Underground Warrior

She listened to the shower across the hall. She imagined Trace in there, washing off all that blood and sweat. Why hadn’t it bothered her more?

Because it’s his.

The horror she’d felt when she’d thought him hurt or dead…the odd ache in her chest when he’d all but dared her to be disgusted by him…. She didn’t need experience she didn’t have, or the IQ she did, to face what this had become. She needed only a little courage.

She was falling in love with Trace Beaudry. Trace LaSalle-Beaudry…no. That confused things too much. Let him be just Trace.

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Dear Reader,

If this is your first Evelyn Vaughn title, thank you for checking me out! If, however, you’ve been looking for Underground Warrior since Knight in Blue Jeans came out, then I also thank you for your patience. I’ve been writing more slowly lately, which, unfortunately, resulted in a long wait for you. My apologies.

Trace and Sibyl’s story gave me the chance to explore human resilience, from that of a girl falsely imprisoned to that of a city striving to rebuild itself after disaster. If New Orleans can keep going, then why can’t the rest of us?

I hope all of you enjoy Underground Warrior!

Evelyn Vaughn

Underground Warrior

Evelyn Vaughn

MILLS & BOON

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EVELYN VAUGHN

believes in many magicks, particularly the magic of storytelling. She has written fiction since she could print words, first publishing in a newspaper contest at the age of twelve. Thirty(ish) years later, she’s publishing her eighteenth novel. Evelyn loves movies and videos, and is an unapologetic TV addict. Luckily, her imaginary friends and her cats seem to get along.

Evelyn loves to talk about stories and characters, especially her own. Please write her at Yvaughn@aol.com.

I owe many thanks for Underground Warrior, including Juliet Burns, Paige Wheeler, Natashya Wilson, Patience Smith, Shana Smith, Kayli Rhodes, the Texas Read’ems (who helped me come up with the idea for the Blade Keepers) and the First Thursday Romance Reader Bookclub (who kept me going). Because of them, I dedicate this book to my readers.

You complete me!

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Epilogue

Prologue

Dallas, West End, August

“He said to come alone,” said the pretty woman.

Her partner answered, “They always say to come alone.”

Silently spying on the couple from her corner of the sun-drenched restaurant patio, Sibyl analyzed her discomfort. It wasn’t fear. Fear she understood—had understood since, as a twelve-year-old, she’d watched her world end. Red-and-blue flashing lights. A pounding on the door. Mama’s cry…

Sibyl pushed the memories safely behind a wall of reason. She’d come here for information. Exposure was the one thing her enemies—a secret society of powerful men, of killers—feared.

A pounding gavel. “The court finds Isabel Daine guilty of arson and manslaughter.” A public defender too drunk to sugarcoat it. “Some people in this town, you just can’t fight.”

Some people. Why not just say secret society? The Comitatus. And no people willing to admit who really started the fire that killed her father.

The wealthy, powerful society wouldn’t allow it. Perhaps Sibyl could catalog her newest discomfort as frustration. Arden Leigh, socialite daughter of a Dallas Comitatus leader, had broken her emailed promise. Sibyl—anonymous under the handle of Vox07—had specified that they meet alone. Instead, Arden brought a suitor. Despite his old T-shirt and faded jeans, his posture and speech patterns bespoke wealth. Power. Comitatus.

“Thank heavens I have a big, strong man to protect me,” Arden teased her beau. Sibyl’s stomach twisted as she watched. She had to get out of there.

Across a wide parking lot, a yellow-and-white light-rail train slid to a halt with a ringing of bells. While disembarking passengers distracted the pretty couple, Sibyl scribbled a simple, angry note onto a strip of paper placemat—Liars!

Risky or not, she couldn’t just ignore people lying, cheating and getting their own way at the expense of others. Not powerful secret societies descended from bloody conquerors like Charlemagne or Genghis Khan. Not beauty queens with false smiles and doting, disguised lovers. Not anyone.

Swallowing back her hurt, Sibyl stood to leave the patio. She dropped the note surreptitiously into the socialite’s purse as she passed.

