Devil at Midnight (7 page)

“I?” Michael’s mouth was gaping. “If that is true, why am I not fighting off wenches the way you do?”

“Your former calling keeps them at bay. Women fear you would rather take their confession than their virtue.”

“Ballocks,” Michael scoffed, though his face had turned thoughtful.

“Tears of Our Lord,” Charles interrupted, returning with a jug of the local sweet red wine. He filled their cups with an easy hand and sat on the other side of Christian. “By the way, my friend, I believe you have a new admirer.”

Charles tilted his head to indicate the murky corner just past the hearth. Herbs hung in drying bundles from the rafters there, casting broom-head shadows on the smoke-stained walls. At the farthest table, a figure sat, sprawled casually back in a slatted chair.

Christian’s shoulders tightened. He had not noticed this person when he surveyed the room. He—or she—was dressed all in black, from pointed shoes to short velvet tunic to the ebony ostrich feather that curled on a small round cap. Built very slightly, the figure leaned forward. Christian saw it was a woman, despite the male attire. When the firelight hit her features, they were surpassingly delicate.

That she had been staring at Christian, she did not try to conceal.

“Traveling minstrel,” Charles informed him. “Her lute is resting against the wall.”

“Minstrel?” William turned his shaggy head to look. “That is a peculiar occupation for a woman.”

When the woman’s gaze slid over William, his hulking shoulders jerked as if he perceived a threat.

“Brr,” he said. “She has funny eyes.”

They were dark eyes, almond shaped and slanting like a princess who had been carried in a fancy litter down the Silk Road. Odd lights glinted in her irises, swimming up and sparking in a rhythm that did not match the dancing of the fire.

Christian was carrying his rondel dagger rather than the larger cinquedea—or five-fingered blade—that he kept under his pillow. Without thinking, his fingers curled around the grip. His thumb slipped between the ears of the pommel, which were designed to impart more force to a stabbing blow. The rondel was a favored weapon among assassins. Christian had always been fond of it.

“I will see what she wants,” he said, rising.

“I daresay I can guess,” Charles joked.

As Christian reached her table, the woman reclined again in her chair, her strange eyes seeming to laugh at him silently. She showed none of the fear most woman would have when caught alone, but instead an almost masculine bravado. Up close, she was uncannily beautiful, her skin smooth and perfect and ivory white. Her small bowed lips were red as blood in all that paleness.

“I was wondering when you would notice me,” she said.

Her hands were as dainty as the rest of her, her fingers slim and graceful as she stroked the scored table top. Her hair hung as loose as Eve’s in the Garden, straight and black as the finest silk. Until he stepped to her, the strands had disappeared into the inky velvet of her tunic.

“Do you desire a service of me?” Christian inquired.

When her lips stretched around her smile, her teeth were as white as Grace’s. Unlike Grace’s, her incisors looked like a cat’s, a fraction more pointed than they should have been. Christian’s gaze snagged on them until she spoke.

“I desire quite a lot of you, as it turns out.”

In spite of his native caution, the archness of her manner stirred an answering warmth in his groin.

Sensing this perhaps, the woman licked her lips and leaned forward. “Your soul is a roaring flame on a cold, dark night. You have no idea how your hunger glows before eyes like mine.”

Christian did not remember deciding to sit, but he was seated—on a hard little stool opposite her chair. His forearms were on the table, to either side of a bejeweled goblet.
Her
goblet, he assumed. The Crowing Cock had nothing like it on offer. Between his arms, the surface of her wine shivered with the hard beating of his pulse.

“You make me glad I stopped here,” she said. “Geneva itself cannot offer such charms as you.”

Her voice curled into his ears like a mystic’s smoke, but when she touched his hand with her tiny seductive fingers, he jerked back as William had. He had felt something drawing on him at the contact, as if she had the power to suck the strength of life from him.

“A thousand pardons,” he said, pushing a little shakily to his feet. “I am afraid you have mistaken me for someone else.”

Her curving smile did not falter. “Never. I always recognize kindred souls.”

His tongue was not quick enough to answer. He bowed and withdrew a step. “I must take my leave,” he said.

“Christian,” she said, stopping him before he could turn.

His scalp prickled violently, though he knew many of the tavern’s patrons could have revealed his name.

“I will be here,” the woman promised, “sipping at my wine, any night you tire of the succor your hand can bring. I shall be here, utterly available to you.”

She was guessing, a lucky arrow shot in the dark.

His nod was a jerk of his head and neck. He backed away from her to rejoin his companions, trying not to retreat too quickly. The woman seemed to fade again into the shadows, but he sensed her still watching him. Tense, he rolled his shoulders as he sat.

“Too rich for your blood?” Michael asked sympathetically.

“Too something,” Christian agreed.

Charles opened his mouth, laughing.

“No,” Christian advised, laying his hand on his friend’s forearm. “Do not give her a try yourself. I think she is dangerous.”

Charles twitted him for that, but his eyes were already seeking out the barmaid. Charles liked simple, blowsy women, not adders in the grass. Christian tossed his wine back in one swallow, wondering how long he had to wait before they returned home.

G
race sat alone in Christian’s chamber. Before he left, Christian had opened the shutters so she could look out at the road and the giant lake, but without him there, that soon palled. Her guide wasn’t answering her calls, and a whole world stretched outside this room to explore.

There was no TV here, no movies, no Nat King Cole crooning over Mona Lisa on the radio. If Grace didn’t entertain herself, no one would.

“No reason to be a mouse,” she said practically, pushing up from Christian’s three-legged stool.

