“I thought you would bite me and hang me up in that room, withthem.”
Beresford swipes a hand over his face and beard, a long sigh flowing from his bearded mouth. “Come into the game room and sit down with me. I’ll tell you everything, and then I’ll give you a chance to run.”
Well, fuck. That sounds ominous. I don’t know whether I should be panicking or not. At least, if he does plan to hurt me, I’ll have the satisfaction of knowing the truth first.
Beresford brings the keys into the game room with him, and he reattaches the bloodstained one to the ring before setting them on one of the shelves. We sit down on opposite ends of the sofa by the wall.
Beresford crosses and uncrosses his legs, shifts his position, and clears his throat about five times before speaking. “I’m surprised that you remained in this house after what you saw.”
“So am I.” I grab a pillow from the center of the sofa and begin twisting the strands of a tassel between my fingers. “Ithought about leaving or telling someone. But I wanted to give you the chance to explain.”
His blue eyes lock with mine. “I’m not sure there is an explanation I could offer that you would accept.”
“Don’t try to concoct a lie or soften the story. I know you prefer the truth, and so do I.”
“One condition,” he says. “Tell me your secret first.”
“Secret?” I focus very hard on braiding the strands of the tassel.
“The thing you’ve been keeping from me. The truth you concealed, because you thought it would drive me away.”
I don’t owe him my truth. Or perhaps I do. In my heart, I believe that he owes me complete disclosure. And doesn’t that kind of honesty work both ways?
My secret feels insignificant compared to the bodies hanging in that distant room. It’s less dire, and yet it’s difficult to confess aloud. Beresford waits with taut patience until I finally force myself to speak.
“My father made a botched deal with an entity called the Barrow-Man,” I murmur. “It left me with an ability, or a curse. I summon things that I call demons, creatures from another realm, things that don’t belong in this world. I can’t control the summoning—it just happens at odd times, and then I take the creatures to the forest, to Wormsloe. Some people in the area know about it, but no one really discusses it. They used to tolerate me, but with all the disappearances and strange happenings lately, that has begun to change.”
My voice fades, and I twist the tassel viciously before continuing. “Your proposal to me came at the right time. It was the ideal distraction, or the situation with our neighbors might have become very bad for me. Whatever you are, whatever you’ve done, I’m grateful for that.”
I risk a glance at him. When I see the hungry devotion on his handsome face, I die a little inside, because I don’t know if Ican love him if he isn’t human. I’m not sure I can be with someone who has ended lives and stolen faces.
“Say something,” I whisper.
He licks his lips, then says quietly, “I knew.”
“You… you knew what?” Both my fists squeeze the pillow. “Not my secret. You couldn’t know that. Unless someone told you, but then you wouldn’t have married me.”
“Why not?”
“Why not?” My voice shrills. “Because I’m unnatural and wrong, because this ability is unpredictable and dangerous. Because no one wants to be attached to someone who’s cursed.”
“Sybil.I knew.”
Tears glaze my lower lashes. “How?”
“Because you summonedme.”
14
I suck in along, quivering breath.
Ever since I looked into that room behind the blue door, ever since I realized that his face might not be his own, some part of me suspected it. On some level I knew the truth—that even before I officially met him, I had encountered him before. Touched him, maybe, in some other form.
“Which one were you?” The words scrape through my throat, and yet even as I speak them, I know who he was. The spindly shadow-monster, tall as the ceiling, and catlike.
“Did I fall in love with a fucking shadow cat?” I vent a hysterical, quivering laugh.
“I’m not a cat.” A sorrowful smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “I’m a kind of shifter called a matagot. Our true form might look catlike to humans, but we’re quite different.”
