Chapter Thirty-Eight #2
Adam’s expression was level. “Might surprise you, but I happen to think it’s wrong to whip a man. No matter how much of a bastard he is.”
A rich, tense complexity swirled between the two men as Jacobs held out his hand again. “Bow.”
Ellie obeyed, and a shudder of pain racked through him as he slid the weapon onto his wounded shoulder.
The movement pulled aside his ripped, bloody shirt, revealing the dark lines of a ruined tower and its twin swords slashed across the pale skin of his chest. Words blazed in black over his heart.
PER ARDUA.
Constance lifted her chin with an air of contempt. “I knew you were a stooge for the Order of Albion, but I didn’t think you’d stoop so low as to tattoo Lord Aldbury’s sigil on your chest.”
Jacobs went deeply, entirely still.
The room froze around him, the air itself holding taut. Even Ellie’s blood seemed to slow, pulsing strangely through her veins as her mind scrambled to make sense of what she had just heard.
Jacobs spoke, each word burning like hot iron. “What did you say?”
Constance frowned, bewildered by his tone. “That symbol on your chest. It’s from Lord Aldbury’s ring. He wears it constantly. Surely you’ve seen it?”
“I have never met Lord Aldbury,” Jacobs replied with exaggerated care.
The buzzing in Ellie’s brain grew louder.
“He isn’t important enough to have met him,” she filled in numbly. “He hasn’t been let in to their circle.”
Constance’s brow furrowed. “But then why on earth would he have that tattoo?”
A cold horror ran over Ellie’s skin as she met Jacobs’ burning black gaze from across the room. “Because he saw it somewhere else. I expect… that he saw it the day his mother died.”
Jacobs stalked forward, leveling the Winchester at Constance’s face.
Neil lurched toward him, reaching for his sword.
Adam stopped him, holding an arm in front of his chest as he watched Jacobs carefully.
Jacobs glared at Constance above the barrel of the gun. “Tell me about the ring.”
Constance looked at Jacobs with genuine confusion.
“There’s a black cabochon inlaid with gold, showing that falling tower and the two swords.
And then the words around the outside—per ardua.
” She offered the rest to Ellie. “I noticed it when Mother had him over for tea. Probably because I was so bored with the two of them talking over me.”
Her expression flattened with shock as her attention shifted back to Jacobs.
Jacobs tensed behind the barrel of the rifle. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“You resemble him,” Constance spilled out.
“Resemble who?” Ellie prompted—even as a chill of understanding crept up her spine.
Constance gazed at Jacobs with dazed recognition. “Lord Aldbury.”
Jacobs took a step back, staring at her as though she had just bitten him.
Adam jabbed a finger, forgetting himself out of sheer surprise. “Hold on—he looks like Aldbury?”
“Well, Lord Aldbury’s a bit taller, and he’s gone silver, especially about the temples, but…” Constance trailed off as though seeing a ghost. “It’s a bit uncanny, actually.”
“But Lord Aldbury is Julian Forster-Mowbray’s dad,” Adam pointed out wildly.
Constance waved a dismissive hand. “Julian takes after his mother.”
Ellie thought of the words she had spilled out earlier that day—the moment before Jacobs had tried to throttle her.
Most women are hurt by someone they love.
The logical, rational conclusion fell from her lips. “The man you’ve been trying to find—the man who hurt your mother. It’s him. Lord Aldbury. And he’s your father.”
Jacobs took a threatening step toward Constance. His breath was short and uneven. “If you even think to try to mislead me…”
“But she can’t,” Ellie burst out. “She can’t. You’d know if she was lying!”
His knuckles whitened where he gripped the rifle as though only his hold on the gun was keeping his hands from shaking.
“Hold on.” Adam frowned. “Wouldn’t that make The Mustache his half-brother?”
Ellie felt dizzy. “Fiddlesticks.”
Jacobs began to laugh. The sound tore out of him, harsh and acid, nearly doubling him over. When he raised his eyes to Ellie and Adam once more, they flashed with a new, dangerous sharpness. “Well, then. I suppose now we know how you two were meant to help me along.”
Ellie’s blood chilled with a quick rush of fear.
Jacobs didn’t need them anymore… which meant he no longer had a reason not to kill them.
Adam realized it as well. He tensed, readying himself for a leap—even though it would almost certainly mean suicide.
Forgotten at Jacobs’ side, Neil whipped out his sword.
Jacobs whirled at the movement, but Neil was already slashing the blade down, even as flames still bloomed up Dyrnwyn’s length. The weapon sliced through the barrel of the Winchester, and the front half of the rifle dropped to the ground with a clang.
