Part First: The Hart Assurgent: Chapter 1

PART FIRST: THE HART ASSURGENT

"She seemed at once some penanced lady elf,

– John Keats, "Lamia"

Chapter 1:

The dark man was looking at Emily Swain.

She kept glancing up casually from her book to check the King's Cross map, or to glance at the great clock above his head – and it occurred to her, after she had been sitting there for about an hour, that she could catch him eyeing her about five out of every seven times she looked up. Every time she did catch him looking at her, it was for about one second longer than he could go back to reading his book (some crumbling and unbelievably thick leather-bound tome.)

Seeing as how Emily was quite pretty, and had red-gold hair, she was not unused to men looking at her, even when she looked (for her) something of a mess. As a result, Emily had become the sort of person who could rather assume that people would be more inclined to look at her in train stations than not.

Over the last few years of her life, however, Emily had felt little desire to flirt with anyone, or have anyone flirt with her, and found much of the attention that her red-gold-ness attracted to be rather annoying. However, this particular fellow in King's Cross was not playing the game of Surreptitiously Ogling Emily Swain the way she was used to playing it. Usually, when Emily observed men playing this game, they would show proper form and properly blush and squirm, and become properly flustered. The next step of the game was usually where they invented some asinine question to ask her in a properly stammering voice, and then properly retreated into cowed silence when she indicated that the game was over and they were to properly go away now.

This fellow's manner was entirely different. He did not blush, squirm, or fluster. He showed no sign of stammering or asking asinine questions – in fact, he had not tried to speak to her at all. He actually seemed quite composed, sitting there, reading his crumbly tome and sneaking glances at her with an almost insolently relaxed air, as if she were merely a part of the décor created by British Rail to prettify his train station experience.

Well then. She would retaliate by surreptitiously observing him. When he stood up, he would be quite tall, with longish black hair, and an olive complexion. He would have an austere, hawkish profile when he turned to look at the passing trains again. His clothes were a trifle unusual for King's Cross, for over his far from simple black suit, he wore a long black woollen cloak that reached the tops of his black boots. The bag beside him suggested a large physician's bag of the last century, the sort that would be full of arcane remedies and strange instruments.

On some men, this sort of garb would have been the ostentatiously theatrical badge of a professional actor, or at least an affinity with some sort of macabre subculture group. This man, however, wore his unusual clothes with such a disaffected air that they seemed utterly normal, even mundane. In short, he was nothing like the sort of man who usually stared after her at all. Thus, Emily Swain became intrigued.

She decided to test him, keeping her head bent down over her book for quite a long time, allowing him to think that she was absorbed in her work. She let ten pages go by, then fifteen.

Then she looked up at the clock again, unexpectedly, and his eyes dived down into his crumbly tome again. She smiled to herself.

She waited for him to try to speak to her, waited for a sarcastic "Pray excuse me, Miss, do you have the time, by any chance?" or "Miss, might I beg the loan of a pencil for a moment?" or "Pardon me, Miss, have you two fifty-pence for a pound?" that would dare her to strike up a conversation with him. But he didn't speak, to her now increasing impatience. He looked rather interesting, and she was now hoping, rather, to get to speak to him.

Then he got up to leave.

Emily felt a sting of irritation at this. He should try to speak to her, this fellow with the insolent eyes and the stubbornly unflustered and unblushing face. She glanced down at his bag, and spoke a word very softly, under her breath.

As she intended, he walked right past his big black physician's bag, completely forgetting that it was there, despite its presence right in front of him. In a moment, he had disappeared into the crowd.

She counted off five minutes by the big clock above her head, then got up, speaking the same word in the direction of her own luggage trolley, wheeling it against a wall and out of the way. When she got up to leave herself, she knew that her luggage could sit unattended for a year in plain sight in the middle of King's Cross station and not be noticed by even the most desperate of thieves.

Then she crossed to his left-behind black valise and picked it up. There was a sound from within like the chinking together of many glass bottles. She bent toward it... a miasma of scents adhering to old leather scent: herbs, insect carapaces, dried flower petals. Some kind of botanist or scientist, perhaps? Embossed on the worn leather in slightly peeling letters were the initials "S. S."

Emily headed for the Lost Items office.

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The dark fellow was arguing with the harassed-looking woman behind the counter when she arrived. She could smell his frustration from the moment she opened the door.

"It must be here," he was saying. "Check for a large black case, with a number of bottles inside it."

Emily walked up behind him. "Sir?"

S. S. half-turned in irritation. "Yes, can I help you?" he asked, as if helping this stranger behind him sounded only slightly more attractive than being suspended in a vat of famished piranha. No doubt he took her for a particularly thick train station employee of some sort.

