Chapter 20
Edge of Uncertainty
Cora let herself into Malachy’s moving house, determined to confront him in the bright morning sunshine. Today, the black-shingled Victorian Gothic house sat impossibly snug between a grocer’s and an office building in Lambeth.
She heard movement in the kitchen and angled her steps there, across worn Persian rugs in rooms crammed with potted plants and priceless relics and stacks of ancient books. She stopped short in the kitchen doorway, her brows rising in concern at what she saw.
“Is it that bad, then?”
“Jesus fuckin’ Christ!” Malachy whirled towards her, brandishing a mixing spoon.
He seemed as surprised by Cora and her question as she was.
An inquiry about his well-being was the last thing she had intended to say.
After he’d washed his hands of her with the excuse of protection, she had spent agonizing days rehearsing a litany of accusations and verbal eviscerations that were now nowhere to be found.
The righteous indignation that had propelled Cora here deflated at the sight of him.
Dark circles ringed his midnight blue eyes. Dried blood streaked his shirt that was unbuttoned at the throat, rolled up at the sleeves, and worn without the civilizing influence of a tie.
The effect was devastating on her concentration. Her gaze found the exposed skin of his chest, dusted with dark hair. Days ago, she had laid her cheek there and listened to his heart beating.
She was cursed with memories. The gentleness of his long-fingered hands as they buried inside her. The shape of his rare smiles. The decadent filth dripped from his lips as she came apart around him.
A blush seeped into her cheeks. She forced her gaze away. This was a confrontation, damnit, not an excuse to take in the angles of his stubbled jaw, the strands of his hair gleaming like burnished copper in the buttery sunlight streaming through the bay windows.
Cora had armed herself in her favorite black dress and taken pains to comb her hair, to no discernible effect. The shoulder-length waves fell wherever they pleased, as usual. Not that Malachy seemed to mind. The heat of his regard danced over her in the silence thickening between them.
She didn’t know whether to be thrilled or furious. The foundation of their relationship had shifted, leaving her on uneven footing. In spite of everything, she still longed for the shelter of his embrace.
A dollop of the fragrant dish he’d been cooking fell from the mixing spoon and plopped onto the floor, breaking the spell.
“Whatever happened must’ve been pretty bad.” She gestured at the state of his kitchen.
Every surface, including him, was a disaster.
Splayed on the table was a smorgasbord of elaborate dishes in various stages of completion.
She brushed her finger over the counter, squinting at the layers of ingredients as if she were uncovering the remnants of a mortifying ritual.
Flour, garlic, cinnamon, salt crystals, possibly cocaine.
Given his mussed hair and bloodshot eyes, possibly a lot of cocaine.
“You stress-cook. Remember when your Newfoundland whiskey shipment sank? I woke up the next morning—fine, early afternoon—to a five-course meal you’d stayed up all night making.” She sampled one of the dishes and hummed approvingly. “That’s not a complaint. I love your stress-cooking.”
“It’s not ready yet.” He batted her hands away.
“Who’s the feast for?”
“I…” He glanced around the kitchen. His head dropped. “I have no idea.”
Before her mind could catch up to her body, she was beside him, a hand on his shoulder. Muscles bunched under her fingers. Mixed with his evergreen scent was the faint tang of blood and ozone.
“What happened, Malachy?”
He turned away, face inscrutable, placing a cigarette between his lips.
“You’re stalling.” Her eyes narrowed. “You start smoking when you need to select which facts to omit. This time, why don’t you just tell me the truth? The whole truth.”
He sighed a plume of smoke. “Haven’t I made you hate me enough?”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“If I say nothing is wrong, what are the chances you’ll drop it?”
“Nonexistent.”
He huffed a humorless laugh. “Ah, Cora.” Misery suffused his features. “Everything. Everything is wrong.”
“Who’d you kill this time?”
“No one. Honestly. More’s the pity.”
“Well, go on, then.”
He searched her features and found only grim sincerity, stubborn determination. Still, he hesitated, poised on the edge of uncertainty.
“You could tell me anything—everything—and I would listen. I still care about you, Mal, whether you fancy me or not.”
A mosaic of cracks formed in his composure. He opened his mouth, and the floodgates burst.
“Last night, Potts and his hired dogs interrupted a cult meeting of mage supremacists led by an Umbramancer with a wrong shadow and an alarmingly persuasive delusion of magic heritability. I only attended the meeting to observe, and the fuckin’ coppers saw me fleeing it.
Potts is dangerously close to the truth about mages.
Too close. He’s a loose end I’ll need to tie, and quickly, before it becomes a noose.
Between last night and the murders connected to me, Potts has more than enough to arrest me.
Even O’Leary sounded concerned when I informed him of the full catastrophe, which is saying something for him.
Me spending ‘some additional time’ in prison was the most optimistic thing my solicitor had to say. ”
She stood in stunned silence, her mouth working on words that wouldn’t form.
“I can only hide in my house for so long. With Potts and Ghose stalking my footsteps, it’s only a matter of time before the cage slams shut around me. And rather than outwitting the coppers or hunting down Ghose, I…”
“Spent half the night making enough food for a dozen people.”
