The Highwayman

by Michele Hauf

  Exhaling, he merely dropped his head back against the headrest.

  Being alone in the car meant solace. He’d never grow accustomed to the city sounds of mufflers backfiring, sirens blaring, people shouting and industry grinding at gears and grease. The world had gotten so noisy over the past half-dozen decades.

  Tugging the diamond earring from his pocket, he examined the sparkle. Two carats, surely.

  He shook his head miserably, and leaned over to toss it in the glove compartment. He didn’t want to steal; he was compelled to it.

  From his other pocket he pulled out a silver coin. The hole in it held bad memories…

  Paris—1758

  The serving wench flaunted enticing curves designed to steal souls, and sensual bow lips to condemn those stolen prizes. She did not win Maximilien Fitzroy’s glance.

  Nor did his partner, Rainier Deloche, look away from Max’s steady gaze. The two men clashed their pewter tankards of the Green Cat’s finest brew.

  “To riches,” Rainier announced. He swallowed the entire mugful, slamming it on the wobbly wood table with a satisfied grin.

  “To riches and fast thinking.” Max followed suit.

  The beer was stale and warm, yet it was the best thing he’d tasted in days. He called for another round.

  The wench poured their drinks, the beer slopping over the side of Max’s tankard, but he did not curse her. Instead, he lifted the tankard and licked around the rim.

  The wench sighed at the sight of his tongue slurping up the moisture. Yet Max’s attention could not be won by feminine wiles this night.

  Affronted, she stormed off in pursuit of other prospects.

  Max tilted his mug to Rainier. “To adventure.”

  Agreeing with a nod, Rainier beat Max at the second round. The flat beer was hardly worth the two sous, but neither minded paying. They could afford it.

  Reaching inside his leather greatcoat, Max mined for his purse, tied at his hip, being cautious not to jingle the coin. He and his partner never drew attention to themselves. After encountering one too many cutthroats with a greedy taste for stolen coin, Max had come to accord with discretion.

  Ah, to the devil! They always drew attention to themselves. Life wasn’t worth the walk unless the world joined in.

  But they did know when to play it quiet—when the law was about. Neither had caught sight of the king’s guards since returning to Paris, hours earlier from the west.

  Max drew out a silver demi-écu from the leather pouch. The size of a sliced egg, it was old, issued fifty years ago during Louis XIV’s reign. It was one of hundreds he and Rainier had “procured” earlier this evening, thanks to the forced kindness of strangers.

  The carriage had brandished King Louis XV’s coat of arms, and five heavy, metal coffers of gold and silver coin destined for Versailles.

  The coachman had spied Rainier’s and Max’s silhouettes, sitting each upon a fine mount waiting alongside the road, pistols drawn and aimed for the coachman’s forehead. Still, the lackwit had shouted a warning to the guards inside the coach.

  Max hated when they made noise. It upset his partner.

  Rainier had shot the coachman in the jaw—not a killing shot, but certainly it had taken the victim’s voice. Max prided himself on never taking a life, yet he’d been forced to deliver a wounding shot on more than a few occasions. He absolved his guilt with a prayer to his father, who had been shot in the head by a highwayman when Max was six.

  Pistols had fired from within the coach. Gunpowder sparks danced in the clear night.

  Max had advanced, heeling his mount determinedly. The snow was deep, and the gelding kicked up a storm in their wake. Rare did a bullet connect when shot without aim and out of fear. With a slash of his épée, he’d disconnected one pistol from a hand.

  Rainier charged the opposite side of the coach, disarming the other guard.

  They’d argued whether to tie up the guards and leave them alive, or to kill them. Rainier insisted leaving behind witnesses was a chance they could ill afford.

  Max had won the argument only because Rainier had dropped his pistol in the deep snow and found no time to dig it out. They had only taken two of the five coffers. The weight burdened their horses as it was.

  Now celebration was in order.

  Max held the silver coin between the two of them, not caring who witnessed. Let them admire the shiny coin. The common man might rarely see such a sight.

