by Zoë Archer
“Not coming home,” he growled. He pulled his hand from hers, and missed her touch at once.
Just then, the very man Sam wanted stepped from the door of the tavern. Sam’s heightened hearing caught the sound even before the man emerged. Sam’s eyes narrowed, his body tensing, as he watched his former commanding officer tug on a dark coat and look up at the glinting night sky. A smug smile tugged on the corner of Broadwell’s mouth. Doubtless the bastard was planning his next defilement. But Sam would stop him before that.
Sam almost forgot Cassandra standing beside him, until he heard her short, indrawn breath. He glanced over to see her also intently watching Broadwell with a look of recognition. What the devil? Was she here for that son of a bitch, too? If that bastard had hurt her, Sam would gut him and force him to watch the spectacle.
Broadwell strode away from the tavern, heading down the deserted street. He still had the same arrogant gait, as if he owned the world and the world should be grateful for the honor. Sam waited until the colonel was well away from the tavern—and civilians—before darting after him. He’d end this tonight.
“Sam, no, wait!” Cassandra’s hissed warning behind him did not register. All he saw was Broadwell’s retreating back, all he heard were the hated bastard’s footsteps upon the cobbled street.
Broadwell rounded a corner, heading toward where his horse was stabled. Noiselessly, Sam drew his sword, then pressed himself against the wall, listening to the sounds around the corner. He heard the colonel enter his horse’s stall and lead the animal out. The shuffling of hooves and feet in straw. The stable boy must be asleep somewhere. Broadwell was alone and had not yet mounted the horse. Now, when the swine wasn’t paying attention.
Sam sprang around the corner, leaping over a low, spiked iron fence that enclosed the stable yard. He raised his sword, ready to strike. Only the alarmed horse alerted Broadwell to his attack. The beast whinnied in fear, dancing to one side, and Broadwell spun around just in time to dodge Sam’s blow. His sword caught in the curve of the saddle, cutting into the leather. Sam pulled it free immediately, but Broadwell had been a soldier, too, and nimbly darted away before Sam could strike again.
“Still on my trail, Major Reed?” Broadwell smirked in the darkness of the stables. God, that face, so thin and cruel, the face of a so-called gentleman—it was burned into Sam’s mind. All around them, animals shifted nervously in their stalls.
“Won’t stop until you pay,” Sam growled. He lunged for Broadwell again.
Broadwell dashed to the side, narrowly avoiding the slicing blade. He grabbed a whip that leaned against a wall. “Your bloody tenacity.” The whip snapped out, biting at Sam’s sword hand, but Sam didn’t let go of the blade. “Thought it was an asset once,” Broadwell sneered. “Now it’s just a damned nuisance.”
Sam swung, and caught Broadwell across the shoulder, cutting through the fabric of his clothes to the flesh beneath. The colonel hissed, sounding more annoyed than in pain.
“I’ll give you a hundred more of those before I kill you,” gritted Sam.
Furious now that he’d been wounded, Broadwell tossed the whip aside just as he launched himself at Sam. The two men grappled, the air thick with the sounds of their boots scraping on the cobbles, their grunts of rage, fearful horses whinnying. And the faint sound of a woman’s running steps coming closer. Hell—Cassandra.
At her approach, Sam’s attention wavered for less than a moment. But it was enough. Broadwell shoved Sam back. The heel of Sam’s boot caught between two stones, costing him his balance. He stumbled backward and then—
Cassandra gave a quick, horrified cry.
A dull white echo of what once had been pain speared through Sam’s chest. He tried to spring forward for another attack, but couldn’t move. Something held him immobile. He glanced down and saw a spike of the iron railing protruding from his chest.
He swore, struggling to pull himself up and off the spike. As he did this, Broadwell leapt upon the back of his horse. The horse wheeled around, snorting and anxious.
“Such a pleasure, Major Reed.” Broadwell turned to Cassandra with a threatening glare. “Whoever you are, you’d best forget everything you’ve seen here tonight.” He gave a mocking salute, and kicked his horse into a run. As he did, bolting from the stable, he sent Sam a glance of pure malicious glee. Sam snarled with fury as his intended prey evaded him yet again.
