There were enough cultists to keep the smoke billowing, and roiling up, but the ranks of the good townsfolk of Bedford were constantly increasing.
A shot rang out.
Daniel jerked his reins tight, caught his horse before it could bolt. Astride its back as it pranced, he cursed some more. The cultists hated guns—as fighters that was their one true weakness. Even the men at his back, far better trained, had flinched. Their edgy tension had ratcheted up several notches.
More shots sounded, more than likely fired over the crowd.
An instant later, three cultists fled past the alley mouth, heading away from the fight.
Daniel ground his teeth. “Where the devil is Monteith?” Despite all distractions, he’d kept his eyes on the hotel’s front door. He had men stationed all around the building, watching every exit. If Monteith had gone out any other way, he should have heard of it by now.
Should have been informed that the troublesome major had been seized. Heaven knew he’d assembled enough men to be sure of accomplishing that.
Could Monteith be thinking to hole up in the hotel? As soon as the smoke faded sufficiently, Daniel would send in his assassins to scour the place.
His mount stirred, as restless as he. Another local man came running down the street from the left, a flaming brand held high, a pitchfork in his hand; the light drew Daniel’s gaze.
Up above the street, the light from the brand fleetingly silhouetted an object—one that fell from one roof to the next. A man-sized object; a crouching man. Daniel stopped breathing, watched. The man didn’t come to the front of the roof. He must have gone …
“With me!” Daniel snapped out the order. Loosening his reins, digging in his heels, he plunged out of the alley. Wheeling left, away from the melee before the hotel, he thundered up the road.
His assassins running as a group just behind, Daniel could, almost taste success as he rounded the block, drew rein, drew his sword, and turned into the lane than ran along the rear of the buildings.
Logan dropped to the cobbles in the narrow yard. He swiftly scanned the cramped space. Stacked crates and empty barrels clogged the entrance to the alley leading to the rear lane. The yard was dark and relatively quiet, the high walls all around cutting off much of the sound and fury from the street. Even the smoke had barely penetrated there.
Straightening, he reached up and helped Linnet down. While she untied the ends of the cloak she’d knotted across her waist, he checked the scroll-holder, resettled it against his spine.
While Charles, then Deverell, joined them, Logan found the back door tucked inside the porch and tried it. Not only was it locked, it was also solidly bolted from inside. No access, no even temporary place to hide.
He looked back down the alley. The walls were plain brick, unadorned, and vertical all the way to the neighboring roofs, no doors or windows. He glanced up and around. There was no other way out.
“At least the archers across the street can’t see us.” Catching the others’ eyes, he tipped his head down the alley. “We’ll have to go that way.”
They nodded, resettled their coats and weapons, then he led the way forward, Charles behind him, then Linnet, with Deverell bringing up the rear.
They’d barely cleared the stacked crates and stepped into the alley proper when a dense shadow loomed at its end. As one, they halted.
The shadow resolved into a horseman in a black coat, breeches, and riding boots, astride a black horse.
Men moved behind the horse, forming up two by two and following the rider as he walked his mount slowly, clop by clop, down the alley toward them.
The sound echoed eerily off the alley’s high brick walls, a portentious drumbeat.
As if responding to the drama, the moon sailed free high above; it beamed down into the alley from behind them, bathing the approaching figure and his retinue, highlighting every line in icy-cold silver light.
Silver light that glinted on multiple naked blades.
The rider wore a black scarf wound about his head, concealing nose and chin; his eyes coldly observed them from above its upper edge as he halted—just far enough away to be safe from any attack from Logan or Charles, now standing shoulder to shoulder across the entrance to the small yard. Both had drawn their sabers. Logan couldn’t remember doing so; the hilt had suddenly been in his palm, his fingers locked in the grip, the blade held down by his side.
His every sense, every instinct, remained locked on the rider, even when two of the cultists moved up to stand on either side of the black horse.
Both cultists, like their fellows behind them, held naked blades in both hands.
