by Gaelen Foley
She jerked her head up and stared into the darkness, the blood draining from her face. She heard hard boot heels striking the cobblestones, rough male shouts. Barbaric curses echoed off the maze of brick all around her.
“Blazes,” she whispered, shooting to her feet. The realization flooded her mind a bit belatedly that larger, more dangerous creatures prowled these back alleys than wily little pickpockets.
The voices were coming closer, bounding everywhere off the cramped walls, confusing her. She whirled around, not knowing which way to flee.
Clutching her satchel tightly, she backed toward the brick wall behind her, trying to melt into the gloom, but when she saw several man-shaped shadows charging toward her, she abandoned dignity and dove into the junk pile by the wall. Scrambling into the heap of rubble, she wedged herself into a small foxhole beneath a faded wooden placard for Trotter’s Oriental Tooth Powder, propped at a steep angle against an old broken barrel. On all fours, she turned around to face the alley, her heart in her throat. Nearby, atop a moldering half boot and a coil of rusty chain, lay an abandoned spool of thick paperboard that had once inhabited the center of a bolt of fabric. Gingerly, she pulled the spool upright and leaned it against the placard’s edge, the better to conceal herself. The sound of her frightened panting filled the cramped, close space, but she could still see into the alley through the crack between the placard and the spool.
How her arch rival, Daphne Taylor, would have laughed to see her in such a state! she thought, then held her breath as half a dozen men tore past, moonlight flashing on the knife each carried in his hand. A gunshot ripped down the alley and whizzed overhead. Ducking, she bit back a cry of alarm. More shots followed, then more footsteps sweeping down the alley toward her at a full run.
Through the small crack between the placard and the spool, she saw four big male silhouettes materializing from out of the fog, spanning the alleyway. Her eyes widened in the darkness as they came closer and she glimpsed the brutal weapons they carried—more knives, lengths of lead pipe as well, and horrible wooden clubs with nails sticking out of the ends. She dared not breathe for fear of being noticed, heard.
No wonder the boy had fled. A gang, she realized as gooseflesh shivered down her arms. Remembered tales and dark legends of what the London criminal gangs sometimes did to their victims filled her with terror. God help her if they found her, she thought. Desperately, she wished she were holding her favorite fowling musket in her hands, primed and loaded.
“Get into position, ye bastards; they’re right behind us!” ordered a tall, wiry man with lank brown hair. She could hear the intense agitation in his voice.
“Did you kill ’im, O’Dell? I saw ye cut him!”
“Don’t know. Got him good, though, I can tell you. Shite!” he muttered as their pursuers flung into the alley and charged at the first group.
Before her eyes, the chase turned into a brawl. The two gangs attacked each other with a furor, screaming incoherently at each other as they fought.
They might as well have been speaking another language, for she could not comprehend a word of their coarse Cockney jargon and the criminal tongue known as the “flash language.” The shadows veiled the worst of the battle from her sight—all she could make out was fast, ferocious movement, a great swinging and slashing—but the sounds alone were awful enough.
To her dismay, rather than moving on, three more thugs rushed into the alley from the opposite direction, coming to the aid of their six embattled comrades. Now the four pursuers found themselves, in turn, sorely outnumbered. She could hear their cursing and ragged breathing as the others surrounded them on all sides.
Then, without warning, a hideous roar burst directly overhead like a thunderclap.
She looked upward with a gasp just as a tall, sinewy shadow leaped up with tigerlike agility onto the pile of moldy bricks adjacent to her hiding place. She caught a flash of wild green eyes in the darkness.
“O’Dell!”
Jacinda stared at the newly arrived man. The fight in the alleyway paused, the others exhaling ragged oaths. Moonlight haloed his tawny mane, limned his broad shoulders in silver, and glinted off the dagger he clutched in his hand like a shard from a lightning bolt.
The wiry brown-haired man who apparently answered to that name cursed and wiped the sweat off his brow. “Still not dead, you son of a bitch?”
The man in the shadows took a menacing step forward, edging into view with a cynical smirk. Jacinda’s eyes slowly widened.
