by Becky Banks
The howl of a battle cry rose up from behind me—something in the sound made the hair on my entire body rise. The air quieted, sleet slowed its fall—it felt like the peach orchard before a tornado hits.
I watched as Rowan crested the hill behind me and descended upon his cousin. His elbow cracked across his cousin’s jaw just before he tucked his head, tackling Kelly like an all-star defensive end.
The sky opened up once again, rioting, feeding on our energy.
Sparing just one glance toward Rowan and Kelly before making my escape, I shuddered at what I saw. Rowan had become a dark shadow of the loving man I’d gotten to know; this was the take-no-prisoners, listen-to-no-pleas, kill-all-them-sons-of-bitches Rowan MacLaoch. It seemed that each one of his demons had come to the surface, and each one wanted to exhaust itself in battle with Kelly. To pummel his kin with practiced restraint until Kelly’s blood ran into the soil of the island as a sacrifice to Lady MacLaoch herself.
Employing a mixture of crawling and scrabbling, I made my way to the fishing shed before I breathed again. Only then did I remember Angus and Bernie. I looked to the place they’d fallen, prepared to see the bodies of my beloved fishermen. They were no longer there. Not on the shore, not in the churning water, not in the boats.
I looked back up the hill, toward Rowan and Kelly and, in the distance to the side of them, a different movement caught my eye. Lightning arched and disappeared in a roar of thunder. It was the MacDonagh brothers.
I watched as they made their way, hunched against the sleet and wind, to a low, flat-topped boulder. A brother on each side, they ripped at the grass covering its surface and then placed their hands upon it.
Realization dawned: as Secret Keepers, they were the final link in the curse breaking, and this was why they needed Rowan. As I watched them, the air above the rock became misty. A solitary fog began to form over the flat-topped boulder.
Kelly’s short scream pierced the air, pulling my attention.
Rowan had turned away from his cousin’s crumpled body on the ground, and he was walking toward me. I tried to smile at him but the happiness faltered on my face, and I pushed off the shed to help close the distance between us.
In that moment I saw the crumpled body move, and I remembered the gun I had forgotten all about.
My horror must have shown on my face because Rowan pivoted, stones flying out from under his boots.
Kelly hadn’t bothered to stand—using his knee as a brace, he held his father’s revolver steady and took aim.
“No!” I screamed as I surged forward, my body instinctively rushing to protect all that I loved, and as I did so, Rowan did the same.
Rowan and I were like human freight trains rushing toward Kelly, each hell-bent on the single purpose to protect the other, moved by an instinctual and ancient bond.
The air felt like it had changed to liquid. Electricity built around us, and the hairs on my scalp began to tingle—somewhere in the back of my mind I recognized what was happening. I felt something white-hot spike through my middle, stopping me cold, and Rowan seemed to experience the same. Thunder clapped overhead. It felt like we’d been shot, but in the next instant I understood.
As the thunder pounded the air so hard our bones shook, light erupted from the circling clouds overhead and spiked to the ground, attracted to the metal revolver in Kelly’s hands. Before the force of the spike shoved us backward, I watched as Kelly’s arm went stiff with the electricity—then his entire body blew backward.
But not before the gun went off.
CHAPTER 44
Rowan had had many years to think about how he would have gladly given his life to take the bullet for Vick; he was not going to miss the opportunity to save me if he could. The instant the bullet left its chamber, it was destined to hit one of us. Kelly had made sure of that.
And it did.
Facing down a bullet is a little like facing down a ghost, because you never see it, you only feel it.
I felt it as it tore into Rowan’s shoulder and embedded itself there, flesh, muscle, bone. I was close enough to break Rowan’s fall, and we slumped as one to the round rocks of the shore.
“Rowan, Rowan, Rowan,” I said in a panicked chant. I watched his face morph from a look of determined intent into one of realization; he’d succeeded in taking the hit.
“Uggh,” he said, and his face pinched tight in pain, his free hand automatically going to his shoulder.
Rowan had shed his sweater at some point, and I made quick work of tearing open his gray shirt and compressing the wound. It was luck or just pure physics that we were so far away and that Kelly had used his father’s revolver, which was not as powerful as the modern one that Eryka had used on me earlier.