Suddenly, the woman’s partner blocked the one exit. “Hiya, Vox.”

Sibyl spun and ran, vaulting the iron fencing of the patio and racing across a hot, Texas parking lot toward the train stop. She dodged surprised tourists. She threaded between cars. The 2:18 pulled away from the historic district, but she could lose herself in the crowd heading for El Centro Community College just beyond, if she…could…just….

The obstacle of a second man, angling toward her from behind the train stop’s handicap access ramp, forced her to a stumbling stop. No….

Tailored suit, despite the August heat wave. Expensive sunglasses. An air of absolute entitlement, even for nobility. More Comitatus.

If her years of uncovering every scrap of information she could find on them had taught her nothing else, it taught her how to recognize their agents.

Fight. No, move. No—fight! Sibyl pivoted—but here came the couple who’d chased her. She fell an instinctive step back and spotted a third enemy—privileged walk despite his cheap clothing and beach-blond hair—closing in from another direction. They’d surrounded her. They’d won. Again.

“It’s all right, honey!” lied the beauty queen, reaching for her. “You can trust—”

The scream of a train whistle drowned her out.

Sybil spun to face the light-rail train that loomed down on her with an urgent wail of warning. A blow hurled her into brick pavement.

Then…? Silence.

Wouldn’t a train’s impact hurt more? She curled her hand on the hot bricks beneath her…and smelled the earthy, unmistakable scent of man on top of her, sheltering her. She felt the rub of coarse skin on her bare arms, of denim on her bare legs. Despite the gruff cursing over the screech of metal brakes, she felt safe.

Literally. Someone saved her.

Someone who weighed almost as much as a train, even so.

Opening her eyes, Sibyl turned her head to the man who rolled off her. His size momentarily blocked the sun and blue sky. Swarthy, she noted. Angry…she’d been angering men for a long time now. This one, at least, had some cause.

He could have died. Which meant he, at least, didn’t want her silenced.

“What the hell were you doing?” her savior demanded, cutting through her shock. His accent held the familiar trace of Louisiana—rural Louisiana. He pulled her effortlessly upward with one huge, rough hand around hers, and she let him. “When a train’s about to hit you, you move, you don’t just stand there!”

Sibyl barely reached his broad chest, even in her cowboy boots. The muscles of his shoulders bulged under his T-shirt; the muscles of his thick arms she could see for herself under sun-browned skin. Substantial, she thought. Blue collar, not white collar. A two-day beard shadowed his jaw. Primitive. And he'd risked his life for her.

A strange sensation filled her. After a decade alone, she searched for a label, then surprised herself. Trust? She trusted him. Completely.

“Oh, thank God!” Arden Leigh put on a surprisingly good show of concern. So did her beau and the blond man, with their prep school postures and thrift store clothes. The one man who’d dressed Comitatus-wealthy had vanished. Safe. “We didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“I guess you just don’t have the way with women that Trace does.” The blond man laughed. Sibyl’s hero grunted casual disgust, but she didn’t hear his reply.

They were together. This man—Trace—who seemed like the anti-Comitatus, knew people she’d assumed were her enemies. And yet, as the others crowded around her, Sibyl instinctively pressed back against her savior’s solid body. Fear, she understood. It shouldn’t stop her from finding out more about these not-quite-Comitatus types…or their friend. If she could trust him.

Needing time, needing proof, Sibyl rolled her eyes upward and dropped into a feigned faint, like some damsel in distress.

Her hero caught her, swept her into his hard arms, held her close to his broad, warm chest—and growled an unheroic, “Crap.”

Sibyl had no intention of analyzing the feelings that swept past her wall of reason, this time.

Some truths were just too dangerous to consider.

Chapter 1

“Doubt separates people…it is a sword that kills.”

—Buddha

New Orleans, three months later

Trace Beaudry didn’t consider himself a big thinker.

Big? Hell, yeah.

A thinker? Not so much.

