“Wrong. You are wrong.” She flicked her gaze to his scar, dull and raised in the candlelight. It had to have bled copiously, covering him in scarlet, his clothes, his hands, smelling of metal as it poured upon the ground. “It’s because you have a good heart that the war damaged you so badly. You cannot go back to being that boy. He’s unneeded. But you can move forward and become someone wiser, someone stronger.”

“Damn you.” His voice was barely human. “Why can’t you leave me in peace?”

Moving away from him, she hovered beside the window. So little was this chamber used that the servants had not closed the curtains for the night. The fog-choked city appeared beyond the glass, and the muted sounds of men and women plummeting deeper into an unrelenting nightmare speared through the heavy silence.

“There is no peace, Bram,” she said over her shoulder. “This night has proven it. You can close your eyes and cover your ears, but it makes no difference. Bit by bit, piece by piece, the world is crumbling away. All we can do—all we must do—is fight.”

“None of this was my doing.”

She whirled around. “Tell yourself that, but you know otherwise. I did summon the Dark One, so the original blame is mine. Yet deep in your heart, no matter your protestations, you understood exactly what your bargain with the Devil meant. The burden falls to both of us.”

When he only scowled at her, she spread her hands wide. For the first time ever, she had to supplicate herself, show . . . humility. I was wrong. We have the means of transforming ourselves even after death, because I am not the woman I once was.

“Please, Bram.” Her voice was a bare whisper, raw as a scraped knuckle. “I cannot do this alone. I need your help.”

The entreaty in her eyes and words must have shaken him, for he looked away. “This cause deserves a better champion than me.”

“Perhaps it does.” She felt a flare of exultation as he whirled to glare at her. He wasn’t immune from pride, and she needed that. A humble man made for a poor warrior. “But you are all we have.”

He could not recall being awake at this hour, not having already seen his bed. Usually if Bram watched the sun crest the spires and rooftops, he was on his way home after a night’s revelry, experiencing the waking city as a visitor from a distant land. Men of trade bustling to their offices. Farmers walking beside their drays laden for market. Crossing sweeps, housemaids, bankers, merchants, costermongers. Here was the realm of business, ambition, subsistence—concepts as alien to him as breathing underwater or flight.

Yet now he rode his chestnut mare through the glare of a daytime London, and though oppressive clouds draped low in the sky, he squinted against the brightness. He had the oddest feeling that the good, industrious citizens would stand and point accusing fingers at him as he wended through the streets, demanding the intruder be driven from the gates and there to pass his days in exile.

But rest had been in short supply as of late. He’d barely dipped below the surface of sleep before his eyes had opened, sticky and hot, to stare at the bed canopy overhead. Livia’s words had dug beneath his skin like burrs, banishing peace. He’d risen from bed no more replenished than he had been hours earlier. Almost on principle, he’d thought to lie abed until his usual hour, but disquiet churned like a rising storm. After nearly murdering an innocent man, he doubted he’d be welcome at the fencing academy. How then, to quell the cagey energy that goaded him into motion?

His grooms had been startled by his appearance in the stable and demand for a horse to be saddled. They had complied, as they were paid to do, and minutes later he trotted toward the park. Impatience burned him. A full gallop was the only pace that could give any measure of release, yet traffic demanded that he keep himself at a sedate gait. At the least, it allowed him the rare experience of seeing London at the height of its bustle, the innumerable people jostling and hurrying from one end of the city to the other on important—or unimportant—business.

All was not order and civility, however. The streets were littered with broken glass, shattered pieces of masonry, and charred wood. An overturned carriage lay on the cobblestones like a carcass, picked clean by carrion feeders. Broken windows reflected back the cloudy sky in shards. And the people moved as though chased by resolute assassins, their heads down, shouldering aside whomever crossed their path, snarling in anger should anyone prove a slow-moving obstacle.

The disease advances, Livia’s voice murmured in his mind.

If a limb is infected, he answered, it’s amputated.

Too late for that. The sickness is in the blood, and our own hearts spread its decay.

He had no answer to that. Everywhere around him was proof. As he progressed toward the park, he felt Livia’s presence, always near, always close. Impossible to feel truly alone when she never left him, like a second heartbeat.

The greater irony? Only days ago, he considered her the greatest punishment. Now . . . the piercing loneliness he had felt, even sometimes in the company of the other Hellraisers, kept itself in abeyance. She was opinionated, obstinate, maddeningly headstrong. And the only person—if a ghost could be called a person—who gave him no quarter. Whit, his closest friend, never knew him as thoroughly as Livia did. Whit never had access to Bram’s most closely-kept self. Livia was everywhere within him.

Guiding his horse around two women arguing in the road, Bram thought, Last night was a first for me.

Visiting a brothel without partaking of its merchandise? Her voice was wry.

That was novel. But I’ve never had so much conversation with a woman in my bed.

Technically, I was on your bed. And I’m not truly a woman.

Most assuredly you’re a woman. When sleep had come, his dreams had alternated between scenes of chaos and fevered images of Livia, fully flesh, fully nude, her dark hair tumbling over her shoulders, her olive-hued limbs entwined with a man’s. Sometimes the man had a stranger’s face, sometimes the face was Bram’s. A mingling of her memories and his. He’d awakened with an uneasy heart and an aching cock.

Did he desire her? Resent her? Like her? Or was it an uncomfortable alloy of all these feelings?

You must have spoken to the women you took to bed, she answered.

Not certain if ‘Spread your legs,’ counts as legitimate discourse.

Her low chuckle was that of a goddess, pagan and earthy. I was never one for an exchange of confidences either. There were more important matters to attend to once a mattress was in the vicinity.

I’d no idea Roman women were so . . . unconstrained, he thought. Aside from Messalina.

She was too stupid to conduct her affairs with discretion, Livia scoffed. But my freedom was my own doing. I didn’t want to suffer the confining virtue of being a wife. And honored daughters resigned themselves to respectable, stultifying chastity. A priestess of Hecate, however, and one with my wealth of knowledge about magic, the years of study and natural ability . . . if there was something, someone I wanted, I could have them.

You sound like a Hellraiser.

Had there been such a thing when I lived, I surely would have been one.

You would’ve been fearsome indeed. He seethed with restlessness, but thinking of beds port was a continuous drumbeat, like an ancient slave ship urging its captives to greater speed on the oars, lest they suffer the wrath of the lash.

At last, Hyde Park came into view, its treetops and wide swaths of field a welcome respite after the tight press of buildings and people.