The entrance to the barn was closed. Owen came flying up from behind, a rifle in his arms. A scream and several loud bangs sounded behind the door. The whites around Owen’s eyes were bright in the low light.
“Stay here,” he said, jerking the entrance open.
The barn was in chaos.
Faces twisted in anger, kingsmen in Campbell kilts poured in through the double doors. Swords and clubs swung in quick arcs from their hands. Guns fired. The Dionadair swelled and met them with fists and knives flashing. Shots blasted off the barn’s towering wood slat walls and rock foundation.
A rush of people flowed out of the tunnel, pushing past and shoving into Myles and Thane. Owen grabbed a man with a dragon tattoo peering out from the neck of his shirt.
“Get the rest of the guns down. Find Dodie,” Owen ordered the man. “I’m here!” he shouted at Vera, who’d hitched up the mini skirt she now wore and was scaling the shelves of weapons, reaching for a bronze-handled rifle.
“Then get to it!” she screamed back, her face wild.
Thane spun toward Aini, Myles, and Neve. His voice was loud and steady despite the horror behind him. “Eat the tablet I gave you. Here’s more.” He fished some from his bag and handed it to Myles. “I’m going to blind everyone else. Though it’ll be uncomfortable, you and only you all will be able to see. Keep to the walls and edge your way out the doors. Remember what I told you, Aini.”
Her lungs seized up. Noise and fear battled for space in her brain.
Myles’s and Neve’s gazes followed the action left and right.
People were everywhere.
Thane pulled a flat, glass container and a fold of paper from his hidden bag. He crouched in the corner where the earth met the wall of the barn and tugged the cork of the container out with his teeth.
“This is a spin on Lewis’s golden taffy made into a gas. It’ll give you time to escape this mess.”
Aini looked over his shoulder, her curiosity overpowering her anger that he’d once again gone against her in this. “But it’s powder.”
“It is until I mix this in.” He held up the fold of brown paper. “Then it’ll become a gas. It’s some of the Cone5 and a five to six ratio of—”
“What about you? You act like you’re not running away with us.”
“I’ll make sure you get out alive.”
She grabbed his shirt.
Ignoring her, Thane shook the package into the container and immediately a cloud of yellow snaked from the glassware. He coughed. “I’ll find you. Don’t worry.”
“No way, man,” Myles said, bouncing on his toes. “We’re not leaving you.”
Neve agreed.
Thane met Aini’s eyes and something dark crossed the gray of his irises.
“I will worry,” she said. “No matter what you have up that sleeve of yours. Why don’t you just come with us?” Her heart was breaking. This was supposed to be the beginning of a new life for everyone, not a horrible ending.
Across the barn, near the double doors, a tall man in a muddied kingsman jacket and a Campbell kilt raised a huge handgun.
“Traitors!” the man shouted. A scar puckered his neck like a gruesome smile, but otherwise he was a fairly handsome man with wavy red-blond hair and broad shoulders.
Aini’s stomach turned. It was Nathair Campbell, the king’s head of security.
“Death to the traitors!” he shouted.
A strangled noise came from Thane’s throat. As he stared at Nathair, he fell back and gripped the wall. “It’s him.”
The vial crashed on the stone, and the yellow haze curled quickly into the air, spreading into the barn. Aini helped Thane away from the smoke he’d created.
Neve gripped Aini’s arm hard. “That’s him. Chief of the Campbells. Earl of Argyll. The King’s Deathbringer.”
Myles pulled at them. “Let’s go.” He looked at Thane. “You’re sure about this?”
Thane nodded tersely. “Get Aini out of here. She can’t be in the same room as that man.”
Aini didn’t even get a last look at Thane as Myles dragged them into the barn. There were too many people moving, fighting, shouting, pushing. Thane’s chemicals whirled around the room like sickly ghosts. Every man and woman shrieked as it touched their faces. Dionadair and kingsmen alike put hands to their eyes, blinded and running into one another. They struck out with weapons and pulled triggers, some killing and maiming. Swords and axes hit tables, walls, and people before clattering to the floor.
Shaking, Aini took the lead and shepherded Myles and Neve along the left side of the barn toward the fighting training cage near the exit.
