Chapter 7 Not Quite a Man #2
“Impersonated you? Darling, I am the most talented Lumomancer amongst my associates—I say this with no false modesty—and not even I could get that brooding scowl or lustrous shade of auburn quite right. Allow me to cool your suspicions, sweetheart. None of my colleagues would dare illusion themselves as the mighty Realmwalker. Everyone knows you’re king of the netherworld, et cetera, et cetera. ”
“Are you in charge of this gang?”
Julian batted away the abrupt question. “Details,” he drawled, oozing charm like pus from a wound. “You know, Mal, we have more in common than you think.”
“That’ll be a cold day in hell.”
“No, no, really. Here we are, both strangers in this strange land. You from the emerald isle, myself from the silver screens of Hollywood. We wish to cohabitate with you in London, darling. Fret not, even I know better than to poke that hornet’s nest. No matter how well-proportioned the hornet’s nest might be. ”
Malachy’s fist was poised to express just how unwelcome that sentiment was when a shiver of alarm coursed through him.
The house wards had tripped again. Of course, the house had to have a temper tantrum right now.
This time, the sensation did not dissipate, and a different kind of alarm went off inside Malachy. What if a demon was inside his house, harming Cora at this very moment?
“Fuck’s sake. I need to check on something.” Before leaving Julian’s workshop, he whispered to Anita, “If I’m not back in ten minutes, wrap it up and reschedule.”
After he double-checked that no one was watching, he traversed home. The Gothic house trembled around him. Books and relics and portraits had been knocked from their places, and fallen plates and glasses lay broken on the floor.
This was more than the house being temperamental.
Every hair on his body stood on end. Anticipation permeated the still air, a fuse awaiting the spark.
Once more, the tripped ward was concentrated in the Witch’s Cap. With a flicker of dread, he traversed atop the library tower to find that the room had been emptied of Cora. All her clothes, books, makeup—gone.
The realization settled into his stomach like a stone, all weight and no warmth. Cora had moved out.
The house slammed a petulant door, wrenching him back. Across the gutted room, a flash of white caught his eye under the bed. He bent down. Letters, dozens of them, were the only thing she had left behind. He turned one over. An ache stabbed his chest.
They were the letters and telegrams he had sent while imprisoned in Rome. The ones she had claimed she hadn’t received. He had assumed the Tribunal hadn’t sent them, and yet here they sat, tucked beneath the bed along with her aborted replies. He read a half-finished letter, dated back in March.
I miss you, Malachy.
His heart stuttered. He could have lived off those words alone for another three months, wrapped them around himself in his lonely cell. He kept reading.
When will you be back? I sleep all the time, hoping to dream of you, but never feel as though
Her sentence cut off midway, as if she had forgotten something and never returned to finish writing it, let alone mailing it. A dozen unfinished letters followed the same pattern, the last dated a fortnight ago.
His fears took flight.
Beneath his telegrams he found several opened letters addressed by Baron Samuel Lakwa.
The Master Necromancer’s earliest letters were dated shortly after Malachy’s detainment in February.
Lakwa had begun with friendly introductions, oozing Southern charm even on paper, and then with invitations to visit him in New Orleans, filled with increasingly persuasive arguments for her to study as his apprentice.
The last letter was dated a week ago, stating the Tribunal would send Cora a Portal Key to New Orleans where she would be a most welcome guest.
Malachy crumpled the letter in his fist. As if moving out of his house wasn’t bad enough, now she was moving across the bloody Atlantic? And she hadn’t told him a wisp of it.
The house wards blared across his senses, this time downstairs. He cast a final look at the damning letters—pocketing the “I miss you, Malachy” one—and followed the tripped ward into the kitchen. Caoimhin was nowhere in sight; had Cora left with his cat, too?
He pushed open the kitchen door and stopped short. He had lost one house guest only to discover another.
The naked man, standing in the middle of his kitchen and wearing a dish towel like a loincloth, was not quite a man.
Tufts of orange fur sprouted from his pale, pudgy body.
His eyes, set too far apart with slitted pupils, shot to Malachy in the doorway.
The creature’s expression brightened, flashing long canines.
He stepped forward, claws tapping on the floor.
