The third guard took two bullets. One through the right arm as he dodged sideways, the next penetrating his skull as he tried to duck away to safety.
Harvey fired back at him with tracer bullets that hissed and flared in the darkness, bursting off the wall at Ryan’s shoulder.
The last of the sec men had thrown himself flat on the floor, behind the jerking body of one of his fellows, firing short bursts from some sort of machine-pistol, but Ryan kept moving, dodging in and out of his room. His first shot at the man missed by inches, howling into the blackness at the top of a narrow flight of stairs.
The second bullet from the Colt drilled through the guard’s open mouth shattered his teeth, slicing his tongue to ribbons of bleeding flesh, angling upward through the palate to bury itself into the man’s brain.
“You fired six, brother,” yelled Harvey. “One to go.”
“I reloaded,” Ryan lied. Morse had only been able to steal a single magazine.
At that moment, the fifteen-year-old boy knew his life was measured only in short minutes. His room offered no escape the window opened on a sheer drop of fifty feet to the stone flags of a courtyard. If he could make it past his brother to the stairs, then he might have a slight chance.
With Ryan Cawdor, even at just fifteen, to think was to act.
He dived headfirst through the doorway, rolling over and coming up, his finger on the trigger, squeezing off his last shot, not even waiting to see that he’d missed the crouching figure of his brother. He drew the horn-hafted dagger from his belt and sprinted through the dim light, hurdling the dying guards.
“Bastard!” screamed Harvey trying to shoot him, cursing as the pistol jammed.
“Butcher!” cried Ryan as he closed in on his older brother.
Harvey was taller and stronger than the boy, but he lacked the ruthless determination. As they grappled, he managed to draw his own knife, and Ryan felt a cold fire across his ribs from the steel. But he also drew blood, cutting Harvey Cawdor on the upper arm, making him cry out in pain and shock.
Within seconds he could have killed him. And the rest of his life would have been utterly different. But there had been a sec man on a regular patrol in the corridor a floor beneath, and he’d come running at the sound of gunfire, arriving in time to drag Ryan away from his screaming brother.
The boy was quick enough, wriggling like a gaffed eel, to stab the guard to the heart, feeling the life flow from the man as his grip relaxed. But the interruption had given Harvey the moment he needed.
Ryan lived all his days with that memory. At times he felt he still had both eyes, so vivid was the image of the knife in his brother’s hand, moving toward his face.
Striking.
He saw it. Actually saw the tip of the blade as it grated into his left eye socket. There was liquid trickling down his face that mingled aqueous humor of the eye with a little blood. Surprisingly little blood.
Shocked beyond belief, not realizing the devastating damage the knife had done, Ryan had staggered back, dropping his own dagger, his hands grabbing at his injured eye. Harvey had slashed out once more, aiming for the right eye, missing it by the width of a finger. The steel opened up a great jagged tear from the edge of the eye to the puckered corner of his mouth. This time blood cascaded over his chin and neck, soaking into his shirt.
In agony and desperation, Ryan punched out at the leering Harvey, feeling the man’s nose break like a rotten apple. Then he turned and ran for the stairs, scarcely able to see, moaning from the pain. He never truly knew how he escaped from the fortress at Front Royal that hideous night. Perhaps a servant aided him. There was a door open. Driven snow from the Virginia winter chill on his face. Darkness, stumbling among the tall pines. A hand on his arm.
Had there been a helping hand on his arm?