Duke of Midnight (Maiden Lane #6)(86)

“Then you are an aristocrat.” Maximus refused to rise to the bait. “And yet you’ve sunk to thieving in St. Giles.”

“Robbing, I’ll have you know.” Old Scratch sounded irritable, as if he thought robbery somehow above thievery. “And it’s a pleasant hobby. Gets one’s blood flowing.”

“You expect me to believe that you do this for excitement?” Maximus scoffed. “Acquit me of stupidity. Are you a poor younger son? Or did your sire gamble your inheritance away?”

“Wrong and wrong again.” Old Scratch shook his head mockingly. “I grow weary, Your Grace. Don’t be such a coward. Come out, come out to play!”

Maximus stepped from the shadows. He was no longer a cowering boy. “I have all of them but that one, you know.”

Old Scratch clucked as his big black horse shifted from one foot to another. “The emerald drops like this?” He touched his gloved fingers to the emerald pin at his throat. “That must’ve cost a pretty penny, for I know I sold them for such. Your mother’s necklace kept me in wine and wenches for many years.”

Maximus felt his ire rise and tempered it. He wouldn’t be drawn out so easily. “I only need that one to have it remade.”

Old Scratch crooked one finger. “Come and take it.”

“I intend to,” Maximus said as he circled the horse and man. “I’ll take it and your life as well.”

The highwayman threw back his head and laughed. “Am I the reason for that?” He gestured to Maximus’s costume. “La, sir, I confess myself flattered. To’ve driven the Duke of Wakefield into madness so deep that he donned the guise of a common actor and runs the streets of St. Giles. Why, I—”

It happened so fast Maximus had no time to think, let alone act. He heard the clatter of hoofbeats behind him, saw the glint of metal as Old Scratch raised his left hand from where he’d kept it hidden in his coat.

And then there was the flash and the bang.

The terrible, terrible bang.

An equine scream. Maximus jerked and whirled. Behind him, a horse was falling, writhing on the ground. He turned back to Old Scratch. The highwayman was spurring his horse into one of the seven radiating streets.

Maximus started after him.

The horse screamed again.

This time when he looked he saw the man trapped beneath the horse. Christ. The horse had fallen on its rider.

He ran back to the wounded horse. The horse’s legs were stiffened and the entire big body shuddered.

A dragoon rode up and stopped, simply gaping.

“Help me get him out!” Maximus shouted.

He glanced into the bloodied face of the man on the ground and saw it was Trevillion. Beneath the blood, his skin was bone-white. The dragoon captain was silent, his teeth clenched, his lips pulled back in a grimace of agony.

“Take his other hand,” Maximus ordered the young soldier. The man grasped his captain’s arm and together they heaved.

Trevillion gave a deep, awful groan as his legs came free of his horse. Maximus saw that the dragoon captain’s lip was bloody from where he’d bitten it through. He knelt by Trevillion and winced when he looked at his right leg—the same leg that Trevillion limped on from some previous injury. It was bent in an unnatural angle, the bone quite obviously broken—and broken badly.

Trevillion reached up and grasped Maximus’s tunic front with surprising strength, pulling him down close enough that the other soldier couldn’t hear. “Don’t let her suffer, Wakefield.”

Maximus glanced at the mare—Cowslip, he remembered now. A silly name for a soldier’s horse. He looked back at Trevillion, his chin bloody with his attempt to silence his own pain.

“Do it,” the captain grunted, his eyes shimmering. “God damn it, just do it.”

Maximus rose and stepped over to the mare. She’d stopped thrashing and lay, her great sides heaving. Her right front foreleg was held oddly, either broken or very badly hurt. An ugly hole marred the mare’s smooth chocolate hide at her chest, and her mane trailed, wet with blood, on the cobblestones. For a moment he saw his mother’s hair trailing bloodily in the wet street channel.

He shook his head and stepped closer. Cowslip rolled her eye as he neared, afraid and hurt.

He drew his short sword.

Maximus knelt, covered her eye, and slit her throat.

Chapter Eighteen

Lin screamed as the red-hot coal singed her palms, but she did not let go of Tam. King Herla flinched at her cry and made as if to tear the burning coal from her hands.

“No!” Lin said, holding the burning coal away from the king. “He is my brother and I must save both him and me.”

At her words his eyes saddened, but he nodded and withdrew his hand.

And the cock crowed.…

—from The Legend of the Herla King

Artemis woke in the early hours of morning to the sound of splashing. She rolled over in Maximus’s great bed and saw him standing by his dresser lit by a single candle. He was bare to the waist and splashing water on his chest and hands… water that was running down his chest in red rivulets.

She sat up. “You’re hurt.”

He paused, then continued sluicing himself, apparently without regard for his carpet. “No.”

She frowned. Something was the matter, he was too quiet. “Then whose blood is that?”