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Back Cardinal Black Save as PDF
Chapters (44)
  1. Title Page
  2. One: Into the Storm
  3. One
  4. Two
  5. Three
  6. Four
  7. Five
  8. Six
  9. Seven
  10. Two: London Calling
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Three: The Malignant Seven
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. Twenty-One
  26. Twenty-Two
  27. Twenty-Three
  28. Four: Squirrels and Cats
  29. Twenty-Four
  30. Twenty-Five
  31. Twenty-Six
  32. Twenty-Seven
  33. Twenty-Eight
  34. Twenty-Nine
  35. Thirty
  36. Thirty-One
  37. Thirty-Two
  38. Five: Revelation
  39. Thirty-Three
  40. Thirty-Four
  41. Thirty-Five
  42. Thirty-Six
  43. Thirty-Seven
  44. About the Author

Black’s gun was drawn. As he reached Julian and took aim, Julian twisted his body and pulled one of the pistol’s triggers. Sparks flew, a small flame gouted, there was an instant of a sizzling sound during which Julian feared the first chamber had misfired … and then the pistol went off with a blinding flash, ear-cracking blast and a whirling dervish of blue smoke.

Lash gripped one of Matthew’s legs and started pulling him out. “Get him! Get him!” Firebaugh screamed, his voice as shrill as a woman’s. Matthew kicked out with his other boot and caught Lash on the side of the head, but it was as a slap against the brow of an enraged bull.

Matthew reached to the seat beside him for his pistol to use as a club, but before he could get it the huge man had nearly climbed into the coach and the vice admiral’s hand closed on the weapon.

“Now!” Lash shouted, a shout of triumph to go with the fierce red gleam of near madness in his eyes, and he lifted the gun and pulled the trigger.

When the blast came, Matthew Corbett had known what was coming. He had thrown both his gloved hands up to protect his face and tried in the instant of recognition to twist his body to one side, but even so the flash was like a sun exploding and his ears rang with the shriek of a thousand of Cardinal Black’s demons. When he dropped his hands and uncoiled, through the roiling smoke he first saw that Samson Lash’s gun hand had been reduced to a red mass of two twitching fingers around a twisted thing that had once been a pistol.

Lash stared at his own misshapen hand. His right eye was a red, sunken hole. Around it the bones of the skull had caved in from the concussion. In his right cheek and forehead above the ruin of the eye had been driven pieces of metal from the gun that had exploded with its three packed charges of lead balls and gunpowder. Blue flames rippled in his beard. Some of the metal bits of the gun had blown out sideways and were imbedded in the walls of the coach, and they too glowed as if on a blacksmith’s forge. Sparks flared and flickered in the air, which smelled not of a winter’s snow but of summer’s hot lightning.

It also smelled of blood, scorched flesh and burning hair.