Lethal Red Riding Hood (Dark Goddess Chronicles Book 1)

by Leonard Wilson

  The night had been warm when they’d gone upstairs, but as they stepped back into the open, an unseasonable chill swept over them. A stiff wind from off the lake had chased the blanketing clouds from the sky, freeing the full, golden moon to brighten the night to something more akin to twilight. The hush of sleep had settled over the town, broken only by the whisper of that wind, the sound of laughter from the nearby Goose and Goblet, and the clopping of a pair of horses disappearing down the street with their curiously cloaked riders. From this distance in the moonlight, Jenilee couldn’t make out much about the riders save those cloaks—one so black as to make the night around it seem bright by comparison, one of bloody crimson so vibrant that not even the moonlight seemed to mute it.

  The black cloak might have belonged to any number of people, but the red was the vibrant sort of color that few could afford, and fewer still could afford to wear casually around the streets of a backwater town, rather than saving it for special occasions at a royal court. It was the sort of red that burned itself straight into memory without pausing to wait for the eyes or the brain to process it, and left Jenilee with the absolute certainty that she’d never in her life seen that cloak before.

  In a town like Hart Cove, where the only strangers’ faces one saw tended to belong to ragged, unsavory mariners, that really narrowed the options of whose back she could be looking at.

  “Do you think that’s your aunt?” Keely whispered, her thoughts having clearly rushed down the same track as Jenilee’s.

  “My condolences if it is,” Holt, the cobbler, said quietly from where he leaned in his doorway nearby. The door stood ajar, but the interior beyond it lay in darkness.

  “What do you mean?” Jenilee frowned.

  “Strangers in red and black?” the old man said. “That’s the Inquisition come for Molly again.” He took a slow drag on his pipe before continuing. “They’ve got no quarrel with a pirate for being a pirate, mind you. That’s king’s business, as far as they’re concerned. But they take exception to an openly heathen pirate queen. The church loses face if they let that sort of thing go unchallenged, even out here.”

  “They’ve come for her ‘again’?” Jenilee asked.

  “They’ve sent a small army every few years since the days of Molly’s mother,” the cobbler said. “Of course, they still lost face. It’s never gone well for them, and never been—”

  Jenilee didn’t realize at once why Holt hadn’t finished his sentence. One moment she was standing there listening to him, the next she was picking herself up off the ground, wincing at the pain in her shoulder, and wondering why the only sound she could hear was the ringing in her ears. Before she could recover her bearings, she felt the second explosion, and saw flames erupt high into the night sky, somewhere on the far side of the Goose and Goblet, though its sound remained disturbingly muffled despite the violence of it.

  Jenilee fought to recover her senses, and to sort out what had happened. The sharp, pervasive scent of burnt gunpowder filled the air, along with clouds of dust and smoke. The riders could no longer be seen, though she couldn’t be sure whether that was because they’d gone, or because they’d been swallowed up by the sudden haze.

  Down the street to the right, not thirty paces in the direction the riders would have come from, the shattered remnant of Finlay’s mercantile now blazed brightly. Just beside Jenilee, Keely was staggering to her feet. Holt also tried to rise, but the older man was having some difficulty at it and looked like he might have hit his head.

  Jenilee made sure Keely was steady on her feet, then the two of them went to help Holt off the ground, while Jenilee kept half an eye out for the riders to reappear. If they did, she wasn’t sure whether the strangers would be more likely to offer their assistance or to kill anyone who might have seen them ride away from here. Could there not be a connection between them and the explosion?

  People had begun emerging onto the street in alarm and confusion. Cries of, “Fire!” went up loud enough to faintly penetrate the ringing in Jenilee’s ears. A bucket chain began to materialize as if out of nowhere. Holt’s wife and grandson appeared, taking over the job of making sure the cobbler had not been seriously injured. Then a third fireball erupted over the rooftops, and a fourth. The crowd’s quick foray into an organized response to the crisis began to unravel into panic.

