FIRE EATER AND DEATH CHEATER
Dead men couldn’t feel sunshine, but Bran could.
Because he wasn’t fucking dead. Until he disposed of this bloody glamour, though, he might as well be.
Hopefully, the plant shop on Philpot Lane could bring Bran back to life.
It looked like life—all greenery and sunshine.
Despite the chill seeping through Bran’s greatcoat and into his bones, despite the low-hanging, white clouds, Apollo’s Plants thrived.
If anyone could help him, this glorified gardener could.
His reflection in the window was tall and lean and haughty, wearing the same fashionable suit he’d conjured time and time again since he’d inherited it—the opposite of what he actually looked like beneath the illusion.
Not that anyone could see.
He pushed through the green door. A bell tinkled merrily above his head, and a wall of heat hit him.
Definitely in the right place. But the right place seemed empty.
Not a soul around. Only plants in all shapes and varieties.
The air smelled of soil, and Bran slipped out of his greatcoat, folded it over one arm.
“Mr. Chester!” he called out.
No answer.
But the plants… danced? Vines hanging from an upper balcony that curved around the shop swayed without a breeze, and the potted plants lining the tables on either side of him stretched their branches in sinuous movements.
He only knew one other person who could do something like this. Born a transcendent, like Mr. Apollo Chester, then trained to be something quite different. Like Mr. Apollo Chester.
“Chester!”
A noise near the back of the shop was Bran’s only answer.
He followed it, and the noise grew louder—yelps and hisses and moans—fucking Jupiter.
Someone was being attacked. He sprinted ahead, knocking over a rose bush as he rushed past the wall of plants near the back of the shop and behind the desk—
“Oh fuck.” He slammed to a stop, spun around, slapping a palm over his eyes. “Apologies.” Hell. What a sight. A woman, her wrists pinned to the wall above her head with vines, her legs wrapped around a man’s waist, that man’s trousers around his ankles, his shirtsleeves rolled above his elbows.
A feminine chuckle. A masculine curse. The rustling of clothing.
“Get the hell out!” Chester bellowed.
“Pull up your trousers,” Bran demanded. He’d decided to seek out this scoundrel, and he wasn’t about to back down because of a little peek of bare arse. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“This is my shop. Leave.”
Bran glued his feet to the floor. “If you wanted privacy, you should have locked the door.”
A small gasp. “You didn’t lock the door?” the woman asked. Miss Sybil Grant. No, not Grant anymore. She’d wed the scoundrel. Mrs. Sybil Chester now.
“Thought I did,” Chester mumbled.
“Are you decent?” Bran asked.
“Yes,” Mrs. Chester said at the same time her husband said, “Turn around and find out.”
Bran did turn, just in time to see the wife slap her husband on the arm and the husband catch her chin and kiss her hard.
“Go away,” Chester said against his wife’s lips. “I’m busy. Can’t you see?”
“How in heaven’s name do you stay in business with these sorts of practices?”
“Because I’m the best. But if you don’t leave, I’ll ban you, and you’ll spend the rest of your life with subpar plants. It would serve you right.”
Bran didn’t even flinch from his spot.
With a troubled sigh, Chester lifted from his wife’s mouth to glower at Bran. “Who are you?”
That’s what he’d come here to tell the man. “I should like to speak privately.”
Chester’s jaw hardened, but his wife patted his shoulder, kissed his cheek.
“I was on my way to Bloomsbury anyway. I’ll return this afternoon.”
Chester watched his wife leave then turned his steely gaze on Bran.
“I hope whoever you are and whatever you want of me is worth my currently painful predicament. I’m going to have to take care of the cockstand on my own now.
And I’d prefer her pretty hand to alleviate the situation.
Now, what do you want?” He rounded Bran and strode out into his shop, snapping up a mister as he coasted by a table.
Bran cleared his throat. “I need your help, fire eater.”
A slight hitch interrupted Chester’s stride, a hesitation mid step before he continued down the aisle, stopping at a clump of flowers to spray a fine mist of water over them.
“Ah. I see. You’re mad.” He glanced over his shoulder.
“And I thought you were transcendent. But then those two sometimes go hand in hand.”
“I’m not mad.” Bran smoothed the folds of his greatcoat, still slung across his arm. If only he could divest himself of his glamour so easily. “And I need your help.”
Chester continued spraying the plants, checking the soil, testing the waxy softness of each leaf. “With?”
“I know what you can do. I saw it. The night of the fire at Lady Guinevere’s potion shop.”
Chester froze, the mister poised over a squat plant with spiky limbs.
Bran pressed forward. “I saw you stop the fire, swallow it. I saw you take all that heat and light into yourself and snuff it out entirely.”
