(A Charm of Magpies 1)The Magpie Lord (22 page)

“In fact, I didn’t. Thank you.” Stephen nodded acknowledgement, and something in the atmosphere relaxed slightly.

“You, on the other hand,” Merrick went on to his master, “you need to get your hands dirty more. Letting that bloke kick you off.”

“Did not. Swine used magic.” Crane spat blood onto the ground.

“So
you
say.”

“I refuse to get involved in this,” Stephen said. “And Miss Bell? Why are you here?”

Miss Bell looked slightly self-conscious. “It’s like what you said, before. There’s no good doing the right thing unless you stop people doing the wrong thing. Is there?”

Stephen smiled at her, the real, crooked smile that lit his eyes. “There isn’t, no. Thank you, Miss Bell. Thank you very much.”

She huffed. “I didn’t do anything, in the end.”

“You held that cow off,” said Merrick supportively.

“You came to help,” said Stephen. “You
acted
. I appreciate it.”

He walked forward, holding out his hand. Miss Bell stepped around Lady Thwaite’s body, took it, and immediately snatched her hand away again with a sharp intake of breath. “What the—how are you
doing
that? Why aren’t you burning up?”

“Good question. Come on.” Stephen started back to the other side of the Rose Walk.

Crane took a long stride to catch up, and Stephen turned to him. “How’s your mouth?”

“Hurts.”

“I am sorry, Lucien. I didn’t have any choice. Here.” He reached up, and as his fingers closed round Crane’s jaw, the prickling turned to a warm, intense glow that rapidly grew searing. Crane made a noise of protest, but Stephen held on with a soothing murmur for a few seconds more. “Better?”

Crane explored his lip with a cautious tongue, realised that his bruised eye was also eased. “Yes. Much. You can heal wounds?”

“Me? No. This is borrowed. From Piper. The charnel posture’s broken, the flow is coming back.” Stephen gave him a swift smile. “There’s power in this house.”

“So I see. Tell me, if, as I deduce, the ring is giving you access to the Magpie Lord’s power, why exactly did you leave it quite so bloody late to use it?”

“It wasn’t on purpose,” Stephen said. “I worked it out in the cellar. Your blood had met mine, on our hands, and when I tried to do—something—I felt the power stir, and I realised. Stupid of me. It should have been obvious that the ring needed Vaudrey blood. But there wasn’t enough from just our hands, and I was about to say so when those swine came in. And then I had to find a way to get more of your blood into me before they killed one of us. That got a bit closer to the line than I’d have liked.”

“Yes, it did, didn’t it,” said Crane, with some restraint. “So it came down to blood, bone and birdspit in the end?”

“Indeed.”

“Does that mean, if you’d just come to bed last night—”

“Probably.” Stephen pushed through the roses. “Shut up.”

“I didn’t say a word,” said Crane, grinning.

They were back in the open space by the Rose Walk, and Crane looked around for the first time. The ground was covered with dust and feathers and uprooted grass, bare earth now at points. Bruton lay on his face, blood wet on his shattered skull. Haining was on his back, blood trickling from his mouth and nose, eyes dark and bulging, not breathing. Beyond him was a vaguely human form that Crane glanced at once and turned from.

“Who was that?” he asked.

“Baines,” said Stephen. “The magpies had him.”

Crane’s eyes flicked again to the bloody, sprawled mess on the ground. White ribs showed through the torn skin and flesh. “Why?”

“He made the charnel posture, I think. They didn’t like that.”

“The— Where is it?” demanded Crane, belatedly realising. “The damned thing’s gone!”

“The magpies took the remains. They’ll have burial under the sky. I think probably the birds know what’s best for Vaudreys, in Piper.” Stephen was looking at Miss Bell, not Crane. She nodded abruptly.

Crane was frowning. “Haining, Baines, Bruton.” He strode over to the stone pedestal, looked behind it, flinched at what he saw.

“Stephen, you should see this.”

“I felt it.” Stephen didn’t move. “Lady Bruton stripped Miss Thwaite, yes?”

