The Serpent's Daughter (36 page)

The mass of rubble and rock proved itself alive to the ear, as well. Scurrying and scratching came from above, the more fearful noises rolled up from below as it settled into itself. Hollow echoes like that of decomposition erupted from the bowels of underground passages. Something fluttered from an upper corner nook. A restless stork? An owl? A
jinn?

Jade watched from the nearest corner as Bennington prodded Mohan with a gun and muttered threats around the old rampart and forward into the ruins. Still Mohan held back, clutching his own protective talisman. He seemed to be weighing the danger of torture from Bennington against that of a
jinn
angered at losing its treasure. You could dig up treasure during the day if you had salt and iron to protect yourself, but not at night when the
jinni
were awake. She heard a painful outcry, quickly stifled. Then the pair, like the cry, were swallowed up inside El Badi. Jade followed.

Once they were inside, not even the city’s torches assisted them, and the last sliver of moon wouldn’t rise until after two a.m. Only a myriad of stars lent illumination. Anyone without the reflective eyes of nocturnal animals was out of luck. Jade fingered her flashlight, tempted to switch it on and muffle the light under a shirttail, but in this blackness even that would be a dead giveaway to Bennington. Luckily Bennington also carried a flashlight in his left hand and turned it on. Something small rustled in the weeds as the beam swept across it. Higher up in the walls, two large round eyes glowed back at them. They blinked independently, then disappeared as the disturbed owl took off.

“Where is it?” hissed Bennington. “I’m losing patience with you.”

“We should wait until daylight,” Mohan said, his voice tremulous with fear. “It is too dangerous at night. I have no salt or iron with me.”

Bennington’s right hand waved a tiny revolver, a Derringer. “I have plenty of iron here as well as lead. And there’s more iron hanging from my belt. But it’s not the
jinni
that will taste it if you don’t give me that amulet.”

“It is not for you,” protested Mohan. “I promised the dark lady. She will be angry.”

“You have no idea how angry,” agreed Bennington with a chuckle. “Which is why you should give it to me now. I promise she’ll get it.”

Still Mohan stalled. “It’s too hard to see. I might miss the spot.”

Bennington shoved the flashlight in Mohan’s hands. “Move!” he commanded. “You’re too much of a coward here to have gone very far even during the daytime. So I know it’s close.” Jade heard a click as Bennington pulled back the hammer on the Derringer. “Find it.”

Mohan moved up against the wall by the old entrance and followed it, counting paces aloud. Then, having identified which corridor to take, he turned left and walked through a pavilion and entered what was once an opulent courtyard of sunken gardens and pools. Jade crept up to the side of them, waiting for Mohan’s next move. Rather than proceed farther into the courtyard, he stopped and strained his eyes in the blackness, looking for a landmark.

Bennington obliged by sweeping the area with the flashlight. Jade dropped and lay flat on the ground behind a long untended shrub and waited until the beam passed overhead. Then she peeked through the weeds.

The Berber apparently recognized a spot, for he went to a chunk of fallen
pisé
near one of the smaller pools. He stopped only fifteen yards from Jade’s hiding place. Bennington followed and stood close behind him. Mohan dropped to his knees and rolled the chunk aside, then dug with one hand, the other still clutching his own amulet. Jade caught snatches of words, but whether they were incantations or pleas, she couldn’t tell. Soon the glint of silver winked back from Bennington’s light. Mohan had unearthed the talisman, the silver box carried by his tribe’s
kahina
since the days when Carthage was founded. From one of the near walls, a Little Owl sounded its questioning
kee-uk
from the opposite wall.

“The
jinni
are angry,” wailed Mohan.

In a flash, Jade’s dream returned to her: the stone walls, the talisman in the earth—it pointed to this ruin. It was the remainder of the dream that terrified her now. She’d seen the talisman replaced by the withered body of a man.
My stars! He’ll kill Mohan!
With this thought came another, more fleeting recollection. In the dream, it was a female form that made the man wither. The idea tickled at Jade’s subconscious.

