Sinner's Heart

Chapter 5

She was coming to know his bedchamber very well. The tall windows that looked out upon a narrow, well-tended but never used garden. The heavy furniture, carved from dark wood. The silver paper-covered walls, sparsely adorned. The bed, large and canopied also in silver. The man slumbering in that bed.

Livia stared down at Bram as he slept. A restless, active sleeper, he’d twisted the covers around him as he shifted his long body, sometimes muttering faintly in the half-coherent language of dreams. At that moment, he’d turned onto his back and flung one arm overhead. Both his hands were knotted into fists.

A sliver of light worked its way between the drawn canopy curtains, tracing the contours of his body, its planes and ridges. The light caught along the sharp lines of his face, no softer, even in sleep. Already stubble darkened his chin, despite shaving earlier in the day. She placed her palm against his jaw, wanting to feel its roughness, and silently cursed when she felt exactly what she always did—nothing.

He muttered again, his muscles tightening, and she moved away. Spending the long hours whilst he slept in a study of him offered no distraction, only emphasized what she couldn’t have. Enough slack existed in the bond between them that she might go elsewhere in the house. So she had, invisibly exploring its numerous floors, the narrow chambers where the servants slept, the countless unused but elegantly furnished rooms. Yet she had returned here, to the bedchamber, and its sleeping occupant.

She could loosen her hold on the mortal plane, drift back to the in-between place where time dissolved and the world retreated. But she’d spent too long there already. The realm of mists and shadow held no appeal. She wanted to be in the world, and of it. Which left her here, spending the hours alone and keeping watch over a restively slumbering man.

An empty decanter of wine lolled on the floor just beside the bed. He’d drained it in order to sleep. He didn’t say as much, but she knew that the murder in the brothel shook him, deeply. Bram had lingered as men of the law were summoned, the body carted off, the girl who had killed him also taken away. Livia had not seen the murder itself, coming upon the girl moments after it had happened. To the men of the law, the girl had tearfully explained her self-defense, but whether the law would show her mercy, that was uncertain. Even when Livia had been alive, whores hadn’t received much in the way of justice. This modern era didn’t seem so different.

Too much was familiar. Over and over again, she witnessed echoes of her own time. Everything reminded her of her own folly, and the chaos that had followed.

She drifted to a window to watch the smoke-veiled stars, but her gaze saw a clearer, older sky. The night sky over a distant outpost of the Empire. Londinium. Much smaller than it was now. But large enough to become a living hell.

She saw not the tall brick and plaster buildings of London, but the courtyards and villas of her time, ablaze, smoke churning up into the night. Livia had stood upon the roof of her own villa and watched as the city destroyed itself. Screams and shouts rose up, as choking as the smoke. The cries of children. The shrieks of a blood-crazed mob.

Through the haze of time, she still felt the tears dampening her cheeks.

This isn’t what I wanted.

The thrill she had felt in summoning the Dark One turned fetid. A sick cavern had opened in her stomach, watching from up high as the Dark One’s wicked influence transformed the people of Londinium into vicious animals. Yet it wasn’t only mortals who tore the city down. Vile creatures from the depths of the underworld had clawed their way to the surface, mixing with the humans, urging them on to greater brutality. Or tearing the mortals apart, their human blood splattering on frescoed walls and mosaic-covered floors.

This is my doing. I’m to blame for all this death.

“Can’t you think of something peaceful?” Bram’s voice growled out from behind the canopy. “My dreams are full of blood.”

He shoved back the silver silk of the canopy with one arm as he sat up in bed.

She glided closer. “What did you see?”

“A Roman city on fire. Demons in the streets. Nothing pretty.”

“My memories.”

He pressed the heel of one hand into his eye. “We seem to share them now.”

“Then you know that mine are as pleasant as yours.”

A humorless smile curved his mouth. “A shame you didn’t spend your life tending flower gardens or making love to beautiful women.”

She couldn’t stop her laugh. It caught them both by surprise, and they stared at one another for a moment, uncertain.

“It’s damned cold with the canopy open.” He jerked his head in a summoning motion. “Come and sit or hover or whatever it is you do.”

