Shadow's Curse (25 page)

She didn’t know what she’d hoped for. An emotional bedside confession of his eternal love seemed
beyond the realm of possibility, but a few kind words would have gone a long way to ease the churning pit her stomach had become. Last night had been a turning point for her. A toe-curling, heart-stopping revelation. To David, it seemed to rate somewhere between ho-hum and Callista who? She knew she wasn’t his first or even his hundred and first, but did he really have to make her feel like just one more in a long chain? Like she’d made a huge, embarrassing mistake?

He met her gaze, his expression holding nothing of the passionate desire she’d once seen there. Instead he looked on her as a particularly irritating problem he was solving. “If you hadn’t sealed the door, could this creature have used the rift you opened to escape?”

Her stomach shriveled, her heart sank into her boots, but she let none of that show on her face. Not this time. She’d already revealed too much of herself. She’d not compound her mistake with embarrassing entreaties, like a dog begging for a pat from its master. He would see only what she wanted him to see; a quiet reserve, a calm professional serenity. “I don’t know.”

His face tightened and though he couldn’t pace, it was obvious he desperately wanted to. “What do you mean you don’t know, Callista? I would think setting demons free should be at the top of your instruction list.”

“You’re yelling again.”

He pressed his lips together and breathed heavily through his nose.

“I have the skill to comfort people like the Stock-tons, but there’s so much more. It’s there in my head.
I can feel the magic, but I can’t focus it. I can’t mold it to my will.”

“How much does Corey know?”

“About my powers?” She shrugged. “He used to watch me when I walked the paths into death. He said he enjoyed my showmanship.”

“Or was he already planning? Did he see your gift for moving between life and death as his ticket to ultimate power?”

His questions beat against her tender head while his indifference slammed against her vulnerable heart. She wanted to cry, but there was no way she would do that in front of him. “I can’t conjure lightning or turn armies to stone or spill gold from every brush of my hair. I summon and banish spirits. I speak with those who’ve passed.”

“You open a door. That is where your power lies. If demons like the ones you ran into are searching for a way out, you can offer it to them. Maybe even control them.” His gaze sharpened with tension.

“I didn’t control the grel. They almost killed me.”

“Did they?”

She remembered the screaming, the lurching shambling run as they sought to catch her, but when they had the opportunity, the grel had not taken it. Those razored claws had never slashed her open. But that didn’t signify anything. She’d been too quick. Surely they would have struck had they had the chance. Wouldn’t they?

“What are you saying? That Victor Corey wants to marry me so I’ll open the door into Annwn for him?”

“And control his own personal dead army. Yes.”

“That’s insane.”

“Is it?” His stare seemed to drill into her skull. “What would have happened if these creatures had caught you?”

“They would have feasted on the life within me until I was cold and gray. I would become one of them, a being forever lost within Annwn.”

“And the door would close.”

“Of course. It takes a necromancer to unlock the many gates and spells. Death is well warded, to keep the beings trapped within from escaping.”

“So, perhaps these things weren’t trying to kill you. They were trying to pass through the door.”

“This is madness. All of it.”

“You’re right. Which is why I’ve decided you should take Nancy up on her offer.”

She straightened, head spinning at the sudden move. “What? Now I think you’re the one whose insane. We’ve had this talk already. I can’t marry Sam.”

“Sam can protect you.”

Her headache tripled in strength until it seeped down her neck and into her spine. She wanted to be sick. “Marry Sam. Marry Corey. Why is it that the solution to every problem ends in my marriage to a man I don’t love?”

“You could finally have the family you always wanted. A place where you’re cared for and . . . and loved. It’s the perfect solution.”

“Perfect for whom?” Anger added to the feverish heat simmering beneath her skin. “I’ll have all the family I can handle when I reach my aunt at Dunsgathaic.”

“Or you’ll be dismissed and tossed aside like a beggar at a miser’s feast. Do you want to risk traveling all
that way to be rejected out of hand? Or worse, handed back to your brother?”

She straightened, chin up. “A risk I’m willing to take. Besides, we made a deal.”

“No, I said what I needed to get you to cut those damned ropes,” he argued, a sour twist to his mouth. “I would have promised you a trip to the bloody moon.”

