Heaven's Gate by Toby Bennett Page B

have been, we are stronger now! Should we never take what is ours, for fear some unseen enemy waits for us to show ourselves? Is it not written that ‘bone remains long after blood has dried.’?”
    “But bone must endure, we are still in too precarious a position to seek open dominion and certainly the Inquisition is not our route to power, they would revile us just as deeply as the Strigoi, if they knew.”
    “The Strigoi created the Union and we shaped the Inquisition that has cleansed it! I do not suggest showing our hand all at once but ‘wait’ and ‘caution’ are words easily said from your palaces and towers, the rest of us must abide in tombs and ghost towns amid these merciless sands, which clean old bones like carrion birds. How long must we wait to see if there is some substance to these shadows you frighten us with?”
    “If I am right, we have only to wait for night fall.” The old priest answers patiently.
    At that the fly, ceases its humming and buzzes across the room, flying drunkenly on dry wings until it alights closer to the girl in the large hat.
     
    “Why you still got your hat on honey?” The man at the next table asks, swiping a meaty hand through greasy hair. Lillian stares fixedly at the food on her plate, holding her teeth together on the cutting retort, which would normally follow such insolence.
    “What’s the matter, sweetheart, no lips under there either?”
    “Mind your own business and I’ll mind mine,” she growls back. Damn that cold fish Leedon, if it wasn’t for the prospect of falling under the sway of that hard eyed fanatic she’d be able to deal with the oaf in front of her the way he deserved. She’d never have gone to Island City in the first place if her father and Julia hadn’t begged her. Her throat closes in tension at the thought of Julia, officially the woman was her nurse but she had been a mother to her since her real mother died giving birth. Her hand steals under her poncho to grasp the amber crystal on the amulet that had been Leedon’s betrothal present. She would have thrown it away long ago but Julia had been insistent.
    ‘It is a royal gift, even if its giver is not noble.’ she had said.
    As she grips it, the crystal grows warm to her touch as if responding to her anger, it did that sometimes, it even glowed faintly from time to time. It was indeed a rare and princely gift. The rarity and beauty of the gift made it all the more galling when she discovered that, instead of a charming prince, she had found herself matched with a cold, aesthetic man with more taste for strategy, empty tomes and hypocritical religion than for life. Because of that she had to endure the fool next to her and who knew how many hardships before she was home. If the man only knew that he was insulting Baron Carter’s only child the oaf would no doubt be falling over himself, pleading for mercy. Not that he’d get any! Lillian is vindictive by nature, she had found a way to pay Leedon back for his bookish failings as a man and now she makes a private promise to herself that if she ever encounters this piece of filth again, once she is reinstated in her father’s court, she will have some part of his anatomy removed.
     
    “She speaks, and such a sweet voice! You see, lads, I told you it was a woman, perhaps she doesn’t look so bad under that poncho.”
    “Or maybe she does Ned and that’s why she wears it.” Another man quips.
    Before she can stop herself the revolver is in her hand, the ornate metal work of barrel gleaming in the light of the common room’s lanterns.
    “No need for that, my dear,” the heavy-set man says, breaking a silence in which the only other sound is the click of her gun’s hammer drawing back, “I believe my friends and I were going after this drink.”
     
    “ We’ll be lucky if she makes it to the Carter estate with a temper like that,” a fly on the ceiling above her buzzes, “s he’ll get herself killed if she pulls a gun at