“Except that she’s an arsonist!”
Sibyl’s gut clenched. So this was how it would come out?
“And worse,” Dillon continued, “she’s a killer.”
Chapter 9
T
hank heavens Sibyl had learned to lay low in jail. Her instinct, like that of any prey animal, was to freeze until the danger passed.
Otherwise, she might have launched herself bodily through the vent cover and tried to prove Dillon right. The killer part, anyway.
“In fact,” he mused beneath her, “didn’t your friend Greta Kaiser have a fire, sometime after she took in Isabel?”
A fire the Comitatus—one deranged member, at least—had started. Surely the others would remember that. She felt sick.
It was Mitch who laughed first, his mirth like bass music. “Sibyl?”
“So she’s changed her name, too?” insisted Dillon.
“Little Sibyl’s a murderer?”
“I said a killer,” Dillon clarified—the son of a lawyer, probably a lawyer himself by now, he would certainly know the technical difference. “She was imprisoned for arson and manslaughter—of her own father!”
That cut off Mitch’s amusement mid-laugh. “Imprisoned?”
“Her father,” repeated Smith, more slowly. That was Smith’s
I’m starting to figure things out
voice. Sibyl, unsure she wanted him to figure anything out at all, hated that voice.
“If you care for Greta Kaiser—and as she’s of the blood, I can hardly blame you—you will let her know what kind of element she has allowed into her home. You will protect her from that kind of element. And if you have any respect left for your own bloodline, your own history, you will stay on guard against the girl’s too-coincidental appearance. You can hardly expect the society to help you, if you’re providing aid to its enemies.”
“So Sibyl’s not of the blood herself?” Smith had definitely been thinking about Sibyl way more than she would have liked. She should probably take the fact that he’d considered her “of the blood” as a compliment to how much she’d learned about the society—instead of wanting to barf.
“Hardly. Her father was the hired help!”
Security guard.
“Well, we’d sure hate to help our fathers’ enemies.” That was Mitch, sounding way too serious for Mitch…which gave Sibyl some hope that he was still playing a role. “Why do you think we’re here, telling you about Trace’s sword?”
To get information, supposedly.
Sibyl tried to swallow past the sick lump still wedged in her throat. Part of her just wanted to flee—to grab Trace and drag him out of here before his friends told him who and what she really was, or at least Dillon Charles’ version thereof. If she could just keep him from learning how stupid she’d once been, and how badly her time in jail had broken her, maybe he would continue to kiss her, hold her, protect her the way he’d been doing recently. But she’d only been in love with Trace…
…love?…
…for a few days, perhaps a few weeks. She’d needed to learn the truth about her father’s death—to avenge that death—for almost a decade. She still needed to do so. She had to finish loving one good man, her daddy, before she could trust herself to try loving another.
So she lay there in the confines of the ventilation duct, lump in her throat and gut full of acid, and listened as Trace’s friends changed the subject and drew the needed information out of Dillon Charles.
“Do you know what this is?” asked Dillon, after Mitch had handed over the photographs.
“I’m no expert,” qualified Mitch. “But I’m guessing…some kind of bladed weapon? Give me a minute…not a spear. Not an ax, but that’s closer…”
“This is an early medieval sword.” So Dillon knew his stuff when it came to weapons. Big surprise. “I need you to get this for me.”
“Whoa there.” Even if she couldn’t glimpse Smith’s smile—and she could, if barred by the ventilation grille—Sibyl would have heard the charm oozing from his voice. “Not so fast. Why would we do that?”
“Did exile rob you two of all your honor? He
stole
it!”
“From his grandfather’s bungalow. I’m not saying I approve—” nor that he didn’t “—but how does your claim to the sword trump his? I mean, sure, Trace is baseborn and all. And he’s exiled like us,” added Smith, still with suspicious charm, “but…his grandfather. Not yours.”
“Except that this sword belongs in the Comitatus.”
“Because…?”
“Because it’s one of the hero’s blades!” insisted Dillon.
“Blades? Plural?” As if Smith didn’t have the sword of Aeneas hidden back at Greta’s place.
“It’s a Comitatus matter,” hedged Dillon. “You two…”
“Didn’t bring the bad influence with us,” Smith finished, nudging the conversation back in his direction. “We get it, Dillon. We’re exiles. You think we can forget that? We’ve got to face that mistake every day of our lives. We’ve paid, and we’ll keep on paying, and, well, we probably deserve it.”
