The Amoral Hero

by Logan Jacobs

  “It won’t be necessary for you to do that,” Janina agreed. “Kat and I will take care of it. And you will do your best to defend us from the consequences, if there are any of the unwanted variety. But of course we do not intend for you to have to fight anyone at all if it can be avoided, by the proper combination of stealth, temporary incapacitation, and other forms of leverage. Kat and I may not be as strong as men can be, but we are very good planners, and that factor can overcome many other factors in a potentially violent confrontation.”

  “You know, this crazed plan of yours isn’t a guarantee either,” I informed them with a shake of my head. “It’s just another gamble, of an even more dangerous sort. At least if you lost the tournament, all you would lose is the money that you bet. But if this scheme goes south--”

  “Good afternoon, Sheriff,” Katrina chirped.

  A sandy blond man with a graying beard who was riding by us in the opposite direction tipped his black hat to the girls. I saw the wink of the silver star pinned to his chest, which must have caught Katrina’s eye too. Then, the man abruptly pulled his horse to a halt and stared from Janina to Katrina and back again as if he had seen a ghost. At first, I thought maybe he’d never seen a pair of twins before. Then, he finally found his voice and spoke.

  “Well, well, well,” he said in a tone of unmistakable bitterness. His face was deeply suntanned. His features were neither handsome nor ugly. His eyes were the only feature that was remotely remarkable, being bright blue with a severe squint, and I didn’t know if that was a reaction to the sun shining in them, or if it was from a habit of scrutinizing individuals for any signs of criminal tendencies. “If it ain’t the deviled Elliott twins themselves, all growed up now it looks like. But I’d wager you haven’t changed a bit on the inside, women like you never do. God help your husbands, if you have deceived any poor unfortunate souls into that bleak position.”

  “An old friend?” I asked my companions wryly.

  “This is Sheriff Cavendish, a more upstanding gentleman you have never met,” Janina said as she rolled her eyes. “We made his acquaintance several years ago, we can’t have been more than fifteen or sixteen at the time.”

  “And yet he wanted to throw us gentle young maidens into jail, all for a silly misunderstanding,” Katrina sighed, as if she weren’t angry with him, just disappointed by Sheriff Cavendish’s evident lack of humanity.

  “It was the only rightful place for you,” Sheriff Cavendish agreed unapologetically. “Indeed I would’ve recommended the gallows, but on account of your youth, and your poor upbringing.”

  “Do you hear how heartless this man is, Mr. Hale?” Katrina asked me with a pout. “I can hardly believe my ears.”

  “It was a solid case, the evidence was indisputable,” the sheriff muttered. His eyes grew, if possible, even more squinted, they turned into the narrowest slits of blue. “The only thing it lacked was a jury with a spine.”

  “This all happened in another town altogether, so long ago that I hardly remember it,” Janina said placatingly.

  “Hardly remember it because there have been so many similar incidents in your life since, I suppose,” Sheriff Cavendish grumbled.

  “The jury, thankfully, had the compassion and wisdom to forgive us our youthful indiscretions,” Katrina said primly.

  “And now, we are entirely different people; we are reformed women,” Janina declared.

  “Oh, is that so?” Sheriff Cavendish scoffed. “And what, pray tell, are you doing here in Sunderly, this weekend of all weekends, during the annual poker tournament? I assure you, the timing of it gets my hackles up. Have you acquired a gambling habit?”

  “Not at all,” Janina said solemnly. “In fact, my sister and I have traveled here, with the protection of our bodyguard, in order to lecture these people on the perils of a dissolute lifestyle, and earnestly preach to them the benefits of earning a living by the sweat of your brow and in accordance with the principles of religion. We do so hope we shall be able to turn at least one soul away toward more honest pursuits, Sheriff.”

  “Do you mock God and those who spread his word?” the sheriff demanded through gritted teeth.

