The Dark Affair by Máire Claremont Page A

else would he get rid of the sweat now trickling down his back?
    Those hands tugged at him again until finally he looked upon the woman at his side. The black veil had been pulled back, and her saintly face peered up at him, her eyes full of intensity. “Listen to me.”
    He didn’t know if he could. The world was so . . . so lost to him right now, as if he’d jumped into an incredibly deep ocean and the waves kept crashing over his head. Drowning him. Compressing him. Wrapping him in death.
    “You need morphine.”
    “No.” He jolted away from her hands, backing away. “Don’t want it.”
    “Not much,” she assured. “Just a little. To stop the imminent hallucinations that come with abrupt ceasing.”
    He shook his head, and the very motion cracked his skull. He winced. His tongue didn’t want to form words, but he very carefully managed to say, “No more. Will not be poisoned.”
    She took a step toward him, her black gown stuttering in his vision like the great feathered appendages of a demon. “If you do not, my lord, you will be screaming for it soon, and the effects will be most unpleasant.”
    The veil around her face twisted into a strange iron crown. Queen of the damned. Queen of the underworld. He swallowed. The entire church bent around him, tumbling into distorted shapes. “Do I look like I give a damn?”
    “You are in a house of the Lord,” the bishop hissed.
    She whipped toward the old man, whose purple cloak had twisted into strange, overshadowing wings. “I think God will forgive him, Your Grace, given he’s out of his raving wits right now what with his need for opium.”
    He lifted his hands to his temples. No wings. No demons. Maggie. That’s who she was. But he was losing even that thought. “I am . . . not”—he gulped back the sick at his throat—“out of my wits.”
    “Sure, and you could walk down Pall Mall right as rain, then?”
    “I most certainly could.” He turned from her and stared down the long nave, determined to show he was not mad. Determined to show he needed no one but himself. But as soon as he did, the church doors went up in crackling flames. A portal to the world he had always so secretly feared but knew he deserved.
    “I—I—”
    Those gentle hands came up and touched his arm. “Let me help you.”
    He could not tear his gaze away from the fiery doorway. “I don’t want to go,” he whispered.
    “Go where?”
    “To hell.”
    “You’re not going to hell,” she soothed.
    But he couldn’t shake the growing fear inside him. “You don’t understand.”
    “Tell me?”
    A breath shuddered out of him. “I’ll never see them again if I go to hell.”
    Her fingers gripped harder, then went up to his face, cupping his cheeks. With a firm, cool grip, she urged his face down. “James, I will protect you from hell.”
    “Are you my angel, then?”
    Her face twisted. And for one brief moment, he could have sworn his red-haired Madonna was going to cry. But then her brow smoothed and her Caribbean-colored eyes locked with his. “Yes, James. I am your angel, and I will guide you away from the darkness. No one will ever take you there. I promise.”
    He looked to the doors, and the fire was gone. Two towering, carved wooden panels stood in the inferno’s place. How close he had come to hell. How close. And then he tumbled through the air, his body slamming against the floor. At last his cheek pressed against the cool marble. He smiled gently and let the world fade.
    •   •   •
    Margaret gnawed on her nail. A filthy habit and one she’d broken long ago, but she’d never seen the like as she’d seen today. She’d thought the bishop was going to have apoplexy, and if the man had been a Catholic, he’d no doubt have been sprinkling holy water everywhere and exorcising the place.
    The viscount had most definitely appeared possessed. But she knew better. He was in the throes of need. And despite his wishes, she’d injected him with a