Son of the Morning

by Linda Howard

  Their eyes met, and he saw his death in hers. She saw a cold, dark intelligence in his, an awareness that went beyond the moment, as if he knew her down to her soul. There was a flash of acknowledgment, then his hand loosened and he slumped to the ground.

  The man she had kicked in the knee began to back away, his hands held up to indicate he was unarmed. She didn’t believe that for a minute.

  She jerked her head around to locate the third man, and heard the driver’s door opening behind her. She threw herself on her back, held the pistol over her head, and shot through the door. Sitting up again, she shot at the first man as he pulled his pistol from under his jacket. She missed, but he dived for cover.

  She had two shots left; she couldn’t keep shooting back and forth, she had to make them count. She clambered over her jumbled possessions and settled behind the steering wheel, and jerked the transmission into gear as she jammed her foot onto the gas pedal. The old truck shuddered as it leaped forward, tires slipping on the icy patches in the parking lot. The third man’s face appeared in the window beside her as he grabbed for the door handle. She shoved the pistol at the window and he ducked, letting go of the door. The truck shook as the first man jumped up on the rear bumper, trying to climb into the bed.

  Grace jerked the steering wheel hard to the right, then to the left. It was like playing crack the whip, except the stakes were a lot higher. His feet slipped off the bumper but he managed to hold on. Watching in the rearview mirror, she barreled out through the parking lot entrance into the path of a car turning in. A horn blared, she jerked the wheel again, and the man lost his grip on the tailgate. He went rolling across the parking lot, and fetched up hard against the rear tire of a parked car.

  The passenger door still swung open, but she couldn’t take the time to stop and close it. Stepping on the gas, she took a hard left at the first corner, then a right at the next one. The door slammed itself.

  She tried to think what she should do. They had a description of the truck, and probably the tag number as well. The truck was registered under Louisa Croley’s name, the same name that was on her passport and her driver’s license. She should ditch the truck, steal a car somewhere, and get as far from Minneapolis as she could. The police would be looking for her within minutes; a shoot-out at a McDonald’s was bound to attract attention.

  But she didn’t ditch the truck. She didn’t take the time to drive to a mall and look for a car with the keys left in it, though Harmony had assured her there were at least two fools shopping at any mall at any given time. Instead she hit 36 and drove west until she got to I-35. Then she got on the southbound lane and headed for Iowa.

  “A mysterious shoot-out at a McDonald’s in Roseville has police puzzled,” the talking head earnestly announced. “Witnesses say several shots were fired, and at least six people were involved, with two seriously injured. But by the time police arrived, all those involved had vanished, including the wounded. Witnesses said one person, perhaps a woman, was driving a brown pickup truck. By law, all doctors and hospitals are required to report all gunshot wounds to police, but thus far no one has requested treatment.”

  Parrish paced back and forth, furious. Conrad sat silently on the sofa, his shoulder bound and his arm supported by a sling. A doctor who belonged to the Foundation had removed the bullet, which luckily had struck his collarbone instead of tearing through the complicated system of cartilage and ligaments in his shoulder. His collarbone was cracked, and the insistent throb seemed to pound through his entire body, but he had refused any pain medication. The cut on his hand, though it had required eight stitches, was minimal.

  “Four men couldn’t catch one woman,” Parrish said, seething. “Bayne didn’t even know anything was going on until it was too late for him to help. I’m very disappointed in the quality of your men, Conrad, and in you. She caught you with your pants down, and now she’s gone to ground again. With all the people we have in this city, no one has seen her. She’s one inexperienced woman; how in hell can she keep getting away from me?” He roared the last sentence, his face flushed dark red, his neck corded with rage.

  Conrad sat silently. He didn’t make excuses, but as soon as he was able, he would personally take care of Melker. As soon as he spotted her, the fool had run up to the truck without waiting for the others to get in place. If they had all come at her at once, taken her by surprise, she wouldn’t have escaped. Instead Melker had tried to take her by himself, and she’d kicked the hell out of him.

