What Angels Fear sscm-1

by C. S. Harris

  Kat’s hand snaked out, suddenly, to touch Sebastian’s arm. “Sebastian,” she whispered.

  But he had already seen it himself: a faint glow of orange growing steadily brighter behind the stack of wool bales near the base of the stairs. A spark from the blunderbuss’s explosion must have landed to smolder amidst the lanolin-rich bales. A breath of air stirred by the draft rising off the open trapdoor brought with it the faintest hint of burning raw wool, pungent and unmistakable. Then the entire pile burst into flames.

  As Sebastian watched, the flames leapt high, carried by the updraft from the open water door. With a whoosh, the old timbers of the staircase caught, coming alive with a crackling dance of fire that sent black smoke roiling through the building.

  He heard Kat suck in her breath on a stifled gasp and knew the full implications of the fire were not lost upon her. Wilcox was between them and the double doors leading to the water’s edge. With the stairs to the second story aflame and the main entrance to the lane padlocked on the outside, the only other way out the building was through the trapdoor. But it was an eight-foot drop into the icy cold waters of the basin; half-fainting from loss of blood and weighed down by the heavy velvet train of her riding habit, Kat would surely drown.

  All around them, the warehouse and its contents were going up like a pitch-soaked torch. Here on the floor, near the open trapdoor, the air was still relatively clear, but it wouldn’t be for long. They had to get out, now.

  From the sound of Wilcox’s hacking cough, Sebastian realized the man was moving again. The bar on the dockside doors gave a metallic shriek as it was yanked back. For a moment, the swirling black smoke parted. He saw the doors open, a man’s form showing dark and solid against the foggy night sky. Then it was gone.

  Kat’s fingers curled around Sebastian’s arm, gripping tight. In the eerie red glow of the fire he could now see her quite clearly. The entire side of her riding habit was dark with blood.

  “Christ.” No longer constrained by the fear of drawing Wilcox’s gunfire, Sebastian moved quickly, tearing long strips of cloth from her train and tying them tightly around the wound. “We’re going to have to follow him out that door. You realize that, don’t you?”

  Kat shook her head, her eyes wide in a pale face. “No. He still has a pistol. If we go through that door, he’ll be waiting for us.”

  Sebastian gathered her into his arms. “We’ve no choice.” He had to shout to be heard above the roar of the fire. “The doors to the lane are padlocked from the outside.”

  “Then break the lock.”

  Sebastian glanced toward the front of the building. Already, the smoke was so thick that each breath burned his throat and tore at his lungs. “I can try.”

  Coughing badly, he carried her to where she could catch a breath of the fresh air flowing in from the gap beneath the two front doors. Casting about in the thickening smoke, he found a heavy sea chest, bound with brass but small enough that he could grasp it with both hands. Using the end of the chest as a battering ram, he slammed it against the juncture of the heavy wooden doors. His aim was to break the lock, or at least tear off the hasp. He could feel the heat of the flames searing his back, sucking the air from his lungs. Gritting his teeth, he slammed the chest into the doors a second time, and heard a satisfying crack.

  With all his strength, he rammed the doors a third time. The chest shattered in his hands.

  “It’s no use,” he cried, heaving the chest aside. “We have to go out the back.”

  He bent to lift Kat into his arms, but she clutched his chest and shook her head. “Leave me. Without me, you can slip through the water door.”

  He met her gaze, his chest jerking for breath beneath her spread fingers. “I’m not leaving you. So you may as well give over trying to be so bloody noble and simply accept that it’s my turn.”

  There was an instant’s silence; then he heard her answering laugh, faint but true.

  With a tearing roar, the great overhanging beam from the central well collapsed in a violent shower of sparks. “Bloody hell,” Sebastian swore.

  Clutching Kat to him, dodging fiery bales and falling debris, he sprinted across the warehouse floor. For one wretched moment he thought he’d become disoriented and lost his way in the thickening smoke. Then he saw the open doorway framing a rectangle of gray mist beyond, and he burst through into the cool, lifegiving air of the night.

  He’d expected to find Wilcox there on the dock, beside the basin. But the dock stretched out empty before them.

  “He must have heard you trying to break through the front doors and gone around,” said Kat, coughing badly.

