Why Mermaids Sing (23 page)

H
e awoke to pain and the mists of confusion. The confusion lifted slowly. He remembered the mare stumbling, the sound of boots in the mud, an explosion of pain in his face. He could taste blood in his mouth, feel more blood mingling with mud and rain. Then he realized the pain in his jaw came not only from that kick, but also from the gag that pried his lips apart, making it difficult to swallow.

Cautiously, he opened his eyes. He lay on his back, his hands twisted awkwardly beneath him and tied at the wrist. His ankles were tied, too, and suspended oddly in the air. Squinting against the rain, he saw that someone had taken one end of the rope that bound his ankles and looped it over an oak branch that stretched above him. He remembered the way Barclay Carmichael had been found butchered and hanging upside down from a mulberry tree in St. James’s Park, and knew a rush of raw fear.

His hat and cloak were both gone, along with the reassuring weight of the pistol he’d slipped into his coat pocket. He’d obviously been dragged away from the road, for he was now in a clearing of what looked like a thick stand of oaks. The smell of wet grass, dirt, and leaves was strong. He could hear the rain still pounding on the leaves overhead, but the canopy sheltered him from the worst of the downpour.

Shifting his head slowly so as not to attract attention, he scanned the small clearing. He could see only one man; a small, thin man with overlong blond hair who leaned against the trunk of a tree some twenty-five feet away. Beyond him, Sebastian could see his own black Arab and one other horse, a big bay.

There had been two men following him, Sebastian remembered. The second man must have ridden away, either for reinforcements or to notify whoever had hired them. The man leaning against the tree had the air of someone waiting.

Sebastian studied his guard more closely. He stood with one knee bent, the sole of his boot propped against the trunk behind him, his hat pulled low on his forehead against the rain. He looked young, very young, his clothes rough. Rougher than those of the killer who had attacked Sebastian on the hoy, more like those of the men who had broken into Kat’s house Friday night.

A sudden wave of nausea roiled Sebastian’s stomach, so that he had to squeeze his eyes shut for a moment. But he knew he needed to make his move now, before anyone else returned. His breath coming shallow and quick, Sebastian opened his eyes and squinted up at his feet.

They might have found his pistol, but it had evidently never occurred to the men who had bound and gagged and tethered him by his ankles to a tree that a nobleman might be carrying a knife in his boot; he could still feel the subtle pressure of that small, deadly blade against his calf. The hard part would be getting the knife out without attracting his guard’s attention.

Moving slowly, Sebastian straightened his legs as much as possible and locked his knees while shifting his weight subtly to the right. The sheath was well oiled, and he was hoping gravity alone might be enough to loosen the knife.

It wasn’t.

He threw a quick glance at the man leaning against the tree. He hadn’t moved. Gritting his teeth, Sebastian gave a series of short, sharp kicks upward with his right heel. The knife slipped out of its sheath to land with a soft thump in the wet leaf litter beside his hip.

By lifting his hips in the air, Sebastian was able to shift his bound arms over far enough to close his fingers around the handle of the knife. He reversed the blade, angling it carefully toward the rope that bound his wrists. The point nicked the pad of his palm and he swore silently to himself. Then he felt the blade bite into the rope.

It wasn’t easy, holding his hips in the air, balancing his weight on his shoulders while sawing blindly. Rain pattered on his face, ran into his eyes. Twice the knife slipped, slicing into his wrists. He could feel the blood slippery on his hands, on the knife.

He became aware of a vibration in the wet earth beneath him: horses’ hooves coming fast from somewhere off to the left where the road must lie. He willed them to keep going. They slowed.

The man beside the tree hunched his shoulders against the rain, his head still bowed as if he were oblivious to the sounds of approach. Sebastian felt the last of the rope give way beneath his blade just as a man’s shout cut through the dripping woods. The hireling beside the tree lifted his head and glanced back at Sebastian. Sebastian lay perfectly still, his hands twisted out of sight beneath him, the knife clutched in one blood-slicked fist.

Lord Stanton rode into the clearing, mounted on a fine gray and flanked by two coarsely dressed men. “Is he alive?” Stanton demanded.

The blond-headed hireling pushed away from the tree and went to hold the Baron’s horse. “Last I looked.”

Stanton grunted and swung down from the saddle. Sebastian looked beyond him to the other two men. One—the tall, thin-framed man with a broken nose—he recognized from the tollgate. The man helping the blond youth with the horses was the survivor from Friday night’s assault on Harwich Street.

