It was like a rot deep within her.
Thorns curling around the lady’s lifeforce.
She’d locked it up as tightly as she could, but she feared it would break through again at some stage.
“I’ve sent for tea and supper,” Sterling said, striding into her room as if he had barely exerted himself today.
Edwina collapsed back on her bed. “Good. Wake me when it arrives.”
He tickled her toes. “No rest for the wicked, Edie. Now. Tell me what you saw when your drove it away.”
She sighed and sat up, punching a pillow into place. “It was like it was spawned within Lady Willoughby, and when it evaporated it simply returned to her.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Within her?”
It sounded ridiculous. “I checked her over most thoroughly. It’s not a possession.”
“She’s not with child, is she?”
Edwina screwed up her handkerchief and threw it at him. “Do not even think such a thing. She is not with child. There is no demon baby.”
Kneeling on the bed, he let himself fall forward until he was stretched out beside her. “Thank god. I cannot even imagine how that would have gone down.”
Edwina squirmed. Bare inches separated them. “What are you doing?”
“Trying not to think about closing my eyes,” he said.
She made a shooing motion. “Get off my bed.”
He stared at her with a blatantly hungry look in his eyes. “Make me. Or better yet….”
Join me.
The words blazed between them, unspoken, but ever the more powerful for it.
“How are you feeling?” she asked.
“I’m fine.”
“So fine that you let it get the drop on you?” Unlikely. Sterling had the finest defenses she’d ever seen before. Edwina reached out without thinking, cupping her palm against his cheek and closing her eyes. “It’s marked you.”
Instantly, she began to weave her spellcraft through him, shoring up the chinks in his psychic armor.
Sterling shuddered, but he leaned into her touch like a starving man.
“I’m fine,” he said.
“It went straight through that chink in your psychic armor as if it could sense it,” she pointed out.
“Most psychic entities do.”
“Is that what you think it is?”
Sterling shrugged. “I don’t know. Not yet. I caught a glimpse of it. I felt it. But it’s like nothing I’ve ever encountered before. I’ll meditate tonight on the situation and see if I can resurrect anything from my memory.”
Edwina sighed. “So what now?”
“We need to talk,” he whispered. “About what we were saying in the vault before the butler kindly interrupted us.”
