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“You’re here, make yourself useful. Any Amhas-draoi out there? Am I walking into an ambush?”
“Seems to me you already have.”
He shot her an evil look as she scanned the street, a small line between her brows. A tightness to her mouth. “None that I can sense. Now, suppose you tell me—”
“Let’s go.” He gave a sharp jerk of his head, forestalling further conversation. Stepped out of the alley without once looking back to see if she followed.
Crossing the street, he pushed open the door of the tavern. Smoke lay over the tables like a cloud. A maidservant yelled an order to the bar. A gruff shout came in answer. Men hunched over their tables, liquid escape hoarded between gnarled, work-hardened hands. The stench of spilled alcohol and the fug of unwashed humanity stung his eyes as he sought through the murk for sign of his cousin.
A hand lifted in weary greeting. A call to the maid for another beer. Brendan smiled. Success.
Threading his way through the tables, he grinned on hearing the dirty propositions and drunken catcalls following in his wake. At one point, a hand reached for Roseingrave. A startled yelp, and it was withdrawn in haste while she muttered warnings about what body parts would be stabbed next if the miscreant didn’t mind his beer and keep his hands to himself.
But it wasn’t the threatened man who answered with a startled oath but Jack O’Gara, whose face even in the tavern’s half-light drained to white. “Fuck all. What’s she doing here?”
“I still can’t believe my eyes, lad. It’s like staring at a ghost. I mean, here you sit. Alive. Barely changed from when I saw you last.”
“You need to clean your spectacles if that’s your opinion, Daz.” Brendan handled his untasted pint.
The old man pushed his glasses onto his forehead, blotting his bleary eyes with an enormous square of linen. Wiping his shiny forehead. Honking loudly into it before shoving it into the pocket of a gold-trimmed, once-scarlet, now-pink velvet coat.
Daz Ahern might have been of the opinion that Brendan remained unchanged in appearance, but the same could not be said of the great bear of a man Brendan remembered. He had a deflated look, as if the years had punched the life out of him. Shoulders hunched, hollowed chest, skin sagging on a once enormous frame. His hair had grown sparse and lank, his face ruddy with drink, and his gaze behind enormous spectacles held a myopic absentmindedness. To top it off, he seemed to be attired in a stained, threadbare suit at least two decades out of fashion.
Daz had been Father’s closest friend. A jolly, happy-go-lucky mountain of a man who carried peppermints in his pockets and would pause in whatever he was doing to play with the children of Kilronan. A game of tag. A round of blindman’s bluff. Hide-and-seek. He’d been a favorite uncle. A doting, laughing adult in a childhood bracketed by a demanding father and a meek, inattentive mother.
Never allowed to breach the inner sanctum of the Nine’s meetings; still, he’d been an active participant in much of the group’s work. Assisting Father in his experiments. Helping him search for the Rywlkoth tapestry and the Sh’vad Tual when everyone called the old earl mad for investing his life in chasing legends. An adoring confidant who always felt privileged to be included.
It was only as Brendan had grown in years and in what he thought of as maturity that he had begun looking on Daz’s lively amiability with contempt and
his unquestioning willingness to do whatever was asked of him with a cheery smile as a sign of weakness.
Yet Daz’s good-natured affection for Brendan had never wavered. And when events began spiraling out of control; when intimidation became a tool and murder a weapon; when the Nine’s influence spread like a disease and Father’s dreams of coexistence changed to a mania for supremacy—when Brendan could no longer ignore the voices invading his sleep and the guilt twisting his bowels—he’d turned in desperation to Daz and been surprised and relieved to discover his traitorous thoughts were shared by at least one other.
Together they’d sought to make amends. To halt the encroaching madness of a march toward a war the Other could never hope to win. To satisfy the clamoring dead.
Daz rubbed his bulbous nose with one sausage finger. “When O’Gara arrived on my doorstep, I almost shot him.”
Brendan spun his pint round and round in circles upon the tabletop. “He gets that reaction a lot.”
And where was Jack, anyway?
He’d gone a rainbow of colors in the moments following Brendan’s arrival with Miss Roseingrave. White, then red, then a decidedly pucey shade of green. Brendan feared his cousin might be in danger of poisoning until he’d glanced at Helena Roseingrave and seen a matching multicolored display crossing her visage. Though she also looked as if her head might explode any second.
“You!” she’d hissed. At which point Jack had leapt to his feet, taken her by the arm despite her murderous glare, and hustled her away. The two had been gone for a while, necessitating a decision. Should Brendan remain here or start an alley-by-alley search for his cousin’s dead body? Would there be enough of him left to find?
“Thought the young gentleman was one of them come after me at last,” Daz commented, starting Brendan back to the matter and the man at hand with a heavy sigh.
He’d sent Jack to bring him old Archie’s ring. Not the whole bloody man. He wasn’t up to a frolic through old memories.
“Aidan says they won’t come now. Aidan says I’m safe from the Amhas-draoi, but I told him they remember.” He stuffed a hand into his pocket, a worried expression upon his features. “They won’t let it go. Not until we’re all gone. Until we’ve paid with our lives for what we did.”
“You’ve spoken with Aidan?”
Daz paused in his pocket-rummaging. “Aye, he came last spring with the diary and the girl.” Withdrew a cherry stone, a duck’s pinfeather, a small bent stick. Laid them out on the table. “Sweet thing, she was, though I don’t know if I believe the story of how they met. Apparently he caught her burgling his town house. Prettiest arch doxy I ever saw.”
Brendan gave a rough bark of laughter. “Aidan always did have a way with women.”
“He wanted to know about those days. Wanted to know about”—Daz lowered his voice—“him.” He stole a worried look over his shoulder. “I told him, Brendan. Told him all of it, even the worst bits. The parts we didn’t want to think about. The things we’d done. You and me and the others. Took it hard, he did. Don’t think he knew how far things had gone.”
