The Charleston Chase (Phantom Knights Book 2) (7 page)

“You need not worry over training them with guns.
Abe and I will teach them. I know how women get around loud
noises.”

My back tensed. As I turned, there was a smug tilt
to his large lips. He was enjoying himself...too much.

I swung around, moving swiftly until we were toe to
toe. His body went taut, and for a moment I saw confusion on his
face, before it was replaced with a cocky grin. But his grin came
too late. I saw how my nearness affected him.

“I assure you, Mr. Mason, that I can handle anything
that you toss my way. I was, after all, trained by a true leader.”
His eyes narrowed and I smiled.

“You are rather zealous about your talents, Miss
Martin,” he replied in a calm, calculated tone.

“Would you care to put them to a
test?”
Please say yes. Please, say
yes.

“Yes,” there was a dangerous gleam in his eyes, “but
I think it only fair that I tell you I have been trained the same
as you.”

“Excellent. I need feel no qualms when I best you.
Shall we?” I motioned toward the door.

“One moment, Miss Martin. We should choose a weapon.
I would not want to tire you out by challenging all of your
skills.”

The atrocious man was mocking me.
Keeping my face devoid of true emotion, I said, “Why not pistols?
Though the loud noises are sure to be a hindrance.” I tossed him a
smirk to rival his own and walked out of the barn. When I reached
the others, Rose had finished firing a pistol.

“Reload, please. Mr. Mason would like to examine my
skill with the pistols.” I walked over to Levi as Abe reloaded the
pistols. “Have you your feathers?” Levi nodded and pulled three
black feathers from his pocket, the sign of the Phantoms in
Philadelphia. Since Levi was the only one left of our original
team, he still carried the sign. “Fix those feathers to the center
of three targets.”

Levi looked at me in pure good humor. “Bess, what
are you about?”

“Training a mule,” I replied, causing Levi to laugh
as he ran over to the targets.

When Sam reached the table, I set the rules. The
person who hit the center of all three feathers would be declared
the winner. To make the contest more challenging, I had Abe and
Levi move the targets back further. The feathers were little more
than a speck blending into the targets. Sam tried to allow me to
shoot first, but I refused.

“Pray, allow me the opportunity to muster my
courage.”

Sam chuckled softly, but as he
stepped up to the mark I had laid out, he was all business. He took
his stance and raised the first pistol. The shot exploded, and
Charlotte squealed as she covered her ears. Sam set down the pistol
and picked up a second. He took stance, aimed, and fired at the
second target, then did the same with the third. We moved to the
targets to check his aim. He had hit the first feather a little to
the left of center, but the second and third was center
marked.

“You see what you must do to win, Bess,” Levi said
to me with a knowing gleam.

Moving back to the table where Abe reloaded the
pistols for me, I picked up the first. The weight felt right
against my palm. I raised it, eyeing the target and the scrap of
feather that I could barely discern from the rest of the target. I
stared until my eyes focused on what I knew to be the center. I
cocked the pistol, breathed in slowing my rapidly beating heart,
breathed out, and squeezed the trigger. After firing two more shots
we walked to examine the targets. At the first feather, Levi
whooped.

“Dead center!” he cried before moving to the second.
“And another.” At the third Levi threw his cap into the air. “Bess
is the winner!”

Charlotte, Betsy, and Rose all
clapped their hands enthusiastically at Levi’s excited
pronouncement.

When I met Sam’s gaze, he was smiling, a perfect
white teeth flashing smile that sent little tremors twisting
through me. He held out his hand, and I shook it firmly.

“I concede to your ability, Miss Martin. You handle
yourself with exactitude, on pistols, but what of horses?” Sam
called for two mounts to be brought into the yard. We walked
through the trees toward the barn.

When Shooting Star was led from the barn, I smiled.
Abraham helped me to mount and handed me a whip as Sam laid out the
course; from the barn, across the front lawn, down the long lane,
around the old oak, and back. I tossed my hat to Levi.