  “We would never do such a thing, Sheriff,” Katrina exclaimed. “I wish there were some way we could convince you of the extent that our hearts have changed since the unfortunate circumstances of our last meeting. We may look like them, but we are not those wayward girls any longer. Our chief concern now is for our immortal souls, and the benefit of mankind.”

  “I will trust you on that account on the day I trust a fox in my henhouse,” the sheriff spat. He tore his eyes away from glowering at the twins to glance me up and down. He clucked his tongue against his teeth and shook his head at me. “I don’t know who you are, Sir, but all I have to say to you is that if you have any sense, you’ll start being more careful about the company you keep.”

  “I appreciate your concern, Sheriff,” I replied. I couldn’t help being greatly amused by his remark, since he might have been just about the only person who would have laid eyes on me, in my undeniably travel-worn suit of clothes with the sword prominently displayed at my hip, with what I’d been told was a naturally forbidding expression and a harsh stare, and concluded that I was the one who needed to be protected from the waifish, angelically beautiful, regally gowned twins.

  “And how have the last five years treated you, Sheriff?” Janina asked him sweetly. I glanced over at her and saw that her entire demeanor had changed as she shifted to a different tactic of dealing with this unwelcome face from the past. “I don’t see a ring on your finger. Haven’t you met a lady who suited you yet?”

  “My focus is on my duty to this town,” he sputtered. His posture had stiffened at her words.

  “Oh, yes, of course, but such a courageous and hard-working man as yourself surely deserves the tender ministrations of a fair and loving wife, whenever you return home for a brief respite from your tireless crusade against crime,” Katrina cooed as she batted her lashes at him.

  “I’ll have my eye on the both of you,” Sheriff Cavendish snarled. Then he spurred his horse onward and hustled past us.

  The twins burst into giggles.

  “The poor man doesn’t have a humorous bone in his body,” Katrina sighed.

  “And I’d imagine his back must be in a constant state of agony from the weight of all the grudges that he carries around,” Janina added.

  “Although we never did him personally a single lick of harm,” Katrina said.

  “But he takes every transgression of the law, no matter how slight it may be, deeply personally,” Janina reminded her.

  “There’s no more town left,” Theo observed as we passed the last building and stared out into the windswept desert. “Shall I turn back?”

  “Guess so, just give that sheriff a wide berth,” I said. As amusing as the twins might find him, I didn’t need any conflicts with law enforcement to complicate my job. It was easy for them to laugh since they weren’t the ones who might have to fight the sheriff and his officers. Although, I wondered if allowing them to be subdued unharmed and delivered into the Sunderly town jail would count as honoring my contract. After all, I had pledged to keep them safe, not to keep them free. I wasn’t sure how I’d go about collecting my fee in that case, though.

  “We’d better find an inn with rooms still left,” Katrina said. She was right. Sunderly actually had three inns that I had noticed in passing, but with their limited number of rooms and the heavy influx of out-of-town guests, that didn’t necessarily mean we would have our choice of establishments.

  The first inn we made inquiries at informed us that they had no rooms left, and the second had one room left, but not enough stalls in the stable to accommodate our five horses. Theo, of course, would have been equally happy to sleep indoors as out, but I doubted the inn would allow that.

  As we approached the third inn, another mounted party rode toward us from the opposite direction. There were several men, bu
t the one I noticed first was the one in the middle, because he was wearing a blindingly bright white suit with a hat to match and twinkling silver spurs and silver studded everything.

  Then Janina beside me suddenly let out a gasp. I looked over at her and saw that she was also eyeing the white-clad man.

  “Kat,” she whispered urgently.

  “Oh!” Katrina let out a little gasp of horror to match her twin’s.

  “Come on, Mr. Hale,” Janina urged. And they proceeded to maneuver the horses to turn down the nearest alley between two buildings and hurry behind a general store so that the approaching party couldn’t get a good look at them.

  The luggage mares were crowding into Theo’s space with all of their boxes and cases sticking out at uncomfortable angles, and Theo reacted by taking a step back and squishing me against the side of a building.

  “Another old friend I should know about?” I groaned to the twins.

