What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

Wilcox awaited him here on the upper floor. But most men feared the dark, and the source of light from within the building obviously came from the ground floor, site of the warehouse’s two main entrances and the water door.
    Slipping the pry bar between the skylight’s frame and base, Sebastian applied a gentle pressure and felt a slight give as the inner catch began to loosen. He tried again, increasing the pressure, and heard the rending timbers whine in protest.
    He immediately eased up on the bar, the night air cold against hissweat-dampened face. Sitting back on his heels, he considered his options. Impossible to break the skylight’s frame or shatter the glass without announcing his arrival. But besides the trapdoor leading up from the water, there remained only one other entrance to the warehouse: the dockside doors to the upper floor.
    His gaze focused on the crumbling chimney of the fireplace used to warm the warehouse’s small counting office. He stared at it for a moment, then retraced his steps to the adjacent roof. Dropping lightly through the open skylight, he retrieved one of the coils of rope he had seen there, along with a stout length of iron.
    He was conscious, again, of the relentless passage of time. Lashing one end of the rope to the chimney, Sebastian wound the other end around his waist and lowered himself carefully over the warehouse’s back wall, the rough planks of the dock some twenty feet below lost in the mists swirling in from the water. Straightening his legs as a brace, he levered away from the wall and walked crabwise down the rough stone until he came to the double doors that gave access to the upper floor. A stout lintel ran just below the door, forming a ledge against which he was able to brace his weight while he applied subtle pressure to the doors. The panels gave for about an inch, then stopped. These doors, too, were secured from the inside by a bar.
    Shifting his weight, Sebastian retrieved the pry bar from his waistband and thrust its end between the two doors, wedging them open far enough that he was able to slip the length of iron rod in beneath the pivot bar and lever it up. He felt it catch for a moment, then drop away with a clatter that had him cursing silently into the night.
    The near door swung open to a gentle nudge that drew no shriek of protest from the hinges. He eased himself inside, deftly closing the doors behind him against any sliver of light or sudden draft of cold air that might betray his presence . . . if the clatter of the falling bar hadn’t already done that.
    The atmosphere here was redolent with the warm, exotic scent of coffee. Surrounded by towering stacks of bulging burlap bags, Sebastian crept toward the golden pool of light that was the central opening. The well was large, some eight to ten feet across, and configured much likethat of the adjoining warehouse, with a straight flight of stairs running up one side. He could see a huge overhead beam to which was mounted a stout pulley wound with a thick rope. One end of the rope ran down, diagonally, out of Sebastian’s line of vision, but the other hung straight and tautly weighted. As he watched, it quivered slightly, as if the weight suspended from it had moved.
    With a sick sense of dread clawing at his guts, Sebastian crept toward the unrailed edge of the well to where he could look down upon the scene Martin Wilcox had prepared for him.
    A triangle of three lanterns were clustered together, their light shuttered so that they threw only a narrow, concentrated beam that illuminated the area directly before them while leaving the rest of the warehouse shrouded in darkness. And in that shaft of light, Wilcox had hung Kat.
    Her wrists were bound together, and it was from these that she hung suspended from the great overhead pulley, her fingers twisting around to grasp painfully at the rope in an attempt to relieve the strain on her arms and shoulders. As he watched, she pivoted slowly, swinging around so that he could see the fear and the pain in her eyes, her lips drawn back in a harsh rictus around the gag that held her mouth ajar. Her ankles had been tied, too, with more rope wound around her legs, pinning the torn cloth of her velvet riding habit tightly against her.
    She hung suspended some three or four feet above where the floor should have been, except that Wilcox had positioned her directly above the trapdoor to the basin and the trapdoor was now open. Through it, Sebastian