by Rebecca King
“Move,” he ordered when he needed to reload his gun again.
He quickly replaced the shot and nudged Mallory into the thickest bramble and quickly followed her. Thorns tugged at their clothing, but neither paid much attention as they half crawled, half slithered through the undergrowth. All about them, men stomped through the thicket in search of their quarry. Callum braced himself and shot anybody who appeared before him until the need to move arose again.
“Let’s go.”
“Which way?”
Mallory had no idea where they were. She had lost all sense of distance. Inside the woods, everything looked the same and it was so dark it was difficult to see much.
“To your right,” Callum whispered.
With nothing to indicate if he was right or wrong, Mallory began to crawl to her right. It was a little undignified to scurry along with her bottom in the air, but she managed to find another hiding place without having to go too far. She paused and waited for Callum to target several more guards.
“Stay down,” Callum growled. “But keep moving.”
Together, they crawled across the forest floor to a new location. The men were now searching but because of their bulk and numbers they couldn’t remain quiet. It was easy for Callum to find them, select a target, and fire. Callum peered around a bush and took one man down, two, then another. Again, and again, he fired.
“Move.”
“Which way?”
Mallory sighed when Callum didn’t answer. She winced when the loud retort of his gun being fired made her ears ache. She eyed the woods and picked the route she suspected she could climb through, and half-crawled toward it. When she stopped, Mallory found Callum directly behind her.
“We must get to Horace,” Callum whispered.
“Where is he?”
“It is impossible to tell in these woods. Just keep moving and try to find that path we were on. Once we locate that we can identify which way we need to go to get to him. We cannot allow them to take him,” Callum hissed. “He is our only way out of here.”
Mallory mentally retraced which direction she felt they had taken and carefully chose the next escape route. Crawling on her hands and knees, she twisted and yanked at clothing as she forced a path through the thick bushes. Her knees were sore. Her palms hurt from the sharp thorns and twigs, and she knew her face had scratches on it, but she wasn’t going to stop. She daren’t stop. Callum wouldn’t allow her to stop. Each time she paused to look back at him, he urged her on.
“Where is Sir Hugo?”
Callum shook his head. He couldn’t reply because of the hail of bullets that slammed into the tree directly above them. The guards were close enough to hear Mallory and had pinpointed exactly where she was hiding.
“We are almost out of shot,” Callum whispered when they stopped again several minutes later.
Mallory’s gaze dropped to his gun. “What do we do?”
Before he could answer her, the woods all around them came alive, but not because of any woodland creature. The number of shots being taken suddenly tripled. The loud booms blasted all around them as Callum and Mallory huddled together on the floor. Callum listened to the noise and knew something had changed. The last time he had heard such a cacophony he had been on a battlefield in the midst of war. The ground shivered beneath the force of the number of bodies hitting the ground. The trees groaned and cracked alarmingly. Bushes danced about as bullets tore through them. All about them, men cried out in pain as bullets sliced through flesh and ended lives.
Mallory clamped her fists over her ears and prayed she would live. She prayed that Callum would live. That they would see the rest of the day, and Horace too.
When the gunfire strayed closer than he would have liked, Callum threw himself at Mallory and hunched protectively over her. It was the only protection he could give her without a gun to defend them with. The only bullets he had left were the two he needed to keep – for now at least.
“I think reinforcements have arrived. There are more guns, but they aren’t all firing at us,” Callum whispered. “Men are still dying, which means someone is firing on them for us.”
“Sir Hugo?” Mallory wanted to cry at the thought that the man had been that meticulous in his planning.
Callum pursed his lips. “It might be the locals, or someone else Sir Hugo knows. That isn’t Sir Hugo. There are far too many guns being fired.”
Mallory threw him a filthy glare. They sounded all the same to her.
Callum grinned. “Do you not hear the blasts? Listen.”
Mallory sighed, but did as instructed because there wasn’t anything else to do. It wasn’t until she concentrated on the noise that she was able to identify two separate bursts of gunfire. It wasn’t constant as she would expect had it come from one source. One burst of gunfire was answered by another. The pause between the bursts was slight, but there. Someone was firing on Melrose’s guards who, if their cries were anything to go by, were being cut down where they stood.
Quite a while later, the gunfire began to ease. Occasional bursts filtered down to a single shot which was eventually silenced. Only when he was sure it was safe did Callum lift his head so he could emit a few strange noises. He waited. When nothing happened, he repeated the noises.
Mallory gasped when the bushes beside them immediately parted. It was odd the way the twisted branches eased open with nothing more than a slight rustle. A hard face appeared through the narrow gap. Mallory winced when Callum slammed a hand over her mouth to silence her scream. He winked at her and placed a finger over his mouth to warn her to keep quiet.
Mallory blinked owlishly at the stranger now grinning at them. To her consternation, he winked broadly at her before disappearing again leaving Mallory to stare blankly at Callum.
“It isn’t safe for us to move right now. They have a few gunmen to find. Don’t move, and try not to talk,” Callum murmured into her ear.
