Before anyone else showed up to gawk at the tree, Pierce locked the strongbox, loaded it into his rucksack, and rode off.
Finding the money filled him with renewed confidence. With little trouble and no threats from the British Guardians, he’d unearthed his ticket home.
A scream rang out from within the forest. His heart lurched into his throat, blocking his airflow. Pierce halted his mount and looked in the direction of the sound.
“Help me! Please! Someone!” a woman cried.
“Shut up!” a man yelled.
The woman screamed again before a door slammed. Something horrifying was happening to her out there. Pierce dismounted and led the horse off-road, loosely tying the reins to a low branch. He carried the rucksack to a nearby tree and covered it completely with leaves. He checked the chamber of his revolver. Lucky for him, he was able to buy bullets in Le Havre. He crossed the road and stepped into the thicket.
After minutes of searching, Pierce found an old cottage tucked away under the trees. A horse stood nearby. Whoever was there, he reckoned it was only one person and his victim. Pierce stayed low, gripping his gun tightly as he made his way toward the house. The closer he got, the louder the crying grew. He came to a dusty, broken side window and peered in.
The cottage had a single room. A man dressed in a long coat and wide-brimmed black hat was shoving the lass around and then slapped her to the floor. The dust obscured the view, and the cabin was dim save for a low-lit lantern located somewhere.
“Don’t! Please!” the woman begged as the assailant snatched her up and began pushing her back toward a table against the wall.
He put her on the table and started tearing at her clothing.
“No!”
Pierce gritted his teeth. He loathed violence against women and children. He’d seen it firsthand too many times.
The front door opened without a sound as Pierce entered. He now had a clear view of the attack in progress. The cocker’s back faced him. He was still working on removing the woman’s clothing while her legs kicked frantically to either side of him. “Please, stop!”
Pierce stepped lightly with his weapon outstretched. He stopped in the center of the room and aimed the pistol at the attacker’s head.
“Get off her, arsehole,” he demanded. “Do it, or I’ll put you down right here.”
Pierce had a plan, a simple but an effective one. First, he needed to get the monster rapist away from the woman, and then he would take him deep into the woods to put a bullet through his skull. Rupert Swansea, the bastard who had tried to rape him, taught him that if he left the man alive, he would only repeat his actions.
“Now!” Pierce ordered with more force.
The man rose to his full height and raised his hands. The high collar and hat kept every inch of him, even his hair, concealed.
When he stepped away from his victim, Pierce instructed her, “It’s all right, love. Just come to me.”
She lowered her legs and her feet touched the floor. She stood from the table and sidestepped away from her attacker.
Pierce’s jaw dropped. “Anci?”
The last time he’d seen the Indian woman was in Edinburgh. He had fooled her into believing he was an assassin named Gordon Jones who had been hired to kill her. A tactic he used to get her to tell him how to open a container that held the deed to the imprisoned demon, Thooranu.
“Hello, Pierce,” she said, placing her hands behind her and raising her chin.
Her clothing wasn’t as torn as he’d thought it would be, and there were no markings on her face where it had appeared her attacker had struck her.
Was it a trap?
The door slammed shut. He whipped around to find three men with guns aimed at him. Two were hiding behind the door, and the third man was crouched behind the old headboard of the bed that appeared to have been moved so he could fit. Outside, he spied more of them, possibly lookouts waiting for him to approach the cottage.
“Get over there beside him, Finley,” a tosser wearing a shabby hat ordered.
Finley came over, aiming his gun at Pierce’s head. The firearms they held appeared modern and high-tech. Better built cylinders, shinier and larger than Pierce’s Oak Leaf. An ugly, disproportional looking bugger—one that looked as if one side of his face was sliding off—held a double-barreled pistol, while Finley had a heavy-looking firearm with a sharpshooting spyglass atop the barrel. A medium-sized bloke with dirty blonde hair, wearing the ratty old hat, owned the most impressive gun. It was equipped with a wide chamber holding many bullets he could shoot from three barrels.
“Hand your gun over, Pierce,” Anci ordered.
