Page 6 of A Case of Possession
“Please, my lord, please,” Stephen was sobbing, as Crane positioned himself at the entrance to the small sinewy body.
“Please what?” Crane demanded, nudging the tip of his cock against Stephen’s arse. “Pleasewhat?”
Stephen howled out, arching his back, thrusting himself towards Crane. “Please, my lord!”
Crane pushed his shoulders down hard. “One more chance, pretty boy.”
“Make me yours,” said Stephen. “Make me fly. Make the magpies fly.”
“You will fly.” Now he was thrusting in the dark heat of Stephen’s body, watching the birds flutter on his lover’s skin, the black and white flickering over his amber eyes. The seven tattoos were silently flapping and shrieking, and magpies were rising all around them in a storm of wings and cawing as the feathers spread wide from Stephen’s extended arms. “Fly,” he said again, and came hard and hot as the magpies screamed.
He woke up thrashing in a tangle of sheets and an empty bed, sweating, momentarily bewildered, and with an unmistakeable sticky wetness on his belly.
“Fuck,” he muttered aloud and let his head drop back onto the hot pillow as he tried to shake off the dream.
It had only been a few days, damn it. Nocturnal emissions seemed hardly appropriate at his advanced age. And he was beginning to lose patience with the bloody magpies.
Crane, though without magical talent of his own, was the last descendant of the Magpie Lord, a hugely powerful sorcerer, and in some way he didn’t understand he—his blood, his body—acted as a conduit between his ancestor’s power and Stephen’s talent. One of the more bizarre side effects of this was that Crane’s seven tattoos of magpies took on independent life when he and Stephen fucked, flying and hopping across both men’s skin. One had even decided it preferred Stephen and had taken up residence on his back, leaving Crane with the frankly unsettling experience of looking in a mirror and seeing plain unmarked skin where a tattoo used to be, and Stephen the equally disturbing gift of a tattoo that he’d never had inked. Crane could live without the damned birds invading his imaginary love life as well.
He touched a hand to his shoulder, where the defecting tattoo had once spread its wings, uttered a curse on magpies, dreams and absent lovers, shifted into a less sticky patch of sheet, and went back to sleep.
Chapter Three
The next day, there was no word from Stephen by eleven, which was when Crane called on Leonora Hart.
Leo Callas had been a coltish fifteen-year-old when he’d first met her, nearly two decades ago. Her father had been a trader, her mother long dead. She had run wild in the Shanghai streets, trading halls and merchant palaces all her life, and could curse in English, Spanish and Shanghainese with as much fluency as any of the young men around her. At seventeen she had abruptly blossomed into beauty and, armed with her father’s fat purse, had been set to go to London and become a Success. Instead, to everyone’s astonishment except Lucien Vaudrey’s, she had at eighteen eloped with Tom Hart, a silk trader of forty-two years, dubious reputation, and no appeal at all to her father.
Lucien Vaudrey had been unsurprised because she had confided her elopement plans to him, and in fact he and Merrick had taken on the slightly unconventional groomsmen roles of overpowering the gatekeepers at the Callas compound to let Leo out that night.
He had played his part without hesitation, because Tom had been kind to him in a life that had been very bare of kindness, and because he was twenty-two and barely expected to last to twenty-three. By the time he was old enough that he might have regretted his role in such an obviously disastrous match, it had become clear that Tom and Leonora were two halves of a soul.
Tom Hart had died some eight years ago, of a heart attack. Leonora had been almost deranged with grief, starving herself, drinking too much, acting in a way that shocked even the least shockable.
There was no trace of that wild, crazed widow now, any more than of the tomboyish girl. Leonora Hart was a very lovely woman at thirty-four. She was tall and curvaceous, with rich black hair and striking brown eyes, high cheekbones, and skin dark enough to seem exotic without raising too many whispers about mixed parentage. She was wearing silk in a shade of dull orange that was a perfect foil for her autumnal eyes, beautiful, elegant, sophisticated. She looked wildly out of place in the conventionally overdecorated drawing room of her aunt’s house, where she had been staying for the last two months.
“Leo, darling, you look magnificent,” said Crane, sweeping her hand to his lips.
She pulled him into a hug. “You rotten aristo. First you become a peer, now you’re playing the gentleman. What’s next, Lady Crane and some chicks?”
“Good God, don’t say such things. Anyway, isn’t it you who’s nesting? Why did I not know about this?”
“Oh sweet heaven.” Leonora rolled her eyes. “I suppose you’ve seenThe Times. I could haveshakenEadweard.”
“But you are engaged?”
“Yes. Well—we are, but it wasn’t supposed to come out yet.”
“Why on earth not?”
Leonora gestured to a pair of chairs and sat. She leaned in to him, and he mimicked her, knowing that the English cousins she lived with were far too respectable for her liking. He wasn’t surprised when Leonora spoke in Shanghainese.
“I like Eadweard very much. I want to marry him. I really do.” Leonora knitted her fingers together. “You understand why I married Jan Ahl, don’t you?”
“Because it was exactly a year after Tom died, and you’d been drunk for the best part of a week, and in bed with Ahl for much of that, and marrying him was one alternative to killing yourself, although not the best one.”
“I love you for your kindness, Lucien,” Leo said wryly. “But you do understand. Because you knew Tom, and you knew what we had, and you know how I grew up, and how things are back home. It’s not like that here.”
“That it isn’t.”
