Avenging Angels (Bad Times Book 3)

by Chuck Dixon

  “Some of us will return home,” Iyov, the translator told her. “Many, like Byrus, have no home. They have always been slaves. Or they would not be welcome there.”

  “How will they survive then?” she asked.

  “Become thieves or bandits. Maybe join the rebels. There’s little difference in the end. If we are caught, we’ll wind up on a cross.”

  “Then we have done you no favor by freeing you.”

  “You have not freed us. We are still slaves. A dog unleashed is still a dog.”

  “I am sorry. We had to do what we did,” she said. “None of us is free, are we? Not for long, anyway.”

  Iyov made a spitting noise.

  Byrus said something in his basso voice that sounded like he had once gargled razor blades.

  “He asks why you used your power to release us from the quarry. What makes you kill Romans with such zeal?” Iyov said.

  Bat wasn’t sure how to answer that. “There was one among you of great renown,” she said after a moment’s thought.

  “A man important to your people?” Iyov asked after relaying her answer to the Macedonian.

  Bat was considering how to answer that thorny question when Iyov fell forward, gagging on the iron tip of the spear blade that suddenly appeared from his throat.

  41

  The Intruders

  It was night once again in Paris, and the few newspapers that saw print were filled with rumors of peace.

  Artillery fire had become more sporadic throughout the day until finally abating altogether as the low winter sun sank behind clouds of smoke from fires still raging in Clichy.

  The streets were empty. The populace was spent. They retreated to their homes and their churches in exhaustion. They were past celebration, or shame, or resentment. Tomorrow they would mourn. Tomorrow they would think again of the future. Tomorrow they would face the terms of surrender.

  The House of Villeneuve had taken to bed. Only Claude wandered the lower floors making certain that the candles they’d lit were damped for the night. The sound of voices from the street caused him to halt on the stairs. He turned to step to the foyer and listen closer. Men were directly before the house and coming closer. They were in a hushed argument, not wishing to be heard. The empty streets echoed their utterances in the cold night air, amplifying them so that Claude could catch the tone if not the words. One voice rose above the others and, after a moment of silence, something hard struck the door of the outer portico.

  A crash of splintering wood and glass informed him that, whoever this was, they were through the street door and into the entryway of the house. Claude moved to the stout front entrance door and made certain all the bolts were shot. Seconds later, the hammering began on the other side. From the noise of them, two heavy iron mallets were striking the door in tandem like lumbermen felling a tree.

  Claude was confident that the door would hold against such an assault. The street-facing windows of the house were heavily barred and entry through them near impossible. Even so, he reached into a stand by the door and retrieved, from among the umbrellas, a heavy cavalry saber that had rested there unnoticed by visitors for decades. He unsheathed the curving blade with no difficulty. One of his self-assigned duties was to keep this relic of his days in the Hussars cleaned and oiled in its scabbard. Now that ritual chore rewarded him with a ready weapon to face these intruders.

  He glanced up to see fresh orbs of reflected light upon the ceiling at the top of the stairs. The cacophony had awakened the house.

  “Remain upstairs, mesdames!” he called.

  A new sound, deeper in the house, reached him. Metal upon metal rang. Glass tinkled musically. The kitchen and pantry at the alley rear.

  “Merde,” he hissed to himself, then shouted, “Anatole! Get out here!”

  A flutter of women’s voices from above. Claude raced down the back hall for the kitchen. Anatole appeared before him in a nightshirt, sputtering questions.

  “The front door, you fool!” Claude thundered as he raced past the man. “Get the girls and shove furniture before the door! Quickly, man!”

  Claude was in the kitchen and through the pantry to find men in dark clothing outside the rear portico and prying the wrought iron bars free from the gate there. He backed toward the doorway to the house to secure the copper-clad service door. The men tore away the ladder of bars to shoulder through the alley gate for him. They were armed with the tools of tradesmen, hammers, adzes, and knives. There were five that he could see.