But even he couldn’t ignore the significance of finally entering his ancestors’ once grand, now ruined, home. This house could have been his inheritance if he’d been smarter, classier, better. He’d tried. He’d failed. Now the house sat empty and rotting.

And here Trace stood, the bastard end of his genetic line—hefting the sledgehammer that would take it down.

Even through the bandanna across his face, even with a fresh stick of peppermint gum in his mouth, the fancy “bungalow” stank as thick and awful as any other New Orleans flood house. It had stood empty for years before Hurricane Katrina turned even nice areas of New Orleans into Southern Lake Pontchartrain. But what really trashed the building were the months it sat untouched, afterward. The Judge—Trace couldn’t think of the man he’d first met on his fifteenth birthday as a father—had apparently fought the city’s attempts to force his hand. For once, the Judge lost.

And now his illegitimate son crossed the threshold at last.

Dirt and flyspecks darkened lead cathedral windows. Deadly black mold laced across layers of brittle wallpaper that sagged like bunting from an equally grimy ceiling. Inches of bug-infested filth carpeted both the floor and the museum-quality furniture strewn about by forgotten floodwaters. A ceiling fan’s blades wilted like an upside-down flower, pulled downward as those waters had receded, and then dried like that, as much as anything ever dried in Louisiana. A rat scurried up the curved, wrought-iron staircase.

Trace knuckled his hard hat back as he took it all in—and snorted.

“Eh?” asked Alain, who’d grown up in the same trailer park as Trace. He ran the construction crew hired for this gut job. He’d bid extra low, just to see this little piece of Trace’s fancy-schmancy history.

Trace shook his head, at a loss for the right words. Irony? Symbolism? Karma? He didn’t want to call on the botched education that his embarrassing attempt at legitimacy, at life as a LaSalle, had bought him. He’d tried living in his father’s world. He’d failed. End of story. Now he settled for, “Life’s funny, huh?”

Then the six-man team set about knocking down every bit of the house except the frame and foundation. They started by emptying it, piling up mounds of trash and recyclables at the distant, weed-shrouded curb. Then they shoveled muck off the floor into wheelbarrows to cart outside. Only later could they break down the walls, pull out the insulation and leave only the bungalow’s frame to be rebuilt. Trace liked the honest, hard work of it—no polish or sophistication required. No stupid rituals or secrecy, either. He liked sweating and lifting and pushing his fighter’s body to the limit without hurting anyone. He liked not thinking.

This was why he’d left his friends—fellow outcasts from their fathers’ world of privilege and power—back in Dallas, once they started making noises about fixing that world. They thought too much.

Trace was a man of action.

“So much for curb appeal, eh?” Alain joked from the street, hours later. The once-white wall had grayed to the waterline, with a spray-painted cross tagging the date of its inspection. Its ancient oak and magnolia trees stood dead, killed by poisons in the long-standing water as much as by drowning. But at least outside, in the humid Louisiana November, they could all breathe and switch to fresh gum.

“Yeah,” snorted Trace, strangely dissatisfied whenever he stopped for too long. “We should hire out as decorators, huh?”

Which is when Bubba called them to “come see.” So they pulled their bandannas back up like Old West bank robbers and headed back in.

Bubba had torn big swaths of moldy wallpaper off the foyer wall.

“Smart,” mocked Trace, of the extra dust. “The air wasn’t nasty enough.”

Then he saw the picture—the fresco, he labeled it in a brief echo from his attempt at higher education—that Bubba had uncovered.

That weight he’d first felt in his chest this morning, that searching for words? It tripled. The plaster painting was ruined, darkened with mold here, torn away with the paper there. But enough remained for them to make out the basics. It showed a field of battle, with banners and horses and knights in armor, some upright, some dead. They all wore swords. One, standing, wore a crown—the king. Another, dead or dying beside the king, had some kind of drinking horn lying near him. Maybe the king had poisoned him. Trace wouldn’t put that past his father’s ancestors.

God forbid rich folks paint the foot soldiers on their wall, right? Or the peasants who shined their armor and cleaned up after their horses. Or, for that matter, their women.

