Haven's Blight (17 page)

Exasperating as always. That’s my Ryan. The other thing is—you need to be ready to let go.

He crossed his arms. “That’s not going to happen.”

You say that now, but there’ll be a time someday when you just have to walk away.

“Are you trying to tell me something, here, without coming out and telling me? Are you saying you’re not coming out of this?”

Ryan, I don’t know. I wish I did. All I can tell you is, I’m fighting, and Gaia fights with me. As to whether this will only end with me dying not even she can say. What I’m saying is, when the time comes—whenever it comes—promise you’ll walk on and get on with your life.

“You trying to scare me worse?”

No. Never that. I just want to know you won’t chain yourself forever to my lifeless husk.

He inhaled a deep breath, let it slide out in a long exhalation between his teeth. “I’ll walk that road when it opens before me,” he said. “Till then, I’m sticking.”

That’s my Ryan. That’s the Ryan I know. I love you.

“I love you, too,” he said.

And then it was as if he was the only one left awake in the room, as if the person he’d been speaking to had gone back to sleep.

“I’m crazy,” he said, shaking his head in disgust.

But the fear was gone. He still felt weak, as if from fever, but he no longer felt as if the fear were tearing him apart from the inside.

He climbed back onto the cot and fell instantly asleep.

H
E
CAME
AWAKE
with a strong hand clamped over his mouth and his own hand gripping its wrist. His eye snapped open, but he saw nothing immediately.

He recognized the smell of Jak Lauren. The youth was bathing daily—all it took, it turned out, was for Elizabeth Blackwood to ask him please to do so. But Ryan had been with him long enough to know how he smelled clean or dirty.

The soap had a faint scent of lilac.

“Ryan, me,” Jak said.

He nodded, and the pressure came off his mouth.

He let go of the slim but steel-muscled wrist. “Got a risky way of waking a body,” he said.

“Why stood aside, out of sight. No time now. People outside. Sneaking up on house!”

Chapter Nineteen

In a heartbeat Ryan was up off the cot and moving toward the window.

“Keep low,” Jak warned in a hiss.

Ryan waved a hand at him. “Yeah.”

He flattened himself against the wall. There was a risk if he looked that somebody below would see him. As dim as it was, the lantern’s light was enough to make it hard for him to see movement in the darkness—and enough to silhouette him for a watcher outside. But he knew that turning the light off was worse. People noticed changes, like lights going out. Especially in a house they were night creeping.

But his luck was in. He saw seven or eight figures, men or youths from the way they moved, stealing across the darkened lawn from the black wall of the trees to the front porch. Dark hoods hid each head. They carried a variety of cudgels—stout sticks, planks of wood, lengths of lead pipe. Ryan saw knives and single-shot blasters tucked into belts.

They weren’t coming to deliver fresh eggs.

None looked up. That wasn’t any huge windfall. People usually didn’t. As long as Ryan didn’t do anything to catch their eye, like move fast or turn a lamp up or down, only bad luck would betray him.

“Right. Why didn’t you raise the alarm, Jak?”

The teen gave him a look of half-uncomprehending disgust. By his very nature Jak was himself a supreme night hunter. His answer to attack by stealth was counterattack by stealth.

May have a point, Ryan thought. A counterambush—falling by surprise on attackers who believed themselves secure in the advantage of surprise—appealed to Ryan’s own dirty-fighting instincts.

“Go rouse the baron and our friends,” he said, “quiet-like. Then do what you gotta do.” Trying to tell Jak how to ambush the ambushers was like telling him how to breathe.

“You?” Jak asked.

“I’m going to drop in and give these boys a nice warm Southern welcome. Move.”

But the teen hesitated, a pale ghost in the dimness. “Krysty.”

Ryan pressed his lips together, looking at his lover lying faultless and entirely vulnerable beneath the thin cotton sheet.

“I don’t want to fight in here,” he said. “Best way to keep her safe’s stop them well shy. Right.”

