She held her breath, staring as he swung up into the saddle, every movement graceful with angry precision.
He glared at his men as he jerked a nod in her direction. “Protect her. Take her to my house. Half of you come with me. I want him alive!”
“Rafael!” She began getting out of the coach with an offer to ride with him on the tip of her tongue, but he looked sharply at her and seemed to take in her intention with a glance.
“No, Dani. Stay!” he ordered. “Help the girl. She’s our only witness.”
With that, he gathered his reins, spurred the horse, and rode away with three of the Royal Guardsmen, their progress slowed by the crowd that had rallied in the street when their fight broke out.
“Are you all right?” Dani asked Carmen quickly.
The girl nodded, then she heard more arguing just outside the coach.
“You have the carriages, man, give me your horse!”
“Rafe’ll need us!”
She looked over quickly and saw Elan, Adriano, and Niccolo taking her remaining guards’ horses. They were eager, full of gusto, as though it were a fox hunt instead of a chase for a deadly killer.
“Hell, I didn’t bring my weapon,” Adriano said suddenly, patting his hip.
“Here.” Niccolo tossed him one of his pistols and he caught it by the handle out of the air.
“Be careful!” Dani shouted. They didn’t look back.
She watched them disappear down the street after Rafael with a heart full of foreboding.
Thunder and dust whirled around Rafe as he and the three Royal Guardsmen charged up the King’s Road about half a mile behind Orlando.
He rode low over the big bay gelding’s neck, keeping the pace vigorous but careful not to wreck the animal’s wind, for there was no telling how long this race would go. His every muscle was taut with slow-burning anger.
Sweat ran into his eyes and made the dust from the road cling to his skin. He squinted against the westward sun, intensely focused on the black-clad horseman in the distance.
Orlando had tried to lose them in the city, but when they had split up to surround him, the duke had bolted. Rafe could not guess his cousin’s destination, but he did not mind chasing him clear to the other end of Ascencion, so long as Orlando continued in this direction, far away from Dani. He could not have gone forward without a sense of certainty that she was safe.
He was so fixed on the rider ahead that he barely heard the faint shouts some distance behind him on the road. When the voices reached him dimly over the pounding of hoofbeats, he stole a moment’s glance over his shoulder and saw his friends galloping after him.
He lifted his arm in salute, acknowledging that he had seen them, but he did not slow to wait for them because he was not letting Orlando out of his sight.
Then he settled into the grueling pace.
Orlando led them nearly twenty miles up the King’s Road. Streaking past the turnoff to the port, he made his way toward the wooded, mountainous north. Seeing this, Rafe realized Orlando had no scheme to flee Ascencion, though he might have been able to save himself by doing so.
Perhaps he hoped to hide in the wilds.
With the sun slowly sinking behind the mountain crests that rose before them, they rode into the western shadows.
Rafe suddenly realized where Orlando was headed when he caught a glimpse over the trees of the crumbling medieval citadel that had been the stronghold of the di Cambio dukes so many ages past. He furrowed his brow.
But that place is an old ruin.
The horses were laboring at a hard canter when Orlando abruptly turned into the woods, disappearing from view.
Within moments, they arrived at the mouth of a vestigial road which had nearly been reclaimed by nature. It was overgrown with tall grasses and vines of ivy draping from the trees.
With a glance that swept the terrain, Rafe decided to use the tactic again of surrounding his cousin. For that, he would need a few more men, but his friends weren’t far behind. Besides, if he didn’t wait for them now, they would likely miss the turnoff that Orlando had taken.
“Stay on him!” he shouted at his men.
“Where the hell’s he going, Sire?” one of the guardsmen yelled.
“To the old di Cambio fort! Don’t let him out of your sight! Remember, I want him alive!” He waved the three Royal Guardsmen on ahead while he pulled up at the edge of the road to wait for his friends and instruct them.
Their arrival would prove a further advantage, Rafe calculated. Orlando had probably counted only the three guardsmen and him in pursuit.
The sight of his friends’ faces was a welcome prospect as they pulled up their blowing horses where he waited impatiently.
“How do you want to do this, Rafe?” Elan asked quickly, wiping the sweat off his brow with his forearm.
