What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

basin; half-fainting from loss of blood and weighed down by the heavy velvet train of her riding habit, Kat would surely drown.
    All around them, the warehouse and its contents were going up like a pitch-soaked torch. Here on the floor, near the open trapdoor, the air was still relatively clear, but it wouldn’t be for long. They had to get out, now.
    From the sound of Wilcox’s hacking cough, Sebastian realized the man was moving again. The bar on the dockside doors gave a metallic shriek as it was yanked back. For a moment, the swirling black smoke parted. He saw the doors open, a man’s form showing dark and solid against the foggy night sky. Then it was gone.
    Kat’s fingers curled around Sebastian’s arm, gripping tight. In the eerie red glow of the fire he could now see her quite clearly. The entire side of her riding habit was dark with blood.
    “Christ.” No longer constrained by the fear of drawing Wilcox’s gunfire, Sebastian moved quickly, tearing long strips of cloth from her train and tying them tightly around the wound. “We’re going to have to follow him out that door. You realize that, don’t you?”
    Kat shook her head, her eyes wide in a pale face. “No. He still has a pistol. If we go through that door, he’ll be waiting for us.”
    Sebastian gathered her into his arms. “We’ve no choice.” He had to shout to be heard above the roar of the fire. “The doors to the lane are padlocked from the outside.”
    “Then break the lock.”
    Sebastian glanced toward the front of the building. Already, the smoke was so thick that each breath burned his throat and tore at his lungs. “I can try.”
    Coughing badly, he carried her to where she could catch a breath of the fresh air flowing in from the gap beneath the two front doors. Casting about in the thickening smoke, he found a heavy sea chest, bound with brass but small enough that he could grasp it with both hands. Using the end of the chest as a battering ram, he slammed it against the juncture of the heavy wooden doors. His aim was to break the lock, or at least tear off the hasp. He could feel the heat of the flames searing his back, sucking the air from his lungs. Gritting his teeth, he slammed the chest into the doors a second time, and heard a satisfying crack.
    With all his strength, he rammed the doors a third time. The chest shattered in his hands.
    “It’s no use,” he cried, heaving the chest aside. “We have to go out the back.”
    He bent to lift Kat into his arms, but she clutched his chest and shook her head. “Leave me. Without me, you can slip through the water door.”
    He met her gaze, his chest jerking for breath beneath her spread fingers. “I’m not leaving you. So you may as well give over trying to be so bloody noble and simply accept that it’s my turn.”
    There was an instant’s silence; then he heard her answering laugh, faint but true.
    With a tearing roar, the great overhanging beam from the central well collapsed in a violent shower of sparks. “Bloody hell,” Sebastian swore.
    Clutching Kat to him, dodging fiery bales and falling debris, he sprinted across the warehouse floor. For one wretched moment he thought he’d become disoriented and lost his way in the thickening smoke. Then he saw the open doorway framing a rectangle of gray mist beyond, and he burst through into the cool, lifegiving air of the night.
    He’d expected to find Wilcox there on the dock, beside the basin. But the dock stretched out empty before them.
    “He must have heard you trying to break through the front doors and gone around,” said Kat, coughing badly.
    “Maybe.” Sebastian’s own voice was a pained rasp. Or maybe Wilcox was simply waiting for them at the end of that long dark alleyway that ran along the north side of the warehouse.
    “Set me down. I can walk,” she said.
    “Are you certain?”
    “Yes.” She pushed away from him so that her feet slid to the ground. Then she said, “Sorry. A miscalculation,” and fainted dead away.
    Swinging her up into his arms again, Sebastian turned south, away from the alley and the dangers that might lurk there. He’d thought the pile of crates at the juncture of the two buildings only partially obstructed the dock, but he saw now that he was wrong, that the way was blocked completely. He had no choice but to go north.
    By now, the flames were shooting from the warehouse’s upper story.One by one, the windows began to shatter, the night filling with the sound of