  And one more man with them, who stood at the back with hands in the pockets of a fine woolen coat in starkest contrast to the rest of the grubby crew clothed in layers of ragged garb. The man had skin of mahogany, made all the darker by the fringe of snow-white hair visible beneath his tall silk topper. The man snapped orders to the others. These were no common looters, and this was no random assault.

  The big footman lunged and speared the most eager attacker through the guts. Claude twisted the blade and pulled it free. The man shrieked. Blood jetted from between fingers laced over the wound. The others hesitated. The dark man growled a fresh order in high-mannered French and the gang pressed forward over the kicking body of their comrade.

  Claude drove the hilt of the saber into the face of one man and felt the crackle of breaking bone through the steel. He booted another in the knee, hearing the joint snap with a report that could be heard over the grunts of his assailants and the shouts of the dark man. The attackers renewed their efforts, emboldened by rage, and carried Claude backward through the door and into the house by the weight of their numbers.

  Caroline was still awake thanks to Stephen.

  He was fussing. Perhaps it was the silence of the night after so many days of constant rumblings from outside. She had the baby back to sleep after rocking him in her arms and pacing for what seemed like hours. The hammering on the front door reached her as she was laying the infant back in the crib. She stepped to the hall to see Claude shouting for the chef, surprised to see a sword in his fist. The front door was shuddering in its frame under steady impacts striking it from the other side. Mme. Villeneuve joined Caroline, a candelabra held aloft in her hand. Jeannot brushed past them and charged down the steps to help Anatole and the maids haul a large chest and then a spinet piano from the drawing room and against the door.

  “Who is it? Have they identified themselves?” the widow called down the stairs.

  “Looters, Mother!” Jeannot shouted back. “Come to rob the house!”

  “Why have they chosen us?” Mme. Villeneuve said with more irritation than apprehension.

  Caroline did not know who they were, but she knew they were not robbers. She knew why they were here and why they chose this house.

  “Where has Claude gone?” Mme. Villeneuve called down.

  The sharp crack of an explosion sounded from below, followed by another and another.

  Caroline backed toward her room where her child was now crying, startled by the sudden noise rising even above the rhythmic hammering. She swept up the squalling, wriggling bundle and held it close to her with one arm. Her hand searched beneath the mattress. There were shouts and then screams from below. After a crash of furniture, heavy footfalls pounded up the stairs. Caroline backed into the far corner of the room, which seemed to grow smaller with each step.

  A man in clothes made filthy with soot and ash threw the door wide and strode for her and Stephen with a leer on his face. A younger man with a gaunt face and hungry yellow eyes came in behind and spoke a warning.

  “It is the child. He said the child must not be harmed.”

  A chill rose up Caroline’s neck like an icy fist encircling her throat.

  She raised the LeMat and squeezed the trigger as her child’s father had shown her.

  The slug struck the sooty man dead center in the chest. He barked a cough and collapsed, lifeless. The gaunt man’s ochre eyes opened wide as he backed for the door. He held up a hand in a gesture of surrender or pleading.<
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  Caroline thumbed the hammer and squeezed again. Three of the gaunt man’s fingers vanished in a spray of bone and blood. The bullet continued on to take the man just above the eye. His body was lifted and thrown spinning against the doorframe. Bits of his skull and scalp stuck to the flocked wallpaper.

  The baby screamed in the dying din as her hearing returned. Stephen was red-faced, his little chin furrowed and quivering with unreasoning fear. She renewed her grip on the infant, holding him tight to her side and held the smoking pistol trained on the empty doorway. Her aim and her arm were steady and unwavering.

  “Mademoiselle Tauber? Or is it Rivard here?” came a cultured and maddeningly calm voice speaking impeccable French from somewhere out in the dark of the hallway.

  “Speak English, motherfucker,” she snapped.

  “We only want the child. I suppose you know why.”

  Caroline remained silent. She would not engage this man on his level.

  “He is very special. Very unique. A gift to science and mankind. You must appreciate that. You must know he would be treated as a treasure by—”

  She squeezed the trigger and put a hole through the wall by the door where she supposed the speaker was standing on the other side.

