The Hostage. Сьюзен Виггс

swore between his teeth, moving even as he spoke. He lunged at the woman, knocking her out of the way just as the burning roof crashed down upon the spot where she had been standing. Beams and timbers rained down, filling the narrow alleyway. The wind shifted, and a geyser of sparks erupted. The horses reared and whistled in panic. The carriage surged forward, racing out of control.

      Holding fast to the reins of the runaway team was Arthur Sinclair. Flaming debris filled the alley behind the cart, forming a giant pyramid of fire. The cracked wall across the way crumbled with a crash of dust and rubble.

      The entire rear section of the house teetered on the brink of collapse. The service alley was impassable, and so was the house itself. Tom’s only option was to go in the opposite direction and hope the narrow roadway cut through to the main thoroughfare.

      He barely thought of the woman, this shrieking blond banshee who had cost him his chance at revenge. Almost as an afterthought, he grabbed her by the upper arm and hauled her to her feet, pulling her out of the way of burning wreckage. Only after he had dragged her to safety did his mind register the word she kept screaming over and over.

       Father.

      Deborah wrenched her arm this way and that, but the wild man held her fast. She kicked out, stubbing her feet on his iron-hard legs. He didn’t even flinch. It was like fighting a wall of solid rock.

      The murderer was a force of nature, as determined and unstoppable as the marching fire she and her father had so foolishly underestimated.

       Father.

      Dear God, what would become of him? Her last glimpse had been of a runaway phaeton with its canvas hood in flames. Now the wild man was dragging her off in the opposite direction. “Please,” she sobbed, unable to keep from pleading. “Please, let me go. I’ve done nothing to hurt you.”

      He thrust his gun in its hip holster and stalked on, showing no indication that he heard her.

      “I can pay you.” She tried to claw off her blue topaz bracelet. “Take my jewelry.”

      “Lady, I don’t want your damned jewelry,” he said between his teeth. The alley angled to the left. He hauled her down the center of it as stinging sparks rained down on them.

      Deborah dug in her heels and leaned back, rebelling with every ounce of strength she possessed. Admittedly, that was not much, but fright and fury added power to her resistance. She had never before fought anyone for any reason.

      “Woman, I’ll drag you if I have to,” her captor said, barely slowing his pace. “Your choice.”

      Her strength ebbed fast, and she went limp. Before she crumpled completely to the cinder-strewn pavement, he caught her against his rough, smoky buckskin chest. “Damn it,” he said between clenched teeth. “You can come with me, or stay here and burn. What’ll it be?”

      “I’d rather burn in hell than go with you.”

      “Fine.” He let go of her.

      She staggered back, catching herself before she collapsed. The heat from the inferno battered her head. Sparks and cinders rained down from every rooftop. She could smell the scent of burning hair, could see small blackened holes appear in her full skirts. With the fringe of her shawl, she beat out a glowing ember. Casting a frantic glance backward, she could see nothing of the mansion that had been her father’s house, nothing but rubble shrouded in a thick fog of eye-smarting smoke. On both sides of her, the buildings burned out of control, turning the alley into a tunnel of fire. Her throat and lungs filled with hot smoke.

      In the roadway ahead, Paul Bunyan marched heedlessly forward, not even looking back to watch her burn like a martyr. She hated that he didn’t look back. She hated him for not looking back. Most of all, she hated having no choice but to flee the fire in one direction—toward her captor. After last night, Deborah reflected, she had not been able to stop shivering. She had pulled the covers over her head and, lying in the dark, reflected that she had reached the bottom of a black pit of despair. Now that she found herself confronted by a crazed murderer, she was beginning to think there were worse things than that pit.

      When she reached his side, choking and sputtering on smoke and outrage, he barely acknowledged her except to seize her by the arm and yank her roughly along with him. She tried to demand what he wanted from her, what malice he bore her, but she was coughing too hard.

      They emerged onto the main street, and finally she grasped the full force of the conflagration. A river of humanity flowed along the street, bobbing and surging forward like boiling rapids. She called to passersby for help, but no one responded. They were all too preoccupied with their own survival. Besides, the fire blazed with a deafening roar that made it seem almost alive. Deborah coughed and wheezed, starving for a breath of air. She staggered with dizziness, and only the oak-hard arm of her abductor held her up. Rushing people, smoke, cinders, flaming buildings, explosions—all filled her senses. But as she was pulled along, her larger view of the crowd narrowed and focused down to individual and heartbreaking detail. A mother holding a screaming baby and running down the street. A child standing on a street corner, turning in circles and crying until someone grabbed him and hurried off. A single shoe in the gutter. A tired old rag doll underfoot. Everywhere she looked, she saw the horrifying evidence of loss and destruction. A drunken man stood atop a piano, declaring the fire the friend of the poor man and exhorting people to help themselves to liquor. A thrown bottle struck him, and he stumbled and fell.

      Armageddon had arrived, she thought. And Satan himself had come to escort her through the flames. To what purpose, she had no idea. Terror swept through her with the same swift and unrelenting fury of the firestorm.

      Caught up in the flow of humanity, they surged with the crowd past grand buildings and residences with flames shooting out of the windows. Bundles of blankets were being dropped from upper storeys. To her horrified amazement, she realized that the hastily bound bundles of mattresses and bedding contained valuables. And some of them, insanely, contained children.

      A little girl in a red nightgown fought her way free of one of the bundles and raced blindly into the street, wailing in terror. Panic-stricken, she headed into the path of a careening express wagon.

      The wild man made a sound of impatience. He dropped Deborah’s arm and plunged into the middle of the road, snatching up the child with a single bear-paw swipe. Moving quickly for a creature of such immense size, he bore the crying child to the walkway.

      For a moment Deborah was so surprised that she simply froze, though rushing people jostled her. Dear heaven, a kidnaper. He was a deadly madman, preying upon helpless women and children.

      Deborah watched as he set the hysterical child on his shoulder. With his free hand he grabbed a black wrought iron light post and stepped up on its concrete base, rising high above the throng. The girl in red waved her arms frantically, and a man with a sweat-stained face broke free of the crowd and rushed toward her.

      “Poppa,” the little girl squealed as the looter surrendered her to her father.

      Deborah gathered her wits about her, covered her bare head with her shawl to conceal her blond hair and plunged into the thick of the crowd. She had no thought but to flee, to lose herself in the ocean of humanity surging through the streets. The maelstrom of noise thundered so loudly that her senses seemed to shut down, filtering out the chaos. Her only awareness was of the thin, high-pitched sound that came unbidden from her own throat. She had never seen a rabbit hunted down by a wolf, but knew now what the rabbit sounded like, felt like, when fleeing a predator. Two days ago she had understood her life. She had known who she was and where she fit in. And if, from time to time, she had felt a small, traitorous prodding of discontent, she had quelled it easily enough by reminding herself of all the unearned privileges she enjoyed. The past two days had disengaged her from that comfortable spot like a snail being pried from its shell. And like the snail she was uprooted, lost in an alien world, longing to crawl back into her shell but unable to find the way back.

      She forced herself to look ahead to the open square of the intersection. Hurrying in that