Kill the Raven: A Thriller (Raven Trilogy Book 3)

by Kurt B. Dowdle

  When he emptied the Colt, Grimp called out, “There’s been a shooting. I’ve been attacked!”

  WYLES AND PICKLER DIDN’T BOTHER getting a hotel room. She intended to finish her business well before sun up, and Pickler wanted to leave town much sooner than that.

  He trailed a few steps behind her as she made the walk from Joe’s cabin and toward the mansion on the mountainside.

  “Miss Wyles? Ma’am?”

  She ignored him and kept walking, her long braid swinging behind her like a metronome.

  “Miss Wyles, I have to go. I have to get back to the store.”

  Still, she paid no attention to him but kept marching between the trees and then picking her way across a stream by stepping from one dry rock to another.

  Pickler tried to follow her steps, but he teetered off the first rock, splashing one foot and then the other into the water and getting soaked to his knees.

  When he reached the far side, he slipped on the bank, pitching forward onto his knees, glasses falling into the mud.

  Pickler balled his fists and said, “Miss Wyles, I’m not going with you.”

  Now she stopped and turned to face him. “Yes. You are.”

  Still on his knees, Pickler pulled a clean, silk handkerchief from his vest pocket and wiped the splatters from his glasses.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “We don’t have time for this.”

  Pickler stood up, put his glasses on and said, “I listened to you, against my better judgment, I listened, darn it. And now I’ve nearly been killed. I’ve nearly been killed, and I’ve been party to your, your…”

  “My what?”

  “Your madness. You’ve been seduced, seduced by what I know not. But, madam, you are under a spell. And I must say it, I must. Mr. Kamp was, too!”

  Wyles set down the medicine bag and slapped Pickler hard across the face.

  “As for madness, you’re entangled in a variety of insanities, the fearful symmetry of which you can’t even begin to fathom. And Kamp was my friend.”

  She picked up her medicine bag again, turned and started walking. Tears welled in Pickler’s eyes as he watched her go.

  GRIGG AND STIER FLED at a full sprint. The hundred-yard head start they got was enough to allow them to slip down a side street where two horses and a carriage stood unattended.

  Grigg helped Stier into the carriage, then clambered up to the driver’s seat. He snapped the reins and said, “Hya.”

  Apart from a few curious stares, Grigg attracted little attention as he piloted the carriage across the bridge and out of town. For an hour or more, neither man spoke, and Grigg didn’t feel safe easing up until he reached the bridge at Treichlers.

  He said to Grigg, “Are you all right back there?”

  “Yah, yah,” Stier said. “We’re fine?”

  “We’re?”

  “It’s not just me back here. Looks like we stole the meat wagon.”

  Grigg slowed the horses and pulled them to a stop on the bridge. He climbed down from the driver’s seat, opened the carriage door and looked at Stier.

  “Say again?”

  “Bodies back here. That sheriff, and Kamp.”

  “Christ.” He looked in both directions and saw no one on the road. The sun had begun to set, and they heard nothing, save crickets and a solitary crow. “Which one’s the sheriff?”

  Stier peeked under a winding sheet.

  “This guy.”

  Grigg slid his hands under the sheriff’s back and tried to lift him.

  “Help me.”

  Together, they removed the corpse from the carriage and dragged it to the side of the bridge.

  “One, two, three.”

  They watched it splash in the river, then bob to the surface and start its lonely journey down the Lehigh.

  FORTY-THREE

  NIGHT HAD FALLEN by the time Emma Wyles reached the mansion on the mountainside. Candles burned on every floor, but all the curtains were drawn, and she couldn’t see in any of the windows.

  She’d cleaned up as best she could, changing into a clean white blouse and putting her hair in a fresh braid. She heard talking inside, and for an hour or so, men would appear on the veranda to smoke. She heard English and German, all in hushed tones.

  At one point, Wyles saw the hunter who’d talked to her in the forest earlier in the day. He stood looking out over the valley and smoking a pipe.

