Broken Crossroads (Knights of the Shadows Book 1) (21 page)

Ioresh blinked in confusion. Conn thumped him on the shoulder. “It takes some time to get used to the dark, twisty way this one's mind works. She's usually right, though, when it comes to understanding another nasty suspicious mind. So tell us why we shouldn't worry about the watchman.”

“He, having what you blunt, honest soldier types would call a nasty suspicious mind, will understand the hold that lock might have on the woman. He also knows I could have left
him
with a cut throat. That would have caused problems for us, but it's still something he has to consider.”

“But why risk everything for a runaway slave who was trying to topple the baron?” Ioresh asked. “I don't know how many people did die in the chaos, and if she'd succeeded, it would have been more. Why let her walk away?”

“Because I have some limits,” Trilisean replied. “If I'd had to kill her, so be it. If she would have wound up in the cells or even on the gallows, I'd have been able to live with that. But if she felt so much hate for a man who bought her to use as a plaything for his jaded entertainment, so much that she thought the city was a small price to pay to see him destroyed, well, I couldn't live with myself if I'd sent her back to that.”

The young man sipped his beer in silence for a moment. “Still seems a shame that the Watch got all the glory. Saving the place should count for something. Key to the city or something.”

“It’s always been my city,” said Trilisean. “Having the key would take the sport out of it.”

About the Author

PATRICK LECLERC MAKES GOOD USE of his history degree by working as a paramedic for an ever- changing parade of ambulance companies in the Northern suburbs of Boston. When not writing he enjoys cooking, fencing and making witty, insightful remarks with career-limiting candor.

In the lulls between runs on the ambulance --  and sometimes the lulls between employment at various ambulance companies-- he writes fiction.

You can find more of it at http://inkandbourbon.com/

Also by Patrick LeClerc

Out of Nowhere

Healer Sean Danet is immortal — a fact he has cloaked for centuries, behind enemy lines and now a paramedic’s uniform.  When Sean heals the wrong man, he uncovers a lethal enemy who holds all the cards. And this time he can’t run. It’s time to stand and fight, for himself, for his friends, for the woman he loves. It’s time, finally, for Sean to face his past — and choose a future.
 

In Every Clime and Place

On the ragged edges of civilization, Corporal Michael Collins has lived those words, taking on riots and evacuations, rebels and terrorists. Asteroid belt patrol is just another deployment.  But soon the platoon of Marines find themselves entangled in the threads of a conspiracy of corporate greed, government corruption, piracy, and a band of war

Time to earn that combat pay, Marines. Welcome to the Suck.

Advancing on Paris

Some 200 years before he became a paramedic in the Boston area, our immortal hero has hidden himself in plain sight in the ranks of Napoleon’s army ... stumbling backwards from the smouldering ruins of Moscow with his musket frozen to unfeeling hands and only hunger keeping him awake as the Cossacks swoop down from the unforgiving countryside to slash at the column's flanks and cut down stragglers.
Patrick LeClerc takes all the sharp wit, wry humor and intelligence of his urban fantasy back in time. Wounded and cut off from the rest of the army, our hero must rely on quick thinking, fast reflexes, natural charm and poorly accented Russian to survive a brutal winter in a hostile country.
Either that, or face a long, cold, lonely walk home.