"Did you say you were missing your bag, sir?"

"Yes, I am indeed missing my bag, thank you." He turned back to snarling at the bewildered clerk again.

Emily raised her voice and interrupted him. "Sir? Seeing as how I've only seen you get up and leave one bag behind about five minutes ago, I can only assume that perhaps this one is yours?"

At that, he looked up and saw that the someone addressing him was helpfully offering him his lost bag, and then noticed that the person doing so was the same person he had been eyeing for about an hour. Then he had the decency to look a trifle sheepish. He exuded surprise, and a touch of nervousness.

"Oh – why yes, that one is mine, Miss. I must have left it behind when, um, earlier." She handed it back to him with a little nod. "Thank you."

"Certainly. Think nothing of it. I simply thought it was odd when you got up like that and left it behind." Behind his back, the Lost Items clerk rolled her eyes and shook her head, grimacing direly.

"Yes, Miss... I don't know what made me so careless." He acted as though he didn't quite believe in the notion that he could have been so careless.

"Quite all right. All the bustle in King's Cross never made anyone feel more organized than before." She stood, not moving away, in a calm and expectant manner, as if they had been talking for a long time and it was now his turn to speak.

"Er, indeed not." He paused, no doubt wondering what she wanted with him, and not about to ask her what, exactly, she wanted with him. Which was a stroke of good fortune, because she probably couldn't have told him what exactly she wanted with him even if he had asked her.

"I do hope this hasn't made you miss your train," she said.

"Oh, no, no," he replied, grimacing. "My train won't be leaving until half past midnight, I'm afraid."

"Oh. Mine is leaving at the same time. We're both here early." She checked her watch. "Still two hours to go. Do let's go sit down somewhere and get tea then."

He stared at her. Could have been pure horror, or nothing at all.

"Do you have a favourite spot for tea in King's Cross? I know of a rather pleasant place, if you don't."

He stared harder. Facial muscles seemingly immobilised. Yet, his scent was tantalising... full of agitation. Perhaps this fellow did not receive many invites to tea by reasonably attractive women he didn't know, she reasoned to herself, and had no idea how to react when tea was proposed.

Or perhaps he was married, or a Catholic priest, or gay, or desperately in love with someone else, or... something, and she had just offended him terribly, right after causing him a great deal of worry first.

She wilted. "I'm sorry. You must dislike tea really very much. Sorry to trouble you." She started to leave, feeling extremely foolish.

"Ah... no." He reached out and verbally plucked her back. "I actually quite like tea."

"Brilliant. So do I."

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Despite his earlier hard stares, having late-night tea with S. S. had been very pleasant. She had ordered jasmine tea, no cream or sugar, and after perusing his menu for a moment with a rather abstracted look, he had closed it with a snap and asked for one of what she was having. He then inquired politely, if very formally, about where she hailed from.

He didn't seem especially interested when she said that her family hailed from the Lake District, but when she said that she was a teacher at university, his eyebrows went up with interest, and the talk began to pick up. He was a teacher himself – he taught at a school for young people, a boarding school, though he didn't mention which one it was. What did he teach? Oh, yes, he taught, er, chemistry.

After that, they had a fine old time talking about teaching. Professor S. S. had a fine sarcastic wit, especially when he was telling stories about unruly students – though he wasn't used to being thought amusing. The first time she had laughed at one of his comments, he looked almost startled. He had a lot of questions about teaching at university. When she answered, briefly, he kept asking questions and seemed genuinely interested, as though she were telling him about teaching in an exotic place very far away from where he lived, and not at commonplace old Cambridge University.

The most amusing part was that he had forgotten to ask her her name until they were an hour into talking over their tea. She watched him agonise over this omission, prompting her in several small ways to elaborate on the topic of what she was called. "How did you spell your name, again...?"

"Oh, the usual way, with a Y. My parents didn't go for artistic furbelows when it came to the spelling of baby names." She could catch a whiff of acute embarrassment under the formality.

When the bill came, he looked apprehensively at it and then set it down, fumbling in his pocket. "Now three pounds... that's... "

She put an end to that quite effectively by dropping a twenty-pound note onto the bill tray and handing it to a passing waitress, and then waving away his attempts to reimburse her. "Men are always buying women tea. Let's even things up a bit, shall we?"

Again, he stared at her for a moment, but then smiled faintly.

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They were chatting rather comfortably when they arrived back to King's Cross at exactly midnight, to await their respective trains. The hour was very late, and the platform was deserted when they arrived back. Discarded newspapers and bits of litter ruffled in the breezes from the departing and arriving trains as they crossed the terminal.