A litany of swears and prayers fell from Cassandra’s mouth as she ran toward Sam. He partly lay, partly knelt upon the ground, thrashing angrily as—good God—a wicked iron spike jutted from the left side of his chest. Such a wound should kill, if not cause excruciating agony, but Sam just glared down at the spike, as though it were no more than a splinter, as he tried to extract himself from it.
“Easy, easy,” Cassandra murmured. “Let me help.” She’d read about field dressing. She reached for him.
He pulled back as much as he was able. “Don’t touch me,” he snapped, eyes cold blue fire in the darkness.
Cassandra stayed where she was, but pulled her hands back. She could only watch as Sam, with a grunt, struggled to stand. He lurched forward in slow increments, and the spike retreated by inches from the front of his chest. He ought to be screaming in pain, but he only clenched his teeth with the effort to pull the spike from his body. At last, he tugged himself free and then rose swiftly to standing. He glanced down at his torn coat and shirt, scowling. She drifted closer, looking at the patch of flesh revealed by the shredded fabric. With a wince, she saw his torn skin. It seemed the spike had pierced him between the ribs, spearing through his lung. Yet she heard no rasp of his breathing. And…
“No blood,” she breathed.
His jaw hardened as his eyes moved back and forth between her face and the wound in his chest. “And there won’t be. Never again.”
As she stared, she saw his skin shift. The wound shrank, his flesh knitting together, sealing itself up, until the gaping puncture from the spike contracted and then disappeared completely. Within seconds, only a bit of raised skin indicated that he’d been hurt at all.
No.
Her eyes burned.
He gave a low, hollow laugh. “Good as new.” Then his glance shot to her. A frown of confusion appeared between his dark brows. “You always had a tough constitution, but why the hell aren’t you screaming or fainting?”
Cassandra continued to stare at the bit of Sam’s chest revealed by his torn clothing. From what she could see, his pectoral muscle was well-sculpted, precisely delineated, and faintly dusted with dark hair. This, almost more than watching him heal from a mortal wound before her eyes, unsettled her. Sam. She’d dreamt of him for years. And now, the impossible had happened. He was back. But this was not the Sam she once knew, for so many reasons.
Had she not been a Blade, she wouldn’t have believed such things were possible. But, within the past year, she had learned—mostly in theory—that the world was full of such impossibilities.
Realizing that she stared, Cassandra brought her gaze up to Sam’s. She tilted her head back to look him in the eye. He’d grown taller, as well as filled out. He must have been a sight, striding across a battlefield, commanding men with his sword upraised. The battlefield where he had died. And, somehow, risen again.
Sam loomed over her, palpably dangerous. “You should be praying that this is just a dream—or a nightmare.”
Chapter Two
Cassandra turned from him—the known world was shifting, tilting, and she needed balance. It seemed as though fate was daring anyone foolish enough to take it on, merciless and mercurial.
Seeing only the street before her, she walked, dazed. She took refuge in responsibility, in her mission for the Blades. Yes, the mission. It would guide her when all ballast was gone.
“Fleeing me,” Sam rumbled. “Wise.”
She spun around—but he was gone. Staring into the night, Cassandra found herself entirely alone. She took a few steps back, to try and find him, then shook
herself and moved on. Determination pushed her forward. She refused the life of a society wife for a reason, because she needed more than pretty rooms and teas and dinner parties where she tried to be a charming ornament. She wanted purpose, a greater contribution. Now, when challenged, she must show her true mettle. With or without Sam.
She walked through the dark streets. When she reached her destination, she stood outside the building, her breath misting on the windows in the chill of early morning. Everything within was dark and quiet. Considering that dawn was only just creeping over the horizon, this wasn’t a surprise. Yet her task was still urgent.
“Midnight assignations, pistols,” Sam said behind her, “and now telegraph offices. Not the Cassie Fielding I knew.”
She jolted. Then fought for steadiness, refusing to turn around. “Cassandra,” she corrected. “You were damned quiet. I didn’t hear you following me.”