He didn’t have a chance against the other guns. He raised his weapon upwards and allowed it to be snatched away by one of the bastards. The loopy-faced twit searched him.
“I have his knife,” announced the searcher. “It’s dirty like he’s been diggin’.”
Pierce wondered if these gents were the ex-members of the British Guardians that Joaquin had warned him about.
“How the bloody hell did you know I’d be here, Anci?” Pierce demanded.
She gave no answer. Instead, she looked over at her so-called attacker.
“Guten Morgen, Landcross,” the man greeted in a deep, ominous voice Pierce had not heard in many blissful years.
A nauseating feeling filled his stomach, and he suddenly felt cold and clammy as Volker Jäger turned around. Pierce swallowed so thickly, he nearly choked as the man—the most brutal and dangerous person he had ever encountered—faced him.
What Pierce had witnessed in Plymouth still gave him nightmares. When Pierce left Volker on the prison transport ship, he had hoped the albino had died out at sea. That hope was dashed when the late Tarquin Norwich informed Pierce that Volker was responsible for the torture and burnings of people during his time as a British Guardian.
Pierce feared the man far more than he could ever hate him.
Volker approached. If there wasn’t a gun jammed in his spine, Pierce would have stepped back.
Volker had only grown more menacing over the years. He was a tall albino with cream-colored hair. Pierce remembered how the blood from his victim stood out against his starched white skin. He wore his dark spectacles over those red eyes of his. They sat just above the scar on his cheekbone where Pierce had struck him with a rifle butt.
“I see her in my dreams,” explained the German. “And it was she who told me where to find you.”
Freya. Of course, it was she who had led this psycho mutt to him. She wanted Pierce in this forest where this manic could kill him in any horrifying way he saw fit. Pierce was such a fool for falling for it.
Pierce’s heart beat faster, knocking against his ribcage.
Volker asked in German, “Scared?”
“Ja,” he replied. “As I am greatly disappointed to see you’re alive.”
“I want to show you something,” Volker said, continuing their conversation in German.
Volker suddenly clutched Pierce’s throat, and he found he could no longer breathe. The scarf only padded the metallic fingers that were digging in like sharp claws.
“This is the arm you destroyed,” Volker said, holding Pierce in place. “When you severely crushed during the attack by those savage Indians. The weeks at sea with no real medical supplies caused it to heal improperly. The pain never left.”
He dug his fingers in deeper. Pierce could hear his heart thumping louder in his ears. Not being able to breathe wasn’t even the worst of it. Volker’s claw-like hand made him believe he was about to have his throat crushed in.
When his legs gave out, Volker released him. Pierce dropped to the floor, gasping and choking in air. His top hat fell off, only to be picked up by one of Volker’s thugs. The bloke with the shabby hat.
“Nice hat,” he said, plucking out the feathers Pierce had put back in after leaving New Orleans. “Could do without these stupid feathers, though.”
He took off his own an
d tossed it. He donned the top hat and looked over at the loopy-faced thug next to him, who nodded. “It suits you, Callum.”
“Cheers, Ryan.”
To Volker, Callum said, “Oi, Jäger. Don’t be killin’ the bastard yet. He needs to tell us where the money is.”
Volker removed his tinted spectacles and set his red eyes on Callum, making the wanker shudder. “This man has earned a long death from me. I will be killing him very slowly.”
He looked down at Pierce and slipped off his steel grey coat, then unbuttoned his shirt and vest. As he did so, Pierce sat up, still sucking in the dusty air kicked up by the commotion. What he saw, he never thought would be possible in a thousand lifetimes.
Volker’s left arm from his forearm to his fingertips was completely mechanical. Just above the elbow, where the bicep had been served, was a flat silver metal plate. A piece of the humerus bone stuck out, with a steel band screwed at its end. That end connected to what appeared to be the radius and ulna bones, only they weren’t bones at all, but iron. Between the humerus and this eerie iron skeletal replacement was a brass pin connecting two thick copper gears located on both sides of the elbow. The same mechanism went for the wrist, which had smaller gears with a curvy axle serving as the hand. Slender black iron rods, screwed together, acted as fingers.