His boots crunching a litter of twigs and wet leaves, Stanton halted in the center of the clearing, his gaze on Sebastian’s face. “So. You’re still alive.”

Sebastian blinked, his mouth held rigid by the gag.

The Baron swiped one forearm across his wet face. “You have no one but yourself to blame for this situation. Indeed, I went out of my way to discourage your involvement. I feared all along it would come to this.”

Sebastian stared up into the Baron’s pale, fleshy face and marveled at the man’s capacity for self-deception. If Sebastian had been less agile or his hearing less acute, it would have come to this in the dead of the night on Harwich Street, or before, on the hoy on the Thames.

“Have you succeeded, then?” Stanton asked. “Do you know who killed my son?”

His eyes wide, his grip on the knife handle behind his back tightening, Sebastian nodded.

Stanton motioned to the tall, thin-framed man with the broken nose. “Take the gag out of his mouth so he can talk.”

Sebastian waited, tense and ready, while the man came to crouch down beside him.

“Lift yer ’ead so’s I can get at the knot,” he ordered.

Sebastian obligingly raised his head. He waited until the man was fully occupied picking at the knot; then Sebastian moved.

Tilting his hips up so that his shoulders took all his weight, Sebastian grabbed a fistful of the man’s coat with one hand, holding him steady while he drove the knife deep into the man’s chest.

The man convulsed, pale eyes widening with shock. But Sebastian was already jerking the dagger out of the man’s chest. Holding the hireling’s body like a shield, Sebastian jackknifed up and hacked desperately at the rope binding his ankles.

“What is he doing?”
he heard Stanton bellow. “Don’t just stand there, you fools. Stop him.”

The young yellow-haired man reached Sebastian just as the knife freed his ankles. “Oye! What the—”

Sebastian twisted so that his falling feet came down against the side of the man’s head with a solid
thwunk
. The man staggered to his knees.

Sebastian hit the sodden ground in a roll and came up onto his feet at a run. With Stanton and the third hireling between Sebastian and the horses, he had no choice but to plunge downhill, away from them. He felt a stinging slice across his upper arm the instant before he heard the boom of a pistol reverberate through the forest.

Bloody hell
. The smooth leather soles of his riding boots slipping and skidding in the wet leaf mold, Sebastian zigzagged through gnarled old oak trees, one hand clamped against his bleeding arm.

“You, Horn,” he heard Stanton shout, “stay with the horses in case he tries to circle back. Burke, come with me.”

Wet branches slapped Sebastian in the face. His coat caught on a hawthorn and he breathed another quick oath, ripping it free. Given enough time, he had no doubt he could outrun Stanton and his men, but time was the one thing Sebastian didn’t have.

He scanned the trees ahead, swerving toward an ancient oak with stout branches arching low to the ground. Slipping his knife back into its sheath, he was reaching for the lowest branch when his gaze fell on the tumble of stones lying half hidden in the leaf litter at the tree’s roots. He hesitated, then swooped to select a particularly lethal-looking chunk with jagged edges. He hefted it for a moment, testing its weight. Then he scrambled into the tree.

S
ebastian found his left arm unexpectedly weak, so he made more noise than he would have liked climbing into the ancient oak. Crouching on the lowest branch, he rested his back against the rough trunk, his breath coming hard and fast.

From some distance to his right came Stanton’s voice. “Devlin? You might as well give yourself up and stop this foolishness. You don’t have a chance. There are still three of us.”

Sebastian could see them now, Stanton and his man Burke. They were keeping close together, and they were going the wrong way, cutting along the side of the hill. For a moment Sebastian considered simply staying where he was. Except he knew that if they gave up and left, they would take his horse with them.

Casting a critical eye over the oak’s nearest boughs, he found a small, half-dead branch and leaned his weight against it until it broke off in his hand with a
crack
that echoed through the forest.

Stanton drew up, his gaze darting first one way, then the other. “It’s him.” He held the flintlock close, one finger curled around the trigger. Sebastian doubted Stanton had taken the time to reload, but it was a double-barreled pistol, which meant he still had one shot left. “Where did that come from?”

Sebastian knew a grim kind of amusement. The Baron’s combination of arrogance and incompetence might have been comical, except there was nothing funny about a man who could kill and eat a young boy, or whose attempt to cover up his ugly past had already caused the death of his own child.

Balancing carefully on his limb, Sebastian opened his hand and let the branch fall. It hit the rocks below with a clatter.

“There.” The man named Burke swung around. “He’s over there.”

