by James Axler
“What good luck!” Dupree crowed. “Here she comes now, the Beast herself. Not looking so formidable, is she?”
Dupree stiffened. “Wait! What does this mean, anyway? I gave explicit orders that the big house was not to be touched until I said so!”
“It was already on fire when we got there,” one of the men accompanying Elizabeth said defensively. “She was lying out on the lawn and some servants were dressing her. They ran off, so we thought we’d bring her to you.”
“Oh. Right.” Dupree seemed to bounce up and down on his toes. “Right! Excellent idea. I think I’m going to rape your sister before your red rat eyes, Tobias. I’m going to take my time. And then a hundred or so of my closest friends—” he waved around at the ragged mob, who howled in excited anticipation “—will take their turns pleasuring her. Whatever’s left, you’ll get to watch me torture to death, before I crucify you in the middle of this square and burn your squalid little ville around you! How do you like that, young Baron Tobias?”
Then, his voice faltering, he said, “Tobias?”
“Dark night!” J.B. exclaimed softly. “He’s changing.”
Rage knotted Blackwood’s face. But mere muscular tension couldn’t account for the bizarre crawling that was taking place beneath his fine alabaster skin. Before Mildred’s shocked eyes his features altered. His jaws stretched into a blunt, fanged muzzle. His eyes retreated behind massive protective brows.
His ropes appeared to be melting into the very skin of his arms. As if they were being absorbed by them. The arms themselves sank into the surface of the heavy wooden beam to which they were tied, as if drawing substance from them.
“Blind norad!” Dupree shrieked. “He’s a beast, too! Chill him! Chill him!”
Most of the pirates hooted and cheered. They couldn’t see the monstrous transformation taking place as Blackwood’s muscles writhed and rearranged themselves on a skeleton that was, impossibly, itself shifting structure. They thought this was a new sadistic game their boss was playing with his victim.
But one of the black-clad cadre guarding the former Black Mask understood perfectly well what was happening. He raised a pump scattergun toward the monstrous white face snarling from beneath the wooden beam.
The pirate’s shaved head exploded in a shower of chunks and dark spray.
“WHY CHILL THE SEC MAN, not the boss?” Krysty asked, risking a glance at the scene below as the ejected empty spun free and Ryan jacked a fresh cartridge into the chamber.
“Got no clear shot at Dupree,” Ryan said. “Anyway, I reckon this is between Blackwood and Dupree. If the nuke-sucker looks like he’s winning, I’ll chill him though.”
He sighted and fired again. Another black-clad bodyguard fell.
“Eyes peeled,” he warned Krysty as he racked the bolt. “They’ll come running to the sounds of my shots like a dinner bell.”
THE PIRATES HAD BEEN firing blasters in the air off and on, as coldhearts who aren’t very smart will in times of exceptional high spirits or in a state of drunkenness. At first they didn’t realize there was anything different about the shots echoing across the square.
Then Blackwood broke the massive beam across his back.
Mildred gasped as he flung the heavy halves away. One struck a pirate in the back and just folded him in two the wrong way. His spine snapping sounded like a handblaster going off. Before anyone could react the Beast Tobias had sprung forward and grabbed Dupree with his clawed hands.
The white monster, which looked more lion than wolf, hoisted the former sec boss and current pirate king over his head into the air. Face up to the rain, Dupree howled and thrashed, to no avail.
With a ripple of monstrous muscles, Blackwood bent his old enemy backward slowly, slowly, until Dupree’s spine snapped, too. Mildred winced as she heard the distinct pops of multiple vertebrae giving way.
Then, tossing his prey in the air like a housecat with a mouse, Blackwood caught the still-shrieking Dupree and twisted his head off his shoulders. A great gout of blood covered the baron face to feet with the dying pulse of his enemy’s heart. He brandished the horror-struck head in the air and roared.
Mildred saw a bullet strike his side. He barely reacted. She sighted the ZKR on the head of the nearest black-leathered bodyguard, then fired. The coldheart crumpled. She felt the sideblast of J.B.’s shotgun as he pumped rounds at the pirates. From across the square Jak and Doc opened up, as well, their weapons cracking and booming respectively.
The pirates wavered. As she emptied her cylinder and fumbled in a pocket for a speed-loader, Mildred knew her lifespan was now measured in minutes if not seconds. Even as Blackwood flung himself into the mob, tearing men apart and tossing pieces aside in a way that could only remind her of a whipper-snipper she saw there were just too many of the bastards, too well armed.
“Been a good run, Mildred,” J.B. said, stuffing fresh green-hulled shells into his tubular magazine. He saw how hopeless their situation was, too. Of course he would.