Not since the Machine Man of Javier Saint’s creation had Pierce seen anything of the sort.
On Volker’s real arm were countless puncture marks where it appeared he’d been inserting needles.
“It is a masterpiece, ja?” Volker asked, moving his mechanical limb.
When he moved it, the gears at the elbow rotated and a hiss came from tiny pumps. Volker pointed to a thick clear tube with black liquid circulating through it. That tube was connected to the elbow, where it was bolted into the humerus and twisted down the iron radius to the metal wrist joint.
“This fuel line acts as the axillary artery, pumping oil through like blood,” Volker explained.
Pierce looked over at Anci. He knew she was the architect. What a cursed small world it was that two enemies of his would join up and become a force against him.
“The real genius behind this,” she said, coming up beside Volker and touching a pair of lines running down his whole arm, “are these electrical wires that I have surgically implanted into his nervous system, sending brain signals to the machine. The body acts like a battery, constantly replenishing the wires with energy, allowing the arm to move.”
As she spoke, she turned Volker around to show off the two electrical wires embedded in the dead center of his back just below the nape of his neck. Volker had cut his hair short, giving Pierce a clear view of it. The wires ran down his bicep, where they were tied down with a leather band and continued downward. One wire stopped at the base of his elbow, below the rotating pin, while another was wrapped around the ulna all the way to the wrist, where it was split under the axle and twisted around and embedded in each finger.
Pierce was certain this invention was the only one in existence, yet there was something familiar about it.
Volker crouched to look Pierce in the eye. “In the days to come, until the pain alone kills you, you will become very accustomed to what this new arm can do.”
He grabbed Pierce by the coat collar with his real hand and hoisted him to his feet. He then dragged him toward the table. Pierce’s feet left the floor when he was thrown onto it and held there.
“Bring the lantern,” Volker ordered over his shoulder. “Someone, strap him down.”
Pierce punched and clawed at the machine limb, trying to pull off a gear, break the fuel line, or do anything to disable it. A gear on the elbow loosened easier than expected. That only earned him another clasp around the throat, immediately stealing his airflow. Volker’s hold was tighter, designed to stop him from doing further damage. It occurred to Pierce that the mechanics were more delicate than they appeared.
It mattered little. Pierce abandoned his fight and worked to pry away the mechanical hand from his throat. It took two men to pull one of Pierce’s hands off and bring it over to a pair of manacles attached to holes in the table corners.
“This bugger is a lot stronger than he looks!” Finley complained, holding down Pierce’s arm as Callum fastened the manacle around his wrist.
It wasn’t much of a challenge to secure his other wrist, for the pressure of strangulation had weakened him greatly. After his ankles were shackled, Anci brought the light over. Finally, Volker released him. Pierce gasped and coughed with hot stinging tears filling his eyes. Instinct made him want to grasp his wounded neck, but the restraints wouldn’t allow it.
“Anci,” he choked out.
She set the lantern down nearby and looked at him.
“Don’t let him do this, love,” he pleaded in a soft, scratchy tone.
Anci’s expression turned cross. “Until those books about you were published, I never knew who came to my room and threatened to cut me up. I tried running and ended up . . .” She stopped herself and her bottom lip quivered. “Thanks to Volker, I was brought out of hell itself.”
Anci looked at Volker and slid her fingers fondly down the mechanical arm she had created. “I’m going for a walk,” she informed Volker. “I’ll know when I’ve gone too far when I can no longer hear him screaming.”
With that, she exited the cottage.
Volker returned his red eyes to Pierce. They flicked rapidly from side to side as Pierce remembered them doing.
“While I was on the ship, I was attacked by the crew and the other prisoners. My wounds made me appear weak.” Volker pushed his face close to him and snarled, “An easy meal. Do you understand me?”
“You fuckin’ earned every bit of,” Pierce fired back.
Volker slammed his artificial hand on Pierce’s chest, knocking the wind right out of him. It caused him to gasp in air with great effort.