Chester’s hand fell to the table, and he pressed both palms into the smooth surface. “You are mad. I know damn well you weren’t there that night. I would have seen you. A duke in the middle of a burning potion shop is memorable.”
“That’s because I didn’t look like this then.”
Chester swung around. “Glamoured?”
Bran nodded then shook his head. “I didn’t start out that way. I began the evening as myself. I ended like this.” He ran a hand down the length of his body. “And I want out.”
“Too much smoke inhalation. Your brain’s rotted right through.” Chester swept past Bran.
But Bran caught his arm and held him fast. He might look like an elegant academic, but beneath this cursed duke’s glamour he still possessed muscle. Could use it, too.
Chester’s gaze flashed from the hand on his arm to Bran’s face, and something hard there gave the message. Release him now or regret it.
Bran didn’t release him. He was desperate. Would regret nothing.
“A few days before the fire,” he said low, allowing the faintest hint of his Scottish accent to bleed through, “I gave you a knife. In the hallway outside your wife’s door.
You weren’t wed then, though. She was still Miss Grant, and she was hiding, and you were ready to die for her. ” Something Bran well understood.
Chester quick as a snake, twisted out of Bran’s grasp and grabbed his jaw.
Bran trapped the other man’s wrists, but not before Apollo had squeezed Bran’s mouth open. Fucking Jupiter. What the hell was the scoundrel about? Something like shock kept Bran from throwing off the touch and curiosity kept him still as Chester peered inside Bran’s mouth.
“Huh,” Chester said, releasing Bran’s jaw. “Do you have Bran in there? You sound just fucking like him. But he’s dead.”
“He’s not. I am Bran.” He loosed the brogue in full force. “And I am very fucking alive.”
Chester stumbled backward, face pale, and jaw like the newly sharpened edge of a blade.
“Can’t be.” Words like bullets shot from fifty paces.
“You’re a transcendent. That’s clear as day.
High up if your glamour’s to be believed.
Bran was a well-trained assassin, hired muscle without even a surname. ”
“I’m a transcendent, too. Always have been. Duke of Braxton.”
“You’re Braxton? The fellow who’s always on about changing the laws surrounding love potion?”
Bran grunted, nodded.
Chester stumbled backward until he found the edge of a table, his weight rattling the plants lined up in bright clay pots. “I’ve never heard a more Bran-like grunt than that, but… how?”
“This”—Bran waved a hand down his body—“is Brandon Lennox, sixth Duke of Braxton, and beneath the duke is Bran.”
“Brandon… Bran. It’s a glamour. Bran can produce glamours… because he’s… a transcendent!” His eyebrows were practically into his hairline. They dropped as he chuckled. “Well fuck me.”
“No, thank you.”
“I never would have guessed.” Chester’s eyes warmed.
“You believe me now, fire eater?”
“Yes, I believe you, death cheater.” He dragged a heavy hand through his hair then made for the back of the shop. “I need a drink. You?”
“God, yes.”
“Why are you letting everyone—and by everyone I mean Lady Guinevere—believe you’re dead?”
“I don’t have a choice. The glamour’s stuck. I can’t dissolve it, no matter what I try.”
At the very back, Chester led Bran through a door into a small but comfortable office with a desk, a large fireplace, a thick rug, and two wingback chairs before the grate, leaping with crackling flames.
“Sit,” Chester said, opening a desk drawn and pulling out two crystal tumblers and a decanter with amber liquid. “Sybil keeps the fire hot at all hours. Don’t even need eternal coal. She’s a wonder.” He poured the liquid into the glasses.
Bran sat, watching him closely. “So are you. She can’t keep those flames going when she’s not here. If there’s no alternative fuel, then… you are the heat, Apollo Chester.”
Chester handed over one of the glasses as he sat in the other chair across from Bran. “Bottom’s up.” But he only sipped the drink and settled into the back of the chair. “Tell me how you came to be undead.”
The amber glinted inside the glass, catching the fire’s light as Bran circled it round and round.
Smelled like whisky, and it burned beautifully going down his gullet.
No idea where to start. He’d hit on the idea of speaking with Chester this morning when he’d woken, once more, with the glamour hard around him, and he’d not thought much about what he would say when he got here.
“Who are you? Really?” Chester asked quietly. “Duke or guard?”
Ah. An easier place to start. “Both. I was born Brandon Lennox. Second son of a second son of the Duke of Braxton. I grew up as Bran close to the Highlands. Death made me a duke.” Quite a lot of death, actually. “This”—he gestured at this face—“is the traditional Braxton glamour.”