Chapter Text
“You lied,” Michael chokes out. It’s an accusation, yes. But it’s the lesser of the two that he could hurl at Star, after finding her, just as, he’s certain now, David had meant him to. Transported by ecstasy. Clasped in David’s embrace. “He’s not your brother.”
Star doesn’t so much as flinch. Only bows her dark, magnificent head. “No.”
The bitterly triumphant laughter dies in Michael’s throat as she continues, her voice flat and dull, her eyes on the toes of her delicate slippers. “He’s my father’s.”
Star raises her head when Michael says nothing more, her eyes blazing into his silence. “Or my grandfather’s. Or perhaps his father’s – I don’t know how old he truly is, Michael. How long he’s been with us, dogging my family’s heels with misfortune and death.”
“What…” Michael begins, and finds he has no thought of what should follow it.
Star studies his face, rolling her lower lip between her teeth. Her voice is low, miserable, resigned. “I tried to warn you. There is a curse upon the blood of the Sharpes.” Her eyes, huge and pleading as they fix upon his own, are glossy with unshed tears. “Michael – David is the curse.”
Michael takes a slow step back from her, mindful of the stairs behind him. With the fury of that awful discovery slowly cooling in his veins, a cold horror is beginning to seep in to take its place. A dreadful burden of understanding, settling upon him like a heavy mantle. “You’re mad. Both of you are mad -”
“Oh, God, that I only were!” Star flies across the short distance between them, her hands grasping at Michael’s nightshirt as she gazes beseechingly up into his eyes. “I thought he was my friend. He was, when he first came to me, when I was a child. Father’s cruelty, Mother’s coldness – he saved me from them. But now, now he wishes me to become as he is, and I fear, for me, it’s already too late. You must – you’ve seen, you’ve felt it. You – you must know -”
Whatever she sees in Michael’s eyes, though, makes the liquid pleading in her own dark ones shift silently to fear, makes her fingers uncurl from the fabric of Michael’s collar as she draws back.
Michael grasps her roughly by the wrist before she can retreat into the safety of this labyrinth, this crypt that she calls home. Before she can retreat into the safety of her brother’s – her lover’s arms. No wonder, that all this time, ever since they first met, David’s always seemed to be gloating over some private amusement – “Why me, Star? What part have I in this game of yours? What need had you of me? Or was it all for his entertainment?”
Star’s chin quivers, as she tugs against Michael’s grip, turning her gaze anywhere but upon his face. “No. No, Michael, never -”
“Then why? Why, Star?”
Star doesn’t raise her eyes from the heavy, carved wood of the railing protecting the edge of the landing from the three-storey fall beyond. Her voice barely rises above a whisper, a flinch shuttering her eyes for a moment as she tries again to pull away and Michael yanks her back towards him. “I wanted you to take me away. I thought -”
“You thought he could save you.”
The voice that echoes down from the top of the attic stairs, above them both, is mocking, heavy with cruel amusement.
Michael looks up just in time to see David’s smile twist, his lips curling in contempt. “Little fool.”
Star flinches, again, pressing her shoulder against the stone of the wall.
David’s sneer fades as his eyes flick up from Star’s cowering form to Michael, his eyes bright with something Michael can’t name. “All she did was deliver you to me.”
Michael’s strength has ebbed, over the long autumn and winter months he’s been trapped in this decaying mausoleum, this mockery of a home. Illness, doubt, and horror have robbed him of much of the brash impulsiveness his father always despaired of in him.
Neither of these truths stops him from charging toward the stairs and David, fury thundering in his veins.
Michael doesn’t know what he means to do, once he reaches the baronet – the imposter? And as it transpires, he never has the chance to learn.
He makes it only a few steps before a ringing blow strikes him across the face, a blow that David, from the top of the stairs, could not possibly have struck him. And yet, Michael’s face stings under the warmth of spilled blood. His feet are gone from under him, nothing but air cushioning his fall as the stone beneath him rises up to strike him a second and a third blow, to his shoulders, his back, his knee, as he tumbles like a ragdoll to the floor. His heel strikes hard against something that gives with a splintery crack, and there’s a hollow clattering of wood under the wrenching scream that Star lets loose.