  From her hiding place in the woods, Wyles scanned the outside of the building and noted an armed man at each corner. She peered up into the bell tower and saw the cherry of a cigarette, winking like an ominous red star.

  She waited and watched until all the men, save the guards, went inside. Minutes later, one last carriage, a fine black-lacquered brougham arrived. A man she recognized stepped down from the carriage and went in the back door. The Big Judge Tate Cain was here.

  And now, every man responsible for the degradation of her life and the destruction of Kamp’s was inside. She would confront them and have her say.

  She pulled in a deep breath, picked up her medicine bag, and marched toward the front door. Before she reached it, Wyles heard the pump action of a shotgun and then a man’s voice.

  “Stop there.”

  She didn’t recognize the man who emerged from the shadows.

  “I need to go inside,” she said.

  “Party’s closed. No visitors.”

  Wyles held up the medicine bag. “I’m a doctor. I’ve been summoned by the owner.”

  “What’s the owner’s name?”

  She spoke slowly. “They didn’t say. Now step aside.”

  “First I heard of it.”

  The man tightened his grip on the gun.

  “Then someone should have told you,” she said.

  Wyles walked past him and up the stairs to the front door, where she encountered the next guard.

  She said, “I need to be let in at once. I must—”

  The first guard came up behind her, grabbed her by the wrists and said, “I don’t know that no one called for no mouthy bitch doctor.”

  “Me neither.”

  The second guard yanked the medicine bag from her hand and began riffling through it.

  She said, “Stop this instant.”

  The second guard looked up at her and brushed her cheek with the back of his hand. Then he unbuttoned the top button of her blouse.

  “Or else what?”

  NYX HOPED ALL OF THEM—Angus, Joe, Shaw and Wyles—had left hours ago and that no one else would get hurt. No one else she cared about, anyway.

  And yet here was Emma Wyles, not only in the way but directly at the center of a conflict that could derail Nyx’s plan.

  Through the scope on the rifle, she’d watched Wyles emerge from the darkness and in her typical style, march straight to the front door.

  If the situation deteriorated further, Nyx knew she’d have to abort her carefully laid plan and effect a rescue. She stiffened in her hiding place, ready to burst out. She saw one of the men at the front door grab Wyles and saw the other one touch her as well.

  Nyx stood and raised the Sharps, sighting the first guard in the scope and curling her finger around the trigger.

  THE GUARDS HEARD FOOTFALLS coming up the drive and then a man hustled up the steps. Before they could turn their attention from Wyles, he’d reached them.

  He said, “Oh, you’re here.”

  Nyx took her finger off the trigger.

  The second guard took his hands off Wyles and said, “Who are you?”

  The man adjusted his glasses and said, “Uwe Wedekind Eu—”

  “No visit—”

  He cleared his voice and spoke louder, “Uwe Wedekind Eugen Schiffhorn, the Third.”

  “Well, Uwe—”

  “But you can call me Pickler.”

  “Yah well, Pickler, you can just turn around and go back down the drive.”

  Pickler said to Wyles, “Thank heaven you’re here, doctor.” Then he turned
to the guards and said, “And thank you, gentlemen, for receiving the doctor so graciously. Now, if you’ll pardon us.”

  Pickler tried to push past the guards, who blocked his path. The second guard gave him a shove.

  “We don’t know you, little fella, and nobody called no doctor.”

  Pickler looked at the first guard’s face and then the second.

  “I’ll have you know that I’m the chief pharmacist at Native Plants and Medicines, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. My employer is Black Feather Consolidated. My supervisor, and my supervisor’s supervisor are inside this very building.”

  He pointed at the front door for emphasis.

  The first guard looked at the ground and said, “Well, ya don’t have to be so—”

  “And as to whether they called for medical assistance, yes, they darned well did. Now come along, doctor.”

  As soon as they were inside, Pickler turned to Wyles and said, “Okay, now what?”

