He felt the demon’s claws dig into him, trying to take over.
“Finish it. Finish it now.”
A cool hand touched his face, but it was not Timothy tending him now. Head spinning, leg aching, body shaking as he fought to hold the demon at bay, Jonathan looked up.
Madeline looked down at him and smiled. “Hello, Jonathan.”
He sank back into the bed, his chest heaving and his lungs rattling as he stared up at her.
Goddess save me, she’s more beautiful than she was when I left
. She stroked his face, still smiling, and she lifted a tin cup to his mouth. Jonathan held himself still, sweat running down his brow as he drank, still staring at her, fighting to keep the demon in check.
“It is time,”
it whispered.
“It is well past time.”
Jonathan seized, and the demon took over, growling as it lifted his hands from the bed, aiming them at Madeline’s throat.
Madeline screamed. The demon let go, and Jonathan saw with sick horror that it was not Madeline at all but the maid.
“Madman!” she cried, then ran from the room.
Jonathan sank into the bed, biting back bile. It was starting. It was already starting.
The door opened, then closed. Soft footsteps approached the bed, but when Jonathan saw that it was Timothy, he only turned his face away.
“The maid says you attacked her,” Timothy said in Catalian.
Jonathan snorted and made a halfhearted gesture at his groin. “With what?” But he shut his eyes against the guilt. He
had
attacked her. For that one moment, the demon had taken control. He opened his eyes and stared at the pattern on the wallpaper. “I have to leave,” he said, trying to be firm, but he was afraid he only sounded desperate. He was. “I cannot stay in Etsey. I must leave
now
.”
“You’re still weak,” Timothy said, shaking his head, “You have attacks every day. I had to rent out the surrounding apartments in your name. The tenants were all shouting to the constable that the place was haunted.”
“It is.” Jonathan coughed, then winced as he swallowed. “How long have we been here?”
“In Boone?” Timothy picked up the cup from the floor and set it on the stand. “Six weeks.”
“
Too long
.” Jonathan groaned and rolled all the way over to his side before fighting his way into a sitting position.
Six weeks
. It had been six weeks on Etsian soil.
And it had named its first target as Madeline.
Jonathan swung his good leg over the side of the bed and hissed against the pain as he dragged the other after. “Get me my walking stick,” he rasped.
“You can’t stand!” Timothy tried to push him back down. “You must rest!”
“I can’t rest. Not here. I have to leave.” He tried again to stand, but Timothy was right. He could not. He swore and sat back down again.
Timothy glared at him. “This is madness, this talk of leaving.”
Jonathan laughed darkly. “Not yet, but that will come soon enough.” He ran a shaking hand through his hair. “I cannot stay here. I don’t expect you to understand, but I need you to help me leave. Right now.” Except he feared it was already too late.
“There is nowhere to go!” Timothy waved a hand at the window. “
Mathdu
, Jonathan! I don’t need to fight you in addition to everything else! When I’m not wrestling with the landlord or battling racism from your ever-so-unenlightened countrymen and countrywomen, I’m staving off your grandfather, who keeps demanding to see you—usually in the same breath he is demanding my resignation, I might add!”
That made Jonathan lift his head. “Watch Whitby. He’ll try to take you down, and he’ll do it sideways. If you so much as flirt with a man within range of his spies, he’ll have you charged with the Indecency Act.”
“As if I have time for flirting when I’m playing your nursemaid!” Timothy swore in Catalian under his breath, then began to pace. “
Indecency Act
. I haven’t looked that one up yet, but I can hazard a guess, knowing this place. Ten
rhadus
says it is some mad decree by your whore of a Goddess, probably to do with purity?” He sat, defeated, on the edge of Jonathan’s bed. “
Bathdu
. I hate this country.”
“Then help me leave it.” Jonathan winced as his leg spasmed; he pressed his palm against its side to try and calm it. “The wounds to my neck are almost healed, but you’ll notice the others are as bad as ever and in fact are getting worse. This will continue as long as we are here, and it is just the beginning. I need to leave. Get me to Hain, if that’s the best we can do. I don’t care. Just get me out of Etsey. Get the ocean between it and me again.”
“I don’t understand why just being here is so objectionable, and I resent that you won’t explain it me,” Timothy said. “If it’s the climate, Hain will be worse. Is it the tension of being here, where your past has so many shadows? That isn’t like you, but I won’t think less of you if that’s the case.”
