Free Demon's Curse (Imnada Brotherhood) by Alexa Egan

right into the Thames . . .” Mac’s deep, lilting baritone broke into the endless spin of her thoughts. The crush of old fear. “. . . touch and go when the pickets were close. Never sure whether you’d be shot by your own sentries . . .” Sweat sheening his forehead, he sat stiff in the seat across from her. “. . . fields so green it makes your heart ache. A sky awash in clouds. There’s a lake. Cold as the devil’s heart, but it never stopped me from swimming . . .”
    The yearning in his voice tugged at her own heart.His usual arrogance stripped away for a revealing moment. “You should go home for a visit,” she said gently.
    Lines bit deep at either side of his mouth. “Impossible.”
    Mac leaned his head against the side of the carriage, and silence descended but for the rattle and squeak of the wheels.
    No. His name was Flannery. Captain Flannery. She needed to stop thinking of him as Mac.
    She sneaked a peek at the grave angle of his profile. Long, straight nose. Strong jaw. Stubborn mouth rimed in bitterness. A thin, bloody slash down his cheek. She dropped her gaze to his side and the spreading wound there.
    “Are you certain you don’t need a surgeon?” she tried again.
    “I’m not one for doctors.” He offered her a sheepish shrug before leaning back in his seat and closing his eyes. “They, uh . . . they frighten me.”
    “But—”
    “Trust me, Bianca.”
    Before she could doubt her decision, she reached into her satchel, her fingers closing around Adam’s journal. “You know, Mac Flannery? I’m beginning to think I can.”
    *   *   *
    An entry about a scouting mission outside Orthez. Another relating an episode with a surgeon near Bayonne after a bloody skirmish. “Where did you get this?” Mac asked, still not quite believing he was holding Adam’s fucking journal.
    The last time Mac had seen it had been in Hainaut,when he and Adam shared a stew of cabbage and gristle, Adam scribbling away as usual until their fire burned to ash.
    “Adam must have slipped it into my bag the night he went missing. I found it a few days ago.”
    Mac’s skull heaved with desperate fear and desperate hope, his nerves scraped thin. “Have you read it?”
    “There’s more.” She handed him a folded piece of paper. “I think this man killed Adam or knows who did.”
    Mac scanned the pencil sketch. It had been years, but there was no mistaking the slight upward slant to the eyes. The long patrician nose. The cynical twist of thin lips.
    Jory Wallace.
    An emnil . An Imnada outcast and rogue like Mac. Like the others.
    His offense? Flouting tradition and Gather law by marrying an out-clan.
    Mac had been a lad of ten when Jory’s sentence was pronounced, but he recalled the incident as if it had happened yesterday: the long journey to Cornwall in company with his father. The great assembly in the hall at Deepings, seat of the Duke of Morieux, hereditary head of the ruling Gather, overlord of the five clans, and Gray de Coursy’s grandfather. The ceremony and then the horror had impressed itself on Mac’s young mind: the circle of angry faces, the calls for Wallace’s immediate death, and the man’s silent stoicism as they’d burned away his clan mark, his life forfeit if he ever dared attempt to pass through the Palings and return to the clans.
    “You saw Adam with this man?” he asked, shaking off the bitter emptiness yawning before him. “When?”
    “About six months ago. They were . . . together.” Dread and embarrassment rose from Bianca’s body to mix with the cinnamon-orange scent of her perfume.
    “ ‘Together’?”
    “Adam was . . . that is, he preferred . . . he and this man were . . .” Scarlet burned in her cheeks as she straightened, a spark of defiance lighting her gaze. “Adam and this man were lovers.”
    Mac nearly choked, the pain in his side flaring into his brain. “Lovers? That’s ridiculous!”
    Sparks became flames. “I knew