Rowan let loose a string of expletives as he took over applying the pressure, rolled to his good shoulder, and stood.
I just watched in awe as he faced back toward Kelly, on guard even under all that pain. But Kelly was not going to be hurting us again for a while—he lay splayed on the hillside, taken down by the lightning.
And yet, something more was happening.
Moving like a serpent along the ground, rolling white fog whispered and billowed, drawing my attention to it. The hair on my arms and my back stood up as it approached.
Standing next to Rowan, I followed its tail to the Secret Keepers’ stone.
“What in bloody he—” was all I heard Rowan say.
Her voice came the way a memory would, as if I had heard this conversation once before and was replaying it back in my mind. She was the woman in my dreams—this was Lady MacLaoch.
My child, she said. The fog folded onto itself. Its edges became more distinct, until it was a woman—the woman who walked with me in the dream—who stood before us. I felt rather than saw her smile.
Rowan cursed again; he knew who the woman was.
It is over. Never will I walk this earth again, but I will go in peace. What I set out to do before I died has been done. You, Rowan, my child, will never feel the pain we have shared ever again. This I promise.
Lady MacLaoch came to my side and smiled falteringly at me. It is good to see you once more, Minory. She spoke in a language as ancient as she, yet I understood. Know that you and my kin have been destined to be together since the day your father of fathers set eyes upon me and I upon him. You will bring each other joy from today until your deaths, many long and healthy years from now.
The fog faltered, then dissipated as if burned off by the sun, taking Lady MacLaoch with it. With her departure the island continued to riot, and I wondered what a spirit like her leaving would do to the energy around us.
CHAPTER 45
Rowan had fallen to the ground and I cradled his head in my arm, my free hand applying pressure to his shoulder. The wind picked up again and didn’t stop gathering. My hair whipped around Rowan and me, wild; the wind whistled over the land, sucking sleet, leaves, twigs, droplets of ocean spray, and both of us backward.
“What in the hell is happening?” I hollered into the air.
Rowan was losing consciousness, and the boats sloshed in the waves that began crashing on shore. As if in response to my question, Peabody came tearing over the hillside, wild-eyed and scared.
“Energy expulsion!” he cried, coming to a skittering halt in front of us. Distracted for a fraction of an instant by all the blood on Rowan, he asked, “What happened? Never mind—we have to go! It’s an energy expulsion!” He moved in to help me move Rowan. “Go! Into the shack!”
“The brothers!” I yelled when we reached the fishing shack.
“No! They must finish!” Peabody hollered back.
I just shook my head at Peabody and moved to get them. Yet I didn’t get out of reach of Rowan. “No,” was all he said, gripping my wrist.
Just as his hand touched me, the air exploded. The force of it yanked me up off the ground. Rowan never lost his grip, his face going crazy with pain.
I fought against the rush of air, trying to
get even a single foothold. I was like Dorothy refusing to be sent to Oz.
Then suddenly all went calm.
“Get! In!” screamed Peabody from the shelter’s doorway, and Rowan and I did.
We watched through the windows as balls of lightning snapped and crackled along the ground and then lifted up over the heads of the white-knuckled MacDonagh brothers and into the eye of the storm.
Silence and snapping were all we heard, and I sent a prayer out to the brothers. As the silence crept on, I began to wonder if that was indeed the end of storm. I was just about to say as much when the ground began to shake.
I heard a grunt and felt Rowan put a hand on my head, pushing me to the floor, his body covering mine. His labored breathing sounded. “Peabody . . . What is this . . . ”
Peabody’s voice shook. I had been scared before, but I was now in a space beyond that—a place where some incredible force was in my face and scaring me to my soul.
“I-it is the absence of energy . . . We are going to equilibrium, scientifically speaking.”
“What the bloody hell does that mean, Edwin . . . ” Rowan said.
“Black hole,” I said. “That’s what he means.”
“What?” Rowan hissed in the dark.
“N-not necessarily, there is an element I’m aware of that has an effect—the chanting and that rock—I’m not sure what that does . . . ”
Air whistled under the door; metal objects rattled on their shelves and glass hit the floor, shattering. Our ears popped as the door began to creak under the strain.