  He and Rainier were common. Both orphaned before they were eight, they were forced to live on and work the streets. They had come together when they were ten and, in a boisterous boys’ pact, vowed they would take their fortunes by trick or by trade.

  Trade had never been an option once trick had gotten into their blood.

  “To us!” Max prompted. “The most successful highwaymen in all of France.”

  “And handsome, too.” Rainier chuckled heartily and pinched the coin between his fingers.

  “I do love the shiny stuff,” Max said.

  The two held it between them, above Max’s empty tankard.

  “So what is the plan?” Rainier prompted. “The usual split and regroup in a month?”

  “Excellent strategy. Tonight was a large take. We’ll need to lie low.”

  “I do believe I shall follow that wench home tonight.” Rainier nodded toward the waitress who still wanted to catch the eye of either of them.

  “You’ve no discerning bone when it comes to women.” But then Max laughed. He was in the mood for a celebratory roll in the hay as well. “Am I to wager I’m to look elsewhere for my entertainment this night?”

  “I stake claim to this watering hole. We’ll meet—”

  The coin flipped out of the men’s fingers as a burn skinned the pad of Max’s forefinger. He recoiled, slapping his stinging hand to his chest.

  Time slowed. Both men watched the coin flip end over end in the air before them. No longer round, it was twisted from the lead ball that had pierced the thin disk.

  “Morbleu.” Rainier upset the tankards as he jumped up. He tugged a pistol from his hip holster, splashing beer onto his suede breeches.

  With a sharp look, Max cautioned his partner not to fire at the king’s guard who stood in the tavern doorway. Instead, he nodded over Rainier’s shoulder. Beyond the fieldstone hearth roasting half a savory sow, the kitchen reeked of onion and smoke.

  Escape out the back was always Max’s first choice. It provided less risk to civilians being accidentally injured from a stray musket ball or slash of the blade.

  “To danger!” Rainier called as he kicked aside a chair and dashed around behind the hearth.

  “To adventure!” Man finished the rallying cry that had become their motto.

  Max dodged a man swinging a half-chewed pheasant leg and bumped into the wench with the needy eyes. “And to lust,” he said as he gripped her shoulders to make sure she wouldn’t stumble. “Another time,” he added, then took off out the door behind Rainier.

  Though their mounts were out front, they were not an option right now.

  Instead, they beat a pace to outrun the devil on foot. Melting snow slickened the cobbles. The clop of horse hooves told Max the guards were behind them, and mounted, which would stunt their efforts to put distance between them.

  “I told you we should have silenced those guards for good!”

  Perhaps so, Max decided, but he’d rather run for his life than hang for taking the life of another.

  Either way, if they were caught, they’d be hanged.

  “We split up,” Max hissed as he gained Rainier’s side.

  Ahead, the narrow alley they’d escaped into parted two opposite ways. “No.” Rainier shoved Max to the right. “The aqueducts.”

  They clattered down the dark stairway into the subterranean tunnels snaking below the city. Rainier was a master of the network, having spent much of his childhood years living in them.

  They paused when darkness enveloped so thoroughly Max cou
ldn’t see his own hand before his face. Above and behind, the fast gait of the mounted guards passed overhead.

  “You see?” Rainier’s chuckle echoed. Max managed to slap a palm over his mouth even in the dark.

  “We cannot return to the surface,” Max said. “They’ll post a guard outside the tavern and at the entrance to the aqueduct.”

  “Then we go onward. There’s a turn ahead, and then a long stretch that’ll lead us under the palace.”

  “You think sneaking about beneath the palace with the royal guard on our asses, and the king’s gold jingling in our pockets, is a wise decision?”

  “No, but since when do we analyze our moves so much?”

  True. He and Rainier lived a free and reckless life. Their motto—To Danger! To Adventure!—was to be lived.

  So far their heads still remained atop their necks. A man couldn’t ask for more than that.

  Except the wench Max had developed a craving for.

