“Grandpa?” Constance asked from the top of the stairs. Martin looked up.
“We can’t dawdle, Cons—” Martin stopped cold when he saw her.
Constance, her governesses, Miss Applewhite and Miss Anhorn, on either side of her, was wearing a rose-colored bustle dress with ruffled lace on the front lower skirt, as well as on the sleeves and collar. Her hair was fashioned high with ringlets tumbling down. The fourteen-year-old looked down to her grandfather.
“My dear,” Martin said, “you look so much like your grandmother, and your mother. You’re beautiful, Constance, truly.”
Her whole face lit up when she smiled. “I look all right?” she asked.
Miss Anhorn cleared her throat. “A lady doesn’t beg for compliments, child,” Miss Anhorn said. Miss Applewhite, smiling as widely as Constance, reached out to the girl and touched her shoulder.
“You look lovely, honey,” Miss Applewhite said. “Go have fun!”
“I am honored to escort you,” Martin said. “Come, dear. Charleston eagerly awaits you.”
They departed in the carriage headed down Elizabeth Street. They turned right onto Calhoun.
“Nervous, dear?” Martin asked. Constance was staring out the window, her pale face illuminated by the passing gas streetlights. She nodded.
“Grandpa,” Constance said, “I’m sorry.”
“Think nothing of it, dear,” Martin said. “We shall be, as they say, ‘fashionably late.’” He chuckled. “Besides, it’s a lady’s purview to make a man wait.”
“No,” Constance said. “For what’s about to happen. I dreamed it, you see.”
“What?” Martin said. “Dear girl, you’re not making any sense.”
“Mother would understand,” she said. Martin looked at his beautiful granddaughter and saw such a terrible weight pressing down upon such young shoulders. Her eyes, so much like his dear departed wife’s, were haunted.
Martin had heard the reports from the governesses that Constance ate sparingly, that she had great trouble getting to and staying asleep, even with medicinal aids. He had assumed it to be a normal melancholic condition that all women went through from time to time, especially teenage girls. He wished his daughter was here now. She should be. Maude needed to give up her silly notions of independence and tend to her daughter properly.
“I’m beginning to wonder if perhaps I make the terrible things I dream about happen,” Constance said. “Perhaps if they succeed, then it will all stop.”
Martin took Constance’s pale hand. It was trembling. “If who succeeds in what, Constance?”
“Killing me,” she said. “The monsters are here to kill me.”
Two blocks up they turned left onto King. The opera house was farther up on the right. Martin rapped on the roof of the carriage and called out to his driver. “Freemont, we shall be returning to the residence at once. Miss Constance is not feeling well.”
The cab jerked to a halt and Martin heard the horses neighing, bucking.
“Freemont, what on earth is happening?” Martin shouted, as he opened one of the carriage doors to address the coachman. Martin twisted his body to look up. Freemont’s neck hung at a lazy, unnatural angle. His eyes were vacuous in death, and the reins lay loosely in his palm.
“Dear Lord,” Martin said.
He turned to see what was spooking the horses. Three men stood in the center of King Street. They wore heavy dusters, derbies and bandannas covering the lower part of their faces. One of the men was hunched, and seemed to have something jutting from his back. Another one of the trio appeared to have large hideous, deformed hands, resembling giant lobster claws.
“Nothing personal, Marty,” said a voice speaking in a clipped English accent above and behind Martin, from the roof of the carriage. “Jist got no use for you is all. Ta.”
The fourth masked man swung his fist downward, toward Martin’s defenseless skull. Constance’s palm flashed out to block the punch, angling her wrist just as Mother had taught her to redirect most of the force behind the punch and stop it. Palm met fist. That should have been the end of it, but the sheer strength of the masked man’s strike was unnaturally powerful; it carried through and knocked Martin to the street. Constance saw her grandfather lying very still and for an instant she thought the masked man had succeeded in slaying him. Then she saw Martin’s chest rise and fall, and she knew she had saved him, barely.
