Starlight & Promises (43 page)

“No, I cannot allow you to sacrifice yourself for me. I shall tell them what little I know.”

“Did Richard die in vain? Will you now make a mockery of his life and kill us, too? Mark my words. If you tell them everything; that is exactly what will happen. Once they get what they want, they will murder us and dump our bodies at sea. Tell me, Samantha. Allow me to help us. I can bargain with them, while you cannot.”

She expelled a weary breath. “They want to know where to find the Smilodon.”

“Smilodon? A saber-toothed tiger? Are they not extinct?”

“Indeed, they are or were. Richard found one, a living one. And some person, another scientist, wishes the cat to be his discovery. He hired Miggs to kidnap Richard and James and coerce the locality of the find from them.”

“If what you say is true, Richard has made the greatest discovery of the century, or so I assume, not being a scientist myself. I now understand why his life was in danger and why the pirates want you. Did Richard inform you of where he found this cat?”

She held her tongue, considering Steven’s question. ‘Twas overmuch to process, what with her headache and their desperate situation. Circumstances were unraveling too quickly. Not really understanding why, she equivocated. “He did, but the coordinates are in Richard’s last letter back at Talmadge House. So you see, I cannot reveal what I do not know. I fear ‘tis hopeless. They will not believe me and will kill us anyway.”

“Do you recall anything from the letter, anything I can give them to stay their hand at least for a time until we concoct an escape plan?”

He sounded so terribly desperate. Was she not obligated to provide him with something? ‘Twas she who had put his life in danger. “Only that the cat is on an island in the Furneaux Group.”

“That area contains over fifty small islands and hundreds of atolls,” he said with a note of exasperation. “Can you not be more specific?”

An unexplainable instinct warned her to guard her tongue. “No, I truly cannot remember. I require Richard’s letter.”

“Very well, save your strength. Try to rest. When they come for you, pretend you still suffer from the influence of the drug. I shall think of something.”

Steven rose and walked out of the room into the cabin’s main living area.

Miggs sat at a battered table where he wielded a knife to carve into its wooden top by the light of a whale-oil lantern. He raised his head at Steven’s entrance. “De she ‘ave what ye want? I know she ‘as what I want.” A smarmy grin covered his mouth.

Steven caught up a chair and swung it around, straddling it backward. “She has it but says it’s in Hobart, meaning this trip was a useless waste of time.”

“De ye believe ‘er?”

He rubbed his chin with a hand. “I don’t know.” He met Miggs’s one rheumy eye with a silent challenge. “You’ll not touch her. That was part of our agreement.”

Miggs laughed. “An agreement atween gen’lemen, eh?”

“Correct, and I shall gut you should you revoke it. I require her alive, at least until I obtain the information from her.”

“An’ ‘ow will ye de that? De ye really think she’ll give ye what ye want once she’s back wi’ ‘er lovin’ family an’ them bodyguards?”

“I shall get it. How I accomplish that is none of your concern. You’ve received your pay. Now we must come up with a plausible escape scenario that will make her forever obligated to me for saving her life.”

“I don’t know,” Miggs mused. “I think this job’s worth more’n ye paid. If this cat’s so bloody valuable, I may jest want it fer meself, an’ the girl, too.”

Steven exploded from the chair. He caught Miggs’s wrist in an iron grip and squeezed. The unholy look he gave Miggs was enough to make the pirate shiver.

“‘Ey now. She’s yers if’n ye want ‘er that bad,” Miggs said in a pained voice.

“You’re bloody right she’s mine,” Steven spat and dropped the pirate’s wrist.

A knock came at the door. Rubbing his wrist, Miggs shoved back from the table and lumbered to his feet. He made his way across the room and cracked open the door. “What de ye want? I’m busy ‘ere,” he said to the pirate in torn breeches with two cutlasses hanging from leather bands crossing his chest.

“We ‘ave trouble.” The man swallowed visibly. “There’s men comin’ down t’cliffs. Not garrison, no uniforms, but not ourn.”

“‘Ow many?”

“Four o’ five so far.”

Gunfire erupted from the direction of the cliffs. The man swung his head to look over his shoulder. “Then take care o’ ‘em!”

While Miggs berated the man, Steven slipped a stiletto out of his boot and silently got up from the chair. He came up behind Miggs. When the door slammed closed, he clamped an arm around Miggs’s neck and thrust the knife deep into his kidneys. The pirate struggled briefly before sinking to the floor. Blood poured from the wound.

Samantha leaned against the rough wall, tears streaming from her eyes. Finding Richard alive after all this time had been unlikely. Nevertheless, she had still held out hope. She cursed the Smilodon and the expedition that brought her uncle to Tasmania. Her stomach cramped, and she vomited on the floor. Though Steven vowed he would find a way for them to leave this place, she no longer had the will to believe him. He was as much a prisoner as she.

She tapped on the wall. “Steven?”

He failed to answer; only muttered voices came from the room beyond her prison. The guards. How many? How in God’s name did Steven expect them to stroll past an entire pirate crew?

Diminishing light bled in from the window, indicating coming night instead of day. Samantha pushed herself up from the floor and stumbled over to the boards. Her legs, still weak from the drugging, scarcely held her upright. She peered out. A bar braced along the outside width secured the shutters. Men in dirty clothing, some with bare chests, their bodies swarming with knives, pistols, and cutlasses, ran past the window. Other cabins sat in the forefront in a space denuded of vegetation. A log corral to the right held horses, and straight ahead on the edge of the settlement, the waters of Macquarie Harbor made a blacker shadow against the darkening sky. A battered ship, its near side stove in, bobbed in the water beside a hand-hewn wooden dock. Sheer cliffs rose in the distance above the enclave.