“First, you will tell these men where the money is so they can be on their way,” Volker ordered through yellow teeth. “Then, I am going to spend hours cutting off things.” He pressed down harder, on the brink of cracking Pierce’s sternum. “I think I will start with your eye.”
This déjà vu moment chilled Pierce to the bone and froze his joints stiff with fright.
Anci’s screams sliced the air. She howled bloody murder and then abruptly stopped. Men outside shouted and then went silent.
“Go find out what’s going on,” Volker demanded.
Even when the pressure was lifted, the pain remained. Pierce swore his heart was knocking right against the bone.
The thugs ran out of the cottage and Volker returned his attention to his captive. “Whoever you brought, I will not let them take you from me.”
Pierce had no idea what was happening, yet he welcomed any distraction from having his eye gouged out.
Gunshots rang out and the men hollered. The window exploded when a fiery arrow wheezed across the room. It struck the wall on the other side and fire instantly took hold of the house. The strong smell of burning pitch engulfed the room. The dim little cottage immediately brightened with warm colors.
“Scheisse!” Volker cursed.
He unholstered his pistol and started for the door. Pierce tried pulling his hands through his shackles, but they held his wrists too tightly. The flames had already built themselves high, eating away at the rotten walls and licking at Pierce’s feet.
“Fuck!” he screamed as they begun cooking within his boots.
Before Volker made it out the door, a hooded figure, dressed in dark green and brown, grabbed him and threw him out of the house.
“Help me!” Pierce shouted to the hooded figure.
His savior hurried over and broke the chains of the manacles fastened to his wrists.
The figure had a bandana wrapped around the lower half of his face, and goggles over his eyes. Not an inch of skin showed, and yet Pierce knew exactly who the person was.
“You’re an idiot, Landcross,” scorned the hooded
man, breaking the chains to the ankle manacles.
“Good to see you, too, Robin,” said Pierce, getting off the table the moment he was freed.
They ran out of the blazing cottage and Pierce immediately spied his hat on the ground. He snatched it up and saw Volker several feet away. He’d been slammed into a tree and lay unconscious beside it. Pierce narrowed his eyes and began approaching, ready to murder the mad bastard.
“Pierce, no!” cried Robin, grabbing him by the coat sleeve. “We must leave.”
“I need to take care of this bloody cocker,” he argued.
Robin pitched forward, but Pierce caught him. “I . . . I can’t withstand the daylight much longer. It’s killing me.”
Pierce lifted Robin’s arm up and placed it around his neck. He looked at Volker, who was beginning to come around. Pierce snarled, angered at the lost opportunity to end him. Then the voices of the men sounded nearby, and Pierce realized Robin hadn’t killed them all.
As they fled, they passed a couple of bodies with twisted necks. Pierce helped Robin mount the single horse that stood nearby and then mounted it himself. They rode to the road, where Pierce jumped off the horse and raced into the woods.
“What are you doing?” Robin asked weakly.
Pierce snatched up the rucksack hidden under the leaves and dashed back toward the pathway.
“Go on, you’re free,” he shooed the old horse, throwing the reins over its neck.
If the nag wasn’t older than Robin, he’d have ridden it out, but he doubted the animal could run fast or far.
Pierce shouldered the rucksack and mounted the other horse. Robin clutched him to keep from falling over. With a swift kick, they fled down the road.
“Where are we going?” asked Pierce.
“To my home, near Archway House.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Drink Up, Ol’ Boy
The world came into focus moments too late for Volker. Landcross fled just as Volker realized what was happening. Landcross and the assailant had vanished beyond the trees before he could gain a clear shot with his pistol. His head and spine hurt from the impact against the tree. As he checked his engineered arm, he wondered what had attacked him and his men. At least some of his people had survived. Cash Finley, Ethan Jones, Callum Grant, Henry Miles, Ryan Anker and his brother, Joe Anker. They all emerged from the forest one by one, staggering about and looking very confused.
The Forgotten Story Page 19