The darkness within Jonathan’s wound began to move, and he smiled a humorless smile. “I’ve already told you why. You just don’t want to believe me.”
Timothy snorted derisively. “Magic is a very stupid explanation. And demons are an even more ridiculous one.”
Jonathan winced and shifted his leg again. “This is old magic. Older than anything most people can understand or bring themselves to believe in. And the demon is real. Goddess bless, Timothy, even you must see that by now.”
“I see that you have an injury,” Timothy shot back. “I refuse to believe you have a demon living in your leg.
K’hertha
, Jonathan, you are not a superstitious fool! This is nonsense! Magic! I’ve seen your country’s magic. It’s little more than science unexplained.” But even as he said this, Timothy looked at Jonathan’s neck and his festering thigh, and he frowned.
“I have not told you much about my family,” Jonathan began. “In some ways, we are no different than any other aristocratic clan: We’re elitist, arrogant bastards obsessed with money, status, and land, ready to stab each other and anyone else in the way of maintaining and advancing our positions. But there is more to my ancestry than that. We are a House, which means our lineage is more about our blood than our estates and our gestures at Parliament. Our House is very old, born in a time that has passed into legend, under circumstances so strange and unreal even most Etsians count our story as fantasy. Every old family has dark shades, ugly secrets it would rather were not known. Every family has a monster in the closet, a secret demon for which they will lie and cheat and kill to make sure word does not get out of its existence.” Jonathan pressed his hand on his thigh, his fingers curling against the edge of the bandage. “My family’s demon is literal. You may not wish to believe it, but it’s true. I have a curse on my head, and despite my insistence I would never become embroiled in my family’s darkness, ten years ago I managed to land myself in the center of it. I swore I would never come back to these shores, because I knew if I did, I would bring the darkness with me. I carry things that should not be allowed to return. I staved off some of its power by leaving, but now that I’m here, it’s all beginning again. Things are changing inside me, things that I do not know how much longer I can control. People might die, now that I am here.” He closed his hand over his chest, over the medallion lying beneath his shirt.
People I care about.
“I have no wish to stay here either,” Timothy said, “whether or not you are cursed. But none of this changes the fact that you are too ill to travel again. And don’t give me that nonsense about not being able to die. By your own warped logic, if you are compromised further, what is to keep this alleged demon from taking over, killing me, and ordering the ship back to Boone?”
Timothy spoke with thick sarcasm, but the possibilities he painted made Jonathan chill to the bone. “Then I must go alone,” he said. “Or take me out to the ship and tie me down.”
But would it be enough? Would it be enough to stop the darkness? Jonathan swore under his breath and wiped his hand over his face.
“There must be a physician here who can help you,” Timothy insisted. “If you are bent on leaving, at least allow one of them to bolster you first. Perhaps your ‘magical’ injury can be cured by an Etsian physic.”
“There isn’t—” Jonathan cut himself off, arrested by a new thought.
Etsian physic
. His hand closed over his chest, and he toyed with his medallion absently through his shirt. “There is no such thing as a physic in Etsey. But we do have alchemists. And witches.”
Timothy looked dubious. “Would they have any effect on your ailments?”
“I don’t dare go near an alchemist,” Jonathan said. “Not as a Perry as a general rule, but especially not with what I carry. But a witch—if I could get to the right one, she might be of use.”
“She would have a cure?”
Jonathan stared down at the bedclothes. “The only trouble is that most witches won’t be any good to me,” he said. “When they find out what is wrong with me, they will refuse to…give me what I need. There are a few who might help, though. One in particular would be very glad to assist me in what I have in mind.”
Timothy nodded tersely. “We’ll go straightaway.”
“There are dangers,” Jonathan said. He fiddled with the medallion again. “There are people I must avoid at all costs. We must be in and out with absolute secrecy. She will not come to us; we must go to her. And yet the place where I must go to see her is full of dangers for me, and it is the place where I am most likely to be a danger to others.”
Timothy put his hand on Jonathan’s shoulder. “I will go with you. I will do everything I can to assist you. You know this. I want to see you cured, Jonathan.”
Jonathan nodded, keeping his head down so as not to reveal his guilt.
Cured
. The right witch could cure him, yes—but it would not be the cure Timothy wanted.
Finish it. Yes. It’s time to finish it, indeed
. Except Jonathan had no intention of letting the demon be the one to decide what was being finished.
