“I dunna need anything from you Ned, or any man—I’m a waitress, not a whore!”
As Big Ned’s grip tightened on Alice’s throat, and her spirited responses were reduced to gurgles, Jack decided it was time to intervene.
“I don’t suppose you learned anything from the last time I found you threatening girls, Ned,” Jack said, with a surprising
amount of bravado. He let his voice echo through the alley before he stepped into view. The sun behind him cast a long shadow, almost touching the shadowy depths at the back of the alley. Ned turned to him and blinked, either surprised by the interruption or rendered temporarily blind by the sun behind Jack. But then, the larger man’s brain clicked into function.
“What’s that, then?” Ned called out.
He sported a bruise on one temple—the side of him that had hit the ground during their last encounter—faded to a yellow and green after more than a week. All it did was make him look more intimidating.
“The last time I found you threatening girls. Don’t you remember? Although, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is a hole in your memory. Being knocked unconscious will do that to a man.”
Jack watched as comprehension dawned. Surprisingly, it took less time than expected. However, as Ned focused more on the figure at the entrance of the alley, his grip loosened on Alice, and she managed to wriggle free and run. She didn’t move fast, but her scurrying must have caught Ned off guard, because she managed to make it past Jack and out of the alley and back into the safety of the pub before Ned had even moved.
“’Ere now. You just cost me a pigeon.” Ned narrowed his eyes at Jack.
“According to her, she wasn’t your bird to begin with,” Jack countered, all the blood pumping to his extremities, his body about to jump out of its skin. Instead he took a single slow step forward, and braced himself for the brawling that was inevitable.
But not before one last surprise.
Because just then, not two, but three other men—different men than the superstitious pair that had scrambled from him outside of the opera house, bigger men—stepped out of the shadows at the back of the alley.
“I found some new associations.” Big Ned grinned. “Smarter ones.”
Well, it seemed Big Ned was not only the brawn, but the brains of the operation, Jack thought with a betraying gulp of fear.
It was not the first time in recent history that Jack questioned his own intelligence. But it was perhaps, the strongest example of his newfound ability to get in over his head.
Now in that moment, time did him the favor of freezing in its tracks, allowing Jack a split second to think.
He could run. He had about twenty feet separating them, and he certainly could lose them in the public mire of the docks.
And he did not have the element of surprise or advantage of position in this fight—and it was not as if their last encounter could be considered a fight to begin with. Not that he’d even been in that many fights, period. He was usually the voice of logic, talking an inebriated friend and fellow
Amorata
crew member out of something stupid. But those occasions when he’d had to become involved, the odds were generally more even—certainly not one to four.
But then, Alice’s face shot into his memory. As did the face of the girl being harassed outside of the opera house. And suddenly, out of nowhere, his memory assaulted him with the look that Sarah Forrester had given him, after he had so thoroughly kissed her. All shock and hope all at once. Looking up to her hero. As if she had just realized in that moment that he might be a hero instead of a villain.
Yes, he could have run away.
But he was in no mood for running.
Instead, Jack ran toward them, at ramming speed, closing the gap between him and Big Ned. The alley was narrow, and he had them cornered there. That was his advantage. Another advantage was (he assumed) his greater agility. As he ran toward them, he put his foot up on the rough brick of the alley wall, launching him higher than Big Ned’s head.
How’s that for the element of surprise?
Jack thought spitefully, before tackling Big Ned to the ground.
This is where any advantage Jack could lay claim to ended.
He pummeled at the larger man, his fists making contact with the remains of the bruise on the side of his head, his ribs, his jaw.
Now, unfortunately, when Jack landed on Ned this time, it wasn’t with enough force to knock him out. So he had to deal with the fact that Ned was not an inert mass, and had the
wherewithal (not to mention strength) to turn the tables and flip Jack onto his back.
It was Ned’s turn to land the blows, his meaty fist taking the wind out of Jack when it connected with his solar plexus. He heard a crack when Ned’s fist came down on his nose and Jack tasted blood.
