Adele, her face still as marble, lifted the muzzle of the pistol on which she’d been taking up trigger-pressure. She breathed out, then slipped the weapon away in her pocket.
Daniel managed to rise to his hands and knees. He patted the priest on the back. “You may not be ready to thank me now, Rosario old boy,” he said through dry lips. “But I just saved your worthless life!”
CHAPTER 16
Adele looked at the sky as Daniel and the Chief Engineer made a final inspection of the thrusters. She wasn’t a weather expert, but . . .
She glanced at Hogg, standing beside her on the quay alongside the Princess Cecile. He nodded gloomily. “Aye, be coming down like a cow pissing on a flat rock before long,” he said, answering the unspoken question. “God knows what it’ll be like to take off in.”
Adele frowned, thinking back. She had to restrain herself from getting out the data unit. “We’ve taken off in the rain before,” she said, frowning deeper. “I don’t recall it making any difference, did it?”
“Yeah, well,” Hogg said. “We’ll see.”
The Pansuelas’ open car splashed toward the harbor, flanked by the rainbows its tires cast up. The Klimovs, warned by Vesey on the bridge, appeared in the main hatch to await their visitors. The Count had been adamant about getting out of Pansuela House immediately after the shooting. Valentina had come back to the ship with him, though she’d exhibited more amusement than concern.
“He could’ve got his head shot clean off,” Hogg said, glowering at the Count but obviously referring to Daniel. “And for what? For some wog who thinks he’s something!”
He glared at Adele in outrage. “What I know, mistress, is when two guys have a problem about a girl, then the job of everybloodybody else is to keep outa the way and let ’em settle it! Right?”
“You’d have done the same thing if Daniel instead of the Count had been at risk, Hogg,” Adele said in a neutral tone. She wasn’t willing to have her silence read as assent, but neither did she want to argue with Hogg in his present mood. At least now she knew why he was so angry.
Hogg flashed her a slight, hard smile. “Aye, I would, mistress,” he said, his tone minutely lighter. “But you and I will be a lot older before we see Daniel Leary crawling on his belly to get out of a fight, eh?”
The idea was so incongruous that Adele chuckled. “Yes, there’s that,” she said.
The Pansuelas were coming down the path, followed by a servant carrying a small box under a piece of damask. The Klimovs started across the boarding bridge to meet them on the quay. Somebody representing the ship ought to be present also. . . .
“Besides which,” Hogg said venomously, “nothing more was going to happen to the Count if the young master’d just let things take their course. That so-called priest was going to be sporting a third eyehole before he got another shot off, right?”
“Yes,” said Adele, “he was. But that didn’t happen.”
She cleared her throat. “Daniel is busy under the ship and it doesn’t look like Mr. Chewning is going to appear,” she said. Though it wasn’t the duty of a junior warrant officer, she knew the crew expected Signals Officer Mundy to deputize for the captain when necessary in any sort of social setting. “I suppose I’ll join our employers.”
Adele thought about the night before as she walked to the foot of the boarding bridge where the two parties would meet. She’d killed in the past, and due to the life she now lived—by her own choice—she would very likely kill again. That was part of what she was.
But at the point she stopped caring that she killed, she’d be another creature like Tovera. There’d be an Adele Mundy who was intelligent and cultured, but who was no longer human and who’d never regain her soul.
She wasn’t sure that those close to her, even Daniel, would recognize the difference; but she herself would know . . . and Tovera would know, looking into Adele’s eyes and seeing a mirror.