“You wouldn’t,” he answered, “unless I wanted you to.”
She checked the posted hours in the office window. A painted sign boasted that the shop opened at six every morning in order to send telegraphs to such cosmopolitan locations as St. Petersburg and Berlin. Thank goodness for provincial pretensions, otherwise she would lose precious hours before sending her message.
She had to let the Blades know that not only was Broadwell in England, he was on the move. Once she sent the telegram to Blades headquarters in Southampton, other operatives would take the next train north and join her. No Blade undertook a mission alone—the dangers were too great. But frustration rose at the sight of the closed telegraph office. She burned with impatience to successfully accomplish her assignment.
“Steady, Fielding,” she muttered to herself. “You’ve just got to wait a little.”
“Not alone, you won’t,” came the growled response.
Her pulse leapt at the sound but with awareness, not fear. Cassandra glanced over her shoulder. Sam had moved silently so that he now leaned against the storefront opposite the telegraph office. His arms crossed over his chest as he watched her. There was nothing indolent or careless about his posture. A brutal, ready awareness radiated out from him. In addition to his sword, he carried a pistol, the form of the weapon hinted at beneath his jacket. But the most dangerous weapon was Sam, himself.
As the sky began to lighten, she could see him more plainly. He still had ink-black hair, though it was worn a little longer now, brushing his collar, as if he hadn’t time or concern with things as frivolous as barbering. His rangy body was a coiled beast, primed to pounce. Only minutes earlier, she’d witnessed him fighting with Broadwell. Cassandra didn’t have much experience watching men fight—she’d never been allowed to watch the boxing matches at local fairs. Yet she knew there was something fiercely beautiful about the way Sam fought, as though he was made for the one purpose and met that purpose with savage grace.
Cassandra crossed the street to stand with him. As she neared, he began to lean closer, but then seemed to force himself to edge slightly away, keeping distance between them.
“The gun I have isn’t decorative,” she said. “I can protect myself.” She hoped she sounded more confident than she felt. At the gun shop, she’d been allowed to use a shooting range in the back to test the weapon. It had roared in her hands, but she’d at least hit the target. That had been the first and, so far, only time she’d used the pistol.
Sam’s forbidding expression grew even more grim, yet somehow resigned. “Not from me you can’t. You can’t understand what I am. If you did, you’d be terrified.” He began to turn away, but her hand on his arm stopped him. They both stilled at the contact, even with her gloves and his coat and shirt between them. Beneath her hand, his arm was unyielding, taut with muscle.
“Aside from that time Charlie locked me in the basement,” she said, “have you known me to be afraid?”
He made a soft exhalation, very nearly an amused snort. “You scared the hell out of him with that snake you caught once.”
She almost smiled at the memory, “I chased him around the yard with the snake, until my mother made me let the poor beast go.”
He pressed his lips together, as if fighting a smile, then grew yet more serious, as if challenging his own desire to smile. “I’m worse than a grass snake, or even an adder.”
“I’m still not afraid of you.” Far from it.
He gave a stiff nod. But moved so that her hand fell away from him, like an autumn leaf. And he remained silent.
She would have to extract it from him, the diseased flesh of memory. So she gave him what she carried within her, “Charlie wrote me,” she said. “The things he described…the disaster of Balaclava…the punishing winter.” She still had those letters, despite the fact that some were gruesome records of suffering.
“You sent us socks.” Sam’s voice held the faintest trace of warmth, an echo of sunlight.
“Terrible socks,” she added. “I can’t knit worth a damn.”
“We wore them anyway. Too cold to care if the socks were all different lengths. And thicknesses.”
She smiled. “Must have been truly desperate.”
“We were. Not bullets but disease took half the men.”
Her smile died. “Charlie’s letters didn’t say much about that.”
“No—he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t allow any of us to wallow in our misery, no matter how bad things got.”
“What would he do?” She craved anything of her brother, any small memory.
