C. Harris - What Darkness Brings

“You said yourself he sounds as if he belongs in Bedlam.”

“That doesn’t mean he isn’t somehow involved in Daniel Eisler’s death.”

“I don’t see the connection.”

“Why was he here, now, watching the house? Watching you? Not me. You.”

She propped herself up on one elbow so she could look down at him. “I can take care of myself.”

Her words echoed those Kat had said to him earlier that day. Only, in that instance she had been referring to the threat posed by Jarvis. . Hero’s own father.

He caught the dark fall of hair curtaining her face and swept it back with his splayed fingers. He had seen her shoot a man point-blank in the chest and barely register any reaction, either horror or remorse. There was a hard edge to this woman that he knew came to her from her father, Jarvis. It was leavened by her sense of justice and a measure of compassion for the suffering of those less fortunate that Jarvis had never experienced. But Sebastian knew she could still kill without hesitation or compunction to protect herself or others, just as he knew that none of that might be enough to keep her safe.

He said, “We’re all vulnerable. Especially when dealing with a madman.”

She was silent a moment, her face solemn, a frown digging a furrow between her eyebrows. “Do you think I don’t worry about you?”

“That’s not-”

“Not the same? Because you are a man and I am a woman?”

“No. Because it’s one thing for me to make the choice to put my own life in danger and something else entirely when my actions endanger someone else.”

She touched her fingers to his lips. “I knew what I was letting myself in for when I married you, Devlin.”

He smiled against her hand. “I’m not sure I did.” It was the closest he’d ever come to speaking of the profound shifts in their relationship and the unexpected, life-altering deepening of the ties that bound them.

She let her hand slide down his chest, down over the tender flesh of his belly. His breath caught, and he saw her eyes darken with want.

He rolled her onto her back, rising above her. The wind drove the rain against the windowpanes. The green glow of the lightning flickered in ethereal pulses around them. He kissed her cheek, her eyelids, her hair, the delicate hollow at the base of her throat. His world narrowed down to the rasp of flesh against flesh, hands reaching, fingers clenching. The softness of her lips. The whispered urgency of her desire.

And his.

Sebastian was easing his breeches up over his hips when he became aware of Hero coming to stand in the doorway of his darkened dressing room. She’d drawn a blanket over her shoulders against the chill, but otherwise she was naked, her body long and pale, her rounded belly silhouetted against the throbbing electric light of the storm.

She said, “I suppose there’s a good reason you’re sneaking away from my bed at one in the morning.”

He smiled and pulled a shirt over his head. “I want to have another look at Eisler’s house-alone, and with no interruptions.”

“Unless someone interrupts your housebreaking with a blunderbuss.”

“Do you think me so careless?”

“No. But you didn’t get any sleep last night. You need to rest, Devlin.”

He bent to pull on his boots. “How much rest do you suppose Russell Yates is getting tonight?”

“There will always be innocent men in danger of being hanged.”

He knotted a casual kerchief around his neck and reached for his coat. “True.”

“You said the doors were bolted and the windows barred. So how will you get in?”

“I’ve an idea.”

“Well, it’s reassuring to know that should we ever find ourselves in dire straits, you could make a credible living as a burglar.”

He grunted and caught her to him for a quick kiss, but she surprised him by holding him close and hard.

She said, “You’ll be careful.” In typical Hero fashion, it was more of a command than a request.

He kissed her again, on her nose. “Good God. You sound just like a wife.”

“Don’t be insulting.” She adjusted the set of his hat. “What exactly do you expect to find?”

“Answers, hopefully.”

“To precisely which questions?”

“I haven’t figured that out yet.”

A single oil lamp mounted high on the wall of the corner greengrocer’s shop cast a small, murky puddle of light. But the rest of the crooked lane lay still and quiet in the wet darkness.

Pausing in the shadow of a recessed doorway that smelled strongly of urine, Sebastian watched as the gusting wind ruffled the rain-drenched ivy that draped the scarred stone facade of Eisler’s house and half obscured the ancient leaded windows. Like the warehouses and shuttered shops around it, the house was dark. He had no way of knowing if the aged retainers employed by Eisler were still in residence, but if so, they would long ago have retired to their attic bedchamber for the night. Casting a quick glance around, he crossed the street to duck down the narrow, malodorous passageway that ran along the south side of the house.

Vennels, he’d heard them called in Scotland and the north of England. This one was barely wide enough for a man turned sideways and terminated in an old gate made of thick, vertical planks studded with clavos and hinged with iron straps. But the wood was crumbling with rot, the rusted mountings flaking and so thin they snapped easily when Sebastian leaned his weight against the boards. He caught the gate before it could clatter onto the weed- and leaf-strewn paving and set it carefully to one side.

What must once, two hundred years or more earlier, have been a delightful Renaissance garden of rose-shaded walks bordering parterres of comfrey and chamomile, tansy and feverfew, was now a dark, overgrown tangle hemmed in by the looming, grimy brick walls of its neighbors. Massive elms, their spreading limbs heavy with rain, had grown up near the terrace. Any other man would have been blind. But Sebastian moved easily, picking his way over downed rotting branches, tangled wet vines, and broken masonry.

It was a gift, his mother had told him, this catlike ability to see clearly in all but the complete absence of any light, to hear sounds too subtle or high-pitched for most human ears. The trait was shared by no one else in his family, and he still remembered the look on his mother’s face when she first discovered the strange, almost animalistic quality of his senses.

She’d come upon him unexpectedly one evening, when he was curled up on a bench in the summerhouse reading a book long after the sun had set. He realized now that she had surely known then, even if Sebastian himself had not, that this gift came to him from his father. .

The father who was not the Earl of Hendon.

He pushed the memory from his thoughts and quietly mounted the shattered steps to the terrace, stepping carefully to avoid the telltale clatter of broken stones shifting beneath his boots. The rows of ratty wooden cages were still there to the left of the door, their forlorn feathered occupants huddled against a damp wind that carried with it a foul stench of neglect and misery. Nearly every food bowl was empty, the water vessels scummed.

Moving purposefully from cage to cage, he quickly unlatched one door after the other, rattling the slats of those whose occupants appeared too weakened or morose to seize the freedom offered them. In a whirl of wings, they rose against the night sky, first sparrows, doves, and larks; then, once the smaller birds had flown to safety, the goshawks and owls. Sebastian stood at last before the cage of the disgruntled, long-haired black cat, which looked up at him with slitted green eyes. Sebastian swung open the cage door, its hinges squealing loud enough to make him wince.