Running to the window, feeling more clearheaded than she had since she awakened, she climbed up onto the sill. Crouching there and holding onto the window frame with one hand, she stretched out and wrapped the other around the drainpipe. She froze, her heart in her throat, but then the sound of him clambering to his feet gave her impetus to move.
Swinging out, she put her toe on the iron bracket securing the drainpipe to the wall, and let go of the window, hastily grabbing the drainpipe just below her other hand. She clung there, shivering, feeling for a toehold beneath her. Blast these entangling skirts! She wished she’d had time to change.
The man shoved his head out the window and lunged for her, hooking his hand in the sash of her dress. She scrambled downward, her shoulders aching with the strain. He cursed, sliding farther out, and she jerked away with all her strength.
Suddenly he was tumbling out the window. His weight tore her from her desperate hold on the drainpipe even as it ripped the sash from her dress. She fell with him, one breathless flash of panic followed by slamming onto the roof below. Her breath left her and a sharp pain lanced through her head. Helplessly she rolled, her momentum carrying her down the slight slope of the roof. Then, once again, she was falling into emptiness.
After that, there was only darkness.
CHAPTER ONE
ALEX TROTTED DOWN the steps, business finished, but feeling vaguely dissatisfied. It wasn’t only because he suspected that the man he had just left had chosen him to design his summer house less for his talent than for the opportunity to boast that the son of the Duke of Broughton had visited him this morning. The fact was, Alex had felt odd and uneasy from the moment he awakened this morning.
He glanced at his watch and decided to catch a hack to his office rather than walking. Con was leaving on one of his adventures this afternoon, and he wanted to be sure to catch him. Even though they had acquired other friends as they grew older, Con was, as always, his closest confidant.
His uneasiness wasn’t worry over Con. He would know instantly if Con was in trouble, just as he had known his brother wasn’t in the house when he awoke. Neither of them could explain their twin sense—it simply was—but likewise, they never doubted its accuracy.
Alex supposed that the odd wisp of alarm that had taken up residence in his chest was merely the residue from his nightmare. He didn’t remember dreaming it, but he’d done so often enough lately to presume it had visited him again. The thing was…usually the nightmare awakened him, leaving him cold and sweating, but it had not caused him to feel this way the next day.
He stepped out of the carriage in front of the office building he and Con owned. It was a narrow stone structure, four floors high and sturdy. Alex might wish for a more attractive design, but it suited their purposes. The bottom floor housed a bookstore, and the floor above held his and Con’s offices, with the upper two floors being the flat he and Con had established as their bachelors’ quarters when they left school.
Even though they had moved back into the family home a year ago, they hadn’t rented out the flat. One or the other of them sometimes bedded down there. Con used it more often, staying there sometimes when he was working on a case or had remained out on the town late.
Alex met Con’s employee, Tom Quick, coming down the stairs. Tom, a few years older than Alex, had been plucked from the streets by their older brother, Reed, whose pocket he had unsuccessfully tried to pick. Instead of prosecuting the lad, Reed had clothed and fed him and sent him to school. Quick hadn’t taken much to schooling, but he had been a loyal worker for the Moreland family ever since, at first running errands for Reed and then, ultimately, becoming the mainstay of their older sister Olivia’s investigative agency. Con had acquired his services, along with the business, from Olivia a few years ago.
The blond man grinned in his cocky way, a distinct warning that something was up. Alex eyed him warily. “Is Con upstairs?”
“Oh, indeed,” Tom answered with a chuckle. “He’s there.”
“What has he done?” Alex asked with some foreboding. Perhaps it was Con, after all, that had given him this feeling.
“You’ll see,” the other man said airily and trotted past him.
Alex took the stairs two at a time and walked past the closed door of his own office to the last door on the corridor. A discreet brass sign on the wall beside the door announced that it was Moreland Investigative Agency.
He opened the door and stopped short at the sight of his brother, his jaw dropping. Normally seeing Con was much like looking into a mirror. Con’s black hair was a bit longer and shaggier, and he had taken to wearing a mustache. But, all in all, it was the same angular face with the same squarish chin and straight black brows, the same sharp green eyes, the same firm mouth always ready to break into a smile. Their height and build, the way they stood and walked, were all so alike that even their mother had been known to mistake one for the other from the back.
But today… Con’s hair was pomaded and slicked back away from his face. His mustache had been waxed into long sharp points and twisted up at the ends into absurd curlicues. He was strangely larger through the chest and middle and even slightly taller, and his body was encased in a suit of eye-popping yellow-and brown-plaid. On the desk beside him were a bowler hat of matching brown and a shiny black cane with a lion’s head for a knob.
Con laughed at his brother’s stunned expression and struck a pose. “What do you think?”
“I think you’ve turned into a bloody Bedlamite, that’s what I think,” Alex laughed. “What in the world are you doing? I thought you were going to Cornwall to infiltrate that lot that says the world’s going to end next month.”
Olivia had opened an agency to investigate the wave of spiritualists and mediums in the past decade that had swindled gullible and grief-stricken people with tales of contacting their deceased loved ones in the afterlife. After she met her husband in the course of one of these investigations, her agency had had a rather sporadic existence, with Tom Quick doing most of the work. The agency had turned to a number of other investigative procedures, such as finding missing persons, uncovering financial frauds and investigating the backgrounds of possible employees or spouses.
When Con bought the agency from her, he continued the sort of detective work that Quick was justifiably known for, but he also delighted in returning to the investigation of otherworldly phenomena, going beyond Olivia’s field of fraudulent mediums and their séances to reports of hauntings and mythical beasts and even, as in his newest case, a quasi-religious group proclaiming the end of the world.
“That is where I’m going,” Con told him.
“I don’t think you’re apt to blend in very well in that costume.”
“Ah, but you see—” Con wiggled his eyebrows “—I’ve found that looking outlandish is an excellent way to go unrecognized. All people will remember is this ridiculous mustache and obnoxious suit. When I get rid of them, no one will recognize me.”