Underground Warrior (18 page)

She read it in Dillon Charles’ own words, an affidavit of sorts. Not the Dillon Charles she knew now—adult lawyer, acquirer of swords. But the Dillon he’d once been, one who’d seemed so old and confident to the twelve-year-old scholarship student she’d once been.

One who, as she read his words, came across as seventeen years old and just plain scared.

As well he should have been.

He and others at the Academy had resented Sibyl’s presence at their prep school…a school that had only started admitting girls several years earlier. A school that had been almost exclusively reserved for the privileged among the New Orleans elite. Oh, sure, granting scholarships gave them tax benefits and good publicity. But those scholarship students weren’t supposed to be in the running for valedictorian. And they certainly shouldn’t have been in a position to turn in their more privileged classmates for cheating.

Cheating…?

Sitting on the floor, surrounded by looming shelves and cabinets, Sibyl remembered how honored she’d felt when someone as rich and charming as Dillon Charles had suggested they all study together. She’d had so few friends, and she’d just started noticing boys. She remembered…she remembered asking where they got the practice tests.

She’d actually wondered that—where had they gotten such thorough examples? It hadn’t occurred to her, even as she’d completed the answers for them, that these might not have been practice tests at all. Not even when she asked their instructor about it, after the test, only to have Dillon sweep her away from the older man’s look of confusion.

She’d begun to figure it out, then. She’d begun to suspect that he’d gotten her to help cheat. But she hadn’t wanted to believe it—and then the fire that night, and the news of her father’s death, and the accusations…

She’d forgotten the rest—the cheating—had even happened.

Dillon hadn’t.

“We figured if we spray painted some stuff about rich guys and being stuck up, and if the fire started in her locker, then she’d get kicked out for vandalism,” he’d written in the affidavit. “We didn’t realize there’d be an explosion. It was an accident. Nobody was meant to get hurt. It’s just—they didn’t belong there. And now I’ve messed up everything.”

After which followed commentary in other hands, signed with initials instead of full names, agreeing that boys with such important futures ahead of them didn’t deserve to have their lives ruined for teenaged foolishness.

For an accident.

“Handled internally,” it ended.

Which she knew meant: we framed someone else. Someone unimportant. For a crime that didn’t matter.

Because the Daines
didn’t
have important futures ahead of them.

Or so the Comitatus had thought.

Now Sibyl stuffed the crumpled pages into her courier bag. Assuming the Comitatus didn’t own every newspaper or news outlet—and they certainly didn’t own the internet!—she would make sure that this cover-up was thoroughly uncovered.

But it wasn’t enough. Not even close.

Rage filled her, like bile. Hatred. Injustice. It needed to explode, just like the incendiary device they’d planted in her locker. It needed to destroy their world the way they’d destroyed hers.

She had to find more evidence against them. Worse evidence. Enough for a
60 Minutes
exposé. Enough for
Dateline
and
Nightline
and Senate Intelligence investigations and independent counsels. She began throwing open file drawers at random, rifling through document after document, casting the ones she didn’t want on the floor. She needed a smoking gun—smokier and even more incriminating than her own setup, since people could claim too much bias in her exposing that one.

The Comitatus had become a mildewed, decaying structure full of spiders and snakes and roaches and rats, and it was time someone shone light on their activities. Sunlight was the best disinfectant, after all.

She hesitated and looked around at the mess she’d created, papers strewn atop papers, documents as old as a hundred, two hundred, three hundred years.

Original
documents.

Irreplaceable documents.

And it occurred to her. Sunlight, as a disinfectant, worked slowly.

Fire, on the other hand…

The thought frightened even her. She drew a fist to her mouth, let the sheaf she clutched drift to the littered floor like a handful of dead leaves.

Fire would destroy it all, beyond any hope of replacement—everything except the most incriminating documents, which she would spirit away. The secrecy of the Comitatus likely led to their reluctance to keep photocopies or digital backups.

Why not use that against them?