She raised a brow. “I’m to join you in bed?”

“If you’re going to keep me awake with your memories, I’d rather be awake someplace warm. So either come here or stop thinking.”

She wavered. Sharing a bed with him seemed far too . . . intimate. Ridiculous. He was mortal. She was spirit. There would be no shared intimacies.

Drifting forward, she moved through the canopy. Her torso emerged from the mattress, near the foot of the bed.

He frowned. “Can’t you sit on the bed? I don’t think I can talk with someone who’s poking up from the mattress.”

“But I don’t need to sit.”

“Just . . . do it.”

“For a man of such esteemed breeding, you’ve terrible manners.”

“A benefit of privilege.” Seeing that she wouldn’t comply without a little more finessing on his part, he said, grudgingly, “Please.”

She decided to be amenable. Concentrating, she hovered higher, until her body fully emerged from the mattress, then lowered herself back down, tucking her legs under her. She focused her thoughts on creating a solid surface beneath her, and exclaimed in surprise when she actually found herself sitting atop the bed.

“Sitting,” she murmured. “How novel.”

“Many people seem to enjoy it.” He let the canopy fall back, enclosing the bed in soft shadow. She heard more than saw him edge back until he sat upright, propped against the headboard. “Even myself, on occasion.”

“What a rich and varied life you lead.”

“I used to think so.”

“And now?”

He rubbed his palms against his face. “Now I’m rethinking my original assessment.”

“That seems to be the way of it,” she said quietly. “We see the past so much more clearly than the present.”

For a moment, he was silent. She studied the pattern on the blanket rather than look at him, for he was a man, beautiful to look upon, and she felt clutched by a surge of loneliness, cut off forever from the company and comfort of the flesh.

“The Hellraisers,” he said, breaking the silence. “We didn’t know what we were doing. When we opened that box in the underground temple, none of us knew who or what was kept within it. I remember seeing the box in that Roman skeleton’s hands, and all I could understand was that I had to open it. A voice in my head, an urge in my muscles. Everything shouted at me to open that box.”

“The Dark One’s doing. Even within his prison, he wasn’t without influence.” She stared at the images of flame that marked Bram’s skin. Within the span of a day, they had grown, spreading down his abdomen. She forced her gaze up. “He sensed the power within you, within all of you. He coveted that power, and lured you to him.”

Bram made a soft, scoffing noise. “We had titles. Leo had wealth. But we spent our hours chasing diversions and pleasure. Nothing powerful about any of us.”

“Your power was latent, unused, but it was there. It dwells within you now.” She felt it coursing through her like lightning, and her form glowed brighter. “Such a banquet of strength—the Dark One couldn’t resist.”

“And we were the fools who blundered right into his trap.” Then he stared right at her, and the shadows within the bed couldn’t hide the hard, sharp blue of his eyes. “What’s your excuse?”

“No excuse,” she answered. “What I did, I did with full knowledge. I spent months ferreting out the secret of how to call upon the Dark One. Burned through amphoras of lamp oil as I stayed up late into the night, pouring over ancient texts in the temple libraries. I searched this wild land of Britannia to find the power I’d need to perform the summoning. I found what I was looking for in an Indian slave and a Druid priestess. They became my prisoners, and I understood full well what I intended to do with them. I combined spells of Hecate with the primitive power I uncovered here to steal the women’s magic. There was no blundering.” She shook her head. “Not at all.”

“A calculated strategy. The same way an officer plans his attack.”

“I’d have made a good soldier. Had I been born male.”

He lifted a brow. “If you’d wanted to become a soldier, you would’ve done so. Sex had nothing to do with it.”

She almost smiled. Already he knew her better than any of her kin. They had been statesmen, her family, but without real ambition to better the Empire. Other families dedicated themselves to the shaping of Rome. Not her father, her uncles and brothers. Content with their roles as minor players, they couldn’t understand her ambition.

“Rome’s first female general,” she mused. “Perhaps. Though Roman people worshipped in temples, they did not believe in magic. It was hidden from the eyes of ordinary mortals. I was ever careful to keep my power veiled. Even so, wielded with cunning, magic had always been my weapon of choice, not the sword.”