“We’ll surround him. You and Nic go around to the south of the citadel—”
Suddenly the most horrific, bloodcurdling screams Rafe had ever heard pierced the air, screams of man and beast. It sounded like slaughter. Rafe swore and turned his horse as the piercing, awful sounds continued.
“Careful!” Elan barked as they urged their nearly spent horses dashing off in the direction of the bone-chilling screams.
The woods were not deep. Instead, the overgrown road led through them only about fifty yards. On the other end there were open, scrubby fields surrounding the ruins.
“Hurry!”
“I don’t think there’s anything we can do for them, by the sound of it,” Niccolo said under his breath.
Even now the terrible screams had begun to fade.
They came to the edge of the woods. Ahead, the brown road wound through the parched green field, up to a rise about a hundred yards off.
“I don’t see anyone!” Adriano said, angrily scanning the open field.
The sounds, hellish groaning now, were coming from just beyond the rise.
“Oh, Christ,” Rafe whispered, staring at the road ahead where there was a gentle undulation in the rolling hills. His horse was spooked by the terrible sounds of suffering, but he forced the balking animal forward.
They rode forward cautiously, keeping the horses to a trot.
When they crested the rise, they all froze for a second in sheer horror, then leaped off their horses and ran to the edge of the spiked pit. All three horses and two of the men were already dead, impaled on metal spikes rising from the ground, in this barbaric defense structure resurrected by Orlando from an age of darkness.
Rafe slid through the dirt to the last surviving Royal Guardsman, but the gurgling man died as he reached him.
Then there was only silence.
Eerie, chill silence, with the crumbling hulk of the black citadel towering over them, not a quarter mile away through the trees.
“Oh, my God,” Rafe said after a long moment, staring at the bodies.
The others were perfectly silent.
He looked over at them with a hard expression, realizing that any manner of evil, insane devices might be waiting to snare them in this place. They were his closest friends and he could not bear to lose them. He wanted to turn back because he knew they might not all make it out of this alive, but if he did that, he might never get this close to capturing Orlando again.
All of Ascencion was at stake. He could not think as a friend. He must think as a king.
Elan had taken his spectacles off and turned away, looking like he might well puke. Adriano was white, as if he still couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Niccolo had climbed out of the pit, his face a rictus of rage, and was staring toward the citadel.
“There!” Niccolo suddenly cried. “Get down!”
A bullet slammed into the dirt near Rafe.
They dropped, the dead momentarily forgotten. Flat on his stomach on the edge of the pit, Nic took aim with his pistol.
“What are you doing?” Rafe asked him evenly.
“Save your fire. You’ll never hit him from here,” Adriano said with unnerving calm.
“You’re right, di Tadzio,” Nic muttered. “Excellent point.”
Rafe watched the brown-haired, brawny Nic slide back down into the pit with a look of pure, cold rage, as though his wits had snapped. Nic climbed over to the dead captain of the guardsman and wrenched free the rifle strapped to his back.
Rafe said, “I repeat, I want him alive.”
Angrily, Elan turned to Rafe with a wrenching stare. “Even now you want to spare him?”
“Especially now,” Rafe said in a low, bristling growl.
Nic dropped down on his stomach at the rim of the pit and took aim with the rifle. “Arrest me, then, Rafe. Because I say he dies.” He squeezed the trigger.
There was an agonized, demonic squeal from the shadows at the base of the fort.
“You hit him!” Elan gasped.
The black stallion bolted out from the place where Orlando had concealed himself in the brush, the duke clinging to the saddle.
“He’s still up! Did you hit him or not?” Elan pressed.
Niccolo didn’t answer, but merely reloaded.
“No, you hit the horse,” Rafe murmured, watching as the excellent black stallion finally stumbled, fell, somersaulting violently while Orlando dove to the side, tumbled, and sprang up, running back to the cover of the trees. “Let’s go. He’ll be on foot now.”
All strode back to the horses and mounted up.
Rafe’s stare tracked Orlando until the man sped into the cover of the woods. “Elan, Nic, you go that way,” he said, pointing left. “Di Tadzio and I will take the right. We’ve got to close him in. Avoid gunfire in favor of swords. Leave the rifle, Nic! Let’s try and avoid accidentally shooting each other. Is everybody all right?” he added, glancing quickly from one face to the next after the carnage they had witnessed.
