Free The Prince of Midnight by Laura Kinsale

not the count's chaise. The steep street filled with mounted soldiers
from the other direction, the French side of the border. Cavalry horses milled
and reared amid a crowd of townspeople, and S.T. suddenly recognized the French
lieutenant from the guard post aiming his musket after the count's coach. The
sound of the shot blasted around and around the narrow chasm of the street, and
then the whole troop pressed and jostled through the crowd and took off at a
gallop across the bridge the way the coach had gone.
    Marc burst through the door. "Too late!" he shouted, and ran to the balcony.
He leaned out over the rail, waving his fist at the last of the mounted
soldiers. "You drunken bumblers! Too late by a trice!" He snorted and pulled
back, shaking his head at S.T.
"Zut!
We did our best, did we not? You
and I can say so. The cards, that was an inspiration of the finest,
mon ami.
But they'll never catch him this side of the border again. And that poor young
fool—the
anglais—you
couldn't stop him going with them? These pups who
want to be heroes! God only knows what will become of him."
    "Become of him!" S.T. snapped in frustration. "What the devil is going on?
They're after Mazan for something?"
    Marc gave him a startled look. "You didn't know?"
    "Know
what
?" S.T. shouted.
    "Ha. Le Comte de Mazan. So he says, eh? Monsieur—he and his valet, Latour,
were condemned to the stake a month ago in Marseilles,. For blasphemy. And"—Marc
lowered his voice to an eager whisper—"sodomy." He shook his head with relish.
"And attempted murder of two young girls. He is no comte, my friend. He is Sade.
The Marquis de Sade."

Chapter Five

    S.T. had walked the mountain for hours, searching for Nemo far up over the
flank until he was almost to the other side, whistling and calling. Now he sat
on a lonely hilltop beneath the moon and cursed her.
    And himself. His own futile instincts that always betrayed him, that had
never earned him anything but misery and a few moments of sensation, come and
gone like a winning gamble, the swift thrill that never lasted.
    This time,
he'd thought, as he always thought:
this time it will
be different.
But it was not.
    He should never have sent Nemo away, never taken that desperate a chance for
the sake of a woman. These grand gestures of his, they never endured beyond the
moment of glory before they vanished, and another game had to be played and won
again.
    And paid for. He'd paid for this one with his last friend. Though he still
walked the mountain and searched, S.T. had the news he'd dreaded. He'd come
across a Gypsy cutting wood and heard the tale. Two children had seen a monster
up on the mountain flanks of Le Grand Coyer, a terrible supernatural creature
with the head of a man and the body of a beast. They'd even brought home the wig
it had snagged on a bush, and then the Gypsies had made incantations and potions
and gone out to draw the beast into a trap, where some Romany witch had turned
it back into a common wolf again before they killed it. He could go and see the
skin and the tattered wig of the devil's monstrosity if he liked, on display for
a small donation in the church at Colmars.
    He hadn't gone. He could not. He walked out here on the mountain and
pretended there was some mistake, that it was all a dream and he would wake up
and find Nemo asleep, curled in a furry, untroubled mound at the foot of the
bed.
    And her ... she deserved it, he thought; she got what she was asking for in
leaving his protection, which might not rate all that it had in younger days,
but was at least more than a match for some popinjay in marigold smalls. She got
just what she warranted, running alone about the countryside dressed in
breeches: a murdering aristocrat with unnatural tastes to use her and abuse her
and leave her body for the birds.
    He tilted his head back in despair. A sound hovered at the base of his
throat, a low moan of grief and loneliness that swelled into