“That’s why you summoned the Devil. To gain more magic, more power.”

“Would it surprise you to learn that once, my motives had been altruistic?” At his skeptical look, she amended, “Not altruistic, perchance, but not entirely selfish, either. I loved Rome. She was a shambling mess, beset by strife, but I thought somehow I might make it better. For its citizens, for the peace of its empire. Stabilize it, in a fashion.”

“Lofty aspirations.”

“I’ve never been lacking in determination. If there’s something I want, nothing keeps me from pursuing it.”

“So I’ve learned,” he said, dry.

“Everyone learns it, sooner or later.” To her family, she’d been an enigma, a wolf amongst lapdogs. “That’s why I journeyed from Rome all the way to these distant shores. There was only so much I could learn at home—and Britannia was rich with untapped magic. I had gained enough power to find new sources, and track it to this land. Yet this knowledge was mine alone.”

She remembered her first steps off the ship, how power seemed to flow in the very water and course just beneath the surface of earth. The forests of sycamore and chestnut and oak sang with magic, and that song repeated in her blood.

Half to herself, she murmured, “There are people who, when they see a beautiful bird in flight, simply watch its progress across the sky, delighting in the creature for its living energy, its liberty. But there are others who catch the bird. They cage it, clip its wings so it can’t fly away. They must possess it, revel in owning something that was never meant to be owned.”

“You caged it,” he said, “the magic you found here.”

“My intent had been so different. I wanted to claim just a little, just enough to make me stronger so I might do more to make Rome stronger. But . . . I couldn’t stop at just a little. I took as much as I could. With spells I had learned in Rome, I stole magic from every source I could find. Stripped it from each sacred stone, wrung it from the holy lakes and chopped it from the hallowed forests.” Hot shame choked her words, as she recalled with cutting clarity her desecration of shrines and theft of revered objects—a stone crudely carved into the likeness of a goddess, an iron dagger.

She forced herself to continue. “My ambition to help Rome crumbled away. I wanted only to help myself. The more power I gained, the more I desired. My soul blackened and charred. What did I care? Mine was a hunger that couldn’t be sated. Then . . . a revelation. If it was power I wanted, where best to find it? None other than its origin.”

“The Devil.”

“That wasn’t the name I knew him by, but yes. How clever I thought I was, discovering the secret to summoning him, opening the door between his realm and ours.” She forced out a brittle laugh. “Whenever we think ourselves clever, it’s a clear sign that we’re actually being fools.”

The bedclothes rustled as Bram shifted. “But you learned your mistake. I saw it, felt it, in my dream. My dream of your past.”

Sharing memories felt impossibly intimate, another’s presence in the carefully guarded palace of her psyche. She didn’t know if she liked the sensation. But she’d had the same access to his thoughts, his past, lacing tighter the connection between them—whether they wanted it or not.

“Too late,” she said. “I learned it too late. The Dark One gave me just what I wanted—I was drunk with power. Knowing I would serve him well, he directed his ambition to the rest of the mortal realm. So exciting to me, seeing how wild men and women truly were at heart. But it degenerated. Mobs, madness. Death. It spread like a wind-borne fever, to the walls of Londinium and beyond. I was angry, sick.”

She wanted to cover her face, but wouldn’t allow herself the escape. Unblinking, she met Bram’s gaze. “I had brought the Dark One to this realm, and I had to send him away again.”

“At the cost of your own life.”

“The price of wisdom is very dear.” She would go on paying it for eternity.

Bram grunted. “All the lecturing, all the berating and reprimands to turn from the path of wickedness, you dared all this, and yet it was your greed that started the whole bloody mess in the first place.”

She did not flinch at the recrimination that hardened his voice. “Which means it’s up to me to stop it.”

“Couldn’t you have been content with a few little spells? Straw into gold or men into pigs?”

“Men smell better than pigs. Marginally.”

He only stared at her.

She exhaled. “No. I couldn’t be content. Greedy, just as you said. But that’s how sin works—the more we consume, the hungrier we become, until we devour ourselves.”