Suddenly the air shivered—I felt the vibration—and was followed by a series of rapid bangs and piercing snaps. We were pelted with shards of wood and glass; the air itself seemed to implode and, for an instant, I couldn’t breathe.
Even under Rowan and through my closed lids, I could see a burst of light illuminate the world like the midday sun. In the snap of a finger, it was gone.
CHAPTER 46
Later, I would remember the medical smell of the ER and the way the short, no-nonsense bobbed haircut of the nurse moved as she wrenched my hand from Rowan’s. I don’t remember the words I said to her but I remember her ignoring them and taking him from me.
I waited in the stark, white room outside the ER, not feeling or seeing the MacLaoch clan members gathering. I tuned out the words that prayed for his life. I clung to the words of Lady MacLaoch as I would a ship in the midst of a storming sea.
It seemed that summer, fall, winter, and spring all passed by before a man in green surgical scrubs came out and asked for both Cole and Nicole. Pulled from my fog, I waded through the people who crowded the ER waiting room; I moved through old and young. They all looked at me in wonder.
The surgeon was not a smiling man. My mind tortured me with thoughts that he’d in fact not smile when telling someone that her loved one had died.
“I’m sorry . . . ” were the only words I heard him say. I closed my ears against his words, against the sobs from the crowd, and collapsed into a chair.
I felt the surgeon kneel in front of me. “Ma’am? Are you Nicole? Do you know where Cole is? Is Cole here, too?”
I swiped at the tears that were streaming down my face. “I am Nicole. Rowan calls me Cole.” Called me, my mind corrected, and I fell deeper into my personal darkness.
“Oh.” He looked at me strangely. “Then I take back my apologies. I assumed it was two people, and we can only have one person in to see him at a time.”
Confusion must have crossed my features because he added, “He’s asking—no, demanding—that he see you.” He stood. “Come with me, please.”
In a haze I left the murmuring waiting room with the surgeon. He explained that Rowan was an extremely lucky man—the bullet entered and lodged itself in the meaty tissue of his shoulder, only coming to a stop when it hit his shoulder blade; any lower and his heart would have been punctured and he would no doubt have died swiftly. The surgeon was direct and vivid in his details of Rowan’s wound and all the possibilities of how it could have gone horribly wrong.
He left me at the door to the recovery room, saying that he’d give us some time. The investigators were most unpleasant about having to wait, yet the doctor would not deny a man to see his wife.
The word wife settled low and pleasant in me, the thrill of it like a free pass to an exclusive club. Speak it, and people instantly know how important you are to the one called husband.
Rowan lay still—it was obvious he’d been given a sedative—but his eyes tracked me as I crossed the small room to his side. The only sound was his breathing and the low whirr, interrupted by rhythmic beeps, of his monitoring equipment. The beep slowly increased in tempo as a rugged smile spread over his face.
“Hi,” I whispered as I took his hand. “How are you feeling?”
The smile never faltered, his eyes took me in, grazing along my face to my mouth, down to our clasped hands and back up to my eyes. Emotion shone in his own dark-blue irises. “I love ye.”
My steel gave way—I slumped under the weight of his words, the weight of the entire day, and I wept. I very gently lay down next to him, my arm around his midsection, and kissed his stubbled cheek and then his lips.
Softly I whispered, “I love you too.”
CHAPTER 47
The investigators made us pay for making them wait.
Peabody was delayed returning home several times by their questioning and re-questioning, but he was finally cleared.
The MacDonagh brothers stayed in the ICU for some time. The rumor that they were indeed the Secret Keepers of the MacLaoch curse was hotly debated. Eventually the hard-headed old men made a recovery and claimed to remember nothing of the fateful day on the Isle of Lady MacLaoch.
Old Gregoire was treated and released from the hospital, but was subsequently arrested for intent to use a deadly weapon and attempted murder. Eryka admitted to everything that she was accused of, but only after she had fled back to Iceland. Her extradition was in progress.
The one who felt the heavy hand of justice the most was Kelly. His brain, we learned, would never return to full function again. The last I heard, he was recovering into an incredibly chipper and happy person who had the mental maturity of a three-year-old. His mother moved him closer to her in Glasgow, into a long-term care facility where he was reportedly doing quite well, for a toddler.
