The Coven by Blaze Ward

Author:Blaze Ward
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781644703755
Publisher: Knotted Road Press

Scene Seventeen

Brianna had considered doing this starkers, but decided that she needed tools too much, and a bandolier or belt would ruin the look. So she’d dressed in something light colored, aiming to vanish against the concrete that showed a pale dimness in the night. Or the waves behind, where they crashed some and generated a white foam.

Night was never black. Black stood out almost as well as day if you didn’t pay attention to your surroundings.

She was hoping for invisible.

Wyatt had briefed her on the pirates. Sleep late. Stay up late, but not that much. Mostly collapsing from excessive drink for about half of them.

She wondered if they needed to visit a civilized world and spend some of their loot on brothels, since the entire crew was male. Not all of them would be happy seeking solace from other men, as she remembered a statistic somewhere suggesting that about ten percent of folks tended towards homosexual preferences, with another ten or twenty being flexible on the topic, depending on the circumstances.

Hopefully, some of this crew actually liked women enough to be distracted by nudity, once all the scouting had been done.

She snickered quietly to herself and detached from the last building. She had found this alley originally. Fin had used it to find the bank. She was keeping to it so that lights from the hotel with all the pirates didn’t fall on her.

Lighthouse. A single tower on something of a point, thrust out on a quay into the water, bisecting the harbor into river runoff and a marshy shallows with reeds and presumably fish and fowl on her left.

Concrete, or close enough. Fifteen meters wide at the base, narrowing to perhaps eight or ten at the top, with what looked like four floors inside.

No light. No lights, save one over a door from the hotel that she could see casting shadows behind a building in between.

Just the sound of waves and the smell of salt. Blown sand crunching softly underfoot as she crossed to the tower. Breeze in her face that would have cut right through her without layers of cloth in the way.

Closed door on this side, a darker shadow dimpled in the smooth surface.

Brianna slid up to it and studied things with night eyes almost as good as a cat’s. Keyed lock, like Fin had found on the bank. Locked, when she placed a hand on the cold metal and tried to turn it.

She pulled a set of pins from a pocket and went to work, doing this entirely by touch, because they’d trained her at the time by blindfolding her and requiring everything be seen with the fingertips.

Not a hard lock to master. And she didn’t think they would notice if she scratched it in the process, but her training required a certain level of professionalism, so she did it right the first time.

And it surrendered quickly.

She cracked the door just enough to confirm no light inside, then slipped in and closed it with a fast glance around behind her.

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