  “Maybe.” Sebastian’s own voice was a pained rasp. Or maybe Wilcox was simply waiting for them at the end of that long dark alleyway that ran along the north side of the warehouse.

  “Set me down. I can walk,” she said.

  “Are you certain?”

  “Yes.” She pushed away from him so that her feet slid to the ground. Then she said, “Sorry. A miscalculation,” and fainted dead away.

  Swinging her up into his arms again, Sebastian turned south, away from the alley and the dangers that might lurk there. He’d thought the pile of crates at the juncture of the two buildings only partially obstructed the dock, but he saw now that he was wrong, that the way was blocked completely. He had no choice but to go north.

  By now, the flames were shooting from the warehouse’s upper story. One by one, the windows began to shatter, the night filling with the sound of breaking glass as the splintered shards rained down around them. Sheltering Kat with his own body, broken glass crunching beneath his boots, Sebastian ran. As he ducked past the mouth of the alleyway, he saw it filled with smoke and leaping flames from the burning building beside it. If Wilcox had been there, waiting, the heat and breaking glass would have driven him back.

  The fire roaring behind him, Sebastian kept to the strip of narrow dock running along the edge of the basin. Passing the row of ancient brick warehouses, he worked his way north. The black waters of the basin reflected the leaping flames, while the fog caught the glow of savage orange until it seemed that the very night around him was afire.

  He could see another passageway ahead, leading off to the left, that he hoped would take him inland. Then his heel caught on an uneven plank and he stumbled, going down as his wounded leg gave way beneath him in a spasm of pain, white hot and nearly blinding.

  He sank to his knees, Kat still held, insensible, in his arms. He was aware of the distant heat of the fire and the ache in his seared lungs as he struggled to suck in air. Gathering his strength, he was about to push up again when he heard the click of a pistol’s hammer being drawn back, and Wilcox’s voice saying, “Bad choice, Devlin.”

  Chapter 62

  Martin Wilcox stepped out of the smoke-swirled darkness, a flintlock pistol gripped in one hand. His driving cloak was gone; soot stained the starched white linen of his cravat, and falling cinders had singed the Bath superfine of his inimitably cut coat. But his voice was still oddly pleasant, almost conversational.

  “It all comes down to choices. Doesn’t it, Devlin?” he said. “The choice you made to stay in London and stir up trouble, for instance, when any reasonable, prudent man would have fled abroad. The choice you made to come here tonight and walk into my little trap. And then there’s the choice you faced just now. By sacrificing the girl, you might have escaped me. But that’s not a choice a man like you could live with, is it? It’s what makes you so fatally predictable.”

  Sebastian felt the planks of the dock rough beneath his knees, the cold air blowing in from the basin cool against the film of sweat on his face as he watched Wilcox walk up to him. “And what of your choices, Wilcox? Your choice to kill Rachel York rather than pay for whatever she was offering to sell to you. Was that so wise?”

  Wilcox kept coming until he stood just feet away, the pistol held straight-armed before him. “Ah, but you see, I thought our dear Rachel had made an unwise choice
herself. When I heard she’d gone to meet Hendon that night, I assumed she’d found a higher bidder for her wares. So I followed, expecting to recover the evidence of my little insurance scheme. Instead, what do I find but your mother’s most interesting affidavit. It was a surprise, believe me.”

  “Insurance scheme—?” Sebastian began, only to break off as he suddenly understood. “Of course. The story you carried to Hendon last year about an embarrassing sexual peccadillo was an invention, designed to extricate yourself from an awkward situation. How long have you been caught in Leo Pierrepont’s web?”

  Wilcox’s habitual smile never slipped. “Three years. I’m the one who tipped Pierrepont off as to our intentions in Spain.” He said it as if he were proud of it.

  “So that’s the reason you tracked down Rachel’s maid, Mary Grant? To recover whatever evidence Rachel took from Pierrepont that would have proved your involvement with the French went back much further than anyone supposed.”

  “That’s right. I doubt the stupid fool even realized the value of what she had.”

  “But that didn’t stop you from killing her.”

