The de facto spokesman’s bravado lent the others courage. They snickered and two more brandished sidearms. Nathaniel braced his weight on his cane and shrugged.
“Shoot then, and let’s have an end to this. I grow bored.” He closed his eyes for a moment and shifted, feeling his armor come alive and slither across his skin. As with the time before this, and the dozen more before that, yelps of horror and the predictable lock and whine of a disrupter just before it fired met the action.
He knew what they saw—a white haired, pale-eyed demon clad in armor that writhed and hissed and snapped fanged jaws in a Medusa dance around his body.
A miasma of green light filled his vision before a blunt force smashed into his chest. Nathaniel stumbled, the breath rushing out of him in a hard gasp. He righted himself with the aid of his cane. Mercurial rays that would have killed a normal man ricocheted against his rib cage and darted through his altered veins in a shower of razor-edged splinters. The living armor pulsed with verdant luminescence, shifting back to rigid angles and points that set him aglow like an ethereal gasolier.
“For God’s sake, shoot it again!”
More blasts, more green light. Nathaniel shuddered from the agonizing shock of the blows but remained standing. All his focus centered on containing the energy suffusing his body, shifting and shaping it until it emerged from his chest in a rotating sphere of fire. The orb hovered between him and the resurrectionists, tiny bolts of lightning arcing along its surface.
“Dust thou art.” Nathaniel blew gently and the sphere exploded, blasting outward in a blinding surge.
It enveloped the men in radiant flame. Their screams cut through the night breeze, dampened to whimpers by the rays’ effects. Fabric and flesh melted away from bone that darkened to coal and finally disintegrated altogether until what were once six men became nothing more than the scrapings from a dirty fireplace.
Nathaniel ran the tip of his cane through one of the ash heaps, pushing aside the melted scraps of destroyed disrupters. “And unto dust shalt thou return,” he whispered.
The sepulchral chorus chanted in his ears once more. “They are gone. They are gone.”
“Yes, and good riddance.” He suffered no guilt for dispatching the vile creatures that desecrated the dead and turned them over to men who would make them lurching horrors. He wiped the cane on the dew covered grass. And people called him monster.
He left the ashes where they’d fallen. Wind and rain would wash them away until they became part of cemetery earth and the gardeners would dispose of their melted tools. He paused at Kenward’s grave. “Be at peace, friend.” He scooped up another handful of petals. Frail slips drifted between his fingers as he carried them through the graveyard to the caretaker’s cottage.
There would be no more thieves tonight. They were a territorial lot and staked their claims on certain burial grounds on certain nights. Once others discovered this band no longer offered a challenge, a new group would take their place to do the nefarious Dr. Tepes’s work. Nathaniel snorted derisively at the pompous pseudonym.
A carafe of wine awaited him at the house, left by the wife of the rector who attended the adjacent chapel. No amount of wine or ale would ever dull his senses again, but he found some lost measure of humanity in the simple act of enjoying a libation.
The cottage had once been a homey place, despite its location. Now it reflected the cemetery’s hushed solemnity. Nearly empty of furniture, the rooms lay in darkness, broken only by bars of moonlight filtered through panes of cloudy glass. Dust drifted across Nathaniel’s feet and rose in a murky cloud when he sat at a rickety table in what was once the parlor and poured wine into a pewter chalice.
Cool on his lips, the wine was sweet and tasted of summer—or what he remembered of summer. An image spun before his eyes, of a brown-eyed girl with an easy smile and long dark hair that glinted red in the sun.
“Lenore.” White rose petals danced across the table, and the name echoed in the void.
CHAPTER THREE
“Would you think poorly of me if I confessed to the temptation to drown my mother in her koi pond?” Lenore eyed her hostess over the rim of her pint glass and wiggled her eyebrows.
Nettie Widderschynnes, captain of the Pollux, grinned and raised her glass in a toast. Lamplight winked off the bits of beads, shell and ribbon entwined in her blonde braids. She’d greeted Lenore’s sudden arrival on the ship with a spine-cracking embrace and the offer to share a pint in her quarters. “I’d think you were your father’s daughter. I’m surprised he didn’t do it years ago.”
A fundamental traditionalist, Jane Kenward had loathed Nettie at first sight and considered her a low-class, immoral strumpet who dirtied their doorstep each time she appeared at Kenward’s workshop to do business. Nettie returned her contempt in equal measure.
A formidable woman of unknown age and even more obscure birth, Nettie Widderschynnes had risen from the gutters of the Abyss to become one of the airship fleet’s most experienced captains. She ran her ship with a strict hand and carried a reputation as a fearless captain and even more ruthless business woman. She had no patience for traditionalists like Jane and told her so in no uncertain terms, forever earning the other woman’s enmity.
Lenore adored Nettie for all the reasons Jane abhorred her. Encouraged, albeit on the sly, by her father, she had pretended to be Captain Widderschynnes when she was a child, guiding the Pollux on her many runs, capturing cargo and enemy dirigibles for the king. She’d dreamed of joining Nettie’s crew, but her mother’s stringent disapproval and the progression of her father’s illness had insured it remained a dream. Until now.
She put her glass down and folded her hands in her lap, once more silently rehearsing what she planned to say. A golden tide of ale rocked in the glass as the airship gently yawed at its mooring mast.
Nettie eyed her, one eyebrow lifted. “Now this should be good. Every time you do that, I know you’re about to spin some scheme. Spit it out, girl.”
Lenore took a deep breath and spilled her words in a torrent before she lost courage. “Papa was a great inventor but no banker. There’s debt—a lot of it. The creditors will seize his workshop and everything in it to pay what is owed.” She took a quick sip of beer before continuing.