Sinner's Heart

“I say, Rothwell,” someone called. “The man’s yielded.”

“My lord,” added Tranmere nervously, hovering near, “you’ve won.”

Bram showed no signs of hearing them. A demand to kill seemed to have him, unrelenting. He kept his sword close to Worton’s eye. The bigger man screwed his eyes shut, as though something as flimsy as an eyelid could stop a blade.

This must not happen.

She drifted close, keeping herself unseen, and spoke directly into Bram’s thoughts.

Fine warrior you are, to slay an unarmed man.

He’s the enemy, Bram answered.

Of what? Hygiene? I’m sure the sweat of his fear stinks like rancid meat.

I have to kill him.

Go ahead. Yet it takes a special variety of coward to kill a man with no weapon.

I’m not a damned coward!

Then put your sword down.

Bram blinked, as though awakening from a daze. He stared at the cringing Worton, then down at the blade in his hand. Slowly, he looked around at the faces of the gathered men, their eyes wide and expressions cautious.

“My lord?” Tranmere took a wary step forward.

The tip of Bram’s sword lowered, then he dropped his hand, so the point scraped against the floor. Worton and everyone else within the chamber exhaled. Even Livia, who had no need of breath, eased out a sigh.

Bram glared around the room, almost in challenge. No one accepted. Without a word, he strode from the room.

He stormed down the winding, narrow stairwell. Men ascending the stairs pressed into the wall, careful to avoid his gaze and angry scowl. Bound as she was to him, Livia hovered at his side, his rage and confusion twisting beneath the surface of her own phantasmal skin.

This has happened before, she said.

Not to me. His voice in her mind was a snarl. Not since I left soldiering.

When I freed the Dark One, she amended. A madness gripped everyone, a need for blood. I saw a respected citizen, a merchant, stab the proprietor of a bathhouse for having the water too hot. There were riots in the marketplace. The army mutinied.

So I’m a symptom of a greater illness, he answered.

Not an illness. A plague.

She and Bram reached the street. Clouds obscured the sun, throwing the remaining daylight into early shadow. A servant hurried to open the door to the waiting carriage, but Bram was faster, and he threw the door open himself. He flung himself into the vehicle. It rocked with the force of his body against the upholstered seat.

“Home,” he snapped to the servant.

The servant closed the door and hopped onto the back of the carriage.

She hovered at the sidewalk, invisible, watching the carriage drive away. A woman crouched by the side of the street, a child in the crook of her arm. The woman stretched her hand out to all the fine gentlemen walking past. No one threw her any coin. The child—girl or boy, Livia could not tell—stared directly at Livia.

“Strange lady,” it chirped. Yet its mother paid no attention, busy wheedling and beseeching the passersby.

Someone walking quickly knocked the woman to the ground. They did not stop to help her up. Nobody did, and the child began to cry.

A sharp tug yanked Livia from where she hovered. She was dragged behind Bram’s carriage like a tattered ribbon. Helpless to stop herself, she could only follow, unseen by everyone she passed. She had never felt so alone.

Not quite alone. Down the length of the connection binding her to Bram, she heard his thoughts.

I don’t know myself anymore. I don’t know a damned thing. I’m lost.

She had been lost too, not so long ago. Yet Bram had an advantage that she had not: a guide. Would he accept her guidance, or continue to fall headlong into the dark unknown? Once, she might have cast an augury spell taken from the arcane wisdom of the Etruscans. Her magic had been split apart since then, and as to what the future held, in that she was as lost as Bram.

In the glass, Bram surveyed his appearance, a soldier readying himself for battle. The night and its pleasures were a battle, one from which he always emerged victorious. Nothing would change that.

He studied his reflection as his valet made final adjustments to his ensemble. The deep red velvet of his slim coat appeared almost black until candlelight turned it the hue of spilled blood. Complex embroidery worked its way down the front of his bronze satin waistcoat and at the very cuff of his matching breeches. The black silk solitaire around his neck could not fully hide his scar—nothing did. He’d grown almost used to the fact by now.

With his hair pulled back into a simple queue and bagged in silk, his stockings faultlessly white, his buckled shoes gleaming, and the jeweled shortsword at his side, he appeared every inch the aristocrat, a man who expected and would receive entrance anywhere he chose. No one would suspect that only hours earlier, he’d nearly killed a man for no reason. All that had prevented him from taking Worton’s eye—and life—had been the scornful words of a ghost.

A tremor worked through him. God, he’d almost murdered someone. And he had wanted to, to see Worton sprawled upon the ground at his feet. Bram hadn’t thought of him as simply a fellow swordsman engaged in training, as Bram himself was. A red-edged fever had taken hold of him. Worton had transformed into the Algonquin, into a French soldier, into a creature with a twisted face and a mouth full of fangs.

Insanity. Yet he’d been driven by a need to kill this enemy. Was this the madness of which Livia spoke? The one that had gripped her own time after she had freed the Devil? He tried to picture what London would be like if its streets teemed with men and women eager for blood—and shoved the image from his mind. The hell he’d experienced in the Colonies would resemble a May Day fete by comparison.

No—it wouldn’t come to that. It couldn’t, no matter what the ghost claimed.

He felt her near, somewhere at the edges of his bedchamber. She was never far. Strange—he thought he’d find her presence an anathema, but there was a curious . . . comfort in having her close.

As if one took comfort from the millstone around one’s neck.

Cleeve tugged gently at the lace at Bram’s wrists, ensuring that just the proper amount showed. It was easier to prepare for actual warfare. A check to make sure the weapons were all sharp enough and ready to fire, and then into the heat of battle. A French grenadier didn’t care if Bram’s stock lay perfectly snug against his throat. He only wanted Bram dead.

The fine hairs on the back of Bram’s neck rose. Livia was drawing closer, hovering near. He couldn’t see her, but he sensed her, his body growing alarmingly attuned to her presence. If he let his eyes almost close, he could nearly see her, the soft outline of her curved form.

What might she look like if she truly walked upon the ground? All women had their own innate rhythm and movement, unique to each female. He had made a considerable study of it. Some moved with intrinsic sensuality, others with deliberate provocation as if throwing down a gauntlet. Both intrigued him, for he did enjoy challenges. There were women who moved with the rigidity of automatons, uncomfortable in their bodies. He avoided them.

How might this Roman ghost move, had she a corporeal body? She might carry herself with patrician stiffness, a queen descending from her throne to unwillingly mingle with the rabble. No. She’d be a seductive thing, those rounded hips canting from side to side with each step, a lure no living man could resist.

He was alive, but she wasn’t. She was also a virago, a presence to be endured only because he hadn’t any choice.