Mildred shot a face that appeared at the window in front of the temporarily helpless Armorer. It twisted away.
“Really good, John. Have I told you how much joy you’ve given me?”
And that was when hundreds of infuriated Havenites, rallied by Barton from north of town, poured into the square, shouting and shooting with vengeful glee.
BARTON WINCED as a fresh set of ear-punishing explosions rippled off to the east. White flashes lit the black cloud of smoke that rose from the direction of the bayou.
“I wish they hadn’t done that,” he said. Meaning, that the victorious Havenites hadn’t put the torch to Dupree’s flagship Black Joke. “Aside from the fact we could use the supplies and any information aboard her, we’ll be lucky if half the warehouses the pirates failed to set on fire don’t burn down now.”
“People can feel some pretty high spirits after a victory like today’s,” Ryan said.
He and his companions stood on the front lawn of Blackwood’s house, now trampled from its former manicured elegance to sorry muck. The rain, the servants’ vigorous but not very effectual bucket-brigade efforts, and the ancient house’s intrinsic toughness had slowed the conflagration’s progress. But even as more folks freed from the battle turned up to help fight the blaze, the great house was doomed.
But this day’s victory had been major. When the forces Barton had whipped up scythed into them, the pirates, already demoralized by coming suddenly under fire when they thought they had everything sewn up—not to mention getting shredded to pieces by the Beast Tobias—had turned and run right off. Few even tried to make it back to the boats. They just headed due south into the swamps, hoping to make their way to the coast, where they ran smack into a couple hundred angry Havenites swarming up from the Gulf, eager for payback from years of torment and plunder at the Black Gang’s hands, which they were, so far as Ryan knew, busily wreaking even now.
Ryan put his arm around Krysty, who snuggled close and beamed at him. “Sometimes you got to just know what victory is,” he said.
Barton’s big shoulders slumped. The man was plainly spent, physically and emotionally.
“You’re the seasoned fighting man,” he said, “so I suppose I should pay attention. I hardly know what to think just now. Where could Tobias and Elizabeth be?”
“Coming yonder up the path,” Doc said, pointing with his swordstick. He stood under the gazebo, staying dry. Or at least not getting any wetter. The way he’d been staring into space, rocking on his heels and humming “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Ryan was surprised he was connected enough to the here-and-now to notice.
Half naked, barefoot and looking as if he’d showered in gore and forgotten to towel off, Blackwood carried his sister’s limp form step by torturous step. Men ran to help him, but he shrugged them off. Instead he walked straight to the porch of blazing house.
“Be careful, Baron!” Barton yelped. “It isn’t safe there. The whole house is about to come down!”
Blackwood smi
led gently and nodded. “Yes, my good and faithful friend. I know.”
He looked down at his sister, who clung to his chest like a feeble child. “It’s the last chance, Elizabeth, dear. Are you sure this is how you want it?”
She nodded.
The baron of Haven looked up. His eyes were blood-colored pools of sadness.
“My sister and I are guilty of many crimes. I make no excuses. We have tried to atone by our actions, but I know now that was never possible.”
“Baron, what are you saying?” Barton cried.
“That the Curse of the Beast must end here. It is carried in our very Blackwood genes, altered somehow by heedless science before the days of skydark. I name you baron now, Barton. I know you’ll do better at it than I, if for no other reason than that you have no ravening monster lurking within, awaiting only the moment to escape.
“And farewell to you, Ryan Cawdor, Dr. Tanner, Jak Lauren. Mildred Wyeth and J. B. Dix. Good friends and heroic ones. And Krysty Wroth—I apologize for my sister’s actions and wish only you could have known each other under better circumstances.”
“Me, too, Baron,” Krysty said. “But wait, there’s no need—”
Sadly, he nodded. “Yes, there is need.”
Without more words he turned. Yellow flames now belched out the front door. Pausing only to kiss his sister on the cheek, he carried her unflinching straight into them.
Overcome with fatigue, Mildred twigged a beat late. She uttered a scream and tried to throw herself forward in a belated effort to stop them. J.B. caught her from behind and held her despite her sobbing struggles.
The greedy flames instantly swallowed Tobias and Elizabeth Blackwood. As if on cue, the whole mighty structure fell in at once upon them with a vast crashing and groaning. The heat that welled from the collapsing house drove everybody scrambling back.
A fountain of yellow sparks shot skyward toward the clouds, oblivious to the now pouring rain, like souls ascending to the heavens.
Epilogue
“You know, Ryan,” J.B. said, standing with his foot up on a locker behind the bowsprit of the vessel now doing business as Fallen Angel. Above and behind him her triangular mainsail snapped and boomed in a stiff easterly breeze. “I kinda wonder, didn’t poor Tobias know all of us got monsters inside, just waiting to get out?”
