Haven's Blight (31 page)

It was an ideal spot for a sniper. So Ryan moved on. He picked a second-story roof one building west of the three-story tower. Once he opened up, any pirates better off than double stupe and blind in both eyes would just naturally reckon he was shooting from the highest point around, and open up on the little blocky watchtower with everything they had. There was even an off chance there’d be line-of-sight between the structure and the
Black Joke
’s bow-mounted recoilless blaster. Ryan wanted no part of that.

As he wriggled forward on belly and elbows across the rooftop, Krysty said from behind him, “Lover?”

“Yeah?” He glanced back. He wasn’t any more worried than she clearly was about pirates overhearing. The coldhearts were raising a powerful hullabaloo out there, laughing, shouting, jeering at their prize captive. Ryan suspected casks of imported rum had been discovered and used to fuel the general good feelings among the marauders.

Krysty was dressed in a gray checked man’s shirt and jeans, and she carried her little Smith & Wesson 640 snubby in her hand. Even former Olympic shooter Mildred, a wizard with a handblaster, would have had her work cut out for her hitting anything she aimed at with that piece at this range. But Krysty wasn’t there to shoot at pirates down in the square. She was there to shoot pirates trying to climb on the roof and blast Ryan in the back while his eye was glued to his scope.

“Would you
really
have screwed that swampie magic woman to save me?”

Ryan’s stomach did a slow roll, and not just because of the unwelcome visual image her words brought to mind. This was one of those questions any man feared from his partner.

As he usually did where Krysty was concerned, when in doubt he fell back on honesty. “Yeah. Made up my mind I was going to get you back whatever it took.”

She smiled like the sun breaking free of the clouds that had stolen in from the sea to cover the ville.

She caressed his calf and briefly laid her cheek against it. “I’m a lucky woman. I love you, Ryan.”

“Um. Love you, too.”

She pulled away and was all business again. She had his back, and no coldheart was getting past her. Well shy of the lip of the roof, Ryan reared up to peer down at the square.

“Fireblast!” he said. He sat up and got his legs around in front of him so he could bring up the rifle and prop his elbows inside his thighs. The rifle thus steadied, he peered through the scope to confirm his startling initial impression.

“It’s Black Mask himself down there!”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Ryan clicked off the longblaster’s safety, sucked in a breath and started to let it go as he sighted in on the black-cowled head of the surprisingly slight figure in its black frock coat and pants. Then, “Damn,” he said.

A body blurred by being off the focal point obstructed his vision. He looked up over the top of the scope. A phalanx of six burly black-clad pirates, with black shades and black bandannas tied around shaved heads, had taken up position in a semicircle behind the pirate chieftain.

“Sec goons in my line of fire.”

“Should we move?”

He gave his head a quick shake. “No time. Now, shush. I need to hear what I can.”

M
ILDRED
COULD
HEAR
quite well. She and J.B. were crouched, barely breathing, a yard behind open windows in the storefront, behind and to Black Mask’s left. They didn’t have a shot at him, either, thanks to his bulky bodyguard.

“So Baron Blackwood,” the pirate boss said. They could tell he was speaking because of the way his hood slightly muffled his words. “You have no idea how long I’ve waited for this moment.”

Blackwood had been bashed by rifle butts to his knees on the trampled grass of the north end of the square. His head hung so that his hair hid his face. The light rain had resumed. The drops made tiny explosions on the beam across his back.

“But then, you’ve no idea who I really am.” Black Mask’s voice sounded more cultured than Mildred expected. It was dry and rasping, and cut like a thin whip.

Blackwood’s head jerked up. He showed a look of puzzlement mixed with disbelief. Unless that’s my imagination, Mildred told herself. Not easy to see his expression beneath all that blood and bruising.

“Yes,” Black Mask said. “I believe a light is beginning to dawn.”

Deliberately he reached up, unfastened his hood and pulled it off.

S
IXTY
YARDS
from where J.B. and Mildred were concealed, Jak could see the face revealed when the mask came off. “Triple ugly,” he muttered softly.

It was a normal enough middle-aged dude face, triangular, fairly thin. But something had clawed the right side of it all to shit. Then it had gotten bastard infected. That whole side was furrows of scar tissue like a plowed field.

A
LL
M
ILDRED
COULD
SEE
was the back of Black Mask’s head. His hair was dark, curly, cropped short. It seemed to be dusted with gray.

But Blackwood reacted as if he’d been shot. “Dupree!” he exclaimed.

“Dupree,” she repeated softly. “That’s—”

“Baron Dornan’s old sec boss,” J.B. finished softly.

“But I thought he was—”

“Chilled? Blackwood thought so, too.” J.B. held a finger over his lips and turned his attention forward again.

The pirate mob cheered and jeered. The diminutive Dupree stood with hands on hips, soaking in the moment.

“You thought I died, didn’t you, you treacherous whelp? The one decent thing I ever did in a long and nasty life was to help Dornan try to kill that bitch-pup sister of yours. Too bad his reward for a good deed was you chilling him with his own sword. And that sister of yours ripped my face open and left me looking like this! The Beast of Blackwood left me looking like this!”

He raised his head and turned it this way and that. “Are you getting an earful, you Havenite pieces of shit?” he shouted. “I know you’re out there, cowering in your holes like mice. Yes. It’s the truth. The mass of fucking scars on the front of my head bears witness. Elizabeth Blackwood is the Beast! And her brother’s been covering for her all along!”

Blackwood was sitting bolt upright despite the weight of the beam on his back. His expression was like a thousand miles of badlands. Rain ran down his face like long pent-up tears.

“They used you. The Blackwoods used you. For sport. Like cattle!”

“That’s not true!” Blackwood shouted. “Elizabeth has no control over her sickness. We tried our best to stop it. Tried to…at least to keep the damage down.”

“I bet that makes a huge difference to the families of those your sister ripped limb from limb. ‘Oh, I feel so much better about the Beast eating my baby girl Michelle’s guts like a string of sausage, now that I know it’s really that lovely Elizabeth Blackwood.’”

“So now you pose as liberator of Haven?” Blackwood challenged.

“Oh, no! What do I care for the people of Haven? You, and Elizabeth the Beast had that right. They
are
cattle. They were never fit to lick dog shit off Baron Dornan’s boots. They let this happen to me. How they must’ve celebrated, thinking that bastard Dupree had finally been chilled!”

He laughed. “Well, you all fucked up. Dupree didn’t die. Dupree didn’t forget, either. No, Tobias, you hypocritical bleached turd, I’m going to loot this town of every scrap, every scavvied thing that might possibly be of value. Then I’m going to burn it down. To the nuke-dusted ground! All your precious people will be sold into slavery, and the weak ones chilled. After my boys have had a chance to play with all the prettier women.”

The pirates shook grubby fists in the air and roared approval.
That
they understood. Dupree turned left and right, making rising motions with his turned-up hands to encourage them.

“I’m going to tear down everything you tried to build here, Tobias, you ungrateful prick. Before you die, in long and excruciating agony, you will know the supreme taste of ultimate failure. And, oh— What have we here?”

He turned. A party of men appeared from Mildred and J.B.’s right carrying a limp female figure dressed in a sodden white silk gown. She appeared to be unconscious. Raven’s-wing hair trailed on the dirt of the street beneath her.

“Elizabeth?” Mildred said. “Oh, shit.”

She looked back in time to see, clearly, Blackwood mouthing the word “Elizabeth.”

So she was the Beast, Mildred thought. Maybe she deserved to die. She didn’t deserve what these monsters would do.

“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.

“W
HY
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.”

T
HE
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.

B
ARTON
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.