phantom knights 04 - deceit in delaware (2 page)

Harvey was smiling as he pushed to his feet. “Samuel Mason. To what do we owe this—”

Sam’s fist flew forward and struck Harvey’s face, knocking Harvey back into his chair. “That is for my wife, you despicable tripe.”

Sam spun toward me, his face like stone. He hopped off the dais and marched for me.

Straightening my back and shoulders, I began to rise, but Sam clamped his hands on the arms of the chair, forcing me to lean back. The fire in his gaze could melt ice.

“Sam, this is not at all what it appears to be,” I reasoned, praying that he believed me.

Sam would be a dangerous foe if he chose to go against me, and he had Jack’s ear. If Sam informed against me, Jack would shut me out of his heart, and his home.

“Indeed? It appears that you have not left the Holy Order as you claimed. It appears that you are holding a meeting of the twelve lords of Levitas. Do you have any notion of what you are doing?”

“Sam, I—”

“You are sitting in my seat.” Sam’s lips twisted into a wicked grin as he stepped back, holding out his hand for me to remove myself.

No!
No, no, no. This was not supposed to be happening. Staid, intense, devoted Sam could not be a lord of Levitas! How could he do that to Bess? Harvey had threatened Bess’s life on more than one occasion. Oh, how Bess’s heart would break when she discovered the truth ... and how she would blame me. As would Jack, but what I was doing
had
to be done. It was my way back to Lutania. What reason could Sam have?

With a painful lump in my stomach, I felt as if I were in a horrible dream. Once seated on the opposite side of Martha, I leaned forward to watch Sam, hoping, praying that he was simply an impostor.

Sam sat himself upon his throne and swept out his hand. “Do proceed.”

“Now that all who could come are present, let us proceed,” Harvey announced, smiling fondly at Sam despite the bruise forming on his face. “The first order of business is directed to you, Guinevere. I require the artifacts.”

“You are too late, Harvey. Rose took them.”

“Rose took most, but not all. There are two missing, and I believe you know where they are to be found,” he said. “Unless there is a reason that you would wish to keep them secret.”

“None whatsoever,” I lied.

“I wonder if you would be so evasive if your sister were brought in to take your place,” Harvey mused, seeing through my lie. “It is what she has always wanted, to be like her dear sister.”

He did not refer to my place on the council. He was threatening my sister’s existence, her future, her safety. “Do you hate me so much that you would use my own sister as a threat against me?” I asked, but knew the truth. Harvey neither hated me nor cared for me. I was a tool, and if I failed to do my job, he would find a replacement.

“I do not hate you, Guinevere. All that I have done has been for you, to train you for your future.” A future of servitude? Even my sister, whom I was not close with, would not demand such from me. Harvey’s vast ideas were a far cry from the truth, which he would soon discover when he joined my sister in Lutania. If he thought he would be the one pulling the strings, he had never come upon Rose when she was angry.

Harvey went on with his disparaging of my character. “Serving a monarch requires strength, unwavering devotion, and an ability to follow rules. All things that you have shown yourself lacking, until this day. Do not destroy my faith before it is firmly set.”

“Your beliefs on what a monarch is differs significantly from my sister’s, of that you may be certain,” I said with conviction. Once Rose discovered what a problem Harvey was, it would not take her long to have him removed. If I allowed him to get that far.

My sister may have said she did not need me, but that did not mean that I would stop protecting her interests. Harvey was proving himself to be a threat, one which I had created. It was my duty to remove him.

“Your sister will not be the queen,” Harvey said, and all of my senses stood at attention. “All it takes is for the family lines to be cut off, and the artifacts placed in one’s hands to be made king.”

Feelings of anger and bitterness settled inside my gut, swirling around with the small amount of shock that I was experiencing. He had done it. He had finally gone too far.

“You will
never
be king,” I spat with every ounce of fire that I had within me.

“My small minded girl, I never said
I
would be King. No, I have someone much better in mind.” Whoever it was, Harvey was pleased with them, but he would never see it come to fruition.

