Darker Still (13 page)

“Oh, Natalie,” he murmured, flushed. His breath, hot on my cheek, smelled of bergamot, of Earl Grey tea. Another detail my dream had foretold…

I used tending to his wound as an excuse to remain close. I plucked a kerchief from my bodice and pressed it to his bleeding cheek. “Are you well? What happened?”

“I’m so glad you’re here,” he said, wincing in pain. “You
are
here, aren’t you? This isn’t one of your dreams, is it? I can no longer trust my senses. I don’t know what’s real…” He trailed off, as I stepped away, the bloody kerchief in my shaking hand.

“My dreams? You…
remember?
” I gestured to the door that in my dreams was a portal. I ran to it and tried the knob. It was locked and would not open. Not in
this
reality. I turned back to him, blushing and confused.

“Of course,” he replied. “You shared your dream with me.”

“Oh…” I blushed, remembering how easily I’d fallen into his arms, how instinctively I’d run to him for protection, how we had nearly kissed…

Reaching out, I pressed the kerchief to his cheek and lifted his hand so that he could hold it himself. A shivering energy passed through our hands as he took the linen from me.

“But today you’re really here, not just your mind, but your spirit,” he clarified, looking past the frame where my body stood, his hand upraised. “I can touch you.” And as if to demonstrate, he smoothed my hair and then brought his thumb down my cheek, just as I had done on first meeting him face-to-face. It was true; this place did make one question all reality, and tactile sensation seemed to be the only grounding force. I could not tell him not to test me.

He took a deep breath as if registering my scent, and I was glad I’d rubbed some of my lavender oil behind my ears. Seeking further sensation and confirmation, he brushed my mouth with his fingertips, and my lips parted involuntarily in a little sigh.

“I am real to you now, here,” I told him. “I feel you as you feel me. And I
am
here to help you. You must tell me what happened. Did the demon hurt you?”

“You were there to hear his threat, but then you were gone so quickly. It almost felt as if you were a ghost. I was afraid I’d imagined you all along.”

I shook my head.

“Within an hour after you both were gone, the museum room shifted as if the devil wished me to see through his eyes. The images were clouded, as if viewed through some fortune-teller’s globe, but I saw dim, distant flashes and the form of a woman struggling. The room crackled with red fire. I felt pain and smelled blood.”

He gestured to his scarred cheek. “Then everything went black. I heard screaming. I’ve no sense of time, but when I collected my senses again, there was stillness and my museum view had returned. I can only imagine the scene that devil left behind him—”

He turned to me, cheeks pale and those unearthly blue eyes now heartbreaking. “Please. Please tell me
that
was a dream.”

I bit my lip. Ignorance would do him no good. “I wish it were otherwise.” The more I spoke in this world, the more my voice became a foundation with less faltering. I had to be strong for the both of us. “There’s been a murder in the Five Points. Downtown. A difficult place, a poor place.”

I described the particulars of the situation, fumbling over the word “beheaded”—truly the most horrifying word I could imagine speaking—and we both glanced at the doorway where the same terror had stood, a terrible omen down to the victim’s very name.

“There was a picture in the paper, an artist’s sketch, of the last man seen with Miss Call. It…looked like you,” I murmured.

“Natalie, it wasn’t me. It was that wretch
outside
me. You must believe me—”

“I believe you!”

He raked a hand through his hair and tried to remain calm. “He preys on the weak, the unfortunate. As if to spite me. There has to be a way to stop him, a way to get
me
back,” he insisted.

I took his hands in mine. It was a bold act, an improper act since we were not in courtship, yet in our moments, broaching custom had
become
custom. “Listen to me. Strength and noble virtue draw evil like a magnet, like a moth to a flame. The light of your will is attractive.” I blushed and tried to mitigate what sounded flirtatious. “To both the noble and the ignoble.”

He stared at me with such sudden gentleness that butterflies took flight in the pit of my stomach. His moods, with their shifting directions, were enough to make anyone reel. I became dizzy again, because in the next moment he darkened.

“But it
is
my fault. Perhaps in part. Can I confess something, and will you promise not to hate me?”

My throat went dry. “Please tell me you’re not somehow a killer—”

“No.” He spoke with such quiet conviction that I could not doubt him.

“All right then, I’ll not hate you…”

Restless, Denbury moved to the bookshelf and slid out a book. It was Dickens’s
Hard
Times
. Oddly fitting. It shook a bit in his hand, its image flickering like a candle, caught between mist and mass. Things weren’t entirely solid here. Only he was.

Denbury shook his head, weighing the book in his hand. It was not real, and yet he was requesting it to be so. Staring at Dickens’s sullen work, he pondered: “This room responds to what you expect of it, but here I am testing its limits, forcing this volume to become what it represents. This dread room is full of phantom objects. If only that were the case with the way
out
. The longer I’m here, the more these objects strain against existence. Will I be the same?”

I placed my hand on his shoulder. “No. You are firm. Strong. Remember how your light bid my nightmares fade? Like a guardian angel? Hardly a phantom.”

He smiled, and the dark circles of weariness below his eyes seemed to lessen a bit. Bolstered, he had an idea.

“So help me demand these to be real. Until I find a way out, I’ll have to keep living, keep hold of something tangible, else I’ll go mad. Come, let’s alphabetize the books while you talk to me.”

I nodded, accepting a few books he thrust in my hands. “But I believe you had something you were about to confess to
me
.”

“So I do,” he sighed.

We moved methodically. The task kept him from having to look at me, which is always best with a confession.