  Moments later, it fell apart completely as half a dozen men in red and black swept out of the darkness on horseback, randomly swinging their drawn blades at anyone within reach as they passed. The screams of the crowd took on a new edge of terror as blood glistened in the firelight.

  Perhaps it was her near deafening from the first explosion that allowed Jenilee to approach the next few seconds with some measure of detachment. Not being able to properly hear the pain and fear of her neighbors certainly slowed the onset of her own panic and that might have been what bought her the precious clarity to see that one of the riders was on a deadly collision course with Keely, and to drag Keely out of the way a moment before the man’s axe would have cut her down.

  Jenilee kept right on dragging until she had the both of them off the street and into the shadows between two buildings that seemed—for the moment—to be securely not on fire. She paused then in the darkness, heart pounding, and tried vainly to communicate with her friend. She doubted they’d be able to hear a word from each other under the circumstances without raising their voices to a shout. Given the deadly attention that could have attracted, she gave up on communicating and focused instead on forcing down the threatening flood of emotion in an attempt to think clearly.

  Whatever was happening, it had turned her brave new path in life into a nightmare before she could even set foot on it. For all she knew, there were going to be more explosions, and the building she had her back to could be the next powder keg on the list. For all she knew, some maniac with a blade was set to charge down this very alley, swinging at anything that got in his way. For all she knew…

  “Page eleven!” Jenilee hissed to herself fiercely. She had to think clearly, not thoroughly. Thinking thoroughly would get her killed.

  What did she know? She knew Holt had said this was the Inquisition come to do battle with Blackwater Molly, and that she—Jenilee—wouldn’t be able to come up with a better guess of what was going on even if she racked her brain all night. Therefore, until proven otherwise, that’s officially what was happening.

  And while she was taking Holt’s version of reality as cold, hard truth, accepting that the Inquisition had been trying for an entire generation to take down the pirate queens of Lake Etherea could put the events of the last minute into a terrifying but comprehensible context: the Inquisition had declared active war on anyone in the vicinity not taking up arms against Molly, and the explosions signaled the start of open hostilities.

  Now she had a working theory that would have to stand in for reality, for want of time to explore other possibilities. It set her teeth on edge even trying to stop thinking it out there, but rules were rules and there were lives on the line.

  So she was trapped in a war zone with her best friend, and still untrained in battle. That didn’t leave much option but to run. But where to run to? Anything she’d normally consider “shelter” seemed likely to burst into flames without notice. They could head for the Siren’s Song, but doing so would surely be heading into the thick of the battle. So leave town? There’d be plenty of places to hide in the swamp, but…

  She closed her eyes and groaned, leaning back against the alley wall. “Page twelve?” she asked the sky. “Already? Seriously?”

  So the question wasn’t what she should do, but what did she love. Maybe if she’d been any sort of warrior, she would have said, “Hart Cove,” or, “the people of Hart Cove”. But she wasn’t any sort of warrior yet, and she’d been ready to leave all that behind forever. All that remained to her that she truly loved were Keely and Axy—and now, maybe, her Aunt Molly?

  Hart Cove would live or die without her. No blood
y way could she save the whole town, so there lay her crystal-clear priorities: escape this chaos alive, take her friends with her, and save the pirate queen if it wouldn’t endanger the other two.

  Keely seemed to have finished ordering her own thoughts at precisely the same moment, and even amid the noise and in the scant light of the alley, they knew they’d announced a single conclusion together. “We’ve got to get to Axy!”

  Keely pulled the flintlock pistol she’d brought with her when she’d said farewell to her own home earlier in the evening. The act reminded Jenilee of Molly’s gifts. She reached for the new blade her aunt had given her, but imagined herself holding it as she hurried through the dark streets filled with panicked crowds, and abandoned the idea. Instead she settled for simply touching the hilt where it hung from her belt, to reassure herself it was there.

  Then the two girls set out through the familiar back ways between the buildings, slowing only when billowing smoke drowned out the moon- and firelight as they ran toward the Drunken Squid. If Axy stuck to their plan for slipping away in the night, that’s where he’d be waiting for them.

