Mine Till Midnight (37 page)

Frost answered, the gun still trained on Cam. “Because it consists of tokens and jewels given by King James to his lover back in the sixteenth century. Someone in the Ramsay family.”

“The king had an affair with Lady Ramsay?”

“With Lord Ramsay, actually.”

Amelia’s jaw slackened. “Oh.” She frowned and rubbed her frozen arms through her sleeves in a futile effort to warm them. “So you think this treasure is here in one of Bissel’s hiding places. And all this time you’ve been trying to find it. Your offer of friendship—your regret for having abandoned me—that was all a sham! For the sake of some wild-goose chase.”

“It wasn’t all a sham.” Christopher gave her a scornful, vaguely pitying glance. “My interest in renewing our relationship was genuine, until I realized you had taken up with a Gypsy. I don’t accept soiled goods.”

Infuriated, Amelia started for him with her fingers curled into claws. “You aren’t fit to lick his boots!” she cried, struggling as Cam hauled her backward.

“Don’t,” Cam muttered, his hands like iron clamps on her body. “It’s not worth it. Calm yourself.”

Amelia subsided, glaring at Christopher, while increasing cold chills rippled through the air. “Even if the treasure were here, you wouldn’t be able to retrieve it,” she snapped. “The wall is filled with a hive containing at least two hundred thousand bees.”

“That’s where your arrival turns fortuitous.” The pistol was trained directly at her chest. He spoke to Cam. “You’re going to get it for me … or I’ll put a bullet in her.”

“Don’t you dare,” Amelia said to Cam, gripping one of his arms in both of hers. “He’s bluffing.”

“Are you going to risk her life on the possibility, Rohan?” Christopher inquired almost diffidently.

Amelia struggled to hold on to Cam as he disengaged his arm from her grasp. “Don’t do it!”

“Easy,
monisha.
” Cam gripped her shoulders and gave her a little shake. “Hush. You’re not helping.” He looked at Christopher. “Let her leave,” he said evenly. “I’ll do whatever you ask.”

Christopher shook his head. “Her presence provides an excellent incentive for you to cooperate.” He gestured with the pistol. “Get over there and start looking.”

“You’ve gone mad,” Amelia said. “Hidden treasure and pistols and skulking about at midn—” She stopped as she saw a shimmer of movement, of silvery whiteness, in the air. A rush of biting cold swept through the room, while the shadows congealed around them.

Christopher seemed not to notice the abrupt drop in temperature, or the dance of translucent paleness between them. “
Now,
Rohan.”

“Cam—”

“Hush.” He touched the side of Amelia’s face and gave her an unfathomable glance.

“But the bees—”

“It’s all right.” Cam went to pick up the lamp from the floor. Carrying it to the open panel, he held it inside the hollow space and leaned in. Bees began to settle and crawl over his arm, shoulders, and head. Staring at him fixedly, Amelia saw his arm twitch, and she realized he’d been stung. Panic tightened around her lungs, making her breathing quick and shallow.

Cam’s voice was muffled. “There’s nothing except bees and honeycomb.”

“There has to be,” Christopher snapped. “Go in there and find it.”

“He can’t,” Amelia cried in outrage. “He’ll be stung to death.”

He aimed the pistol directly at her. “Go,” Christopher commanded Cam.

Bees were showering onto Cam, crawling over his shining black hair and face and the back of his neck. Watching him, Amelia felt as if she were trapped in a waking nightmare.

“Nothing’s here,” Cam said, sounding astonishingly calm.

Now Christopher seemed to take a vicious satisfaction in the situation. “You’ve hardly looked. Go inside and don’t come out without it.”

Tears sprang to Amelia’s eyes. “You’re a monster,” she said furiously. “There’s nothing in there, and you know it.”

“Look at you,” he said, sneering, “weeping over your Gypsy lover. How low you’ve fallen.”

Before she could respond, a blue-white burst of light filled the room in a noiseless strike. The lamp flame was extinguished in a freezing blast. Amelia blinked and rubbed the moisture from her eyes, and turned in a bewildered circle as she tried to find the source of the light. Something shimmered all around them, coldness and brilliance and raw energy. She stumbled toward Cam with her arms outstretched. The bees lifted in a mass and flew back to the hive, the blue light causing their wings to glitter like a rain of sparks.

Amelia reached Cam, and he caught her in a warm, hard grip. “Are you hurt?” she asked, her hands frantically searching him.