For a moment, all five of them stared at the damage with shock.
Neil snapped back to himself, swinging up the sword.
Jacobs recovered faster. He threw the rest of the gun at Neil, forcing him to flinch back.
With a grunt of muted agony, he ripped the bow from his shoulder—and fitted the arrow to the string.
Unearthly light flared up around the bolt in swirling threads. All the air in the room pulled toward it, setting the dead leaves spinning once again.
Jacobs pointed the arrow at Neil, who gripped Dyrnwyn’s silently flickering length in his hands. “Drop it.”
Adam raised his hands, pleading. “You can’t use that thing on him.”
“I’ll use it on whoever I bloody like,” Jacobs snarled in return, threads of silver and gold painting the harsh lines of his face.
“But it only works once!” Ellie insisted desperately. “What about Aldbury?”
“I don’t need an arcanum to kill Aldbury,” Jacobs snapped.
Ellie stepped toward him, willing him to understand. “You know who you’ve been searching for now. It doesn’t have to be like this anymore!”
Fresh blood streamed down Jacobs chest, fingers of it staining the black lines of his tattoo. His body was rigid with wild, conflicted energy.
Too much had changed for him, far too quickly. The contemptuous lash of Borthwick’s whip. The shocking revelation of the identity of the man he’d been seeking for most of his life. The blazing, terrible power he held in his hands. Jacobs was wrenched taut with all of it.
One impulsive blaze of fury could see all of them destroyed. The arrow, after all, could hit a collective target as easily as a singular one. All that stood between Ellie and death was the question of exactly how Jacobs would process the maelstrom raging through his heart.
He moved around them until the arrow pointed through them toward the door.
“Outside,” he ordered thinly. “All of you. Now.”
Adam took her arm and guided her back to the entrance of the temple, watching Jacobs warily. Neil and Constance followed.
Ellie squinted as they emerged back into the light of the sinkhole—and then froze at the sight of a ring of rifles pointed at her chest.
“There you are,” Colonel Charles Borthwick declared smoothly.
Grass whispered around his boots with the breath of a warm breeze. Singh Rao stood to his right, stoic and unreadable. Sepoys framed them, weapons steady in their hands.
The stairs to Sita’s cave lay beyond, a distant black promise in the impenetrable wall of red stone.
Jacobs lingered in the shadows at Ellie’s back.
The cold glow of the astra dimmed to a simmer as he moderated his grip on the weapon—but she still sensed the threat it posed.
The danger encompassed all of them—her and Adam, Neil and Constance.
Singh Rao and his men. Borthwick, who eyed them with a triumphant contempt.
The feeling was like a lit fuse hissing in her ear. An explosion was coming—but she found she could not begin to guess where it would be directed.
Borthwick hadn’t seen Jacobs yet. His gaze was locked on Adam.
“I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised you would turn up here,” he commented mildly.
Dawson popped out from behind the soldiers. “I knew these people weren’t trustworthy! They are a bunch of unqualified riffraff!”
Constance opened her mouth for an indignant protest.
Adam cut in, muttering. “Not worth it.”
Borthwick’s gaze shifted to the flaming sword in Neil’s hand. “I’m a little more surprised to find you still standing. Perhaps that trinket you’re carrying has something to do with how you managed to survive. I look forward to examining it more closely, once I’ve relieved you of it.”
Neil’s mouth firmed at the implied threat, his hand tightening on the sword’s hilt.
“I assume they’ve been in league with you all this time,” Borthwick remarked casually to Adam. “It’s an insult, really—that your father would send you out here to cross me with nothing more than a scholar and a pair of women.”
Hot, swirling wind gusted through the sinkhole, rippling the wild herbs at Adam’s feet. He looked as queasy as he might on a hundred-foot precipice. “You think my father sent me here?”
Borthwick’s eyes blazed with hot violence.
“Don’t treat me like a fool, Mr. Bates. I don’t take well to it.
” He moderated his tone as he paced through the grass.
“I do give you credit for the sheer audacity of the show you put on in order to insert yourself into my party. I assumed, of course, that you had most likely been sent to spy on us. Even that would have been a violation of the gentleman’s agreement that governs this delicate work.
But to learn that your actual mission was to try to steal the arcanum out from under my nose—well, that’s something else entirely.
The relative civility of this little arms race depends upon the understanding that you Yanks have your territory, and we have ours. ”
Ellie’s mind whirled to keep up with Borthwick’s words.
You Yanks have your territory…
“What the hell are you talking about?” Adam demanded.
But Ellie already knew.