Chapter 15 The Rotten Right Hand of the Devil
The Rotten Right Hand of the Devil
Cora burst into his office and skidded to a halt in front of the desk. She was clad in black from head to toe, her eyes wide with panic.
The tinny voice on the other end of the telephone receiver held to his ear was lost to Malachy as his gaze raked over her. He hadn’t seen her since the Ishtar debacle, when everything had been left in exceptional disarray.
“I’ll call you back, Collins.” He hung up the telephone. “What happened?”
“Do you promise not to get mad?”
“No.”
“Well. Do you want the good news or the bad news first?”
“The bad news.”
“I went to exhume and commune with that dead copper but… I don’t know how to say this, Mal, so I’m just going to say it.
We were spotted and Sloane killed a second copper, and I buried him along with the first but there was a third copper that Anita left unconscious in the bushes and now Lt. Potts is on his way to arrest you.”
His brows lifted. “Why?”
“Because they found two bodies outside the club.”
Their gazes locked. Understanding rippled between them.
“Jesus.” Malachy pinched the bridge of his nose. “I left Guy’s body in the fuckin’ alley. Who’s the second?”
“I dunno. The dead copper said he was in a bag—in pieces. And he didn’t look fully human.”
“Damnit.” He glanced away, raking back his hair. Two bodies, two more bars on the cage of circumstantial evidence Potts was forging around him.
While Malachy had not hid the Electromancer’s body, he had taken pains to hide Francis’s.
Someone must have dredged up the cursed Bestiamancer from the lake in Suffolk and the canal in Birmingham to leave on his doorstep like a present for the police.
There was only one bastard who had the time to do it.
With sudden, terrible clarity, he realized just how closely Ghose had been following him.
Planting incriminating evidence against his former apprentice had been quick work indeed, with the Doomsday Watch in hand.
Ghose was using Malachy’s own murderous crimes against him.
It was cunning Malachy had failed to anticipate, and a dire miscalculation on his part.
He rose and began to pace. The walls of a permanent cage were pressing in on him. The heavy stone of Lt. Potts’s human laws. The sharp spikes of the Tribunal’s wrath. The opaque weight of Ghose’s sinister presence.
“Who was in the bag?”
He stopped. Swallowed. “Caoimhin.”
“Kevin?” she shrieked. “You killed Kevin? How could you? He was your—Wait. When did Kevin become a man?”
He sighed. He still felt a pang when he came home and a familiar orange cat wasn’t there to greet him.
But Caoimhim had never really been there to begin with.
“Long story. Caoimhin— Francis, actually—was a Bestiamancer cursed to remain a cat by Ishtar, the same creature that whipped the club into a frenzy.”
“Ri-ight.” Cora exhaled a shaky breath. Her bewilderment turned to mute horror, then slowly, she nodded.
“Of course he couldn’t just be a normal cat,” she said, and Malachy was struck by her acceptance of the most bizarre worst-case scenario.
Then she shuddered with a sound of disgust. “God, he slept in my bed.”
“I, too, was violated.”
“Bloody hell, Mal. Why’d you kill Kevin—er, Francis?”
“He hurt you.”
She blinked. “Oh?”
“He let Moneta, a Memnomancer corrupted by the Profane Arts, through the mirror to siphon your memories. He also helped Ishtar past the wards into the club.”
Her eyes rounded. “That treacherous orange bastard. You killed him?”
“Aye,” he said gravely.
“Good.”
His heart swelled. Most women would have fled at his confession of double murder, but not Cora. Her sense of justice was as twisted as his.
“How long until Potts gets here?” he said.
“A few minutes, maybe.”
He resumed pacing. “Any more bad news? Tell me everything.”
“I communed with the second dead copper that we accidentally killed. Don’t you give me that eyebrow, Malachy Bane. Sloane killed him first. The copper had heard a rumor that Potts is being funded by somebody with a vendetta against you.”
“That’s a long fuckin’ list of suspects. Did he have a name?”
“No. He just saw a man with a gravelly voice wearing a hood. Worse, we were spotted in the cemetery. What if they piece together that I’m the Unweaver and I’m working for you?
There were witnesses to my fight with Guy right before he was found dead.
Oh god, what if they arrest me too? They’ll be here any moment!
We need to traverse somewhere—anywhere.”
“What we need is an alibi.” He captured her hands and led her behind the desk. “The gang can corroborate that I’ve been in my office for hours. I’ll prove that you’ve been here as well.”
“Brilliant. How?”