“Oh,” he muttered, “I know a lot about sin.”

Images from his past tumbled through her mind, scenes of unbridled dissipation and debauchery. If she still possessed a body, such visions would have heated her, the blood coursing through her becoming thick and hot. Yet she had only her recollection of fevered, shocked arousal to stir her. He had applied himself to licentiousness with the same single-minded purpose he had toward combat. In both, he was an expert.

“We’re of a kind,” she said softly, “you and I. Left to our own devices, we’re wicked creatures indeed. But it wasn’t always so.”

After a long moment, he answered, “Not always.”

She had felt the bond he’d shared with the other Hellraisers. Such friendship and trust was alien to her, but the echoes of his loss reverberated through her own insubstantial body.

“Did it frighten you?” he asked in the darkness. “Knowing that you’d have to sacrifice your life?”

“Most grievously.” She had not gone into battle with the Dark One with this knowledge, but as she had fought, it became clear that in order to put an end to his destruction, those moments would be her last. “The pleasures of life were sweet. There was so much left undone, so much I hadn’t experienced. Sensations I wanted to have again. All of it would be lost. Yet what choice did I have? If I clung to life, the world would become a hell, and then life wouldn’t be worth living anyway.”

“Sounds like you were damned rational about dying.”

She shook her head. “These thoughts were but momentary grains of insight, falling through my fingers. I understood what I had to do, and I did it.” She peered at him through the shadows. “You’ve been to war. It’s much the same, is it not?”

His exhalation came from deep within his chest, and he lifted his hands to grasp the headboard behind him. He was shadows and sleekness.

“It’s a dawning horror. We’re fed stories of valor, and the great good we perform for our grateful nation. I’d hold it with both hands, that heroism, praying for it when all around was carnage.” Bitterness laced his voice. “I wanted to run.”

“Yet you did not. You stayed, and fought.”

He snorted. “Because I was a dolt.”

“Not a dolt. Courageous.”

In a blur of moment, he rose quickly from the bed. She had the impression of long, hewn limbs, and then he threw on a robe. A tinder hissed, then light flared as he lit a candle. His eyes were glacial in the flickering light.

“I’ll show you proof of my courage.” He strode from the chamber.

Even had she not been tethered to him, she would have followed. She floated from the bed and went after him, into the shadow-strewn house. At the end of the corridor, she glimpsed the silk of his robe. He stalked the house like a hunter, silent and intent, the candle he carried casting transitory light.

She trailed him as he pushed open a door at the end of the passageway and went inside. In her solitary haunting in the depths of night, she had made a cursory examination of this chamber—it seemed to serve no other purpose beside superfluity. This house, with its many rooms, far surpassed even the most luxurious villa. Wealth, it seemed, always strove to be impressive, regardless of the era.

Bram stared up at a large gilt-framed painting upon the wall, and she joined him in his contemplation. Holding the candle up, the painted surface of the canvas gleamed, revealing the artist’s minute brushstrokes. She had seen the painting but not paid it much attention, the chamber too dim for anything but the most perfunctory study. Now both she and Bram looked at it.

A dark-haired youth stared back at them. He wore a uniform of scarlet, white and gold, a polished gorget at his throat. A scarlet sash crossed his narrow chest—he hadn’t yet broadened into a man. The youth leaned against a column, one hand on his hip, the other holding a braid-trimmed hat. Unlike some of the other somber portraits she had seen in these modern homes, in this painting, the sitter smiled. So much pride and excitement in that smile, so much eagerness for the world and its chances for glory, a certainty that the glory would be his; it made the nonexistent heart in her chest ache.

“Behold, Madam Ghost,” Bram said, his voice cold and cutting as a shard of ice. “I call this Portrait of Folly.”

She continued to stare at this other Bram, this inchoate form. He held himself with such confidence, assured that whatever he desired would be his. His eyes were bright and clear, looking into a future of gallantry and daring, a boy dreaming of tomorrow. He had seen nothing of the world. Not yet.

No scar marred his throat. He was unmarked.

“Not folly,” she said. “Hope.”