  “One could never be sure,” he said, smiling through his teeth. “The evidence against myself I destroyed at once, of course. But the other documents I kept. One never knows when such things might prove useful. Where you made your mistake was in taking your mother’s affidavit from my library. Until I found it missing, I’d no notion you’d tweaked onto me.”

  Sebastian looked up into his brother-in-law’s face, and laughed. “I don’t have the affidavit. Do you mean to tell me you’ve lost it? How . . . careless of you.”

  Wilcox’s hand tightened convulsively around the pistol’s handle, then relaxed. “An interesting tactic. You think to unnerve me, I take it?” He shook his head. “It won’t work.” The man’s face suddenly hardened, his normally placid, smiling features twisting in a way that reminded Sebastian of Bayard. “Set the girl down on the dock—but don’t get up. Back away from her on your knees.”

  His gaze still focused on Wilcox’s face, Sebastian eased Kat down onto the dock. She let out a soft sigh, then lay still as he shifted away from her, repositioning his weight subtly so that he came up into a crouch.

  Wilcox smiled. “There. I need a clean shot. Wouldn’t want to confuse the authorities when I present them with your dead body. And the mutilated corpse of your last victim, of course,” he added, his gaze flicking significantly toward Kat. “They’ll be so pleased.”

  Sebastian had his good leg under him, his muscles tensed, ready to spring, as he watched Wilcox’s eyes.

  “No one actually cares who killed those women. You understand that, don’t you? No fire burns within the collective metropolitan bosom to see justice done. People simply want to feel safe, and with you dead, they will. I’ll be a hero. Ironic, isn’t it?”

  Sebastian saw the flicker in Wilcox’s eyes the instant before his finger tightened on the pistol’s trigger.

  Sebastian dove forward, twisting his body sideways as he flung up his left arm. His open palm slammed into Wilcox’s extended wrist, knocking it up just as the pistol exploded fire and smoke into the night.

  Sebastian felt a searing heat tear across his upper arm. Then his right shoulder slammed into Wilcox at midthigh. He wrapped his good arm around the back of the bastard’s knees and yanked, although the sheer momentum of the lunge would have been enough by itself to knock him over.

  Wilcox went down hard, his back hitting the dock with a thump that drove the air from his lungs in a huff as Sebastian landed on top of him. Still gasping for breath, Wilcox swung the empty flintlock like a club, bashing its heavy weight down on Sebastian’s back.

  Swearing harshly, Sebastian grabbed the man’s pistol hand in a brutal grip and yanked it over his head, tightening his grip until Wilcox relaxed his hold on the pistol in a spasm of pain. Then he went suddenly, utterly still.

  “So you’ve overpowered me,” he said panting, the light from the distant fire gleaming in his eyes as he smiled up at Sebastian. “What now, hmm? You do realize that you’ve no proof of what I did to those women. None. Even the scratches that bitch left on my neck have healed. It’ll simply be your word against mine. And who would believe you?”

  “You’re forgetting Kat Boleyn.”

  “What? The word of a whore? Against that of a friend of the Crown Prince himself?” Wilcox smiled. “I don’t think so.” Still smiling, he twisted his lower body and drove his knee up, straight into Sebastian’s wounded thigh.

  The pain exploded in a fireball that made Sebastian gasp. For an instant his vision blurred and his head swam, and his hold on Wilcox relaxed just enough to enable the man to clamber backward from beneath him.

  Rolling over, Wilcox made it as far as his hands and knees before Sebastian lunged after him. They teetered for a moment at the edge of the dock, then went over together.

  Sebastian lost his grip on Wilcox as they fell. Wilcox slammed into the water in an awkward, crumpled heap. But Sebastian managed to straighten his body so that he hit feet first. He plunged deep into the cold, black water, then shot back to the surface, treading water heavily, weighed down by the awkwardness of boots and rough breeches, the wounds in his shoulder and thigh on fire.

  He could hear his brother-in-law coughing and gasping, see the white of his cravat and waistcoat glowing out of the darkness of the night. Sebastian swam toward him. For a moment the man’s fat head disappeared beneath black water sheened with orange by the distant fire. Then he floundered up again, arms and legs thrashing, his eyes opening wide in his pale face when he saw Sebastian.