“You will never win against my sister. She has the Phantoms on her side.” I met Harvey’s icy gaze. “Jack knows,” I said, and was rewarded with a flicker of panic in Harvey’s eyes. “He knows who you are, and he is coming for you.” Slowly meeting the gaze of each of the lords, I added, “He is coming for you all, and you may be sure that he will not stop until he has destroyed every layer of the Order.”

All eyes turned to Harvey, searching for his reaction, waiting for his order.

“I do believe that Jack Martin has outworn my patience.”

With each spoken word from the moment that he threatened my sister, my fury rose. There was no panic left within me, for Harvey had stripped it from me, replacing it with a vengeance that only his death could quench. He had not only threatened the lives of my sisters, but that of my husband, and that was something that I would never tolerate.

Harvey’s eyes glanced around to each of the lords before settling on me. Our gazes locked in a battle for supremacy.

“The time has come.” Harvey rose and stepped off the dais to stand in the center of the room. “By the power granted to me as the high lord of the Holy Order of Levitas, I do declare us at war with all those who call themselves Phantoms.”

He could not be in earnest. He could not...

“Guinevere,” Harvey said with a hint of a smile, “bring us your husband.”

CHAPTER 2

JACK

20 June, 1817

Savannah

D
eceived was never a word that I truly understood until I met my wife. It was then that I began to understand that to be deceived meant that you were betrayed by everyone that you hold most dear.

It was late evening when I entered the temple in the middle of the woods outside Savannah. In the antechamber to the throne room sat General Lucius Harvey. The room was dark except for a single candle burning in its holder on a table where Harvey sat writing a letter. Seeing him sitting there, scratching away at the paper before him with his quill, my anger rose to near boiling. On silent feet, I stepped up behind him and placed the cold barrel of my pistol against the back of his neck. His quill paused over his paper as his head rose.

“Jack Martin. How good of you to come.”

“I hear that you have declared war upon the Phantoms.”

Harvey set his quill aside. “So I have, but there is a way to cease that. Join me. Together we can rule an empire.”

The years had surely made him daft. “I am not here to join you, Harvey.”

“Then why have you come?”

“I have come to see my father.”

And so it was.

This is the account of the end of my journey as a Phantom, truly the end of life as I knew it. I thank you, whomever you may be that is reading this account of my life. May you never know the horrors that I have lived through. If my sacrifices have made the world even remotely better for you, then nothing I have done has been in vain.

My discovery to the truth that my father was indeed still alive began on the day that my wife first confessed about her connection to the Holy Order. The more she spoke, the more I began to realize the truth. Her protector was my father, but William Martin would never have given up control of the girls to anyone. As my mind pieced together the astonishing truth, I came to realize that not only had my father not died, but he had more than one secret society. My father created the Holy Order.

“She has told you then,” said Harvey after about a minute of stunned silence.

“My wife did not tell me. I put the truth together myself.”

“How long have you known?” the man who had once been my father asked. Risking his life, he turned his head to meet my gaze.

“Since my wife told me of her true identity.” Looking into his brown eyes, I could not believe that I had not known the truth longer. He had pulled off the greatest coup, on his own family.

When Guinevere told me of her history, slowly, the thought struck, and then, like a fire being given free range over a forest, the truth had grown. I had thought about the names of the ships my mother had owned, Guinevere’s guardian who owed a debt to her family, and the Holy Order. Then I thought about Harvey. Thinking hard over the past, it occurred to me that I had never seen him and my father together.

My father had first mentioned meeting Harvey at his club, and then came the parties where both had been present. After we arrived, my father disappeared, supposedly meeting with friends in the card room, and a while later Harvey would arrive. They each spoke highly of the other. And there was the difference in their looks and carriage. Harvey’s hair and beard were gray and white, he had a long scar on his face, and he walked with a limp. My father had none of that. The only similarity was the eyes, but many men had brown eyes. Under bushy gray eyebrows, I did not know the difference. I did not see the difference because it never occurred to me to do so. When I had discovered the truth, it took a few weeks to decide what to do with my newfound truth.