"I'm sorry you have to go," she said, smiling. "It's been a good talk. Now that I've left teaching at Uni, I don't get to have these wonderful intellectual chats so often."

S. S. seemed pleased by this, though not inclined to say that he was pleased by this. "Do please let me see you to your train."

"Oh, no need," she said, glibly. "It's not far. I'll be off in a moment."

"Before you go," he asked, "might I beg a moment's assistance?"

"Of course. With what?"

"You see, I have to... " He was fidgeting around the edges a bit – "I have to place a phone call and I'm not certain as to how one uses the new telephone cards."

The new phone cards? Phone cards had been in common use for years. But she said, "Of course. How can I help you?"

"Well, where exactly can I locate one of these telephones to make a call?"

"Just find a red call box and make your call from there," she said helpfully.

"A red call box... "

"I think there was one a few steps back from the platform where we were both waiting earlier. Let's go see... " She led him back down to the platform where she had first seen him, earlier that evening. As she had thought, there was a red call box a few steps down from Platform Nine. As he stepped inside to make his call, S. S. seemed reluctant to allow her to merge back into the random.

"Please, miss, so after I put my card in here, I dial the number, and then... "

He was being hopeless. But he didn't seem the sort to use some silly ploy to gain a bit more of her attention.

"Yes, that's it exactly." She stood beside the callbox, watching him dial. He did so very carefully and deliberately, matching the numbers on the slip of paper in his hand to the numbers on the keypad. He waited for his call to connect, leaning on one large, rough-knuckled hand.

"Miss? Do you know what this signal means?" He recited: "'The number you are calling is no longer in service.'"

She shook her head. "It sounds as though your friend's number has been disconnected."

S. S. shook his own head emphatically. "No, I'm afraid that's quite impossible. It has to be – it's rather important that I speak to the lady in question."

"Will you let me try it for you?"

S. S. handed her the slip of paper with the phone number. Emily punched in the numbers on the paper for him, but he was right – an operator's voice returned, number had been disconnected.

"Is it still not working?" he asked.

"No, I'm so sorry. This number's really been disconnected."

He was standing directly behind her, and she could feel the heat radiating from him on her back and shoulders. In the close confines of the call box, the scent of his body was concentrated, agitated... and suddenly full of fresh male lust. She was drawn toward the scent of it, her heartbeat suddenly picking up.

She turned back to him and handed back the phone card. "I'm terribly sorry. Perhaps you can call the operator for their new number, and give them a ring in the morning."

"Perhaps I can. Thank you." He pocketed the card.

They fell silent, looking at each other.

He was also becoming agitated, because the warmth of his body was not what she would have expected in a train station in an unseasonably cold late September – he was actually sweating a bit. The scent was not unpleasant, but with senses as animal-sharp as her own, it made the dispersal of tiny molecules of testosterone readily apparent to her, especially when there was such an intense concentration of such. Yesssss, this stag was in season and make no mistake about it.

"I'm sorry about that." She had to turn away, toward the featureless metal and glass callbox wall, because suddenly his scent and proximity were provoking the oddest reaction in her.

"Not your fault, quite all right."

She could feel his eyes on her face like a heavy, warm weight.

"You know," she said conversationally, "you've wanted to kiss me for at least the last hour and a half, and you haven't done it yet."

The red-black eyes glinted.

Then he did kiss her.

His idea of a kiss was just as tantalisingly arrogant as his idea of pretending that he wasn't looking at her from a train station bench. He tasted of jasmine tea.

Well then. First shot fired.

She hadn't been expecting to respond to him the way she did. S. S. had been content to stare insolently at her and say nothing to her, he snarled at unsuspecting Lost Items clerks, he was perplexed by a teashop menu, and he didn't even know how to make a phone card call. But when he kissed her, her stomach quivered and her knees took on the consistency of jelly.

This was crazy barking mad. She was not going to pursue this business of kissing some ill-tempered stranger in a callbox. She had to get to her train straightaway. That was it.

She curled an arm around his neck and kissed him right back. Only she fired off even more salvos in their mounting contest, caressing his tongue briefly with hers before withdrawing.

"I suppose I'll go wait on the platform, then," she said. Even to her, her voice sounded breathless.

His arm didn't move from her waist. "Do you really want to leave?"

"No."