Smith turned away from his one-time cohort. Getting a full-on look at his expression, Sibyl marveled at his ability to lie—and she knew he was lying. All he needed was a melodramatic piano background to complete the scene. Regret leaving the secret society? She didn’t doubt it. But deserve that exile and admit it?
Not likely.
Dillon didn’t burst out laughing, the way she’d feel tempted to if she weren’t swallowing back roiling horror at the earlier conversation. So Smith continued. “Bad enough to have lost our money, our work, our homes. But you know what’s worse?”
“So much worse,” echoed Mitch, pushing it.
“It’s knowing that we betrayed our lineage. Our fathers and our fathers’ fathers. Our history. The one solace we have is knowing that, at least, we can’t lose. Where we come from. What’s in our blood.
“You want the sword? Part of me understands. It’s probably better off with you, with someone who’s legitimately of the blood. And at least it’s given us this one chance to connect, to, I guess, to visit this world. Just for a while.”
“Despite our sins,” added Mitch. He shouldn’t. He didn’t have Smith’s gift for bull—even when serious, Mitch generally sounded like he was joking. But something Trace’s friends said, as over-the-top as Sibyl found it, must have resonated with Dillon so powerfully that he missed that.
“We’ve got a piece of Comitatus history, right?” Smith urged. “It’ll be hard enough to give it up, because it’s maybe the last thing we have, but maybe if you could explain. If we knew what we were returning.”
Dillon sighed—but nodded. “Of course you know that we’re descended from heroes.”
“Is the Pope Catholic?” countered Mitch. “Is the sky blue? Do Stuarts live in big mansions?”
And—Sibyl heard something else. Faintly. From behind her.
From Trace.
But…she had to hear
this.
“One summer during college, I had the privilege of seeing the Comitatus archives in New Orleans and I found a list. Not just heroes—Charlemagne and El Cid and King Arthur—but their swords. As if their swords had been members of the Comitatus, too, you know? The papers even showed which family line descended from which hero, maybe still had which sword.”
Smith looked even less convinced than was Sibyl. “Wouldn’t the families already know it?”
“Except that the swords became obsolete. A century or so after gunpowder became common, groups like the musketeers replaced knights and swords seemed downright archaic. Most families kept their swords, but the men weren’t bringing them to meetings anymore. They were shoved aside, like inkpots or candle-snuffers.”
“Or vinyl records,” mourned Mitch. When the other two looked at him askance, he frowned back. “Hey, when CDs came out, people were tossing their turntables. Now vinyl’s cool again.”
Dillon didn’t concede the example. “The thing is, gunpowder became too common. Vulgar, even. Anybody, of any class, can pull a trigger and discharge a pistol. It takes training to properly wield a blade. But by the time the Comitatus saw that…”
“By then, the swords weren’t community property anymore,” finished Smith.
“But the idea behind them was. Have either of you heard of the
noblesse d’épée?
”
Nobles of the sword?
translated Sibyl to herself, even as Dillon spoke the words out loud.
“The term refers to the old nobility in France,” he continued. “The classical nobles. The chivalrous nobles. The fighting nobles.”
Only Sibyl saw Mitch, behind Dillon, pump his fist and mouth something that looked like, Go, Fighting Nobles! Like a team mascot.
“The Comitatus descend from the
noblesse d’épée,
” explained Dillon. “I haven’t been able to get back into the archives since, but once I get that sword back, I can make a case to the higher-ups. How powerful would it be to bring those swords together? To remind everyone how special we are? Maybe to help support Phil Stuart over his cousin for position of overlord?”
Sibyl tried to concentrate on the Comitatus conversation—the admission that they had archives in New Orleans was, itself, the most important thing she’d learned in years! But other voices, including Trace’s fought for dominance. Trying to follow both felt like listening to post-modern music.
Trace’s voice, faint through the labyrinthine ventilation ducts, triumphed. “I said
stay where you are!
”
Which he was clearly saying to someone else, someone Sibyl didn’t know about—but which, she suspected, carried a message for her, too. Because Trace wasn’t scared of anybody or anything.
Except maybe of her getting hurt.
Below her, in the borrowed boardroom, Dillon was talking about how his family had descended from Charlemagne and how Trace’s great-grandfather must have been keeping the sword for them. How the Judge could best sort everything out. But Sibyl couldn’t concentrate.
