What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

breaking glass as the splintered shards rained down around them. Sheltering Kat with his own body, broken glass crunching beneath his boots, Sebastian ran. As he ducked past the mouth of the alleyway, he saw it filled with smoke and leaping flames from the burning building beside it. If Wilcox had been there, waiting, the heat and breaking glass would have driven him back.
    The fire roaring behind him, Sebastian kept to the strip of narrow dock running along the edge of the basin. Passing the row of ancient brick warehouses, he worked his way north. The black waters of the basin reflected the leaping flames, while the fog caught the glow of savage orange until it seemed that the very night around him was afire.
    He could see another passageway ahead, leading off to the left, that he hoped would take him inland. Then his heel caught on an uneven plank and he stumbled, going down as his wounded leg gave way beneath him in a spasm of pain, white hot and nearly blinding.
    He sank to his knees, Kat still held, insensible, in his arms. He was aware of the distant heat of the fire and the ache in his seared lungs as he struggled to suck in air. Gathering his strength, he was about to push up again when he heard the click of a pistol’s hammer being drawn back, and Wilcox’s voice saying, “Bad choice, Devlin.”

Chapter 62
     
     
    M artin Wilcox stepped out of the smoke-swirled darkness, a flintlock pistol gripped in one hand. His driving cloak was gone; soot stained the starched white linen of his cravat, and falling cinders had singed the Bath superfine of his inimitably cut coat. But his voice was still oddly pleasant, almost conversational.
    “It all comes down to choices. Doesn’t it, Devlin?” he said. “The choice you made to stay in London and stir up trouble, for instance, when any reasonable, prudent man would have fled abroad. The choice you made to come here tonight and walk into my little trap. And then there’s the choice you faced just now. By sacrificing the girl, you might have escaped me. But that’s not a choice a man like you could live with, is it? It’s what makes you so fatally predictable.”
    Sebastian felt the planks of the dock rough beneath his knees, the cold air blowing in from the basin cool against the film of sweat on his face as he watched Wilcox walk up to him. “And what of your choices, Wilcox? Your choice to kill Rachel York rather than pay for whatever she was offering to sell to you. Was that so wise?”
    Wilcox kept coming until he stood just feet away, the pistol held straight-armed before him. “Ah, but you see, I thought our dear Rachel had made an unwise choice herself. When I heard she’d gone to meet Hendon that night, I assumed she’d found a higher bidder for her wares.So I followed, expecting to recover the evidence of my little insurance scheme. Instead, what do I find but your mother’s most interesting affidavit. It was a surprise, believe me.”
    “Insurance scheme—?” Sebastian began, only to break off as he suddenly understood. “Of course. The story you carried to Hendon last year about an embarrassing sexual peccadillo was an invention, designed to extricate yourself from an awkward situation. How long have you been caught in Leo Pierrepont’s web?”
    Wilcox’s habitual smile never slipped. “Three years. I’m the one who tipped Pierrepont off as to our intentions in Spain.” He said it as if he were proud of it.
    “So that’s the reason you tracked down Rachel’s maid, Mary Grant? To recover whatever evidence Rachel took from Pierrepont that would have proved your involvement with the French went back much further than anyone supposed.”
    “That’s right. I doubt the stupid fool even realized the value of what she had.”
    “But that didn’t stop you from killing her.”
    “One could never be sure,” he said, smiling through his teeth. “The evidence against myself I destroyed at once, of course. But the other documents I kept. One never knows when such things might prove useful. Where you made your mistake was in taking your mother’s affidavit from my library. Until I found it missing, I’d no notion you’d tweaked onto me.”
    Sebastian looked up into his brother-in-law’s face, and laughed. “I don’t have the affidavit. Do you mean to tell me you’ve lost it? How . . . careless of you.”
    Wilcox’s hand tightened convulsively around the pistol’s handle, then relaxed. “An interesting tactic. You think to