AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Tobacconist. Warehouse. Knacker’s yard. Tenement. Tenement. Stables. Alehouse. All achingly familiar. They ought to be. He’d passed them at least four times already.
Bloody Patrick bloody Street again.
Once more he strolled up the street, his gaze passing over the pinched, desperate faces. Hoping to recognize Cat’s dark hair and clever features. Hoping she wasn’t using the glamorie’s enchantment to hide in plain view. On a whim, he whispered the nix. The burst of released mage energy was like a struck note at the base of his brain, the scream that followed dropping him into a flat run.
He’d found her.
It must be how a snake felt shedding its skin. Exposed. Defenseless. With a jolt like a body-wide static shock, Cat’s blurred, indistinct features dissolved. So too did Smith’s final hesitation. The man lunged for her, his burly fist clutching air where she’d been only a moment before. He cursed but kept his patience. His accomplice had her cut off. She’d nowhere to run, and they all knew it.
Cat’s frantic gaze took in the suddenly empty alley, the dead end stairs, the locked doors.
“Look at the pretty bit, Neddie. What do you think she looks like out of them clothes?” Smith jeered. “You and your partner thinkin’ we’re a couple of gulls? We showed him we meant business. Now it’s your turn unless you hand over that book.”
Oh gods. Geordie. Be all right. Please, be all right.
“I haven’t got it,” she stammered.
Smith stepped forward, flashing a knife. “No more tricks, girl. The book. Now.”
Cat took a step back for every ominous movement made in her direction. “I tried. I did. It wasn’t any use. Lord Kilronan had the place guarded. Tighter than a tick.”
“Our employer isn’t wantin’ excuses. He’s wantin’ the Kilronan diary. Now.”
“And who would your employer be?” From the shadows to her left came a familiar deep voice, dripping with patrician arrogance and the calm assurance of easy authority.
Cat’s puddling relief came tempered with butterfly nervousness. Not exactly a rescue. More like exchanging one pursuer for another.
Smith’s eyes traveled between Cat and Kilronan as if weighing this new development. “This isn’t any of your concern. Just a cheating street rat what needs to be taught a lesson.”
Kilronan stepped around Cat and into the field of battle, his eyes never straying from the weapon-wielding attacker as if he could sway him with the power of his gaze alone. “I’ll ask you once again, who wants the diary?”
Understanding finally lit Smith’s face. “Kilronan,” he spat.
The earl inclined his head. “Neither the diary nor the girl are your concern any longer.”
“The hell they aren’t.” Smith lunged, his knife coming within inches of Kilronan’s ribs.
Kilronan answered with a quick dance sideways and a follow-up fist to the jaw.
“Neddie! Get him from behind!” Smith hollered between dodging feints.
The earl closed in, clamping down on Smith’s weapon hand, and with a quick twist tore the dagger free. It spun with a clang across the alleyway.
Smith sought to dive for the loose blade, but Kilronan punished him with a fist to the jaw before swaying under a blow to his stomach. Another to his ribs. He responded with a move that had Smith back on his heels. At least for the moment.
What Kilronan possessed in training and finesse, Smith made up for in street fighter cunning. Fists. Feet. Teeth. He used them all to hold the earl at bay while Neddie advanced, murder in his piggy eyes. The deciding factor in this up-to-now evenly matched life-and-death struggle.
Cat jumped into the fray. Caught Neddie’s arm to drag him away from the pair still locked in a tit-for-tat rain of blows.
He shrugged her off with the ease of swatting away a fly. Followed it up with an open-handed slap knocking her flat into the alley’s quagmire, ears ringing.
“Kilronan. Watch out!” she squawked, spitting blood.
The earl spun and ducked just as Neddie sought to stab him in the neck, but his feet slid from under him, his body falling sideways into a stack of boxes.
Neddie and Smith took the opportunity to end it, but it was Kilronan who struck first.
The spell he uttered came fast and furious. A vicious swathe of mage energy catching even Cat in its riptide. She clutched her stomach, her breakfast in her throat while Smith and Neddie doubled over, the sour odor of fear and then vomit rising from their grubby clothes, their eyes rolling to spear the earl with twin gazes of hate and horror.
