Wake of the Bloody Angel by Alex Bledsoe Page A

tarred corpses displayed as a warning. The prison was smack in the middle of a stretch of desert, isolated by a range of low mountains. On the other side of these slopes stretched miles of verdant countryside leading down to Mosinee and the ocean. Here, though, there was nothing but heat, dryness, and death. For a man of the sea, there could be no closer approximation to hell.
    Only one road led to the pirates’ graveyard, and it ran straight across the open desert. This made sense tactically, since no one could approach without being seen. I’d picked up a wide-brimmed straw hat for the occasion, but this early in the morning, it wasn’t needed. Some weird weather inversion had drawn moisture across the mountains and bathed the area in a heavy mist. It wouldn’t last, but while it did, the temperature was almost pleasant.
    Queen Remy of Mosinee led the international co alition that supported and funded the Anti-Freebootery Guild. Her goal was to make it more lucrative for these sea bandits to turn honest than to keep raiding ships, and it worked for a lot of them. I didn’t know the exact circumstances that turned Jane from pirate to pirate hunter, but she became as legendary fighting on the right side as she had on the wrong. I also didn’t know what had caused her to leave the sea entirely and turn land- bound sword jockey, but I could accept that none of it was my business. She never asked where I’d come from, either.
    The prison walls were twenty feet high, with guards stationed at each corner. The only thing that rose higher was a single round tower, stretching into the mist so that we couldn’t see the top. Jane looked up at the tower and sighed wistfully.
    “Sentimental about prison?” I teased.
    “About my old job. Rody Hawk was the toughest son of a bitch I ever crossed blades with. When they sent me out to find him, I almost peed my pants, both because I was excited and because it scared me to death. For the first three weeks I hunted him, I was afraid he might be a ghost, the way he’d appear and disappear, like he was taunting me. Which he was.”
    She’d shared many stories of the man known as “the Sea Hawk” on our ride. By the time she finished, I was really glad they were about a man who was locked up. “He knew you were after him?”
    “He knew everything about me,” she said distantly, then came back to the moment. “He was a mean bastard anyway, but he got much worse when he heard I was after him. Like he was trying to pack in all the evil he could while he still had time.”
    “Really?” I said. Jane wasn’t above a little self-aggrandizement, but something in her tone told me she wasn’t doing that here. Her intensity sounded almost religious.
    “Yeah. I found one ship he’d hit, a little merchant vessel carrying settlers along with a cargo of rum. He killed the crew, then tied all the civilian men together around the mast. He hung the women and children by their ankles and drilled tiny little holes in their foreheads, so they’d rain blood down on their husbands and fathers. We heard the screams across the water before we even sighted the sails.” She shook her head. “Not many of the hanging ones lived. And a lot of the men forced to watch died by their own hand before we reached port.”
    “I’m glad you finally caught him,” I agreed. We were close enough now to see the archers along the wall, and the long curves of their bows. They watched us with the silent composure of men secure in their profession.
    Jane said, “Do you know what the hardest thing about catching him was, though?”
    “What?”
    “Leaving him alive when I had him under my sword.” I knew that feeling for sure. The fact that she did leave him
    alive reinforced my opinion of her. “And now where do they keep him?”
    She pointed at the tower. “Up there. Permanently. No way in, no way out, and no visitors until he tells where his treasure’s hidden, or dies.”
    “Then how do we talk to