A sudden volley of gunfire shattered the silence, and a suggestion of movement on the face of the cliff attracted her attention. However, the light had become too faint to make out details.

When her door flew open, Samantha swallowed a scream. Her heart pounded, and she whipped around. Steven stood in the opening, holding a cutlass.

“Come,” he said and motioned sharply. “I disabled the guard. We must leave while the pirates are distracted.”

“How?” she asked, moving toward him. “How did you escape?”

The door to the outer room banged open, and Steven spun away, the cutlass raised. At the clash of metal on metal, Samantha ran to the door, and her hand flew to her open mouth.

Steven was engaged in a battle with a pirate twice his size. The pirate slashed down, his cutlass a lethal arc of steel. Steven stepped aside, blocked the blade, and the men circled the room in a furious flurry of thrusts and stabs.

The pirate’s blade nicked Steven’s arm, and blood flowed. Steven seemed to gain strength from his wound and pressed the larger man toward the door and the body of another pirate lying on the floor. The man fell back with the onslaught and in his haste slipped in a pool of blood and went down on one knee. Steven plunged his blade through the man’s stomach, pushing him onto his back and pinning him to the floor. As he fell, the pirate smashed into the table and toppled the lighted lantern. Blazing oil spread outward, igniting the table and racing across the floor toward the wall at terrifying speed.

Steven turned to Samantha, breath ragged, and gestured violently. “Come! Now, while we have a chance.”

She hurried to his side. He bent over and snatched up the dead pirate’s cutlass. Pulling a pistol from the man’s belt, he shoved it beneath his own. With the cutlass in one hand and Samantha’s palm in the other, he left the burning cabin.

With the sun slipping far down the horizon, shadows spread over the encampment. Glowing light from smoky fires illuminated pirates firing rifles and moving purposefully toward the cliffs to the south. Steven pulled Samantha up against the cabin wall into a pool of darkness. Once the men fled past their location, they sprinted toward the horse corral. Steven cut down the guard coming at them out of the gloom and retrieved his pistol, passing it to Samantha. She tucked it into her waistband.

They caught up two horses and stole along the verge of the town, moving toward the trees at the eastern edge of the cliffs. With deafening rifle and pistol fire and the pirates’ concentration on the intruders, Steven and Samantha slipped by unnoticed.

Their path took them close to an outlying shack. A flicker of movement near its door made Samantha pause. She grabbed Steven’s arm and pulled him to a halt.

Four men crept toward the building in the gathering darkness. Samantha became paralyzed, her breath suspended. Hairs along the back of her neck rose as though touched by a chill wind. The man in the lead resembled Richard. She released a choked sound. When the last man approached the door, a flare from the fire outlined his features. The air gushed from her lungs.

“Chris!” she screamed. She dropped the horse’s reins and stumbled forward, her heart knocking so hard against her ribs she feared it would burst outward.

The man at the door paused, turned his head in her direction, then entered the shack. A second later, two men ran out and into the woods. Neither was Christian.

Steven clutched an arm around her waist and pulled. She fell back, limp against him. A bullet whistled past her head and into the wall of the hut. When the night exploded in a blast of heat and fire, Steven pushed her to the ground. The shock wave rolled over them, and hot wind peppered their bodies with wood splinters.

Samantha lay stunned beneath Steven, searing agony tearing at her heart and stomach. She dared to look up, eyes awash with tears, heart rent with pain. The conflagration choked her, robbed her brain of air. The blast had demolished the shack. ‘Twas utterly gone, the two men still inside. Her husband, the partner of her heart, was dead. She receded into a numbness welling up from the deepest recesses of her soul.

B
y the time Steven and Samantha approached Talmadge House three weeks later, Samantha’s bleak depression showed no signs of lifting. Even the certain fact that she carried Christian’s child could not pull her from her grief-stricken state. Breeding sickness had finally claimed her body, further slowing their journey, and withdrawing into a frightening silence, she refused all food, other than what Steven forced on her.

Whenever Steven attempted to draw Samantha out during their trek, he came up against a blank stare. Distant and silent, withdrawn and wan, she shed no more tears and followed his lead like an inanimate puppet. She never asked how he overcame and killed Miggs, and his questions to her remained unanswered. Steven was soon at an impasse as to how to reach her. If she were to linger indefinitely in this state, he would never convince her to give him the Smilodon’s location. Anger and frustration beat like bat wings inside his breast and grew more frantic with every mile they traveled.

When the riders entered the courtyard, Pettibone shouted for Delia and hurried out to meet them. Delia, Gilly, and Chloe spilled from the house, brimming with questions and flooded with tears of joy. Cullen, drawn by the commotion, edged out of the stable door and leaned back against the sun-bleached wood.

“Samantha!” Delia cried, running forward. When Steven dismounted and lifted Samantha to the ground, Delia bustled up to her and swept her into her arms.

Gilly and Chloe hung back, hugging their arms to themselves and eyeing Steven with pained confusion on their faces.

“I do declare, my dear, you are naught but skin and bones,” Delia exclaimed. Her concern ran deeper than she dared express. Samantha was gaunt and pallid, her riding habit torn and splattered with mud. Scratches and bruises marred her sunburned skin. Her eyes, however, caused Delia the greatest alarm. Cold and distant, their normal bright gold had dimmed to a pale, sickly yellow.