Secrets In Savannah (Phantom Knights) (3 page)

He shook his head and came at me with a
growl.

I could do no more, and he knew that,
for he grinned. He placed the tip of the knife over my heart, but he did not
plunge it into me. Instead, he toyed with me, pressing the knife hard enough
that I could feel the tip drawing blood, but not hard enough to plunge into my
chest.

As he leaned close to my face, I could
smell his foul breath. “Where’s the girl?”

“Right here,” said a woman who should
not have been there.

He twisted around, removing the knife
from my chest. I breathed out a harsh breath as Bess stood in the open doorway,
her hands on her hips and a look on her face that promised retribution.

The seriousness of the situation struck
me to the gut causing me to grimace at the slicing pain. Bess did not have any
weapons in her hands. Not that she could not fight without weapons, but the man
was a brute. He was well over six feet tall and the breadth of a tree.

He lunged for Bess, swinging the knife,
and my body jerked, needing to help, but the pain held me prisoner against the
bed.

Bess jumped to the side, punching his
ribs as he passed her. Sliding to a halt on the wooden floor, he twisted and
lunged again. Bess hopped back like a skilled fighter would in a boxing match.
She knocked the hand with the knife away with one fist while the other slammed
against his cheek with enough force to send his head bobbing to the side.

On any other woman, a hit like that
would have broken her hand, but not Bess. From the moment of their betrothal,
Bess and Sam had been training together. Everything from boxing to fencing,
they did together, Sam instructing and Bess correcting.

He growled as his hand swiped at her,
and the knife grazed the front of her blue dress. Bess’s
breath
hissed as she bumped into the dressing table. There was not much room to move
about, only five feet of unimpeded space. With a wardrobe, fireplace, dressing
table, and chair surrounding them, Bess had to be precise with her movements.

He lunged, and Bess spun. She delivered
a well-timed hit to the back of his head, shoving his forehead against the
looking glass above the dressing table and cracking the glass. He twisted so
fast that Bess did not have time to clear his path. He wrapped his hand around
her neck, but it gave her the perfect angle to throw a knee between his legs.
He grunted as he lifted Bess into the air, and to my horror, began slamming her
against anything in his path.

Where was Sam? Where was Leo? I tried to
shout, but no audible sound would come from my lips, only hissed breaths.

My entire body was tight, and the pain
was breathtaking, but I could not stop as I watched my sister being slammed
against my wardrobe. Her hands came up, her thumbs jamming into his eye
sockets. He let out a slew of curses as he stepped back, swiping his arm over
her hands to knock them away.

Bess slid down the front of the wardrobe
as he released her. What she had done was not enough to blind him, or stop him,
for he hunched and ran at her. She sidestepped him, her hands landing on his
back and shoving him against the wardrobe. Bess backed to the fireplace and
grabbed a poker.

“Bess!” I tried to shout, but it came
out as a rasp.

The man had the knife raised to throw at
Bess. Bess raised the poker. My chest rose and fell in quick successions as I
watched, helpless to do anything.

A shot exploded in the room, and my body
jerked at the sound, sending fiery sparks of pain across my chest.

Sam stood in the doorway holding a
pistol, Leo and Gideon behind him. Bess kept the poker raised until the man had
fallen to the floor, then she lowered it and released a long breath before
smiling at Sam. As he reached her, he wrapped his arms around her, searching
her face.

“My thanks, darling, for your
intervention,” she said to him in a voice that she tried to make lighthearted,
but it quivered.

“How are you, Jack?” Leo asked as he
leaned over me to check my wound.

“Did he hurt you?” Bess asked as she
flew to my other side.

I shook my head, but Bess sucked in a
breath. I knew what she was staring at for I felt myself losing blood.

Bess shouted something, but it sounded
muffled to me. Sam appeared above me, and then my mother and Gideon, but I
could not speak to any of them. There was little feeling in my body as they
worked on me, trying to stop the blood. My mother was speaking to me, for her
mouth was moving, but I focused on the ceiling, trying to calm the shuddering
of my breaths. My nose burned and my eyes filled with stinging moisture, but
not from tears. From anger, from fear, from helplessness—a feeling that I
detested with the whole of my being. My back was shaking, and my feelings came
back like a rush.

Sucking in a breath, I pushed at the
blanket tucked across my stomach, and tried to push myself up. The pain that
ricocheted through my body forced a cry out of my mouth, and my head dropped
back as I squeezed my eyes shut until the pain lessened. My mother was saying
my name; Bess was shouting, even Leo was speaking, but all I could see was
Guinevere’s terrified face as the guards carried her away.

Where was she? What had Lucas Marx done
to her?

“Jack!” Bess shouted my name, and I
opened my eyes.

“What?” I demanded in a far stronger
voice than I thought myself capable.

Bess was leaning over me near my head,
and she ran her soft, cool fingers across my forehead. Her brown eyes were
filled with concern. “She is well, Jack. She is well.”

A spasm shook me, and I closed my eyes
again.

“I saw her at the harbor on an outbound
ship. She is gone, but she was well.”

That was all I heard for several hours.
When I awoke, it was dawn. My mother was asleep in a chair by the fire; Leo was
asleep on his feet, leaning against the wall, and Bess was sleeping beside me
on the bed.

