She mouthed the words,
We have to leave.
They ought to. But something rather vicious in him wanted to see more, to watch these respectable ladies tear each other apart. See the chaos unfold.
“
Now
,” Zora urged lowly. “Before someone spots us out here.”
He tore his gaze from the spectacle and nodded. Within a minute, they crossed the garden, and he and Zora were back on the street. The shouting and sounds of breaking furniture could still be heard. A maid carrying her brooms gasped at the foul language and hurried on her way.
The sun had risen higher, brightening the sky. Whit placed Zora’s hand on his arm as if they were merely out for an early stroll. But the day was anything but routine. He remembered the patterns of morning from his more clearheaded stumbles back to his chambers. Instead of the usual wagons bringing food to market, the craftsmen heading purposefully toward their businesses, and dairymaids with pails of milk balanced on their shoulders, the streets were oddly derelict. As if abandoned. Yet, from open windows fronting the lanes, the sounds of arguments and tears tumbled out.
“Seems Arabella and Maria aren’t the only ones caught in domestic troubles,” Zora murmured.
As Whit and Zora moved down the street, they passed three arguing men. These were not students in the middle of a drunken brawl, nor rough country men in homespun and mud-stained boots. The men were clad in the sober, well-made clothing of staid tradesmen. Yet their faces purpled in rage as they yelled and shoved. A professor in his robes and old-fashioned, full-bottomed wig stood in the middle of the arguers trying to keep order. To no avail. The fighting men continued to hurl insults and accusations at one another.
“The man in the middle is Dr. Hammond,” Whit murmured as he and Zora moved past. “He tried to teach me philosophy. Now he’s mediating brawls between respectable burghers.”
A fragment of the doctor’s lectures popped into Whit’s mind. “
Malitia unius cito fit maledictum omnium.
Publilius Syrus.” At Zora’s blank expression, he translated, “ ‘One man’s wickedness may easily become all men’s curse.’”
His heart stuttered and he stared unseeingly at the roofs of Oxford, the homes and university buildings. Much of the university had been built hundreds of years ago, at the direction of monarchs and clergy, monuments to enduring legacies.
“It’s all so damned fragile,” he said.
Zora gazed up at him, understanding written plainly in her eyes. The chaos—the
geminus
had created it. Wherever the
geminus
went, destruction followed. Even here, this seat of learning and reason.