by Becky Banks
Rowan eyed her. “Ye are saying that you’ll no’ tell me who sold ye the gun unless I tell ye something?” he said more calmly than he felt.
“That’s right, Rowan. You have to give something up before you can get what you want,” she said, intoning much into her words.
“An’ what might that be, Eryka?”
“You have to promise to let me go after I tell you.”
“Mmmph.” Rowan turned and opened the trunk.
“I mean it, Rowan—I’ll not tell you a thing if you do not let me go,” Eryka said, strain obvious in her husky voice.
“Aye. I believe ye.” He turned back to her, the tape and the rope in his hands, his intent obvious.
Eryka screamed and, in a movement that seemed to defy the tightness of her jeans, leaped to her feet, hands poised claw-like, and attacked Rowan. She ripped at his face with her fingernails, leaving long red scratches.
Rowan snarled, shifted the goods in his hands, and grasped Eryka by the neck. He threw her against the back of the car and bound her wrists together, keeping her pinned with his elbow on her spine.
“I’m going to fucking kill you!” she screeched.
Wrenching her off the trunk, Rowan forced her into the backseat, only taping her mouth when she changed her murderous tirade into plain screaming.
Rowan reversed the Peugeot back down the service road to the boathouse and parked at the entrance to the parking lot.
Getting out, he saw that it was obvious Eryka had been on a rampage with her pistol. The boathouse window was shattered. Several indentations in the steel door said that she had tried putting a couple bullets through it, too. He crunched over the broken glass to look into the boathouse. He wasn’t sure what he would find when he peered inside, and was relieved to see that Cole’s lifeless body wasn’t there. Where the hell was she?
Voices behind him announced the cautious arrival of Simon, the overseer of the boathouse, and Professor Peabody. Rowan counted the shells on the ground. Just a couple—one through the glass and two at the door. But the shots he’d heard earlier were rapid-fire, the unloading of what seemed like an entire magazine. Where had that been?
He looked out and down the pier, where a littering of brassy tubes angrily reflected the day’s fading light. Heart pounding at what he would find, he reminded himself that he still felt the low hum of Cole, that she was all right. Alive. He corrected himself: there were a lot of forms of alive. He jogged the rest of the way, to the end of the pier, and looked over the edge for a floating body. The only thing floating was a boat; the other boat was gone, and the realization of who had it had his knees buckling in relief. Rowan doubled over, breathing deeply, hands braced against his knees.
Through the rush of blood in his head, Rowan heard the running feet of the men behind him and their shouts.
Peabody’s was the most insistent. “Rowan! What has happened? What have you found?”
“Nothing, and she’s not here. It’s OK. Tha’ boat’s gone and she’s in it,” he said, relief obvious in his voice.
Wits quickly returning, he turned to Simon. “Have the authorities arrived yet?”
“Aye. They’re taking accounts from everyone—that is why we came down was tae get ye; they’re asking after ye,” said Simon.
Suddenly Peabody looked puzzled. “Is that screaming?”
“Aye,” Rowan said, nodding toward the car. “I’ve got Eryka trussed up in the back. She had tape, rope, and rubbish bags in the back of her car—no doubt used on Cole, or intended to be used on her.” He turned to Simon again. “Tell the authorities tha’ Eryka is here, and that she shot up the boathouse with the gun in the front seat.”
“What in the world . . . ” Peabody said, looking up at the sky.
The sky had blackened considerably in the few moments that they had stood talking.
“Dinnae know,” Rowan said softly.
The storm’s center perched over an island in the distance.
As if on cue, the wind picked up, pushing at their backs and then coming back around and whipping at them sideways. The sky growled; seconds later, sheet lightning lit up the sky below the swirling cloud mass.
“You,” Rowan said to Peabody. “We’ve no time to waste; ye come with me.”
Rowan checked the remaining boat’s gas tank and, finding it empty, filled it. He loaded Peabody, then himself, into the boat and set course for the island. Rowan called to the stricken Peabody, “I hope your family is no’ expecting ye anytime soon.”
