The Fatal Flame by Lyndsay Faye Read Free Book Online Page A

already nerves of sheer Irish cliffside and a heart to stand up for her friends—even if they weren’t her friends at all. That would have been more than ample, for my money. But the girl thought it over, and she gave it time.
    “That one,” she determined, her eyes staking a claim on Ronan McGlynn. “Give me the dog who dragged us t’ this den and call it even.”
    “Thank Christ.” Valentine shoved his cigar in my direction. “Hold this. For a moment there, I thought we’d all have to witness something unpleasant.”
    My hand had scarcely moved before McGlynn hurled himself at my brother with a knife snatched from within his boot, swinging wide and wishful. Val, pivoting on the instant, blocked the strike with his forearm. Snarling, McGlynn tried his luck with a backhanded stab, twisting all his weight onto his opposite foot to lend more strength to his gnarled fist.
    It didn’t work.
    Valentine caught McGlynn’s wrist with a little circle that looked like a waltzer’s flourish and tethered it, the knife now pressed against the hollow of the villain’s spine. With his other hand gripping McGlynn’s shoulder, Val took four quick steps forward with his shorter, weaker antagonist and sent his head through the wall.
    By saying
through
the wall, I mean literally. For the walls were crumbling back into forest sod, and the upkeep was nonexistent.
    One speechless moment passed, everyone staring at the hole with McGlynn’s motionless pate resting inside it. A fragile bird cradled within an inhospitable nest. Then Val uncurled his hands and Ronan McGlynn slumped to the floor. Breathing, as I could see plain in the swells of his swollen belly. As oblivious as an unborn babe, fresh blood caressing his eyebrows.
    I traced my mouth with my fingers introspectively. Wondering just how Val expected me to drag a fourteen-stone villain to the Tombs. And certain as the Party is crooked, he wasn’t going to be helping.
    The girls burst into spontaneous applause. All except their ringleader, who was still shoving honed metal into my friend Kildare’s neck. Exchanging a look with Piest that was equal parts relief and exasperation, I lowered my hands.
    “Everyone back flat against the walls save Kildare, who doesn’t try anything exciting.” I hoped she remembered he had a name, however much she mistrusted him.
    Val strode in my direction and plucked his cigar from my fingers as the others retreated. I’d forgotten I’d been holding it.
    “Victors first,” he announced, winking.
    The girls, Kildare, and his lovely freckled captor foremost, headed for the stairs. Connell raised a ginger eyebrow at me as if demanding to know what abominable alchemy had created my only sibling and what in bloody hell we were doing with our lives.
    I’d have given him an answer or two. But I hadn’t any.
    When the girls had filed out, we waited to give them a nice, amiable head start. Connell, worried over his closest mate, followed them first. Mr. Piest nudged McGlynn’s temple with the blunt toe of his weighty Dutch boot and, finding him incapable of further atrocities for the time being, turned to my brother with palm outstretched.
    “Always an absolute pleasure to work with a man of your caliber, Captain Wilde,” he announced happily, wringing my brother’s hand.
    He would say that, though. Mr. Piest is crazier than a sack of river rats.
    “You want a rough on the muscle, I’m your scrapper.” Val turned to the wall, grinding his cigar out on the peeling paint. “I’ve seen you fight. It looks like a chicken after the ax has come down.”
    Laughing, Piest marched for the door. It was true, after all, and Jakob Piest owns the rare virtue of not allowing true remarks to unsettle him.
    “I didn’t know you spoke English,” I informed Valentine. It sounded ridiculous even to me.
    “You . . . I
what
?”
    We headed in Piest’s thudding wake, Connell’s flaming head just visible entering the front foyer. Unfettered light