“Michael!”
It takes Michael a moment, stunned and already weakened as he is, to find his bearings. To lift his head again, to begin the slow, painful process of raising himself back to his feet, all the while searching the shadows of Allerdale’s crumbling great hall for David’s sneering face.
When his eyes do light upon it, though, Michael has to wonder if he’s taken leave of his senses. If, perhaps, he hit his head on the stone stairs and slipped, without his knowing, into another nightmare. If his twilit life at Allerdale Hall has driven him as mad as Star.
The face that looms suddenly out of the darkness above is, unmistakeably, David’s. And yet, it’s also, unmistakeably, the face of a monster.
Michael knows those hellish eyes. He knows those sharp, sharp teeth.
He’s felt them in his throat.
“Lord Almighty,” Michael breathes, half-scrambling backwards across the floor as he tries to rise to his feet. The knee he bashed against the stairs doesn’t seem to want to hold him, despite the white silk of Star’s nightdress fluttering as she hurries to his side, the cool strength in her slender arms as she tries to help him upright.
The bestial amber eyes of the face caught in the firelight narrow, the long yellow tusks bare in a mocking grin, and David’s voice says, “He’s not here, Michael.”
All the warning Michael gets is Star’s scream of “David, no!” before hands like claws, like iron, grasp his shoulders, tearing him from her arms.
The stone vanishes, once again, from beneath his feet, and then Michael is falling, helplessly, through empty space.
He has two whole storeys to fall. This time, Michael has just time enough to understand, to brace himself, before the floor can reach up and slap him from the air, wrench the breath from his lungs, dash his brains from his skull and his bones to dust. Time enough to grasp, desperately, out for Star’s extended hand, vanishing from view as the force of David’s impossible throw drags him ever further from her reach. Time enough to hear the cackling laughter reverberating throughout the high vastness of the great hall, until it seems to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
Time enough to wonder at how long he seems to have been falling, at how he has nevertheless failed to yet meet the ground.
The cackling continues even as David’s voice breaks through the silence, what Michael had taken for mere echoes revealed at last as, in truth, multiple voices. “Whatever could be troubling you? Michael?”
On the last word, the voice comes very near to Michael’s ear, the wind of it tickling the side of his neck, and he whips around as best he can to try to catch a glimpse of the speaker. But his efforts are hampered by the lack of anything from which to ground himself, to push against. He twists and jackknifes in the clear air, against the wind of his falling that still buffets against him despite, as he can now see by gauging against the staircase and the walls, the fact that he is no longer moving. At all.
Somehow – somehow, it’s as though the wind itself is holding him aloft. As though he’s wasted away enough to weigh no more than a single autumn leaf from the great hall’s perpetual pile.
It strikes Michael then, that if Star and David are both mad, he must credit himself with an equal share in their madness.
He tries, with great apprehension, a stroke with his arms as though swimming through the air, and the laughter filling the hall breaks into whoops and jeers. As though the invisible chorus is entertained by Michael’s predicament. By Michael’s terror. Though the loudest laughter of all comes from close beside Michael’s other ear. David’s.
“In need of a hand, Michael?”
A caress of leather-gloved fingers across the back of Michael’s neck transforms into a clawed grip. The way it jerks him upward through the air is, by now, familiar. Michael has no time to protest, to get his bearings, before he’s flung to his knees on the stone of the landing once more. His injured knee twists painfully under him, forcing him to throw out his hands to brace himself.
There’s a sharp sting as the heels of his hands scrape against the stone, a wet warmth against his right palm, and Michael curls his fingers inward against the cut. A strong smell of iron rises on the air, reminding him strangely, for a moment, of the tea that both David and Star had pressed on him. Something in his belly, that yawning pit that has been with him almost since he crossed the threshold of Allerdale Hall, sits up and takes notice.
Silk rustles and settles around him, light and cool as a breath, as Star hurries over to kneel beside him, her hands solicitous on his shoulders, his face.
Michael shoves her roughly aside.