He shook his head and righted his glasses. “Nope, they’re safe at the castle.”
“Good, now tell me what ye found,” Rowan said, keeping his eye on the horizon.
“Well,” Peabody said, “I asked around, thinking that your abrupt departure with Cole yesterday was worthy of looking into. My apologies if that is a breach of your personal rights, but I’m most curious as to what is going on. You see, I heard that Gregoire had words with you the other night, and the older folks here are saying that he was claiming himself to be the rightful heir to the chieftain’s position, which meant Cole was rightfully his. I’ll not bore you with the obvious facts on why that is completely untrue, but it made me dig a little further into this real-life drama. I discovered that Kelly, after the incident on the terrace, said many things about your person and made oaths of vengeance against you.
“When we were all mingling in the main banquet earlier, I made a quick search about the room and saw that neither Gregoire nor his son were present. That tells me that the gun shots were possibly from those two . . . ” Peabody’s voice drifted before becoming shrill. “Oh. Oh. Oh!” he said, fright and excitement taking over him, both at once. “Rowan! She’s there! She must be there!” He pointed to the island they were heading toward.
“I know.”
“No, Rowan, this is completely exciting and horribly terrifying—the clouds, the storm, it all means that there is some sort of energy collision that is happening at the island right now.”
“Aye,” Rowan said, but he was only partially listening, thinking instead about the best way to get to the island undetected, and who would be there.
“Don’t you see, Rowan?” Peabody continued. “Gregoire and Kelly must be there, and they are upsetting some sort of balance.”
“What?” Rowan said, looking to the professor; he had his full attention now.
“Yes! Gregoire said to you the other night that he wanted Cole for himself. To handfast himself to her. This would cause dramatic rifts in energy because he isn’t descended from Lady MacLaoch herself—only you are.” Peabody thought on it for a bit and then went white and whispered, “Unless . . . ”
Rowan looked at the professor, his insides twisting, but he had to ask, had to know what else. “What? What else would cause tha’?”
Peabody just shook his head and said, “Hurry.”
CHAPTER 43
We felt his presence before we knew he was behind us. Following the brothers’ lead, I looked up the hill toward the man who was ambling down to us in a white dress shirt, full kilt, and tartan socks, a long walking stick in hand. And I wanted to throw up again.
Gregoire waved at us as he picked his way carefully down the hill, walking as if hurt. I prayed he would trip in his fancy dress shoes and save us all the trouble.
Turning to the brothers, I caught the movement of something ducking just behind the stone building. Alarm bells went off in my mind. “Get to the boats,” I said, putting my arm out to herd them in that direction.
“What is it, lass? It’s just Gregoire—ye will have no need tae be afraid of him. Besides, we are with ye,” Bernie said, taking my outstretched hand and patting it in what I can only assume was meant to be a reassuring gesture.
“You’d be surprised what that man is capable of,” I said matter-of-factly. “Please, we can discuss this on the way back—please just trust me and get into the boats. We need to go.”
“Oy, man,” Angus called, greeting Gregoire. “How are ye? Ye are looking smart
for a leisurely stroll, aren’t ye?”
“Good afternoon, gentlemen and lady,” Gregoire said, curtseying, jesting that we were the royal court and he our subject. I noticed a strawberry bruise on his temple, as if someone had clobbered him with his royal chieftain fist. “The weather has turned, but nothing a nip won’t take care of, and as long as it does not rain, my wedding day will be marvelous.”
Bernie and Angus exchanged a look, and I groaned.
“Well,” Bernie said, seeing that things were becoming strange even for him, “we were just leaving, so we’ll let you tae yer stroll in peace.”
“No, no, gentlemen, I’m afraid you’ll need to leave your charge with me. She and I have a date with history, do we not, dear?” he said and winked elaborately, nearly upsetting himself. He was indeed three sheets to the wind, if not closer to ten or twelve.
“I think not. Let’s go,” I said, confident that I would be successful that time in rounding the brothers into the boats.
“Ha ha!” Gregoire laughed, yet the sound was completely devoid of happiness. He pulled an old revolver from his sporran.