Constance switched the palm block to a grip on the attacker’s wrist and executed a sacrifice throw that sent the masked man and herself flying off the carriage and tumbling to the street, several feet away from the coach and from Martin’s unconscious body. Constance rolled and came up on her feet immediately. She almost tripped on her skirts, but hours of training let her keep her balance. The masked man with the English accent was flat on his face. He began to laugh.
“Oh, that’s a nice trick, pet,” the masked man said. “I see the Daughters have given you a bit of the witchery, yeah?” The masked man grunted and the fingers of his left hand sunk into the cobblestone of the street, down to the first knuckle, with a thick crunch. “Let me show you a bit of mine.”
He climbed back to his feet, ripping a large section of the stone free with one hand as he stood. The bandanna had dropped and Constance could see his face. The man had a blandly handsome face, pleasant enough but forgotten quickly. He bared his teeth like an animal might and she could see the decay and rot eating them.
He grunted and hurled the chunk of street at the girl. Constance slipped out of the way, but her beautiful yet cumbersome dress caused her some drag and it nearly clipped her. The stonework exploded against a shop front about twenty yards behind her, demolishing part of the store’s wall. Fragments from the collision threw debris everywhere, like pellets from a shotgun.
Constance found herself moving without thinking, her body remembering the endless drills her mother had forced her to endure. She spun, tumbled through the rain of rock. She felt a sharp sting in her arm and another at her shoulder. This damnable dress! It was slowing her down, breaking the rhythm of her breathing and her balance. Thinking about it slowed her even more as her muscles were forced to wait for her brain. She landed and found herself face-to-face with another of the masked men. The killer had cleared the distance to her swiftly and now his arcing, clumsy punch was headed straight for Constance’s face. She stilled her mind, calmed the rising panic and fear in her, like Mother had taught her, and trusted her body and her training. She folded into the punch and felt it flutter by her. Without a wasted motion, her hand darted out and pulled the bandanna up over the man’s eyes, blinding him. That was when she saw the wide, ugly scar on his right cheek. The scar opened wide to reveal a pupil with a sickly yellow-green iris the color of bile. The third eye glared at Constance with alien hatred.
Constance gasped at the eye’s revelation. She was completely flat-footed when the man backhanded her. Instinct came to her rescue once again and she rolled with the hit at the last instant. It saved her life. Constance had never been struck so hard before. She saw a brilliant strobe of white light behind her eyes, and then she felt the rolling impact of the ground, again and again, felt herself sliding along it. Her hands, of their own accord, were slapping the ground with open palms to slow the impact and dissipate the kinetic energy.
She came to rest facedown. Her first awareness was of the poor horses whinnying, mad with fear. Her head felt like it was full of thick molasses; it was hard to think, harder still to get up, but she knew she had to, knew her life depended on getting up, so she did. The pain in doing so helped clear her head.
The four assassins circled her. The carriage was veering wildly down King Street, poor dead Freemont jerking about in his seat like some grisly marionette. Grandfather lay in the road, still unconscious, but thankfully none of the killers seemed to pay him any mind.
The man with the eye on his cheek had pulled his bandanna back over his nose and mouth. The assassin with the huge claws snapped them as he eyed
Constance, and she noticed the claws secreted a viscous fluid that sprayed each time the claws clamped shut with a loud clack. The one she had thought was a hunchback at first had bone spines jutting out from his back. The two-foot-long bone spears were yellowed and sharp. The man with the bad teeth didn’t bother to hide his face anymore. He seemed to be savoring every bit of this struggle, clapping and dancing as he and his companions closed the circle around Constance.
“Oh, I truly wish we could play with you a bit, luv. You’ve a cokum bit o’ jam, ain’t you?”
Constance felt the fear that was eating her brain drown in something else, something that seemed older, more powerful.
“I am not your love,” she said in a voice not entirely her own. “I am not your pet.” She filled herself with clean air and felt her whole body burn with a power she did not fully understand. “I am a Daughter of Lilith; I am the Mother’s sword. If you’re so eager, come play, come play with death.”