Sam mounted a beautiful, black horse, but hard to
control from the way he reared against the man who brought him to
Sam. Sam was the master though, from the moment he took the reins
in his gloved hands. Charlotte had a handkerchief out and was
waving it in the air, announcing that when she dropped it the race
would begin. She stood off to the side with Levi, Rose, Betsy, and
Abe. She counted to three and tossed the flimsy piece of fabric
into the air.

Shooting Star knew what we were doing and shot
forward like a cannon ball. The large lawn was smooth and well
kept, perfect for galloping over. As we reached the lane, Sam was a
pace ahead. The wind whipped at my face and hair, but it added to
my exhilaration.

The only sounds I could hear were the hooves
thundering across the hard ground and Sam or my occasional shout of
encouragement to the horses.

The lane that had taken ten minutes to drive down
took no more than two to cover on galloping horses. I came up
beside Sam as we reached the end of the lane. The old oak was a
massive tree across the road from the lane.

My horse was on the outside for the upcoming turn
and I angled Shooting Star closer to Sam. It was a great risk, but
I had complete faith in Sam’s skill on a horse.

He saw what I was doing by edging him in and slowed
his horse to make the turn. I rode in a swoop around the tree that
was our marker, and moved ahead. I laughed, but the sound caught on
the wind once it left my mouth.

Sam yelled from behind me, and
that made me encourage Shooting Star on. Hearing his horse coming
upon me had me pushing Shooting Star harder. The wonderful girl had
more in her as I knew she did. We stayed ahead of Sam until the end
of the lane, when his horse’s head appeared out of the corner of my
eye. As we hit the lawn, his horse still had not pulled ahead. I
saw the barn. I saw the finish. I was going to win. I was going
to
win
...

Bess

S
amuel
Mason was the most infuriating man of my acquaintance, but the man
could ride. Our race had been very close as we soared across the
lawn, but right as we reached the barn, his horse bounded ahead,
and he beat me by the length of his horse’s nose.

After seeing the way he handled himself and his
horse after winning, never once smirking or throwing his win before
me, I congratulated him. Before we parted ways, he assured me that
he would not keep me out of his investigation of the Holy Order,
but he still expected an artifact.

I had in my possession five of the
seven sacred artifacts of the Holy Order stolen from Levitas by my
brother Jack. Pierre my French contact had given me a book that
described each artifact and hinted that, together, the seven
artifacts held power that only the
sun
could wield. The book said the
artifacts were never kept in the same place for safety.

It was no wonder that Levitas had wanted the
artifacts. Richard Hamilton the leader of Levitas had been a
power-craving lunatic. Guinevere had been sent by the Holy Order to
Philadelphia to destroy Levitas and keep the artifacts out of their
clutches. She had practically told me as much when I was held
prisoner by the secret society.

Den kop torden was a silver chalice with an
engraving of a throne on one side and a crest of an eagle and a
lion over a shield on the other. Sværd af lyn was a small sword
with a silver knob handle engraved with a phoenix, and an L. Dolk
af hemmeligheder was a dagger with a pure gold hilt. The blade was
engraved with an eagle perched atop a throne, with the words Min
herre, min Konge engraved in small script over the eagle. The book
of incantations was still a mystery, since the whole thing was
written in ancient Greek, and my knowledge of the language was
minimal at best. The last artifact I had acquired was a black,
odd-shaped object with many points and symbols engraved in gold
known to me only as the black box.

The two I was missing was a ring with a raised stone
and a ring shaped like a serpent that wrapped around the finger. I
had a serpent ring with pure gold eyes, worn by the man who had
murdered Ben, the man I was about to marry when I was sixteen, but
the ring I needed had rubies for eyes.

The day after the race, Sam had not come to the
house to retrieve the artifact, so by one in the afternoon, I set
out in Rose’s carriage with Charlotte. Having decided to take time
with each member of Sam’s team individually to determine their
strengths and weaknesses, I was beginning with Charlotte, who in my
judgment needed the most work. When we arrived at Sam’s plantation,
we walked back to the tables that had been left up from the
previous training. Abe, who drove the carriage for us, laid out a
line of knives and a few pistols.

