She pushed away from the door, one hand extended. “Hartley,” she whispered.
“Are you surprised to see me alive?” he asked coldly.
She blanched. “What?”
“Did you not tell your aunt who I was? Did you not know that she attempted to kill me with a pistol ball of iron?”
She shook her head wildly, loosening strands of hair from her elaborate coiffure. “No,” she cried. “I did not! My aunt—”
“She knew what I was, and how to hurt me,” he said. “How could she have known if you did not tell her?”
Eden’s expression had gone beyond shock. “I told her nothing. I would never see you hurt.” She reached out again. “Are you well? She did not harm you?”
Fear he had expected, but not this passionate sincerity. He shielded his heart. “Your aunt did not quite aim true. But Lady Claudia is a very clever woman. Most determined. It would have been convenient for you if she had succeeded, would it not?”
“No.” She took a step toward him. “No… I do not know what to call you.”
Reflected in her tear-bright eyes was the stranger’s face he wore, neither Hartley’s nor that of Cornelius. He let his shape change, and suddenly he was Hartley Shaw again, incongruously dressed in an aristocrat’s clothing.
“Does this set you at ease? Or should I alter my dress as well?”
“Hartley.” Her eyes pleaded with him, as they had done with Rushborough. “You meant to take my son from me.”
“Not when I came to you at Caldwick. I had other plans then.” The effort of speaking was beginning to tell on him. He spread his fingers on the wood as if he could draw its dormant energy into himself. “I waited for you, Eden. I even dared to hope.” He laughed. “I offered you all I had to give. You had not even the courtesy to answer me.”
Her posture straightened, like that of an errant soldier awaiting deserved punishment. “I was afraid to return. I was horrified at what you had revealed to me.”
“That I am not human?”
“That you deceived me not once, but twice. That you intended to steal my son. And—” She bit her lip. “Yes. Because of what you are. And because my whole life, and Donal’s, was shaped by your deception.” She looked away. “Did you use your Faerie powers on me? Did you cast a glamor upon me, so that I would… do your bidding?”
His heart had begun to pound, battered by emotion and the workings of man on every side. “I never bespelled you; I only took on different forms. What I was did not change.”
“And what is that?” She was calm now, unnaturally so. “A being who lives forever? Without a soul, or a heart, or the ability to love?”
His body shivered with warning. She understood much more than she had at their last meeting. She had talked to someone—someone who knew how to kill one of the Fane.
Claudia. Always Claudia.
An invisible fist slammed into his head. He sucked at air that no longer existed. The blood seemed to drain from his body. Soon he would be too weak to stand or to speak at all. With a great effort, he concealed his pain. She would not pity him.
“Lady Claudia has taught you much, has she not?” he said, fighting for breath. “Did she tell you… why she wishes to destroy me?”
Eden backed away until she came to one of the bookcases. Her fingers felt blindly along the row of spines, as if she sought answers among the pages of mortal writings.
“She knew you,” she said. “My father told her what you were six years ago, and of the bargain you made for my child. How you threatened Papa with death or worse if he did not obey. She thought you were gone forever, but then she discovered that you had returned, that you were Hartley Shaw. I did not even have to tell her. She knew.
“She told me… of your intention to put me at ease so that you could steal Donal from me. You must understand that I will not let that happen.”