“Those,” Logan murmured, “are cult assassins.”
“Ah,” Charles replied, and uncharacteristically left it at that.
Linnet, behind Logan, heard the exchange. Looking over his shoulder, she finally comprehended just what had driven him and his friends to battle so hard, for so long, to face so many dangers to bring it down. To defeat it.
True evil.
It stared back at her, not from the cult assassins’ dark, unflinching eyes but from the shadowed eyes of the rider. He … somehow, he made the hair on her nape lift, made her skin pebble and crawl; when his gaze found her, and, as if intrigued, rested on her, she had to fight to quell a wholly instinctive shiver.
An instinctive reaction.
An instinctive fear.
He wore a black coat, he rode a black horse, he had black hair. Yet it was his soul that was blackest; she knew that to her bones.
Her cutlass was already in her hand; she tightened her grip on the hilt. Not a single thought—not even a fleeting one—of fleeing entered her head. She’d come to fight alongside Logan and she intended to do just that.
Yet the odds … were by any estimation hopeless. That didn’t mean they couldn’t be overcome. She counted twelve assassins, but the biggest threat was the mounted man. He carried an unsheathed sword, held lightly balanced across the front of his saddle.
If they could get rid of him …
The rider had shifted his gaze to Logan. After another long, studied silence, he said, “At last we meet, Major Monteith.”
His voice was educated, very English, his diction only lightly muffled by the scarf.
When Logan said nothing, the rider’s eyes smiled. “I believe you know what I want. Please don’t waste time by telling me you haven’t got it—that you aren’t carrying it on your person at this moment.”
Opportunity. Possibility … Leaning forward, Linnet whispered to Logan, loudly enough for the rider to hear, “Give it to him. It’s no use to us if we’re dead.”
She knew it was a decoy, no use to anyone anyway. But the rider didn’t know that, and if he could be fooled into taking it and leaving, they had a chance of surviving even this attack.
Logan shifted, frowned. Made every show of reluctance, grateful to Linnet for giving him that chance. Whoever this man was, he’d know immediately that the letter was a decoy if Logan simply offered it up.
He waited, hoping that the man would make some threat—preferably against Linnet—to further excuse his surrendering the document he’d fought to ferry over half the world.
But the rider’s gaze remained locked on him and didn’t, again shift to Linnet. Eventually, the rider arched a brow, as if growing bored.
Who the devil was he? He wasn’t Ferrar, yet from the color of his hands he’d been in India, and not long ago. He clearly commanded cult assassins, so he was, at the very least, a close associate of the cult leader. Coat, breeches, boots, and the horse were all of excellent quality, and the rider wore them, rode the horse, with the unthinking air of one long accustomed to such luxuries.
Logan allowed his frown to deepen. “Who are you?” He saw no reason not to ask.
The rider’s gaze took on an edge. “My name is not something you need to know. All you need to understand is that I am, in this moment, in this place, the Black Cobra.”
“The Black Cobra�
�s Ferrar.”
“Really?” The rider’s smile returned; he seemed genuinely amused. “I believe you’ll discover you’re mistaken. However”—his voice hardened, along with his gaze—”the one thing you should note is that I am here, Black Cobra or not, to retrieve the letter that inadvertently fell into your hands.” His gaze flicked to the others, then returned to Logan’s face. “And I’m willing to barter for it—your lives for the letter.” When Logan didn’t reply, the rider drawled, “Word of a gentleman.”
Logan managed not to scoff. Not to react at all. The offer was the best he could hope for, not that he believed it; he knew better than to trust the Black Cobra in whatever guise. Still … moving slowly, he withdrew the scroll-holder from the back of his belt, held it up for the rider to see.
The rider’s gaze turned superior. “Yes, but is there anything inside?”
Letting his saber hang from its lanyard, Logan slowly opened the holder, then tipped it so the man could see the parchment inside.