There was no time to spend on the second thought. Mohan’s life was at stake. Time to end this once and for all. Jade drew the Arab guard’s flintlock pistol and took a bead on Bennington’s right hand, the one holding the pistol. Jade’s other hand held her flashlight, her finger poised to switch it on. She counted on Bennington’s attention being focused on the amulet. She hadn’t reckoned on what came next.

As soon as Mohan picked up the amulet and stood, Bennington pulled the knife from its sheath and rammed it into Mohan’s chest. The Berber dropped to his knees, the light falling from his left hand. His right hand still gripped the amulet as he clutched his chest in disbelief.

That’s when Jade turned on her light. Bennington wheeled around and squinted against the beam just as Jade fired.

CHAPTER 26

—The Traveler

AS SOON AS SAM LANDED THE PUNCH, he knew it wasn’t enough. De Portillo reeled under the blow, but didn’t fall. Sam stepped up and aimed a left for the jaw, but de Portillo twisted away and escaped with only a glancing blow across his left cheek. Sam’s immediate jab with his right, however, landed squarely on de Portillo’s nose.

Like a Spanish bull, de Portillo didn’t go down easily. Sam’s element of surprise gone, de Portillo fought back with ferocity and the advantage of having little conscience. He lashed out with his right foot and kicked Sam on his right shin with the intention of cracking a bone.

“You’ll have to do better than that, man,” said Sam as he took the blow without so much as a wince of pain. “It’s hard to break an oak leg.”

De Portillo, now thoroughly enraged, roared with anger and charged Sam. Sam met the rush and braced both hands against de Portillo’s shoulders. Whatever advantage de Portillo had in size and anger, Sam had more than gained with Jade’s good-bye kiss. When the Spaniard pushed Sam over backwards, Sam took the fall with his left foot firmly planted in de Portillo’s gut. The lighter American used his enemy’s momentum and pushed up and over, before rolling off his shoulder to one side.

He heard de Portillo land with a heavy thud, the side of his head hitting the fountain’s marble rim. Sam sprang to his feet, ready to launch himself on top of the fallen man, but the Spaniard didn’t stir. Sam’s tanned, angular face paled as he worried that the man was dead. He hadn’t intended to kill him, just knock him senseless. Then to his relief he saw de Portillo’s chest rise and fall.
Good. He’s still alive
.

He was in the process of deciding what to do with him when Bachir ran in. Sam swiped his unruly forelock out of his eyes and to the side. “Help me here, Bachir,” he said in his muddied French.

Bachir took one arm and Sam the other and, together, they dragged de Portillo to an empty room similar to the one the guard was in, and bolted the door on him.

“Where is Jade’s mother?” Sam asked after they had de Portillo safely squared away.

Bachir rolled his eyes like he’d never met anyone quite as exasperating as Inez. “Jade,” he answered.

Sam laughed. “Two peas in a pod.” But his laugh was cut short as he remembered he didn’t know where Bennington was, and so consequently where Jade had gone. He grabbed Bachir by the shoulders and faced him. “Do you know where they went?”

Bachir nodded. “El Badi. Come.”

The old flintlock went off with a loud, pulsing
whoomp
that nearly muffled the pop from Bennington’s little Derringer. Jade didn’t need to hear the return fire, though, to know to duck. She had seen the hatred that quickly replaced Bennington’s initial shock at seeing her free. But even then the flintlock’s recoil took away the necessity of ducking by knocking Jade on her backside. She hit the ground, rolling. The return shot passed over her head.

Bennington’s face writhed in pain and as the lead ball clipped his hand a high scream erupted, a scream that Jade could barely hear after the flintlock’s low percussive jolt in her ears. Bennington’s little pistol flew from his grip and clattered into an empty pool on the other side of the aisle. Jade heard it plunk into water. Pool’s not quite empty, she thought as she turned onto her knees.

When Jade got to her feet she realized she’d dropped her own flashlight. It must have landed on the switch, because it went out. Bennington’s light was still on, its glow hazy in the powdery smoke that belched from her pistol’s muzzle. Jade scrambled to her feet as Bennington retrieved the light from the ground. He pulled the amulet from Mohan’s dead fingers and ran deeper into the ruins, leaving Jade engulfed in darkness.

