Demon's Curse (Imnada Brotherhood) Read Free

sidewalk was empty but for a knife grinder hurrying for shelter and a man selling meat pies to a dripping-wet customer.
    She lifted a hand to hail a hackney before remembering she had no fare. Instead she hastened east down Piccadilly on foot, all the while feeling a gaze leveled at her back, tickling her shoulder blades. She would not turn around, but her steps came faster until, cowardly as it made her feel, she was almost running.
    *   *   *
    “The woman knows, I’m sure of it.” Captain Mac Flannery splashed brandy into his glass before downing it in one quick gulp, letting the heat travel soothingly through him. Without any explicit invitation, the group of old friends had ended up at Gray’s town house after leaving the cemetery.
    Mac poured another, trying to wash away the grave stench clinging to his nostrils, the roof of his mouth. The memory of earth striking the coffin lid as Adam was entombed. The Imnada did not hold with enclosing their dead in the ground but released their spirits with fire, the better to send them back through the Gateway to be reunited with their ancestors. Unfortunately, Adam’s murder had garnered too much public attention to make that possible.
    Instead, he’d died as he’d lived: in exile from his clan. His kind. Only Mac’s intervention keeping him from a pauper’s lye pit with the rest of the unclaimed dead.
    “You think Adam betrayed us to an out-clan?” Gray demanded from his seat by the fire.
    Mac hadn’t seen de Coursy since the chaotic days following Waterloo. The estranged heir to the dukedom of Morieux lived a reclusive life in the north, rarely venturing to London, and even then shunning the usual Society entertainments. Some gossip blamed it on a horrible disfigurement acquired during the war. Others whispered he kept his mad wife locked in a tower. The most salacious hinted at black arts and satanic rituals carried out in the catacombs beneath his bleak Yorkshire estate.
    If only the truth were that simple.
    “Was that Bianca Parrino paying her last respects?” David St. Leger paused in shuffling a deck of cards to hold out his glass for Mac to refill.
    “Who?” Mac asked, glancing at the faces of the men he’d once soldiered with. Men who at one time had been as close as brothers. The Fey-blood’s curse had shattered that bond as it had destroyed so much in their lives.
    Friendships forged by blood and steel had frayed like ragged cloth as if each of them had hoped to flee the curse by running away from each other. They should have known their fates and Fey-blood magic had tied them too closely for escape. They were bound by darker forces than the war.
    “All work and no play, Captain Flannery.” David gave a disgusted shake of his head. “Do they have you chained to your desk over there at the Horse Guards?”
    Mac chose not to answer. This wasn’t David’s first refill.
    “She’s an actress at Covent Garden,” he continued. “All the rage this year. Audiences love her.”
    Of course. That was why the woman at Adam’s funeral had seemed so familiar. Mac had seen her penned likeness staring out at him from countless newspapers. They didn’t do her justice.
    Statuesque as any Nordic queen, she carried herself with a pride that bordered on the insolent. Hair blond as corn silk. Eyes a chilling blue. And just enough of an accent to give her an air of the exotic. But it was what she’d said more than how she’d said it that had truly rooted him to the spot. As you kept my secret, so shall I keep yours.
    Had Adam been foolish enough to trust her with the Imnada’s existence? And could this reckless confession have led to his murder?
    “They say she’s high in the instep as any duchess. Throws men into a quake with one glance from those alluring blue eyes,” David said, refilling his own glass this time. “They also say she and Adam were lovers.”
    Gray rose to toss another log on the fire. “I find that hard to believe while the Imnada are