Mallory did just that. Unfortunately, with nothing much to distract her from the position she was in. Callum might not have even noticed how they were lying, but she was shockingly aware of how his weight was pressing her into the ground. She could feel every twitch as he moved to try to look for the stranger through the branches all about them. It reminded her that her life had been devoid of human contact. So much so, she wasn’t at all sure what she should say or do in such a situation. She knew that she should ask him to move not least because she was struggling to breathe beneath his weight, but he was protecting her from the gunfire. In fact, there wasn’t a part of her that was vulnerable to the gunmen. She was the safest person in the woods and knew it.
Until the ground beneath them began to tremble beneath a new noise.
“It’s a horse,” Callum said. “Someone is riding through the woods.”
Mallory winced.
“Get up,” he growled, rolling away from her.
Before she could move, Callum hauled her upright. The second his head appeared above the bramble, the woods around them exploded once more.
“Down!” Oliver bellowed.
Callum yanked Mallory back down again and hid her in a small hollow in the ground to the side of the path leading out of the trees.
“Who was that?” she demanded once Callum joined her.
“My boss.”
“That wasn’t Sir Hugo.”
“No.”
Callum peered around the bush and spotted the rider, who wasn’t sitting upright but was draped over the saddle with his hands tied behind his back. From their position beside the path it was difficult to see the rider’s face. All Callum could do was hope that it wasn’t one of his colleagues from the Star Elite, or Sir Hugo.
“Is he dead?” Mallory whispered as she watched the horse amble past.
Callum shook his head. He had no idea. The only reason Melrose would send in someone draped over a saddle like that would be to warn the Star Elite that they were in danger and could be killed whenever Melrose chose to kill them.
/> “What was Sir Hugo wearing?” he asked somewhat absently.
“I cannot remember. It was too dark to see him,” Mallory replied.
“They are trying to get us out of the bushes. Stay still. We aren’t going to be scared out of here,” Callum breathed.
Mallory had no intention of going anywhere. Not now. Maybe not ever.
It was a little disconcerting that Callum seemed to be in his element. They had spent the better part of an hour rolling around on a forest floor being shot at and all Callum could do was grin and try to get into a better position so that he could join in with the gun battle.
“Men,” she grumbled.
Callum’s grin widened. He made no apology for what he did or had to do to keep them alive. In a way, he wanted her to see the brutality of his life. It wasn’t romantic, or chivalrous. It was dangerous, dark, sickening. It was difficult to forget, and impossible to escape from seeing as his life was his work. Mallory needed to know that.
Maybe seeing the stark truth of what I do will stop her looking at me with those calf eyes.
Mallory edged closer to Callum’s reassuring strength. It wasn’t until he felt his hand slide into hers that Callum realised what he had done when he had felt Mallory edge closer. He looked down at their now clasped hands. It had been an instinctive move to touch her and had nothing to do with the unconscious rider. This was personal.
Mallory cannot be personal. We hadn’t met before a couple of hours ago. She is a victim we are in the process of recovering, nothing more than that.
But deep inside, Callum heard the small voice that warned him that he was lying to himself. He wasn’t usually the kind of man who shied away from things, but the thought of Mallory mattering to him was something he instinctively wanted to distance himself from. He didn’t want to care about another human being. He didn’t want to care about a woman. Women wanted more than he could give. Women wanted a relationship, a home, family, a man who would be there to help them run a house. He wanted a life with the Star Elite. It was who he was, not just what he did. He had gotten used to spending his life outside, in the shadows, watching and catching criminals. The last thing he wanted was to have to swap it for evenings before the fire with a wife by his side.
Now why should I look at her and think about marriage, hearth, and home?
Callum shook his head in disgust. Despite his reluctance to get involved with her romantically, when he knew he should release her hand Callum continued to hold it because he wanted to keep her next to him. He knew it was the best place for her to be.
“Come on.”
“Where are we going?” Mallory hesitated.
They were safe where they were, yet Callum wanted to keep moving.
“Out of here.”
When they tried to move again, though, they were immediately trapped by another hail of bullets, this time more ferocious than any that had been aimed at them before. All Callum and Mallory could do was huddle together and wait for it to stop again and hope they would still be alive when it did.
“This is bloody impossible,” Callum growled several minutes later when the bullets still hadn’t eased. He studied the small gap beneath the thorn bush they were hiding behind and sighed.
“Stay here.”
“You cannot leave me,” Mallory protested.
But he did. Without even stopping to explain to her where he was going, Callum slithered through the bush and disappeared.
Once at the edge of the path, Callum emitted a low guttural noise he knew his colleagues would understand.
“Shot,” he whispered when Oliver appeared on the other side of the path.
A small bag was immediately launched into the air and landed with a dull thud directly in front of Callum. Heaving a sigh of relief, Callum immediately picked it up and shuffled backward. When he glanced up, he could see the figure still atop the horse. He nodded at it and lifted his brows at Oliver, who shrugged to say that he hadn’t been able to see who it was either.