His shoulders fell. “There were too many big decisions to make, and so I baked.”
“I’m sorry, Mal. You must be long past knackered. Why don’t you rest a bit?”
“No time. Well.” He loaded up a plate with food and offered it to her. “Help me eat this while you tell me whatever bad news you came here to tell me.”
“It’s not bad news. I just wanted to talk. About us. About not-us.” She had wanted to look him in the eye and ask the question that had been eating her alive: Why do you actually not want to be with me? But there were issues bigger than them at hand. “We can talk later, if now is a bad time.”
“No, I—” He reached out, then let his hand fall. He looked around the kitchen helplessly. “I can’t possibly eat all this by myself.”
He cleared a space on the cluttered kitchen table for them. Cora, delighted he had made so many meatless dishes, helped herself to a serving of everything.
“Fuel for scheming,” she said around a large mouthful. “So. You undoubtedly have several schemes in mind about Potts and Ghose. How can I help?”
“You can’t.”
“Nonsense. Necromancer, remember?” She washed down a delicious bite with a gulp of lukewarm tea. “Let’s start with the demon. How do you feel about murder?”
“In favor. But you are not getting involved in this, Cora.”
“Why not? Kill Ghose, problem solved. And if Ghose kills me, I’ll resurrect myself and have another go at him.”
“Absolutely not.”
Their gazes battled across the table. Hidden beneath the firm seal of his lips was a lifetime of secrets unsaid. She wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until the truth fell out.
“Malachy, either you let me help you, or I help you anyways and, let’s be honest, probably fuck it up.”
He pushed his plate away, untouched. “You can’t help.”
“But I can, if you’d let me. Just because you can do everything on your own doesn’t mean you have to.”
He held her gaze. Worry shadowed his features at the resolve carved into hers.
“Please don’t defy me in this,” he said softly, as if her feelings were made of flesh and might bruise.
“I know defiance is the only way you have felt in control of your life. But if you don’t listen this time, you won’t have a life left to control.
People close to me wind up dead. Ghose has already taken too much from me.
My family, my brothers and sisters… But not you, Cora.
I won’t let you be collateral damage in Ghose’s quest for vengeance. ”
“And I won’t let you suffer alone.” She grasped his hand in hers.
He squeezed her hand tight as a lifeline. “You don’t know what Ghose is capable of. To him, you’re a pawn he won’t hesitate to sacrifice in a game he’s spent decades setting up. I can’t lose you, too.”
“I don’t want to lose you either. Do you honestly believe my life was better before you?
I’ve hidden who—what—I am my whole life.
You’ve seen me at rock bottom, a few times, and have never judged me for it.
You accepted me as I am, Necromancy and all, and you are by far the most rational person I know so it makes hope that maybe you’re right, that I’m not an abomination.
I’m just Cora, and that’s not such a terrible thing.
With you, for the first time, I feel alive.
I don’t know how things will go—we could kill Ghose, and you could change your mind about me within a week—but I want to try. We can take it a day at a time.”
“Cora, I… ” Dark blue eyes pierced into her. His mouth opened to speak, then closed again with a shake of his head.
“You’re right.” She released a pent-up breath.
“I’m getting ahead of myself. First thing’s first. Kill the demon.
Let me help you, Mal. Let me in. Maybe if you tell me what happened with Ghose, the history with your family, we could find the demon’s weakness and come up with a plan. Tell me everything.”
Malachy was tempted to unburden himself, at least a bit.
He had broken both their hearts and here she was asking—demanding—to help him. Yet he hesitated to give her a part of himself that she could break. Once she knew what he had done, this beautiful, fragile understanding between them would shatter and he’d lose her all over again.
Her gaze remained steady, full of compassion and curiosity.
She had glimpsed the darkest corners of him and accepted him as he was.
She was a marvel to him, to have experienced such cruelty in life and not become cruel herself.
Rather, she was cursed with an uncanny understanding of life’s ugliness.
Perhaps this once, he could share the awful truth he had never spoken aloud. Perhaps she wouldn’t despise him more for knowing it.
While he couldn’t tell her everything about his history with Ghose because of the gagging spell, he’d tell her enough. He owed her that much.
Malachy’s secrets were as deep as a catacomb. He opened his mouth to unbury them and found himself voiceless. Over seventy years had passed, and the jagged edges of those memories still drew heart’s blood. His chest tightened with a pang of grief and guilt.
“There is a three-drink minimum for this story.” Scraping back his chair, he fetched a bottle of whiskey and poured them both a full glass. He downed his and refilled it to the brim, staring into its amber depths with anguish swimming in his eyes.
The memory floated up from the dark murk of those years passed at the bottom of a well. The memory of a summer day in Dublin when he had been setting off on what was supposed to be his grandest heist but had become his bitterest regret.
His family’s death had been the pivot point for the downward spiral his life took thereafter, shackled to Master Ghose and forced to do the Tribunal’s nefarious bidding.
Malachy took a deep breath as the riptide of memory pulled him under. “My history with Alastair Ghose began before I’d heard of the Master Chronomancer. It began with a job that went right, then irreparably wrong. It began when my life ended on August 6, 1850.”