Heir of Starlight, page 21
“True. He must have known what Karl’s body was being used for,” Wexley agreed. “This Operation Serpent’s Egg has been going on for years, and it isn’t something the general is going to scrap for the sake of a single person. We’re going to need some kind of leverage.”
“Then what do we do?” Tom asked. They had to do something.
“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have some papers to put in order before I keep my appointment with Lady Langdon tomorrow morning—” Drake fished an unlit cigarette from his pocket and popped it into his mouth. “Plus, I’d like a cigarette, so I bid you all good day.”
“Don’t think you’re going to Crestmore alone,” Wexley stated.
Drake scowled.
“I could drive him,” Karl offered.
“Too many people at Crestmore have seen you as Dr. Alton, Princess Julianna’s fiancé.” Drake shook his head. “You are one of the few advantages we have over Langdon and Drysdale-Martin right now. So long as they still think it’s Brian in that body, they’ll believe their secrets are safe and they won’t take steps to remove the threat we represent.”
“You mean in a fish-food kind of way?” Karl asked.
Drake nodded.
“I’ll follow you in my own car,” Wexley said. “I’m not just going to send you off. Drake—”
“All right, you can follow me to Crestmore, but not inside. But be careful and keep your distance. Don’t rush in to rescue me at the first sign of danger. You can’t get me out, if they’ve got you too.”
Sleep didn’t come easily to Tom that night. After three hours of tossing, turning and waking from terrible, murky dreams, he abandoned his bed to indulge in his secret, private consolation of a cup of hot chocolate.
As he crept out from the kitchen with the warm mug cupped between his hands, he noticed a light shining from beneath the door of Wexley’s dining room.
That would be Drake, the perennial night owl.
Tom knocked quietly at the door.
“Come in,” Drake called.
Drake looked more disheveled than usual. He had an unlit cigarette tucked behind each ear. He sat at the head of the table, tightening a rubber tourniquet with his teeth. Three pieces of parchment and a blood pen sat on the polished oak table in front of him.
“Tom, how lovely. For a moment I thought you might be the politest member of a West Court goon squad come to bag me.” Drake pumped his hand a couple of times so his vein stood out. “Have a seat.”
Tom took a place next to Drake.
“What are you drinking there?” Drake inquired.
“Cocoa,” Tom admitted, too disturbed to be evasive. “What are you doing?”
“I’m signing your souls back—yours and Adam’s, I mean. It’s just a precaution in case I’m disembodied tomorrow morning. I also wrote a will. You get my magical properties, including all souls in my possession, my condo and half my money. Everything else goes to Adam.”
Drake threaded the needle into his vein and pumped his hand a couple more times to get the blood flowing down to the nib. He signed his name at the bottom of each page with a distinct flourish. He then handed Tom one of the pieces of parchment—the deed to his own soul.
Tom could feel the spell moving within the paper. He watched the letters fade from the parchment. Each of them was an element of a spell that was working on another piece of parchment—the one in Drake’s filing cabinet across town. Gradually, the writing would disappear entirely and the deed proclaiming that Tom’s soul belonged to Drake would crumble into dust.
He’d have never believed Drake would do this.
And the will?
Plainly, Drake not only feared that he would be disembodied for a time but that either he would never return or he would die.
“Drake?” Tom said quietly.
“Yes?” He lit his cigarette and pulled in a long drag.
“When I met with Lord General Wakeman, I had a vision of King Louis being shot during the Royal Regatta while the ships were being attacked… You were there.”
“Was I?” Smoke rose with his words, veiling his red-rimmed eyes.
Tom swallowed a mouthful of hot chocolate. It might as well have been warm sludge, for all he noticed it.
“What if Lady Langdon takes you out of your body and uses you to assassinate the king?” Tom asked.
Drake sighed heavily and rested his cigarette in the rim of a porcelain saucer.