“To where shall I arrange transportation?” Timothy asked.
“North.” Jonathan felt his leg twitch, and he placed his hand over the wound, trying to gentle the beast within. “We will be traveling to the village of Rothborne.”
* * *
Timothy Fielding hated Etsey.
He hated the climate. For years he’d listened to Jonathan effuse over the lush, green forests of his homeland, heard him espouse the poetic beauty of a mist-covered moor, listened to him sing the praises of the splendor of the white cliffs jutting out over an angry sea. But now that he had arrived to bear his own witness, Timothy couldn’t see it. He had traveled over almost the entire length of the island country, and now he was in the northern moorlands, at an inn outside of the “quaint, rustic village” where Jonathan had spent much of his youth. Timothy did not find it quaint, and the term
rustic
seemed generous. This was not a village; it was a hole that people lived in, and from the smell of things, they pissed in it too. Oh, there were elegant manors for the upper class scattered everywhere, and there were the poor middle classes who dressed like their betters but scraped along with everyone else, but even they were not the norm. Most of Etsey was dirt hovels and rickety shacks. And even the best of the houses were trapped in the same wet and cold and fog of the hovels—and this was
summer
. Timothy had no desire to see snow, no matter how much it looked like “a soft blanket of white over the world.” He suspected it was only wetter and colder.
Timothy hated the people of Etsey as well. He’d known Etsian soldiers for years, and he’d acclimated himself to their idiosyncrasies and contradictions, and he’d even managed to find most of them to be charming in their own simple way. The charm must have come from being abroad, Timothy decided, because the natives themselves were less developed than apes.
“
They distrust foreigners
,” Jonathan had warned him as they’d traveled north. Sitting at the bar in the pub room at the inn outside of Rothborne with two dozen pairs of eyes glued to his every move, Timothy let the understatement echo in his mind as he snorted into his ale.
Distrust foreigners
. They didn’t distrust him. They wanted to string him up or put him in one of their quaint, rustic pillories for no other reason than he had a permanent tan and wore “funny clothes.” As Jonathan would say, Goddess save him if they discovered how creatively and frequently he had violated their mathdu Indecency Act.
And that was another thing to hate, Timothy thought darkly, taking in more ale.
The Goddess
. He’d thought her modest enough when the soldiers appealed to her in battle, and he still wasn’t against the idea of a metaphorical mother for these backward, superstitious morons, but their Goddess was little more than a greedy whore from what he had seen. The soldiers had appealed to a great spiritual force that would, they hoped, give them strength and courage when theirs was spent. In Etsey itself, however, the deity seemed to be as much a slave driver as the Continental God and ten times as arrogant. They didn’t just call their country Etsey. The whole
world
was called Etsey, according to the Goddess, implying that they were, by extension, the chosen country, the only one that really mattered.
Timothy granted the Goddess points for being interesting enough to be two halves in her human form, one male, one female. He’d never understood the Lord and Lady lore exactly: something about the divine being both masculine and feminine, and should they choose to incarnate, they would be one and the other. Timothy also liked their bawdy little rhyme they’d trotted out when drunk; it was crude, yes, but it was true. It made sense, and it was catchier than “You make your own destiny.” He sensed, however, that suggesting to the grubby, angry men and women glaring at him that they should invite their domineering, judgmental Mother to go down on them would not win him many points of favor.
Timothy drained the last of his ale and set the empty tankard down on the bar in front of him. He kept his fingers on the side of the mug, tapping them idly as he tried to decide if he wanted another or if he should head back upstairs to check on Jonathan. What he
wanted
, he admitted in black humor, was to be fucked. To be absolutely honest, he wanted to fuck, then be overpowered and fucked back. He didn’t want any preamble or niceness, and a dearth of conversation would be considered a bonus. He had months of anger and fear pent up inside him, and now he had judgment and hate as well. He wanted it purged, and he didn’t feel like setting up a circle of candles and meditating. He wanted to feel
alive
, not connected to a greater whole. He wanted someone to remind him that he had a body, that he was vulnerable and soft inside, and he wanted someone to use those insides roughly. In the old days, this would have been an easy request to fulfill—though not in a single one of the old days had he ever felt this black or frightened or unsteady. Of course, it didn’t matter, because the old days weren’t just gone, they were decimated, their bones ground beneath the unforgiving heel of the Cloister Army’s boots.