Why, it was Byron’s corsair come to violent, throbbing life. The band of moonlight down the middle of the alley striped his black-clad body and slanted across his hard, chiseled face like war paint. He wore a short black coat over a loose shirt of natural linen that hung open halfway down his chest. Black trousers hugged his compact hips and long legs. As his hand curled into a fist at his side, she saw the gaudy gleam of thick gold rings on his fingers.
Jacinda stared at him, holding her breath. In a glance, she knew instinctually that, in this brick-and-mortar jungle, he was king.
Then the gang leader charged. The sharp blow of his boot heel resounded overhead as he sprang off the tooth powder placard, cracking it under his muscled weight, and leaped off the junk pile, landing in the midst of the fight. With a fist reinforced by his chunky metal rings, he dealt O’Dell a punch in the jaw that sent the man flying across the alley as though he’d been struck by a cannonball.
And then all hell broke loose.
Eagerly pressing her eye to the crack between the placard and the spool, Jacinda watched the gang leader wreak havoc on his opponents with dark thrill pounding in her veins. Once he had thrown the first punch, his men reengaged their enemies with renewed gusto. They were still outnumbered, but their leader’s arrival had decidedly evened the odds. Back and forth across the alley the battle raged.
“How many times have I told you,” the gang leader growled as he threw one of his enemies to the ground,
“you stay off my turf or you die.” He kicked the prone man in the stomach, then swooped down and, she feared, made good on the threat.
She blanched.
Crashing blows, curses, and guttural male grunts of exertion filled the alley, then the gang leader appeared again in the strip of moonlight, nimbly twisting out of the way as O’Dell swung at his lean middle with a spiked club. She drew in her breath silently. It was a terrible weapon, though crude. The makeshift mace, with its bristle of long nails, was designed to tear flesh off bone, but its intended victim danced out of range by a hair’s breadth as the club whistled through the air again and again. Wielding it menacingly, O’Dell advanced.
Jacinda cringed against the barrel as the fight moved closer. With another two steps, they were so near that she could practically feel the heat of their bodies. She hunkered down in her hiding place, but when O’Dell struck again with a bellow, the gang leader dove aside. The great club plummeted through the air, crashing into the top of the barrel mere inches over her head, showering her in a rain of dust and splinters.
How she kept from screaming or coughing in the sudden cloud of debris, she did not know. The placard, thank God, remained in place, keeping her hidden, but a meaty thud sounded from somewhere nearby, and the next thing she knew, the gang leader came crashing down on his back amid the garbage pile. She stifled a gasp, still clutching the snapped placard desperately over her head as she saw that his dagger had flown out of his hand amid the trash. It lay within her reach, gleaming in the moonlight.
O’Dell wrestled the spiked mace free from the barrel’s wood; the gang leader, still on his back, scrabbled for his knife. With the alley ringing with shouts and the gang leader totally absorbed in his reckless fight, he did not notice her, though a mere two feet separated them. Jacinda’s heart pounded. Everything in her shouted for her to nudge his knife toward his hand so he could defend himself, but what if they saw her?
O’Dell’s eyes gleamed evilly in the darkness. He raised the club over his
head to deal the death blow. Jacinda could not help herself. She stuck out her gold-slippered toe and furtively nudged the dagger toward him, but his searching hand found the coil of rusty chain instead. His fingers wrapped around it. With a growl, he yanked the chain upward like a whip, clomping O’Dell in the face. The man let out a scream and dropped the club, clapping his hand to his injured eye. Temporarily blinded, unable to fight, he chose to retreat.
The gang leader grabbed his dagger and leaped to his feet. His fury quickly broke the others’ resistance. They turned and ran.
“After them!” he bellowed at his men.
Peering out the crack, Jacinda saw O’Dell’s thugs fleeing. The rest gave chase, leaving the alley all but deserted. The gang leader started to run after them, too, as though he had not slaked his bloodlust yet.
“Blade, wait! Riley’s hurt!”