At the cage, a kingsman, his eyes rolling as he tried to see past what had to be a blinding, glaring rainbow of colors, swung a club at a Dionadair, way too close to Aini’s head. She dodged the thing, the fighting cage’s barbed metal biting into her back and her heart pounding.
Through the press of bodies, they eked their way to the double doors and into the predawn light.
Outside, three kingsmen knelt by strange boxes. Their kilts partially blocked Aini’s view.
“They say a chemical’s been released,” the first one said into a walkie talkie, not noticing them. His associates swore and spoke into their phones and to one another. “No one can see,” the first one said to them. “That yellow fog—it’s screwing with their vision. Call for the false retreat. Then raze the front section.” The second man held a black box with a red handle. “Explosion on my count. Are you clear?”
Aini’s knees shook. Explosion. They were going to blow something up.
The men shifted as more kingsmen with streaming eyes rushed from the barn, some Dionadair trailing them. Thane’s concoction blossomed into the air and dissipated.
“Retreat!” the man shouted as they rushed toward Dodie’s empty truck. “Soon as you see the chief clear the entrance, raze the barn.”
Thane is in there.
Aini ran free of Myles and Neve, with nothing in her mind but buzzing and white and panic, she dove at the man with the black box. She hit him hard, her cheek bruising against his shoulder as more yelling rose around her. Then all the noise and movement was swallowed by a flood of golden light. As she fell to the earth with the kingsman under her, the ground beneath the three-story barn erupted into the air. Splinters big as a man. Foundation stones. Sprays of dirt. Bodies. Everything in sight shot into the dawn.
She landed, ears throbbing, and jumped off the kingsman. Myles was near, on his knees, Neve at his side and lying on her stomach. Her hands shielded her ears.
Surprisingly, most of the barn’s other side still stood, but the front area near the doors was nothing more than a pile of rubble overrun with kingsmen and Dionadair, scrambling up to continue their fight or holding bleeding comrades. Moans and screaming came from the rubble as the yellow haze dissipated.
Thane.
Aini tore toward the damaged barn.
At the first cluster of wooden debris, a man shouted, “Aini MacGregor!”
She froze.
The man was partially covered in broken wood planks and dirt, his body trapped beneath one of the barn’s doors. Reaching from the rubble, his hand snagged her ankle and she screamed, pulling with everything she had. His fingers dug painfully into her boot and the skin underneath. He held on, the scar at his throat vivid despite the mud and dust.
Nathair Campbell.
The man who had led the public execution of rebels last month. The Campbell who seemed to be going mad. The one who gripped his own countrymen by their throats and squeezed money from them and their businesses, who had ordered so many innocents shot to death or imprisoned for life in the famed cells under Edinburgh. The memory of the boy crying on market day blazed through her mind. He’d lost his parents to a ridiculous law about Subject Identification Cards all because of the king and his beast, this man, Nathair.
And Nathair controls the men who have Father.
Keeping his hold on Aini and blinking repe
atedly, Nathair used his other hand to dig beneath the stone, into his pocket. He tossed something at her. A roll of rag cloth. It fell to the ground at her feet. With Myles and Neve shouting to come on to the truck, she unwrapped the cloth. But she couldn’t understand what she was looking at. Flesh. Pale and blue and streaked with blackened blood.
A finger wearing a ring. The MacGregor ring.
Gasping, she dropped it, and the ring fell away from the flesh. A rushing sound filled her ears, bile rising in her throat. She braced herself on a boulder and bent to vomit. It was Father’s finger. His. Finger.
The ground dropped away, and she took hold of the boulder with both hands.
“Is he still alive? Is my father still alive?”
“Aye,” Nathair hissed, working his way out of the debris to stand.
The earth stopped rushing away and she managed a breath.
“You should look to what side you choose, girl. I don’t think you’ll enjoy losing.” His words rose and fell unevenly, his body swaying and his head cloaked in blood.
“Father,” a low voice said.
Nathair and Aini both whipped around.
Thane stumbled out of the boiling mess of fighting and bleeding men and women.
