Chapter 3
Don’t Say Demon
After a quarter of a year balancing on the sharp edge of his nerves, Malachy surfaced on the rim of the travertine quarry. For once, the guards remained behind.
Fresh air, redolent with wildflowers and chalky minerals, filled his lungs. The full moon hung like a dead god’s eye in the satiny darkness of the midnight sky. His eyes drifted shut as he basked in the crisp night, alive with the chorus of crickets and the possibilities unfurling around him.
Free. He was free.
Summoning his atrophied Choromancy, he mapped out the traversing anchors between himself and London, distant points in the star-flecked fabric of space that his magic could weave a thread between.
But he was rusty, and the distance was far.
Traversing to London would not be as easy as folding the impossibly vast fabric of space into a neat pocket square.
It was a risk he would happily take, a thousand times over, to see her again.
The night warped into a twisting void. Suspended in the nothingness in between, he was weightless, breathless, tugged by a connection hooked under his navel and around his heart. Cora’s malachite ring, paired with his own, guided him back home, to her.
The farther he traversed, the narrower the portal between Rome and London became. Space compressed around him, squeezing the air out of his burning lungs. He broke out of the portal with a gasp.
For the span of a heartbeat, he was suspended above London, held in a swath of darkness too vast to comprehend. The gas lamps below were like an inverted night sky, the city its own glittering constellation, with the Thames wound through like a dark ribbon.
Then he dropped.
A scream tore out of his throat as he plummeted several stories from midair. The last rational part of his mind fired up right before he turned into a human pancake on the sidewalk. He traversed onto a nearby rooftop and collapsed in a panting heap.
Christ, his portal magic had not been this inaccurate since he was a lad. The Tribunal had done more damage than he’d thought.
He looked out over the dark skyline of squat medieval cathedrals and towers of skyscrapers, the glittering spires of modern progress afflicting London.
Somewhere in the night, his moving house awaited him.
Somewhere, the matching ring on Cora’s finger called out to him.
Gathering his strength, he followed her call and traversed home.
The ring was there, but Cora was not.
The dark, Victorian Gothic house shook like an earthquake at his sudden entrance. Every hair on his nape rose as the wards went haywire, sparking alarm down his spine.
“Calm down, you daft thing, it’s just me,” he told the temperamental house. Gradually, the shaking stopped. A crooked portrait on the far wall righted itself. “That’s better.”
Gas lamps flickered on as he wandered dreamlike through hallways and rooms that were strange in their familiarity within the cluttered Victorian house.
Reminders of her greeted him everywhere. An empty wine glass, ringed with lipstick, on the grand piano in the parlor. A scarf flung over an armchair before the library’s smoldering hearth. Her scent lingering on the unmade bed in the Witch’s Cap atop the library tower.
Cora’s bedroom, bathed in moonlit prisms from the stained-glass windows, was a beautiful disaster.
Both her wardrobe and his library appeared to have exploded across every surface.
Half of his teacups, along with several gin bottles pilfered from the cellar, decorated the piles of books strewn with garments.
Malachy found himself smiling to see that his house felt like a home to her.
The door creaked open behind him. A shaft of light in the gloom. After so long in the darkness of his own thoughts, he whirled towards that shining pinprick of hope.
Cora stopped short in the doorway. Her eyes, rings of turquoise and hazel, widened on him standing bedraggled and heartsick in her bedroom.
His gaze trailed over her, slow as poured honey.
He could weep at the sight of her. Cheeks flushed, unruly waves of chestnut hair gleaming.
The black silk of her sheath dress hinted at curves he had spent many sleepless nights entertaining thoughts of.
In his absence, she had filled out into an even more beautiful figure that his hands longed to study.
Was she glad to see him?
His hopes gathered around her like a held breath. All his longing and heartache he sank into the word he had chanted those long months apart: “Cora.”
She crossed her arms. “Arsehole.”
He blinked. He had pictured their reunion a thousand times, but never like this. No tears or embraces or kisses, his fingers sinking into her hair and crushing his mouth to hers. Just cold hostility.
An ache opened inside him. Beware of answered prayers.
“Cora—” He traversed between her and the door when she turned to leave. She stopped just before colliding with him. Her eyes glinted dangerously up at him. “Cora, all I have wanted for three months, two days, and sixteen fuckin’ hours is to return home to you.”