She’d served six years in juvenile detention for a fire she’d never set. This might not count as double jeopardy—different fire, different times and she was an adult. But she knew how to leave no proof.

Sibyl’s survival instincts, the same instincts that had kept her alive behind bars and paranoid even after her release, protested—but she protested back. She had the ammunition to keep those noble villains from trying to hurt her or hers, ever again.

All she had to do was wait until dawn. Light the fire in person—more sensibly than Dillon Charles had ever tried to light his—and then slip downstairs. When Dillon, arriving for his duel, disengaged the alarm system, she would slip out.

That should buy the fire time before anybody recognized what was happening. Enough time to do serious damage upstairs while, because of the tendency of heat to rise, the men downstairs should stay relatively safe.

Immediately she thought of Trace—and of Smith, and of Mitch. They’d be here, of course.
For her.
She couldn’t put them in danger.

So warn them. She could telephone them as soon as she was safely away, before the fire could become a true hazard. She’d let them know what was going on, ask them to cancel the duel and get out. That would buy her archive-hungry flame even more time to do maximum damage before it was discovered.

Part of her feared what she would become, if she did this.

The larger part of her knew she’d already become worse—because of the Comitatus. This would be no less than justice.

Handled internally?

She just had to find a way to distract herself over the next few hours before dawn. Sabotage the fire alarms, of course. And collect the most incriminating examples—the examples that would most blatantly out the Comitatus secrecy to the world—before torching the rest.

Which meant reading.

Which was fine.

Sibyl never minded a night reading….

“You’d fight better if you’d gotten some sleep,” noted Smith, emerging from the early morning mist to where Trace still stood, watching the blocky, looming Arsenal.

The French Quarter was never more peaceful than this, the early morning. The parties had wound down. The bars had closed. The hookers were sleeping off their night’s work. In the early morning, the age of this place crept back.

Buildings two and three hundred years old. Cobble-stone walks. Private courtyards. Wrought iron balconies and French doors with the original, imperfect glass.

And what was basically a fortress.

“I don’t need sleep to fight.” Trace rolled his shoulders as he pushed away from the wall. “Is it time?”

“Not quite.” Smith surprised him by handing him a cardboard cup of coffee. Like Trace really wasn’t beneath him. Like they were just friends. “I wanted to check on you first.”

They sipped their hot, Louisiana coffee in tense, mist-draped silence.

Trace looked around them. “You think maybe I had noble ancestors walking around here once?”

“You’re Judge LaSalle’s kid, aren’t you? No matter what name you take, you’ve got his bloodline. Sure you did.”

Trace tried to imagine it. Important men, wealthy men, only a few generations beyond the time of knights in armor, striding around the city that had been cleared out of the swamp. Men with critical decisions to make. Men responsible not just for themselves, but for their communities, the way the Comitatus should have been.

The way Smith insisted they could someday be again.

“You think they were worth anything?” He looked back at his friend. “Not, you know, in dollars or francs or whatever….”

Smith considered him. “I know we tease you a lot, Trace. You—” He grinned. “You kind of make it easy.”

Trace scowled.

Smith feinted a step back, as if to dodge a blow, but he was still grinning. He wasn’t afraid. “But you’re still one of the more impressive guys I’ve ever met. You knew what you were giving up, when we quit the society. Mitch and I could only imagine, but you knew, because you’d escaped it once already. And you did it.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that.”

Okay, now this was getting mushy. Trace shrugged and looked back up at the Arsenal. He hoped Sibyl had found what she needed.

“Judge LaSalle may be a lost cause,” Smith said.

“But you sure as hell don’t take after him. So yeah. Somewhere back there in your family line, there have to be some heroes. Here.”

Trace hesitated to look back, unsure what to do with the blatant praise. But Smith nudged him—sort of—so he looked.

Smith was holding out the aluminum case that held the sword. Maybe it was the sword of Charlemagne, maybe not. But it was his now.

Mine.