  THE FACT THAT Wyles was in the mansion greatly interfered with what Nyx intended to do, and if Wyles didn’t emerge of her own accord, and soon, Nyx knew she’d have to go in and get her. She picked up her burlap sack and the rifle and crept down the mountainside.

  WYLES SCANNED THE DOWNSTAIRS and listened. Through a set of closed double doors, she heard talking. She and Pickler stepped to the doors, and Wyles put her eye to the crack between the doors. She saw a great room and costumed figures, maybe a dozen, seated around a long table.

  At the head of the table was a high-backed chair on a platform. Wyles couldn’t see the face of the person in the chair. She pressed her ear to the crack, and now she could hear what they were saying.

  She felt a hand at her elbow.

  Wyles snapped her head around and saw the face of the hunter to whom she’d spoken earlier the day.

  “Yes?”

  The man studied her face and said, “I thought you said you weren’t a doctor.”

  Pickler spoke up. “That’s correct, sir. She is not a licensed medical doctor.”

  “Well, then, I’m afraid you’re going to have to—”

  “But she is a most excellent physician.”

  The man turned to Wyles.

  “Is that so?”

  She looked the man in the eye and said, “Where’s the patient?”

  NYX FELT HER BREATHING SLOW, and she felt no fear in spite of the armed men who guarded the perimeter of the house. The throbbing in her back where the bullet had broken one of her ribs receded and then disappeared.

  She crept in silence to the stone patio and looked in the windows at the back of the house. In the dim light of a candelabra on a table in the foyer, Nyx saw Wyles and Pickler talking to a man she’d never seen before. Then they followed him up the stairs.

  BEADS OF SWEAT FLOWED from Joachim S. Thaler’s blond hair as he thrashed in his bed.

  Wyles pulled up a chair and sat beside Thaler.

  “Let me see it,” she said.

  “Wer ist es?”

  “Der Arzt. I’m here to help you. Let me see your arm.”

  Thaler rolled onto his back and held out his left arm, which was wrapped in a crude bandage. Blood had soaked through it at the elbow.

  Wyles gently unwrapped the bandage and saw the jagged, exposed ends of broken bones amidst the tangle of ruined ligaments and flesh at what used to be his elbow.

  The man said, “How bad is it?”

  “How do you know this man?”

  “He’s my brother.”

  “Your brother is going to die—”

  “For god’s sake, help him.”

  “Unless I amputate.”

  Thaler’s brother shook his head. “There must be some other—”

  “Tell me your name.”

  “Barend.”

  “Barend, get me hot water and clean towels.”

  He said, “Fine, fine” and left the room.

  Wyles looked at Joachim S. Thaler and saw desperation and terror in his eyes.

  He said, “You’re not here to help me at all, are you?”

  NYX CAME IN through an unlocked window. She saw no one in the downstairs hallway and heard no sounds on the ground floor. She tiptoed down the hallway and reached the double doors of the great room.

  Nyx wanted to see all of the men in that room and to hear clearly what they were saying. But she couldn’t see or hear enough without opening the doors. Perhaps she could get the access she wanted from above. She turned and headed up the stairs and encountered no one on the second floor.

  She heard footsteps coming in her direction, so she ducked into a room and closed the door just as the man she’d seen talking to Wyles went rushing past.

  Nyx waited a few moments and then explored the second floor until she found a balcony overlooking the great room. She crawled on hands and knees until she could see all the men, who were arrayed in their bizarre and fantastic outfits.

  E. WYLES APPLIED THE SPIRAL TOURNIQUET to Joachim S. Thaler’s arm, cranking the large brass screw until the blood flow stopped. Then she inspected the limb and looked for the precise spot to start her work.

  She said to Pickler, “Come over here and get ready.”

  “Get ready?”

  “You must hold him down when I begin.”

  Pickler positioned himself as Wyles reached into the medicine bag, removed a large ringed syringe, then produced a green bottle labeled with a skull and crossbones.

  Barend Thaler said, “What in god’s name?”