  “A very dear friend of Janie’s,” Katrina replied as she snickered through her fingers.

  “Someone you robbed?” I guessed.

  “She stole his heart,” Katrina quipped.

  “An old suitor?” I asked.

  “Her former betrothed,” Katrina said. “One of them, anyhow.”

  “What made you break off the engagement?” I asked Janina this time. She seemed a lot less enthusiastic than her sister about sharing the story with me.

  “The fact that I had already secured the wedding gift he promised to my uncle in exchange for consenting to the match,” Janina answered after a moment’s hesitation.

  “Two hundred gold coins!” Katrina exclaimed.

  “Once he paid it, we left town for a few days,” Janina recounted, “and our dear uncle informed Mr. Kennedy Cox that my sister and I had both suddenly caught a fever and tragically died within hours of each other. He also mentioned to him that the two hundred gold coins already paid would be used to cover our funeral expenses.”

  “Mr. Cox didn’t live in Dunville, he was just visiting on potencium mining business when he met her,” Katrina explained. “And when our uncle emphasized the rapidly contagious nature of this lethal fever of which we had perished, he decided against remaining in town for another week to attend our funeral.”

  “But you didn’t know he lived in Sunderly?” I asked.

  “I don’t think he does, I think he must be here for the poker tournament,” Janina said miserably. “I never could have guessed that.”

  “So, Sheriff Cavendish thinks you’re liars and thieves,” I said, “and that man in the white suit thinks you’re… dead?”

  The twins nodded their silvery blonde heads in unison.

  Well.

  This was going to be one hell of a poker tournament.

  Chapter Ten

  As it turned out, the third inn that we checked did have two suitable rooms available, although they were some of its smallest and shabbiest rooms since all the finest rooms had already been rented out to wealthy tournament competitors. Having a roof over my head at all meant that I considered it more than adequate. The twins on the other hand huffed a bit when they saw the quality of the furnishings and the lack of windows, but they accepted that it was our best option for the time being and made arrangements to have their luggage carried upstairs.

  For the rest of that day, we wandered around town and just explored the shops and conversed with residents of Sunderly and poker tournament participants and spectators. We went on foot and left the mares stabled at the inn, but Theo walked next to me, because he was curious to see the town too.

  Men both young and old stared at the twins everywhere we went. Either Janina or Katrina would naturally have been a magnet for male attention on her own, but the fact that there were two creatures sharing the same graceful figure and angelically beautiful face seemed to enthrall passersby even more. The twins smiled at everyone, extended their gloved hands for introductory kisses, and chattered vivaciously about vacuous subjects like the weather or how fine a town Sunderly was or how exciting the tournament was going to be.

  I hung off to the side without involving myself in most of these interactions and occasionally observed the glint of a watch or the leather sheen of a wallet disappearing into the folds of one of the twins’ skirts. None of their victims ever seemed to notice, but I still wished they wouldn’t do it. Whatever they could steal by hand would amount to very paltry sums compared to the cash prize for winning Sunderly’s annual poker tournament, and if that was what they were really in town for, then it wasn’t worth jeopardizing it by potentially getting apprehended for petty thievery before the tournament even began.

  The Elliott twins were clever enough to realize that, but they just didn’t seem to be able to help themselves. They were almost like magpies, compelled to snatch at any bit of shine that caught their blue-green eyes.

  As for me, the twins started introducing me to their hordes of admirers as “our cousin Henry.” I would shake hands or tip my hat to them if they initiated any of those sorts of gestures, but more often than not they barely glanced at me, satisfied that I was a poor relation of the sisters’, and not romantic competition for either of them. My sword, which tended to attract a lot of attention in saloons everywhere, did not really perturb the wealthier class of gentleman, because many of them wore swords too, and they thought of them as an expensive accessory that it was proper to possess, and probably assumed that mine was as merely decorative as their own.

  Theo, on the other hand, in all his towering, glossy black glory, received many compliments from the strangers that approached us.

