Page 17 of A Honeymoon of Grave Consequence (The Unexpected Adventures of Lady and Lord Riven #2)
How could she have ever doubted exactly what she felt for him? She might have initially justified their alliance on practical, rational grounds, but her heart had never accepted those limitations. She’d simply been too much of a coward to admit the truth to herself...
But it must all have been blatantly on show to the baroness through her mirror every day. Whether the mirror that was Reflection’s Heart revealed her husband’s vampiric image or not, Margaret herself had been on full display, with all of her emotions only too obvious to everyone but her.
Leonie said, “But Lord Riven told me to protect you.”
“ I’m not the one...in danger now. Go !” Gritting her teeth against the burn in every muscle, Margaret forced herself forward to doggedly continue her own unbearably slow run across the mossy, uneven ground, which felt no longer magical or mysterious but only littered with infuriating obstacles.
Thankfully, Leonie sped past her a moment later, swiftly disappearing from view through the trees.
With every brutally slow minute that passed in the dim green world of the Black Forest, as Margaret lurched around tree branches, scrambled over rocks, and jumped over trickling, shadowed streams, she prayed with more fervency than she’d felt in years that the nachzehrer would reach the inn on time.
When she finally glimpsed the inn through the thick press of trees ahead, she saw the front door left standing carelessly ajar, like a mouth opened in a scream. She lunged forward, all pain smothered by one last, panicked burst of energy.
“Doom!” wailed the specter who floated just inside the door.
Margaret thundered up the cobwebbed staircase without stopping to ask him for details. Leonie met her in the dark corridor, holding out her pale hands and opening her mouth to speak, but Margaret dodged around her. She didn’t stop until she reached the open doorway of her own room.
The bed where she’d left her husband was empty. Even the covers were all gone. They must have been used to swathe his body against the burning rays of the sun.
There were, of course, no signs of struggle in the room. He wouldn’t have had any idea what was happening to him, alone and undefended.
Margaret turned, slowly and full of dread, to the dusty mirror on the vanity.
The baroness’s face smiled at her from the glass, free of her cloak and revealed to be an elegant woman, perhaps fifteen years Margaret’s senior, with silvering dark hair beautifully arranged above a gown that even Margaret recognized as no longer fashionable.
“ Finally ,” the baroness purred. “I’ve been waiting to show you something.”
Standing up, she tilted her side of the mirror to reveal the carpeted floor beside her...where a long, transparent glass coffin had been placed. Filtered through her own non-supernatural mirror, Margaret couldn’t see anyone inside...
But she knew exactly who must be laid out within that coffin even before the baroness tilted Reflection’s Heart once more to show the thick, cream-colored curtains that hung over floor-to-ceiling windows perilously nearby.
“I can open these curtains at any moment to allow the sun inside, Lady Riven. So, tell me: are you finally ready to accept my invitation?”
When Margaret stumbled back down the staircase three minutes later, her mind was a whirling storm with no clear center for thought.
She was well on her way down the final flight of stairs before she even took in the blurred sound of agitated voices nearby—and it took another second for her vision to finally focus and reveal almost all her fellow residents of the inn assembled at the bottom of the staircase, waiting for her by the front door.
It was such a baffling sight that she stopped, blinking in confusion. Still, the startlement cleared her mind enough that she heard every word Leonie spoke as the nachzehrer hurried up the first few steps of the staircase to meet her: “What are we going to do?”
“ We? ’” Margaret repeated blankly.
That pronoun certainly couldn’t include her . She hadn’t been part of a ‘we’ with anyone except one particular person in well over a decade, and he wasn’t here. He was in danger. He needed her!
But why would Leonie bother asking Margaret about what any of the others should be doing? Margaret had only been accepted into this refuge in the first place on sufferance as her husband’s companion. Now that he was gone... oh, God...
“ All of us,” Leonie repeated slowly and clearly, frowning and stepping even closer.
“What did the baroness tell you? She was watching in the mirror when I went to your room, but she said she’d only talk to you, so I went to wake up everyone else.
Olga’s out on one of her mysterious wanders—sometimes she disappears for days—but all the rest of us are up now and ready. ”
“Ready...for what?” Dazed, Margaret shook her head in utter incomprehension. She was the odd one out here, as usual—and for once, she couldn’t force her brain to think through the puzzle.