It occurred to her that one advantage to being a spirit was that no one heard you talking to yourself.

Through trial and error, she discovered she couldn’t float or fly, but she could walk through walls. Many of the rooms she passed through were as dull as Christian’s-apart from the start she took at finding groups of people sleeping there. Most were soldiers—mercenaries, Christian had said—each of whom kept a frightening knife or two close at hand. Grace saw a lot of gruesome scars and heard a lot of bodily noises, making her glad her ghostly nose wasn’t functional.

None of the rooms impressed her until she got to the dining hall. There the ceiling rose to a dizzying height, with thick, age-darkened beams to support the roof. Three tall men could have stood inside the hearth, could have danced a jig in it, if they wished. The fire had been extinguished for the night, leaving the great space quiet and dark. Grace could see everything anyway, including the colors of the intricate patterns painted on the walls, which said volumes about her changed circumstances.

Grace wasn’t alive anymore. She might not even be human.

For all she knew, she’d never find out whether
All About Eve
really was Bette Davis’s comeback.

She hugged herself, shivering for reasons other than a chill. What was she supposed to
do
here? Perform some divinely appointed task? Pester Christian for the rest of his life? Maybe she was meant to rescue him from some danger. Grace didn’t mind that idea. She kind of liked it, in fact. She just wondered what would happen to what was left of her afterward.

She didn’t understand why heaven wasn’t any more responsive here than in Ohio. Shouldn’t
that
have been an advantage to being dead?

“You are a fool, Philippe,” someone chuckled low and dark behind her.

It wasn’t Christian. It was one of the men who’d left with him earlier. He had a companion, yet another of the oversized, supermuscular males who seemed to populate this place. This one—Philippe, she expected—crowded the male who’d spoken into the paneled wall. Grace’s mouth fell open. The pair were pressing their bodies full length together, their arms locked fist to fist and stretched above their heads.

Neither appeared unhappy with this mutual bondage.

“If I am a fool,” Philippe rasped, his hips grinding the other’s as if he meant to dig through, “I am only a fool for you.”

His friend rumbled out a groan and kissed him, their mouths and muscles warring in a battle Grace blushed to see. They were fighting to get closer, grunting and heaving their weight into each other until they writhed. The man who was trapped against the wall tore one hand free, squeezing it between his hips and the other man’s. What he was gripping wasn’t hard to deduce.

“Yes, Matthaus,” Philippe gasped, his head flung back in a pained sort of ecstasy. “God in heaven, it has been too long.”

“It is always too long,” Matthaus returned. His hips thrust forward in a hard rhythm. “I could take you twelve times a day.”

In answer, Philippe clapped one hand around his rear, increasing the very enthusiastic pressure with which they strove together. Without warning, Matthaus made a choked, high sound, his face twisting strangely as his body went board-stiff.

Inexperience notwithstanding, Grace had a pretty good idea what had just happened.

Philippe did, too. He waited until Matthaus relaxed, then slid down him to his knees with a soft chuckle.

“You always go first,” he said, his hands untying something at the other’s waist. “It is fortunate I know how to help you rise again.”

Matthaus moaned as Philippe’s face disappeared into his parted clothing.
“Yes.
Lave me there with your tongue.”

Grace had been frozen, but now an upsurge of embarrassment reminded her what she was doing.

Get out of here
, she thought to herself.
You weren’t invited to this party.

She wasn’t sure how it happened, but the hall blinked out of sight around her. In an instant, she was transported to Christian’s room.

 

 

C
hristian felt as rattled as a bunch of knucklebones a giant hand had thrown. Between his father and Grace and this odd encounter at the Crowing Cock, he scarcely knew which end of him was up.

He should not have been walking faster as he approached his chamber, should not have felt his heart beating harder as his prick swelled ungovernably. Most definitely he should not have experienced a bloom of warmth within his breast at finding Grace inside. Her company had no business assuaging him. Her company was not even real. Strange though the woman at the tavern was, she was a far more suitable match for a man like him.

At the least, the minstrel had been alive.

Grace twisted from the window as he came in. Her cheeks were as flushed as if he had caught her in a forbidden act. The deep pink stain was like a punch to his heating groin, an all too pleasant one. A thousand thoughts of what she might have been doing blazed through his mind.

“Christian,” she gasped.

He closed the door behind him. “Has something happened?” he asked carefully.

Her hands were clutched together beneath her bosom, which her gown did not shield any more effectively than before. He struggled not to stare at her rose pink nipples—or to notice that they were furled.

“I was walking,” she said somewhat breathlessly. “Around the house. I popped back here, and I don’t know how.”

“You
popped
back here.”

She nodded and blushed harder.

The laugh that rushed up in his throat surprised him. “You were spying, and you saw something personal.”

“I didn’t mean to spy. I was bored up here on my own.”

The plaint was half apology. He stepped to her, remembering only at the last moment not to try to stroke back her deep red hair. He did not know how he could have thought her a witch. She was clean and sweet, almost radiant in the candlelight. Christian wanted to bathe in the sight of her. Her lashes dropped shyly at his nearness, her high, lush breasts rising and falling more swiftly in her sheer kirtle. Christian’s prick finished hardening with a vigor that tempted him to groan. Be she maid or not, if he could have touched her, he would have fallen on her like an animal.

“Did you enjoy yourself?” she asked, speaking to a spot somewhere on his chest.

Christian’s head felt muddled. “Enjoy myself?”

“Wherever you and your friends went out.”