Cedar slid down the rope, then let go. The ship rocked wildly, trying to stabilize without her port fans. Cedar was thrown more than thirty feet, but he tucked and rolled, taking the fall like a tumbler.
And then he stood up, looked around the field. The wolf, his brother, loped up next to him. As the ship above burned and wailed, Cedar Hunt and that wolf glanced first at Miss Dupuis and her people nearly in the tunnel, then up at Hink.
Cedar was bloody, burned, dirty. And yet he stood there as if he felt no pain. Like a warrior out of legend.
Likely he didn’t feel the pain. Hink had seen that on the field before too. Sometimes it took a man an hour or more to realize how he’d been broken, and what he was missing. And that discovery came on sudden and unpleasant. Some men never survived it.
Captain Hink cupped his mouth and yelled, “Inside. Tunnel!”
He didn’t wait to see if Cedar heard him, but the man had damn good ears.
The relative silence from the Gatling guns’ reloading wasn’t going to last.
He wondered if Mullins was going to try to land that fiery barge. As if in answer, a huge explosion hit the field, throwing Hink to his knees and nearly sending him tumbling down the stairs.
Dynamite. Old Jack was done horsing around with his guests.
Since he’d likely been paid by all the parties involved, he meant to kill them all. Old Jack never took a side in a conflict, other than taking as much money as he could fist, and saving his own hide.
Ears ringing, Hink got up, and got moving. Didn’t care about cover. He wanted speed. Every step down that staircase was agony, his leg getting heavier and heavier. But he pounded on, down the stairs, across to the hole in the mountain. Dupuis and her people were gone, hopefully already inside the mountain.
Just a few more yards, and he’d be there. Just a few more yards.
An arm came out of nowhere and grabbed hold of him by the waist, tugging his arm over a shoulder.
Cedar Hunt had somehow caught up, even across the distance of the field.
“Don’t need help,” Hink panted.
But Cedar kept hold of him, and half ran, half carried him despite his complaints.
Man was inhuman. The strength of him, the calm of him, the speed of him. And even though Hink had seen that on the battlefield too, to have him up close like this, the wolf guarding their rear, and then running ahead to make sure the path was clear, as if the wolf had a man’s mind in an animal’s body, sent a certain kind of dread through Hink’s belly.
Cedar Hunt had said the men they were fighting weren’t really men, but men worked up by something Strange. Hink agreed.
It was also clear that Mr. Cedar Hunt was not really a man either. Or not just a man. Same as the wolf was not just a wolf.
They were stuff of fairy tales and legends, or at least the bloody ones.
He was suddenly very glad to be on the same side of the fight as Cedar Hunt and his brother and wasn’t looking forward to a day in which that was no longer true.
They were nearly at the door now. Joonie Wright stepped out just enough to let loose a couple shots at the gunners who had reloaded the Gatlings. That copper shield device of hers wasn’t shooting bullets. When the hammer of her gun hit, the shield let out a blast of lightning that cracked across the air and dropped the Gatling gunner flat.
“Get inside,” Hink ordered.
She moved aside so he and Cedar and the wolf could enter the hill.
This was not the hall where they had been staying. As a matter of fact, it was halfway across the landing field and to the south of where they had been. Three tunnels led off in three directions. The only light came from Theobald’s foldable lantern that he’d pulled out of that carpetbag of his and lit.
“Let’s get moving,” Hink said.
“How badly are you hurt?” Miss Dupuis asked.
“The leg. It’s fine.”
“Broken? Shot?” she asked.
“Shot. And I said it’s fine.”
He pushed away from Cedar, who still had hold of him, and nearly collapsed.
“You might say the leg’s fine.” Miss Dupuis motioned to Theobald to come closer with the lantern. She knelt down in her skirts so she could get a better look at Hink’s thigh. “But your leg says otherwise.”
Hink was going to argue, but her man had placed the lantern on the floor and put his arm around Hink so he wouldn’t fall while Miss Dupuis probed at the wound with no remorse.
“She has quite the hand with battle injuries,” Theobald was saying, his voice carrying that smooth rhythm to it that drew attention away from everything else. “It’s how we met, as a matter of fact. I’d taken a terrible shot to the chest. She nursed me to recovery.”
“Did she make you hurt like the blazes too?” Hink ground out.
“She did. But you can endure,” Theobald said, and it annoyed Hink to no end that he found himself wanting to believe that every word the man said was true.
Miss Dupuis checked the front and the back of his thigh. “I think it went clear through. You are a very lucky man, Captain Hink. Any lower and that would have taken your kneecap right off.”
“If this is what lucky feels like, it ain’t all it’s talked up to be.”
Cedar was standing watch at the door. “Men. Headed this way. Guns. We need to move. Quietly. Wil, choose a tunnel.”
“Do you think it’s wise to follow an animal into this hill?” Theobald asked.
“He’s more than an animal, Otto,” Miss Dupuis said. “He carries the same gift as Mr. Hunt.”
“You,” Cedar said over the top of their conversation, “can do anything you want. Surrender to the men on their way in here and beg for mercy if you like. Maybe they’re not interested in killing you.”
“No need to worry,” Miss Dupuis said. “We follow you, Mr. Hunt. Do you have bandages, Theobald?”
“I have something that might work.” Theobald pulled out a clean neckerchief. “Will this do?”
“Very nicely, thank you,” Miss Dupuis said with a smile. A sort of intimate smile, from Hink’s perspective.
Huh. Maybe these two were quite a lot more than traveling companions.
He grunted, and exhaled on a curse as Miss Dupuis bound his leg tight. Woman had some muscle behind her.
“Now,” Miss Dupuis said, standing and drawing a derringer out of a pocket cleverly hidden in her dress. “What is our plan, gentlemen?”
“Can that…,” Hink started. “Can Wil find a way out of here?”
Wil stood in the far right tunnel entrance, sniffing the air.
“I don’t know,” Cedar said as the sound of gunfire rang out behind them. “But what’s left of Mullins’s crew isn’t going to give us much of a choice.”
“I hate tunnels,” Miss Wright said as she swiftly unwrapped the coils from her arm, and handed those and the shield device to Theobald to pack in his carpetbag along with the harness that had attached to Miss Dupuis’s shotgun.
“Too dark, and too many echoes,” she said with that soft Southern accent. “I can’t hear a blasted thing.” She tossed Miss Dupuis her denuded shotgun.
“Now, I’m not arguing it’s a certain kind of risk navigating these tunnels, Joonie,” Theobald said. “But I trust Mr. Hunt and Wil will see us through.”
Joonie shook her head. “You say those pretty things, but then we still get shot at, Otto.”
He grinned at her. “And yet we always win, don’t we?”
“So far,” she agreed.
While they’d been talking, Cedar Hunt had been staring out the door.
“Dynamite,” Cedar yelled. “Get back!”
They ran for the tunnel Wil had chosen. Theobald, who had the sense to snatch up the lantern, was somewhere in the middle of the group, Miss Wright and Miss Dupuis at the front behind Wil. Captain Hink and Cedar brought up the rear.
