“You can trust her, Jule.” He tapped his tumbler against his thigh. “As well as you can trust me.”
“You say this because you’ve invited her into your life, involved yourself in hers.” Julian tapped his tumbler on the desk. Three hard pops while he ruminated. “Her gift, as I assume she has one?”
This was where Finn paused, trepidation, the same he’d felt since the debacle on the docks, seizing him. He was no good to anyone if he let fear manage him…but the enormity of Victoria’s gift frightened him. Their enemies often had incredible abilities, a talent to see into the future and the past, their desire to use their gifts for nefarious means the difference. The League could never slumber, never rest, never disregard. “She seems able to erase memories. Short-term, brief, I’m not sure how far back it goes—minutes, hours, days—but erasure just the same. When she touched me, I took a mental stumble before I could right myself. I’ve never felt the like.”
Julian slid his hands across the desk, scattering ledgers and sketch pads, paintbrushes and ink wells. “Something odd occurred when I entered the house after talking to you on the lawn. I touched the doorknob and saw nothing, Finn. Which has not happened to me ever. Not once in my life have I touched an object and not seen images of a person who touched it before.” He drew a shaky breath, his fingers flexing into fists. “Is that because of this girl?”
Finn stared into his tumbler, wishing like hell more gin would magically appear. Why couldn’t any of them have that gift? “I can’t read her. Nothing. When she’s around me, my ability to grasp her thoughts snuffs out like a flame in the wind. And it mutes what I receive from others. Sometimes more than mutes. She shuts me down.”
“A blocker,” Julian murmured in wonder.
Finn gave his empty tumbler another wistful glance. “Blocker?”
“Piper’s grandfather detailed it in the chronology, long passages from a German contact we have yet to translate. He believed a blocker cloaked supernatural ability. Lessened or halted outright. Dulling the shine, he called it. A gift he considered more powerful than Piper’s. There was believed to be another with the ability two hundred years ago. In Berlin, as I recall, hence the German texts. But nothing since.”
Finn closed his eyes, a headache ripping through his temples. More powerful than the healer. Of course. After they’d barely been able to safeguard Piper when their enemies found out about her. Should their enemies discover someone with the ability to block a psychic gift, protecting that person would pose an impossible challenge.
Unbearable, Finn thought as his heart dropped to his knees.
“Her dreams?” Julian asked.
Finn squeezed the bridge of his nose, shook his head. I don’t know.
“Will she work with you? With Piper? To test her ability, then cross-reference against what’s written in the chronology? You can translate the text.” Julian yanked a scrap of foolscap from beneath a ledger and starting scribbling notes across the page. “Does she need to touch someone to curb their gift or only be near them? Does one’s ability simply diminish or completely fade? How far away from you is she before you’re able to read minds again?”
“You think I know the answers to any of these questions?”
“We’ll have to increase security at the gates, the main house, the perimeter. Employ the Duke’s mercenaries in full force. You’ll have to make Lady Hamilton understand why she can’t go anywhere on this estate without someone with her. Not until Ashcroft and I have a chance to put a plan in place. It could be years, but at some point, she’ll need protection. At some point, they will find out about her.”
“She doesn’t trust me,” he whispered, loathe to imagine protecting her when the mere thought of losing someone else was intolerable.
Julian issued a brittle, humorless laugh. “With your shenanigans of late, would you?”
Finn spun the tumbler in his hands, shooting crystal prisms across the paint-stained Aubusson rug. He could tell Julian he was bored with the women, the drinking, the gambling. His pointless existence. By his own hand, he’d reduced himself to being an aimless commodity. “Do you know I’ve never had an honest relationship with a woman? One undertaken without knowing exactly what she’s thinking? Fairly easy to manage expectations when there are no surprises.” His encounters felt forged, crafted by knowledge he shouldn’t have, didn’t want, couldn’t prevent from slipping through the cracks of his mind.
Now, he felt out of sorts because he’d met a woman he couldn’t read as cleanly as the copy of The Mystery of Edwin Drood shoved in his portmanteau. For once, he’d been assigned a level playing field. Finn Alexander had no advantage in this game.
“Maybe she can help you experience a normal relationship. But be warned, you often have to give up one way of life for the chance at another. I speak from experience.”
“Normal,” Finn murmured, the word as foreign as the texts he translated.
Julian sighed. “Without reading her mind, Finn.”
Finn slid low in his chair, balancing the tumbler on his belly. He didn’t know how to be himself. And he didn’t know normal.
He also didn’t know what to do about Victoria Hamilton.
His lips curved in a cautious smile. The lady would be surprised to find she was what she loved.
A puzzle.
One Finn desperately wanted to solve.
Dinner that evening was a laborious affair.
Lady Beauchamp—Piper, as Victoria had again been urged to call her—had an infectious spirit, and it wasn’t from her lack of effort to ease the tension in the room that the gathering wilted like a discarded blossom.
Finn, the person bringing them all together, skipped out on the festivities, the rat.
“Dodging life,” she’d murmured when he failed to show, surprised when Viscount Beauchamp laughed in agreement. A sound filled with fondness and exasperation.
The viscount’s gaze had touched her often, questions about her parlor trick almost tumbling off his tongue like a rock down a well, but his wife had simply given the slightest shake of her head—not the time—to hold him off.
She’d watched Julian touch items on the table more often than he needed to, his cutlery, his wine glass, the saltshaker, while throwing bewildered looks her way. Eccentric behavior, on a curious estate, a setting teeming with those with mystical talents. Victoria had tried not to look over her shoulder too often, wondering what supernatural trick the footman might be able to employ, the kitchen maid, the cook. Thankfully, the meal was casual, even by country standards. Limited to five courses with no entertainment after, which was a blessing as a musicale by a tone-deaf heiress, was the last amusement she’d been subjected to.
With a sigh, Victoria closed her bedchamber door and slumped against it. One night down. A new puzzle book and the glass of sherry she’d smuggled upstairs awaited. If that didn’t put her to sleep, she’d sneak down to the kitchens and bake after the servants vacated the area.
“Didn’t show, did he?”
Victoria gasped, nearly spilling the sherry when she wanted every drop to hit her tongue, not the Beauchamp’s rug. “Who?”
“The scamp that drug us here, that’s who.” Agnes rose from the overstuffed chair tucked in a corner, hiding in wait for her mistress. She loved making disquieting entrances, and Victoria, after years of these contests, should have expected one. “Saw him climb into a showy landau, fancy crest decorating the side, and ride off into the night. Sneaking away from his brother’s disdain and heading for trouble in that charming village we passed on the way here.” Agnes crossed to Victoria, motioned for her to turn, then began unbuttoning her gown, a routine they’d completed a thousand times. “No good ever came from being that handsome. Just like no good has ever come from your prank. Scrambling thoughts and making people forget your foolishness, what kind of talent is that? A talent everyone in this house seems overly interested in, is what. I suppose because most of them seem filled with the spook, just like you. Takes one to know one. Peculiar, this entire place.”