“I returned to the Greenwich estate upon my parents’ death. The servants were hysterical, driving me mad. A solicitor awaited me there, Crenfall. I didn’t like him. He was eerie and odd. Yet he was the only one not screaming, crying, or demanding something of me as a new
lord
.” Denbury ground out the words as we hovered back and forth along the shelves. “Over properties and ledgers, he promised he’d take me to a place to cure me of all pain and frustration. I didn’t realize he would take me to an opium den.”

I shouldn’t have gasped, but I did. It was a bit shocking. Denbury was blushing and ardently avoiding my eyes. But he continued.

“There were beautiful women strewn about, all dazed and blissful. Everything was dark and filled with sweet scents. I took a pipe into my mouth and I was lost. I don’t remember a thing past the drug overtaking me. I awoke bound to a truss and trapped in the Greenwich study with a mad artist painting my doom.”

He moved closer, shifting a book over my head, and I could feel the heat from his cheeks, which were burning with shame. My heart broke further for him and his plight. “So you see, Natalie,” he murmured, “I was Adam. I bit the apple. I tasted. I fell. This is my punishment.”

“No. That wasn’t fair.” I shook my head, looking up at him. “You were vulnerable. Tempted, tricked—”

“So was Adam. He paid the price. We all did.”

“You can’t think that way. People make mistakes. You were targeted. Crenfall counted on you being inexperienced, vulnerable—”

“Still, I should have been smarter—”

“I don’t think less of you for one mistake in the throes of grief. And regrets won’t fix your present situation.”

His tortured grimace eased as he reached out as if to touch me and then suddenly dropped his hand, thinking better of it. I bit my lip. I
craved
that touch again. We touched in moments of emergency and fear. Touching for the pleasure of it was new. Still, it felt so natural, right, comfortable. If it were reality—Oh, who was I fooling?
Reality
meant I couldn’t talk and I would never be the sort of girl to attract a man like Lord Denbury. I don’t turn in all those godforsaken societal circles I’d been hearing about all morning.

I changed the subject, handing him more books to sort. “Tell me more of your hopes for the future, about your work as a doctor.”

He nodded and brightened. “Ah yes, a doctor’s noble work…A horrible cholera outbreak during my childhood made me wish to understand its causes. Ever since then, I’ve felt my purpose in life is to tend to those afflicted and have studied whenever and wherever I could. A lot of English wealth was built upon the backs of the poor. It’s my duty to make a return on that investment of blood.”

As he moved to place a book on the same shelf as I did, he gestured toward my mouth and we were close enough that his fingertips inadvertently brushed my throat. I couldn’t hide my delighted shudder. “That this strange affair granted you a voice is my only comfort. You are my only comfort. My only friend.”

The brush of contact had me thinking of our near-kiss in my dream, and I had to steady my hand upon the shelf. Denbury’s next words were sobering enough.

“I wonder if I’ll survive another day if the demon strikes again. If consequences of death fall on me, I wonder how long I have.” He threw a few books onto a cleared shelf.

“I don’t know,” I replied.

As he glanced at me, the wild light of his startling blue eyes stilled me. It wasn’t the foreign, reflective darkness of his other half, yet it was still frightening; his natural gallantry had been supplanted by slow-building desperation. And yet with us standing only a few feet apart, the heat between us was palpable and the effect of his fingertips a wonder. I didn’t know what to do around this man: how to act or what to say. Every moment was charged, meaningful, and unexpected.

My mind spun with the crime and its results, but Denbury’s magnetism overpowered all. I didn’t just wish to take his hands again; I wanted to bring them to my lips, confessions and all. My own impulses were dangerous. The mad shifts of emotion that this world evinced affected me too. My eyes closed and opened slowly. I had known from the first that I was under his spell, so why deny it?

“We…shall meet each day as it comes,” I stammered, trying to regain some sense of myself, only to find that he’d drawn closer. “You’re not alone. Mrs. Northe is your friend too.” I turned to face the frame, having entirely forgotten about her and my mission for information.

The room was empty except for my stilled body on the other side of reality, alone in the exhibition room.

“No one else comes through,” Denbury stated, gesturing to my stationary self. “Not that I called to anyone but you, and only then when I saw your light. None who’ve handled the piece can travel through its portal, save you and the demon.”

“But Mrs. Northe is versed in magical things. Why me?” I asked.

Denbury looked at me curiously and suddenly chuckled, wincing from the pain of his wounded cheek but unwilling to let it keep him from smiling. His ability to maintain some humor did him credit. “Haven’t you read fairy tales? I’d have thought a girl like you would know all about the manner in which they work magic.”

I bristled and held my head high. “I’m nearly eighteen years old, I’ll have you know, a
woman
, not a girl. While I read fairy tales in my
youth
, they are foggy in my memory as an adult.”

This was an outright lie. I read my book of fairy tales cover to cover at least once a month. Still, I wasn’t about to have a man near my age thinking I was a child. I wasn’t exactly sure what he was getting at. He just kept smiling at me.

“You must be special. The moment I saw you, my world shimmered, like bright light through dark water. Like an angel.”

“Does that mean you’re a frog? Or a sleeping princess?” I asked, unable to hold back a giggle. “You need a kiss and you’ll be free from this painting?”

Wincing as his expression caused a drop of blood to weep from his wound, Denbury pressed the kerchief to his cheek again but valiantly maintained his smile. “I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t be honored by a kiss from such a fair maiden. If you’d like to try, I daresay it would make for a most pleasing experiment.”

My cheeks were on fire. He kept that delicious grin on his lips, the lips of a prince in need of kissing.

“I am a gentleman, Miss Stewart. I promise,” he assured me. “But in a circumstance like this, it’s easy for one’s fantasy to get away with them, for I exist in a fantastical premise. You must think I’m a cad.”