Three of the assassins paused, even took a few steps back from Constance. Only the smiling man held his ground. “Oh, I know who you are,” he said. “You are the last Daughter of Lilith; you are the Grail of the Mother. That is why you are going to die.”
The four killers came at Constance as one, a pack of jackals spurred to action by the faux courage of their numbers. Constance readied for the onslaught. She blocked one’s punch and then used his shoulder and back as an acrobatic horse to tumble out of the ring of death and get behind them, move them out of position. Like the smiling man’s punch, the force of the blow was inhuman and it jarred her; she spun a wheel kick at her attacker that should have shattered his hip and completely disabled him, but it didn’t seem to faze him very much.
The other three moved to regroup, with two of them attacking in unison, one with a roundhouse, the other with a low snap kick. She managed to slow down the punch but not stop it. The kick felt like it was from an angry mule. Constance staggered back and fell to the ground. The four moved in to finish her.
A storm tore through the assassins, a blur of motion and force, raging around the girl. The killers careened through the air, tumbling to the ground before the living whirlwind.
Maude stood beside her daughter, in an hourglass stance, legs apart, arms raised in fists. She was dressed in the men’s clothing she used as a disguise, with a bandanna of her own hiding part of her face. Maude shifted into a defensive posture and helped Constance to her feet. “You cover my back and left,” Maude said. “Defensive only. Don’t go on the attack until we know what they are, and don’t let them goad you into moving out of position.”
“Yes, Mother,” Constance said.
The smiling man was back on his feet, too, and he wasn’t smiling anymore. “You have no need for a disguise with us, Maude Stapleton. We know you, we know all the Daughters of Lilith. We can smell your kind on the wind, bitch.”
“Then you know what I’m going to do to you if you try to hurt this girl. Go now. Only mercy you’ll receive.”
“Mercy is for the weak,” the smiling man said. “Kill them both for the glory of the Father!” The smiling man charged Maude and the others followed.
Maude was trying to understand what these men were and why they wanted to kill her daughter. Isaiah had given Maude Constance’s cryptic letter that had been delivered that evening by one of Martin’s servants. The note simply said, “I love you, Mother, good-bye.” Maude had arrived at her father’s residence shortly after Martin and Constance had departed for the opera house, and had tracked the carriage here, jumping rooftop to rooftop across Charleston.
Maude had tried to finish this quickly; Father most likely needed a doctor. However, the hurricane kata that she had executed as she jumped from the rooftop to save her daughter had been less effective than it should have been. Her attack was intended to cripple all four men; it should have, but it had hardly stunned them.
The strange assassins were up and upon them again. Maude sidestepped the man with the claw-hands, catching his follow-up assault with a forearm counter. The force of the impact almost broke her arm. Maude stumbled back from the impact and straight into the man with the extra eye. She pivoted to check his assault but again the strength behind the punch was superhuman and her defense began to crumble. Constance was suddenly there, adding her own strength to Maude’s effort. It worked, and the two women held their ground.
“I told you not to break formation!” Maude shouted as they turned in unison to deflect, side step and jointly hit the spine-backed assassin.
“If I hadn’t you’d be dead now!” Constance shouted back. The mother and daughter bashed Spine-back on opposite shoulders, simultaneously, as he lumbered by. It should have shattered his bones into powder; instead it felt to Maude like hitting a stone mountain. Spine-back grunted and toppled to the ground but then was already struggling to get back up.
Maude knew how to identify and adapt to virtually every known style of combat. Gran had told her many times over the years that martial arts from all the corners of the Earth were derived from the teachings of the Daughters of Lilith. With a few minutes of study, a Daughter could figure out the secret of any style and a counter to it.
The way these “men” fought was different, alien. To an untrained eye it appeared as no style at all, merely brutish brawling like you’d find in any back alley or tavern, but it was a system, a very subtle and specific one at that. When Maude began to see the edges of the design in their style it chilled her blood.
All combat has a rhythm, a music to it. The way these assassins had been trained was specifically without a rhythm; it was counterintuitive, it relied on raw power and chaos rather than pattern and technique. It was a fighting style specifically designed to bypass much of a Daughter’s combat skills.