“Someone did.” Crane couldn’t take his gaze off the terrible rictus of staring eyes and clenched teeth on Helen Thwaite’s yellow corpse. “And Lady Bruton’s nowhere to be seen.”

Stephen sighed. “Lady Bruton clearly persuaded her dear Muriel into this business with the promise that Helen could be turned into more than a flit by the power of the charnel posture. She was virtually talentless and knew it, and it was driving her mad. Easy enough to dangle a cure in front of her mother.”

“Would it have worked?”

“No idea. Maybe.”

“And Lady Bruton stripped Helen to get away. Lady Thwaite chose to die just now, didn’t she?”

“She was going to anyway,” Stephen said. “Don’t feel too sorry for her. She chose her path.”

“Maybe, but the other lady was the worst of a bad lot, if you ask me.” Miss Bell gave an emphatic sniff.

“Inarguably,” said Stephen. “And I will catch up with her, in due course.”

“I’m sure you will.” Crane looked around. “Meanwhile, what do we do with all the bodies? And what the hell do we tell Sir James?”

“We’ll have to burn the Thwaites, at least. Is there any chance of a tragic house fire?” Stephen asked Miss Bell.

Miss Bell tapped her lip thoughtfully. “Baines’s house would do. It’s isolated enough.”

“But what would Lady Thwaite have been doing there?” asked Crane.

Stephen shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Look at the corpses, Lucien, we can’t let people see that. We fire a house with the bodies in it and leave a terrible mystery, or we burn them here and their families never find out they’re dead. I say the former unless anyone has a good reason not to. Let’s leave Bruton and Haining here, I’ll get the magpies to take them. And I hope someone drove here, because we’re going to need a carriage.”

Chapter Nineteen

Later—significantly later, leaving an isolated house burning—Stephen Day finished washing his hands in the scullery and walked back through Piper’s long corridors until he reached the library door, outside which Crane was leaning, propped by his shoulders against the doorframe.

“Hello.”

“Hello,” Crane said. “How are you feeling?”

“Fine. More or less. How are you?”

Crane’s eyes narrowed. “Are we having a polite conversation?”

“It’s been a fairly trying day,” Stephen said. “If you need some time for reflection—”

Crane reached out, jerked him off his feet, pulled him into the library, and shoved him against the door to push it shut.

“Right,” he said, leaning down into Stephen, voice low and intent. “There is now plenty of power in this house. You’re perfectly capable of throwing me across the room with a thought. Right?”

“Yes…am I going to want to?”

“Let’s find out,” said Crane. “Because the hell with ghosts, the hell with families, I intend to have you, right now, and that’s not up for discussion or reflection.”

He wrenched Stephen’s shirt off as he spoke, jerking at the buttons, dragging the torn, filthy linen over his narrow shoulders.

Stephen’s mind stuttered to a stop. In the brief respite since he’d finished killing people and burning bodies, he’d veered between the fear that the end of the danger would spell the end of Crane’s interest, and the fantasy, sternly pushed away, of a private compartment on the train home with uninterrupted time for Crane’s perceptive, teasing lovemaking. He had not expected to be unceremoniously fucked against Piper’s walls with the blood barely washed off his hands.

Not here, he thought helplessly, as the old fear of this house, this family stabbed through him again. Not like this.

Crane’s hands stroked Stephen’s thin bare chest, lined white with faded scars, brushed his nipples and slid down to his hips, where Stephen’s body, unlike his mind, felt no doubt at all. The long fingers ran over his stiff cock, his arse, then flicked the buttons at his waist open, and Stephen made a stifled noise that was somewhere between need, protest and terror.

Crane pulled sharply back to look into the shorter man’s face. His hands were still firm on Stephen’s body, his breathing ragged with lust, but his eyes were questioning, concerned, and with that second’s pause, Stephen could think again.

Hector was long gone. Piper was cleansed, purified by fire as the bodies burned and the fresh air rushed in. The hands that claimed his body now had held his bloody fingers in the darkness of the cellar.

The past was dead. They were alive. He wanted this man so much.

Right here, right now,
exactly
like this.

