Archer's Lady: Bloodhounds, Book 3 (3 page)

The command deserved an answer. “Fuck you.”

The sneer deepened even as helpless fear mounted in the ghoul’s eyes, some wisp of the spirit fighting to escape its master’s clutches. A useless struggle, one crushed as the vampire’s laughter echoed through Archer’s mind. “Leave, and perhaps we’ll simply kill the women and children.”

“Where I’m from, that’s not incentive. Guaran-damn-teed to piss off the menfolk, though.”

This time the laugh held a sickening edge, sadistic and hungry. “A quiet, gentle death is gift. There are so many ways to feed on the innocent. Their fear and their pain and their fragile bodies.”

A ghoul could be a vampire’s voice and eyes, even their hands, but all that puppetry took its toll in distraction and slow reflexes. Archer bit back a snarl and slipped his hand into the small pack slung over his shoulder. “Lots of ways to kill vampires too, not to mention their ghouls.”

The ghoul crooked a finger in awkward invitation. “Come in, fool. Come and see how many we are. How many are yet to come.”

“I have a better idea.” His hand closed around a familiar shape, smooth and warm, and he thumbed out the pin before pulling the grenade free of the bag. “Let’s turn up the lights.”

He threw the grenade hard, and it whistled past the ghoul’s head, glowing even in the midday sun.

One of Satira’s latest inventions, and it worked like a charm. He counted two quick heartbeats before sunlight exploded in the cave, a flash bright enough to illuminate five figures.

It didn’t last long—twenty seconds at the outside—but it took less than five for the screams to start. Even the ghoul began to sizzle, and he cried out as he stumbled away from the cave’s opening—only to stop short on the wicked end of Diana’s blade.

“Five vampires and half a dozen ghouls,” she muttered. “That’s about right for a raid. They must have been planning one for tonight.”

Archer watched one flaming figure and then another drop to dusty stone before vanishing in a puff of smoke and ash, leaving only bones behind. “Not anymore.”

“Holy hell.” Jacob’s boots skittered over pebbles as he scrambled to their sides. “What
was
that? Some sort of bloodhound weapon?”

“A little something our resident inventor put together for us.”

“Do you have another one?”

“Not on me.” He had more supplies, everything Satira had been able to shove off on him, stored in his packs at the saloon. “We’d better get back and prepare everyone.”

Diana squinted into the sun as she turned and looked across the prairie. “You think they’ll mount a search?”

“I think they know what happened.” They always seemed to, no matter the distance or circumstance. “I think they’ll come for vengeance. An eye for an eye, make us pay.”

One way or another, the gangs were coming.

Hope had returned to Crystal Springs.

Grace hovered just inside the room that housed the boiler, enjoying the warmth of the freshly fed fire at her back. The bright electric lights twinkling from the pair of impossibly tacky chandeliers were a reminder of a better time, a time when this little border town had boasted its own inventor and dozens of luxuries that made eking out a life here more pleasant than one might expect.

She’d seen more impressive creations. Carriages that required no horses to pull them, great ships that sailed the clouds above New Orleans. Sometimes for no more reason than because they could, even if it cost a fortune.

Here, in Crystal Springs, everything had a purpose. The lights twinkled merrily, illuminating happy faces as they listened with rapt attention to Jacob’s latest—and most heartily embellished—retelling of the great battle against the vampires. Elaborate copper piping lined the walls, carrying hot water to the rooms above and heating the dining area to a comfortable temperature, even with the evening chill settling outside.

The hero of the evening had been enthroned at the finest table. Archer looked vaguely uncomfortable with all the attention, including the fawning from the working girls who’d gathered along with everyone else.

He almost looked the way she felt when terrified children clung to her skirts or adults turned to her for comfort or wisdom. As if the burden of respect weighed far heavier than the responsibilities of leadership.

Whimsy, to see her own insecurities in a man who inhaled confidence and exhaled dominance. He might be uncomfortable playing the hero, but she had no doubt he expected absolute obedience from them all.