“Do you mind not just leaving me like that?” Mallory grumbled when Callum finally reappeared before her.
Callum smiled at her, reloaded his gun, and took aim, but as he joined in with the next gun battle, he assessed the area.
“The field Horace is in is to the right of here. We have to stay off the path but can still reach him.”
Before Mallory could reply, the loud snap of a twig made Callum immediately roll over so that he was between her and the intruder. Mallory stared at the leg that appeared just inches from her nose. She was so horrified by how close it was that she couldn’t tear her gaze away from it. Hardly daring to breathe, she waited for that inevitable bang that would end her life. When the shot came, Mallory jerked so badly she almost stood up, but she hadn’t been shot. Nor had Callum. She watched a guard look blankly at her before slowly dropping his stunned gaze to the gaping hole in his chest. As if uncomprehending of what he saw, he gurgled before trying to look up. The effort unbalanced him. He teetered on the balls of his feet before, like a fallen tree, he fell face forward in the dirt with a heavy thud.
Mallory wasn’t the only one who had watched the man’s demise. Another guard nearby suddenly lunged to his feet, but rather than race toward Mallory he ran in the other direction, clearly no longer prepared to risk his life for Melrose.
A single gunshot ended his flight.
“Why? Why would your colleagues kill him? He was running away?” Mallory cried tearfully.
“They wouldn’t. Melrose’s guards would. To them, he is a traitor. They are ruthless. They will cut him down because they won’t want him telling anybody who they are and what they are up to,” Callum said.
“They will kill each other?”
Callum looked at her.
“It’s incomprehensible how heinous they are, isn’t it? They have been ordered to get you no matter what the cost to themselves, and if that means they have to behave like a pack of feral dogs then they will.”
Mallory understood then that it wasn’t just her who had been caught up in Melrose’s brutality. If anybody wanted their lives to themselves while Melrose was about they faced death, and that included people willingly in Melrose’s employ.
“Melrose should be behind bars.” Mallory had never meant anything more strongly in her life. “But his men shouldn’t die like dogs to get him there.”
Callum threw her a sharp look.
“Do you think that someone who is prepared to kill is going to be easy to take to gaol, or his men for that matter?”
“No, but to keep killing each other like this isn’t going to solve anything, is it? I mean, Melrose will just employ more men when this lot are dead, won’t he?”
“Do you want me to put down my gun so we can go back to Melrose House with them, or what is left of it? I am sure Melrose won’t mind showing you what he did to Jemima, or explaining why he sadistically murdered her,” Callum snapped.
Mallory stared at him. He had a point. Melrose would indeed have no problem showing her what he had done to Jemima, and just as slowly and painful as well.
“I am sorry,” she whispered.
She knew that Callum hadn’t asked to be dragged into any of this. It was wrong to criticise him, or his colleagues. He was involved because he had been told to fight to the death to carry out his orders, but his mission was completely different to that of Melrose’s guards. They were criminals. Callum wasn’t. He was fighting for a good cause. Melrose’s men were not. Even though Callum was fighting for a good cause, the possible loss of his life seemed a hideous price to pay for her freedom.
This time, Mallory couldn’t stop her tears from trickling steadily down her face. She stared helplessly at the ground beneath her boots because she thought it was the only place that she could look that wouldn’t remind her of the death all around her. Unfortunately, when she looked at her boots, she saw the twigs and leaves covered in splatters of blood, and it brought a fresh wave of tears to her eyes that trickled after the first.
<
br /> “Callum!” Oliver bellowed.
“Yes.”
“Remember what Archie used to do?”
“Yes.” Callum grinned.
“Ideal place about a quarter back. We will use it. You get out of here.”
“Ten,” Callum shouted to his colleague.
“Good enough.”
The reply came from a different location to the rest of the odd conversation. It didn’t even sound like the original man answered Callum’s strange numbered code. Even so, Callum understood what his colleagues were saying to him. Given the smile on his face he was more than happy to do whatever they suggested as well.
“Slowly and quietly, follow me,” Callum whispered to Mallory.
Mallory didn’t get the chance to ask him what they were going to do before he propelled her through the undergrowth. Together, they stomped through the woods in a silence that did little to quell Mallory’s growing sense of disquiet.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Where are we going?” Mallory demanded several minutes later when they reached the end of the path, took a sharp turn to the right, and found themselves facing nothing more than miles of empty fields.
“Now, we double back and make sure we aren’t followed. Then we make our way to Ribberton.”
Later that morning, Mallory read a crude sign scratched into a large rock which had been positioned discretely at the side of the road.
“Now why does Mallow Farthing sound familiar?”
Mallory tried to remember where she had heard that name before but couldn’t quite place if she had heard Callum mention it, or one of the staff at Melrose House.
“How far are we from Melrose House?”
“About thirty miles or more,” Callum replied. “Melrose’s contacts stretch toward London and Scotland. As far as we can tell, they don’t stretch out west.”