  “What a fine horse.”

  “Friesian, I presume?”

  “He must be seventeen hands tall!”

  “Are you renting this fellow out as a stud?”

  Theo clearly took great pleasure in these compliments. He pawed at the ground, tossed his long, luxurious mane, and sometimes whickered softly.

  “It’s almost as though the horse understands us!” some of the women kept exclaiming, while their husbands and male relations chuckled indulgently at their childish imaginings. Theo also chuckled, but his form of laughter was so strange sounding that no one else but me usually recognized it for what it was.

  All was well and good, until our party emerged from a milliner’s shop, each of the twins swinging a new hatbox on her arm, to see a man in a top hat excitedly approaching Theo as he waited outside.

  “This your horse?” the man called out as he pointed.

  “Sure is,” I replied.

  “How much for him?” the man asked. Before I could respond, the man patted Theo vigorously on the flank. Theo shifted his weight with an indignant snort. Then the man reached up and jammed his thumb in Theo’s mouth to push up his lip and examine his teeth.

  Theo reacted by chomping down on the invading thumb.

  The man howled in agony and caused every person on the street to whirl around immediately and stare at us.

  “I, Emperor Theodosius the Great, did not grant you permission to defile my mouth with your filthy digits,” my horse intoned unapologetically as the man continued to scream.

  “Your goddamn horse bit my goddamn finger off,” the man yelled once he became capable of forming words again. He clutched his wounded hand with the other hand as blood streamed through his fingers and dripped into the dust at his feet.

  “I don’t think he did,” I said as I squinted at the wound. “It looks to me like he cracked the bone and lacerated the flesh, but did not fully sever all the ligaments. Of course, you will probably wish to have it amputated regardless, in order to avert the risk of gangrene spreading up your arm. I would go seek out a doctor at once, if I were you.”

  “I could sue you for this!” the man screamed. Despite his extreme agitation, his top hat remained securely perched on his head, which gave him a rather comical air.

  “I suppose you could try, if you wanted the jury to laugh at you,” I said.

  The top-hatted man glowered at me thr
ough his pasty white, sweating face and his bleeding hand with the stump of a thumb twitched toward the hilt of the shiny sword at his belt, that I would have bet a fortune he had never used in earnest.

  “Please don’t,” I sighed. “It wouldn’t be a fair fight even if you weren’t injured, and I really don’t want to have to explain your bloodied remains to the sheriff who already has an unhealthy obsession with my clients here.”

  The top-hatted man’s bloodied hand hovered in the vicinity of his sword hilt for a few more moments, then dropped away, as I had already known that it would. He wasn’t the sort. If he had been, he would have attacked me already.

  Then he let out an audible whimper and scurried off down the street, presumably in search of medical attention as I had advised him.

  “Good riddance,” Theo snorted with a self-satisfied swish of his tail.

  I looked over at the twins to gauge their reactions. Both of them were wide-eyed, with their hands clasped over their mouths, but as the soon-to-be-thumbless man receded from sight, their posture relaxed and Janina let out a slight giggle.

  After that, we continued browsing shops for another few hours. The twins bought themselves hair ribbons, gloves, and stockings, but at least they didn’t buy any more dresses. Various men continued to approach them hopefully, without realizing that they were being charged for the few minutes of conversation that they enjoyed with them, before they quickly swept away.

  Then, as we started to exit a shop, we spotted the blindingly white suit of Kennedy Cox, surrounded by his posse of half a dozen men dressed in more natural colors, and quickly ducked back inside.

  “What if he sees us?” Janina whispered. “What do I say to him?”

  “I’m sure you’ll think of something,” I said dryly. I didn’t know how the white-suited man would be likely to react to the miraculous resurrection of his betrothed and her twin sister, but truth be told, I felt he would be well within his rights to hold a grudge against them both for that particular trick that had robbed him of two hundred gold pieces. Of course, that didn’t mean that I wouldn’t still be professionally obligated to defend them from any form of vengeance he might care to exact.