James Axler – Bitter Fruit

“You could be leading us to our deaths,” Basil said.

Ryan let a cold grin twist his mouth. “If that was the case, you’d already be there. And the deal is, me and my people go into the fortress ahead of you and yours. In case you got any traitors in your own nest.”

“Besides,” J.B. spoke up, “we’re without a doubt a lot better at skulking and chilling than you people. I never lived a day of my life in subjugation. Got a natural disinclination against the whole system.”

The word might have been big, but Ryan knew the Celts recognized it from the bright spots of anger that suddenly flamed their cheeks.

“You’re suggesting that none of us could keep up with you once you’re inside the Prince’s fortress,” Basil replied.

“Smart man,” Ryan commented to Cardamom. “Fireblast, you get a couple dozen more like him, you people might have stood a chance against the bastard Prince without us.”

Basil stepped toward Ryan, sliding his knife into the open, his face knotted in anger.

Ryan didn’t flinch. Before the big man could blink, he was staring down the barrel of the SIG-Sauer. “I figure I could put a round through your eye before you could make a move with that knife. Want to find out?”

“No.” Basil froze in place, but he breathed in great drafts, barely restraining himself.

“You’re one paranoid son of a bitch,” Ryan said. “I don’t blame you. But don’t be a triple stupe. Me and mine can do what you people have only been dreaming of doing for years. Or mebbe come closer to it than you ever would have. And we’re properly motivated. Mildred is one of us. We don’t leave our people behind. You understanding that?”

Reluctantly the big man nodded.

“How about you put the pig-sticker away and I’ll put the blaster away?” Ryan suggested.

Basil pushed the knife back into the sheath under his jacket. “You’re not an easy man to get along with. Or even like.”

“People tell me I got a rough side to me,” Ryan said agreeably, putting the blaster away. “But I always stick to what I say. So when I tell you I’m here for a piece of Boldt and to get my friend out, that’s how it is.”

Basil nodded.

“I figure we got enough problems with this Time of the Great Uprooting you people are concerned about,” Ryan said, “without adding to it.”

“You’re right.”

“I know it.” Ryan swept the four Celt men with his gaze. “Now, about that back way into Boldt’s fortress”

Chapter Twenty-Three

Mildred tried sleeping off and on, but it didn’t work. Her mind stayed busy, putting things together like how the plague would string a new line of death everywhere it touched. That was a recurring thought.

The guards had given her a feather-stuffed pillow and a thin blanket. She’d gotten to keep her clothes, but her weapons were gone. The temperature inside the Celt Prince’s fortress remained stable, so the blanket was more for modesty than for comfort.

Mildred glanced back through the bars set into the floor and ceiling and caught the guard staring at her, his mouth hanging open.

When the man saw she’d spotted him watching her, he hurriedly looked away.

Making herself grin instead of giving in to the sick feeling that knotted her stomach, Mildred kept staring at the man. She could tell that he felt her gaze upon him.

The cell was Spartan. Besides the cot built into the wall, the pillow and the blanket, it contained only a bucket that she could relieve herself in. So far she’d passed on that, but her bladder was protesting fiercely.

She looked at the guard, thinking back on her tour of the ville, about how everyone living there had been white European stock. “You’ve never seen a black woman, have you?” she asked the guard.

He was young, surely no more than a teenager, twenty years old at the most. “No,” he said.

Besides being an egotistical murderer, evidently the elder Boldt had been something of a racist. “You knew there were black people?” Mildred asked.

“I’d heard,” the sec man said.