“By showing them what we’ve been doing.” He sprawled in his desk chair and patted his thigh in invitation. “The distraction will need to look convincing.”
“Convincing,” she echoed. Her gaze coasted over his face, lingering on his mouth.
A blush suffused her cheeks. “Mal, I’ve been meaning to tell you since, well.
.. Unlike with the last demon, I unfortunately remember everything that happened the other night and I am perfectly mortified that I forced myself on you. I would like to apologize and—”
“Ask me if I liked it.”
She searched his features, gauging his sincerity. “Did you?” She wet her lips. “Like it?”
The words were tentative, as if she hesitated in an unfamiliar doorway, one which he flung wide open.
“No.” Desire roughened his voice as he gripped her hips and tugged her down to straddle his lap. “I fuckin’ loved it.”
Cora landed with a gasp, hands curled on his chest. Her thighs slid apart, bracketing his legs, the heat of her flush against him. Christ, she fit perfectly. His hands skated up her thighs, coaxing them further apart, and over the swell of her hips to span her waist, holding her close.
She met his hooded gaze. “You mean it?”
“I do. I think about you all the time, Cora.”
“Clothed?”
The sly smile that curved her lips chased away the fears swarming him.
“Sometimes.” He cupped her face and claimed her soft mouth in a softer kiss. "I have not known a day of rest since the night you burst through that door and tried to shoot me, and I wouldn’t change that for the fuckin’ world.”
Dipping his head, he showed her what he could not say with words.
With his lips, his hands, he channeled all his desperate longing, all the panicked adrenaline coursing through his veins, into her.
He kissed a scorching path to the base of her throat, one hand on her back, the other digging into the supple flesh of her hip, holding her close as they tenderly devoured each other.
“What was the good news?” he murmured between kisses.
“What? Oh. There’s no more bad news.”
Her words melted into a moan when his hands found her breasts. Back arched, her hands tunneled through his hair. Her thighs tightened around him.
“A convincing distraction, you said?” She fisted his shirt and ripped it open in a pinging hailstorm of buttons. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to do that.”
He needed more of her, all of her. “I’ll buy you a new dress.” He tore the garment open along with her silky chemise, freeing a bare breast.
The startled hitch of her breath turned into a gasp of pleasure as his tongue flicked over a stiff bud. Claiming and possessing, he kissed, licked, sucked. The breathy sounds escaping her lips made his cock throb in synchrony with his thundering heart.
Her fingers charted the planes of his torso, hooking in his trousers. It still wasn’t enough. Malachy needed—
The door burst open.
Lt. Potts, flanked by two coppers, stormed inside his office, weapons raised.
“Hands where we can see ‘em!” shouted a copper with a thin mustache, aiming his revolver at Malachy.
Blood drained from Cora’s face. She jumped to her feet, and four masculine pairs of eyes latched onto her breasts, her nipples wet from Malachy’s adoration.
With a sharp inhale, she covered her chest and ducked behind him.
Sprawled in a chair with his hair tousled and an ill-timed erection straining his trousers, Malachy had looked better.
The coppers were certainly distracted. Their gazes darted between the flustered pair of them.
Disheveled or not, Malachy did not have to feign his frustration. “To what do I owe this interruption?”
“The devil that stalks London’s shadowy underbelly shall be vanquished by the light of justice.” Potts’s usual, carefully modulated tone sounded almost shrill. A feverish brightness shone in his eyes.
The two coppers looked askance at their superior officer.
Potts appeared more harried than the last time he’d barged into his office.
Malachy had gotten his hands on the psychological evaluation he'd demanded Potts’s superiors perform, and the confidential notes had revealed the depths of turmoil in the lieutenant’s mind.
Privately, Potts feared that he was taking a step outside of himself and watching someone else use his body.
The coppers exchanged an uncertain glance. “You, ah, all right there, Lt. Potts, sir?”
Potts sobered at the question. His chin jerked to the door. “You are dismissed.”
They exchanged another look.
“You daft?” blurted the copper with a bandage wrapped around his head. “Er, sir.”
“We have orders, Lieutenant,” the mustached copper rushed to explain. “To make sure this Fenian scum sees the inside of a jail cell. Alive, sir.”
Malachy smoothed his features. Dissension amongst the London Police’s ranks required careful scrutiny, when he wasn’t at imminent risk of imprisonment.
Too much rested on the outcome of this encounter for a grievous misstep on his part.
The next few critical minutes required a delicate interweaving of truth and bullshit.