  Exhaling, Max counted his heartbeats to five before drawing in a breath in the confines of the Mustang. The familiar was his only hope. He’d not played his cards right. But he was not a man to cash in his chips when there were more hands to be played. Nor did he run when a re-advance was the best option.

  It took less than five minutes before he spied the wolf escorting Aby to a black limo parked before the building. Man, that woman’s legs could walk through his dreams any day.

  If he had dreams.

  He tapped the steering wheel to an imagined beat. What it must be like to have those gams wrapped about his waist as he plunged himself inside her. He imagined those long fingers gripping his shoulders, urging him to move faster and faster, and that soft red hair tickling his face, his chest.

  On the other hand, he had sworn off familiars two and a half centuries earlier. They weren’t the sort of female a man wanted to have a relationship with, let alone sex. Sex with a familiar served one purpose.

  And that was why he’d slain every single familiar he could find.

  He muttered what had become his mantra for this mission, “Find her, screw her, kill her. And don’t forget it.”

  The man called Severo opened the back door for her. While Max expected the long-haired freak to lean in for a kiss, instead the wolf squeezed Aby’s hand and closed the door after her. He spoke to the driver, then watched as the limo rolled away.

  Max gave them a two-block head start, then put the Mustang on the limo’s trail.

  The limo dropped Aby off before her building. She shared a two-story double condo with Brenda Meyers, an elderly woman who had once modeled for Vogue in the 1950s. She had moved here a month ago, and on the second day, the elegant ex-model had knocked on Aby’s door and presented her with still-warm brownies. Brenda was on vacation in the Bahamas now with a younger lover.

  Aby looked forward to becoming friends with Brenda. As much as her job would allow.

  Severo had owned this condo for years, and had hired a construction team to “enhance” the place so Aby could use it as her office. The outer walls in the shared foyer were decorated with a pretty tile mural. The walls inside Aby’s home were soundproofed, and the wood floors warded as well. A good thing, or her neighbor might wonder if she were a sex-crazed lunatic.

  She was not. But her job did require surrendering to climax. Over and over. Not a bad gig, until a girl considered that the results of such exquisite pleasure brought forth demons.

  And unfulfilling relationships.

  Heck, she didn’t have relationships. She’d love to have sex with a man and not worry demons would send him screaming. Which was exactly why she’d told Max she was retired.

  Because there was a big difference between job sex and relationship sex.

  Damn, she’d been lucky. What if she’d said yes? Aby had no idea the man was the Highwayman. That was an important detail he’d neglected to reveal. Good thing Severo had figured him out.

  She smoothed a finger over the tattoo on the inside of her left wrist. It was a month old and the tiny lettering still felt raised.

  “The Highwayman,” she whispered. “My enemy.”

  She’d be more careful about talking to strangers from now on.

  Without bothering to flick on the lights, she crossed the room, slipping the dress sleeves from her shoulders. Moonlight crept across the hardwood floor, puddling near the head of her bed.

  She’d been on her own for a month. That first day away from Severo’s estate had been scary but exciting. Now, the scary part was diminishing, and the excitement growing.

  Still, she couldn’t quite get the independent woman thing right. A girl would think, after three lives, she’d have that mastered. Unfortunately, she didn’t retain personal knowledge from life to life. The basics of survival, like eating, reading, as well as her sensory memory, she retained.

  Yet, she liked to believe she took some things she’d learned from each life into her soul. Things like the desire for independence, a strong curiosity and a love for nature.

  She was on her own now, trying to live life normally. Yet just when she’d thought it possible to touch normality, a freakin’ demon slayer shows up begging her to bridge for him.

  A handsome demon slayer.

  Who wanted to kill her.

  Although he had told Severo he’d no intent to harm her.

  Could she trust him?

  Chapter 3

  M ax observed the familiar’s shadow move away from the second-floor window. She’d seen him. He’d parked across the street, and now leaned against the Mustang, arms crossed high on his chest.

  “I’ve got all night, sweetheart. Hell, I’ve got all day, too. All week, all bleeding century.”

