Mary Putney - Dancing on the Wind

As Jason landed, he whipped up his pistol and shot Nunfield at point-blank range. Even before the other man hit the floor, Jason grabbed the lever that controlled the statues. He yanked it and the effigies clanked to a stop, harmless again.

In the eerie silence that followed, Jason called hoarsely, "Kira?"

She looked up and gasped with shock, her face chalk-white. Slowly, incredulously, she broke away from Kit and walked toward Jason, whispering his name. She raised a hesitant hand to touch him, as if unable to believe he was real. He caught it and pulled her into his arms, desperate longing engraved on his face. She buried her face against him, her shoulders shaking.

Lucien noted the reunion as he dashed toward the center of the circle, but his main concern was for Mace, who was still free, still armed, and deadlier than ever. Pistol ready in his hand, Lucien started to circle the altar. A quarter way around, he came face-to-face with his quarry.

"I liked you, Strathmore," Mace said with fatalistic calm as he aimed his gun at Lucien's heart. "You're almost as clever as I am. A pity you're such a bloody middle-class puritan."

More experienced than his opponent, Lucien didn't waste time on talk. He pulled his trigger, diving sideways at the same time. The pistol sputtered and misfired. Mace's gun didn't, but Lucien's evasive maneuver saved him. The other man's ball blasted past his right ear, deafening but harmless.

Swearing viciously, Mace reached for his knife. Lucien scrambled to regain his balance, only to find that he had twisted his damned ankle again when he had dodged Mace's shot. As he fell to one knee, the other man moved in, blade glittering wickedly in the lurid light of the bonfires.

From the corner of his eye, he saw Kira break away from Jason. She raised the pistol that Lucien had given her-where the devil had she carried it in that revealing costume?-and pointed it at Mace, her eyes wild. Yet her hands were steady when she cocked the hammer, and her aim was true.

Her bullet caught Mace square in the chest. He gasped in astonishment, then slowly folded to the floor, his gaze on Kira. In a last, harsh whisper, he said, "You were the best, mistress. A pity…" Then he closed his eyes and died. The whole bloody altercation that left three men dead had taken place in well under two minutes.

Kira stared down at Mace for an endless moment. There was fury in her face, and the triumph of a woman who had taken power into her hands after a long hell of helplessness.

Slowly, her expression changed to a kind of horror.

Guessing her feelings, Lucien limped to her and put one arm around her shoulders in a brotherly hug. "Thank you, Kira," he said softly. "You're everything Kit said." Though he'd met her less than half an hour before, she seemed like an old friend.

He was looking around for Kit when danger reappeared. Most of the surviving Disciples were staring at the carnage, shocked and disbelieving. All except Lord Chiswick. In the lull after Mace's death, he had darted behind the altar and pulled out his own pistol. Keeping a wary eye on the gallery where Michael still stood, he pointed his gun at Lucien. "You've gone mad, Strathmore," he snapped. "Do you think we'll all stand still to be slaughtered?"

Lucien said under his breath, "Move away from me, Kira." While she withdrew from the line of fire, he dropped his useless pistol and raised his hands a little so that Chiswick could see that they were empty.

High above, Michael began to race around the gallery to a position where the altar wouldn't block his shot. But something in Chiswick's voice made Lucien think that the battle might be over. He said, "You think this is a senseless massacre?"

Pistol shaking, Chiswick said with an unconvincing show of nonchalance, "Christ, we were having a peaceful little orgy when you and your friends came and began shooting everyone in sight."

Michael reached a position where Chiswick was in his line of fire, but Lucien raised his hand in a signal to wait. To Chiswick he said harshly, "Are you claiming that you don't know that Mace kidnapped Cassie James two months ago and has kept her captive here? Or that he did his damnedest to kidnap her sister as well? Those things are facts, and he himself boasted to his captive that he had kidnapped, brutalized, and ultimately killed other women in the past."

Chiswick's jaw dropped. Across the room Sir James Westley exclaimed, "You've got it all wrong! The girls Mace hired for the solstice rituals were told to fight and scream and pretend to be captives. It was part of the fun. The rape of the Sabine women and all that, y'know."

His mouth trembled. "I thought you were part of the show, until you started killing people."

Lucien shifted his hard stare to the baronet. "Would you have known the difference between a real and a pretend captive?"

"You mean they weren't …?" Westley's complexion took on a greenish hue. "I thought that Mace had hired Cassie James to entertain us for the evening. She's hardly the first actress to sell herself for the right price."

Kira had retreated into Kit's arms, but at Westley's statement she raised her head. "Not only did he tell me of his murders, but he said that my sister and I were to be the next victims," she said bitterly. "After the general rape, he and his closest cronies would have had a private little orgy of their own that would have ended with our deaths."

Her testimony left the surviving Disciples shaken. Chiswick's gaze went from Harford to Mace to Nunfield, and the shock in his eyes could not have been counterfeited. "I didn't know," he said with horror. "I swear to God that I didn't know."

Face implacable, Kira said, "Not consciously, perhaps, but by your cruelty and self-absorption, the whole rotten lot of you condoned Mace's behavior."

Chiswick's expression grayed.

Lucien said, "Think back and you may find it easier to believe."

After a painful hesitation, Chiswick nodded. "I always knew there was something a little strange going on with those three, but I thought it was merely family eccentricity between two brothers and their cousin." He straightened up, his gun sagging to the floor. "Though sometimes I wondered…"

Fragments of fact from his own investigation clicked into place in Lucien's mind, bringing near-certainty. "Did it ever occur to you that one of them might be a French spy?"

Chiswick looked startled. "Strange you should say that. I once overheard something that made me consider going to the authorities. Nunfield had access to information, Mace enjoyed confounding authority, and Roderick always needed money. But they were my friends, and I was reluctant to accuse them. Then the war ended, and the matter didn't seem worth pursuing. It… it never occurred to me that they might be murderers."

It made sense. Later Lucien would question Chiswick about the evidence of spying, but his intuition confirmed the other man's suspicion: the Phantom was not one man, but three, and all now lay dead. "I think their vices were multiple," he said dryly. "Though I didn't plan it this way, what happened tonight was justice, not slaughter."

Chiswick looked down at his pistol, then holstered it. "This wasn't loaded, you know. It was only part of the costume."

Which explained why he hadn't shot Lucien. It was also further evidence that Chiswick had not been part of Mace's violent inner circle.

Michael had descended from the gallery, alert but no longer in battle mode. He asked, "Has everything been resolved to your satisfaction?"

Lucien laid his hand on the other man's forearm. "It has. Thank you, Michael. God knows what would have happened without your marksmanship."

His friend smiled. "Think nothing of it. I'm always looking for a chance to atone for my sins." He moved away to look more closely at the warrior statues.