  “Laudanum. For pain,” she said, dipping the needle in the bottle and filling the barrel. She secured a leather belt around Thaler’s good arm and found a suitable vein.

  Wyles inserted the needle, looked at Barend and said, “Listen carefully. Half of this dose is sufficient for your brother.”

  “Good.”

  “The full dose will kill him.”

  “Say again?”

  “If all of my demands are met, he will live.”

  “You’re out of your mind.” Barend Thaler started across the room.

  Wyles shook her head gently and pressed the plunger, injecting half the dose.

  “Stop right there,” she said, “and lower your voice.”

  NYX LAY ON HER STOMACH and peered down through the balusters at a ceremony, the likes of which she’d never seen.

  Nine of the eleven men seated around the table wore formal attire in the Victorian fashion. The tenth wore an elaborate army uniform and one wore a black robe. And each wore an elaborate mask depicting a different animal. Stag, bear, turtle, ram, and so on.

  The last man, seated in the ornate chair at the head of the table wore a black robe and the most elaborate mask, a raven’s head with eyes that blazed sapphire.

  The raven spoke in a low growl and in a language that Nyx didn’t recognize. When he became silent, two of the men, the goat and the lion left the room, and returned with a young woman between them.

  She was nude, blindfolded with a black kerchief and bound at the wrists with a red silk ribbon. She offered no resistance. Nyx didn’t recognize her.

  The goat and the lion guided her to the front of the room and laid her supine on the table before the raven. From his vest pocket, he produced a dagger with a silver blade and set it on the table.

  The raven said, “Fais ce que tu voudras.”

  The men around the table stared straight ahead, and no one moved for several minutes until the ram stood up, walked to the front of the room and took the dagger in his hand.

  FORTY-FOUR

  WHEN THE LAUDANUM BEGAN TO TAKE EFFECT, the terror drained from Joachim S. Thaler’s eyes and was replaced by stupor.

  Barend Thaler stood motionless at the center of the room, a bead of sweat rolling down his cheek.

  He said to Wyles, “What are your demands?”

  “I need to speak to the man in charge. Immediately.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Have it your way.” She put her thumb back on the plunger of the syringe.

  �
��You don’t understand. There’s a ceremony happening right now. I can’t disturb it.”

  Wyles studied Barend’s face, then looked at Joachim S. Thaler. His eyes rolled back in his head and then closed.

  She said, “In other words you can’t meet my demands?”

  “Not that I can’t get the man for you. I can’t right now. For the sake of Christ, who are you, and what do you want?”

  “My name is Emma Wyles. And I want—”

  Joachim S. Thaler vomited and began thrashing in the bed.

  Barend Thaler said, “God damn it. Please.”

  Wyles turned to Pickler and said, “Saw.”

  Pickler retrieved the instrument and put in in her hand. Without hesitation she went to work above the elbow, cutting deep.

  Joachim S. Thaler’s eyes shot open.

  Wyles said, “Pickler, put your hand over his—”

  Thaler let out a loud wail before Pickler could react. Seconds later, Thaler’s mangled limb dropped to the floor.

  “Get over here, Barend.”

  Barend Thaler stood stupefied, rooted to his spot on the floor and staring at the carnage.

  Wyles called to him again. “Get over here and stanch the bleeding.”

  Now he moved to the bedside, picked up a clean towel and pressed it to the wound. Wyles retrieved the needle and thread from the medicine bag and began suturing.

  THE MAN IN THE RAM MASK POSITIONED the blade at the young woman’s throat. Still, she offered no resistance.

  Nyx propped herself on her elbows and readied the Sharps, sighting the ram’s head.

  The raven raised the blade as she curled her index finger around the trigger. An instant before she squeezed it, Joachim S. Thaler let out his scream, and the ram lowered the blade. The three men closest to the door left the room and ran up the stairs.

  In a single motion Nyx stood up and leapt over the railing. She landed square on the table, rifle in one hand, canvas sack in the other.

  She shouted at the woman on the table, “Get going. Go!”

  The woman didn’t move.