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She slept.
Brendan was alive. That was Aidan’s first and overriding thought.
Father hadn’t gone through with it. His brother hadn’t been led like a lamb to slaughter.
Somewhere out there, Brendan was alive.
Aidan stood within the shadowed bedchamber. Surveyed the stripped bed frame, the furniture swathed in Holland covers, the yawning, cold hearth. He’d not been in here for years. Not out of any childish sentimentality. Simply because a lack of guests meant a lack of need to open extra rooms.
He ran a casual finger over the dusty mantel, a corner of his mouth twitching at the stain above where an errant thrown egg had marred the expensive Chinese wallpaper. All right, six thrown eggs, but Brendan had deserved it for swiping Aidan’s birthday half crown. Father had summoned him to the library where a dripping, eggy Brendan had run to tattle. Aidan had been given a sharp lecture on the nature of self-restraint. But now that he thought about it, he never had gotten that half crown back from his little brother.
Aidan hadn’t thought about that incident in years, yet the Amhas-draoi’s insinuations had stirred all sorts of similar slights and strange oddities to the surface—Brendan’s tight-lipped silence whenever questioned about the meetings with Father and his friends, his unexpected fury at catching Aidan in his rooms unaccompanied, his dismissive rebuff of Aidan’s invitation to join him in London. That last one still stung. He’d not realized at the time it would be the final letter he’d receive from his brother.
But did those things alone point to the menacing conclusions drawn about him? Hardly.
“Aidan?” came a tentative voice from behind.
“What do you want?” he answered, startled by the renewed sense of loss these memories dredged up. Brendan’s absence had been a grief long healed over. Or so he’d thought until the discovery of his father’s damned diary. The resurrection of numerous buried hurts.
“I came to make sure you were all right.”
Aidan finally turned to face his cousin, the pathetic hangdog expression on his face almost humorous. Or it would have been had Aidan not been in his current black temper. “As well as can be expected.” He jerked his head in the direction of downstairs. “Has she gone?”
“Aye.” Jack’s own troubled gaze circled the room before coming to rest on Aidan. “I know you said to keep the Amhas-draoi out of it, but you have to admit if I hadn’t—”
Aidan offered a chilly, humorless smile. “If you hadn’t, you’d even now be preparing to pack to make way for the new earl.”
Jack shuddered. “Bite your tongue.”
“And loath as I am to admit it, you saved my sorry backside with your bungling interference. Thank you.”
“So all’s forgiven?”
“On that score, yes.” Aidan took a stiff and painful turn about the room, his thigh one big knotted ache throbbing all the way to the bone. Pausing at the window, he twitched back the blinds. Looked out on the garden as if he could pierce the gloom. See what lurked beyond the meager light of his taper.
The night breathed like a great animal. And he shivered, imagining the creature Lazarus. The hollow, pitiless stare
as he struck, but for that split second’s regret.
What sort of devil would create a man from the dust of his former life? And what sort of hell would that existence be for one who found himself enslaved beneath a madman’s spell?
“Have you reconsidered Helena’s advice? Will you entrust the diary to the Amhas-draoi?”
Aidan smirked. “Helena is it?” Resolve stiffened his mouth into a grim line. “No. The diary stays with me.”
Jack joined him at the window. “That creature is still out there, Aidan. And you heard her, it won’t give up. Besides, you don’t know what more harm that bloody book will do before it’s all over. There must be a good reason Brendan wants it so badly.”
“Not Brendan!” Aidan snarled.
“You heard her—”
“I heard her offer a convincing argument, yes. But not convincing enough to change my mind. Brendan’s no black sorcerer conjuring living nightmares from dead bodies.”
“I know you don’t want to believe it,” Jack argued. “But it does make sense. His disappearance right before your father’s murder. His continued absence after so many years. And who else would know your father kept a diary?”
Aidan had already battled his way through those arguments within his own mind. Come to conclusions he sought now to explain to his skeptical cousin. “If he’d wanted the diary, why didn’t he simply take it with him when he vanished? Why wait six years to come after it? Or why not come himself and ask for it? He’s my brother, not some stranger. He should know I’d let him look his fill. He doesn’t have to kill to gain it.” He shook his head. “Someone else is behind this. It has to be.”
Jack shrugged his grudging acceptance of Aidan’s persuasions.