“Rise.” Pressing the barrel harder into his skin, I pulled back his chair. He rose with fluid grace. As tall as he was, I had to raise my arm to keep the barrel against him, but he knew better than to see my height as a hindrance.

“Walk,” I ordered.

My father walked toward the closed door that would lead into the throne room. On the other side of that door were the twelve lords of Levitas. I had made certain that they all had arrived before finding a way into the temple.

He opened the door and stepped into the brighter room. All of the lords were seated and waiting for Harvey. When he stopped beside his throne, I stepped to his side, keeping the pistol aimed at him.

The surprised and shocked faces of eleven out of the twelve lords would have caused me to smile if I were not so astonished.

“I give you good evening, high lords of the Holy Order of Levitas,” I announced. “You may be curious as to why I am standing before you, holding a pistol upon your leader. You see, you have something, or should I say
someone
, who belongs to my family.”

It had been over a week since Guinevere became one of the lords. Since she returned home with the tidings that Harvey had declared war upon the Phantoms.

When I told her what I was going to do, she pleaded with me not to approach Harvey. She asked me not to challenge the Holy Order, until I explained that I knew the truth. I knew that my father was alive.

I was ashamed that the truth had not come to me sooner than when Guinevere was confessing who she was. I felt as if I should have known, but my father was a master of disguise. He did not want me to know the truth and so I had not. His disguise was so great, so deeply rooted, that I never stopped to question. Never suspected.

The last eight years had been full of so much deceit that I no longer knew who to trust. My sister kept secrets from me in the name of protecting me, my brother had lied in the need to prove himself. My greatest friends had both lied about their identities. My wife’s deception was a difficult one to swallow, but I had hope that one day we could get past it, if we lived that long.

Through all of the lies, deceit, and manipulation, it was my mother’s secrets that had affected me the most. Her deceit was so rife that I did not know if forgiveness was possible, for she would never make me believe that she was blameless. She had twisted the truth for years, and now I was paying the price.

If I lost my life in this approaching final battle, she would be, in part, to blame. She knew it, and what affected me the most was the knowledge that she would not have changed her actions if given the chance. She believed in what she had done. But what she believed was a lie.

A curse slipped through Dudley’s lips as his eyes grew large. He quickly fixed his emotions, and rose from his chair. “Jack, old fellow, allow me to explain.” Dudley spoke as if I did not understand the significance of his presence inside the temple.

“There is no need, for I know.”

Dudley gulped. “The devil…”

Hannah rose from where she had been seated beside Dudley. She hurried around him with her arms outstretched as if to protect him, but I would not hurt Dudley, nor did I care that his presence meant that he was one of the lords of the Holy Order. My focus was upon the other lords.

I felt myself begin to understand more of the duplicity that had been played upon me. Every person in the room I knew well. My father had chosen his lackeys with care, for everyone in the room owed him some kind of debt.

If all of these persons were on my father’s side, Luther had no hope of succeeding in his plan to steal the throne. My future no longer looked so bleak. For I knew that I could control these people, I could steal the reins from my father.

“Do be seated,
Harvey
.” Shoving the barrel into his back, I guided him to his throne.

Once he was seated, I stood beside his chair.

“You have some nerve, sir, being alive when you should be dead,” I spat at my father. He watched me as one would a stranger. With interest bordering on unconcern. I thought perhaps my father truly was dead … until he spoke.

“If you want to be like me, son, you must remember to always be seven steps ahead of the enemy.” He leaned to the side of his throne, at his ease, and smiled.

Gripping the handle to my pistol tighter, I raised my voice. “That is what I am now? Your enemy? I am your son! You abandoned your family, and for what? A place on a council?” I was sure to add venom to my words, and it worked as Jeanne, my mother’s former housekeeper, winced.