“It wouldn’t be the least effective plan she could contrive. If Louis dies before he can disinherit Julianna, the crown still goes to her. As Julianna’s guardian, Lady Langdon would become regent. She knows Adam is making a play to get my soul back. Having me executed for assassinating the king would certainly keep me from blabbing about her many girlish secrets. It makes sense.”
“You already thought of this?”
“Something like it,” Drake replied.
“You can’t go to her tomorrow—”
“If I don’t show up, she’ll only pull me out of my body faster. Complying with her demand buys us some more time.”
“But time to do what?” Tom asked.
“To find a way to beat her.” Drake picked up his cigarette but didn’t smoke. He looked at Tom. “How’s the cocoa?”
“Good.” Tom could hardly think of it for the ache in his chest. He hadn’t felt so much pain since his parents’ execution. It surprised him that it should be there. Drake had acquired his soul for the purpose of stripping him into a ring. And when he’d discovered that Tom’s soul failed to qualify for his purposes, Drake had kept him on as a servant. Tom had thought their relationship purely transactional but in spite of everything, Drake had been a good provider and protector. Through the years he’d become fond of Drake, and he was humbled to discover Drake must have become fond of him.
Drake crushed out his cigarette and stood. “Well, I’m going to retire to the honeymoon suite for a final night of debauchery and wanton lust. You should get to bed as well.” Drake reached out, and to Tom’s shock, patted him on the shoulder. “Tomorrow looks to be a long day.”
Chapter Nineteen
The next morning Drake rose early and ignored the hearty breakfast Adam’s cook prepared for him. Adam, too, hardly ate. They were both on the road, albeit in separate cars, by seven.
Drake headed directly for Crestmore Place, and Adam followed at a great enough distance that Drake couldn’t often glimpse his Stallion-Brilliant in the rearview mirror.
As Drake drove the winding road toward the conservatively artistic and structurally secure front gates, he wondered how his life had come to this.
When he was young, he’d always imagined himself to be a villain. Looking back, he could find no reason why. No evidence of his own cruelty or even indifference slithered through the murky depths of memory. But he’d been shy, small and unmistakably homosexual. He’d also been a magical prodigy. Other students who envied his skills could find easy reasons to despise him. So he’d taken an offensive stance.
As a consequence, he’d made very few friends. Other students avoided him, and most of the masters took his affected arrogance as a personal insult. He’d found one ally in Madame Gantry, who visited the academy often. Even on their first meeting, she had seen right through his dark flamboyance. She’d taken one look at his black leather pants and said, “Excellent choice, young man. Wear them while you can. You won’t be young forever.”
Wearing nothing but black had originally been a statement of mourning about his father’s disembodiment. But gradually he’d found other reasons. “Wearing colors implies allegiance to a court,” he would say, “and I have no allegiance.”
Oh, how the times had changed.
Now the West Court owned his soul.
And he strongly suspected that he had grown too old for leather pants.
Once inside the hospital gates, he parked askew, across three spaces. A petty action? Absolutely. But it made him feel better.
Because his dark visage had frightened the princess on his previous visit, Drake had borrowed a pair of khaki pants and a white pullover from Adam. Both were much too large and had been rolled and cuffed and belted to be wearable. With his hair combed down, he looked nothing like himself, which was good because he felt nothing like himself.
And he did not want to be associated with the person who he suspected he would become today. He did not want to be the kind of man who would be party to crushing the will of a girl whose only offense was to have been unlucky enough to suffer traumatic brain injury.
Still, he made his way to the princess’s suite. Lady Langdon sat in an ugly chair, reading her granddaughter a story about carefree birds. Lady Carolyn was also present, looking perfectly coifed and polished but distinctly hollow-eyed. She stood next to a gurney that had been fitted with restraints typical of those used to control the newly soulless.
The moment to commit the heinous act of installing Lady Carolyn into the princess’s body had come, plainly.