“Ready to get Lord Riven back, of course. What did you think was happening here?”
Earlier today, Margaret had felt like an expert guiding a new assistant. Now, she stared into the young nachzehrer’s eyes and felt lost. “But I’m the one she threatened. I refused her invitation and made her angry, so it was my husband?—”
“Ahem.” A tall, unfamiliar man with unfashionably long, greying brown hair stepped forward at the bottom of the stairs. “Lady Riven.” He nodded with grave courtesy. “We’ve met only once before, last night, when I was in my other form.”
“Other—? Oh, yes, of course.” Even in its current, storm-hammered state, her brain could put that much together: this must be Herr von Krallemann, the werewolf owner of this inn.
Perhaps she ought to curtsey to him—but he was already speaking again, his voice firm.
“According to Fr?ulein Leonie, our neighboring baroness has been watching all of us through our mirrors for months and actively abusing at least one guest in our inn through that medium.”
Pausing, he swept his gaze across the other assembled guests. “To be clear: was Fr?ulein Leonie the only one to hear degrading personal insults—in their own heads, as it may have seemed—when looking into their bedroom mirrors?”
Gazes shifted away from him in response. Low, unhappy murmurs sounded. Herr Schneider played a low, melancholy ripple of notes in a minor key on his soul pipe, while Herr Fischer, the night raven, jerked his head in a swift, unhappy negative.
Apparently, Leonie had not been the baroness’s only victim.
Margaret could feel distant rage at that news lighting somewhere far on her emotional horizon, but it couldn’t burn through the numbness at her core. That shield of blank not -feeling was all that kept her standing upright now instead of falling into a useless panic.
“In other words,” Herr von Krallemann said inexorably, “you and your husband are far from the first or only members of my household to have been attacked, and she began well before you came here. This inn is meant to be a much-needed shelter, not a staging ground for her malice. None of us can allow the situation to continue nor allow this blatant outrage to go unpunished.”
“But what can we do?” The words burst out from Herr Fischer as he jigged unhappily on the tiled foyer floor, wrapping his arms tightly around his chest. “Can’t send for the local militia for help. They’d never stand for us against a human.”
“They might, perhaps....” Herr von Krallemann began.
“No!” Margaret spoke urgently over him. “ No one can march over there in an attack. At the first sign of any militia or the rest of you approaching, she’ll open her curtains and turn my husband into ashes! She showed me where she’s holding him; he has no protection.”
“I see.” Herr von Krallemann’s expression tightened.
“In that case, if she followed through on her threat...and her servants cleared away the ashes quickly enough...then the militia would not believe he had ever even been there. She could even complain that we were the ones harassing her by calling them.”
“They’d believe it, too,” Herr Fischer muttered.
At the image of dusty ashes swept into a fireplace, Margaret felt a wave of faintness nearly overcome her; she forced herself to focus instead on her next step. “I have to go to her estate alone, ready to do whatever she tells me if he’s to have any chance at surviving the day.”
“But you can’t,” Leonie said. “You told me yourself earlier not to trust her to keep her word on anything—and who knows what she might ask you to do?”
Nausea curled through Margaret’s stomach. “I know,” she said, voice low and shamed. “Lord Riven would never wish me to make this choice. But I can’t lose him, even for my principles—or his. I cannot .”
“Ohhh.” By rights, Leonie should have been disgusted by that confession—but she let the word out on a long, wondering sigh. “I was wrong about you after all. I see! You don’t think of him as lesser at all—and you didn’t marry him only for the sake of your studies, did you?”
“My husband is the best and most honorable man I’ve ever known,” Margaret said tightly. “He is lesser to no one .”
And if he woke tonight to discover that she’d committed unforgivable acts in the baroness’s service—in his name!—he would never look at her the same way again.
Five minutes ago, alone in her room, she’d seen that crushingly bleak outcome as her best and only hope for his survival.
Now, though, under Leonie’s expectant gaze—and surrounded by a breathtakingly unexpected crowd of willing support—she drew a deep, clearing breath for the first time since she’d glimpsed that glass coffin in her mirror and been overwhelmed by mindless terror.