Underground Warrior (17 page)

But he’d been turning his back on his birthright his entire life. Why, with so much at stake, should he change now?

He looked up at Smith. “How do we use it to get Sibyl into the Arsenal archives?”

Smith grinned. “Honorably, of course.”

“It’s a trap,” insisted Beckett Covington, Dillon’s law intern and Comitatus mentee, as their town car pulled up to the Cabildo. The famed eighteenth-century capital house rose above New Orleans’s Jackson Square in Old World elegance immediately beside the Saint Louis Cathedral. From the ground floor’s arched gallery to the mansard roof, it had seen power come and go in this ancient city: French, then Spanish, then French, then finally American.

But the Comitatus hold on New Orleans—and, through it, the wider world—had never wavered, was never “gone.” Here was the strength of a society that worked behind the scenes, a society based on bloodlines instead of mere nationalities.

“It’s a trap,” Beckett repeated when Dillon, not moving from the back seat, didn’t first answer him. “People don’t fight duels anymore.”

But Beckett was young. Even here, where the Cabildo had been turned into a state museum. Beckett didn’t yet understand how, when the Louisiana Purchase was signed on the second floor of this opulent mansion, Comitatus were there. When Louisiana seceded from the Union, Comitatus stood on both sides of the Great War, guarding a history far older than the United States itself.

“Perhaps people should fight duels.” Dillon had been both wary and pleased to receive the hand-penned invitation from Smith Donnell—written in fountain pen on thick, hand-pressed parchment, as it should be. “The old ways had their justifications.”

And he rose out of the town car to go face his destiny.

The museum might be closed for the evening, but appropriate workers had of course remained to open it up for them. Dillon, followed by Beckett, strode through the old state house with its gleaming floors and white walls as if he belonged here…which, of course, he did.

Beyond the pomp of the Cabildo lay the old Arsenal. For this, Dillon didn’t need employees; he had the security codes to disarm and rearm the alarms. By entering the blockier, plainer building through the secret passage, Dillon was able to cross to the thick double doors of the main entrance and welcome his visitors as might a landlord.

Which, for the most part, he was.

The heavy door creaked as he pulled it open, the sound echoing through the large, empty first floor.

As requested—dictated, rather—Trace Beaudry and Smith Donnell had come alone. Good. Dillon wouldn’t have put it past Beaudry to try to use this meeting as some sort of lowly ambush. But Dillon’s faith in Smith, in the respect Smith still gave his father’s ancient bloodlines, was rewarded. Nobody but the two men stood in the immediate shadow of the Arsenal, despite the tourists beyond.

Smith Donnell’s shoulders hunched. Trace Beaudry, a half head taller than any of them, hulked sullenly.

“Please come in,” invited Dillon.

Beaudry glared at him, but Smith responded with a nodded “Thank you.” He could have belonged there, too, had he not forgotten his heritage and gotten himself exiled.

Smith…

Dillon would not have accepted even a note from outcast Trace Beaudry. Beaudry merited neither his concern, nor his honor, which is why Dillon had arranged some decidedly non-Comitatus thugs to teach him a lesson back in Dallas. Some people might have been impressed to find all five of those same thugs, beaten and in varying states of consciousness, sprawled outside the conference room. Mitch Talbott had whistled through his teeth.

But when Dillon had met Smith Donnell’s gaze, Smith’s curled lip had mirrored his own disgust. One’s competence in a low-class brawl hardly spoke for one’s suitability as a noble. Dillon thought he’d recognized Smith’s longing for what he’d abandoned. He, Dillon, had come so close to losing his own place of honor once. It made him uniquely sympathetic to Smith’s plight.

Oh, he’d never welcome an exile back into the Comitatus fold, not without specific instructions from someone in the inner circle. Like that would ever hap pen! But he could do Smith the honor of a meeting, especially when Smith was willing to bring Beaudry here, to
his
territory.

According to the note, Beaudry—unwilling to part with his misbegotten sword of Charlemagne—might be convinced by one-on-one combat. And Smith was willing to second him, tending to the requirements of etiquette to make the duel happen. Right would be restored, and that particular thorn in Dillon’s side removed.