“You sure you want to risk it?” his friend asked as a cheerful hello announced Mitch’s arrival. “As long as Dillon disarms the security system, so Sibyl can get out, we don’t have to go through with the duel.”

Trace looked at the quiet, misty streets around him…and he could almost sense the presence of some kind of great-great-grandfather who might have still cared about duty and honor and all that other stuff.

“Nah,” he said, taking the sword. Even through the case, its weight felt right in his hand. “I said I’d fight. I’ll fight.

“Besides.” And he grinned at his friends as wolfishly as he could. “I’m kind of curious about who’ll win.”

It’s time,
whispered Sibyl’s need for vengeance. She’d fed it, counted on it for so long—for years—that it almost had its own personality.
Finally time.

She kept skimming the scrolls on her lap, cross-referencing them to the ones she’d sorted beside her, reaching up for more. Just a while longer…

Start the fire now, or you won’t get out while they’re coming in.

“Don’t hurry me,” she whispered, and only then truly noticed her internal debate. Maybe she finally had cracked. But more likely, she just needed more time.

A society that had taken millennia to develop couldn’t be dismissed in mere seconds.

Or mere hours.

Besides, she’d found something.

Actually, she’d found
lots
of somethings. Her courier bag was stuffed with incriminating documents from the nineties, the eighties, the seventies. She’d found a few tasty scandals from the sixties, the fifties, the forties.

But then, as she’d worked chronologically backward, something interesting began to happen.

The scandals and incriminations became fewer and farther between.

The voices caught within male penmanship from generations ago showed more and more…honor.

Concern.

Conflict.

And, the further she went back in time: Heroes. She found references to El Cid of Spain and Roland of France, to Lord Guan of China and Prince Yamato Takeru of Japan, to Beowulf and Charlemagne and Siegfried and the Arthurian knights. More recently—as in, post-Renaissance—she found references to explorers, founding fathers, governors, generals.

“Smith was right,” she whispered. “Smith, and Mitch, and Greta…they were right.”

The Comitatus had once been something wonderful.

Once,
insisted her need for vengeance.
No more.
Which was true. Nobody knew how true more intensely than did she. And yet, seeing what they’d once been, she could page forward through time with more insight.

Those men of noble blood, men who’d descended from heroes, had honestly strived for generations to live up to their past. They had founded and funded charities. They had spoken up against injustices from the horror of slavery to the threat, and occasional necessity, of war.

They hadn’t always been evil.

And as members within their ranks had slowly turned further and further from philanthropy and heroics, and more and more toward elitism and pragmatism, it hadn’t been a simple change. Even men named Charles and LaSalle had protested that they might need to risk their existence to protect the core of decency among them. But as times had changed, as new generations replaced the old, fewer and fewer of those protests had found voice.

More than once, Sibyl had come across documents with a surprising “kids these days” tone, be they from the 1920s or the 1840s. More than once, she found documents in which men debated the common sense of maintaining pure honor, if that honor might lead to the society’s destruction. Many felt that without honor, they didn’t deserve to continue.

More—and more often—chose pragmatism.

They weren’t one body. They weren’t one mind. Not everybody in the Comitatus had betrayed her—the New Orleans powers had. In Dallas, Arden Leigh’s father had lost his life pursuing belated honor. Smith Donnell’s father, even now, seemed to be doing what he could to help his son without breaking his own vows. And then there were Smith, and Mitch….

And Trace.
Exiles, yes. But exiled for a reason.

The Comitatus weren’t an army—they were an organization. Powerful, yes, and everyone knew what absolute power could do. And yet, if they could somehow be salvaged…?

Ridiculous. Stupid. She needed vengeance, didn’t she?

But did that vengeance need to come at the cost of the exiles’ idealism? Did it really need to come at the cost of Trace’s belief in himself? Or did the cycle of violence have to end somewhere? And who, really, did she want to risk?

Dillon Charles hadn’t thought anybody would be hurt, in the fire he set. And Sibyl had it in her power to be not just nothing, but nothing like Dillon Charles.