“Ridiculous hopes. Other younger sons went into the military, and in that, I was no different. But I was singular in that I truly believed I’d do some good. I didn’t want to spend my military career doing useless drills and showing off my uniform in town. When they told us we’d be going to the Colonies to defend our people, I was happy.” He spit out the word. “Thought I would make a difference.”

“You did. I have seen it. Those people on the frontier, you defended their homes. There are scores of lives you saved.”

He made a dismissive wave with his free hand. “Token gestures. Nothing could keep pace with the spill of blood.”

“All of it meant something.”

Turning to her, his mouth twisted in a sneer. “Ned Davies would argue otherwise.”

“Ned . . . ?”

“He’s here.” He tapped his forehead.

Memories began to engulf her, swirling around her in a misty vortex. The chamber receded, fading, transforming into a muddy hill. The scent of gunpowder hung thick in the air, as did the groans of dying men and horses. Atop the hill stood a military fortress, its walls made of felled trees as though hastily constructed. Part of the walls had been blasted away. The yard within the fortress held more wounded men and bodies.

Outside the fortress, soldiers in red picked their way through the fallen.

“Find all the wounded,” said a blood and smoke-streaked Bram to the soldiers. “Bring them to the surgeon.”

“He looks fair gone.” One soldier lifted the shoulders of a man upon the ground, his head lolling back to reveal an ugly wound in his shoulder. If he lived, the injured soldier would of a certain lose his arm.

“Does he breathe?” Bram demanded.

The soldier bent close to the wounded man. “Aye, sir.”

“Then there’s a chance for him. Get him to Dr. Balfour.”

After signaling for some assistance, the soldier and one of his comrades bore the wounded man away, toward the fortress. Bram continued to move through the bent and contorted shapes of fallen men, his face ashen, lips pressed tight. Yet he appeared familiar with the aftermath of battle and the sight of the dead. He waved away clouds of flies from the face of a dead boy holding a drum.

“What of this one, sir?”

Bram turned at Sergeant Davies’s question. Bram outranked the Cornishman, not only in rank but station. Back in England, they would have had little to do with one another, Bram being the second son of a baron, Davies being the fifth son of a farmer, yet in the strange methods of war, they had become unlikely friends. They told one another stories of home and laughed raucously at remembered childhood exploits. He’d had no idea that a farmer’s boy could be just as reckless and foolish as a baron’s supplementary heir.

The other officers did not care for Bram’s fraternization with an enlisted man, but it seemed even war could not dim his insistence for doing whatever he damn well wanted.

Now Davies stood over a fallen French soldier, the enemy moaning weakly. One of his legs was nothing but tatters, taken off inelegantly by cannon fire.

The battle had been a rough one, with losses heavy on both sides. Bram had witnessed many of his brothers in arms killed, including men with families, and men who weren’t men, but boys who hadn’t grown a single whisker or been between the thighs of a woman. These were the fellow soldiers who, only the day before, talked longingly of their mother’s elderberry preserves, or cleaned their muskets and whistled. Now they were carcasses.

“The Frenchman goes to Dr. Balfour, too,” said Bram.

Davies looked hesitant. “You sure? I saw ’im gut Fitzhugh with a bayonet. Just tore ’im open, innards spilling out. Made me lose my tea and hardtack, it did.”

A wave of nausea threatened Bram’s struggle for composure. Evisceration was no way to die, slow and brutal. “We won’t leave him out here to be picked at by crows.” He’d seen too many men, still breathing, torn apart by scavengers.

Davies shrugged. “You’re the officer.”

The sergeant bent down to pick up the wounded enemy soldier. As he did, the Frenchman lifted his hand. He held a pistol. And aimed it at Davies’s face.

“Davies!” Bram shouted. He ran toward them.

Too late. The French soldier pulled the trigger. A flash and bang, and the pistol fired directly between an astonished Davies’s eyes. Most of his face blew apart.

Bram was there in an instant, his sword drawn and ready to run the Frenchman through. But the soldier denied him the pleasure, toppling back to the mud, dead.