The rider sighed theatrically and beckoned. “Give me the letter itself—I’m not going to cede you your lives in exchange, for a plain sheet of paper. You can keep the scroll-holder as a souvenir.”
Inwardly, Logan sighed, too. He didn’t expect the rider to allow them to live, to call off his assassins—no one from the Black Cobra hierarchy would ever be so forgiving—but if the rider had taken the scroll-holder and ridden off, they might have had a fighting chance.
While reaching into the holder and drawing out the rolled parchment, he was planning, plotting, evaluating the closest assassins, imagining how a fight would commence; the opening minute would be crucial.
Drawing out the letter, he tossed it to the nearest assassin. The man caught it in his right hand and passed it up to his master.
Logan kept the empty scroll-holder, its brass end open and flapping, in his left hand, slid his right hand into the guard of his saber, gripped the hilt.
Beside him, he felt Charles shift slightly, also tensing for action.
The rider had, as Logan had feared he would, unrolled the parchment. He angled it to the moonlight; it was bright enough for him to confirm the letter was a copy.
The rider flipped the parchment over, confirming the absence of any telltale seal, and once again the skin at the corner of his eyes crinkled in a smile.
Logan blinked. A smile? It was a decoy copy. The rider, if he’d been the one directing the campaign to keep Logan from reaching Elveden, had lost countless men—and all for a copy? He should be furious.
If anything, the rider’s smile lines deepened as he folded the letter, tucked it into his inner coat pocket, then he looked up, inclined his head. “A pleasure doing business with you, Major.”
Raising his reins, the rider backed his horse. His men parted to let the beast through, but they didn’t fall back; they held their ground, reforming as the horse retreated beyond them.
Once free of his men, the rider turned his horse; the alley was just wide enough to allow it. Then he walked the horse up the alley.
For one instant, Logan wondered … yet he still couldn’t believe it.
The rider halted in the mouth of the alley, looked back at them, over the heads of his men saluted them. Then what they could see of his face leached of all expression, and something coldly sinister took its place. “Kill them.”
The order was given in a flat, even tone.
Instinct prodded, and Logan called, “I thought you were a gentleman.”
The rider laughed, a chilling sound. Abruptly he sobered. “I was born a bastard—I’m simply living up to my birth.” With that, he spurred away. At the first clack of hooves, the assassins attacked.
Alex had been about to turn and flee the debacle Daniel’s plan had degenerated into when Daniel had suddenly spurred out of his hiding place down the street, opposite the hotel, much closer to the writhing mass of cutlists and townspeople. Alex had drawn back into hiding, watched Daniel ride up and turn down the opposite half of the same street Alex hovered in. A little way along, Daniel reined in, unsheathed his sword. With his guard close behind him, he proceeded slowly down the lane behind the buildings facing the street—the lane that, Alex felt sure, ran all the way along the block to the back of the hotel.
What had caught Daniel’s attention? What had he gone to take care of?
Alex hoped, sincerely hoped, the answer was Monteith.
But as the minutes ticked by with no further sign of Daniel, and the melee down the street increasingly turned the townspeople’s way, the compulsion to quit the scene grew. Alex didn’t want to be caught there—a stranger watching the action, and at such an hour. Difficult to adequately explain.
Alex dallied, and dallied—was lifting the reins, about, to leave, when Daniel rode out of the lane. Sheathing his sword, he looked up, but he couldn’t see Alex tucked deep in the shadows across the road and further down the side street.
Alex watched Daniel walk his horse back to the High Street. Halting, he tugged down his scarf and looked back down the street at the now faltering melee. Then he smiled.
Slowly, Alex smiled, too.
Daniel, his expression tending toward triumphant, turned his horse away from the fight and rode unhurriedly out of the town.
Back in the shadows, Alex relaxed, felt tension drain from muscle and tendon. Daniel had succeeded. He’d got Monteith’s letter, and that was all that mattered.