“No, just a sting or two. I—” He broke off with a sharp inhalation.

Twisting in his arms, Amelia followed his gaze. Two hazy forms, distorted in the broken light, struggled for possession of the gun. Who was it? Who else had come into the room? Not a heartbeat had passed before Cam had shoved her to the floor. “Stay down.” Without pausing, he launched himself toward the combatants.

But they had already broken apart, one man tumbling to the floor with the pistol in his grip, the other running for the door. Cam went for the fallen man, while the air crackled as if the room were filled with burning Catherine wheels. The other man fled. And the door slammed shut behind him … although no one had touched it.

Dazed, Amelia sat up, while the fractured light dissolved into a faint blue radiance that clung to the outlines of the men nearby. “Cam?” she asked uncertainly.

His voice was low and shaken. “It’s all right, hummingbird. Come here.”

She reached them and gasped as she saw the intruder’s face. “
Leo.
What are you—how did you—” Her voice faltered at the sight of the pistol in his hand. He held it loosely against his thigh. His face was calm, his mouth curved with a faint wry smile.

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” Leo said mildly. “What the devil are you doing here?”

Amelia sank to the floor beside Cam, her gaze remaining on her brother. “Poppy found your note,” she said breathlessly. “We came here because we thought you were going to … to do yourself in.”

“That was the general idea,” Leo said. “But I went to the tavern for a drink on the way. And when I finally got here, it was a bit crowded for my taste. Suicide is something a fellow likes a bit of privacy for.”

Amelia was unnerved by his tranquil manner. Her gaze fell to the pistol in his hand, then returned to his face. Her hand crept to Cam’s tense thigh. The ghost was with them, she thought. The air had turned her face numb, making it difficult to move her lips. “Mr. Frost was treasure-hunting,” she told her brother.

Leo gave her a skeptical glance. “A treasure, in this rubbish pile?”

“Well, you see, Mr. Frost thought—”

“No, don’t bother. I’m afraid I can’t summon any interest in what Frost thought. The idiot.” He looked down at the pistol, his thumb gently grazing the barrel.

Amelia wouldn’t have expected a man contemplating suicide to appear so relaxed. A ruined man in a ruined house. Every line of his body spoke of weary resignation. He looked at Cam. “You need to take her out of here,” he said quietly.

“Leo—” Amelia had begun to tremble, knowing that if they left him here, he would kill himself. She could think of nothing to say, at least nothing that wouldn’t sound theatrical, unconvincing, absurd.

Her brother’s mouth quirked as if he were too exhausted to smile. “I know,” he said gently. “I know what you want, and what you don’t want. I know you wish I could be better than this. But I’m not.”

He blurred before her. Amelia felt tears sliding from her eyes, the wetness turning icy by the time they reached her chin. “I don’t want to lose you.”

Leo bent both his knees and braced an arm across them, his fingers remaining curled around the gun handle. “I’m not your brother, Amelia. Not anymore. I changed when Laura died.”

“I still want you.”

“No one gets what they want,” Leo muttered. “Not now.”

Cam watched her brother intently. A long silence unfolded in pained degrees, while a burning cold breeze fanned over the three of them. “I could try to persuade you to set the gun aside, and go home with us,” he said eventually. “To hold off one more day. But even if I stopped you this time … one can’t keep a man alive when he doesn’t want to be.”

“True,” Leo said.

Amelia opened her mouth with a shuddering protest, but Cam stopped her, his fingers pressing gently over her lips. Cam continued to stare at Leo, not with concern but a sort of detached contemplation, as if he were focusing on some mathematical equation. “No one can be haunted,” he said quietly, “without having willed it. You know that, don’t you?”

The room grew even colder, if that were possible, the windows rattling, the lamplight flickering. Alarmed by the taut vibrations in the air, the unseen presence circling them, Amelia huddled against Cam’s back.

“Of course I do,” Leo said. “I should have died when she did. I never wanted to be left behind. You don’t know what it’s like. The thought of finally ending this is a bloody relief.”

“But that’s not what she wants.”

Hostility flared in the light eyes. “How the hell would you know?”

“If your situations were reversed, would you choose this for her?” Cam gestured to the gun in his hand. “I wouldn’t ask that sacrifice of someone I love.”

“You have no bloody idea what you’re talking about.”

