“And my personal payment for services rendered?”
Gray took a leather pouch from his coat and tossed it on a nearby table. “You can disappear quite thoroughly with what’s in there. Make a new life on the Continent or the Americas. You’ll be safe. You’ll be free.”
“I like the sound of that. I’ve already booked passage on the packet to Calais. From there, the world is my playground.”
“You leave so soon?”
“You sound disappointed”—she offered him a sly smile, which he did not return—“but now that you’ve done as I asked there’s nothing holding me here.”
“The boy is here.”
“He’s a boy no longer. He’ll miss me for a short while, but life will rectify that quickly enough.” She shrugged, though he knew she cared more than she let on. “I’ve been asked politely by Lord Drummond to vacate my town house in favor of his latest
“I might.” Gray opened the lid to reveal a notched copper disk, dulled green with age and bent at one corner. On one side, the crescent of the Imnada. On the other, two vertical opposing arrows within a diamond. “How did you get hold of it?”
“Best not to ask. You might not like the answer.” She cocked her head, a frown drawing her lips into a pout. “You know, I could take your money and still sell you out to the highest bidder, Gray. The Ossine would be on your doorstep by nightfall. And if they didn’t kill you, the Other would. Your enemies are mounting.”
He closed the box and slid it into his coat pocket.“You could, but you won’t.”
“What makes you so certain? I’d sell my own mother if it gained me a profit.”
This time it was he who reached out and touched her cheek. “You say these things, but I know you better.”
“You always did.” She sighed. “Probably why we never got along.” Her eyes grew troubled. “Be careful, Gray. In my line of work, I hear the whispers. You’re being watched by my kind as well as yours. There are wagers about who’ll move first to eliminate you. Perhaps you should think of joining me in Calais.”
He rubbed a thumb across his scarred palm, the myriad pale lines crisscrossing the roughened skin like a tangled skein of threads. Each day brought a new cut and a new scar as he worked the magic that kept him whole and the black curse at bay. A magic that had become an addiction. He could not stop. He could not continue. Either choice brought sickness and then death. “If I can’t break the Fey-blood’s curse, neither side will have to worry over me for long. I’ll be dead and the Ghost Earl shall be ghost in truth.”
The mouse squeezed its way into the narrow crack between street and foundation, glancing back once to make sure it had not been followed. No sign of pursuit. The way was clear. Wriggling through the maze of lathing and plaster, it followed its clever rodent nose past the kitchens, now quiet this late at night, and upward to the ground floor. The study was dark, the dining room empty, but the mouse expected that. It was the perfect time to explore unseen, and the perfect form to do so unnoticed. What was one mouse among a colony of such? A nuisance, but hardly worth more than a stiff whisk with a broom. Better that than a sword in the gut, which might be the reaction should Gray discover the real identity of the rodent creeping along his wainscoting.
Sliding under a broken slat, the mouse moved through the walls with purpose, assessing the town house’s layout should quick escape be necessary, searching rooms as it went. No guests resided in the empty chambers. Only half a handful of servants lay sleeping in the attics. Of guards, she saw no sign. He was alone and unprotected. Didn’t he understand the danger?
Reaching a small room at the back of the second floor, the mouse paused at the flicker of candlelight coming through a gap in the chair rail. Following the dim glow, it sniffed and pushed its beady-eyed head out through the hole. A bedchamber.
A shocking thought followed close upon this observation. A shocking, unnerving thought that had the mouse shoving its way out through the hole into the room to rise on its hind legs, whiskers twitching. Did that heap of blankets in the bed move? Was someone sleeping? Was it two someones and were they sleeping at all? What if they were in the middle of . . .
So focused was the little creature on determining whether the four-poster in the corner contained one or two people, it never saw the descending glass until the crystal walls surrounded it, held in place by an enormous hand.
A face leaned close, studying the mouse, searching for answers. Older now. Harder. The gentle rounded features and sweet innocence of youth had been stripped bare and scraped raw until it seemed honed like a knife blade, no softness to dull the glittering edge. No tenderness to moderate the harsh austerity. But the same icy blue eyes shone from beneath dark winged brows, the same tiny scar remained at the edge of a strong uncompromising mouth. The same long aristocratic nose flared now with suspicion and doubt.
Scooping up glass and mouse both, the man lifted them to eye level. “Eagles eat mice, you know.”
Meeryn Munro was the last person Gray had expected to visit him—in his bedchamber—in the middle of the night . . . alone. Yet here she was, shed of her mouse’s skin and seated on the edge of his bed in nothing but his borrowed robe. At this point, he would have preferred her covered in fur. It was far less revealing. Far less apt to make his thoughts wander away from what her unexpected arrival meant.
“You’ve changed—grown up.” A trite and pointless comment. Of course she’d changed. It had been almost ten years since he’d seen her last.
“Age happens to the best of us, I’m told,” she answered with a wry smile.
“Yes, but . . .” He waved a hand in her general direction. “The curls are gone”—replaced by soft waves of honey colored hair—“and your figure has matured”—the gawky flat-chested girl of his memories was now a woman of luscious, feminine curves and long elegant limbs—“and you used to have . . . I mean there were the . . . the . . .”
She wrinkled her nose. “Spots. I know, they were positively horrid, but thankfully long gone. Lemon juice and Gower’s Lotion every evening before bed. But surely, I haven’t changed that much.”
“No, not exactly.” His gaze traveled over her from head to foot and back. The ghost of the old Meeryn lingered in the narrow elfin face, pert chin, and full coral lips, but there was a shrewdness in her eyes and a severity to her jaw that had never been present in the laughing playmate of his youth. “And then again—yes.”
“Well, you haven’t. You look just as you always did.”
His smile came laced with bitterness. “That’s the first lie I’ve caught you in tonight.”
“It’s true. You do look the same. A bit longer in the tooth and leaner in the face, of course, but that’s to be expected after . . . well . . . after all you’ve been through.”
She couldn’t say the words. He didn’t blame her. It had taken months before he could speak of his sentencing without vomiting his guts until his throat and stomach were raw. He rubbed his scarred palm without even thinking. Dropped his hand to his side when he caught her watching him.
“I heard rumors that you’d lifted the curse,” she said.
“Contained . . . not lifted.”
“But it’s night”—her gaze cut to the window—“the sun is down and you’re still . . . they said when the sun left the sky, you were forced to become your animal aspect. Forced from man to beast against your will. That’s what I was told.”
“There are ways to hold the spell at bay and keep to the form I choose, but it comes at a price.” He poured and handed her a glass of restorative brandy from the decanter permanently set beside his bed for those nights he couldn’t sleep.
“Things never change, do they, Professor Gray? Still got your nose caught in a dusty old book,” she commented with a nod of her head toward his cluttered desk.
“That’s where the answers are,” he answered. Realizing he stared, he quickly busied himself with clearing