“Whattaya think?” asked Bubba. “Maybe you’re related to one of those old guys, huh, LaSalle?”

“I’m not a LaSalle,” Trace growled—and picked up the nearest sledgehammer. “My ma’s a Beaudry.”

“Whoa!” shouted Alain. “Safety goggles!”

Trace swung. The heavy, iron head of the hammer bit hard into the painted plaster. Its impact ran up his arms. Pieces of kings and knights fell off the wall, leaving fresh, pale scars on the mold-stained scene. Still, too much remained, so Trace swung again.

Then again. Damn, it felt good. He liked denying the heritage that had felt like a fairy tale, like a lie come too late and never as promised.

He liked unleashing his strength, no-holds-barred. He might be a bull, but this was no china shop. This was man-versus-wall.

And the wall freaking went down.

Goodbye, king. Goodbye, dead knight. Goodbye, trees and horses and hills and sky. Goodbye, secret society of overlords and servility that should’ve died out centuries ago.

Au revoir, LaSalle fairy tale.

Within moments, Trace had reduced the whole water-stained ruin of a wall to rubble. He was breathing hard. His whole body vibrated from the exercise. This felt better than the endorphin rush after a long run, a hard workout, an underground fight.

And then, half-hidden behind clumps of former wall in the settling plaster dust, he saw it. And everything kind of went still.

A…sword?

He crouched down to one knee, his ears ringing in the sudden silence, and reached out—but hesitated to touch the thing. Instead, almost respectfully, he moved clumps of wall off it.

Yeah. That was a sword, all right. Not flared like a pirate’s, like the one his fellow outcast Smith Donnell had gotten hold of a few months back. And not slim and light, like the ones they’d used when he took fencing as a PE credit, back at that damned college he’d hated.

This was a real sword. A warrior’s sword.

It stretched longer and wider than a yardstick, straight as a line. Its hilt formed a cross. Despite never paying attention in history, Trace had a sudden flash of a knight stabbing the sword’s blade into the earth, then kneeling to pray to the temporary cross he’d created.

Kind of like how he was kneeling, right now. Weird coincidence.

“Whoa!” exclaimed Alain, reaching for it. “What the hell?”

“Mine!” snarled Trace. “Go!” And his friends immediately backed off. Probably because Trace sounded insane. This had to be a LaSalle antique. He didn’t want anything to do with the LaSalles. He was a Beaudry.

But sometimes a guy just knew, whether it made sense or not, that something belonged to him. And that sword, lying sealed behind the wall for God knew how long? That sword was his.

His.

Which somehow made him think of the exact person who could answer some questions about it for him.

Click. Down the once tree-lined street, a private investigator sat in his car snapping picture after picture. Grunts in hard hats hauling scrap iron and rotting furniture to the curb? Click. Guys stopping to catch their breath under dead trees before going back into the bungalow? Click.

He smoked. He drank coffee. He peed into a jar. And he photographed. Thank God digital photos were so cheap. He could just save it all onto a DVD, instead of the old days that required prints. He didn’t know what the blue blood who’d hired him cared about this stinking, ugly cleanup; it was still happening all over New Orleans. But if Charles was willing to pay, he was willing to document.

Still, he doubted they’d see anything interesting. Click.

Sibyl reached the top of the apartment’s spiral staircase—a trendy loft bedroom, complete with old brick walls and exposed ductwork—and realized she didn’t know why she’d gone there. She turned in a circle, using the loft’s vantage to worriedly eye the rest of the apartment. Of course it looked perfect, from its concrete floors to its wall-of-glass windows overlooking the Trinity River levee. But nobody would ever believe it was hers.

What had she done? Hadn’t she gone to great lengths to avoid visitors?

A child genius, Sibyl—then Isabel Daine—had gotten a scholarship to the prestigious New Orleans Preparatory Academy by the age of ten. She must have known what secret societies were, even then—could probably have recited the Oxford English Dictionary’s etymology of the phrase. But she would have more easily believed in Santa Claus, which, based on the scientific and temporal improbabilities, she had not.