He had to get unpinned; it was his only chance. So as the three other men held back, circling them and laughing like hyenas, Jack wriggled his arms free from under Ned’s weight. When Ned reared back to deliver what was sure to be an almighty blow, Jack brought both of his hands up in a modified upper cut, catching Ned just under the chin and sending him reeling back. Ned’s hold on his legs then loosened enough for Jack to bring up a knee in one swift motion, that single motion that strikes fear into the core of every man everywhere. Jack’s knee connected with his target, and Ned crumpled into a ball and rolled off of Jack.
The hyenas circling them stopped laughing.
Jack scooted back in the alley to where there was a pile of debris from the pub—empty crates and broken chairs, and the like, evidence that this was a lively establishment, indeed.
“Kill … him…” Ned wheezed from his position on the ground.
Jack grabbed the first thing his hand found in the pile of debris—a chair leg—and set to the task of defending himself.
But to no avail. He swung wildly, the chair leg connecting with one of the men in the stomach, another on the back of his shoulder. But three to one were not odds that his inexperience could handle. Eventually one of them caught his modified club mid-swing, and he was forced to again resort to his fists. That but closed the distance between them. Six fists to two.
And three-to-one were not good enough odds.
They got his arms, two of them holding them out as the third man worked his ribs—ribs that had yet to fully recover from his fall out the opera house window. Then, the one who was assaulting his ribs must have gotten tired of all the work involved, because he took a blade from a sheath hidden beneath his coat.
“We softened up the meat enough, boys.” He grinned, his mouth a pit of black teeth and grime. “Time to stick the pig.”
The hyenas began their merciless cackle again, as Ned’s voice came from behind them.
“No, boys. He’s mine.”
Ned lurched to his feet and stumbled over to them. He took the knife out of Black-tooth’s hand, and ran it over the buttons of Jack’s uniform jacket.
“This’ll be fun.” He leaned close, his breath sticky and warm at Jack’s neck. “I ain’t killed a man in uniform since the war.”
“Neither have I,” came a voice from behind Ned.
All five men blinked and turned their attention to the man who had come to stand behind Ned. He was dressed neatly, if plainly, his black hair gleaming with blue light in the setting sun. He carried a brass-handled cane.
A brass-handled cane that he brought down on Big Ned’s temple.
“However, I have the ability to tell a friendly uniform from the enemy,” he drawled, as Ned fell in a heap, face-first into the pile of broken crates, bottles and chair legs.
Then the stranger looked Jack dead in the eye, and quirked a winged eyebrow.
He didn’t have to be told twice.
Using the surprise appearance to his advantage, Jack wrested his arms free from his captors and rammed his body against the thug to his right, slamming him into the wall of the alley. Two precise blows to that man’s head and he was on the ground, unmoving.
Jack then turned his attention to the two men left.
Although, he didn’t really need to.
The stranger was holding his own against them, as graceful with his cane as the most skilled fencer was with a sword. He threw one into the other, both of them hitting the wall hard. One went down, leaving him with one last, slightly deluded and terribly outpaced thug to fight.
But as the stranger traded blows with him, Jack watched as the second, downed thug—it was Black-tooth—staggered to his feet, and went to Big Ned’s prostrate form … and retrieved his knife.
Jack didn’t have time to think out his actions; he just did them. Using all the strength left in his body, he grabbed hold
of the rough bricks of the wall, his fingers and toes finding grooves enough to hold his counter weight. He moved quickly, up, and up again, and just as Black-tooth raised the knife above his head, about to bring it down on the stranger’s back, Jack cried out.
“Oy!”
Black-tooth turned, and Jack launched himself off the wall, tackling Black-tooth to the ground. And just as had happened the last time he had landed on someone from above, Black-tooth was rendered unconscious upon impact with the ground. And the knife skittered across the alley, away from where it would be of use to anyone.
The last thug, who was incidentally the youngest looking, took stock of how the odds had shifted. And ran.
The stranger watched bemusedly as he disappeared out the mouth of the alley.
“Finally, some intelligence.” The stranger shrugged to himself. Then he turned to Jack, and watched, equally bemused, as Jack came to his feet and shook the alley dirt from his cloak and uniform—the former of which was likely beyond repair at this point.