When he feels he has mastered himself sufficiently to raise his head, he finds his eyes on level with boots.
Four pairs.
He lifts his gaze slowly, uncertain whether he should trust the evidence of his senses. Uncertain whether this has, perhaps, all been some strange, fevered dream. Perhaps none of it has been real, from the moment he swung the attic door open to find Star and David entwined, to this moment now.
The pain in his hands and his knee and his shoulders and the pit of his stomach says otherwise.
David stands a little proud from the rest of the group, that monstrous visage concealed once more behind a smirking mask of handsome humanity. But Michael will never again mistake the hellish light in those blue eyes.
Of the other three, two are unknown to him. The long, dark hair and darker eyes of the man with nothing beneath his buckskin jacket save a pair of breeches, the vicious amusement in the grin of the little dandy with the death’s-head pin sparkling rhinestone eyes at Michael from his cravat, cocking his head at Michael like a bird of prey, spark no recognition. Only a hazy sort of familiarity, as though he might have met them once in a long-forgotten dream. But the wild blond mane of the man in the tattered naval officer’s garb –
“Michael! We meet again.” Paul Crenshawe throws his head back in a maniac laugh, the others following suit. “The look on your face!”
“What -” Michael manages, and then finds his train of thought entirely stymied. “Who…”
“Where, when, and why,” the little dandy pipes up, glancing over at the others. “Oh, and how. I think that ought to cover it, don’t you?”
“You’ve met Star, Michael,” David says, leering, triumphant. “Don’t you think she makes a pretty little lure?”
Michael casts a glance toward Star, curled in on herself before what remains of the banister, clutching her robe about herself as though it could shut out the nightmare in which they both find themselves entrapped.
“She told you the truth, you know. We have a name. And little else.” David crouches on his toes before Michael, reaching out to grasp him by the chin, force his face up. Michael meets his blue gaze with as much defiance as he can muster when his limbs still mostly feel like water, and is rewarded with a low chuckle. “You won’t be the first whose estate will help keep this crumbling old roof over Star’s head. Isn’t that what you wanted, Michael? To provide for her?”
He gives Michael’s chin a little side-to-side shake, leaning in to grin directly into the teeth of Michael’s glare. “To protect her?”
Michael doesn’t know what possesses him, where the sudden urge to snap his teeth in David’s face rises from. He manages, with a little difficulty, to swallow it down, though he can feel the snarl his lip curls into without his directing it to. The pit in his belly twists cruelly.
David smiles at him, the cat that got the cream, and gives his cheek a gentle pat before releasing his grip on Michael’s face and rising back to his feet. “You have a rare opportunity, now, Michael. A choice. One that not every man who’s cast his eyes in Star’s direction gets. You can join us. Or you may, if you prefer, join the others.”
He bobs his head to one side, as though indicating something unseen, his grin turning sly. “Down in the vats.”
“You – you killed -”
The dark man fixes Michael with a look as though Michael is dog dirt on his heel. “And we’ll kill again.” He says it as casually as commenting on the weather, that solemn mask cracking with a vicious grin as he adds, “Shortly, if you choose wrong.”
The little dandy snickers.
Michael looks from face to face, searching for a flicker of kindness, a scrap of sympathy.
He doesn’t find it.
“You were poisoning me,” Michael accuses David, who raises both eyebrows in a silent sort of shrug. He doesn’t deny it. “You claimed I sleepwalked – I never did, did I?”
A chilling thought strikes Michael, clean through to his core, and he blurts before he can think, “Those dreams I had, of you – they weren’t dreams at all.”
The smile that curves across David’s face is cold and sharp as ice.
“Michael.” Star’s voice is barely more than a whisper, heavy with regret. But she offers no explanation, no apology, only a plea. “Please. I tried -”
“You tried what?” The fury burning in Michael’s breast frightens him, a little, only the fact of his spent strength and his twisted knee keeping him from rising and rounding on Star. He doesn’t know what he might do, in this instant, with red rage pounding behind his eyes, through his veins, in the pit of his guts.
