could use a man here at HQ who’s done some real fighting, been to the front, so to speak. The marquess’s record of twelve confirmed air combat victories [and I believe another five unconfirmed behind enemy lines] has everyone’s rapt attention.
Hope all is well. Margie sends her best. We’ll pop by for a spot of hunting before long, I’m sure.
—Bernie
Chapter 28
“Reginald?”
Armand poked his head past the doorway of the study, glancing about.
Empty. Lights left burning. Curtains left open to show the night. A crushed cigarette and a china cup in its saucer on the desk.
He walked to the desk, lifted the cup to his nose. Coffee. Coffee. Black, unadulterated, a few good inches of it still sloshing around the bottom, gone cold.
Mandy dropped into his father’s chair behind the desk and thought about that. He hadn’t seen Reginald sober in days. Actually, he hadn’t seen Reginald sober or drunk in days. His Grace had been distinctly absent from manor life, and damned inconvenient it’d been, too, leaving his remaining son to deal with all the endless details of managing an estate he’d never been trained to inherit.
But nothing dislodged Reginald from his mourning. Armand had asked the chatelaine to keep an eye on him as discreetly as she could; he couldn’t forget those Vickers, despite what he’d said to Eleanore. The chatelaine’s reports to him had all been of the same flavor: Reg was locked in his room or locked in his study. He ate very little; he drank a great deal. He shifted from one chamber to the other, back and forth, but tonight he was in neither.
Mandy had already picked the lock on the duke’s bedroom door to be sure.
Something had changed. Something felt not right, and if he was going to be completely honest with himself, that same not right had been hounding him all day.
His fingers drummed a tattoo atop the leather blotter.
He glanced down. There was a crack in the line of the desk’s edge that meant the drawer hadn’t been properly closed.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood up.
That voice that lived within, that sly dragonish-thing, warned, Don’t do it. You won’t like it; you can’t change it. Don’t look.
The bracket clock counted out, seven, eight, nine …
No one would ever know how close Armand came to obeying that foreboding command, to just getting up and walking away and letting the world sort itself out as it would. He was seventeen years old and weary to the bone. If it were up to him, he’d abandon his entire family’s legacy, his mother’s lost magic, his father’s insanity. What good had ever come of any of it?
But he had to look, didn’t he? Drunk or sober, crazy or sane, Reg was all he had left. So he had to.
With a drowning sense of déjà vu, Armand Louis opened the drawer. He reached inside until his hand discovered papers.
He unfolded the top sheet, a letter. Official-looking, government letterhead.
You’ll be pleased to know your concerns regarding the marquess have been noted and all matters I assume sorted to your satisfaction.…
It took no time at all to understand the grisly enormity of what Reggie had done.
• • •
In the darkness of his bedroom, amid the mess of his sheets and all the golden songs he’d made and shaped just for her, Jesse Holms opened his eyes.
awaken! awake! the stars were crying, piercing with urgency. your time is now!
“Lora,” Jesse said, into the sightless dark.
• • •
I opened my eyes, startled. Was someone in the room with me?
I sat up, rose to my knees in the bed. No one else was here, no Jesse, no Sophia. Nothing but me moved, yet something wasn’t right.
The tower was gripped in shadows, a flat tintype of a small round room frozen in time, forever on edge. If armoires and bureaus could respire, these were holding their breath. Even the sky beyond the window hung ominously still.
And purple. Amethyst. That rare, uncanny dark.
My nightgown had twisted into a tourniquet around my waist and thighs. I must have been tossing in my sleep. I plucked at it, walking on my knees to the end of the bed. My feet hit the floor and absorbed its unyielding cold.
Beloved, rose Jesse’s song, strong and clear at once, shattering the calm. Armand is in danger. He needs you.
I didn’t think. I just reacted. I opened the window and Turned to smoke and raced over the green and the water. Toward Tranquility.