Adele shot the gunman in the left cheekbone with her pocket pistol. The light was from the west; she hadn’t allowed enough for the low sun. She shot him a second time through the temple as he spun away with a cry, then put a third pellet into the back of his skull while he was still falling. She heard Tovera’s sub-machine gun firing quick, short bursts like the crackling of an extended lightning bolt.
The Mundys were a pugnacious house, quite apart from their political endeavors. Her parents had believed that the best protection they and their offspring had was to be deadly marksmen—not to win duels, but to make it clear to any outraged enemy that challenging a Mundy was tantamount to suicide.
The thug who’d knocked out the Chatsworth doorman dropped his blackjack and fell to his knees screaming. The servants who’d been dicing at the next house had frozen when the first man pulled his gun; now they collided with one another in their haste to open the door and run inside.
Mother would be proud of me, Adele thought as she turned. Those hours in the basement target range hadn’t been wasted. It’s good to learn skills at leisure so that they’re available when circumstances force a career change. . . .
The eight men who’d been behind Adele’s entourage were all on the pavement now. Several were thrashing violently, but those were their death throes. At least one had started to run.
The barrel shroud of Tovera’s weapon was white hot. Like Adele’s pistol, the sub-machine gun accelerated projectiles down its bore with electromagnetic pulses. The pellets’ aluminum driving bands vaporized in the flux, so sustained shooting created a good deal of waste heat. The muzzle of Adele’s own pistol shimmered and would char the cloth if she dropped it back into her pocket.
Tovera turned and shot the thug who was praying on his knees. He sprang backward, a tetanic convulsion rather than the impact of the light pellets directly. Three holes at the base of his throat spouted blood.
Adele grimaced. “Sorry, mistress,” Tovera said as she slid a fresh magazine into her weapon’s loading tube. “But we didn’t need a prisoner. We already know who was behind it.”
Adele had a sudden vision of Marina Rolfe herself kicking on the pavement, spraying blood. Of course knowing Tovera, it might not be anything that quick for the lady who believed the Casaubon family money insulated her from retribution when her thugs crippled the rival who’d ousted her from the status she thought she’d purchased.
“Don’t kill her!” Adele shouted. “Don’t kill her, Tovera, or I’ll hunt you down myself. On my honor as a Mundy!”
Tovera dipped her head in acquiescence. “I understand, mistress,” she said.
A stain was spreading across the trousers of the gunman Adele had killed; his bowels had spasmed when he died. She went down on one knee, still holding the pistol in her left hand. It’d cooled enough that she could put it back in her pocket now, but she was too dizzy to do anything so complex at the moment.
Tovera fitted her sub-machine gun back into the attaché case she’d dropped when she began shooting. Wilsing had picked up his phone and was speaking into it in urgent tones. He didn’t seem affected by what he’d just watched, until you noticed that as he spoke his eyes flicked across building fronts. They always stayed on the second story or above. He wasn’t taking any chance of seeing the carnage surrounding him.
Wilsing hadn’t done anything but stand where he was; none of these deaths were on his conscience. But only a sociopath like Tovera could watch such slaughter and not be affected by it.
The senior footman said, “Mistress, what should we do?” Adele tried to speak but the words caught in her throat. He grabbed her shoulder and shook her. “Mistress, what do we do?”
Adele rose to her feet, putting the pistol away. She hadn’t reloaded, but it had a 20-round magazine. I don’t think I’ll need to kill more than seventeen additional people tonight, she thought. Of course it took me three shots to put the first one down. . . .