He paused a moment and shrugged. “Granted, not all of us got monsters that actually turn into lions and munch pirates when they break free.”
“Philosophy, John,” Mildred said from behind him, “isn’t your strongest suit.”
Behind them the crew out of Haven moved briskly about their seamanly duties in the clean-smelling early morning air. They were all pleased at their handsome new vessel, a fifty-foot schooner, although there were still some nasty cleaning duties left over from the previous owners.
They wouldn’t be needing her anymore. Scarcely had the flotilla of pirate boats towed behind the Black Joke vanished up a masked and little known inlet into the system of interlinked waterways than Havenite coast dwellers rowed out and fell upon the skeleton crews left on board the larger ships, hungry for retribution. As seasoned seafolk themselves, the Havenites made sure to damage the vessels as little as humanly possible.
The crews, not so much.
Krysty put her arms around Ryan’s waist from behind. “Wouldn’t it’ve been lovely if we could have stayed, lover?” she asked.
He patted her hands. “Yeah, mebbe.”
A shift in the wind carried a fine mist of salty spray into his face. In the heat of the Gulf morning, even with the sun just peeking mischievously at them from dead ahead, it was welcome coolness. He smiled.
“Well, couldn’t we at least have taken Barton’s offer of employment on a trial basis? With the swampie war ended and the pirate situation dialed way down, Haven’s a pretty stable ville. They should be back on their feet in a year or two.”
Barton, once a baron’s chief aide-de-camp, now baron in his own right, had agreed at once to the terms brought by Ryan from Papa Dough, pending face-to-face negotiations in a few weeks’ time to shake the details into place. Barton had never believed in the war. But he had been a genuinely loyal servant of the ruling family, especially its final generation.
And that, Ryan knew, was the point where the metal seriously commenced to scrape.
“You seriously believe he meant it?” J.B. said. “After we burned down the house, not to mention his favorite baron and his sister.”
“But Barton seemed like a good man.”
Behind, Jak uttered a caw of laughter. “So Tobias! How that work out?”
“Baron Tobias was indeed a good man,” Doc said deliberately. “A flawed man, it is true. But in this wicked age of this wicked world, where is the man who is not?”
“Baron turn into monster,” Jak said. “Some flaw!”
“Admittedly, some flaws are of greater magnitude than others.”
“I agree with Doc,” Ryan said. “Tobias was a good man. But in the end trying to do good in two different directions tore him apart.”
“And what moral instruction do you draw from Tobias’s dilemma, my dear Ryan?” Doc asked.
Ryan shrugged. “World’s a complicated place, for sure.”
“When you’re thinking of a good man being bent this way and that like a length of bailing wire,” J.B. said, “you might also consider the old saw about barons and gratitude.”
“Why, John Barrymore!’ Doc exclaimed. “You are a philosopher!”
“Dark night!” the Armorer said. He brushed at his scuffed leather jacket. “Don’t let on. People might fear it’s catching.”
“Elizabeth was a good woman, too,” Krysty said.
“Powerful judgment,” Ryan said, “allowing as your only interaction with her involved her being a ravening monster thirsting for your blood, and all.”
“I can’t pretend I sensed anything from that creature but rage and hate and fear,” Krysty said. “But I talked to people of the ville about her. About the life she tried to live, as opposed to that which was pressed on her. The evil wasn’t of her choosing. It was a hateful gift of predark science.”
“She could’ve stopped it, though,” Ryan said.
“How?” Krysty asked.
“She could have chosen suicide, instead of continuing to change shape every now and then and go kill people—then in between work hard to make up for what the Beast did.”
Krysty sighed. “You’re right. The world isn’t simple.”
“Still,” Mildred said, “it would be good not to be constantly driven from pillar to post, We don’t even have to put down roots. Just…rest.”
“We all feel that way, Mildred,” Krysty said. “But J.B.’s right. Haven wasn’t an option after everything that happened. Not really.”
“Least they let us ride boat where it go,” Jak said.
“They owed us that much, sure,” J.B. said.
Ryan turned around to face his friends. “Listen up, people,” he said. “I want it, too. What you all want. An end to constant running and gunning. Peace. Sanctuary. I promise one day we’ll find it—home.”
“Cross your heart and hope to die?” Mildred asked playfully.
Ryan did the deed with his thumb. “Cross my heart and hope to die!”
And, laughing, they sailed away up the golden trail of light on water, into the rising sun, toward a dream that receded as perpetually as the horizon.
* * * * *
ISBN: 9781459219717
Copyright © 2012 by Worldwide Library
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