“I do,” Cam said. “I understand. And I’m telling you to stop being selfish. You grieve too much, my
phral.
You’ve forced her to come back to comfort you. You have to let her go. Not for your sake, but hers.”

“I can’t.” But emotion had begun to spread across Leo’s face like cracks in an eggshell. Blue light danced through the room, while a frigid wind lifted a few locks of Leo’s hair like invisible fingers.

“Let her be at peace,” Cam said, more quietly now. “If you take your own life, you’ll end up condemning her, as well as yourself, to an eternity of wandering. It’s not fair to her.”

Leo gave a wordless shake of his bent head, cradling his folded knees in a posture that reminded Amelia of the boy he’d once been. And she understood his grief with a thoroughness that had been impossible for her before.

What if Cam were taken from her without warning? She could never again know the feel of his hair in her hands or the caress of his lips against hers. No consummation of all she had begun to feel, the promises, smiles, tears, hopes, all ripped from her grasp. Forever. How much she would miss. How much could never be replaced by anyone else.

Aching with compassion, she watched as Cam moved to her brother. Leo hid his face and jerked a hand up, fingers spread, palm facing out in a broken, helpless gesture. “I can’t let her go,” he choked.

The lamp blew out, and a pane of glass shattered, while a freezing blast of air struck them. Energy crackled through the room, tiny snaps of light appearing around them.

“You can do it for her,” Cam said, putting his arms around her brother in the way he might have comforted a lost child. “You can.”

Leo began to cry harder, each breath a burst of angry despair. “Oh, God,” he groaned. “Laura, don’t leave me.”

But as he wept, the atmosphere seemed to settle, glacier-cold and calm, and the blue light, like the afterglow of a distant dying star, began to fade. There was a quiet drone of wings—a few bees venturing from the hive, then flying back to settle for the night.

Cam was murmuring something now, holding Leo in a firm protective grasp. He spoke in Romany, the words drifting into the thinning air. A promise, a compact, offered to a fading, formless spirit.

Until all that was left were three people sitting among shattered glass in the darkness, a discarded weapon on the floor.

“She’s gone,” Cam said softly. “She’s free.”

Leo nodded, his face hidden. He was damaged but still alive. Broken, but not beyond the hope of repair.

And reconciled to life, at last.

Chapter Twenty-two

After they had taken Leo back to Stony Cross Manor and put him to bed, Amelia stood outside his room with Cam. Her emotions were brimming so high and strong, it took all her strength to contain them. “I’m going to tell Poppy that he’s all right,” she whispered.

Cam nodded, silent and somewhat distracted. Their fingers tangled briefly.

They parted company, and Amelia went to find her sister.

Poppy was in bed, lying on her side, her eyes fully open. “You found Leo,” she murmured as Amelia came to her.

“Yes, dear.”

“Is he…?”

“He’s fine. I think…” Amelia sat on the edge of the mattress and smiled down at her. “I think he’ll be better from now on.”

“Like the old Leo?”

“I don’t know.”

Poppy yawned. “Amelia … will you be grumpy if I ask something?”

“I’m too tired to be grumpy. Ask away.”

“Are you going to marry Mr. Rohan?”

The question filled Amelia with dizzying delight. “Should I?”

“Oh, yes. You’ve been compromised, you know. Besides, he’s a good influence on you. You’re not nearly so much of a porcupine when he’s around.”

“Delightful child,” Amelia observed to the room in general, and grinned at her sister. “I’ll tell you in the morning, dear. Go to sleep.”

She walked through the somber stillness of the hallway, feeling as nervous as a bride as she went to find Cam. It was time to be open, honest, trusting, as she had never been before, not even in their most intimate moments. Her heartbeat resounded everywhere, even in the tips of her fingers and toes. She went to Cam’s room, where lamplight seeped through the fissure of the partially opened door.

Cam was sitting on the bed, still clothed. His head was lowered, hands braced on his knees in the posture of a man who was deep in thought. He glanced up as she came into the room and closed the door.

“What’s the matter, love?”

“I…” Amelia approached him hesitantly. “I’m afraid you won’t let me have what I want.”

His slow smile robbed her of breath. “I have yet to refuse you anything. I’m not likely to start now.”

Amelia stopped before him, her skirts crowded between his parted knees. The clean, salty, evergreen scent of him drifted to her nostrils. “I have a proposition for you,” she said, trying for a businesslike tone. “A very sensible one. You see—” She paused to clear her throat. “I’ve been thinking about your problem.”