“I don’t believe you. If that was the case, why didn’t you just shove me into a mail coach in London?”

Her question was met with a dry, angry bark of laughter. “I’ve asked myself that same question every day over the last two hundred miles.”

“Why are you saying these things, David? What happened to this morning and the words we spoke to one another?”

“Words don’t change anything. You imagine I’m a chivalrous hero carrying you off into the sunset. I’m not that man, Callista. I never have been. I’m an arrogant, self-absorbed bastard, and the sooner you realize that, the better off you’ll be. I’m no hero and there is no happy-ever-after at the end of this story, only death.”

The woman kneeling on the cold, stone-flagged floor. The flash of a blade. A figure she now recognized. She folded her hands into her skirts to hide their trembling, but she met David’s gaze head-on. “My death or yours?”

He froze, a grim and dangerous light in his eye. Nothing of the teasing cynicism or the bitter loneliness was left. Only a white-hot fury that scalded her and made her drop her eyes to her lap, seeing her hands clutching the heavy fabric, a small tear in her hem, the dust shimmering in the afternoon air. She heard the
scrape of his boots on the floor, the squeak of hinges as he opened the wagon door.

“Last night was a mistake, Callista. It should never have happened.”

“Too late,” she snapped.

“To undo the past, yes. But not to change the future—your future at any rate. Mine is writ in stone. I’ll not take you down with me.”

She lifted her eyes, unable to keep the pain from her gaze. “You know what you are, David St. Leger? You’re a coward. So afraid of being hurt, you’ve forgotten how to love.”

“Or this might be the most courageous thing I’ve ever done,” he said, slamming the door behind him.

Callista pulled the crumpled broadsheet from beneath the bunk’s mattress. Smoothed it out, staring at the artist’s crude sketch as if she might read the thoughts behind the curled lip and carved jaw. She wished things were different. She wished she could feel for Sam what he felt for her. It would have made her life so simple, her problems solved with the slide of his ring upon her finger.

But she couldn’t make her heart obey.

Not to love Sam. Not to hate David.

Both were impossible.

*  *  *

My death or yours? The question reverberated like a loosed arrow as he shoved his way through the growing crowds. He repeated to himself,
A dream. It’s only a dream
, until the worst passed. Callista’s last shouted accusation was harder to escape.

The truth always was.

If only she knew how hard it was to stand aside and let Sam Oakham ply his claim. Somehow Callista had woven her way into his blood. His need for her was as destructive as the draught. He would walk away. Leave tonight. There would be no need for another conversation. And no, that was not cowardly. It was selfless, noble, and damned decent. So, take that, Callista Hawthorne!

He’d not even finished congratulating himself on his sacrifice before he slammed to a halt midway between a trio of enthusiastic fiddlers that made his head ache and a stall selling fried sausages piled with onions and mushrooms, which made his stomach growl.

The book.

In his haste to leave before he confessed more than was wise, he’d left his saddlebag behind in the wagon. Perfect. He’d have to skulk back with his tail between his legs and submit himself to another painful round of thunderous looks and finger-pointing. He wasn’t sure whether he didn’t prefer the Callista who kept her thoughts close to the vest and hid her feelings behind eyes as opaque as a leaf-clogged stream.

He spun on his heel, quickly retracing his steps, though with dusk approaching, the crowds that had been thick were fast becoming impenetrable. The stout farmers and apple-cheeked goodwives were replaced by quick-fingered cutpurses and shrill-voiced doxies. Torches guttered and smoked and the scents of roasting meat and sour wine warred with the stench of urine, sweat, and vomit.

As he shoved his way back toward the cluster of gaudily painted wagons, he fought off groping hands and pointed elbows, staggering shoves in the back and
gin-heavy laughter blown in his face. Rounding a corner between a booth selling secondhand clothes and a stall offering gingerbread, two men stepped in front of him. A third closed in from behind. Within the space of a few pounding heartbeats before they rushed him, David detected the rancid odors of grease and cheap spirits, noted the lack of prickling along his nerves that would have signaled the presence of a Fey-blood among them, and caught the slide of steel from the corner of his eye.