He’s been used, betrayed, violated in the most unimaginable ways, and now, as he stands on the very gallows, she has the nerve, the unmitigated gall, to beg his sympathy? He could take her slender graceful neck in both hands and wring it. He could rip her open gullet to gizzard with his bare hands. He could watch her gasp helplessly until the life in her bled out over his hands, until she lay limp and still and cold in his arms…he could…he could lick her life’s-blood from his fingers, from her cooling skin, he could tear the throat out of her with his teeth while she still lived and suckle the wound while that blood was still hot, still fresh…
When Michael manages to form words, spitting them into David’s avid gaze, he’s alarmed by how strange his own voice sounds to him, rough and gravelly in his ears. “What have you done to me.”
David’s smile grows wider, catlike. “As I told you, Michael. Given you a choice.”
His grip on Michael’s shoulder as he yanks Michael roughly to his feet is firm and hard as iron, every bit as unyielding. Michael expects to collapse back to his knees the moment David releases that grip, but to his surprise, his twisted knee holds his weight. He tests it, and finds it tender, but little more. His shoulders twinge where he’d bashed them against the stone steps, when David snakes his arm across them in a mockery of companionship, but no more than a twinge. The only thing that truly hurts, now, is that winding twisting clenching thing in the pit of Michael’s belly.
“So, then. Michael. What’s it to be?” David’s grin is bare inches from Michael’s face, the iron in his grip belying the friendly way he pats Michael’s shoulder. Michael can’t help but think again of his dreams, of the teeth he knows lurk behind David’s smile, so close to the exposed flesh of his throat. “Never have a care again for money. Never have a care again for scandal or disgrace, for the demands of miserable old men who fancy themselves your superiors, your betters. Never grow old. Never die. Be one of us…”
The others are already beginning to snicker before David says, pleasantly, “Or be history.”
Never die? Michael’s first thought was correct. David must be quite mad.
But Michael can’t deny it. He has no explanation for what transpired just moments ago, when David had flung him from the landing. When Michael had failed to fall. He has no explanation for how quickly the complaints of his injuries have vanished. And he has no explanation for that face, those demon’s eyes, those tiger-tusks that David had sported. No explanation for how David had been able to move across such distances with such impossible speed, the iron strength in his arm, his voice in Michael’s ear as Michael had hung midair. No explanation for the dreams that had not, in truth, been dreams.
No explanation, save for Star’s.
David is the curse.
It hardly matters. Madness or no, what David offers, either way, is murder. What David demands is murder. What David – what David and Star – have done is murder.
Still, Michael cannot wholly deny there is a certain allure. Beyond just the feeling that flares in his chest at a brush of Star’s delicate hand, the anticipation that quivers every nerve at the sight of David’s predator’s smile. Something in David’s words about scandal, about money, about miserable old men, strikes a chord.
Michael’s father was the one who abandoned his family with no warning, reason, or prospects, but his mother and brother are the ones who’ve paid for it. As though there were anything his mother could have done differently. As though the whole sordid affair were her fault. As though Michael and Sam could somehow have stopped it, should somehow now force their grown mother to act the wilting wallflower, the poor relation hidden in the attic and pathetically grateful for crumbs. As though the three of them still owe any kind of respect to the man who had treated them with none.
The thought of escaping from under the thumb of Buffalo society, Michael must admit, is tantalising.
But he’s not willing to kill for it.
“Why me?” he asks, more to buy himself time than out of any real desire for an answer.
“Why not you, Michael?” But David’s grip tightens, suddenly possessive. “Look around at this place! Have you ever seen anything so devoid of life?”
For a second time, Michael finds himself forced to agree.
“We told you no lies, Michael. The name of Sharpe has grown quite unpopular in these parts.”
“No thanks to Paulie,” the little dandy says, an aside, and Paul cuffs him upside the head. He thrusts an elbow into Paul’s side in return, knocking Paul into the dark man, and the three of them fall into a scuffle that seems to absorb all of their attention.
“Yes, Star’s little romance certainly failed to help matters,” David continues, with a contemptuous glance at Star, still huddled against the remnants of the railing. “But I believe the blame lies more with the collapse of the mines due to the carelessness and greed of the late Lord Sharpe, which took the lives of countless husbands, brothers, and sons. Wouldn’t you say, Star?”