  “I see. A mother’s love, then,” the voice resumed after a moment. “I fully appreciate your position. You could come along if you wished. You could be the boy’s guardian. You could see that we mean him no harm.”

  Another shot. This one farther left. It drilled through a cameo portrait hanging on the wall. She fired again, lower and to the left. A cry went up in the hallway and something heavy struck the floor hard enough to make the boards beneath her feet quake. More cries from without, and feet retreating down the stairs.

  “Ah,” came the voice, still irritatingly serene and reasonable. “You have disposed of one of my hired men, with the added benefit of the rest fleeing.”

  She said nothing. Stephen’s face was frozen in a silent shriek of terror. The voice from the hallway resumed.

  “I suppose that is what comes of paying in advance, eh?” The voice had a patrician English accent with a touch of something foreign. He was baiting her into speaking. She would not rise to his taunts.

  “You know who I come from. You know who sent me. The man is like a father to you. He would be the same to your son.”

  “He’s a lying bastard,” she said, then slid to her right on bare feet. Dwayne always told her to shoot and move, shoot and move.

  “Sir Neal wishes only to welcome you back, to share his confidences with you and the rewards of all your research. Your brother as well.”

  She squeezed again. This time through the doorjamb, splitting it top to bottom.

  The silence was long this time, and she watched over the smoking barrel of the revolver, quivering now under its weight and from the effort to hold her arm straight for such an extended time. The door swung slowly inward. A dark man with ivory hair stepped into the doorway holding Mme. Villeneuve in a chokehold before him. In his other hand was a handgun of flat back metal—a modern automatic of some kind. He held it easily, pointed from his hip at her midriff.

  “Neither one of us can miss, Caroline,” he said with an easy smile, showing teeth that gleamed in the haze of gun smoke that hung in the air. The widow clutched at his arm in a feeble effort to release the grip that was asphyxiating her. Mme. Villeneuve’s face was turning crimson, her lips parted to draw in air that would not come. Caroline kept the pistol trained on the man, who continued speaking in measured tones.

  “Spare the child any more of this. Think of what is best for Stephen’s interests,” he said, stepping into the room over the bodies of the two hired men. The toes of Mme. Villeneuve’s slippers brushed the floorboards in involuntary spasms.

  She thumbed the hammer back and trained it once again on the stranger. She squeezed the trigger. Only a metallic click rewarded her effort.

  The ivory-haired man dropped the widow choking and gasping to the floor. He reached out a hand to Caroline. His smile beamed wider even as his eyes turned to glittering black stones.

  “And so we are done,” he said. She drew back the hammer again.

  “Mademoiselle, please,” he said, the fixed smile collapsing a bit at the corners.

  Her thumb pushed forward a lever recessed into the curve of the hammer and she applied steady pressure to the trigger.

  At this close range, the buckshot from the underslung shotgun barrel had no air time to spread into a wider pattern. The buckshot took the man from the future like an iron fist traveling at ballistic velocity high in the chest and neck. He was flung from his feet and through the open doorway. A fountain of blood sprang from his torn gullet. His body struck the far wall and dropped in a heap to the floor. His legs pumped in some instinctual animal response from his dying brain telling him that he must flee. Too late, too late. He lay still.

  Setting the gasping Stephen on the blood-sticky floor by her, Caroline knelt by Mme. Villeneuve. She loosened the widow’s collar and supported her neck. Natural color began to return to the older woman’s face. Her eyes searched Caroline’s. Her lips formed words but no sound. Caroline leaned close to hear the woman over her child’s panicked shrieks.

  “Jeannot,” the woman whispered through the pain in her throat.

  42

  Eye to Eye

  From atop the hill, Lee Hammond saw the figures appear from the grass as if by magic. They converged on the loose gathering of men down at the camp on the slope below his position. He was sighting on one of the attackers when he heard a whisper of movement in the grass behind him. Spinning around, he saw three naked men, smeared head to toe with mud, racing toward him with raised swords.