The news slowed but did not stop him. He cast a torn, angry glance over his shoulder at the man who had called to him. “Take care of him! Get him back to Bainbridge Street! I’ve got to finish O’Dell.”
In the shadows, Jacinda could make out the shape of one man lying on the ground. Two others crouched on either side of him.
“He’s hurt bad, man.”
“Billy,” a weak voice pleaded.
Still in shock after all she had seen, his name did not register in her mind. Looking exasperated and thoroughly torn, the gang leader stalked back to his friends, glaring over his shoulder and muttering curses at his fleeing enemies. “Bloody goddamn cowards…”
Jacinda blinked at his language.
“Billy,” the wounded man gasped again.
“Ah, Riley, you stupid mick, what have you gone and done now?” he asked gruffly, lowering himself to one knee beside the man.
“I’m done for, Billy!”
“I’ll not hear such dramatics. Shut up and take a drink, for God’s sake.” He raised a flask to the man’s lips. “Takes more than a bloody Jackal to kill an Irishman, isn’t that what you always say?”
“Jaysus!” the man gasped out.
“Easy, lad.” He gripped the Irishman’s bloodied hand. “Come on, Riley. Come on.” Taut desperation edged his voice.
Ensconced in her hiding place, Jacinda stared helplessly from the shadows. Surely this poor wretch was not going to die right in front of her.
“You get O’Dell, man. Swear ta me,” the wounded man said, hoarse and trembling.
“By God, Riley, I’ll get him if it’s the last thing I do. You have my word.”
The other two seconded his vow, but none of them could prevent the inevitable. A moment later, their friend was dead.
The three survivors were perfectly silent.
Jacinda gazed at their young leader’s hawklike profile, silvered by moonlight as he bowed his head.
In all the alley, there was not a sound. Even the breeze had stopped.
“Short, nasty…and brutish,” the gang leader said with a bitterness in his low voice sharp enough to cut the very darkness. Rising to his feet, he shook his head with a weary shrug. “Bury him,” he ordered, and walked away, passing dangerously close to her hiding place, but Jacinda stared after him in bewilderment. Had her ears deceived her, or had that ruffian just quoted the philosopher Hobbes?
Impossible, she thought. There was no way this crude, violent, Cockney prince could read. He must have heard the famous quotation somewhere and was merely parroting it.
“Pick him up. Let’s go,” he ordered his men, all fight and muscle and hot impatience like a stallion.
Yes, do, please, she mentally agreed, unsettled to the core. She could barely wait for the gang to leave the alley so she could come out of this wretched garbage heap and find her way back to the coaching inn, but for now, she studied the marauding heathen in reluctant fascination. Who is he?
There was something so familiar about him, something that snagged at her memory. She felt as though she ought to know him, but how could she possibly? They were from different worlds. Perhaps she had merely read his story a hundred times, she mused wistfully, for surely he had stepped out of the pages of The Corsair. God knew he was a dangerous beast—bad, wild, cocky, and mean. He was tall and lean and whipcord tough, with a giant chip against the world sitting almost visibly on his shoulder, but something in his weary air plucked at her compassion.
His borrowed words haunted her. Better for him if he were too ignorant to comprehend the wretchedness of his state, she mused, for surely the only thing worse than having to live like this would be possessing sufficient sensitivity to feel the full despair of such an existence. As though sensing her scrutiny, he half turned away, his narrow, hungry face closed and brooding. His wide shoulders slumped a little as he waited for his men, his hands loosely planted on his lean waist.
When he paused to examine his left side beneath his coat for a moment, she realized that he had been injured—rather seriously, if the dark stain on his white shirt was any indication. He let his black leather coat fall over the wound again, hiding it, merely wiped the sweat off his brow and turned away as the other two joined him, carrying their fallen friend.
He nodded to them to go first. “I’ll watch your back.”
They went ahead as instructed. He pulled out his knife again with a soft, deadly hiss of metal and glanced over his shoulder, making sure that none of the Jackals were lurking nearby—a dreadful thought, in light of her predicament. She realized uneasily that she would have to move quickly to escape the alley before O’Dell’s gang came back to retrieve their dead.