Like hounds following the scent of a fox, the two men swept across the hillside, their gazes hard on the undergrowth of hawthorn and holly. They never thought to look up.

“I don’t see him.” Burke paused almost directly beneath Sebastian, his gaze searching the rainy hillside. “Where is he?”

“My shot clipped him.” Stanton crouched down to touch the leaf litter beneath the tree with one splayed hand. “Look. There’s blood. He must be—”

Slipping the handle of his knife between his clenched teeth, Sebastian gripped the rock with both hands and dropped straight down on the henchman, his full weight smashing the rock onto the man’s head.

The man collapsed beneath him, then lay utterly still.

Stanton backed away, the pistol clutched in a two-handed grip, his mouth going slack with shock. “My God. You smashed his head in.”

Wordlessly, Sebastian slipped the knife from his teeth and held it loosely in his right hand.

Stanton extended the pistol, his elbows locked. But he was shaking so badly the gun barrel waved wildly. “Stay back. I’ll shoot. You know I will.”

Sebastian’s lips pulled into a tight smile. “You have only one shot left. What if you miss?”

The Baron’s throat worked as he swallowed hard. The finger on the trigger twitched. Sebastian flipped the knife so that he held the blade between his thumb and forefinger, his gaze on the other man’s eyes.

He thought for a moment Stanton meant to put the pistol up. Then a wild kind of determination flared in the man’s eyes. Sebastian sent the knife whistling through the air just as Stanton squeezed the trigger.

The shot went wide, but Sebastian’s blade caught the big man in the throat. Blood spurted from the wound, spilled from both corners of his open mouth in dark rivulets. His legs buckled beneath him, his eyes rolling back in his head.

Sebastian surged to his feet. He could feel the sleeve of his coat wet and heavy against his arm and realized suddenly it wasn’t just wet from the rain. He was losing more blood than he’d first realized.

Staggering slightly, he walked to where Stanton lay. Blood still pulsed from the man’s throat, but it was slowing. Reaching down, Sebastian loosed the Baron’s grip on the pistol and thrust it into the waistband of his own breeches. The gun was empty now, and a thorough search of Stanton’s coat failed to turn up the powder and shot required to reload. But there were times when even an empty pistol had its uses. He searched both men for his own small flintlock, as well, but did not find it. Gritting his teeth, Sebastian retrieved his knife. He might need it again.

Leaning against the tree trunk, he yanked off his cravat and used it to bind up his arm as best he could. He stayed for a moment, trying to calm his roiling stomach and clear his head. Then he headed up the hill toward his black mare and the young blond man Stanton had called Horn.

Horn stood beside the horses, his head jerking this way and that as he searched the surrounding wood with wide, anxious eyes. Hunkering low, Sebastian crept up behind him, his knife in one hand, Stanton’s flintlock pistol in the other. The pistol was empty, of course, but Sebastian was betting on the hireling being too scared to realize that.

Treading softly in the wet, leafy humus, Sebastian pressed the barrel of the pistol behind Horn’s ear. “Move and I’ll blow your brains out.”

The youth froze.

Sebastian clicked back the hammer for dramatic effect. “This is your lucky day, my friend. You get to live.”

“Jesus Christ. Don’t kill m—” The man’s voice broke off in a whimper as Sebastian brought the pistol’s handle down like a club on the back of his pale blond head.

Yanking off Horn’s dark neckcloth, Sebastian used it to quickly bind the unconscious youth’s hands, just in case. A quick search of Horn’s pockets again failed to yield Sebastian’s flintlock, and he realized it must have been lost on the road when the Arab fell.

Pushing to his feet, his head swimming sickeningly, Sebastian turned toward the horses. The horses snorted with fear, smelling blood. He reached for the Arab’s reins and she tossed her head, her eyes wide. “Easy girl,” he crooned. “Easy.”

Hauling himself into the saddle, he started to turn toward the road. Then he hesitated, his gaze lingering on the clearing. Beyond the silent heap of the young blond man, Horn, Sebastian could see the bloodied body of the first man he’d killed; the bodies of the other two—Lord Stanton and his hireling Burke lay someplace out of sight farther down the hill. It occurred to Sebastian with a strange sense of detachment that he’d just killed three men. Yet, when he searched inside himself for some flicker of remorse, all he felt was a strange, detached kind of numbness. He knew the men he’d killed had been trying to kill him, but he wasn’t sure that should matter.

Wiping his sleeve across his wet face, he turned the Arab’s head toward the road and spurred her forward, toward Avery.