  Hart Cove was no little village. It had the market. It had the garrison. It had the harbor. It even had a couple of streets with actual cobbles instead of dirt. No surprise, then, that even at a dead run, it took them a few minutes to get across town. While they ran, the ringing in Jenilee’s ears began to fade, but she almost wished it hadn’t. Screams of pain and panic dogged their heels, some raised from voices she recognized despite the emotion distorting them. The clanging of the garrison alarm bell competed with the ring of steel and the crack of musket fire.

  Cannons began to roar. Three more powder kegs blew. One of them tore open the stone wall of the garrison tower that dominated the Hart Cove skyline, sending out shards of rock far enough to rain down on them as they ran. One sharp fragment glanced stingingly off of Jenilee’s cheek—drawing blood—at about the same time they arrived at the clifftop overlooking the harbor. The three largest vessels in the harbor—two merchant ships and the Siren’s Song—had all been set ablaze, as had half a dozen fishing boats.

  Figures down on the pirate vessel could be seen rushing about, fighting the flames, even as her guns returned fire on the small fleet of black warships now blockading the harbor entrance.

  This could be no simple raid or skirmish they were caught in, but a long-planned and vicious trap to catch up the entire town when Molly was in port. Agents of the Inquisition must have been in town for weeks or months to set those charges, to say nothing of the planning and coordination it would take to get that fleet to where it was right now without it being sighted well in advance. People were going to die tonight—lots of people. Most of them would be people Jenilee had known all her life. Hart Cove itself might be left as little more than a bloody cinder.

  When they arrived in front of the tavern, it wasn’t Axy they found waiting for them but Molly and a half-dozen hardened members of her crew, all standing with their backs to the door, blades drawn and discharged pistols discarded on the ground. Around them waited a ring of men in livery of red and black, at least three times their number but in no rush to throw themselves at the pirates’ blades. Dead and dying of both factions lay tumbled in the no-man’s-land between them.

  Most of the remaining pirates had been bloodied, including Molly herself, but still she seemed to be holding the forces of the Inquisition beyond arm’s reach as much with the intensity of her gaze and her ferocious, confident grin as by any threat of her blades.

  “Blackwater Molly!” a knight of the Inquisition bellowed, stepping forward. He was a big man, armored in a suit of ornate steel that shone red in the firelight. “I am Lord Auron, Master at Arms of the Knights of the Inquisition, right hand of the Grand High Inquisitrix. You have been found guilty of countless heresies and other crimes against Mother Church and our lady, Seriena. Repent and surrender yourself, that your soul might yet be salvaged in her eyes.”

  “Wow,” Molly said. “You people honestly talk like that?”

  “Do not mock me, witch,” Auron growled. “Personally, I’d as soon see you dead. I can’t imagine there’s anything worth saving in that shriveled little thing you call a soul.”

  “You’re the one calling it a soul,” Molly answered. “Personally, I call it Bosun Taggart. But be nice. Just imagine what you’d look like after fifty years at sea.”

  “It is, as they say, your funeral, but I shall offer leniency one last time. Any man who surrenders by a five count can walk free. Surrender yourself, Molly, and I’ll spare your crew.”

  The offer met with a very ungentlemanly chorus of derision from the men at Molly’s side.

  “You’re the outlaw here, sir,” Molly spat. “You’ve broken my peace and killed my people. Surrender, and you have my word as the Queen of Lake Etherea that I’ll not keep you begging for death for more than a week or two.”

  “Five!” Auron snapped. “Four!”

  That was when Keely stepped out of the shadows, leveled her pistol, and calmly shot Lord Auron in the back from fifteen feet away. The man staggered a step forward, then failed to crumple to the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. What he did do was slowly turned around, glowering.

  “It would seem it takes a bigger weapon than that to punch through steel plate, girl,” he growled. Jenilee lost the fight to pretend she wasn’t terrified, and simply froze wide-eyed in place behind Keely, who suddenly wasn’t doing much better with the whole bravery thing. Keely let the empty flintlock clatter forgotten to the ground.