She’d been too busy studying, too busy “looking ahead,” as her father had always advised. He’d taken a job as a night watchman at the school. Academy students lived far above her family’s middle-class income. By the age of twelve, Sibyl was set to graduate first in her class. She had full rides to Yale, Harvard, even Oxford, hers for the choosing.

Then came the pounding at the front door—she woke to a strobe of red-and-blue lights entering her dark bedroom. A fire at the academy had killed her father.

A fire the police said she’d set.

Evidence came from nowhere—classmates and even professors suddenly labeled her as sullen, resentful, unpredictable. Her? The school paper produced a “rejected editorial” she’d never actually written.

Even her mother had begun to doubt her. “Darling, if you were so unhappy there,” she’d said through the Plexiglas that separated visitors from prisoners.

“I wasn’t,” Isabel had screamed, so the guards ended the visit.

She’d been too young for a jury trial, so the verdict rested on a certain Judge LaSalle. He convicted her of arson and manslaughter. Sibyl lost her graduation with honors. She lost Yale and Harvard and Oxford. She lost her daddy, who’d been so excited for her, and her mother, who couldn’t bear up under legal bills, scandal and doubts. She gave up her very name, her identity.

Sibyl lost everything except her genius. From the girls’ penitentiary, getting computer access to earn her GED and several undergraduate degrees, Sibyl had thrown every bit of her IQ into hacking the truth. She couldn’t tell for sure who had set the fire. But eventually, she learned who had covered it up.

Conspiracy theorists warned of the Masons. The Trilateral Commission. The Bildebergers. But far better hidden lay a secret society called the Comitatus.

Sibyl learned as much as she could from behind bars and then, after her release at the age of eighteen, she uncovered the rest. Peripheral comments in ancient manuscripts. Lost journals she’d uncovered. The testimony of other, frightened victims. Personal correspondence that people like Judge LaSalle thought inaccessible. Nothing was safe from her quest.

Now twenty-two years old, Sibyl considered herself as much an expert on the powerful, world-wide Comitatus as existed outside their control. Name a powerful family, and they’d likely belonged. Capet and Valois. Aragon and Castille. Plantagenet and Stuart. Just in case she’d foolishly thought heroes still existed, after what she’d been through.

But she needed to know more. Comitatus members were wealthy, blue-blooded and influential. But Sibyl meant to take them down—if she could survive that long. So she took precautions.

Sibyl never, ever answered her disposable, untraceable, prepaid cell phone—if she wanted to talk after hearing the message, she would call back. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you. Especially one small, lonesome woman versus a worldwide secret society. The people who had her latest number, she could count on two hands—as if someone with her IQ needed to finger count.

The people she would call back, she could (figuratively) count on one hand.

Trace Beaudry was the first person she’d not only called back, but invited to visit. Her inability to decide why worried her. She knew why she trusted him; that went back to the risking-his-life-to-save-hers business. It factored in data she’d gathered in the few days she’d spent helping him and his friends, after that rescue. His friends had former Comitatus backgrounds. Their claimed rejection of the society explained both their poverty and their foolish goal to somehow salvage said society. But Trace had no such background at all. Trace was a Beaudry. Despite being a frighteningly good hacker, Sibyl could find no reference to a Comitatus member or family line under that name.

And she’d looked. See: paranoid.

But even meeting non-Comitatus men here, alone, fell under the heading of “Things movies teach you not to do.” Unless the movie was a romance. This wasn’t a romance. Sibyl wouldn’t know what to do with a—

Drinks! She spiraled back down the stairs to the large, open kitchen to look into the formerly empty, stainless steel refrigerator. Again.

It held a six-pack of every major soda she could find and nothing else. Sibyl suspected Trace wouldn’t want any of it—he was just coming to ask a few questions about her research. Besides, he’d seemed like a beer drinker. She’d considered getting beer for him, but knew she’d get carded because of her height. Although even her real ID showed her as legal, Sibyl didn’t like using it. She didn’t like people looking too closely at her.