  Conrad was deeply annoyed at himself, too; he should have expected her to have armed herself by this time, but instead he had allowed himself to be caught off guard, first by the knife, then by that unwavering pistol. She hadn’t hesitated, hadn’t panicked. She had said, “I’ll kill you,” and the warning was sincere. She would have done it. In that moment, looking deep into her pure blue eyes, he saw the strength none of them had suspected.

  He could have held on. She would have killed him, but the delay, and the hindrance of his body dragging on her, would likely have resulted in her capture. He had chosen to let go and pretend to lose consciousness, to save himself. He didn’t want to die, he had too much left undone. He didn’t want anyone except himself to capture Grace St. John, and he wanted to be alone when he did it. Parrish would never know what happened to her. To that end, though he had noted her license plate number, Conrad kept it to himself.

  Rather than get involved in a tedious police investigation, they had all gotten into their cars and left. Despite his pain and blood loss, Conrad had managed to drive to a secure place and arrange for medical care. Parrish was in a rage, not yet paying attention to the sheet of paper Paglione had picked up in the parking lot, the paper that had blown out of Grace’s truck.

  The paper lay on the table. Conrad hadn’t yet looked at it, but his gaze kept going to it. After all these months, searching for both Grace and the papers, a sheet had virtually fallen into their hands. How important could one sheet be, out of all those papers? But it drew him, and he couldn’t stop glancing at it in a mixture of dread and anticipation.

  At last Parrish noticed that his temper tantrum was being mostly ignored. He followed Conrad’s look and stalked over to snatch up the sheet of paper. “What’s this?”

  “Paglione picked it up,” Conrad said. “It blew out of her truck.”

  “It’s some notes she’s made,” Parrish said, his tone growing thoughtful. He walked over to the desk and sat down, turning on the lamp. “I don’t know this language. ‘C-u-n-b-h-a-l-a-c-h’ means ‘steady,’ ‘c-u-n-b-h-a-l-a-c-h-d’ means ‘judgment.’ I’m so glad to know that. This is gibberish. It must be a code that’s in the papers. ‘Creag Dhu’—this doesn’t have any interpretation beside it. Then there’s ‘fear,’ and beside it ‘gleidhidh.’ This looks like Welch without all the y’s and w’s.”

  Conrad didn’t comment, but the feeling of dread was growing stronger. He stared at the paper, hearing his heartbeat pounding in his ears, throbbing in his shoulder. Perhaps he had lost more blood than he had thought, and was about to lose consciousness for real.

  Parrish lapsed into silence, his head bent over the paper. He was an educated, sophisticated man, well traveled. He had seen this language before.

  “It’s Gaelic,” he said after a moment, his tone soft. “It isn’t a code. Dhu means ‘black,’ and I think creag means ‘rock,’ or ‘rocky.’ Black rock.” He stood abruptly, his eyes narrow and intent. “Get some rest, Conrad. I’ll have this translated. Grace’s little slip may be just the break I’ve been needing.”

  Chapter 17

  ONE OF HER PAGES OF NOTES HAD BLOWN OUT. GRACE COULDN’T stop thinking about it, her insides clenched tight with dread. She had made a dreadful mistake.

  She drove carefully through the snow-dusted Iowa night, well aware she was long past exhaustion and operating on sheer instinct. She needed to sleep, but she couldn’t make herself stop. She felt driven, somehow, and so she drove.

  She had lost one of
the sheets. It was just a sheet of her notes, not one of the document sheets, but still she clearly remembered seeing “Creag Dhu” on it as she reached for it. What were the odds against one of those men picking it up? Not very good. They had to know they weren’t just after her, but some papers as well.

  She had given Parrish the location of the Treasure; all he had to do was figure out what it was. She had to assume he would. After all, the Foundation’s business was archaeology. Parrish had access to any number of old maps, files, cross-references. He would learn Creag Dhu had been a fourteenth-century castle, and with a little effort he would be able to pinpoint its location. He could throw the Foundation’s enormous resources into excavating the site—and he would find the Treasure.

  Her fault. Her fault. The words drummed ceaselessly through her head. She had failed Ford and Bryant, letting Parrish attain the knowledge for which he had killed them.

  She had failed Niall.