Most ears would have lumped the nearly simultaneous gunshots as one shot with an echo. Inez had more familiarity with firearms. She heard two distinct reports; the deep, booming pulse of a black-powder weapon and the shorter pop of a small-caliber pistol.
Who fired first?
Inez didn’t think Jade had carried a pistol, especially not one of those little pocket-sized models, but she might have taken the guard’s flintlock. That meant Jade had fired first. It also meant she was out of shots unless she had a brace of pistols.

Inez hesitated by the gates into the ruins and listened for the sound of a groan or anything that indicated someone wounded. Nothing. But that was no relief. It might mean her daughter was dead.
Impossible. Isn’t it?
Somehow Jade always seemed indestructible, surviving throws by unbroken horses and bulls, falls off roofs and out of trees, and one fistfight with an older boy who made the mistake of saying that girls couldn’t shoot straight.

Inez’s fear for her daughter rose to a panic. She ran into the ruin in the direction she’d heard the shots and tripped over Mohan’s corpse.

It took several minutes of blinking before Jade’s eyes lost the afterburn from the flintlock’s flash. She hoped it was worse for her enemy, but didn’t count on it. In the meantime she tracked by sound, listening for any footfalls. Bennington would first put distance between them, but Jade knew that once the noises stopped she needed to be more cautious. Bennington’s gun might be down in a watery pit, but that might not be his only weapon.

As she crept along, that vision from her dream tickled her brain again. It made a little more sense now. After all, Mohan kept saying he had promised the amulet to “her” and not to Bennington. Jade surmised that it was Lilith who originally bought Mohan’s supply of stolen bracelets. He probably told her of this wonderful silver amulet and took it, intending to sell it to her. So if Lilith was behind the initial theft, she’d essentially sealed Mohan’s doom even if she were hiding safely away on a ship disguised as Bennington’s aunt. But as logical as it sounded to Jade’s head, her gut reaction was that it was all wrong.

Jade’s left knee ached fiercely and she threw a glance to the star-studded sky.
Okay, rain’s not imminent. That means
someone’s trying to kill me.
She almost laughed.
Tell me something I don’t know
. She started to take another step and hesitated. Maybe the knee could be useful after all. Maybe it would hurt less if she were farther away from Bennington. In other words, she could gauge the pain and play a game of “hot and cold” like children did.

Right, and get killed for making a wrong choice
. She decided to find out if Bennington had another gun. Jade groped around on the ground until she found a handful of broken stones and brickwork. She tossed one somewhere in the direction she’d last heard any noise. No one fired. She tossed another a few yards in front of her first throw. This time her efforts were rewarded by the scuffing of leather soles over stone pavement. Bennington was headed towards an open arch on the other side, exiting the courtyard. Jade followed, careful to avoid the sunken pools around her.

The pain increased at the arch entrance.
I’m getting warmer
. What if Bennington was waiting on the other side? Jade pulled the guard’s curved blade and gripped it in her right hand, hilt facing forward, the blade paralleling her forearm with the unsharpened edge against her skin. She took a step towards the arch. A stabbing pain in her left knee held her back.
Can’t wait here forever
. Taking a deep breath, Jade mentally readied herself for an attack on the other side, and darted through the arch, shrieking like a banshee to unnerve her opponent.

A suggestion of movement to her right caught her eye, a shadow within a shadow. She wheeled, keeping her knees bent and ready to dance off to either side. Bennington’s flashlight flared on, its beam hitting Jade’s eyes. The light burned painfully in her fully dilated pupils, and Jade fought the urge to shut her eyes. Instead, she kept her fists up in a boxer’s stance and focused at the ground in front of her. The decision saved her life.

The new afterburn image on her retina reduced everything directly in her line of vision to a black hole. That meant she never saw Bennington’s feet. But as long as she used her peripheral vision, she could see the blade driving down towards her left. Her left arm swung up, blocking the blow by pushing up against Bennington’s right arm. His left hand still aimed that blinding beam at Jade’s face. Her right hand shot out and twisted clockwise as she dug the tip of the curved blade into Bennington’s right elbow.