“I don’t want to do this,” Drake said, by way of greeting.
“It doesn’t matter what you want,” Langdon replied. “We should finish this as soon as possible.”
Carolyn said nothing. She merely lay down on the gurney and strapped herself in. All except for the final restraint, which she could not buckle on her own.
Her mother did that for her.
Langdon glanced from him to Carolyn, who lay still as the top of a sarcophagus, staring upward. A faint expression, like that of transient regret, crossed Langdon’s face as her gaze roved over the straps that would hold her daughter’s soon-to-be-soulless body down.
Drake could not bear it.
“What you want me to do is ethically and morally wrong, illegal and sick. More than that, I don’t think that it will work,” Drake whispered. He heard the sound of shuffling feet in the hospital corridor outside. Why did the staff stay out there? Why had no one even tried to overpower him? One good bullet could kill him, just the same as any other man. How could not one person in the hallway have the courage to take the shot?
And why, for that matter, did he not kill Langdon himself? If he acted quickly, used Spider and his blood diamond, he could finish her before she could speak the spell to separate his soul.
But even Adam would have a hard time defending him after he murdered a defenseless woman in cold blood. And where would Tom be? He was the guardian to Tom, the next Guardian of the City. He had to control himself…or at least plan the murder a little better.
Perhaps seeing the hardness of Drake’s thoughts reflected in his eyes, Langdon launched into a pragmatic consolation.
“We should at least try. If it works, it will be best for everyone,” she said. “It’s best for our great kingdom. Can you imagine the throne falling into the hands of an old North Court drunk like General Wakeman? The economy would be ruined. This is your fate, Drake. This is the reason the stars brought you into my court—to keep the laws of primogeniture intact.”
Drake stood silent in abject astonishment. Could she really be serious, sacrificing both daughter and granddaughter to ideology?
“Don’t trouble yourself, Grand Magician.” Finally, Lady Carolyn had located her voice, if not her ability to make eye contact. “This way I’ll get to be with my daughter. They say that when one inhabits a body, one can sense the soul of the inhabited.”
“It’s well documented,” Drake managed to say. But there was a huge difference between being with a child and being inside one. For all Julianna’s challenges, she was still an individual with her own personality and mind. Suppressing that, even in the guise of motherly concern, was no better then locking her away in this asylum, perhaps worse.
“I can help her achieve everything she was born to have,” Carolyn said.
“But what I think that you are not realizing is that you will be bound by the limitations of this body. If your goal in this endeavor is to present the princess as a viable heir, it will not work. I predict that you’ll have little more luck controlling her damaged body than she does.”
“On the contrary,” Lady Langdon said. “Significant research has been done in using inhabiting souls for rehabilitation after brain injury. There is noticeable improvement.”
“Noticeable?” Drake couldn’t keep the skepticism from his voice. “That’s not convincing.”
“Even if this doesn’t work, I want to live together with my daughter.” Lady Carolyn turned her head to look at Drake. “It’s the only way I’ll be able to be with her. She’s too much of an embarrassment to ever leave this hospital. If you won’t do it for Mother, then please do it for me. I can’t bear being this heartbroken anymore.”
Drake wanted to give her a thousand—or at least one alternative method by which she could achieve her goal. Stealing her daughter and fleeing to the country sprang to mind, for example. But the wealth and power that had been conferred upon her because of her nobility had its downside. No place under or among the stars would be safe for her because there was no place she could hide from her mother’s most powerful agent—him.
“You’re wasting time, Drake,” Lady Langdon said.
“Fine then,” Drake murmured. “I will do as you ask.” In fact he’d do a little more.
After ensuring that his subject was sufficiently restrained, he casually drew a thread from Spider, bent and pressed his mouth to Carolyn’s. He sensed the soul within as a perfumier might sense the elements of scent. Carolyn might be soft-spoken and demure, but her soul tasted like iron and nightshade. With one voracious breath, he pulled her soul from her as he pulled the breath from her lungs.