In increasingly buoyant mood, Alex toyed with the notion of riding after Daniel, catching him up, and joining him in a jubilant race back to Bury, but … how to explain? Daniel wasn’t a fool like Roderick had been. Daniel would instantly see that Alex’s secretive presence in Bedford demonstrated a very real lack of trust.
Which it did. But letting Daniel know that wouldn’t serve the cause.
After several moments’ cogitation, Alex realized that Daniel’s guard, all twelve of them, had yet to come out of the lane. Which almost certainly meant they were engaged—which suggested Alex should leave before some worthy citizen stumbled on some grisly sight and raised a hue and cry.
Urging the chestnut into a slow trot, Alex headed up the High Street, taking the same route Daniel had.
The chestnut was a stronger, more powerful beast than the black Daniel was riding; easy enough, at some point along the way, for Alex to overtake Daniel without him seeing, and so reach Bury ahead of him, to be there, ready and willing to be graciously rewarding, when Daniel arrived, victorious, to lay his prize at Alex’s feet.
Smiling in anticipation, Alex rode on.
The fighting in the yard at the end of the alley was fast, furious, bloody, and desperate.
Somewhat to Logan’s surprise, he, Linnet, Charles, and Deverell were all still alive.
Cut, bruised, scraped, slashed, yet still alive, still on their feet.
They’d managed to turn the alley’s narrowness to their advantage. The instant the cultists had moved, Charles and Deverell had whipped their pistols out. They’d fired at close range, and the first two cultists had crumpled.
The smoke from the pistols hadn’t even dissipated—the other cultists hadn’t recovered from their instinctive recoil—when Linnet had caught his belt and yanked. “Get back!”
He’d stepped back, and she’d sent a pile of crates tumbling half across the end of the alley. Charles had seen, and done the same on the other side.
Knowing it would mean death to leave the higher ground to the assassins, Logan had leapt up to the top of the crates and wildly slashed at the cultist who’d been scrambling to climb over his fallen comrade’s body to claim the advantage.
He hadn’t held back his swing, so that cultist, too, had joined the debris before the crates.
Charles had claimed the top of the crates on the other side, hacking at the cultist who’d come at him. Deverell had worked with Linnet to shore up the wobbling crates with others, until both Logan and Charles had had solid platforms from which to work.
The advantage was incalculabl
e. Added to that, their longer swords, greater reach, and the narrowness of the alley, which meant that no more than two assassins could face them, come at them, at once, meant they had a chance.
They fought to make the most of it.
To Logan’s utter relief, Linnet didn’t try to claim a place on the crates. In such a confined space, the strength behind each blow, behind every block, was critical; she couldn’t face opponents like this, in such a place.
She remained behind him, not safe but safer, yet by no means cowering. When an extra assassin pushed in alongside the one fighting Logan and slashed at his legs—with both saber and dirk engaged, he couldn’t block the strike—Linnet caught the assassin’s blade with her knife before it reached Logan’s thigh, then her cutlass flashed forward, striking hard and deep across the cultist’s exposed wrist.
Blood spurted. The cultist’s blade fell. In the turmoil, Logan couldn’t see what was happening to the assassin, but he doubted the man would live to fight further.
Then he took a thrown dagger in his upper arm. Deverell tapped him on the shoulder and they smoothly changed places.
Before Logan could think, Linnet grabbed him, seized the dagger, yanked it out, clamped her fingers around the wound, staunching the flow, then, wadding her neckerchief over the cut, she slid a belt—her cutlass belt—up around his arm, then cinched it tight.
He looked into her face, saw on it the same expression he knew would be on his. In battle, you stayed alert, did what needed to be done, and pushed all emotions deep.
She arched a brow at him.
He flexed the arm. As a field dressing, it would do. He nodded. “Thank you.” Then he turned back to the fight.
He replaced Charles when he took a slash to his thigh, not incapacitating but bad enough to need tending.
The Untamed Bride Plus Two Full Novels and Bonus Material Page 111