A cool rush of relief ran over Aini. Blood masked the left side of Thane's face. Like a wraith, his cheekbones were sharp in the sunrise, and his eyes were deep and dark, but he was alive.
Nathair held his arms open wide, a twisted look on his face. “Son.”
The word cut Aini at the knees.
Shaking, weak, choking, she met Thane’s gaze.
Regret blackened the light in his eyes. A shiver rolled through him, and he clenched his hands and threw his head back as a vicious shout of frustration and rage erupted from his throat.
He launched himself at Nathair, fisting his hands in the man’s shirt and jerking him roughly. Nathair shoved Thane back, but Thane drove at him again. Shouting unintelligible words, he rained down wild strikes. Tears mixed with the blood streaming over the line of Thane’s jaw. His shirt absorbed the wet and clung to his chest.
Aini was frozen. Neve and Myles were suddenly beside her, but she felt no relief. It couldn’t be true. She shook, worked air into her lungs. The trees, grass, the mess of the explosion, the people—hurting and shouting—spun once, fast, around her, before she could focus on Thane and Nathair again.
Though he was unsteady on his feet, Nathair dodged most of Thane’s blows. Staggering, he ripped a silver chain from his neck. “You left this at the MacGregor house.” It was Thane’s necklace. “You should not forget who you are, son.”
Tearing it from Nathair’s large hand, Thane threw the chain to the earth. The silver dropped to the ground like a piece of the morning moon had fallen from the sky.
Aini choked out one word. “Why?”
Nathair smiled. “Because I told him to.”
Chest heaving, Thane’s rage took him again. He was a lion, his strikes quick, strong, vicious. A hit to his father’s stomach. A knee to the groin. Two elbows aimed at Nathair’s temples. Nathair’s eyes dazed, and he fell at Thane’s feet.
Myles and Neve seized Thane by the shoulders and dragged him back a step. His shirt ripped down the back as they pulled him away.
Aini’s stomach reeled. Her fingers were numb.
A terrible smile tore across Thane’s face. “I’m as terrible as him. As the lot of them.”
Jerking away from Myles and Neve, he laughed like a madman, wiping tears and blood from his face. His torn shirt hung loose and showed his shoulder, the tendons and muscles moving beneath his skin as he looked at Father’s ring in the mud. He closed his eyes, his black lashes making lines above his cheekbones.
“To think I believed all this could change…I’ve always been a Campbell.” He punched a fist against his chest. “That’s all I’ll ever be. Ne Obliviscaris. Forget Not. That’s our dear clan motto. Forget not how we beat you down until you’re bleeding and begging to serve us.”
He performed an exaggerated bow, almost seeming drunk, stumbling but catching himself on another pile of rock.
“I tried to tell you, Aini. But I should’ve known. How could you care for a man who has a part in this? I’m a fool. A spy. I’m the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.”
“No,” she whispered. “Bran is working for them, but you, you’re my father’s favorite, like a son…”
Aini’s world fractured into a million pieces. Was anything she believed actually true?
Scooping up his Campbell necklace, Thane rushed toward the damaged fencing surrounding the property. A black horse trapped in the space between a fallen section and a tree shied from him, but he caught the animal and threw a leg over its back.
Myles ran after him. “Thane!”
Thane pushed his heels into the horse. “Yah!” His voice cracked, and he rode toward the dawn’s light, the sun making his bare shoulder and tangled hair glow. The horse’s hooves kicked up chunks of earth as they disappeared down the road.
The fight went on around Aini. A shot rang out and something stung her ear, but she didn’t flinch. Father’s finger lay in the grass beside the MacGregor ring.
Myles and Neve put hands under her arms.
Myles pulled Aini toward Dodie’s truck. “We have to get out of here.”
Neve shuddered. “I never would’ve guessed Nathair’s own son…right in front of our faces. There was something odd about him, yes, but this? I never thought the genius lab rat could be that Thane!”
“Wait!” Aini pushed away from them, running to Father’s ring. She cupped it in her palm, then returning, clambered into the truck.
