Enchanter's Embrace by A R DeClerck

Author:A R DeClerck [DeClerck, A R]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: romance, steampunk romance, alternate history, gothic romance
Publisher: AR DeClerck
Published: 2019-08-10T22:00:00+00:00

THE CLOCK CHIMED EXACTLY twelve times. Lucia could only turn her head a bit, but she saw the delicate hands of the grandfather clock sitting precisely at midnight. The witching hour.

She looked left and tried to catch Elizabeth’s eye, but the woman had her head down. It had not been a pleasant trip from the house to this dust-filled cabin at the edge of the estate. Their captor had not spared them violence as he used his considerable magic to bind them, leaving only their legs free to walk. Elizabeth’s white night dress bloomed red with drops of blood from her nose, and Lucia felt a cut swelling on her lip. Shivering in nothing but their indoor clothes they had been forced through the dark tunnel and deposited in this room. The chair, at least, was comfortable.

“I’ve often wondered about my darling.” Their captor returned with an armload of firewood that he dumped by the fire. He fed a few logs to the flames and did not look at them as he spoke. “Was she sad to see me hang? Did she cry for me?”

He waved his hand and Lucia felt her tongue free of the spell that bound them. “She was only a child back then. You’re sick.”

“No sicker than any other man beguiled by a beautiful girl.” He poked at the embers with the poker. “She sought me out.”

“You didn’t say no.”

He laughed. “Who would? She was lovely even then.” He turned to Elizabeth and stroked a gnarled hand over her still-bent head. “Even lovelier now.”

“Don’t touch her.” Lucia knew that revulsion colored her words, but this scene was too much like another she’d lived before. A man obsessed with a young woman, willing to do anything to have her. Bile rose in her throat.

“I would never hurt her. Not the way she has hurt me.”

“You were sentenced to hang for your crimes.”

“And I hanged.” He was close to her face now, his bulging eye and the thick knot of scars on his neck just in front of her eyes. “I hanged but I did not die.”

“Black magic.”

“Justice.”

She turned her head away as he backed away, back to Elizabeth’s side to sit at her knee like a puppy. His hand stroked over hers but she never moved or made a sound.

“You know a lot about blood magic, witch. I smell it in you.”

She did not answer, staring instead at the flames.

“I can make you tell me.”

And he could. He would torture her, perhaps not even physically, with all his considerable magical strength, and she would eventually answer all his questions. “No.”

“Come, then,” he invited. “Tell me.”

“At sixteen I was rebellious. My parents were sending me away to a French boarding school and I was angry.”

“Tell me all of it.” He moved his finger and she felt constriction across her chest, cutting off her air supply. She gasped for breath, and when she nodded he let loose the tourniquet.

“I had magic and they did not. I resented them for being normal.

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