  She should have done something, should have shot both the other men if necessary, and chased down that errant sheet. But all she had been thinking about had been escape, survival; she hadn’t remembered the paper until she was already in Iowa.

  She had actually shot a man. All of Matty’s advice had worked, and she had functioned well enough to do something, instead of simply flailing in terror and hoping for a lucky blow. Eight months ago she wouldn’t have had any idea how to use a pistol, and would have been horrified at the thought of doing so; this afternoon she had used both knife and pistol. Thinking of the moment when she had pulled the trigger, Grace wondered numbly if she was still the same person at all.

  But what good had all of it done? She was alive, yes, but still she had failed Niall. She had failed to protect the papers. Parrish had won, through her own negligence.

  Eaten alive by guilt, sick in the aftermath of battlefield adrenaline, it was almost ten when she thought of Kris. Swearing softly to herself at her lack of consideration, she began looking for an exit occupied by people and equipped with a pay phone. Perhaps she simply hadn’t been paying attention, but it seemed as if most of the exits were nothing more than lonely intersections, access to empty roads leading off into empty night.

  She must not have been paying attention. There was a brightly lit truck stop at the next exit. She pulled into the crowded parking lot, her truck dwarfed by the huge tractor-trailer rigs that sat idling, their motors rumbling like enormous sleeping beasts. She decided she might as well gas up while she was there, so she pulled up to one of the islands and stood shivering in the icy wind as the tank filled. At least the cold woke her up; she had sunk almost into a stupor, her eyes half closed, hypnotized by the endless zipper of stripes between twin banks of dirty snow, where the snowplows had cleared the highway.

  It had started snowing again, she realized, seeing the white flakes blowing through the bright vapor lights of the truck stop. She couldn’t go much farther; she was too exhausted to battle snow too. She paid the attendant for the gas, then got in the truck and moved it to the restaurant.

  The warmth inside went right through her, making her shudder with relief. Truckers sat at a long counter, or in pairs in the booths that lined the wall. A jukebox played some rollicking honky-tonk song, and a cloud of blue cigarette smoke hovered against the ceiling. There was a tiny hallway to the left, decorated with an arrow and a sign that said “Rest Rooms,” and two pay phones were crowded into it. One of the phones was in use by an enormous bearded fellow whose gut strained his thermal-knit shirt. He looked like a cross between Paul Bunyan and a Hell’s Angel, but when she neared she heard him say, “I’ll call you tomorrow, honey. Love you.”

  Grace squeezed past him and dug change out of her pocket. A quarter bought her a dial tone. She punched in the numbers, then waited until a recorded voice told her how much more change to feed the beast.

  Kris answered immediately, his voice anxious.

  She turned her back on the big guy, and lowered her voice. “I’m okay,” she said, not giving her name. “But they almost caught me this afternoon, and I had to leave. I just wanted you to know. Is everything okay on your end?”

  “Yeah.” She could hear him gulp. “Are you hurt, or anything?”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “That was you, wasn’t it?” His voice shook. “That shooting at the McDonald’s. They said—on television—a woman in a brown truck. I knew it was you.”

  “Yes.”

  “The police don’t know what happened. All those men vanished before the cops got there.”

  Grace blinked. That was surprising news. She had expected the cops to be hot on her trail, too. Evidently Parrish didn’t want the cops to catch her, preferring to do so himself. She didn’t know why; she had seen about half the city’s muckety-mucks on the donor list, so she had no doubt he could pull enough strings to get the papers out of the evidence room, or whatever they called it. He could also have her killed in her cell, and she would be just one more jail violence statistic.

  The implication was startling. Parrish wanted her alive, and he wanted her as his prisoner. A wave of revulsion swept her at the thought, but she didn’t analyze it.

  “I have to go now,” she told Kris. “I just wanted you to know I’m okay, and tell you how much I appreciate what you did.”

  “Grace—” His voice cracked on her name. “Take care. Stay alive.” He paused, and his next words came out quiet and strained. “I love you.”

  The simple words almost shattered her. She had been too alone; too many months had passed since she had heard them. She gripped the receiver so tightly her knuckles turned white, and the plastic creaked under the strain.