  His smirk didn’t touch mirth. Immortality wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. He had an ink-scribbled stack of sudoku books stuffed under the front seat to prove it. How pitiful was that?

  The night was warm, and he should take off his coat, but it concealed his weapon. Immortal or not, he still had to be wary of the police. Imagine life in prison with his never-ending mortality?

  He wouldn’t close his eyes. He would stand outside the car, waiting, even as the sun rose.

  If he did close his eyes, it would only pick at the open wound he’d worn for centuries. Normally when one closed his eyes, he intended to drift off to sleep. But it didn’t work that way with Max. He’d tried. Thousands of times. Tens of thousands of times. He’d closed his eyes, quieted his mind, and…wound up focusing on some latent noise or a bastard demon he was tracking. He simply could not sleep.

  He’d been knocked unconscious a few times and recalled the experience of lying stone-cold out on the ground had really rocked.

  Now he glanced around him on the dark street. If he had to stay in this town longer than a day, he’d have to check in to a motel. Camping out in the Mustang wasn’t comfortable, or cool. He’d passed a motel at the east end of the city that advertised a swimming pool. He loved a swimming pool, his one salvation.

  A white Monte Carlo rolled by, its booming speakers vibrating the tarmac with the beat. Max nodded to the faces inside. They drove on.

  No one wanted to mess with him. Especially not tonight when he was pissed at being turned down by a thin slip of a familiar who denied her very nature.

  Retired? The chick was a familiar. They walked this earth for the purpose of bridging demons. A familiar who didn’t bridge might as well go the lemming route and jump off a cliff.

  A bad comparison. Aby was a living, breathing creature, who was as close to human as they came, save her ability to shift shapes and call forth demons. He shouldn’t consider her as a mere tool for his use.

  But it was easier that way.

  Over the years he’d grown impatient. Two previous familiars had been unable to bridge the demon whose shadow he carried. They weren’t powerful enough. So he’d slain them. One familiar fewer in this world meant hundreds less demons.

  It was finding the familiar that proved the hard part. He didn’t get
invitations to have wild all-night sex with a beautiful woman anymore…

  Paris—1758

  After two hours of stumbling through the darkness and feeling along rough limestone walls that dripped noxious damp, the men emerged from the bowels of Paris. Moonlight glistened on Rainier’s wet, brown hair, which he kept closely shaved. He shook his broad-shouldered frame like a dog.

  “Must have passed below the sewers,” Max commented as he tugged off a knee-high leather boot to dump out the cold, reeking water.

  They’d landed in deep water halfway through their journey and had waded up to their waists. But Rainier had been sure of his path, and Max trusted him.

  “Looks as though we’ve landed in the Tuileries.” Rainier heeled off his boots and sat on the rock below a barren apple tree. Snow blanketed the gardens, and their boots sank in to their ankles with each step. “I wager the insipid boy king is looking out his window right now, wondering where his coin is.”

  “It’ll be clinking between a fine wench’s fingers soon enough,” Max answered.

  “You know it. But why must they be fine? Pretty never does appease you, Max. You always need that other something as well.”

  That other something. That certain glint in the woman’s eye. A glint of intelligence and refinement that allowed Max to see the queen beneath even the tawdriest of wenches.

  “You have your preferences, I have mine.”

  Rainier may not be as discerning, but he did have a knack for choosing the loud ones.

  “I think the mounts are a loss. No doubt the guards will round them up. I really liked that one.”

  Rainier chuckled. “You’ve had the gelding but two days. Stole him from a bastard vicomte.”

  “Yes, and for two days I loved that horse!”

  Max slicked his fingers through his shoulder-length hair and shook out the wet. His fingertip still stung, but he had been lucky. The musket ball could have sheered off his trigger finger.

  With a relieved mixture of laughter and a sigh, he declared, “I’m hungry. We’ve yet to eat.”

  “The brothel on rue du Rocher has soup and bread,” Rainier suggested. “And a warm handful of bosom waiting to be suckled.”