Still he would not let himself look away from her. He swallowed hard, audibly. Then he nodded.
“Did you . . .” Luna paused, gathered herself. “Did you know?”
“Know what?”
Luna made herself look at him then. Made herself look into his eyes when she gave voice to the question. “What she was? What she was doing? All those . . . those people?”
His eyes shimmered for a moment before suddenly two streams of dampness poured out and ran down his cheeks. It was horrible. Horrible because, at the sight, Luna found herselflonging all over again to reach out to him. This time to catch him by the head, to draw him down to her breast, giving him a soft place to weep. But she couldn’t. She held herself very still and strong, even as she knelt before him.
“She killed so many people,” she heard her own voice speaking, the words dull and heavy in her ears. “They say that in the dungeons of her tower there were . . . there were . . .” She couldn’t finish. She couldn’t repeat the stories she’d heard. Dark, horrible stories, which had rippled throughout Plym following the fall of the Shadowbane Lady, reaching even as far as remote Crimble. Stories of tortures and monstrosities discovered in the depths of the evil sorceress’s lair. Stories so overblown and hideous, Luna had thought at the time they must be more fiction than fact.
Only now, looking into Mr. Grimm’s face, she wasn’t so sure.
“I didn’t know,” he said at last. He blinked once, and more tears issured forth. But when he opened his eyelids, he continued to meet her gaze. “Not at first. She kept it from me, for years. But then I began to suspect and . . . and I . . . didn’t do anything. Because I didn’t want to believe it. I didn’t want it to be true.”
“Because you loved her?”
“Yes.”
He loved a monster. A fiend. The nightmarish, demonic villainess, who haunted the dreams of every man, woman, and child of a generation, here and across the world.
“You were her consort.”
He swallowed again, painfully. “Yes.”
“My lovely, lithe, lusty Jastira was seduced by a younger man.”
“Oh!” Luna gasped, Mortimer’s voice ringing painfully in her head. She got to her feet and backed away, her hips hittingthe cold stove. Shuddering, she braced herself there, her heart beating like a caged animal.
Mr. Grimm got to his feet as well, moving slowly so as not to startle her. But his body shook violently, whether with emotion or the after-effects of poison, Luna could not say. “Please, Miss Talbot,” he said, “I am not that man anymore—”
“Why didn’t you stop her?” Luna demanded. “Why did you let her . . . let herdothose things?”
“I did stop her.” He stretched out both hands, pleading, but did not touch her. His fingers trembled in the shadowed space between them. “I destroyed her utterly and completely.”
“But only after she’d killed all those people! Only after she’d killed your father!”
Mr. Grimm nodded. He dragged in a rough breath, and she heard the sob catching in his throat. “I was afraid. I was afraid to face the truth, to let myself acknowledge that . . . that I loved a monster. Had loved a monster, for years. That I’d devoted my life, my skill, my power, my very heart, to someone whose wickedness ran so deep. I didn’t want it to be true, and I thought, somehow, if I loved her well enough, I could make itnot be true.”His gaze sought hers again, and she watched the tears pouring down his cheeks unchecked. “I was such a coward,” he admitted. “I couldn’t face what I’d become. What I’d made myself into, trying to please her. I always told myself that we could both come back from it. That there was still time for redemption. But I didn’t realize how deep she’d gone. I didn’t realize how deepI’dgone, trying to keep up with her.”
“Did you . . .” Luna stopped. She wasn’t certain she could bear to learn the answer to this question. But she had to ask. She had to know. “Did you drain people’s lives to feed your spells?”
“No,” he answered at once and with such finality of tone that she believed him. But then his face cracked, and he rolled his head to one side. “But I may have caused a number of deathseven so. I drained life from the land itself. I brought famine to Plym, channeling so much of the lifeforce of the land through the Dire to feed my spells. I told myself the risk was worth it, that what I was going to create would make up for any little inconveniences along the way. And I refused to look. Refused to acknowledge what I was doing.”
Luna nodded slowly. The famine had not reached as far as Crimble, but there were signs nonetheless. Whispers and rumors from hollow-eyed vagabonds, wandering through the mountains on their way to better prospects. She had always believed the sorcery they spoke of was the Shadowbane Lady’s doing, however.
“So,” she said at last, her voice sounding dull as blunted knives in her ears. “This is why they tattooed you. With that large heptagram. On your chest.”
He nodded.
“Why didn’t they just kill you?”
How cold the question was once stated. But she couldn’t soften it. Even if she wanted to.
Mr. Grimm turned away, closing his eyes, even as a fresh outpouring of tears raced down his haggard cheeks. “They should have. They should have killed me or, at the very least, locked me up forever. But I overthrew the Shadowbane Lady. In the end, they felt they couldn’t. That’s the story they told me, anyway. Right before they exiled me.”
Luna stared at him. Trying to reconcile everything she knew, every dark tale she’d been told, every ominous rumor which had reached her ear, with this man who stood before her. This man who had been nothing but kind to her from the moment she met him. This man who had always fallen over himself to see to her comforts and happiness, who sought out ways to make her laugh, to make her smile. This man who seemed to rise eachmorning with the sole purpose in mind of somehow making her life a little better, a little easier.
This man whose kisses had awakened in her a desire like nothing she’d ever known.