Good-bye, you heathen, she thought, rather mystified as she watched the gang leader head back down the alley, moving at more of a swagger than an ordinary walk. She thought again of the little pickpocket who had led her into this dark maze, and wondered if that was how the gang leader had started out. It was difficult to believe there were people living this way right under the very noses of the opulent ton, overlapping worlds virtually oblivious to each other’s existence. Still, she was not sorry to see them go.
Somberly watching them carrying Riley’s limp body away, she exhaled slowly, relieved to be almost in the clear. Her post chaise was no doubt ready by now and waiting to bear her away to the Channel.
In that moment—without warning—disaster struck.
Something small and sleek with claws and a naked tail went scampering over her foot. Her reflexive kick and small girlish shriek of revulsion were as swift and emphatic as they were involuntary. Her awkward movement jarred the placard, which sagged down over her shoulder and knocked over the fabric spool, sending it rolling before she could grab it. The rat vanished, but she was too late to call back her muffled cry.
She sat frozen, too late, watching, aghast, as the pasteboard cylinder went rolling right up to the toes of the gang leader’s scuffed black boots.
Instantaneous yells of rage filled the alley. In a second, his men had abandoned the corpse and surrounded the garbage pile. Jacinda looked around wildly in terror, pushing back farther into her covert as her heart beat frantically.
“Come out! Come out of there, you Jackal son of a bitch!”
“We got one hidin’ in here, Blade! Probably wounded.”
“Well, let’s finish him, then.” She knew his voice at once, cool and low and deadly. “Leave him to me.”
“Be careful, man….”
Oh, no, she thought in perfect horror, paralyzed with fright as a hard, callused hand adorned with thick gold rings grasped the edge of the half-broken placard and ripped it away. He threw it aside with a pirate roar, gripping his dagger in his other hand. As he swooped toward her, bent on bloody murder, Jacinda jolted backward.
“No!”
He stopped midmotion with a startled grunt. “Huh?”
She swallowed hard, then sat stock-still, not daring even to breathe as his big knife hovered inches before her face. Slowly, defiantly, she lifted her stricken gaze from the weapon’s deadly blade and looked into the gang leader’s fierce green eyes.
&nbs
p; CHAPTER TWO
Perhaps he had taken one too many blows to the head. Blade squeezed his eyes shut for fear they were playing tricks on him, but when he flicked them open again, she was still there—a beautiful blonde hunkered down in a little hidey-hole between the moldering brick pile and a broken barrel, her arms wrapped around her bent knees. He stared at her in wary astonishment.
“Well, well, what ’ave we ’ere?” Shaking off his daze, he slowly lowered himself to a crouched position before her. His men crowded in on either side of him.
“Wot the devil?”
“It’s a lass!”
“Aye, a right little beauty, ain’t ye, darlin’?” Blade murmured, not taking his eyes off her. Sheathing his knife, he offered his hand to help her up.
She made no move to take it.
“Come out, little stray. No one’s gonna hurt you. Let us ’ave a proper look at you.”
She swept him with a nervous look of haughty disdain.
Stung, he withdrew his offered hand. “What’s the matter? You too good to talk to us?”
“Careful, mate,” Flaherty warned, “she could be with O’Dell.”
He snorted. “That bastard couldn’t get near the likes of ’er in a hundred years.” Letting his stare roam greedily over her, he felt like some rogue buccaneer who had just discovered someone else’s buried treasure—and he was not above stealing it. Indeed, he was not.
Her hair was a golden wealth of bright, spiraling tresses. A few short, unruly curls fell over her smooth forehead, escaped from the small, star-shaped pins that had tried to keep them tamed. Beneath her prettily curved brows, her dark eyes blazed with defiance. There was a sweet roundness to the shape of her face, an elfin delicacy to her features—high cheekbones, a pert little point of a chin. The ruby hue of her lips was enhanced by the deep red coat that molded the curves of her slender body. He knit his brows as he studied her. No one around here wore a coat like that.