Davies also lay in the mud, his arms outflung, his one remaining eye staring at the cloud-smeared sky. What was left of his face held a look of almost comic surprise. As other soldiers came running, Bram sank down to the sodden earth and could not look away from the fallen Davies, burning the image into his mind and heart.

The field covered with the dead vanished. As did the overcast sky, the ravaged fortress. Livia found herself once more in the elegant but unused chamber in Bram’s home, the bodies of the soldiers now pieces of furniture, the muddy ground turned to patterned carpets. Bram wore a robe instead of his uniform, but the expression on his face was the same. As though he’d torn the heart from his own chest and stared at it, clutched in his hand.

“For nothing,” Bram growled. “Ned Davies died for naught. The battle was over, the Frenchman was to have been given medical attention. Ned got his brains blown out anyway.”

Hollowed by his grief, she looked away. “I cannot pretend to know the whys and wherefores of combat. In my time, men fought and died simply for the amusement of the crowd.”

“In my time, men fight and die for many reasons, none of them worthwhile. There’s only death, and more death. That stupid boy”—he nodded toward the portrait of himself—“was an ignorant child. The only thing he achieved was the fashioning of the man standing here. And that’s a piss-poor accomplishment.”

“Nothing has been decided,” she fired back. “For over a millennium, I have seen this world change, constantly remaking itself. Until our bodies become the food of worms, we’ve the means of transforming ourselves. We might be anything we want. Anything at all.”

His jaw tightened. “Including those that would take up a futile fight against the Devil.”

“Winnable, unwinnable—all that matters is the fight.” She drifted closer, wishing she could touch him, though she didn’t know if she wanted to gently stroke his face or strike him. Any means of reaching him within the depths of his self-constructed crypt.

Gaze bleak, he turned away. “No.”

She darted through him, passing through his body, to stand in his line of sight. She pointed to the painting. “That boy was ignorant, yes, but he believed. That belief still dwells within you.”

“Don’t you understand?” He bared his teeth like an animal. “Men went to war. Some were killed. Others maimed. And others returned home and took up their lives. Not me. I was never strong enough. I came back broken.”

He stepped nearer so only a few inches separated them. Though she could feel nothing, some vestige of his heat penetrated the mists surrounding her, the first hint of sensation she’d had in over a thousand years.

“I see the world going to hell all around me,” he rumbled. “I know what will come. But I cannot fight anymore. If I ever possessed honor and virtue—which I doubt—they are long gone.”

“Wrong. You are wrong.” She flicked her gaze to his scar, dull and raised in the candlelight. It had to have bled copiously, covering him in scarlet, his clothes, his hands, smelling of metal as it poured upon the ground. “It’s because you have a good heart that the war damaged you so badly. You cannot go back to being that boy. He’s unneeded. But you can move forward and become someone wiser, someone stronger.”

“Damn you.” His voice was barely human. “Why can’t you leave me in peace?”

Moving away from him, she hovered beside the window. So little was this chamber used that the servants had not closed the curtains for the night. The fog-choked city appeared beyond the glass, and the muted sounds of men and women plummeting deeper into an unrelenting nightmare speared through the heavy silence.

“There is no peace, Bram,” she said over her shoulder. “This night has proven it. You can close your eyes and cover your ears, but it makes no difference. Bit by bit, piece by piece, the world is crumbling away. All we can do—all we must do—is fight.”

“None of this was my doing.”

She whirled around. “Tell yourself that, but you know otherwise. I did summon the Dark One, so the original blame is mine. Yet deep in your heart, no matter your protestations, you understood exactly what your bargain with the Devil meant. The burden falls to both of us.”

When he only scowled at her, she spread her hands wide. For the first time ever, she had to supplicate herself, show . . . humility. I was wrong. We have the means of transforming ourselves even after death, because I am not the woman I once was.

“Please, Bram.” Her voice was a bare whisper, raw as a scraped knuckle. “I cannot do this alone. I need your help.”

The entreaty in her eyes and words must have shaken him, for he looked away. “This cause deserves a better champion than me.”

“Perhaps it does.” She felt a flare of exultation as he whirled to glare at her. He wasn’t immune from pride, and she needed that. A humble man made for a poor warrior. “But you are all we have.”