And he would get his family sword!

Beaudry would likely have wanted Dillon to come to him. Beaudry, on his own, might not even know about the initial meeting the night before the duel, or about seconds. Beaudry probably thought he got to choose the form their fight would take.

Fisticuffs?

But with Smith on the side of the heroes, Dillon felt certain this one concession—arranging and then enact ing a duel in the Comitatus-owned New Orleans Arsenal—would end the problem of Beaudry and the sword in the best possible way.

Especially
with Beaudry in his territory now.

Where Dillon knew any thugs he might need. New Orleans was his rightful place. So was this building of ancient power.

“As the one challenged,” Dillon said evenly, “I choose swords.”

Act annoyed.

That’s what Mitch and Smith had instructed Trace, the whole long drive from Texas.
He’ll choose swords. Look upset.

Yeah,
Mitch had added, sounding less certain.
Like that.

Because “annoyed” was kind of Trace’s default expression. Having folded his big body into Mitch’s latest car rebuild annoyed him. Being back in this blocky old Arsenal—the first floor of which he’d known since being drafted into the Comitatus himself—annoyed him, especially when he remembered how stupidly anxious he’d been to win his father’s approval. Dillon Charles of the perfect tennis-and-Bahamas tan and too-expensive suits annoyed the snot out of him.

Worst of all, though, was thinking about Sibyl using the distraction of this meeting to slip upstairs to the archives for the night. That downright terrified him—and yeah, he communicated terror through an expression of annoyance.

“What swords?” he growled when Dillon chose weapons. “You can’t even lift mine.”

“Yours?”
Charles reacted just as Smith had predicted—insulted, yes, but with a smarmy condescension. “The sword of Charlemagne is a relic. Even were I to choose one-handed broadswords, we wouldn’t use that.”

He considered it in that snotty way of his, then said, “Sabers. I’ll provide them.”

Score! No foils, which Trace hated. The can’t-even-lift insult had struck home.

Sometimes, Smith was so conniving that he made Trace uncomfortable. But he’d planned out this exchange perfectly. Now Smith drooped his shoulders even lower, as if he could die of shame. It was an act. A good one.

Trace thought about Sibyl and about the fact that after tonight, she would have no use for him again. He glowered.

For Sibyl, the hardest part of infiltrating the Comitatus archives wasn’t the security. Not once she learned where the papers were kept—a hidden room high in the New Orleans Arsenal. Not when she had Dillon Charles himself turning the alarms off, then on, first to enter the building, then to allow the Texas exiles in, and finally to leave again, to prepare for the morning’s duel.

No, the hardest part was when she hesitated at the top of the blocky stone steps, watching through a piece of old iron grillwork, as Trace formally challenged Dillon Charles to a duel for possession of that old sword.

Trace might not be wielding the sword of Charlemagne for her. But he was willing to wager that sword. He was suffering through the impediments of propriety and condescension not for the sword, which he would never have risked on his own.
For her.

To give her this time with the archives, which she’d all but demanded.

She watched him like she might a bull in a pen, allowing Smith to keep him in check, but just barely. She knew him well enough to recognize his frustration with the ritual.

Knew him…? When had that happened?

Wasn’t their problem that she hadn’t known him? Couldn’t know someone of Comitatus blood?

No, she reminded herself, sprinting the rest of the way up the stone stairs. She had to be ready to breach this next door when Charles disabled the alarm to leave. No.

The problem was the same it had always been.

The problem was bigger than just Trace’s father, despite him being the man who’d sentenced her—as a child!—to years behind bars. If this were just a matter of Trace’s father…well, Trace hated his father. He might choose her if only to flaunt his independence from the Judge.

But the whole society of men, some perhaps as decent as the exiles, but more of them corrupt? The whole history of them? Bloodlines running back to ancient times, as ancient as patriarchy. As hierarchy. As conquest?

She had to let all of them know what they’d done was not acceptable. She had to destroy them completely. And when you destroyed something, you didn’t keep some of it for yourself, just because you might have feelings for it. What if they did finally make love? What if she ever were impregnated by him…by the very blood she hated?