An innocent schoolteacher wouldn’t know enough to blush at the thought. And if Grace wanted anyone to believe she
was
one, she’d do well to act with more restraint than Lucy, who might have slid under the table and done her best to get her face in Archer’s lap if Cook hadn’t hauled her off to the kitchen by her ear.

In another time, in another place…

Grace shivered and forced her gaze away. She’d had hands like Archer’s in her hair. Rough and demanding, strong and unforgiving. She knew how seductive it could seem, and how disappointing it could be.

But when she looked back, he was stubbornly avoiding eye contact with another of the girls, one who’d undone the top of her bodice in a clear attempt to catch his attention. The man didn’t look like a rough soldier hungry for a quick tumble as a reward for a battle won.

He looked a little like someone in need of rescue.

Grace positioned herself directly between Archer and his ardent admirer. “Have you had enough to eat?” she asked him.

“Sleep,” he answered immediately. “I could use that more than anything. I’m tuckered out.”

He must have ridden through the night, or at least set out before dawn. After a morning checking their fortifications and an afternoon battling ghouls and vampires, it was no wonder he was weary. “Has Cecil shown you to a room yet?”

“No.” He rose, every line of his body taut weariness. “Would you be so kind?”

“Of course. I’m sorry, I should have thought.” She might have, if she hadn’t been avoiding him so carefully, still ashamed of how naked she felt under his knowing gaze.

Turning, she wove a path through the scattered tables to the far side of the room, where a pair of staircases ran along the back wall in opposite directions. The one on the right led to the balcony built high on three of the walls of the dining area, one lined with small doors leading to rooms that had served one purpose—one not conducive to sleep.

Grace took the staircase to the left, the one that disappeared into the closed area above the kitchen. Four doors stood along this hallway, each leading to a fine suite of rooms with a well-appointed bathroom and a steam-operated dumbwaiter that could deliver a hot meal straight from Cook’s kitchen.

“This one’s mine,” she told Archer, pressing her hand to the door closest to the staircase. “The others are empty. Cecil sleeps with Cook in her rooms behind the kitchen, and the children sleep together in the private dining room. We moved the beds there, since it’s the only room with no windows.”

Archer laid his hand on the door next to hers. “Is there an alarm system? Some sort of early warning in case of intrusion?”

Embarrassment flooded her, bringing heat to her cheeks. “The former owner of the saloon paid for one, but he died in the first raid. None of us are sure how to operate it. There’s a bit of calibration necessary and we didn’t…” She felt stupid, even if a schoolteacher wouldn’t have been expected to understand the intricacies of a Guild inventor’s work. “We nailed the windows shut.”

Archer only yawned and nodded. “I’ll look at it in the morning, but damned if I—I mean, I don’t know that I’ll be able to do anything with it, either.”

His weariness roused a tenderness inside her vast enough to obscure her self-consciousness. “Would you like me to show you where everything is in your room?”

“I can manage, thank you.” He turned the knob but didn’t push open the door. “You’ll have to tell me the truth eventually, you know.”

Her heart pounded its way into her throat. “What truth?”

He regarded her thoughtfully. “Why you really didn’t leave.”

Not the truth she’d clutched so closely that even Diana didn’t know the whole of it, but a precious truth nonetheless. Perhaps one she could offer him, though. A token of her gratitude, and of her commitment. “Do you believe in redemption, Archer?”

He smiled, secret and knowing. “No. But for you, I might make an exception.”

That smile shook her. Melted her, turned her insides warm and liquid, and no one could fake innocence when she wanted to fall into a man just to remember what it felt like to be alive. “The border is about second chances.” She didn’t know if she was reminding him, or herself. “I’m a good schoolteacher. I’m almost a lady here.”

“And I’m a good bloodhound,” he murmured. “Nowhere near a gentleman, though. Remember that, Grace.”