S. S. bent to her again. The call box door fell heavily shut.

Emily was suddenly not in a prohibitive mood. When S. S., who did not know her name, kissed her with increasing intensity for some time, then lifted her off the ground and somehow perched her on the booth ledge, the better to press his body more fully against hers, the idea of doing anything other than thoroughly enjoying herself never occurred to her. S. S. roused quickly – no, the man was a veritable Tesla coil of concentrated, electric need, soaking up the touch of her hands, skin, and mouth like water through the skin of a frog.

His lust perfumed the close air of the tiny booth, disquieting her with its urgency. He forbade nothing and encouraged her to greater perversity with remarkable quickness. When he bent down from her lips to the place where her neck became her breasts, she let her head fall back, offering him as much skin as he wanted. Somehow he was leaning between her thighs, one hand beneath her skirt and cupping the rise of muscle where her thigh became her buttock, finding the slice of skin above where her stocking was clasped by her garter, and she was only the more aroused for it. She helped him open the front of her dress, blood pounding in her ears and throat, mouth open under his.

She tried to unbutton his jacket, the better to touch his skin... but this jacket was constructed like nothing she had ever seen before. It didn't simply unbutton like other men's clothes; instead, one button unfastened to reveal another in the most disconcerting place possible – his tailor must have been a bona fide lunatic to make anything so complicated.

Luckily the trousers weren't so difficult to access. He had left himself so completely open to her that she felt no shame about slipping her hand between his legs, tugging his belt open, and into his clothes. He gasped sensuously as her hand closed on his sex – and she exhaled in delectation at its luscious size and painful readiness.

But she was first going to secure some privacy for the two of them. She soundlessly muttered a word into his neck. Now, entire phalanxes of people could have trooped past the callbox and never noticed a fair woman and a dark man steaming the interior. This was risky – but, it simply had been too damn long since she had touched a man she found desirable.

Polite pretence was gone. His body was cleaving to hers with the unselfconscious lust of an alpha male covering his mate during her oestrus. Clothes were hurriedly pushed or torn aside – she heard stitches ripping and didn't care. Then he was silkily naked in her hands, and she was dragging him down over her, shifting on the tiny ledge, cold metal under her thighs, moving to fit herself more closely to him. In a second he had filled her to the hilt, wet and snug.

She locked her arms around his neck, letting out a strangled outcry that, where she came from, would have had every male mammalian creature within earshot pricking up his ears with excitement. As she reached her orgasm, her hips jerked nearly off the freezing callbox ledge as she convulsed against him. She fell, satiated, against the cold, steamed-over glass wall, with the sounds of trains accelerating and decelerating, and S. S.'s harsh breathing, in her ears.

S. S. followed her into satiety a moment later, slumping down onto her so that she nearly had to hold him upright, heat draining from his body into hers. They clutched each other for a long, long time.

"I'm sorry you couldn't call your friend," she said, apropos of nothing, feeling her humid breath condensing on the side of his face.

He ran his lips over her cheek. "It wasn't a matter of life and death."

She slid down off him and off of the ledge, shakily, and put her skirt to rights. But a second later, she grabbed him by his damnably complicated lapels and kissed him again. He returned it with the same intensity, his fist clenched in her hair. Fuck it. This man was hotter than she would have believed. She wanted to take him back to her flat and keep him there for a month, preferably without clothes on.

But she didn't have months alone in her flat. She didn't even have the flat anymore. She didn't even have another quarter of an hour. She had a new position to show up for. What time was it? She glanced at that great clock again.

One twenty-eight.

Oh bloody hell.

"I think I've missed my train," she said inanely. Her cheek was sealed to his neck with sweat.

"I think I've missed mine as well."

"Don't you have to teach class on Monday... "

"Yes, I do. But I haven't used a sick day in thirteen years – I think I can take one now. Now stop being so damnably coy and tell me what your name is."

"I really have to go. I'm late."

"I have to go, and I'm late too." His lips caressed her neck, making her every muscle shiver. This was really just too damned good. A man like this should be had somewhere other than standing up in a callbox, for pity's sake.

But she couldn't, wouldn't, stay. Panic was suddenly gripping her. She extricated herself from his thrilling, clinging weight, staggering a little as she stepped out of the steamy callbox confines onto the chill train platform.

S. S. had composed himself as well, and was calling to her. "Wait a moment, please. No need to rush off... "

She turned toward him, dilated dark eyes riveted on his face. In another moment she slid out of his sight, and for the fourth time that night, spoke a word under her breath.

When S. S. turned to her again, she was gone. The platform was entirely deserted.

He stared round, obviously startled. "Hello? Miss?"

No answer.

"Miss Spelled-With-a-Y?"

No sound, other than leaves and discarded papers rustling in the breeze, and the dull roar of passing trains.