The Black Hawk (3 page)

The last time they’d exchanged words, she’d promised to kill him. He hadn’t expected her on his doorstep, half-dead, running from an enemy of her own.

I have the most dangerous woman in London in my bed.

Downstairs and distant, the front door to Meeks Street opened and closed again. He couldn’t hear what his men were saying in the study, just the front door and the sound of rain coming down, urgent and hectic, like it meant business.

“Pax traced the blood trail to Braddy Square. That’s where it happened.” Doyle reached inside his jacket and drew a knife from an inner pocket and passed it over. “He found this, lying in a pool of blood.”

“Justine’s.” A black knife with a flat hilt. Deep hatch marks on the grip for fighting. Balanced perfectly for throwing. “I gave her this.” Razor sharp, of course. Justine knew how to respect a blade. “It’s been a clever and useful piece of cutlery today. It’s drawn blood.” He looked past the knife, down into Justine’s face. “You cut him, Owl. Good work.”

He remembered putting this knife in her hand. Saying, “You shouldn’t walk around without one.” Gods. They’d both been kids.

“She’s carried it awhile,” Doyle said.

“A long time.” He could feel that in the steel—the years she’d kept it close to her skin. Why had she held on to it? “Now all we need to do is find a Londoner walking around with a slice cut in him.”

“Which don’t narrow the field as much as I’d like. And he might not be English. Could be the Prussians or Austrians are still irritated with her.” Doyle scratched the stubble on his cheek. “Or the French.”

“Given the length and ingenuity of her career, there are Swedes and South Sea cannibals annoyed at her.”

She’d kept his knife all these years.

He slid Justine’s blade, still with the dried blood on it, under her pillow, putting the hilt to the left. That was the way she’d kept it at night, back when he knew her well. Maybe she’d thrash in her sleep and feel it under there and be reassured. Maybe she’d reach for it in her dreams and use it to hold death off.

Her breath caught in her chest with a rattle. Then silence. Cold sluiced over him. Time stopped . . . till she grabbed air again and settled to a slow in-and-out.

Not dying. She wasn’t dying. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

“She hurts,” Doyle said. “They do that when they hurt. It doesn’t mean anything.”

A friend always lies to you.

She muttered something—he couldn’t make out the words—and turned her head on the pillow. She was shaking in all her muscles, as if the pain were trapped inside her body, trying to get out. He said, “This isn’t sleep.”

“No.”

“I used to watch her sleep sometimes, back when I knew her that well.” He’d get out of bed after they made love and go stoke up the fire. He used to stand in the cold, naked, looking down at her, thinking how perfect she was. Not quite believing it was real. “She falls in deep, every muscle loose. It’s the only time she’s not a little watchful. Then she wakes up all at once, all over, smooth as a cat. Probably there’s cat in her ancestry someplace. Those old noble French families . . .”

“No telling, with the French. Inventive people. And she is still strolling about armed to the teeth, even in these piping days of peace. We took a gun out of the pouch in her cloak. Loaded. Not fired recently.”

“I keep telling her—” He steadied his voice. “I used to tell her, you can always trust your powder in the rain. It’s reliably wet.”

“Might be why she had that knife in her hand instead of a gun and she ain’t dead. She was also carrying this.” Doyle took out a handkerchief and unwrapped it carefully to show a soggy, square mass, layer on layer of thin paper, pale pink with dilute blood. “Newspaper clippings. Unreadable at the moment.”

Wet paper. That would be fragile. He didn’t touch. “That would be the papers she’s talking about. Somebody thinks the popular press is worth killing over.”

“Might be the
Times
. Might be the
Observer
. This had the bad luck to fall in an inch of water. We’ll dry it out and separate the sheets and see what we got.” Doyle refolded the handkerchief. “It’ll take a few hours.”

“She’ll tell us when she wakes up. Shouldn’t be long.”

Doyle nodded. He gave a last long look at Owl before he walked over to the window. He was dressed like a laborer today . . . a big, ugly, thuggish, barely respectable giant in sturdy clothes. His hair was wet and the gray streaks didn’t show. The scar that ran down his cheek was fake. The imperturbable strength wasn’t. “Still coming down like all the saints’ frogs. Hope the basement doesn’t flood.”

Good weather for killing. Nobody would have seen Justine or the shadow that stalked her. Back when he hunted men, he’d chosen this sort of day.