Constance swung a high kick at the smiling man as she drove a directed finger strike into the cheek eye of the three-eyed man. The smiling man took her most powerful kick square in the face; there was a shower of blood and rotted teeth as his head snapped to the side, the kick stunning him instead of breaking his neck as it should have done. The smiling man grabbed Constance’s still extended leg and swung her off the ground by it like a rag doll, smashing her to the cobblestone street.
“Constance!” Maude called out.
Constance’s eye gouge had proven very effective, and the three-eyed man clutched his vulnerable, blinded orb, hissing and doubled over in pain. Maude, seeing Spine-back was still struggling to rise, grabbed the three-eyed man’s wrist in a reaping throw that completely ignored his superior strength and bulk, and hurled him with all the power she could conjure. The three-eyed man landed hard on Spine-back, impaling himself twice through the chest on the rising assassin’s sharp bone protrusions. Spine-back crashed back to the ground, momentarily dazed by the force of the impact. The three-eyed man was silent and still, dead and pinned to his ally’s back.
“You bitch!” the smiling man screamed, red-faced. He smashed Constance to the ground again. The girl no longer struggled and looked to be unconscious, or worse. “I’ll flay you alive after I turn your brat into jelly!” With a seemingly effortless jerk of his arm, the smiling man lifted Constance’s limp form into the air again, to crack her like a whip. He smashed her again and again, a look of almost ecstasy on his face as he did.
Maude closed the distance between herself and the smiling man. Something massive and sharp grabbed both her arms from behind before she could. It was the claw-handed assassin, and she hadn’t even sensed his approach. His pincers had her. Maude heard the hiss of the liquid his monstrous appendages secreted as it burned the sleeves of her coat and shirt and began to sear the skin of her arm. Maude felt a wave of dizziness and nausea follow the searing pain, and she realized the ooze wasn’t just acidic, it was also venomous.
Her vision was starting to blur and smear. She willed her blood to isolate, slow and direct the toxin to her stomach. She’d need to get it out of her body, to purge it. The pain in her arms was getting worse and she heard the claw
-man growl in her ear, “Jackie there was my friend, whore of Lilith.” He had a heavy German accent. “Let’s see how tough you are when I burn both your fucking arms off.”
The claw-man was lifting Maude off the ground by her pinned arms. It was like being squeezed in a red-hot vice. Maude struggled, but she lacked leverage. She saw the smiling man swinging Constance down to smash her into the street again. In her melting vision, Constance looked so young to Maude, too young for all this.
A butterfly with iridescent wings of metallic blue fluttered before Maude’s face. “Hermana,” a soft voice whispered in Maude’s mind, in her blood. A living, billowing mass of blue swarmed over her, around her, and filled Claw-man’s face, his mouth, his nostrils. His shout of protest was muffled as he choked on thousands of tiny, beating wings. The claws released her and Maude dropped to the ground, lurching toward her daughter. The shifting, churning wall of coruscating blue opened to let her pass unmolested. Maude was already sweating out the venom, her heart hammering as she saw Constance rushing toward the ground again.
A black woman dressed in a man’s suit and a large, fluttering topcoat dropped into view, driving both of her legs into the smiling man’s lower spine. He yelped in pain and released Constance’s leg sooner than he expected. Constance sailed through the air and Maude’s muscles screamed in protest as she hurled herself toward her daughter. She caught Constance midair and used her own body to cushion their impact near where Martin lay.
Constance was still breathing raggedly. Her body was covered in black bruises. Maude sat her next to Martin and struggled back to her feet. She stepped away and retched up the toxin. Immediately, she felt her head clearing.
The woman in the suit was not giving the smiling man time to regroup, pounding him with one powerful punch after another, hopping and bobbing in between blows and snapping tight, lightning-fast kicks to his face. She landed another hit but they weren’t having much effect.
“Get over here and help me!” the woman called to Maude. “Before we both end up dead, and your daughter too!”
The Queen of Swords Page 11