No. She’d promised her murdered father’s memory that she would avenge him. Men weren’t the only people with honor.

Her word meant something, too.

So she picked the physical lock on the thick wooden door to the upstairs archives. She waited for the deep voices downstairs to finally move toward the exit, then for the faint beep that—according to Smith—would signal the alarm system temporarily dropping. When she heard it, she pulled open the door, using both hands and all her strength, and slipped into the second-floor room.

She shut the door behind her. When the alarm system beeped again, she knew she was stuck here until morning—and that she’d shut all hope of rescue out. Not that she needed doors to shut people out.

Besides, she hadn’t started this quest with backup. No reason she should end it that way. And even by the faint glow of French Quarter lights through slits in the blocky Arsenal wall—slits just large enough to fire arrows or flintlock muskets at the ground below—she could see that she’d all but reached the end of her quest.

She’d struggled for so long to piece together the most basic facts about the Comitatus. She’d compared genealogies and microfilmed newspaper articles. She’d hacked deeper and deeper into personal accounts and financials. She’d looked at what schools what trust fund boys had attended, and who counted as legacy enrollments. She’d made assumptions, then struggled to support those assumptions, struggled for every tidbit of confirmable intelligence. She’d met in secret, at great risk, with people who knew of the Comitatus, as well as many more who knew even less than she did.

For years. And now…

Glass-fronted bookshelves surrounded her. Wooden filing cabinets rose to the ceiling. Even apothecary cabinets, with small drawers the right size to hold scrolls, surrounded her. She could smell the familiar, dusty scent of old documents, original documents, primary sources. A conspiracy theorist’s dream.

If she couldn’t find the proof of her father’s murder—certainly of the reasons for the cover-up—here, she would never find it.

So why was she suddenly so terrified to begin?

Trace loved the city of New Orleans. He’d loved it well before the disaster of Katrina—the evacuations, the overcrowding of refugees, the floods, the neglect. He loved the strength with which the people who remained worked to rebuild it.

The French Quarter, which housed the Arsenal, was the oldest part of the city and sat on the highest land. It had escaped the worst damage. It shone as a bright, jazzy reminder of all the city had been, was, and would be again.

And Trace didn’t care about going back to it.

Smith and Mitch did, along with Arden and Val, who’d flown in from Dallas to support Sibyl. The four of them had tried to talk Trace into accompanying them on a night out in the Quarter, at least for a drink—especially Val, who didn’t want their outing to seem like a double date. They knew he would be worried.

He couldn’t do it. Not with the knowledge of Sibyl, all alone, locked away in a secret chamber all night.

He no longer trusted Comitatus guards not to kill her if they found her.

Maybe he’d never trusted them to do the right thing.

So his friends headed for Bourbon Street—to, as Mitch put it, “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we duel.”

But Trace kept his own kind of vigil across the street from the Arsenal. As if he might sense if she needed him.

Not that she would. Sibyl had made that clear.

Trace was the last person Sibyl needed in her life.

Upstairs in the archives, though, curled on the dusty wooden floor with a sheaf of papers in her hand, Sibyl wept as she hadn’t wept since she was twelve years old.

She wished she had someone to hold her. And she knew it was her quest for this exact piece of information that had robbed her of any such possibility.

The Comitatus had never held a grudge against her or her father. The Daine family had been less than enemies. They were mere pawns. Nobodies. Nothings. And by devoting her life to vengeance against the Comitatus, keeping nothing for herself or her future, she’d allowed them to make her just that.

Nobody.

She’d given vengeance her life…and now she had nothing.

Chapter 12

“H
andled internally.”

Two lives—her father’s fiery murder and the loss of her own youth, family and future—had been reduced to two cold, final words.

“Handled internally.”

Eventually, Sibyl pushed herself off the polished archive floor. She wiped her damp cheeks with fingers made gritty from all the papers she’d examined, knowing she probably left muddy stains on her face, hardly caring. She felt exhausted. Not stayed-up-half-the-night-researching exhausted, but wasted-her-life-for-information-that-didn’t-bring-Daddy-back exhausted. Because she’d been right about one thing. No, the Comitatus had held no particular grudge against the Daine family line.