“I sent word to Sévie. She’ll want to be with her sister.” Doyle started to close the curtains.

“Leave the curtain. It’s still light out. She likes light.” Then he said, “She’s shivering.”

“The room’s warm enough. The chill’s coming from inside her.” But Doyle went to nudge at the fire basket with the toe of his boot. Sparks shot up the chimney and out onto the hearthrug.

Soft thuds on the stairs turned into clicks headed down the hall. Muffin had attached himself to one of the agents, keeping him company, making him conspicuous.

A minute later Pax came in, carrying a tray. Muffin, a dog the size of a small pony, his rough, gray, untidy coat glazed with drops of water, followed. “Broth. Luke says to spoon this into her, if she can swallow.”

“Set it down.” Doyle stripped down to shirt and waistcoat and slung his wet jacket over a straight-backed chair. He rolled up his sleeves, looking ready to hold off a few bruisers, barefisted.

Pax said, “Fletcher and his crew are working their way out from Braddy, asking questions, trying to pick up her trail. We think she may have come directly from her shop. Stillwater and a half dozen are searching the square. Everybody else is in the study, dripping on the rug, drinking tea.”

The men and women who belonged to him were gathering. They’d want to see how he was taking this. Want to lay down the words people said at times like this. They’d need orders. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

Muffin came over, looking worried, and nosed in under an elbow to stick his big square head up to the pillow to sniff over Justine’s hair, memorizing her. He approved of the Justine smell. Didn’t like the blood and antiseptic of the bandage. A few more whuffles up and down the bedcovers and he was satisfied. He clicked across the room to assist Doyle.

Doyle was hunkered down to lay coal on the fire, piece by piece, acting like his hands didn’t feel flame. When he was through and stood up, Muffin took his place and thumped down in front of the fire, taking one end of the hearth to the other. The coal scuttle rattled. He stretched his chin on his paws and curled the great plumed tail to his side.

“I brought the knife.” Pax set bowl and spoon from the tray on the table beside the bed. “Luke says it fits the wound.” He looked at Justine soberly.

“Show him.” Doyle motioned.

Pax had brought it up on the tray. He passed it over, hilt first. “Fletcher found this under a ledge, thirty feet from the blood. Tossed in on purpose, looks like. Don’t touch the edge.”

The knife was a flat, matte-black, deadly curve, elegant as a crow’s wing.

He knew it, of course. “Another of my children has found its way home. What well-trained knives I have.” The weight of it, the balance of it, were completely familiar. He turned it over in his hand. “And look. Somebody’s engraved it for me. The letters
A
and
H
. . . for Adrian Hawkhurst. That does make a truly personal gift.”

“From someone who does not wish you well,” Pax said dryly.

“They’re not friendly to Justine, either.”

“It’s yours? You’re sure?” Doyle said.

“Mine. Without doubt. See this?” He ran his thumb on the shaping of the swage. “That was supposed to steady the turn in flight. It didn’t, so I only made an even dozen. I gave one to Justine.” A glance at Pax. “You got one. Fletcher got one. I gave Annique one and she immediately misplaced it, careless woman that she is. I lost two in France, sticking them into people. And I left three behind with my baggage when I fled in undignified haste from . . .” he had to think, “Socchieve, in Italy.”

“So they’re spread broadcast over Europe,” Doyle said.

“That’s nine.” Pax was never happy till the numbers added up. A shop clerk at heart.

“There’s three tossed in a drawer in the workshop downstairs.”

Doyle hooked a finger in his waistcoat pocket and curled out with a pocket lens. Typical of Doyle that he walked around with a magnifier. Wordlessly, he handed it over.

Under the glass . . . “No wear on the edge, for all it’s sixteen years old. A few nicks, probably where it fell today. We have lots of dried blood, just turning brown. That’s an hour old, at a guess. And . . .” There was a white film, as if somebody had drawn the blade through milk and let it dry. Nobody ever put friendly things on a knife. “The blade’s dirty. Poison.”

Pax said, “Luke thinks so. He doesn’t know which one.”

Damn and bloody codswallowing hell. Poison. He dropped the knife down. Took the three steps to the bed. Pulled the blanket off Owl. He’d reopen the wound. It wasn’t too late to—

“Hawk—” Pax caught his wrist. “Hawk. Leave it. It’s clean. You didn’t see. She left a trail of blood all the way back to Braddy Square. Anything that was in there washed out.” Slowly, Pax let go. “There can’t be much poison left in her.”