“I’m so done with guns,” I said.
Bernie and Angus put their hands up in a placating manner. “Now, Mac, we’re not going to cause trouble, so just let us go, aye?”
I watched as Gregoire processed the words. He was slow, excessively drunk.
“Nope,” he said, popping the p. Something behind us seemed to distract him just then—his eyes widened in shock, then squinted in anger, and he yelped, “Not yet, ye fool!”
Something hard struck something else hard, with a sickening thunk, behind me. I turned and staggered backward as Kelly dealt a blow with a wooden paddle to Bernie, Angus already crumpling to the ground, blood oozing from his head.
“Oh . . . ” I said, not fast enough to catch Bernie as my knees went weak and I fought the rise of bile in my throat. Bernie and Angus, I was sure, could not have survived such brutal blows.
Kelly’s face had changed—he was truly grotesque. A putrid purple and yellowy-blue bruise covered the left side of his face, and his nose angled strangely. The colors stood in such stark contrast to his pale skin and red hair that I had a hard time looking away. He tossed the paddle down and yelled at his father, his voice constricted through his broken nose, “What’d ye mean she’s to be your wife?”
I sent up a prayer for the old fishermen but could not wait to see the outcome of their argument. I didn’t care that Gregoire had a gun—he wouldn’t shoot me if he wanted to marry me alive. I bolted for the boats.
“Get her!”
I pushed myself as fast as I could go, but I was a whole foot shorter than my aggressors. Sometimes it’s athletics and sometimes it’s simple physics, but longer legs will cover more ground than shorter ones.
It felt like I had been struck by a Mack truck, I was hit with such force. The blow knocked me clean off my feet and into the water. I barely caught my breath before my head went under. A hand caught a fistful of my hair and held me there.
Rocks slipped under my hands when I tried to push back; the only ones that seemed rooted in place were the ones painfully cutting into my forehead. Legs planted on either side of me, Kelly held me under until my last bit of air bubbled out my nose and up to the surface. Then he held me under longer. I grabbed rocks and tried to smash his feet with them, only I was moving slower and slower, and then I stopped.
Violently my head was yanked up. Cresting the surface, I gasped and coughed, sucking in air and water droplets, careless of the painful pinching in my oxygen-depleted lungs.
Getting a second lungful of air, I mimicked my first action out of the womb and screamed my head off.
My scream was accompanied by the thundering of the clouds, shaking me to the very bone.
Kelly lost his grip on me. “Get the fuck off me, old man!” I heard him holler at his father.
I made my way to my feet, keeping an eye on Gregoire, who was whaling on his son with his walking staff—the gun tucked away, no doubt, in the fur satchel on his belt.
“She’s tae be my wife! But no’ if ye kill her!”
“Wife?” Kelly asked and swatted the staff away. “Ye daft? Ye are already married tae mum.”
A wicked smile crossed Gregoire’s face, making me wonder if he was really all that drunk. “Oh yes, ye are right, son, I misspoke. She is tae be yer wife—ye shouldn’t kill her, or ye’ll have the curse forever on ye and our family. Ye don’t want that now, do ye?”
Kelly looked at me, his bludgeoned face a bloated pout.
I began to shiver, the cold of the water having taken up residence in my core and adrenaline making my body shake. My muscles had been deprived of oxygen too long, effectively making me a human jellyfish. But I kept flopping forward, trying to get away.
Kelly picked me up under one arm and dragged me over to his father. “Pick up yer bloody feet!” he snarled at me.
“I can’t,” I said faintly.
“The fuck ye can’t! Don’t talk back to me!” He wrenched me higher, grasping both my shoulders and shaking me until it felt like my head was going to snap off and roll down to the water’s edge.
I heard Gregoire chuckle through it all, a tight, low sound. “Come now, Kelly, don’t damage your bride-to-be.”
Kelly stopped and glared at me through a puffy eye.
I gave him an equal, though less bloated and more bedraggled, look back, and wished for just a moment that looks could indeed kill.
Kelly threw me at his father’s feet as another blast of thunder and blinding lightning burst the sky wide open.
