“Mr. Hunt?” Captain Hink asked. “Are you in agreement?”
The beast pushed against Cedar’s bones. It wasn’t the full moon—wasn’t even close. The new moon should be tonight, complete blackness in the sky. But he couldn’t think. Couldn’t just think as a man ought to. The hunger, the need, the scent of the Strange drew a hard, killing thirst up through him.
His grip on logic, on the thoughts of a man, was slipping.
The beast thrilled and tore at his mind. Taking. Ruling.
Cedar strained to push that desire away. His sanity was sliding with each breath.
He growled, and pulled his goggles into place, his crystal-sighted Walker heavy in his palm, and the need to spill blood and tear bones from flesh rolling through him in a hot wave.
“You have me,” Cedar rasped, answering Hink, answering the beast within him. And promising the ship full of strangeworked men, coming down hard over the landing pad now, doors open, guns rattling through the air, that he would be their end.
Distantly, Cedar was aware of the captain and the others firing at the ship.
He didn’t care about the ship. Didn’t care about the bullets spraying through the air. Didn’t care about the cannons locked and loaded, fuses lit.
He ran. To the ship, to the strangeworked crew, Wil beside him, ahead of him.
All the world seemed to slow to a dream landscape. He could sense the heartbeats of the strangeworked men in the ship. He could hear their sour song, hungry to devour this world, tainted with the nightmare singsong stitched together by Mr. Shunt’s thread.
The song, the beat of hearts, the blood he could almost taste in the back of his throat were so clear, they made Captain Hink’s yell, the gunfire behind him, the gunfire ahead of him seem like the softest hush of wind through leaves.
Cedar’s world was filled with the scent of the Strange. All his reason for breathing was their death.
He was running, close enough now so he could see their faces clearly, the flat hatred twisting features into snarls of malevolence. The ship wasn’t near enough the ground, still, three of the strangeworked men jumped from it.
Their legs should have shattered. But they landed cat-light, and were running, guns firing, straight at him, each with a flamethrower at the ready on his back.
Cedar didn’t pause. Ax in one hand, gun in the other, he shot the first Strange in the head, then pivoted and hacked the second man through the neck.
They both fell.
And they both stood up again. But not for long. Wil was on them, tearing out throats, breaking necks.
Cedar laughed. He licked the blood off his lips, shifted his grip on the slick ax handle, and lifted his gun. He took aim again and fired.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Captain Hink realized all the shouting in the world wasn’t doing a thing to stop Cedar Hunt from charging straight into enemy fire.
He’d seen that sort of thing on the battlefield before, where a man goes fool-headed and doesn’t know when to retreat.
But there was something about Mr. Hunt that he didn’t expect.
He moved fast, far faster than a man should, and seemed to have an uncanny awareness of where the bullets were headed and when to duck them.
The wolf beside him was the same. They moved and fought like two creatures with one mind, faster than their enemies, always knowing where their enemies would be and how best to take them down.
Before Hink could even get more than a few cuss words out, Cedar and the wolf had killed three men.
Except then the three men got back up again.
Holy hellfire. That was something Hink had never seen on the field before.
But Cedar Hunt just laughed and found himself a flamethrower. And then got serious about his butchery.
More men were jumping out of that ship. Men Hink recognized. Men who shouldn’t be walking without crutches. Men with hands where stumps had been.
They weren’t Mullins’s men. No, the ship’s crew stayed on the ship, and turned the guns on the field.
It didn’t matter how fast Cedar Hunt was. Didn’t matter that the wolf moved like shadow and smoke. They were going to be killed.
More gunfire rained down from the cliffs above them. Jack’s men had turned out the Gatling guns and were aiming them at anything that moved.
Theobald stood side by side with Miss Dupuis, that gun of his shooting out grapeshot that caught anything it touched on fire, while Miss Dupuis unloaded her shotgun, sending out bullets that exploded on impact.
They were a coolheaded couple who looked like they’d seen their share of battle at each other’s sides.
But it was too much. Too many bullets. Too easy to die. And Hink wasn’t about to get himself shot and let Mullins finish him off for good.
“Out!” he yelled. “Get in the tunnels. There’s a door that way you can bust in.”
“What about Mr. Hunt?” Miss Dupuis yelled.
“I’ll get his attention. You get running!”
Captain Hink bolted toward the stone stairs that led up to the main cannon. He was exposed, halfway up the stairs, but out of range of the Gatling guns, which couldn’t fire straight down on him since they were set back too far in the hole cut into the cliff.
Almost there, almost there, he panted as he ran the stairs.
Something hot bit through his leg and he fell forward.
Son of a bitch. He was shot. If that bullet came from Mullins’s gun he was going to dig it out and make the jackass eat it.
Hink got back on his feet and took the rest of the stairs, cussing his way through the pain.
The cannon was unmanned. Likely the boy had been shot and tumbled to his death, or had hightailed it when he saw Mullins’s ship come up with her guns.
Hink got busy, checking the cannon, clearing the barrel, adding the powder, tamping, and dropping the ball inside.
It was slow work for one man. But Captain Hink was a determined man who had no problem doing the work of two when he put his mind to it. He glanced down over the battle. The ship still hovered there, letting loose round after round of ammunition, while Cedar and the wolf seemed to have come enough to their senses that they’d taken cover behind a scree of stones.
Hink could make out six dead men on the ground, pieces and parts of them tossed about, and on fire. Cedar must have gotten the hang of that flamethrower.
Miss Dupuis and her crew were scurrying from one scant cover to the next, working their way away from the landing pad toward the opening into the mountain.
“Burn in hell, Mullins.” Hink took aim and lit the cannon’s fuse.
A chest-thumping explosion reverberated across the cliffs and sent sharp echoes over the horizon. The shot struck true. Right down the port side of the ship, knocking out her fan and blasting her hull into splinters.
Before the chunks of ship had a chance to hit the ground, Cedar Hunt was running.
Toward the damn ship.
He got up under her belly, and caught one of the netting ropes.
With the flamethrower strapped to his back, Cedar overhanded his way up that rope. When he was close enough, he stopped, triggered the flamethrower, and shot a blast of oil and fire twenty feet out, setting the ship on fire.
The ship he was hanging from by a thread.
The man was crazy, that was clear sure. But he knew how to cripple a foe.