“You should have shown the same intelligence before the fight even began,” the stranger said to him, as Jack approached.
“I’m inclined to agree,” Jack wheezed. “I cannot thank you enough for your intervention,” he said gratefully, and extended his hand. “Lieutenant Jackson Fletcher,” he introduced himself. “A pleasure.”
A sardonic smile stretched the stranger’s features, his eyes taking on the fire of the sunset, making him look like the devil himself. He took Jack’s hand and shook it. But he did not, as expected, let go. Instead, he held it in a death grip, and his voice as cold as ice, introduced himself.
“The Blue Raven. And really, the pleasure’s all mine.”
Shock coursing though his veins was the last thing Jack would remember, before that brass-handled cane came down swiftly upon his head, and blackness overtook him.
“T
HAT’LL
hurt like the son of a bitch it is.”
The words came to him through the filter of haze and time, blackness giving way to a dim gray in his vision.
He was aware of a cold, hard surface, slammed up against his left cheek and shoulder. He could feel the rough drag of rope binding his hands and legs tight. He was strapped to some straight, rigid object—a chair, he imagined—but lying on his side.
He moaned as he came to, completely now, throbbing pain shooting up and down his left shoulder, compressed between his own weight and the floor.
“What?” Jack rasped, his eyes searching the darkness, finally falling on a bit of movement. A flash of gold, catching the faintest stream of light, from a tin lantern hung above him. It was the brass-handled cane, last seen heading swiftly for his left temple, being spun between a pair of hands.
“You fell over. In your chair.” It was the stranger’s voice. He leaned into the light, his expression lacking any humor. “I merely commented that it would hurt.”
“But at least it had the benefit of waking you up,” came another voice, similar, but less stark and forbidding than the
first. And as the owner of that voice stepped into the light, Jack realized, it did not belong to a stranger.
“Sir Marcus Worth!” Jack’s surprise was masked by his pained speech and decidedly uncomfortable position. He had not seen Sir Marcus since their short conversation at the Whitford banquet. “I’d not realized you had returned to town.” Then, because manners were drilled into him as surely as latitude and longitude, he asked, “I take it Lady Worth is well?”
“I am pleased to see you again,” Sir Marcus said, leaning down from his impossible height to find Jack’s eye. “Although, the circumstances are rather unfortunate.”
“Yes, well,” Jack exhaled. “I might have difficulty rising to greet you. Unless you could convince your friend over there to untie me.”
Sir Marcus shot a look to the stranger—whom Jack suddenly remembered with a flash had identified himself as the bloody Blue Raven. A myth made flesh, who quirked his brow in reply to the taller gentleman’s silent inquiry.
One thing was for damn sure. Jackson Fletcher had just gotten himself in way over his head.
Using all the strength he had left, Jack rolled himself onto his front, then reared up onto his knees. As the two gentlemen looked on, decidedly bemused, Jack—still well attached to the chair—jumped from his knees to his feet, and then rocked back just enough to sit down in the chair. Properly this time.
“Agile,” Sir Marcus drawled, taking off his spectacles and wiping them on his coat before replacing them on his nose.
“You should see him climb a wall,” the Blue Raven replied.
“Explains a great deal,” Sir Marcus agreed.
“Like how he managed to climb up the wall of the theatre.”
“And how he managed to climb into Lord Fieldstone’s library, and slit his throat.”
“Which do you think he did first?” the Blue Raven asked, conversationally.
“Oh, the theatre of course. Lord Fieldstone himself had attended that evening, but left early. I suppose you missed your chance with him there,” Marcus replied.
“And then had to sneak into his house later on,” the other man finished. “Lucky his residence is only a few short blocks from the Forresters.”
“Must have been surprising having been walked in on by Miss Forrester while changing costume. You seemed to have talked your way out of that one though. Well done.”
“Thank you,” Jack replied automatically. Then realizing what he said, not to mention being confused beyond all reckoning, he tried to backtrack. “Wait—I didn’t mean that I—”