The Sins of Nightsong. V. J. Banis

      April cradled him like a child, stroking the smooth, taut muscles, of his back until she felt him relax. The frightening tensions of the last several hours, the disappointment of a foiled escape were forgotten for the moment. There would be other nights. She only hoped that they would not all end like this one, as had so many earlier ones.

      Eddie stirred. “Now I surely must leave you. It will be dawn in a couple of minutes.” He got up and started putting on his clothes. “Get some sleep, pet. Just have patience. I made you a promise that I’d get you out of this infernal country and I will.” He leaned over and pecked her mouth. “We made a bargain, you and I. You’ve been keeping your part magnificently and I swear to you that I will keep mine—or die in the attempt.”

      He meant it. She could tell by his voice. Scoundrel that he was, he was an honorable scoundrel, she knew, with all the romantic ideals of a teen-aged boy, which Eddie had forgotten to shed.

      He paused before the mirror to tie his tie. “One thing I can’t understand, though; never could.” He glanced over at her lovely face with its almond eyes and skin of pink porcelain. “You are a Chinese princess and look every bit the part. It beats me why you want to chuck away all that royalty stuff and go back to San Francisco, where Orientals are not exactly the favorite citizens.”

      She knew what he meant because she remembered only too well how badly she’d been treated when she lived there with her mother.

      “I told you,” April said. “I have a debt that needs to be paid. Besides, the Dowager Empress would only make me a prisoner, perhaps even kill me if I’m taken back inside the walls of the Forbidden City. She and my father are not particularly close.”

      She snuggled deeper into the covers and watched him slick back his hair with her brushes. He was a good-looking man and a very accomplished lover. She felt a stirring below her waist. The lovemaking had been too brief, but that was always the way with Eddie Wells—the one important way in which he differed greatly from David.

      “But you’re a princess,” he insisted with his practical American way of thinking. “A member of her family.”

      “In China, royal family members are the most susceptible to the High Executioner’s hatchet.”

      He stooped and kissed her again, briefly. “The next contingent of Marines leaves in a week,” he said. “If the road is clear we’ll try again to hide you and Adam in one of their caissons.” He blew her a kiss and was gone.

      Left alone, April heard Adam move uncomfortably and mutter something in his sleep. She slipped out of bed, pulling a robe about herself, and went to his trundle bed. Again he’d kicked off the covers and again April tucked him in. As her hand brushed his little arm she frowned. It felt warm. She placed her hand on his forehead. She couldn’t decide whether or not he was running a temperature, but to be safe she’d have the doctor look at him in the morning. It might well be just the excitement that was making him flushed and feverish.

      She started back to her own bed. A glint of moonlight reflected on the silver box she’d removed earlier from her portmanteau and had left lying atop the bureau. Unconsciously she lifted its lid and sorted through the collection of exquisite jewels and packets of money she’d taken when she fled the palace. She picked up the sapphire ring the old Empress had given her and bit down on her lower lip to stop its quivering.

      “You too, you old devil,” April swore, remembering the Empress’s stony face as she sat stolid and unmoved while David was dragged to the block. The woman she’d once revered above all the gods would also feel the sting of her revenge one day, April vowed. If it meant the giving of her own life to accomplish it, the three of them—Peter, Lydia, and the Dragon Empress Tz’u Hsi—would suffer as they had made her suffer.

      She took up the long strands of pearls she’d braided into her raven, waist-length hair that night in Paris when she and David planned their flight to China, to what they believed to be the security of her father’s royal house. It all seemed so long, long ago and yet the agonies and terrors she’d undergone had left no scars on her lovely young face. Her dark almond eyes were just as lustrous; her flawless complexion still exquisitely delicate. She’d be twenty-four in the spring. She smiled at her image in the mirror. She still looked like a young girl.

      She replaced the jewels, lowered the lid, and returned the box to the top drawer. It would take most of what she had to pay for her protection to the harbor in Shanghai and once there for passage on a ship bound for San Francisco. Once in America she would be a princess no longer. She’d be despised and demeaned as she’d been once before. She hated the city and the people in it, but that was where her enemies were and that was where she had to go. Afterward—and time being on her side—she would come back and somehow wreak her vengeance on the Dragon woman who thought herself invincible and eternal.

      That meant that she would again have to seek her father’s help. Perhaps by then Prince Ke Loo would have lost the incestuous interest he’d expressed in her. She’d learned early that in China a woman was a woman, nothing more, a mere commodity any man could bid for, regardless of kinship. A shudder ran through her as she thought of the way her father, had coveted her with his eyes.

      Outside the legation compound was beginning to stir with the approach of dawn. In the years she’d lived here she noticed the gradual dwindling of the presence of foreigners. Eddie said it was the ever growing threat of the Chinese rebels who called themselves Boxers. April couldn’t understand why the Occidentals feared these Boxers, an unorganized ragtag of Chinese peasantry who wanted change, but did not know what kind. It took any peasant forever to accomplish anything so she could not see what everyone feared. There was no immediate danger.

      The light in the sky heightened. April unlatched the casement window to relieve the closeness of the small room. There was a winter chill in the air and the sky was already beginning to turn slate gray. Winter was getting nearer and Peking would again be a deserted city when the royal parties retreated into the recesses of the Forbidden City, and peasants stayed sheltered in their hovels, having no need to bend under the yokes of their lords. Winter in China was a time for quiet and boredom, a time when the people, like the earth itself, turned hard and cold and slept.

      “I pray I’ll never see another winter here for some time to come,” she said, closing the window against the cold morning.

      She went over and checked Adam’s temperature again. It seemed higher. She scooped him up and carried him to her bed, then crawled in beside him, cuddling him protectively in her arms.

      CHAPTER THREE

      The following morning Adam’s temperature felt still higher. She went to find the doctor and found Eddie instead at the bottom of the stairs leading to the doctor’s quarters.

      “Doctor Lemming had to go out on an emergency,” Eddie told her. “Are you feeling unwell, April?”

      “It’s Adam. He’s feverish, I’m afraid. It may be nothing, but I want to be on the safe side.”

      “I understand.” He thought for a moment, then snapped his fingers. “There’s a Chinese chap who arrived here in the compound late yesterday. He lists himself as a doctor on his travel papers. Shall I find him and send him up to your rooms?”

      “I’d very much appreciate it, Eddie. Thank you.”

      The Chinese man who entered her rooms a while later was stocky and short, dressed in western clothes. His black hair was slicked back and he wore a wide, flat moustache. He seemed to have no neck; his round, Oriental face rested heavily on a high celluloid collar and string tie. He was carrying a small black satchel.

      He bowed low. “I am Sun Yat-sen. Your child is not well, I am told,” he said in almost flawless English.

      “He appears to be running a temperature,” April answered in Chinese.

      The man bowed again. “With your permission, Princess, I would prefer if we spoke in English. I want to perfect my knowledge of the language as much as I can before I arrive on those shores.”

      April stared