“Pick up a knife, Char, feel the weight in your
hand. Allow your hand to grow comfortable. We will throw together
until your throws match mine.” Counting out to three, we threw. My
blade stuck in the target, but Char’s bounced off. She was not
daunted and picked up another knife.

Teaching Char brought memories of my father teaching
Jack and me when we were barely tall enough to see over the table.
William Martin had been swift and sure when he brandished a knife,
but he did not usually fight. He preferred battles of the mind
instead of brawn. He understood the inner workings of a man’s mind
as a scientist did. He had been murdered nearly three years ago,
but his teachings would live on as long as I had breath in my body.
Though I did not want to be a Phantom myself, I would pass on his
wisdom to any person willing to take the time to learn.

Char could have been one of those people if she did
not grow so angry so quickly. She had little control of her
emotions, flitting from anger to utter joy between one blink of the
eye and the next.

When I moved her on to pistols, she was huffing
loudly. “But why must I shoot a gun? It is not as if I will ever
shoot someone.”

“There may come a time when you must shoot someone.”
I picked up a pistol and started to load it. “In this work, one
never knows the amount of danger that lurks around us. If you are
not capable of defending yourself with your hands, you must be able
to shoot a gun.”

“Have you ever fired at someone?” She asked, looking
at me and not the weapons on the table.

“Yes, and killed him too.” I set the loaded pistol
on the table and turned to face Char. “If you were facing an enemy,
what would you do?”

She had a ready answer. “First I
would try to reason—”

“There is no reasoning with the enemy,” I
interrupted her, “if they are pointing a weapon at you. They will
not give you the opportunity.”

“What if they do not mean to kill me, but to hold me
captive for a price,” Char asked curiously. I could see in her blue
eyes that she did not believe any such thing could ever happen to
her. I was living proof that it could happen.

“I pray that will never happen to you, but if it
does, you must know that the chance of escape is almost
nonexistent. They will want the information that you hold. They
will torture you, and once you surrender what they want, you will
no longer be an asset, and they will dispose of you.” I did not
want to be cruel, but reality could be cruel, and it was better
that she knew what we faced in this job.

“Have—” she cleared her throat,
“have you ever been ca-captured?” I knew I was frightening her, for
she was stuttering, but she needed to know.

“Yes,” I replied thickly, “a few times.”

“Were you tortured?” she asked, sounding
breathless.

“Once. They branded me.” Even though it had been
over six months it still affected me to my core to speak about what
had happened with Levitas; watching Levi be tortured, then
branded.

“Can I see?” she whispered, her eyes round with a
mixture of fear and determination.

With a glance around, I untucked the back of my
shirt and raised it half up my back so Char could see the mark that
would forever be a part of me. I knew what she was looking at. A
pyramid with a lightning bolt through it, four inches in
length.

“How could anyone do that to you?” Char exclaimed; a
hand placed over her heart, and the other curled into a little fist
at her side.

I lowered my shirt, tucking it back into my black
breeches. “The people who held me wanted me always to remember that
I was a spy, that they had captured me and forced their judgment
upon me.” I left out that I had been captured and branded because
of the woman my brother loved. That was something I would not share
with anyone outside my own family, for I intended to deal with
Guinevere myself.

“So even Raven can be broken,” Char said as if to
herself, as if she was awakening from a dream and did not like what
she was seeing.

“We can all be broken, Char, but what matters is the
choice you make, to either stay shattered or to pick up the pieces
and put yourself back together as best you can.”

Charlotte turned from staring at me, picked up a
loaded pistol, aimed, and fired. She dropped the smoking pistol on
the table. “I would like to go back to the city now, please.” She
walked away without looking at the target, but I looked, and then
stared. Charlotte had hit the center.