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Back The Ninth Daughter
Chapters (37)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Page
  3. Dedication
  4. One
  5. Two
  6. Three
  7. Four
  8. Five
  9. Six
  10. Seven
  11. Eight
  12. Nine
  13. Ten
  14. Eleven
  15. Twelve
  16. Thirteen
  17. Fourteen
  18. Fifteen
  19. Sixteen
  20. Seventeen
  21. Eighteen
  22. Nineteen
  23. Twenty
  24. Twenty-one
  25. Twenty-two
  26. Twenty-three
  27. Twenty-four
  28. Twenty-five
  29. Twenty-six
  30. Twenty-seven
  31. Twenty-eight
  32. Twenty-nine
  33. Thirty
  34. Thirty-one
  35. Thirty-two
  36. Thirty-three
  37. Thirty-four

“Everything about you.” Her mind screamed, How could you not have known? and along with Perdita Pentyre’s slashed-up body she seemed to see the black cat Pirate, cleaning himself with the stump of his cut-off paw. To read again the horrible verses about slitting the throat of a red-haired devil so that she would not tempt him again, as he was tempted by the dark-skinned succubus who haunted his dreams.

How could I have sat at Rebecca’s table with this man? Shoulder to shoulder with him, not just one night but dozens? How could I have talked politics with him, commiserated with him about servant-girls, made dinners for him—for him and for the mother he murdered not forty-eight hours ago? How could I not have seen and smelled and felt all that horror inside him?

She knew she should feel something—fear? Rage? Disgust? Hatred? But all she felt was strange, separated from herself, as if she were coming down with fever. For a moment she thought that she stood on the threshold of Hell, speaking to someone just within its doors.

Orion Hazlitt drew breath again, and let it out. “Would that anyone,” he whispered, “knew everything about me.” He turned away.

A part of her wanted only for him to leave. Muldoon, with the blood soaking into his jacket and his eyebrows standing out ghastly in the torchlight against his waxy pallor, could not have saved her from an attack. Yet she knew Hazlitt would not raise his hand against her. She asked, “Where will you go now?”

He looked back. “I should say, to Hell,” he said softly. “Except that I am there. I was raised there. I suppose I’ll go where God sends me, who made me as I am.”

Had he not turned back to speak to her, she thought he might have gotten clear away. The night was pitch-dark, and even with a small lead, he could have been swallowed up by the native woods of his childhood, and so gone on to the West beyond the mountains. But when he looked away from her, and started again for the door, it was to find Lieutenant Coldstone standing in the aperture, his coat as red in the torchlight as the Reverend Bargest’s pooling blood and not a hair of his marble white wig out of place. He had a pistol in his hand and two very large soldiers of the Sixty-Fourth at his back. “Orion Hazlitt?”

Abigail caught the officer’s eye, and nodded, knowing that with him, she handed all his knowledge of the Sons of Liberty over into the hands of the Crown.

“I arrest you for murder, in the King’s name.”

“Don’t worry,” said Hazlitt, when they stood together while two of Coldstone’s men dug a shallow grave. “I am what I am—but I’m not a traitor to Liberty. I’ll tell them nothing.”