coordinated for balance. His last reserves of strength all went into that last dash.
It went by in a flash and he tucked up into a ball in mid-air, rolling through the canvas flap and into the midst of a silent bloody brawl. A blurred vision of torn flesh, faces twisted into snarls of fury and pain, and undulating flames flashed before his eyes. Then he was standing again with the pistol raised, at the ready.
He’s here! The thought rang like a gong through Lucian’s mind.
Sitting right in front of him was a figure draped in a long cloak with a balaclava around his face. Lucian had seen the very same man back at New Canterbury the night Rayford Hubble had been killed, when he and Norman had chased the culprits into the woods to exact revenge. He had seen the man by the firelight then, but it had been Norman who had gotten close, trying like a fool to make peace.
Lucian had been covering him from the treeline. He had been the one to put a bullet in one of the slimy bastards. He had never stared the masked man in the face.
If he had, he would have known him immediately. He would have recognised him just as he recognised him now. James Chadwick’s emerald eyes glowered behind the layers of cloth. Sat on a stool with one leg crossed over the other and a book in hand, as though the riot erupting around him were distant and immaterial, he had been staring at Lucian even as he had first entered the tent, as though he had been waiting for him.
It’s true. God, it’s really true. He’s here.
In the split second he had to react, while aiming the pistol between myriad struggling shadows, Lucian realised that while he had been scheming and plotting all this time—while he had assumed ever since Max had first walked by his side that the one behind all this really had been his brother—he had never truly accepted that James could still be alive.
You’re dead, he thought. I saw you die.
Max’s voice bellowed from the other side of the world, made sonorous and inhuman by the slowness of time’s passing. “LUCIAN, NOW!”
Those emerald eyes flickered to the pistol, then up at him. James didn’t speak a word, but the meaning was clear. Well?
Lucian gritted his teeth and steeled himself. But those eyes had a hold on him; it was as though they gripped his fingers and bent them back away from the trigger. Lucian’s hand shook violently and he willed his finger to squeeze—
Damn it, damn it!
“LUCIAN, KILL HIM!”
Do it or they’ll die. Alex, Norman, Agatha, all of them.
But he’s your brother, another voice whispered insidiously.
I have to!
Alex lied once. He could have lied again. It could all have been a lie.
“LUCIAAAN!”
Lucian bellowed with the fury of a stabbed bull. He felt all the hurt and pain from all his days would pour out through his mouth. Something in his throat tore. All the while the pistol trembled.
Then, with a gasp and a screech of rage, he dropped it. The pistol clattered to the ground, and all the fight drained out of him. He collapsed on his haunches in front of James’s stool and looked up at him.
He closed his eyes, sighed, and hung his head. “Damn it,” he muttered.
The battle inside the tent came to an abrupt end. The hulking brutes he had dragged up here, though they still had the sudden and dangerous strength of kicking mules, couldn’t defy physics; none of them had eaten anything more than thin gruel for days, and after the long walk north and forging by the fires, their energy levels were depleted. Under the prolonged struggle in the tent, their captors had gained the upper hand fast.
They hadn’t realised how weak they were, how tired and uncoordinated. The element of surprise hadn’t been enough. The floor of the tent was painted with blood. They had fought to the last breath and taken at least four men screaming with them to the floor, but those who remained flagged even in the few scant moments Lucian sat crouched on the ground.
Then it was all over: the tent flap was cast wide and at least a dozen more men piled in. The light filtering through the tent walls was cut off by yet more shadows surrounding them on all sides. Only the weak embers of the dying fire illuminated the last-ditch struggle. All the while Lucian squatted immobile on the