  “Help me! For God’s sake, help me. I can’t swim.” One of his flailing hands caught at Sebastian’s neck, clutching, strangling.

  “Let go of me, you fool. You’ll drown us both.”

  But Wilcox was beyond reason. “You can’t let me drown,” he sputtered, his grip on Sebastian tightening, frantic.

  Sucking in a deep breath, Sebastian dove, twisting under Wilcox’s arm to break the man’s grip. This time, he was careful to surface behind the floundering man’s back. With a straight arm, Sebastian reached out and grasped the back of Wilcox’s collar. It was a standard lifesaving maneuver; Sebastian had only to pull the man in close, wrap a bent elbow beneath Wilcox’s chin to keep his head above water, and swim toward the dock.

  He could hear in the distance the roar of the flames consuming the warehouse and, more distant still, the frantic clang-clang of the fire bell. Sebastian tightened his grip on the back of Wilcox’s coat. But he kept his arm straight.

  It all comes down to choices, the man had said. And the choice Sebastian now faced lay dark and murky before him. Because Wilcox was right: there was no proof of what the man had done, nothing linking him to the twisted slaying of those two women, nothing to stop him from doing it again, and again.

  Other considerations whispered to his conscience: if saved from the water, Wilcox might still somehow manage to best Sebastian and attack Kat. But Sebastian knew that wasn’t the real issue. He had learned long ago that the line between right and wrong, between good and evil, isn’t always sharply drawn. But he still believed that the line existed, nonetheless. He’d set out, barely a week ago, to prove himself unjustly accused of a heinous crime. Only gradually had his purpose shifted. And he knew that while he might never be able to prove his own innocence, he could at least fulfill a promise made to a woman too long dead to hear.

  From somewhere near at hand came the sound of a man’s shout. But it didn’t matter. Sebastian had made his choice. Opening his hand, he let the coat of Bath superfine slip through his fingers.

  Chapter 63

  From where he stood at the edge of the dock, Sir Henry Lovejoy watched the Viscount climb the rough ladder from the water below. As he reached the top, Devlin looked up, his uncanny eyes gleaming yellow in the reflected fire’s light.

  The two men stared at each other, Devlin’s breath coming so hard and fast that the coarse cloth of h
is water-soaked, bloodstained shirt shuddered with each lifting of his chest. It was Devlin who spoke first.

  “The boy, Tom? Where is he?”

  “Quite safe. I intercepted him just outside your father’s house in Grosvenor Square. That’s right,” he added, when Devlin’s eyebrows twitched together. “I overheard your instructions to the lad back at the Rose and Crown.”

  “And?”

  Lovejoy cleared his throat. “I found Wilcox’s note in his pocket.”

  “The note was unsigned.”

  “Yes. I admit I initially found it difficult to credence the lad’s rather long and tangled tale. But he’d had the forethought to liberate his lordship’s pocketbook, which lent considerable weight to his story.”

  Levering himself up onto the dock, his wet clothes clinging to his lean frame, the Viscount went to crouch beside the crumpled, bloody form of the woman. Lovejoy didn’t move. “Is she . . .”

  “No.” Her blood streaming over his hands, Devlin lifted the woman gently into his arms. The wind caught her long dark hair, blowing it loose across his face. She stirred, her voice a hoarse murmur, and he nuzzled his lips against her ear, whispering reassurances.

  Then his gaze lifted, again, to meet Lovejoy’s. “How much did you overhear? Just now.”

  And Sir Henry Lovejoy, that hardheaded stickler for the processes of the law and the sanctity of truth, who had arrived at the basin’s edge only in time to watch Wilcox’s head first disappear beneath the black waters, smiled tightly and said, “Enough.”

  Chapter 64

  Sebastian watched Kat breathe, watched the gentle rise and fall of her breasts beneath lace-trimmed sheets, watched the flicker of golden candlelight over the pale skin of her eyelids, closed now in gentle sleep.

  He stood beside the bed, his dressing gown thrown casually over his shoulders. Around them, the Brook Street house settled into the hush of the night. It seemed oddly strange, to be here again in his own house, to be wearing freshly laundered linen and fine silk. He was here, and safe, and yet the coiled sense of alertness, the driving restlessness remained.