Something powerful is drawing Ward back to Devil's Island. Something he thought he had forgotten. He must evade vicious lighthouse keeper George Jaggles in order to rescue it, but Jaggles will soon be the least of his worries. Because an assassin is...
His best friend Joe Carmichael had not been there that day. Only Joe's mother Anna. It had been she who had represented Nick's parents in the trial after all – represented them brilliantly, but to no avail. They had been found guilty, and were hung.
Anna loved Nick as if he were her own son, and after the execution she had taken the orphaned boy into her own home. This was where Nick had met Anna's bodyguard Randall.
According to Joe at least, Randall had once been a Brother. If this was true, he was in as much peril as the woman he had been hired to protect, for Brothers who deserted the Brotherhood were privy to great secrets, and duly executed. Only a handful had ever renounced the cloth over the years, becoming fugitives. They were usually found.
The mercenary was a stony-faced man. He seemed to have no friends, and confided in nobody. Even Anna was wary of him. He was paid well for the job of protecting her because he was good at it. Nick observed him closely whenever he was around. The man showed no sign of annoyance – he seemed not to notice the boy at all. Nick didn't pester him with questions, but simply trailed him like a dog, watching, learning.
He learned fast.
After months of silence, Randall finally showed him how to dismantle and clean a barking iron. If he was surprised by the speed and ease with which Nick picked this up he didn't show it. He never praised the boy, nor did he scold him. He showed his approval only with more quiet lessons. These were undertaken without Anna's knowledge, for she would not have allowed it. Sometimes Nick caught her giving him a contemplative look, and he would wonder if she suspected something was going on. Nick didn't even tell his best friend Joe about the lessons. He had learned Randall's first and most important lesson well: one did not talk recklessly. Prattlers died.
He soon convinced Randall to allow him to join his gang. He flourished in it. He was not afraid of being caught, of dying. To do something was better than nothing, and to do something dangerous was better still.
"You're twelve years old," Randall said to him once. "Why do you want to throw your life away?"
Nick had simply shrugged.
The risks he took paid off. The gang came to respect him despite his age, and his abilities grew as he gained experience. He was barely home. Anna's attempts to learn where he went at night failed. She was a skillful interrogator, but was no match for Nick, hamstrung as she was by her love and sympathy for him. He loved her too, but he could always justify his silence as a way of protecting her. If she didn't know anything she could not be held culpable.
Then came the night Nick's luck ran out. He was captured in a sting orchestrated by Brother Tamerlane, thrown into Bedlam Prison, charged with a string of crimes, and tried before Anna had a chance to learn of it. He was represented by a useless State-appointed legal counsel. He pleaded Guilty – his counsel assured him he would receive a lighter sentence if he did so. But the magistrate sentenced him to death.
The night before his execution, Nick was taken down to one of the chambers beneath the prison and tortured. The pill that killed quickly and painlessly when ingested, which he carried in a little locket attached to a chain that hung around his neck, and which all members of Randall's gang had worn, had of course been taken when he was apprehended, otherwise he would have swallowed it. He had another, but it was inside the mattress in his room at the Carmichaels' house. Shackled to the chair, he had lied convincingly, but at some point the pain had become so great that he had passed out.
They must have unshackled him from the chair and laid him out on his stomach on the floor, perhaps so he wouldn't choke if he vomited, because that was how he found himself when he woke up. The Brothers were gone and the door to the chamber was locked. They had searched him so thoroughly when he was brought in that they had even found the hairpin he kept tucked away out of sight in his long hair. So he had nothing with which to pick the lock. But even as this thought crossed his mind he had heard the footfalls of the Brothers returning down the corridor, and he had looked around the room for somewhere to hide.
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