Tied With a Bow

floated up in the dark, muffled and indistinct, like voices in a blizzard.
    “. . . gone before morning.”
    “. . . find her relatives. Basing, you say?”
    “. . . I can feel . . . not much time.”
    “It’s all right, lad. We’ll get her where she needs to go.”
    They were talking about her, she realized dully. It was her future they were deciding, these strange men with their shabby clothes and English accents.
    Her pride stung. Her throat burned. She was young and dazed with grief but not spiritless or stupid.
    She erupted from her nest in a flurry of skirts and resolution. Bits of hay scattered on the men below.
    “I do not go with anyone until I know who you are,” she announced.
    What you are , she thought, and shivered.
    They looked up, startled.
    She had a brief glimpse of their faces, the young one, lean and sardonic, the older man’s, broad and shrewd, before the light winked out.
    But her rescuer . . .
    Aimée forced air into her lungs. Her tall, handsome rescuer was already gone.

Chapter Two
     
    FAIR HILL, ENGLAND, OCTOBER 1800
     
    Damon Carleton, the Earl of Amherst, pinned Lucien with a look like a rapier blade, glinting, gray, and cold. “You need an occupation.”
    Despite the autumn chill of the library, sweat pricked under Lucien’s high, starched collar. He resisted the urge to tug at his neckcloth. “I had an occupation,” he reminded the earl. “I was an angel. Now I am nothing. A cipher. A human.”
    “You have had eight years to accustom yourself to that condition,” Amherst said evenly. “During which time you have been sheltered, educated, and well provided for.”
    Lucien stiffened. He was well aware that he owed everything to Amherst. Still, the reminder stung. “Because the world believes me your bastard.”
    Amherst raised his eyebrows. Even if one disregarded the earl’s earthly rank and powers, he was a formidable man, with a brawler’s build and an aesthete’s face. “When the old earl took me into his nursery to replace his dead heir, only the boy’s mother knew of the substitution. But you arrived on my doorstep as a youth of seventeen. I could hardly claim you as my legitimate son.”
    “Especially as you never married,” Lucien said.
    Amherst shrugged. “I have brought eleven bastard children to live at Fair Hill. Fallen, every one, of course. No wife could be expected to tolerate such flagrant reminders of her husband’s excesses.”
    Lucien inclined his head. “Indeed, sir, we are all grateful for your single state. As well as your ongoing liberality.”
    “Ongoing,” Amherst said, “but not without limit.”
    Lucien eyed him warily. It had been years since he was last summoned to the earl’s study for discipline, but he recognized that tone. “Sir?”
    “It is time you demonstrated some initiative. Made something of yourself. Made a difference in the world.”
    Lucien swallowed the bitterness in his mouth. “My last attempt at initiative could hardly be termed a success.”
    And that, of course, was the source of his discontent.
    Amherst, he was sure, was aware of the resentment simmering under his small rebellions. But even the earl, the head of the Nephilim, the Fallen ones, in England, did not guess at Lucien’s loss of faith.
    His heart burned.
    He had been punished—cast out of Heaven, demoted to the mortal world—for trying to make a difference. For trying to do some good. For answering a dying woman’s selfless prayer.
    In recent years he had concluded it was better not to try. Only with Fanny . . .
    “You did well enough during the Terror.” Amherst interrupted his thought. “Gerard tells me you saved his life or Tripp’s on more than one occasion. The three of you rescued hundreds of innocents from the guillotine. You were only a boy then, but you cannot have changed so much.”
    He remembered. He had made the moonlit channel crossing too many times to count, nearly puking with seasickness and excitement. At least when he’d been dodging French gendarmes and secret police, he had not questioned the value of his existence or the rightness of his decisions. Hundreds of innocents saved. The memory kindled a flicker of satisfaction.
    But then . . .
    “The Terror ended six years ago,” he said flatly. “Napoleon is in power now.”
    And Lucien had been bundled off to Oxford for a gentleman’s education. To equip him, Amherst had said, for what was to be the rest of his life on earth. Older than most of his classmates,