“
Yes
,” he said aloud, and saw the smile in Crane’s eyes for a second before the man hauled him up and into a ferocious kiss.

As soon as they broke for breath, Stephen grabbed for Crane’s belt, hands sparking and prickling. They kicked and wrenched each other’s clothes off impatiently, and Stephen gave an astonished gasp as he saw the final two magpies that adorned Crane’s body, one across a lean hip and the top of his groin, one on the opposite inner thigh.

Crane gave him no time for admiration, let alone second thoughts. He’d long concluded that Stephen thought a great deal too much. Instead he picked the smaller man up, clear off the ground and pushed him against the wall, holding him up with one hand as the other probed with practised skill. Stephen, whimpering, wrapped his legs round Crane’s hips and grabbed on to his shoulders, and the power in his hands spangled through Crane’s skin like shards of diamond, leaping with Stephen’s gasp as Crane’s fingers worked inside him, opening him, tormenting him, and their cocks jutted hard against each other’s bodies.

“Oh God,” Stephen whispered. “Please. Please, Lucien…”

Crane ran his tongue up Stephen’s neck, nipped his ear. “Tell me what you want. Exactly what you want. Let me give you the fucking you deserve.”

Stephen took a shallow breath and looked into Crane’s eyes, direct and naked. “Take me. Right now. Make me beg.”

Oh sweet God. Crane was well aware that Stephen’s tastes ran in harmony with his own, but that surrender was still a jolt right to the groin. “At your pleasure,” he said thickly, lifted the little man away from the wall and half-fell with him onto the desk where Stephen had lain on his back just the day before. “Hell. I need—”

Stephen’s hand was on Crane’s cock, and there was a sudden sensation of slick wetness. “Done.”

“Slippery little witch.” Crane pushed into Stephen’s body, spread before him for the taking. Stephen’s hands clawed his back, their touch like a burn that intensified as he drove harder, deeper. He pressed on Stephen’s shoulders, holding him down, using words and cock and fingers to bring him to the edge of ecstasy, and Stephen writhed and thrashed and cried out with breathless pleas as Crane mastered him with deliberate roughness, spurred by the fizzing, sparking hands that betrayed Stephen’s pleasures and demanded more.

Crane took him thoroughly, almost brutally, and when he had fucked him into helpless, whimpering submission, he pulled back and almost out, and lifted Stephen’s hips, before plunging in at an angle of attack that had the little man gasping.

“Please. Please. Oh God, I can’t—”

“You’ll take my cock whenever I want to give it to you.” Crane lifted him clear off the desk as he thrust into him. “Won’t you?”

“Yes, my lord,” Stephen whispered.

Crane gritted his teeth against his own climax at those breathy words and all they implied, feeling Stephen’s hands flare with ecstasy like burning rain on his skin. “Say that again. Beg me to fuck you.”

“Oh God, don’t make me—”

“Say it.” Crane drove in as hard and deep as he could.

Stephen cried out, desperately. “Please, my lord, please fuck me, my lord, fuck me,
fuck me
—”

It turned into a scream as he bucked violently, and as Crane felt the hot wetness spurt against his belly, Stephen’s hands tightened convulsively on his hips with a surge of power that sent Crane suddenly, uncontrollably over the edge of his own climax, spilling into Stephen’s body, howling as he fell.

Crane let Stephen flop back onto the desk and slumped over him. Their rasping, gasping breath mingled for a moment of silence.

“God,” Crane said finally. “For a quiet man, you fuck like a mink.”

Stephen didn’t respond to that. He was completely still for long enough to make Crane wonder if he was regretting their act. Then he gave a sudden, convulsive shudder, and his whole body spasmed into rigidity.

“Stephen?”

Crane pushed himself up on his arms, withdrawing as gently as he could. Stephen didn’t react. His eyes were wide and blank.

“Stephen!”

His pupils enlarged terrifyingly, blotting out the gold irises, and returned to normal equally quickly. He blinked and focused on Crane’s face.

“Lucien.”

“What is it?” said Crane sharply. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Nothing. I—” He broke off, staring at Crane’s chest.