“Hurry!” Kelly said. “I wannae get out of ’ere.”
“All in good time, my boy,” Gregoire said and leaned over me. He pulled from his bag a long strip of plaid that was not MacLaoch plaid, and grabbed one of my wrists; as soon as the cloth touched my skin, hell broke loose.
Thunder rolled continuously while electricity arched and webbed through the spiraling clouds. Sleet in white sheets slammed down from the heavens.
I found I had the strength again to do simple things, like stand, which I did.
“Ho-no ye don’t!” Gregoire cried out, grabbing for my arm.
Kelly had an arm over his tender face in protection from the sleet. He was not trying to help his father.
After successfully standing, I felt that I could run. So I did that, too.
“Stop!” I heard Gregoire scream and then, seconds later, the distinctive pop of a gun, its sound miniaturized by the climactic weather beating around us.
I ran until I was halfway up the hill. For every two crawling steps forward, I slipped one back on the slick ground. Wind lifted me up one moment and whipped around to slam me down against my backside in another.
I kept looking back—I couldn’t trust my sense of hearing, with the thunder, to know how close my pursuers were. Kelly had wrestled the gun away from his father and was slamming it against the old man’s head.
I hoped they’d stay busy with each other. When Kelly was happy, he was a pervert extraordinaire; now that he was angry, something much darker, filthier, and vile moved in the depths of him. With renewed effort I pushed for the top of the hill—their boat would be on the other side.
I made it to the ridgeline before I was grasped from behind.
I lost my balance, and Kelly and I hit the ground in a tangle of arms and legs. Twisting and hitting, each of us wrestled for the upper hand. I came rolling onto my back, and in an instant Kelly was straddling me. Hands still free, we kept at each other; he tried to capture my wrists as I swatted at him. Panic was widespread within and around me, as if the wildness that I felt inside was being mirrored in my surroundings.
“Leave. Me. Alone!” I hollered through my exertion to both avoid him and try to free myself from under him.
I wasn’t fast enough to see his change in tactics until it was too late. His wide hand smacked across my face, slamming my opposite cheek into the grassy rocks.
“G
ive me your hands, ye bitch!” he hollered.
Stars danced in my vision and I gasped at the pain that spiked in my skull. “Fuck—” I said, getting cut off as he smacked the other cheek.
It felt like my head was going to rip off under the force of the strike. Moments passed as my brain slogged a torrent of expletives and ringing of commands. In those precious moments, I missed Kelly’s tirade of yelling.
I finally heard him say, “I said to watch me!”
I looked up at him. He’d gone wild, crazy wild. His face contorted in anger as it screamed at me to watch. I still didn’t understand, until I realized his hands were at my button fly, the demand for my hands completely forgotten.
I felt my jeans pop open as he ripped at them and the cold, snapping wind made direct contact with the skin of my belly. Kelly wanted me to watch him as he raped me, and that wasn’t what I had planned for the afternoon.
A shock of cold rage poured in and filled me. Lady MacLaoch must have felt something very much like this in her final moments—rage, the kind of spitting-mad rage that consumes you from head to toe. The hot and moving feeling that anger creates when something has crossed a primal threshold, an attempted trespass that violates the very essence of you.
I grabbed his occupied hands and the second we made eye contact, I said, “I told Rowan that if you ever touched me again I’d break your balls with my knee and your face with my fist, and I keep my promises.” I slammed my knee into his crotch, making the connection the way a hammer does with a nail. Kelly coughed out his breath, pitching forward—as he fell, his face came close, and I kept the second part of my promise. My fist connected with the swollen tissue of his already bruised face and grindingly crunched his nose.
Kelly screamed, clutching his face as he staggered and slipped backward down the hill. I knew I had only a few moments, but I had to button my pants—the need to have that in place consumed me. My fingers shook, but I got each button secured. At the last button, I looked up—to see Kelly, a rock in his hand and intent written clearly upon his face.
Before my mind could tell me to roll out of the way or kick at his legs, or tell me anything at all, something unexpected happened.