Peacemaker (The Flash Gold Chronicles, #3) by Lindsay Buroker Page A

Cedar. Talking to Lockhart had been a waste
of time, and now she was captured, in the hands of a rapist and
murderer, surrounded by a whole crew that apparently supported
him.

Part VIII
     
    Kali’s captors dragged her into the bowels
of the airship. Though the bag over her head stole her sight, the
stifling heat told her where they were. The boiler room.
    The man carrying Kali dropped her like a
sack of corn meal, and her shoulder hit hard, sending a fresh stab
of pain through her. While men shuffled about, and chains clacked
nearby, Kali fantasized about commandeering the ship, sailing to
the North Pole, and making these louts walk the plank. She’d leave
them on a sheet of ice where they could become a nice snack for a
passing polar bear.
    Someone grabbed her by the head and pulled
off the sack, removing numerous strands of hair at the same time.
It was hard to glower effectively from one’s back on the floor, but
Kali gave it her best.
    The men ignored her icy stare. A burly
pirate clapped a leg iron around one of her ankles. Its chain ran
five feet to an eyelet in front of a bin of coal and two furnaces.
The pirate cut the rope that tied her ankles together. Kali lifted
her bound wrists, hoping he would do the same for them. He did
not.
    “ We don’t allow anyone
free passage on our vessel,” a graying reed of a man said. Scars
peppered his face, and he wore an eye patch like the pirates in
storybooks. He lacked only a parrot to perch on his shoulder,
though such birds were probably hard to come by in northern climes.
He took a shovel from a scruffy man cloaked from head to foot in
soot. “Everybody here works, ain’t that right, Chum?”
    “ Oh, aye, Cap’n,” the
sooty man said.
    Kali remained quiet. Working in the boiler
room sounded far better than being mauled by that Sparwood, but she
wasn’t about to say so. The other woman the pirates had kidnapped
was nowhere to be seen, and Kali scowled at the realization of
where she must be. Would she be next?
    “ Take all of her things,”
the captain said.
    Invasive hands pawed at Kali, and she
gritted her teeth. With her wrists tied and her leg chained, she
could do little to fight the intrusion, though she stood with one
leg slightly in front of the other, blocking the view of the ankle
that held her vial of flash gold. She hoped the man wouldn’t think
to check her socks. Maybe she should have taken the vial back to
her workshop and locked it in its safe, behind a series of booby
traps. Too late now.
    Unfortunately, the man searching her proved
adept at finding things. He removed her remaining smoke nut, her
gun, and every single tool in her pockets.
    “ Tarnation, girl,” the
pirate said, “you rob a tool shop?”
    “ Your murderers caught me
when I was in the middle of a project,” Kali said.
    “ I ain’t murdered
anyone.”
    “ You let it happen on your
ship.” Though she was responding to the man searching her, Kali
looked the captain in the eyes when she spoke. She thought of the
airship hovering above the alley behind the Aurora, and of that
ladder dangling down. “You even help out, don’t you?” That
explained why Cedar hadn’t found a trail at the murdered woman’s
home. “You drop that bastard down and pick him up when he’s done,
don’t you? You help him perpetrate the idea that there’s something
otherworldly involved in these murders, since there’s nothing but
those fake bead patches to be found.”
    Kali was surprised the pirates had chosen
such a public target this time, a woman getting ready for a show in
a saloon full of people. Maybe it’d been a last hit before the ship
cleared out of town. Or maybe they’d counted on Sparwood getting in
to steal the girl without anyone up front hearing about it. Kali’s
stomach clenched at the idea of him leaving a bead patch in the
changing room and people blaming “spirits” for the girl’s
disappearance.
    The captain lifted his chin in response to
Kali’s accusations.