CHAPTER 48
I stood in the kitchen of our apartment at Castle Laoch, coffee mug in one hand, flipping through a photo album on the counter with the other. The living room was filled with the boxes my mother had sent, and I was unpacking. Mother was happy to have me finally settled but was breathing fire that I had found my husband so far away. She had had the movers ship everything from my apartment, including the office wastepaper basket, still full, as well as some stuff she’d been trying to get rid of from her house. I was just happy that she hadn’t sent the entire contents of the refrigerator.
I was trying to get my things sorted quickly, as cataloging of the wilderness area and managing research students needed the majority of my time. I was also coordinating with my family the plans for our wedding at the castle the next year. Rowan seemed blissful that it was taking place in Scotland but was also conveniently absent when wedding details needed to be sorted out with my mother.
I didn’t have to be too particular with my unpacking—Rowan’s apartment in the upper part of the castle was soon to be used exclusively as his office; we were moving into a refurbished crofter’s cottage by the sea. The renovations of which were nearly done.
Sipping my coffee while I paged through the album, a lone photograph caught my eye. Pulling it out from the plastic sheeting, I realized it was old, very old. The man in the sepia image was standing next to a woman who held a toddler on her lap. They all looked severely unhappy, the way most people look in old photographs, as if they were convinced the camera was stealing their souls.
I heard Rowan come in behind me, the flap of the kitchen door sou
nding just before he leaned against my back and took the mug of coffee from me.
“What’s tha’, love?” he asked before taking a sip.
“I don’t know. Relatives?” I leaned back against his warm body.
“Mmmm,” he said into the mug. “Flip it over and see what it says—maybe their names are on the back. Tha’ man looks some like ye.”
Flipping the photograph over, I read the names, then read them again. Only when Rowan started chuckling did it really sink in what I was seeing. It was doubly confirmed when he started laughing outright.
It said, in shaky cursive, Iain Eliphlet Minory.
Minory with an o.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
No person is an island, and it takes a village to raise a child. Both sentiments are completely appropriate for describing the community effort that it took to raise this book from an idea to what you have in your hands now. The community grows each day as more and more people read it and fall in love with the story, but in the beginning there were those who were instrumental in getting this book to where it is now. I’d like to first and foremost thank Anne de Ridder for being there for the first baby steps I took as an author and shouting, “You can do it! Great job!” A big thanks goes out to my writing group, Adam Stonewall, Chris Lytsell, and our newly indoctrinated Jennifer Newton. Adam, I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank you for your awesome idea of incorporating a larger portion of the curse in the story—the benefits, I think all would agree, are stupendous. To my peer review group, Annie Small, Ayn Generes, Joelle Allen, and Heather Vaughn-Lee: all of you brought enthusiasm and loving critique that buoyed me and The Legend of Lady MacLaoch’s characters to new and even greater heights. A high five also goes out to my editing team at Indigo Editing & Publications—Kristin and Susan, you guys rock! To my dearest friend, Kate Carman, for telling me to “just write, damn it!” and for the unwavering help and expertise along the way. To Toby Neal, for the initial challenge and for being my writer-in-arms as we took on this authoring journey together. To my father-in-law and uncle for patiently explaining about fighter jets, and that when a pilot and copilot eject from an airplane, they don’t land together but rather, miles apart. To my friends who made me wild with jealously when they visited Scotland and then those who introduced me to the fabulous Highland Still House in Oregon City and its co-owner Mick. It’s because of you all that I went to Skye, fell hard for Scotch whisky, watched the RAF do training maneuvers, met the bartender who was the inspiration for Rowan MacLaoch and the wonderful couple Bill and Charlotte of Ben Tianavaig B&B. A special thanks goes to my family for support and encouragement, not to mention the endless ideas for characters! And finally, because he is the most important one to thank—the one who has stood by me day and night, the one who has encouraged me from the first inkling of an idea, the one who held his hand out to me in support when things got tough, the one who taught me what love is and what it can become—thank you to my husband, Keith. You are my best friend—thank you.