“Mal,” the creature lisped, his oversized canines cutting bloody trenches into his lip. “Thank god.”
Malachy jolted out of his stupor. With a flick of his hand, the floor opened and swallowed the creature’s furred feet whole.
Rooted to the spot, the creature twisted and toppled over, upsetting the precarious balance of his loincloth.
The dish towel dropped. Malachy wished he could unsee the wriggling stub of a tail on that moon-pale arse.
“Who—what—the fuck are you?”
“Why, Caoimhin, of course! Your constant, most trusted companion these many years, have I not been?”
Malachy’s eyes widened in horrified understanding on the former cat. “Fuckin’ hell. You—You’ve lived in my house for years. I petted you. Jesus, you slept in my bed. Who are you? What are you?”
Not-Caoimhin rubbed the back of his neck.
“My name—before you took me to your bosom, my dearest, truest friend—was Francis. I am but a humble Bestiamancer. Or I was, before my vengeful wife willfully misunderstood my relationship with our maid and cursed me. ‘If you’re going to stray like a tom cat,’ she says, ‘you’re going to stay like a tom cat. ’ The nerve of that—!”
A growling meow emerged from Not-Caoimhin.
“Over a decade I have been stuck like this. Not until the day I found myself on the mighty Realmwalker’s doorstep did I feel hope once more.
At long last, a mage with the power to uncurse me!
For years I have striven in vain to tell you this, dearest Mal.
Knocking things over, spilling ink pots—all in an effort to reach you. ”
Malachy could only stare, his mind imploding. Every time Caoimhin had jumped onto his lap or twined about his ankles, Malachy had been petting this pasty, ginger-haired Francis. “I thought you were just being an arsehole cat. How are you—not a cat now?”
“I, well, can’t quite seem to recall. I do remember seeing a feline in the mirror before it happened. A lioness, but… not. With yellow eyes and a woman’s voice telling me she would fulfill my desire of becoming a human again if only I… I can’t remember.”
A weak excuse. The only feline Caoimhin—Francis—had seen in the mirror was himself, and the only voice he had heard was his own wishful thinking.
A lioness. His attention snagged on the word. A few days ago, Sloane had mentioned reports of a lioness spotted outside the club.
He assessed the creature trapped shin-deep in a portal in the kitchen floor. Had the cursed Bestiamancer’s transformation set off the house wards, or had it been another nature of beast?
“Tell me about this lioness.”
Slit-pupil eyes widened, then glanced away. “I-I am afraid I cannot remember her very well. But I do recall seeing a strange lamp through the mirror afterwards. It wasn’t a reflection, but something… else.”
A lamp seen through a mirror.
Malachy went very still. “Describe the lamp.”
“It was most peculiar. Its flames made me feel homesick for a place I cannot remember.”
Alarm shivered through Malachy for a reason other than the house wards. He knew what Francis had seen.
“Pl-please, my dearest, sweetest, most forgiving friend. Have I not been good to you these many years? Nothing need change now. I merely have less fur! B-but I could try to acquire more if that would please you.”
“I…” Malachy expelled a long breath. “Can’t.”
Ignoring Francis’s shrill pleas, he locked the former-cat, now-man in the spare bedroom with portal magic. The creature’s caterwauling followed him down the hallway.
A cursed Bestiamancer, a lioness, and a lamp of forgetfulness seen through a mirror. Without a doubt, more demons had slipped through the rift in the veil between Realms than Alastair Ghose. And rather than hunting them down as the Tribunal had tasked him to, they had come to Malachy.
He was far from thrilled.
Malachy had glimpsed that lamp through a mirror once before, on a spring day long ago when he had stood dry-eyed over his father’s grave and summoned a demon.
Not just any demon. A demon that could siphon memories with a flash of her enchanted lamp.
The reason why Francis couldn’t remember, why Cora was losing time—their memories had been siphoned.
Malachy cursed viciously. How had the memory demon gotten past his wards? How could he find the demon to return Cora’s stolen memories? And what the fuck did a lioness have to do with it?
Another demon for another time.
He forced himself to remember that ill-fated day in 1841 when he had committed patricide and summoned the memory demon. If he could sift through that encounter, through every heartbreaking moment, then he’d find a way to stop the demon and save Cora’s memories.