Damn it!
With answers at her fingertips, Sibyl began to crawl awkwardly backward, toward what was increasingly sounding like a scuffle from the foyer near the elevators. She banged an elbow on the air shaft’s side—twice. The corner proved especially tight, but she could also better hear the sounds of someone hitting a wall, someone grunting in pain.
She hurried.
She caught her shirt on a sharp, loose screw, but a wedged hand managed to unhook it. Finally, continuing backward, she made it to the point where—
Her feet touched the vent cover.
Trace had locked her in?
He had. But she didn’t feel trapped. She felt protected.
Now the fight sounds were unmistakable through the vent cover—not the
whack!
Or
pow!
of movies, but the real, almost silent thuds of flesh on flesh, grunts of someone struggling for a choke hold. She knew the sounds from her years in prison…and from watching Trace fight.
Trace. He really could take care of himself. But she could tell he was up against more than one person. And she’d long ago stopped believing in fair fights. Without another thought, Sibyl kicked the vent loose with both feet and pushed herself out of the crawlway, dropping to land lightly, ready to join him.
From the dazed expression on Trace’s face, where he slumped against the wall—and to judge from the three bodies sprawled around him, two more still standing—she’d made it just in time.
Trace had done everything he could to protect her. He’d set the vent cover lightly in place, in case someone passed by, to hide her route. When he heard the elevator ding open, he’d shifted to the opposite wall to draw attention—just in case.
He’d figured a little paranoia never hurt. Not with Sibyl at stake.
Turned out he’d had cause for every extra precaution. Five toughs stalked around the corner and down the carpeted corridor toward him like a gang, full of threat and bravado.
Why the hell that surprised him, he couldn’t figure. He wasn’t like Mitch, or even Smith, thinking the Comitatus types had any grasp of real honor. He’d known Dillon Charles on and off for years, after being acknowledged by the Judge, and heard firsthand how selective that honor could be even for the true believers.
For example, the guys approaching him were definitely
not
Comitatus types. Their sagging jeans and faded shirts were thrift store, not Brooks Brothers. That meant they wouldn’t have to follow any annoying rules about how people “of the blood” should be treated, even if Trace still counted. But they’d had to get into the building, and know which floor to target, somehow. This was no coincidence.
Dillon, of course. Delegating dishonor to keep his hands clean. Which, to Trace, wasn’t honor at all.
“Hey,” he’d grunted, as if they were just passing by.
But they’d surrounded him. “Big,” said the guy in front, with a shaved head and raggedy denim jacket. But he wasn’t talking to Trace. “Dark. Yeah, this is the guy.”
Not with Sibyl here, damn it.
“The guy telling you to stay back,” Trace warned, mostly for Sibyl’s benefit. God forbid she come back into the middle of a fight. Hadn’t he endangered her enough? Just to be sure, he added, “I said, stay where you are.”
Very loudly. He hoped she heard him and obeyed.
The five who’d come here to punish him for trespassing on hallowed ground grinned. They thought he was scared. He wasn’t—except for Sibyl.
When the first one, a lieutenant to his left, lunged, Trace showed them just how scared he wasn’t.
Wham!
A simple body check, with the kind of force that should have echoed down the hallway, took the lieutenant down. Probably temporary, but it felt great all the same. It also bought time for Trace to turn and—
Yes! Shoulder block lowlife #2.
That, unfortunately, is when they all piled onto him at once, and he lost track of who was who. All he knew was the bloodlust, the brutality, the joy of releasing his big body to do what it did best.
One
of the things it did best.
Destroy.
He knew he probably couldn’t win this one. The odds just weren’t with him. But the choreography of the fight almost delighted him, in a feral kind of way. The beautiful arc of blood against the papered wall, when he caught Baldy in the nose. The
oof!
of one guy with a prison tat across his cheek when Trace flipped him backward onto the plush carpet and landed on top of him, full weight. The sense of almost flying, when he rolled off that one in time to catch another, hard on the chin with his head, as he stood again. The crack of a bone here. The grunt of lost breath there. Even the tooth-shaking crash as he hit the wall, as one head shot too many sent him reeling. It had a vibrancy to it. Fancy rules about honor and secret societies, those felt like make-believe. But this was flesh, blood, bone. Real. No pain. Just exhilaration.