They murmured grimly in the affirmative.
“Good. Let’s get him.” He nodded to Adriano and they wheeled their horses away while Elan and Niccolo cantered off in the opposite direction.
They rode past the black stallion, dead with a seeping bullet wound in its neck, then plunged into the darkening woods.
Rafe’s pulse pounded in his ears as they stalked Orlando, slipping stealthily through the trees. Adriano kept abreast with him about twenty feet to his right.
The woods were alive with the sounds of twilight, the breeze, the rustling leaves, the chattering birds. At the sound of a twig snapping, Rafe jerked his head, leveling his weapon, but three ghostly deer merely bounded by in a line, tearing through the brake.
He glanced over questioningly at Adriano through the semidarkness, sweat trickling down his cheek. The other man shook his head, indicating that he saw nothing so far.
Rafe realized Orlando’s black clothing would help him blend all the more easily into the growing shadows.
They pressed on.
Time had lost all meaning in the riveting tension, so Rafe did not know how long they had been hunting Orlando when suddenly two gunshots roared from some distance away and there was a shout. Immediately Rafe and Adriano drove their heels into their horses’ sides, sending the animals lunging forward through the undergrowth.
Another shot boomed, its echo rippling across the hillside.
Rafe prayed it was Niccolo doing the shooting. But when he and Adriano burst into a small grove by a stream, they found Nic flattened on his back. He tried to sit up as they jumped down from the horses and ran to him. Rafe swallowed hard, seeing the dark stain spreading across the front of Nic’s brown waistcoat.
“He dropped out of the trees,” he gasped out, his eyes round, his face ghastly white. “He ran! He could be anywhere.”
“Don’t try to talk.” Rafe quickly took off his coat, covering Nic with it. He ripped off his cravat and used it to try to stanch the flow. “Where’s Elan?”
Shaking violently, Nic whispered, “I don’t know. His horse threw him.” He began to choke.
Rafe pulled him up to a sitting position. Nic leaned weakly against Adriano.
“Stay with him,” Rafe ordered.
Adriano nodded as Rafe swept to his feet and scanned the grove. He drew his sword and thrust his way into the brake in cold fury. There was a place where the twigs were crushed and broken. Elan’s spooked horse had probably forged the path.
“Elan!” He sliced vengefully through a mound of thorns, casting an enraged glance up at the branches overhead.
“You savage,”
he said under his breath. “Elan!”
He dreaded what he might find. It was bad enough that the sarcastic, wisecracking Nic was down. Rafe refused to admit to himself that he knew Nic was going to die. He could only think that without Elan’s brains and steady, cautious nature to balance his own recklessness, he had no idea how he would go on.
“Elan! Answer me, damn you,” he added in barely a whisper.
“Rafe!” came the viscount’s thin cry from a small distance to the left.
“Elan! Where are you?” Rafe shouted, his heart pounding anew as he looked around frantically. “Are you hurt?”
“I’m here!”
Rafe whirled around as Elan picked his way through the thorns.
“Nic’s down, Rafe.”
“I know.” He saw that his friend was covered in cuts, his spectacles skewed, but he appeared to have sustained no serious wounds.
“My horse dashed. Orlando dropped right out of the trees in front of us and opened fire. He hit Nic. I think he only missed me because I was on his left.”
“Did you see which way he went?”
“Towards the citadel, I think.” He looked around, at a loss. “My horse is gone.”
“Forget the horse.” Gesturing to him, Rafe led the dazed viscount back to the grove.
Adriano glanced up as they joined them. Seeing Elan, he let out a long breath of relief, then looked back down at Nic. “He’s unconscious.”
Rafe looked down bitterly at his friend’s wan face, etched with pain. Then, with his eyes narrowed and thunder in his heart, he scanned the tree line.
“Both of you, stay with Nic,” he said. “I’ll finish this.”
“You are out of your mind if you think I’m going to let you go after him by yourself,” Adriano said quietly. He looked up at Rafe with searing intensity from under his black forelock.
“It’s between him and me.”
“Rafe,” he said, “you don’t even know what Orlando is.”