Grave Mercy. Don Pendleton

the paralyzed young man’s chest, checking for a heartbeat. You’ll forget her quickly enough, he thought. It was a pointless gesture, the youth couldn’t hear his thought, and he really didn’t care about his torment, but that brief show of compassion was something he felt the urge to give.

      As soon as the Haitian had his dart gun loaded, he nodded to his companion. A third of their number was waiting in reserve, ready to hit anyone who wasn’t put down by Fortescue and friend’s darts.

      Four quiet puffs of CO₂ launched their pointed, toxin-laden missiles with stealthy quickness. The two young couples were rendered immobile with little fuss or muss. One of the young men struggled, his lungs failing due to an unforeseen bout of asthmatic response, but two losses abovedeck were little loss to Morrot’s operational plans. Fortescue waved his assistants on to scoop up the unconscious ones, ignoring the flopped corpses on the decks.

      “How many belowdecks?” Fortescue asked.

      “Register says three crew and another couple,” his ally, Cornelius, said, looking at the laminated paper. “Do we take the crew?”

      “They’re strong and will be useful,” Fortescue said. “Besides, these men aren’t true believers. Just because they share the same skin color means nothing. They are pagans, adherents to heathen gods.”

      “They think the same about us,” Cornelius answered. “So, it’s only fair.”

      “It is unconscionable that they consider us savages, worshipping carcasses impaled to planks or a burning shrubbery,” Fortescue replied. “When we make our move, their world’s streets will run with their blood.”

      Cornelius’s smile was broad and infectious. “Blood shed by their own hands.”

      Fortescue nodded sagely. “Reload, and we’ll head belowdecks. Get Gallad.”

      The three Black Avengers headed below the deck.

      THE STRAPS CUT into Guillermo Rojas’s wrists as consciousness returned to him, his arms twitching futilely in response to his feeling of restraint. Rojas wanted to turn his head, but a leather thong across his forehead and gripping his chin kept him still.

      All he could remember was Stephanie, her gorgeous blue eyes alit with horror, foam streaming over her lips. Then there was the black shadow, wielding a strange, sci-fi-looking handgun, that reached out to touch his chest, as if to soothe his worries over the gurgling, drowning girl who trembled beside him. Rage and grief spun in his strap-bound chest, his fury an impotent storm as he didn’t know where the midnight-skinned marauder was, and grief over the sweet, blue-eyed creature he’d fallen for. Stephanie Coulton, tiny and privileged, had found him as beautiful as he’d found her, and had brought him down for a spring getaway despite her father’s disgust that she was consorting with someone that the man felt was destined to be a pool boy or a gardener, not her social equal.

      She’d loved him, she’d defied her father, and now he knew what her face looked like when her lungs shut down, jammed with histamine. He knew the symptoms of bronchoconstriction well—Rojas was a medical student, only a year away from his first internship. His mind reeled as he searched for a reason why he’d just lain there, helpless as she died, suffocating.

      His mouth was dry, and he wasn’t able to speak. His pharmaceutical knowledge simply wasn’t enough to determine what had happened, but he was certain that it wasn’t any form of anaesthetic. No “knockout drug” acted so quickly against a person, but he knew that there were toxins out there that were used for rapid incapacitation. He’d been present at emergency intubations, and knew anaesthesiologists utilized drugs that caused instant paralysis—which was why intubation teams acted instantly when the patients were given their injections. As soon as the subject went limp, the intubation tube was put down the windpipe and into the main bronchial tube.

      Such a drug acted instantly, and was capable of stopping someone’s breathing, indeed it was counted on to prevent reflexive movement during surgery. Handled right, it could render a big man like him immobile, easily captured, but a dose that would leave him helpless was far too much for a girl who was half his weight. Muscles frozen, Stephanie was doomed the minute the toxin hit her bloodstream.

      A fingertip caressed his cheek, and Rojas grimaced as his effort to turn was again stymied by the rig that held his head in place. Tendons cracked as they tried to move a completely immobilized head.

      “The first one awake, good.”

      Rojas tried to open his mouth, but he finally figured out the dryness in his mouth—a leather “tongue” was stuffed into it, and it was part of the multistrap system that held him immobile. All he could do was murmur past the gag.

      “Yes, so sorry about not allowing you to speak, but unlike my favorite visionary, I do not care to listen to the wails and laments of my experiments,” the voice said, a lilting French accent weighing heavily on his words. His timber was deep, its resonant echo making Rojas imagine that it came not from a throat, but a bottomless gullet that would be more at home on a shark.

      Rojas snorted, trying to trumpet out some form of sound. His eyes craned to see the shadowy man flitting in the darkness at the edges of his peripheral vision. His chewed on the leather pad that gagged him until his teeth started to hurt.

      “Such fire. I appreciate it,” the French-accented shadow man said. “It gives me a challenge.”

      Rojas’s blood chilled at the ominous sound of that statement. Dark brown eyes swiveled in their sockets, grasping for more than a blurred glimpse of the smear of motion that possessed the doom-laden French accent that taunted him. Fingernails scratched along his jawline, and the young man caught a glimpse of the man’s digits, callused and long, bearing the color of straight, strong coffee.

      “Oh, you want to see me?” his tormentor asked.

      Rojas managed an affirmative sound.

      A face loomed into the light over Rojas’s left shoulder. The shadowy figure bore a distinguished face that was handsome with middle age’s wisdom and grace, his broad, flat nose the only sign of any imperfection as the bridge had an odd kink in the middle of it. Rojas almost felt relief that it was a fairly normal-looking man, not some chimeric predator, when dread snuck into his heart, a frightened tingle that zipped through his chest and rolled down his arms to his fingertips. Something on the other side was wrong, horribly wrong.

      The man stepped out from behind Rojas’s chair and turned toward him. The oversize, milky-white eye glared out of the fused mass of flesh that was the remnants of what used to be human features. The eye, three concentric rings of varying hues of white, glared at him, and Rojas would have kicked and screamed had he retained any ability to move. Instead, a high-pitched whine blared through his nostrils, the closest approximation of a scream of horror that he could manage with a mouth stuffed with leather.

      “My name is Dr. Morrot,” the man said.

      Rojas had initially thought he’d awakened to a nightmare, a fever-dream where Stephanie had died slowly and horribly and where he had been kidnapped by monsters. He realized that the first of his waking moments were a respite of peace compared to the wave of insanity washing over him. Bound helpless in front of a deformed madman with a nausea-inducing orb where an eye should have been, tormented by a voice that belonged to a devil, not a human, Rojas’s arms, laden with lean, strong muscle, flexed against his restraints, but they didn’t budge. His legs tried to kick, to twist, but they, too, were thwarted by the trap that Morrot had placed him in.

      Rojas could hear that others in the room had begun to awaken. Their nostrils blared and bleated as they made an effort to speak, alarm filling those nasal sounds as they realized that they, too, were immobilized.

      Morrot leaned in, licking Rojas’s shoulder. “Mmm. The salty taste of fear, accompanied by the buttery scent of panic. Of course, the smell is really a byproduct of the body’s elimination of potassium, but as a medical student, you already knew that, right, Mr. Rojas?”

      Rojas wanted to bellow, to throw that trivia back into Morrot’s ugly, misshapen face. He’d