Curled on her side with a hand tucked
under her cheek, she reminded me of when we were young children, and I would climb
into her bed and have her tell me stories. Bess was an excellent story teller,
always creating adventures that awed me. Her stories were one of the reasons
that I took to being a spy in the beginning. The adventure, the intrigue, the
role playing all held me spellbound for the first few years. Until I killed a
man.

There is no going back from something
like that. Stories never tell you the guilt that fills you, the memories that
haunt you, and the innocence that you lose when you take a life. I grew up that
day and saw that I did not like the life my father had created for me. That was
why I left the Phantoms to join the militia and fight in the war. If I had to
kill people, I wanted to know without any doubts or secrets that I was doing it
for a cause far greater than myself and the greed of men.

War was full of greedy men, but I
believed in freedom. I believed in this small country called America, and the
great potential that I saw in it and its people. People like my sister.

Bess stirred, and her eyes fluttered
open. When she saw me looking at her, she smiled sleepily, asking me how I
felt.

Annoyingly weak, but alive was what I
told her.

She sat up, shoving her dark brown hair
out of her face while reaching to the bedside table and bringing a letter to
the bed.

“I need you to make me a promise,” she
said and I felt my brows rise. “I want you to let Guinevere go. She is the
reason that you almost died.”

“Lucas—”

Bess gripped my hand. “Lucas tried to
kill you because of Guinevere. You must let her go.”

“We have been through this, Bess. I will
marry her.”

“Even when she refuses to come to you on
your deathbed?” Bess held out a folded letter.

As I took it, Bess looked truly
repentant for whatever she was about to say. “Pierre has sent word that he
rescued Guinevere from Lucas. He gave her a choice to come to you, but she
chose to leave you to your fate.”

The letter said as Bess had, but there
was more. Pierre warned that Lucas would send men after me as we witnessed.

The only part of the letter that truly
interested me was that Pierre was escorting Guinevere away from Charleston “to
a place of safety.”

“Now that you know the truth, you must
let her go. I cannot and will not lose you.”

As mother was waking, Bess said no more
about the letter, but she left me with much to consider.

Later in the afternoon after having
visited with all of the Charleston Phantoms, Gideon, and my mother, Bess had
forbidden any more visitors and told me I needed my rest. Though I was not
tired, Bess was adamant. As she walked to the door, I halted her.

“I want you to go ahead with the
wedding, Bess.”

She spun around, her dress fanning out.

“I know that you decided to put it off
for a few weeks because of me, but I refuse to allow it. I am wounded, not
dead, so there is nothing to keep you from marrying Sam.”

Bess gaped at me before crossing her
arms over her chest in a truly ‘older sister’ pose.

“If you do not marry him forthwith, I
will get out of this bed and march you to the church, I swear it.”

She smiled and when she came close I saw
the tears in her eyes. She leaned down and kissed my brow. “How does tomorrow
sound?”

“Like a drop of honey from the heavens,”
said Sam from the doorway, and I laughed as Bess whipped around. She moved to
his side and as he took her hand, holding her nearer, an ache formed in my
chest.

Guinevere and I should have been married
and attending Bess and Sam’s wedding together.

“Jack,” Bess said softly, but with worry
covering her face, “no matter my feelings toward her, Guinevere is safe. Pierre
said so in his letter.”

“No, Bess,” I said with a calm that I
was far from feeling. “I am sure that I know where she has gone, and she most
assuredly is not safe.”

GUINEVERE

7
May, 1817

Washington

S
tanding a little straighter, I breathed in and then
out to calm myself. It would not do to face the interview with frayed nerves.
Harvey
would sense my emotions within
seconds and play upon my feelings as he had always done. That thought did its
job.

Clamping my teeth together, I
stared at the wooden door across the temple floor from where the Holy Order’s
guards had left me to wait. I did not look around, for there was no need.
Harvey had taken up residence in the place that Pierre lived for many years, protecting
one of the sacred artifacts. The dais, instead of holding a pedestal and the
Sfære
af
lys
, held a single golden throne.

There were smaller thrones placed
around the walls of the square temple, all occupied. The colorful glass dome
above me had been repaired. Harvey had been working hard in the short time
since his escape from Charleston, but that was Harvey. He refused to hold his
court anywhere that was not as ostentatious as he was himself.

“Standards, Guinevere, are what
we have and what we must demand from others.”

The wooden door at the right of
the dais opened and a tall man with the haughty demeanor of a pompous king
walked into the room and deposited himself on the large throne. Wearing a
claret colored coat with gold buttons instead of his usual regimentals, he
could have almost passed as a stately gentleman ... almost.

When he saw me, surprise showed
in his brown eyes before quickly turning into amusement, but I saw his surprise
and it sent leaps of excitement through me. For once he did not expect me.

He held out his hand as if he
expected me to curtsey low—as he taught me to do—and to kiss his bejeweled
hand.

When I made no movement toward
him, he spoke. “You are slipping, my dear. I expected to see you a week past.”

He always said
dear
in a patronizing voice, as if he were speaking to
his favorite dog.

“On the contrary,” I mocked, “I
would have been here a week past if
you
would
have told me where you were to be found instead of leaving me to the wolves.”

He laughed, and the sound grated
on my nerves, but I did not allow myself to show emotion. I would not give him
the satisfaction.

“I would hardly call young Martin
a wolf. Would you?”

His words held a double meaning,
and it took every ounce of strength to keep myself from charging forward and
strangling the life from his evil body. If I could make it that close to him.
Harvey knew what had happened to Jack, for there was little that he did not
know when it came to the Phantoms.