  The men rushed in from the dark all around the camp. They were among the escaped slaves and their liberators inside of a heartbeat. The attackers were naked but for skirts and singlets. They made Bat think of the cheap Hercules movies her dad still liked from when he was a kid. The men wore short-cropped hair that identified them as Romans. Within seconds half of their party was on the ground dead or wounded and the rest fighting for their lives. Gunfire exploded close. Chaz was in the fight somewhere behind her.

  Bat drew her Sig Sauer and brought down a man who thrust at her with a spear point gleaming with fresh blood. She turned and sighted on another man hacking at a fallen slave with a short sword. A double-tap lifted that man off his feet.

  A hammer blow between her shoulder blades drove her stumbling. She turned, dropping to one knee and sent a three-round burst into a swordsman rearing back for a second strike. A dull ache turned to lancing agony as she fought to regain her feet. The armor caught the sword blow. She wasn’t cut but she took all the blunt force between the shoulder blades. Gasping, she dropped to her knee again. A wet gasp sounded close behind her. She threw herself on her side and swung the Sig’s sights toward the source. Byrus was there, drawing the blade of his gladius from the back of a Roman’s head. The man buckled to the dirt, his blood streaming from a mortal wound to shower over Byrus.

  The Macedonian wore a face of pure feral menace. Gone was the genial grin she’d grown accustomed to over the course of the march. This was the pit fighter she was seeing, an animal spirit that had survived God alone knew what horrors to live to this day.

  He rushed to stand astride her, catching the blade of a new attacker on his. She rolled on her back and fired two rounds point blank into the attacker’s crotch. The man fell back howling, with Byrus riding him to the ground, chopping furiously. Bat struggled to her feet and made for where Boats lay unprotected. Her feet tangled in something. She fell hard. A Roman had used the pole of his spear to trip her. He stood over her, chuckling darkly.

  Bat whipped the Sig to line up on him, but the man was fast and struck her wrist with the butt of the spear. Her fingers went numb. The automatic spun from her hand. The man bent to grip the bodice of her armor. She drove the heel of her hand into his face with all her force. The blow smeared h
is nose across his face with a liquid crunching sound. Blood jetted from his nostrils.

  He kept his hold on her and drove her back down on the ground. The back of her head struck the hard earth. She saw white speckles at the edges of her vision. The Roman spat a gobbet of hot blood in her face before setting to tearing the armor from her. The buckles frustrated his efforts. He sat hard atop her to draw a knife from his girdle to begin sawing at the straps.

  One hand feebly slapped at her attacker while the other sought the Colt snubby from the concealed carry holster on her belt. His weight was bearing down on her midriff and she couldn’t get her fingers to it.

  The man took a handful of her hair and banged her head off the ground once again. The speckles covered her narrowing field of vision for an instant. She fought back the darkness long enough to drive fingers up toward the man’s ruined nose. She got two fingers into the mess of fractured gristle and hooked them both hard. The man roared in pain and swatted at her blindly, his hands striking glancing blows off her face and shoulders. He shifted his weight, trying to release himself from her two-fingered grip buried deep in the soft flesh of his septum. She rose up with him, fingers locked into twin hooks.

  Her other hand dove under her pinned thigh and found the rubber grip of the .38. He was shrieking now and clasping her arm in both his hands, trying to force her to release her hold. Bat twisted her wrist upward and jerked the trigger of the holstered Colt.

  A searing heat washed down her leg. The weight of the man came off her waist. Her fingers were jerked free of his face in a gush of blood. She freed the snubby and fired three more rounds center mass, spilling the man back. Rising to a sitting position against a crushing tide of nausea she could see Jimmy Smalls swinging his Winchester like a club against a pair of brawny Romans with short swords.

  From behind her, she heard a heavy chopping sound. A man’s body fell beside her, spasming as the blood left it, gushing, around the blade of a gladius stuck to the hilt through his chest. She put the last round from the Colt through the man’s skull and watched it come apart like a melon. A high keening shriek reached her, and she realized that it was coming from her.