He looked around. Jak had already vanished. Ryan nodded.

The window stood open as far as it would go for air. It was covered by a metal-mesh screen. Ryan drew his panga, which he kept honed close-shave sharp. With decisive yet quiet motions he slashed three cuts in the screen and folded it down.

He poked his head out. Though he seethed with rage and desire to throw himself on the foe, he forced himself to move deliberately. A quick check showed him the portico covering the front entrance to the mansion was too far away to jump to. But there were other windows spaced along the third floor. Windows with sills.

That was enough, because it had to be. He grabbed the sill and stuck one leg out. Turning to face into the bedroom, he brought the other leg out, so his bare feet gripped the sill as he crouched. He cast a last longing look at Krysty, then he turned and sprang at the next sill.

He made it effortlessly. He looked around, more out than down. No one had noticed him.

Quickly as he dared Ryan shuffled sideways to the end of the sill nearer the portico. Two more windows. Then he’d be directly over the peaked roof of the porch. He could lower himself to the next sill, and from there quietly to the top of the portico.

He gathered himself, then jumped sideways.

Maybe he misjudged distances in the darkness and with the adrenaline yelling in his veins and hammering at his heart. Maybe the sill was off true, cambered just a smidge outward. Or maybe there was some kind of loose rubble on it, flaked-off paint perhaps, that slid.

The balls of Ryan’s feet hit the weathered wood and slipped right off. He fell toward the ground two dozen feet below.

J
AK
SLIPPED
down the stairs to the second floor. He’d checked the baron’s room. It was empty. Blackwell had either gotten the word already and acted, or he was just elsewhere. Either way, Jak reckoned he’d done the first part of the job Ryan gave him. He was always going to warn his companions in preference to searching a big creepy old house for an absent baron.

He tapped the door of the room he shared with Doc. It was an arrangement that worked surprisingly well. They didn’t have a lick in common. For his own reasons each preferred to keep quiet during downtime. So when they bunked together neither troubled the other with idle chitchat.

“Doc,” he said quietly in a voice he knew would carry less far than a whisper. “Jak.”

“Yes, yes—”

“Stay ready. Coldhearts come. Don’t let reach Krysty!”

“You may depend on me, young man, for—”

The albino teen had moved on, as silent as a ghost in a hallway lit only by starlight trickling through open windows at either end. Doc might not make small talk, but let him get going on one of his speeches and he ran on like a babbling brook.

Next came the door to J.B. and Mildred’s room. Jak turned the knob and cracked the door. The pair came instantly awake at the slight sound.

“Trouble,” Jak said. “Coldhearts night creep. Ryan says keep quiet and bushwhack.”

“And not let them get to Krysty!” J.B. added as Mildred swung off the bed. “Got it.”

Jak nodded and shut the door. He descended the next stairs to the ground floor.

Voices came from the front stoop. Grinning like a wolf in the darkness, Jak found the deepest-shadowed corner of the dining hall and slipped into it to await his prey.

This was the night. And this was
his
house.

F
RANTICALLY
, R
YAN
grabbed at the sill. His right fingertips slammed the edge and bounced off. His left hooked the very end of the small wooden ledge. Elbow and shoulder wrenched as they took the full force of his falling weight. At the impact his half-healed ribs shot pain like a knife into his lungs.

At once his grip began to slip. He writhed frenziedly, then got his right hand up. Relief flooded him. He was back in the game. The ribs wouldn’t distract him. That was only pain.

He looked down. The hooded men were hunched over, straining forward. From the angle of their heads they were all staring fixedly at the front door of the big house, as if their eyes were attached to it by fishhooks on strings.

Ryan slid his hands to the right, pulling himself to the far sill’s end. He swung his legs left then right, three times.

The third time he launched himself with all the strength in his shoulders and arms. He flew sideways through the air. His right hand reached and it caught the final sill, followed an instant later by his left.

Shit, Ryan thought, as he dangled and firmed his grip, this is the easy way to do it.