Though she’d already played out the vision embedded on the ring, memory brought it back, clear and beautiful and sharp as glass. The vision—a memory so important to Father that it had sunk into his signet ring—had shown the day she was born. Her mother, sweating and smiling, held a red, newborn Aini. She screamed like babies do, her face scrunched in a fierce scowl. Father took her into his arms, his face glowing, and Aini’s crying stopped.
Aini suddenly felt far away from where she was. Her mind took her…somewhere else, a place foggy.
White.
Numb.
Then the truck bumped harshly to the right, and the daze slipped away. Myles was behind the wheel, silent and eyes narrowed. Dirt covered Neve’s knuckles as she stared out at the road. There was nothing in front of the three of them but ruined plans and the coming crash of grief.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CREATURE
THANE SLID FROM HIS horse under the broad branches and clustered leaves of an English oak, maybe five, six miles from…everything. He was in a bracken and weed-strewn fallow field beside long, flat runs of barley and something green and short. Blood slugged through him as he moved his fingers slowly in and out, fisting and unfisting. Dried red flaked from his knuckles. His father’s blood.
Thane’s eyelids shuttered closed against the struggling dawn. He pictured a finger in the grass and mud. Stomach roiling, he dragged a hand over his sore face and swollen eyes.
What was wrong with Father? What had they all become? But it was a question he already knew the answer to. They had become people Aini could never forgive. Shouldn’t forgive.
Exhaustion lay over him like a lead blanket. His last thought he had before sleep pulled him under was of his mother. Her eyes, pewter like his, always smiled even when her mouth did not. His mother was scarred, her spirit lashed and beaten into submission by a love she shouldn’t feel.
Almost every Monday morning of Thane’s childhood, his father went to London and his mother took him from their Georgian mansion, Inveraray Castle, and out to the wishing well, hidden among the clean-scented pines and dense oaks outside of town. He remembered reaching a hand toward the arch of carved stone that stood over the sacred spot. The air smelled like it did here in this farmer’s field, green and good. She’d picked him up, her hands gentle on his sides. When she nodded toward
the spring bubbling from under the earth, he’d made a silent wish that every day would be Monday. Now the king had taken the very day’s name away.
His dream came to him then.
It showed his hand, five fingers, then the palm, then closer and closer, until the dips and swirls of his ring finger’s print were walls, valleys, canyons. The flesh darkened, blackened, grew sharp and strong, and Thane was lifted by a thundering storm and driven through the curves, flying, rushing, the sound like one thousand drums.
Eventually, the sun’s white light chased the confusing dreams and tender memories from Thane’s mind, and he lifted his aching head, his hand going to his ribs. The dull pain didn’t crack him apart like a true break. It only made him slow in rising to his feet. A cut pinched at the side of his head, but it wasn’t serious. He pulled a twig from his hair and rolled his tongue around in his mouth. Thirst almost seared away the pain in his body and his heart. Almost.
Past the oak’s wide-reaching and dappled shadow, the horse he’d ridden snapped up grass with velvet lips. Bracing himself against the tree, Thane stood. The summer breeze blew across the bare skin of his shoulder. When had he torn his shirt? Everything was a blur of violence. Fists, fury, and shouting.
But it had also somehow freed him.
All his life, a creature with burning eyes and grabbing claws had lived inside him. He’d thought the creature to be a sense of justice. But now, no. He knew better. It was his father’s growing need for power, his madness. Nathair had nurtured the creature with nights by the hearth spent repeating why Campbells were special and owed fealty. The creature knew the names of generations of Campbells, MacArthurs, MacIvers, Burnes, and MacConochies, and Orrs. It was well versed in the wrongs done them by the Dionadair. And what Campbells did about it when they found the rebels.
Thane put a hand over his chest. His heart beat slow and sure.
The creature was gone. The crippling fear and anger absent.
He only hoped Mother would understand.
Taking the horse’s loose reins, he searched the saddle bag for water, ale, anything to wet the desert of his mouth. A hawk’s sickle shape soared high, swooped low to the golden grasses, and rose again to search for prey, ready to strike. Thane’s fingers tightened on the reins. The ragged leather twisted in his grip. Even with the creature exorcised, his father would always be there, watching, waiting, wanting.
The Edinburgh Seer: Edinburgh Seer Book One Page 21