How could she forget? “I know. Gentlemen don’t smile like that.”

“No, they don’t.” He slipped into the bedroom and closed the door behind him.

She couldn’t retreat to her bed, not when only a thin wall would separate them as they slept. How much privacy could such things afford her, when bloodhounds were said to have animal-sharp senses? Would he hear every too-quick breath, every betraying sigh?

Unsettled—and unaccountably aroused at the thought—Grace retreated down the stairs. Better to spend a few hours playing the part of the sweet, innocent schoolteacher than give in to the urges that had left her in such terrible need of redemption to begin with.

Chapter Three

The sound of knuckles on wood jerked Grace out of blissful sleep and left her scrambling for the watch she kept on her bedside table. “Who is it?”

Diana’s voice drifted through the door. “It’s me. Jesus, are you still asleep?”

“Come in.” With the curtains drawn, Grace had to squint at the elegant little timepiece, one she’d stolen from the items left behind by the town banker. He’d undoubtedly had a collection, but this one was perfect, engraved in gold and whisper silent, with only the softest tick to lull her to sleep every night.

Except now it declared the time as half past nine. Surely that couldn’t be correct. “I think my watch is broken,” she told Diana as the door opened.

Diana laughed as she dropped to the end of the mattress. “Why, because it says you’re a lie-abed?”

“Am I one?” Grace settled the watch back in its usual place with a sigh. “I suppose it was inevitable. Too much work and too little sleep for far too many days.”

“Mm-hmm.” The other woman tilted her head. “Your hound fixed Hamish’s security system. If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was intimately familiar with that sort of thing. Shutting them down, perhaps?”

“Or it’s simply a skill in which bloodhounds are trained.” It would make sense, after all. The Bloodhound Guild had always lured the best and brightest away to serve as their inventors. Grace had sat through Jacob’s final retelling of Archer’s heroic deeds, complete with his worshipful description of a weapon that exploded in shards of sunlight.

“You might be right.” Diana’s shrewd gaze clearly showed how she doubted the concession.

To Diana, it would be a concern, but Grace found the idea rather intoxicating. It took a keen mind and nerves of steel to rob banks along the borderlands, where bankers paid for complicated, customized security systems that cost more than a farmer could make in half a dozen years and were liable to kill any who tampered with them.

It also took incredible physical strength, which was the main reason Grace had never tried her hand at it—and
that
bit of knowledge was one she couldn’t share. “Whatever he was, he’s a bloodhound now. And a veritable titan of one, if you listen to Jacob. How much of that is a scared young man latching on to a hero?”

Diana shrugged. “The man’s smart, and no coward in a fight, that’s for sure.”

Grace couldn’t hide from him by staying in bed all day. Pushing back the blankets, she eased her feet to the floor and smoothed her hands over the wrinkled cotton of her thick nightgown. “We didn’t have much time to talk yesterday.”

“Should have plenty of time today. Your hound needs someone to show him around.”

“I meant us, Diana.” Grace closed her eyes, unable to stare at the cheerful blue wallpaper while she laid her heart bare. “I almost ran. I almost abandoned you. I’m a coward, and I’m sorry.”

“I know,” she murmured. “I saw you go to the stable every morning. I figured you’d do what you had to do.”

It took courage to inch her hand across the quilt until she found Diana’s, but the woman clasped her fingers easily enough. “You’ve never asked,” Grace murmured. “You saw through me from the start, but you never asked.”

“Why should I? You’ll tell me what I need to know.”

“Yes.” She squeezed her friend’s hand. “I’m not a good woman. Maybe I’d started to believe that I was, living here so long and being treated with respect. These are good people who have treated me well, and I don’t want to hurt them.”

“Then don’t,” Diana urged. “I won’t stop you from leaving, Grace. I don’t believe in that. People are who they are—or who they
want
to be. Either one, you just have to choose.”

Grace laughed, and it sounded as helpless as she felt. “Archer sees through me too. I must be more transparent than glass.”