He glanced down. The peaked porch roof waited right below him. He thought about a drop straight down and decided against it. It wasn’t far, but the downward-angled sides of the roof meant too much danger of slipping or twisting an ankle. Plus he doubted he could land silently.

He looked closer. The second-story sill wasn’t far below his bare toes. He calculated, swung inward a bit, dropped.

His landing was sure. It was also quiet. As fluid as a mountain lion down a boulder outcrop, Ryan flowed down to hang from the ledge and drop with only the faintest of thumps to the portico roof.

He got a good foothold on either side of the peak. Then drawing his panga in his right hand and his SIG-Sauer P-226 handblaster in his left, he walked bent-over to the end of the roof.

Some of the coldhearts were on the porch now, muttering softly. Four others stood on the grass just short of the steps up.

Ryan leaped toward his prey.

“G
ET
YOUR
PANTS
ON
, John,” Mildred said. “Having your naughty bits dangling in the breeze will only distract you.”

“Right,” the Armorer said. He had started to join her where she stood with her back to the door, and the door opened to a hairline, clad only in boots, shotgun, eyeglasses and fedora. He turned back to the bed, scooped up his pants and sat to pull them on.

Mildred had taken her own advice, after a fashion. She had pulled on a thigh-length T-shirt to give at least the psychological sense of protection to her own tender parts. She hadn’t bothered pulling on underpants. There were advantages to internal plumbing.

She had her .38 ZKR 551 target pistol held barrel-up in her right hand.

“Somebody’s coming,” she said. She heard J.B. trying to stand. “No, I got it. Back me.”

Footsteps, she thought. Coming up the stairs.

E
VEN
BEFORE
HIS
toes touched the grass of the front lawn Ryan’s panga chunked into the hooded back of the head of a lean man in a checked flannel shirt hanging untucked over badly holed blue jeans. The impact shivered up his arm. His feet struck. He flexed his legs deeply, allowing his own weight and momentum to yank the blade free.

The intruder melted and his knees struck ground. Then he turned into a lumpy puddle.

Ryan was already rising, swinging his left hand. He had aimed his leap to land behind and roughly between the man whose skull he had split and the shorter man on his left, who had a big gut and a bum left leg. The second was turning, holding a wooden ball bat but not swinging it, as though he wasn’t fully aware of the fate that had befallen his companion.

Ryan rapped the magazine end plate at the bottom of the SIG’s grip hard against the man’s right temple. As a rule he didn’t care for hitting people with blasters. Most made crappy clubs, and if you banged them around too much,
clubs
could be all they ended up being good for. Right now he couldn’t be choosy.

The second man pitched forward, dropping the bat to clutch at his face but not saying anything, stunned.

Ryan’s plan was to tie up as many of the sneak attackers as he could here, outside the house. Whether they were chilled, incapacitated, run off, or just occupied beating and stomping him to a helpless pulp on the ground, they wouldn’t be threatening Krysty. He couldn’t say, now or ever, that he didn’t care about being chilled.
Survivor
was core to who and what he was. But this time he could say surviving wasn’t his number-one priority.

He judged his best bet was to turn himself into a whirlwind of pain and potential death.

“
No blasters!
” hissed a tall, black-clad figure, its features obscured like those of the other attackers, that hung back not far from the deeper shadows of the trees. Ryan felt relief. He hadn’t wanted to shoot because he didn’t want the coldhearts shooting back. Apparently they didn’t want to alert their quarry.

For a moment there was only motion: slashing, clubbing, feeling resistance to his strikes, hot blood splashing his face and bare upper torso. Shouts and groans. He kept his attacks moving, kept them fluid, never lingering, trying not to be predictable.

But the numbers caught up to him.

An ax handle caught him across the belly, doubling him over briefly. He threw himself forward, diving beneath and inside the skull-crushing follow-up blow. Coming to his feet, he slashed another man upward across the gut.

A long, bubbling scream erupted inside the house.