Immediately, Carolyn’s soulless body began to struggle. Drake used her thrashing to cover the motion of his hand against her head. Then he strode across the room and wrenched open the princess’s mouth. He leaned over and exhaled Carolyn’s soul over the fine tether that Spider held. Both pushed deep into Princess Julianna’s lungs.
The princess writhed and tried to spit as if she could taste a bitter poison entering her. Drake kept hold of her until she calmed. When he stepped back, he noted the fine spectral tether running from Carolyn’s spastic empty body, through his ring to Carolyn’s soul, hidden deep inside Julianna’s chest.
Lady Langdon drew near, watching as Carolyn moved Julianna’s body. To Drake’s surprise, she was able to do much more than he had expected. Drake wondered it she had been practicing and, if so, on what unfortunate servant. While she didn’t move gracefully, she kept her balance as she walked to Drake and made a functional curtsey.
“Thank you, Grand Magician.” Her voice was still slurred as it had been when the princess spoke for herself, but at least she formed complete words. Drake suspected she might not ever improve much beyond this. She then turned to Langdon and gave another curtsey. “We’re fine, Mother. I think it’s going to work.”
Langdon smiled beatifically and embraced her. “Of course it will, darling,” she said.
Drake bowed his head to keep either of them from noting his troubled expression. There was no way that so slight an improvement would win Princess Julianna the crown, not when there was a sound child on the way. But then, if Tom was correct and Langdon meant to assassinate the king, why bother with this at all?
Langdon’s cold gaze fell on Drake from over her daughter’s shoulder. “You may leave us now.”
“There is the matter of my freedom,” Drake reminded her. “You swore on your life that you would release my soul.”
“After the regatta, I said.” Langdon drew back from Julianna’s awkward grasp. “I expect you to accompany Julianna and ensure that her condition is…stable. Once that is done you will be free.” She picked up her purse and withdrew a sheet of parchment. She handed it to Drake.
Drake took the document. Though he knew it was too good to be true, and that Lady Langdon would never release him so easily, his hands still shook.
“It’s all there,” Langdon said. “Signed and notarized.”
“And postdated,” Drake added.
“I need some insurance that you will finish your job. Now leave us,” Lady Langdon told him.
“As you wish.” Drake bowed and went to find a restroom where he could wash some of the revulsion from himself. Now he truly was the villain he’d played at being all these years.
And he wasn’t even wearing black.
Because the princess’s ward was secure, there were no pubic lavatories.
The nearest place to accomplish this largely psychological cleansing was the lavish first-floor facilities near the main office, so this is where Drake went.
He rinsed his mouth, splashed water across his sweaty face and emerged from the opulent, orchid-infested water closet just in time to see a stupid purple robe rounding the corner.
Drysdale-Martin.
Drake knew it wasn’t a coincidence that Drysdale-Martin chose to come here on the day of the princess’s miraculous recovery. Obviously Drysdale-Martin and Langdon were exploiting the inherent secrecy and tight security of Crestmore to meet and scheme.
How did Drysdale-Martin imagine that Langdon would not double-cross him? In fact, nothing having to do with this arranged marriage between Brian and Julianna made sense. For all intents and purposes, Brian was known as the commoner Dr. Karl Alton. In what universe he would be considered an appropriate match for a queen, Drake could not fathom.
Granted, Drysdale-Martin could legally adopt Dr. Alton, and thus confer nobility on him, but why would Langdon agree to such an inferior match?
Drysdale-Martin must have blundered into Langdon’s plans. By accident, most likely, given the man’s intellect. She must have offered the marriage to keep him quiet.
But Drake could foresee no arrangement of stars or fate wherein Langdon would make good on that promise. Ambition ruled her every action, and Drysdale-Martin would have to go.
Any other time and Drake might have found it amusing. Today he just wanted out and as far away from these people as he could get.