  With a barely human howl, Molly launched herself like a wildcat, crossing the distance to the Inquisition in something akin to two heartbeats. Lord Auron, weighed down in the heavy steel plates that had saved him from Keely’s gunshot, had barely begun to turn when Molly hit him in the back. The fully armored man might have weighed three times what Molly did, but what weight she had now came charged with fifteen yards of predatory acceleration, and she applied it with the express purpose of adding to the load on his shoulders. The net effect left him suddenly top-heavy while in the off-balance act of attempting to spin. She bore him instantly to the ground, and he landed hard on the shoulder of his sword arm.

  Few of Auron’s followers had actually taken their eyes off of Molly, but for that moment in time, all had at least been trying to split their attention in two completely different directions in the instinctive attempt to assess the new threat at their backs. By the time they’d re-focused themselves enough to intervene, Molly’s men had come charging in behind her, and Molly herself had dropped her saber, pulled a stiletto, and plunged it with deadly, unhesitating precision under Auron’s unarmored chin, into his throat.

  When the first enemy blade came swinging at her, she was already rolling away and reaching for her saber. The brief moment of calm that the stand-off had bought amidst the swirling storm of chaos vanished.

  “Run, girl!” Molly screamed at Jenilee above the renewed ringing of steel. “I’ll not take getting yourself dead as an excuse to avoid meeting your mother!”

  Jenilee ran, her buckling resolve to live up to the freshly inked “page twelve” happy for any excuse to do so. Keely ran with her. They’d barely gone fifty feet before Jenilee saw the tall, dark figure rushing through the shadows after them. With an involuntary shriek, Jenilee grabbed Keely by the wrist and dragged her once more into the deeper darkness between buildings, not daring to slow despite the danger of colliding with some unseen obstacle in the alley.

  “Keely! Jenny!”

  The girls skidded to a halt; then their momentum reversed. In a moment, Keely had flung herself at their pursuer, breathlessly kissing Axy all over the face.

  “We’re under orders to run and hide!” Jenilee blurted as she stopped a few feet short, letting her friends have their moment.

  “Good,” Axy said when Keely’s assault had abated to the point that he could. “I’m under orders to…”

  An ear-piercing shriek rose above the din,
and the three friends turned to see Molly stagger. What remained of the Inquisition force around her seemed poised to break and run, but the shaft of an arrow protruded from her stomach—unmistakable even at this distance and in this light, thanks to the flames that had already leapt from it to Molly’s clothes. The pirate queen screamed again, lashing out blindly with her saber as she spun in disoriented pain.

  “Orders be damned,” Jenilee snarled. As she charged back toward Molly, a small, logical part of her brain noticed with satisfaction that it was in no way being consulted about what should happen next, and she added a quick endorsement of herself for it onto page eleven of the Rules.

  She found herself stopping to tear the cloak from the body of the first fallen soldier she came to; then she rose and resumed her charge toward Molly. She paused only to consider her best hope of dodging the wildly swinging blade while she adjusted her grip to spread the cloak, but in that moment of her hesitation, a figure in red and black swept in on horseback and a vicious swing from his axe connected solidly with Molly’s rib cage. Molly flew ten feet through the air to land in a heap, the axe lodged firmly between her ribs. As Jenilee looked on in horror, the great war horse wheeled around and came back to trample the fallen pirate queen, her bones snapping under its hooves with sickening finality.

  The impulsive part of Jenilee that had made her run to Molly’s aid apparently divorced itself completely from the rest of her brain in that moment, and it began shouting instructions to her body while the rest of her mind just looked on in shock. She felt nothing, heard little more than the screams that seemed to be coming from her own mouth, but saw the eyes of the young knight on horseback, boring dispassionately into hers, taking her measure as they tried to decide whether this screaming girl posed enough of a threat to bother with dispatching at that precise moment.