“Told jokes, sang nonsense songs so that we laughed even as we starved. The men loved him. The men came to me when they wanted guidance, but it was Charlie they loved.” Here, his voice warmed again slightly, and a spectral smile hovered around Sam’s mouth. Cassandra’s heart seized, seeing the tattered vestiges of the old Sam. Then it was gone.
“The last letter he sent,” she said, “was a month before he died. Nobody ever knew what truly happened, only that he’d been killed in action at the Redan.”
Sam stared, unseeing, at the windows of the telegraph office, as though they reflected the past and not the spectral forms of Sam and Cassandra standing opposite. “A damned mess,” he growled. “The commanding officers wanted it captured, and threw men at it. The dead piled up. Broadwell commanded our unit, and one morning he gave the attack orders that I knew would slaughter us. Even though it was grounds for court martial, I tried to move the men, get them out of the way of enemy bombardment. Better to lose my life at the end of a rope than the hundred men of my company should be killed for nothing.”
That did sound like Sam, who gladly put himself in harm’s way to protect others. More than once, he’d stepped between her and Charlie when her brother had been hell-bent on teasing her mercilessly. The two boys had even traded punches over it. Of course, Cassandra had been able to hold her own against her brother, biting and scratching like a rabid badger, but Sam’s actions had earned him her fervent adoration. She wondered if he even remembered those fights between him and Charlie. Likely not, given that much greater events had transpired since then.
Events he continued to narrate, shaking his head. “No good. The enemy chopped us to pieces. Charlie…” He swallowed hard, and Cassandra felt her own throat burning. She wanted to cover her ears and run. She wanted to hear every word. Charlie’s love of practical jokes had been the bane of her childhood, and she had loved him desperately, seeing later in those tormenting jokes his only way of expressing fraternal affection. Although she’d had enough of frogs down the back of her dresses. She got him back, though. He never drank another cup of tea without giving it a cautious sniff first.
“Charlie took it hard,” Sam rasped. “But he died fast. Couldn’t say the same about everyone else. I was…lucky. Took a bullet to the leg, and I went down. It wasn’t fatal.”
“But,” Cassandra breathed, “the letter my parents received…it said everyone in the company died.”
Sam smiled, brittle as winter morning. “I died. While I was lying there, bleeding, I saw s
omeone making their way through the fallen. Methodically firing and reloading his revolver. Those who weren’t dead got a bullet in the heart. I readied my sword, thinking it might have been a French soldier, but when he got closer, I saw I was wrong.” His voice hardened. “It was Broadwell. Killing his own men.”
“Oh, my God.” Cassandra thought she might be sick, but fought the wave of nausea.
Sam continued on, relentless. “Broadwell got to me. I tried to fight him off, but I’d lost a lot of blood and was…weak. He laughed and said I’d be a good addition, and then shot me. Right through the heart. Fiery pain starting in my chest and exploding outward engulfing everything, my blood coursing out of my body, my heart slowing. And I was angry, so goddamned angry, that it was ending like this. Then I died.” His hand drifted up and he absently touched the place on his chest where he’d received his death wound.
“It was…peaceful. But it didn’t last.” Sam stared down at his clenched fists. “Next thing I knew, I felt this slam of pain, like a battering ram straight to my chest. Broadwell was standing over me, holding something in his hands that glowed while he chanted something in a language I couldn’t recognize. When he saw my eyes open, he jeered at me, said I wouldn’t be defying his orders any more. He told me to stand up. I couldn’t refuse. And when I looked around, I saw all the fallen men standing, like me, except the ones who’d been too…damaged. None of us understood what had happened, how we could be alive. But we soon learned. Charlie was one of the truly lucky ones. Me and the others…” He tightened his jaw. “We weren’t alive. And our will…wasn’t our own.”
Sickened to her deepest self, Cassandra breathed, “What do you mean?”
Before he could answer, a whistling middle-aged man ambled up to the telegraph office. Keys jingled in his hand. In the growing light, he looked curiously at Sam and Cassandra, his gaze lingering on Sam with a puzzled frown. Sam glanced away, as if trying to deflect the man’s curiosity. With a shake of his head, the man turned back to the office door and unlocked it.