His desperate sincerity was rewarded with a door slammed in his face.
In the ringing silence, something brushed his leg. He looked down. A Persian cat twined around his ankles, rubbing orange fur all over his trousers.
“Caoimhin,” he said with genuine feeling. He reached down to pet the feline, and his affection was rewarded with the swipe of a paw, claws out. The cat strutted away, tail turned up to grant Malachy a full view of his arsehole, and leapt atop the armoire to judge him from a higher vantage point.
“Not you, too, Caoimhin,” he muttered.
Malachy traversed to the bottom of the spiral staircase and watched Cora huff down past two stories of leather-bound stories crammed onto the bookshelves. “Cora—”
“Don’t.” She stormed across the library. “You disappeared to Rome for the whole sodding year without telling me. I had to hear about it from Anita!”
He traversed across the library in time to have its door also slammed in his face.
Alight with anger, she strode into the kitchen, shut the door, and rested her back to it, eyes closed and chest heaving.
“Cora,” he said, already sitting in a chair at the kitchen table. She let out a howl of frustration, turning to leave. “Listen. Please.” He stood, reaching out, desperate to touch her, yet dropped his hand. “It was not my choice to stay away this long. The Tribunal wouldn’t— I’m sorry.”
“I’m sorry, too, Bane. For letting you waste so much of my time.
” She rounded on him. “How could you think I’d want anything to do with you after you ignored me for three months?
You shouldn’t have said you’d be there for me if you were just going to leave right after. What happened to brutal honesty?”
“You don’t understand—”
“No, I understand perfectly. I get it, all right? I was in a bad place, you felt sorry for me, and that’s all.
I’m the only one to blame for my disappointed expectations.
But don’t you dare stand there and lie to me, Malachy Bane.
You left for three months—without warning, without word—and now you show up and expect me to welcome you back with open arms?
Go fuck yourself, because I sure as hell won’t. ”
His mouth hung open in bafflement. “My letters. Didn’t you get my letters?”
“What bloody letters?”
“I’ve sent you letters, telegrams every day since I was arrested.
I posted the first when Master Bittenbinder dragged me to Rome for that bullshit trial.
They detained me for—” The Tribunal’s spell gagged him.
Clearing his throat, he managed, “For much longer than I anticipated. I assumed they’d redacted my letters.
Apparently, they didn’t send them at all. ”
“How convenient for you.”
“Rome was a fuckin’ punishment. Didn’t Anita or O’Leary or the others tell you any of this?”
Her eyes narrowed in suspicion, then consideration. “Anita might have mentioned it. I… can’t remember.”
Malachy had written Anita weekly. The Sanguimancer was like a telegraph herself, transmitting news to distant shores. It was more likely that Cora had forgotten what Anita told her than Anita not mentioning his arrest at all.
For months, Cora had believed he’d abandoned her. Malachy looked at her with growing worry. In the soft glow of the gas lamps, she was pale with shadowed eyes.
“Didn’t you get my letters?” she asked.
“What letters?”
She threw her hands up. “You know what? It doesn’t matter.
Whether you sent letters or I sent letters or not, I only stayed here to keep an eye on the house and feed Kevin.
Now you’re back, I’m no longer needed. Sloane’s moved in with her new boyfriend and out of the flat above the club, and I’m moving into her old room. ”
“You don’t have to go. I don’t want you to go.
Please, can we talk?” He had said ‘please’ more times this evening than he had in decades, and it worked.
Some of the tension in her shoulders softened.
Sensing an opportunity in her thawing temper, he fired a shot he knew wouldn’t miss. “I’ll make you dinner.”
She considered him. “I’m listening.”
He turned to hide his grin. Shrugging off his suit jacket and rolling up his shirtsleeves, he rifled through the nearly empty cupboards. “Let’s see what we’ve got. Which is nothing. Jesus, what have you been living off?”
“Toast, mostly. And biscuits.”
“That’s grim.”
“I tried cooking once. Not even Kevin would eat it.”
Malachy laughed. How rusty it sounded; how good it felt.
The corners of her mouth tipped into the shadow of a sly smile, and it took a concerted effort not to kiss her then.
He busied himself with examining the empty icebox while Caoimhin glowered with feline disdain from his perch atop it, tracking him with yellow eyes.
“Did Caoimhin notice I was gone?”