Free IVORY DAWN (The Razor's Adventures) by P.S. Bartlett Page A

had just raised the pistol and stepped to her right, when she heard her cousin’s screams coming from the side of the house.  She leapt over the bloody body of the dying pirate before her and raced down the steps.
    “Keara, watch them!” she shouted.  In the darkness, she came upon Miranda, with that same bloody arm pulled tightly around her neck and a dirk pointed at her side. The man was enormous and stood at least a foot over Miranda’s head. His arm looked like the low, thick branch of a tree covered in sap in the now risen moonlight.
    “Cass, stop…he’ll kill me.”
    “Not before I splatter his tiny brains all over the yard, he won’t.”
    A moment later, the tree branch fell as if struck by lightning, and Miranda ran towards Cass shouting, “Shoot him! Shoot him now!” But when Cass raised the pistol to fire, the man already lay on his back on the ground. Bent over his slit throat was Ivory, wiping her razor on his shirt.
    “Is everyone accounted for?” she asked as she stood and folded the razor in her hand.
    “Wait, weren’t there six of them?” Keara asked, looking in every direction. “Let’s get back in the house and figure out what to do.”
    “I saw Mister Six take off for the riverbank. From the looks of him, he was hit, but obviously not as bad off as this bunch,” Ivory stated upon seeing the rest of the damage littering the front porch. “Cass, help me with these bodies.”
    “Ivory, I think it’s best if we regroup inside and put together some sort of plan.”
    “A plan, Cass? How do you plan on explaining to the next wave of pirates how their mates ended up dead on our property?”
    “We stood our ground tonight, and we’ll keep standing our ground until…”
    “Until when? The Carolinas run out of pirates?”
    Cass stood silent for a few moments, as Keara and Miranda looked on in the darkness, and then said, “What say you two? Should we call a vote or something?”
    “Vote all you want. I’m dragging these bastards to the river, rowing them out to the current, weighing them down, and letting them go.” Ivory had grown into a hard-headed, strong-willed young woman, and her survival instinct probably outweighed every other instinct she had.
    “Well, I guess that’s settled then,” Cass said as she brushed her hands together. “Miranda, go to the shed and get the rope. Keara, grab an arm.” Cass realized Ivory was right. This wasn’t about how much corn to plant or how to keep foxes out of the henhouse. These were dead pirates, and sooner or later someone was going to come looking for them.
    “It’s a shame. This one was very handsome,” Miranda commented nudging one of the men with her boot.
    One by one, they dragged the blood-stained and lifeless bodies of the men down to the river bank and tied their legs together at the ankles. Ivory and Cass climbed into the rowboat and pulled them along through the water. They weighed them down with the heaviest rocks they could find, and then they cut them loose. The water was black and murky from the previous day’s rain, which helped shroud the bodies and relieved some of the angst of their deed.  The bodies disappeared quickly below the surface and were soon out of sight.
    There were about two hours left of night when they’d finally completed their task.  They bathed themselves in the river and huddled together around a small fire in the parlor, drying and warming their ice cold stares. “Someone please say something before I vomit,” Keara whispered, shivering beneath her blanket.
    “We had no choice. They gave us…no choice,” Cass answered, putting her arm around Keara’s shoulder.
    “I pulled the trigger. I murdered those men,” Keara murmured, pulling her knees to her chest and wrapping the blanket around them.
    “We both pulled triggers,” Cass shot back at her.
    “But we’ve never killed anyone before,” Miranda said, leaning over on Cass’s other shoulder—the flame dancing in her eyes.
    There