  She couldn’t blow off his youthful devotion as an adolescent crush; he deserved more respect than that. “Thank you,” she whispered. “I love you, too. You’re a wonderful person.” Then she gently hung up, and pressed her forehead against the wall.

  Beside her, the trucker was saying his own good-byes, more “I love yous” and “I’ll be carefuls.” He hung up and glanced at her.

  A meaty paw patted her shoulder with surprising delicacy. “Don’t cry, little bit,” he said comfortingly. “You’ll get used to it. How long you been on the road?”

  He thought she was a truck driver. Amazement chased away all other emotion. Did she look like a truck driver? Her, the poster girl for academia?

  She looked down. He wore boots; she wore boots. He had on jeans; she had on jeans. Baseball caps topped their heads.

  She looked like a truck driver.

  She was so tired she was giddy, and nothing seemed quite real. For the first time in eight months, her lips quivered with amusement. She didn’t laugh, but she was astonished at the impulse. Quelling it, she cleared her throat and looked up at Paul Bunyan. “Eight months. I’ve been driving for eight months.”

  He gave her another pat. “Well, give it a little more time. It’s tough, being away from your family so much, but the freight has to move and somebody’s gonna get paid for hauling it. Might as well be us, huh?”

  “Might as well,” she echoed. She nodded to him and escaped out to her truck. She hoped he didn’t see her driving off in an ordinary pickup, instead of one of the snoozing behemoths; she didn’t want to destroy his illusions about her.

  The snow was falling faster, and more trucks were leaving the interstate, rumbling up the exit ramp to take overnight refuge at the truck stop. There was a small, ratty-looking motel next door, and its “Vacancy” sign was lit. Grace decided not to chance driving any farther, and to take a room before the new arrivals got them all.

  The room was just as ratty-looking as the exterior. The carpet was worn and stained, the walls were brown, the bedspreads were brown, the lavatory bowl was brown—and it wasn’t supposed to be. But the heating unit worked, and so did everything in the bathroom; good enough.

  She stuck the pistol in the waistband of her jeans and dragged out the computer case, and a change of clothes for the next day. If the rest of her clothes weren’t
safe in the truck overnight, well, she hoped the thief was small enough to wear them, because she didn’t have the energy to cart everything inside.

  She undressed, then reloaded the pistol. Her hands trembled, and she fumbled the bullets. She thrust the gun under her pillow, then climbed into the lumpy bed and was unconscious even before her head hit the pillow.

  She dreamed.

  “And so came Grace to Creag Dhu.”

  Niall wrote the words, the pen scratching across the page. He signed it, dated it, then turned to face her. “Aye, lass, that will bring ye to me.” His intent black gaze moved over her, starting at her feet and lingering at hips and breasts before reaching her face. She drew a deep breath, knowing what that look meant. He was the most intensely sexual man she had ever met, and the challenge of that burning appetite only fed her own sensuality. She could feel her body readying itself for him, growing warm, softening, her nipples standing upright and her cheeks flushing. Excited desire began coiling deep in her belly.

  He knew it, saw it. His hard mouth took on a sensual curve and he dropped the quill onto the table, turning on the high wooden stool to face her. He held out his hand. “Dinna wait near seven hundred bluidy years,” he said softly. “I want ye now.”

  Grace took the five steps that carried her to him, her hands lifting to sift through the thick black silk of his hair. He bent his head, and his mouth covered hers. No one else kissed like Niall, she thought dazedly. His taste was as potent as fiery whisky, his kiss was both dominating and seductive, taking what he wanted but giving pleasure in return.

  His big hand covered her breast, his thumb rubbing gently over her extended nipple. Her hands clenched in his hair and she crowded closer to him, shivering.

  They had already made love so many times he knew exactly how aroused she was, knew there was no need for love play. With a soothing murmur he pulled up both her skirts and his kilt, and lifted her astride him as he sat propped on the high stool. Their loins came together with ease, and she gave a little whimper of relief as his thick erection slipped up into her. Niall gasped, his teeth set, then he gathered her close and they clung together, their need deeper and sharper than physical desire.