He bested the first easily enough with a sidestep and a thrust of his elbow hard against the side of the man’s skull, a second crushing punch to his stomach that dropped the bastard retching and gasping into the dirt. The second attacker dodged David’s fist, spinning under his guard with his knife raised to strike. David caught his wrist, the bones snapping beneath his fingers. The man’s screams were drowned out by the chaos swirling around them. David grabbed up the fallen knife and slammed it hilt-deep into the man’s neck. The screams died to gurgling moans and then silence. The third man never saw the blow that killed him, a smashing close-fisted punch that shattered his nose and drove the bone shards into his brain.

“Hold, St. Leger or . . . or I’ll shoot.”

David straightened from where he crouched above the body, blood spattering hot across his face and leaking sticky and dark over his hand. Sam Oakham aimed a pistol at David’s chest, his eyes cold and hard and undaunted. His hand shook only slightly.

“The broadsheet said you need me alive else you’ll receive nothing,” David said calmly, though his nerves thrummed and his muscles twitched just as they’d
always done when he was faced with an enemy on the field of battle . . . or, more recently, in the cramped alleys and mean back ways of London’s stews.

“Did I say I’d kill you?” Oakham answered. “Oh no. I can put a bullet in you that will deaden your legs. Alive, if not lively.”

“Do you intend to split the fifty pounds with Sally or keep it for yourself?”

David lunged, grabbing the woman lurking at the edge of his vision, dragging her in front of him, deaf to her curses and shrieks, though her heavy cheap perfume burned his nose and turned his stomach. Sally’s hair fell draggled and loose down her back as she wrestled with him, but his grip was firm, and a forearm across her tender throat quieted her quick enough.

“How skilled are you, Oakham? How desperate to win Callista’s heart? Do you think she’ll welcome you with open arms when you come to her with the blood of her lover on your hands?”

The pistol wavered as Oakham fought his temper. “You’ll never escape. The law has men scouring every road for you. You’re to be arrested and taken back to London in the name of the king.”

“The king of the stews, perhaps. I’ve just rid the world of three black-hearted killers. If I go to London, it will be to be accept a knighthood for my valiant action.”

Oakham steadied hand and voice. “Let Sally go.”

“By all means.” David leaned down, his lips almost brushing Sally’s ear. “You’d have been better off with my coins. Your loss.”

With a shove that sent her staggering into Oakham,
David threw himself behind the booth, rolling to his feet and into the mob thronging the wider alleyway. He braced for the gunshot that would take him in the back, but it never came, and Oakham was left behind. Still, he remained armed and dangerous. Add his pursuit to Corey’s, who, once he realized his men had been killed, would send more and many to finish the job. The fair and Callista must be left behind now . . . this instant.

David’s body simmered with a wild, driving power like a summer storm charge. The wolf smelled the blood on his skin and woke hungry.

The woodland was close. He would lose himself within the tangle of trees and thorny undergrowth. No swayback mount for him. He would run beneath the moon, follow the hidden ways used by badger and hare and fox, slink unseen past lighted villages and lonely farms, until he reached Gray and safety.

Where, before, the fair’s crowds swarmed close, now they parted for him like waves breaking upon a rock. Fearful glances, hissed whispers, and shrinking bodies; he noted and dismissed them in the space of the same heartbeat. They might not know what prowled beside them, but they sensed his danger and his difference.

Even the sheep bleated and shuffled, huddling at the far side of the pens as he passed. A lamp hung outside the wagon he’d shared with Callista, but he dared not stop for the book. He’d return close to dawn. Or perhaps wait for word of his flight to spread and then come back to reclaim his possessions in a day or two. Time for Corey’s men to leave the fairground for the roads and tracks nearby. Time for Callista to hate David for leaving her.

He couldn’t help himself. He paused at the trees’ edge. Opened his mind to the pathing, sending his last farewell upon a ribbon of thought, though it came with the sting of mocking amusement.
So much for twenty-four hours.

*  *  *

Callista lifted her hand to knock at the door to Sam’s wagon. A lamp shone from inside, men’s voices too low to hear over the fair’s nighttime revels.