The Mad Earl’s Bride by sabine

Author:sabine [sabine]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-02-13T07:01:34+00:00

Dorian awoke from a restless, nightmare-plagued sleep to nightmarish pain. His head pounded relentlessly. His insides churned, raw with bile. Slowly, carefully, he inched up to a sitting position and reached for the bottle on the nightstand. He put it to his lips.

Empty.

Already? he wondered dully. Had he finished it off in a single night? Or had several nights passed in the oppressive haze of pain and opiates?

It didn’t matter.

He had seen the silvery wraiths again. Today, they’d slowly closed in from the peripheries and shimmered everywhere he looked. He had watched the wedding preparations through sparkling ripples undulating in the air like waves in a ghostly sea. Then, finally, the silver shards had vanished from his vision and sliced into his skull like white-hot blades.

Now he understood why his mother had claimed the “ghosts” had vicious talons, and why she’d screamed and torn at her hair. She had been trying to rip the wicked claws away.

Even he had trouble reminding himself there were neither ghosts nor claws, that it was all a sick fancy.

He wondered how much longer he would be able to distinguish between sick fancy and reality, how long before he began confusing those about him with ghosts and demons—and attacked them in mindless rage.

But he would not, he told himself. Kneebones had promised that the laudanum would quiet him, quelling the delusions along with the pain. Dorian edged closer to the nightstand and opened the door. He reached in and found the porcelain cylinder.

He took it onto his lap and pried off the lid.

The narrow bottle, nestled in a wooden cloth, lay within. The elixir of peace…perhaps eternal.

Her took it out and with trembling hands set the cylinder upon the nightstand. Then he hesitated, but it was not the prospect of eternity that gave him pause. No, he was too shallow and base for that. It was the witch he thought of, and her soft mouth and slimly curved body. And that image was enough to set his mind to fabricating noble reasons for avoiding laudanum’s risks: if he died before the marriage was consummated, it might be annulled, and she would not get her hospital…and it was his duty, besides, to get an heir.

But her hospital and the end of the Camoys would not matter to him when he was dead, Dorian reminded himself. Nor would she. He would be gone, and good riddance, and God forbid he should leave a child behind. With his luck, his off-spring would inherit the same defective brain and live—briefly—and die in the same mortifying way. He unstopped the bottle.

“I should be careful, if I were you,” came a quiet, familiar voice out of the darkness. “You are married to a witch. What if I’ve turned it into a love potion?”

The room was black as Hades. He couldn’t see her—couldn’t focus past the throbbing anyhow—but he could smell her. The oddly exotic scent stole through the thundering sea of pain like ghostly fingers and lifted him up to consciousness.

“It might even be a potion to turn you into a cat,” she said.

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