Star raises her eyes under furrowed brows, responding to David’s goading only with a flashing glare.
“Or perhaps it was the previous Lord Sharpe, and what they said were his unnatural appetites. The ones that led them to lock and bolt all the nursery windows,” he explains, to Michael, very matter-of-fact, as though the words he speaks do not paint a picture of a nightmare. “Or could it have been, by chance, the rumours of his father hunting young men and women from the countryside for sport?”
David’s too-bemused smile seems to be pointed, aimed directly at Star. “There certainly have been enough atrocities laid upon the name, over the decades, to foment a little resentment. And more than enough mysterious disappearances and deaths to substantiate the rumours. Haven’t there been, Star?”
Michael flashes back to that evening he’d thought he’d heard them discussing their plan to poison him – had heard them. He’s certain now, even though he still cannot say how he was made to hear the voices as though they issued from an empty room. He remembers the tales David had regaled him with, as David helped him back to the master bedchamber. The nasty ends that so many of the Sharpes seem to have met suddenly take on a new and sinister light.
David flashes Michael a bright-eyed smirk, as though he can hear the horrified thoughts racing through Michael’s brain.
David is the curse.
“But at last we’ve come to the end of the bloodline,” David says conversationally, reaching out to draw Star to her feet. She rises, slowly, her eyes fixed on his face as though mesmerised. “None left, after you, my dear, to carry on the cursed name.”
He winds one of Star’s loosed dark curls around his gloved fingers, letting it slide through his grip to brush softly against her bared collarbone. She flinches as though struck, and David smiles.
“After poor Paul, I began to wonder,” he muses, out loud, speaking to Michael without taking his eyes from Star’s. “If perhaps my dear sister had the right of it. If we have wrung every possible drop of blood from this particular stone. The Sharpes and their legacy are utterly destroyed, just as I once promised. Perhaps it is time we sought greener pastures. And what pastures are greener than those of the New World? Where there are gaslights, and solid roofs on all the houses, and no ancient superstitions about cursed blood, and no one anymore really truly believes in monsters?”
Michael’s still reeling from the realisation that David had overheard his conversation with Star – had, perhaps, eavesdropped on every conversation he’s had with Star, within these crumbling walls – when David delivers the knockout punch.
“But to establish ourselves in the New World as we’ve become accustomed to here, we need money, and connections. You’re the key to the new America, Michael. And you’ll open all her doors for us. Alive…or dead.”
David steps forward, and as though responding to some secret signal, the other three break up their scuffle to flank him. Their advance forces Michael back until he steps over the broken railing, until his heel meets the edge of the landing. Michael risks a glance away from David’s face, down toward the inlaid floor two storeys below.
He doesn’t know, should he take that fall again, whether the same miracle would save him twice.
“I grow weary of these games, Michael,” David drawls. “Are you one of us? Or are you not?”
Michael starts to open his mouth, still unsure of what he’s going to say, what he can do.
But as it transpires, he never has the chance to find out.
Instead, he’s interrupted by a hollow heavy knocking at the door. And a voice from without, a voice that simultaneously makes his heart leap even as the pit of his stomach plummets like a stone.
“Open up! I know you have my brother locked up in this mausoleum!”
Dvid turns to glance over at the door, and then back to Michael, raising an eyebrow. “Yours?”
Michael doesn’t dare breathe a word. His heart is hammering in his throat. Sam isn’t supposed to be here.
The knocking turns to a ferocious hammering, and a voice Michael doesn’t recognise, trying hard to sound deep and imposing, bellows, “Last chance, leeches, before we break this door down!”
David regards Michael with narrowed eyes for a moment longer.
And then he smiles.
“All right,” he calls down, through the vast empty space of the hall. “Coming.”
And then, quieter, “Boys? On your best behaviour, now.”
Michael likes nothing about the way David grins, the murmurings of laughter from his friends, the way Star shrinks away, as David says, “We’re about to receive company.”