It doesn’t take much.

“The Borgia touches don’t work.” Doyle wasn’t looking at him. He was pulling the covers back over Owl, studying her face. “It’s been over an hour. Pupils are normal. No sweating. No swelling on that arm. Her mouth isn’t dried out. Her pulse is fast, but that’s from the pain.”

You could buy five hundred poisons in London if you knew where to go. Fast ones. Slow ones.
Name of God, Owl, which one? What did they put inside you?
“I never used poison. It encourages sloppiness.”

Pax said, “Even in the middle of the war, there weren’t many men who poisoned. That narrows the field.”

The war was three years over. Doves of peace were flapping every bloody where. But something from the bad old days had slithered out of the past to reach up and claw Justine.

“They used my damn knife.” He stooped and retrieved it. Holding the knife, he could remember the feel of making it. The first time he shaped the edge on a grindstone. It took hours to get it exactly right.

Some knives wake up. They get to be a little alive. Nobody’d ever been able to convince him otherwise. This was an angry knife, full of purpose. A killer.

But you didn’t kill her, did you? There was that much loyalty in you.

He flipped it in his hand, threw it into the doorframe. It thunked in solid, an inch deep. Muffin jerked up out of a doze and trotted over to hide behind a chair.

He worked it out of the wood and set it on the mantelpiece, cutting edge to the wall, where it wouldn’t hurt somebody accidental-like.

Doyle said, “They’re piled up like cordwood downstairs, without orders, losing daylight.” When there was no response, he said, “I won’t let her die while you’re gone.” And then, “Don’t waste what it cost her, coming here.”

Justine would be the first to kick his arse out the door. She’d send him out to do his job. He could almost hear her telling him to get to work.

He leaned down to her ear and whispered, “Stay alive for me, Owl. Remember. You promised to slit my throat while I slept. I’m going to hold you to that. We have unfinished business.”

She lay, unquiet, her forehead pinched in tight lines, her lips shaping words that didn’t get spoken. Still breathing. Still alive. The knife had missed her heart because she fought back like the she-devil she was.

He straightened up. “I’m going to kill the man who did this.”

Doyle said, “I know.”

PAX wasn’t fast enough, following Adrian out the door.

“Stay,” Doyle said.

“I have to—”

“It’ll wait five minutes.” Doyle crooked two fingers. “Get on the bed and lift her up. We’ll put some of this broth into her.” He took the bowl.

“I’ll send Felicity up.”

“Justine doesn’t know Felicity. She knows you. Even half out of your head, your body knows when it’s strangers touching you.”

“She doesn’t know me well enough to want me handling her, naked.” But he went around and lifted her carefully, trying not to joggle the arm with the bandage. He kept the sheet between them so he wasn’t touching her skin. “She’s Hawker’s.”

“She won’t mind. Hell, she won’t know unless you go bragging about it. And we won’t enlighten Hawker.” Doyle took broth in the spoon. His voice hardened as he spoke to Justine. “Drink this.”

She swallowed. She didn’t open her eyes, but she swallowed.

“You’re a man of many skills.” Pax shifted uncomfortably, holding a woman who belonged to Hawker with discretion and disinterest.

“Four kids, and Maggie taking in every stray in England.” Simple pride filled Doyle’s voice when he talked about his wife.

Another mouthful. Justine came a little awake and drank thirstily when the bowl was set to her lips. Then she lay her head back against Pax, falling into sleep. After a minute, Pax shifted away and gingerly settled her down to the bed.

“That’s good then.” Doyle picked up a straight-backed chair, one-handed, and brought it over to the bedside. He sat and propped his boots on the frame of the bed. “I’ll take it from here. Tell Felicity to send in some tea.”

“Should I put that knife away? Hawk’s knife.”

“Might as well leave it be. I think he has plans for it.”

“You see what it means, don’t you? Using one of his knives?”

Doyle nodded. “I see, all right.”

“I don’t think Hawk does. Not yet. He’s distracted.” Pax let his eyes touch Justine.

“It’ll come to him when he’s thinking clearly.”

“Men all over Europe know Adrian Hawkhurst’s knives. The Black Hawk’s knives. Somebody wants to make it look like he killed her.”