Elliot swore silently as he hurried back to Fellows. “The idiot Stacy is trying to lead them into a trap,” he said in a low voice as he led Fellows forward. “They’ll kill him instead.”
“Then let us get there,” Fellows said.
Elliot led Fellows up the tunnel and into the large room, the other man staying close behind.
Images of his last night in the caves came to Elliot, his desperate run down the tunnels, the churning in his stomach when he dared to crawl through the crack that led into the cave that held his rifle. At any moment, he’d be stopped and shot, or strangled, or beaten again. If they caught him, he’d never have another chance to get away.
He’d alternately crept on his belly like an animal and run like a rabbit. At every moment, he’d expected to feel shot ripping through his back, stopping his life in a wash of pain.
Elliot’s breath came faster. If he didn’t slow, if he didn’t calm himself, he’d run in on a burst of panic and get Stacy killed.
He saw the flash of gunfire. Heard yells. Elliot’s thoughts scattered, and he ran forward.
Stacy. Was he dead or alive?
A few more shots were fired, then silence.
Elliot moved on, Fellows behind him. Both men moved noiselessly on toward where he’d heard the shots.
Another flash of revolvers. Bangs echoed through the tunnels and made it impossible to hear. Fellows clapped his hands over his ears, but Elliot, trying to hold on to his rifle, didn’t have that chance. His ears rang, and smoke choked him.
The barrage of bullets died, and Elliot moved quietly forward.
He finally saw his old friend Stacy at the end of the tunnel behind a crate, a lantern on the floor to give away his position. Two men rose from the shadows, revolvers cocked, and opened fire on Stacy.
Chapter 27
The light extinguished to blackness. Elliot sensed rather than saw Stacy rise, aim his gun with uncanny precision at the flash of one revolver, and shoot his assassin through the heart.
A marvelous shot, with only the tiny light of the gun’s flash to guide him, but the problem was, the bullet that had left the assassin’s gun hit Stacy. Stacy grunted, then went quiet.
Elliot could neither see nor hear. He crept into the end of the tunnel, shouldering his useless rifle again, trying to stay utterly silent.
On a sudden, he was shoved against the wall, a body rank with sweat and smelling of blood and smoke pushing past him. The second assassin, who fled down another tunnel.
Elliot heard the worry in the other man’s running footsteps, the growing terror. The assassin didn’t know where he was, and his friend was dead. He was alone. In the dark. Under the earth.
Elliot let him go for now. He returned to the crate and the lantern, dug matches out of his pocket, struck one, and lit the lantern.
Stacy sagged against the wall, blood on his side. Another man lay stretched out beside him, facedown, unmoving.
Stacy lifted his gaze to Elliot, his eyes resigned. “I’m sorry, old friend. So sorry.”
“Shut it,” Elliot said. “Ye trying to die a hero?”
“Best way.”
“You’re an idiot. Stay still.”
Fellows came into the light, shaking his head. “Heard him, tried to follow. Lost him.”
“Never mind,” Elliot said. “You don’t know your way around down here. Stay with Stacy. I’ll hunt.”
He turned away and picked up the fallen assassin’s pistol as Fellows nodded, Elliot’s heart hammering, his skin hot.
“McBride,” Stacy said.
Elliot looked back. Stacy was grim-faced, blood trickling from the side of his mouth.
“Get the bastard.”
Elliot intended to.
Elliot could move like smoke when he wanted to, or a ghost in the night. He tracked the other assassin in silence and darkness.
The footsteps of the man ahead of him moved swiftly, then hesitantly, then swiftly again.
This was Elliot’s territory, and here he was master. He’d learned his way around the tunnels of his prison on his own, sometimes hiding down there for days. Whenever his captors found him again, they beat him, but eluding them had given Elliot a small measure of triumph. He’d made his captors hunt him. He’d turned the tables and enraged them.
The unknown man in the dark was trying to kill Stacy for defiling an Indian prince’s sister. Never mind that the prince had kept Jaya behind locked doors, never allowing her even to look out a window. Jaya, as headstrong as her brothers had been, had escaped. Jaya had been gifted in conversation and intelligence, wasted, secreted in her luxurious home, waiting for her brothers to marry her to some elderly wealthy man to further their own power.
He couldn’t help thinking that Juliana would have liked Jaya in other circumstances and been indignant on her behalf.
The man was slowing now, uncertain. He went one way, then the other. Elliot followed, allowing his footfalls to sound occasionally so that the other man would flee him.
Up through a tunnel, again with a low ceiling. A faint light glowed at the end, and the man hurried forward.
The light was not daylight. It came from the cracks around the trapdoor that led to the boiler room. Elliot’s quarry hesitated, then swarmed up the ladder fixed into the wall.
They or Stacy must have found the entrance before and worked on the door, because the man quickly pushed it open and climbed through. Elliot rushed him, yelling.
The assassin turned around and shot once, but Elliot had expected that. He threw himself out of the way, the bullet missing him and pinging into the wall. The assassin climbed desperately up into the house, Elliot after him.