Night of the Highland Dragon

by Isabel Cooper

  She discarded that idea partly for the reason she’d told Stephen not to come up—he had a wife and a small child, and she was only willing to trust D Branch so far.

  Partly she wanted to go. The thought squeezed her chest and throat, smoke from a much sloppier fire than she’d ever built. Loch Arach wasn’t a refuge any longer.

  “I’ll come,” she said and then cleared her throat and added, “I’ll have to leave in a year or two anyhow.”

  She’d spoken half to herself, but when William asked, “Why?” the question was neither startling nor intrusive.

  Judith shrugged, still not turning from the fire. She heard him walk forward, then felt his arms wrapping around her waist and pulling her back against his chest. Surrounded by warmth, breathing in William’s scent, she leaned her head against his and felt her muscles unwind. “It’s what we do,” she said, and the words didn’t hurt as much as she’d thought they would. “You can’t have the same lord for two hundred years, can you? Not even for sixty, if he—or she—looks twenty the whole time. So I’ll leave, and my ‘nephew’ will come and take over and inherit when I ‘die overseas.’”

  “You do that regularly?”

  “Aye. I’ve stayed too long as it is.” She sighed. “It’s easy to do.”

  He nodded, his hair brushing lightly against her. “It’s a peaceful place. And one gets tired of war—even the small ones I fight. I’d imagine it goes double for the larger sort.”

  “I’d really hoped to forget the way a bullet sounds going into flesh,” Judith said, “or the smell of human blood. But that’s not the way life happened, is it?” Regret was a waste of time. She’d learned that when she was still young, even by mortal standards. “Do you know who those ‘brothers’ Ross mentioned might be?”

  “One of the cults I mentioned,” he said after a second’s hesitation. “The most likely call themselves the Consuasori—derived from a Latin word that means ‘advisers.’”

  “Seems like he had more than advice in mind. What do they want?”

  “England the way it was in their day. Ruling the world—or at least the nation—to make sure it doesn’t change very much.”

  Judith laughed, viciously satisfied. “They must be having a hell of a time lately, then.”

  “In more ways than one. We raided their main meeting place about half a year ago.” William flexed the fingers of one hand absently against her stomach, a man recalling an old pain. “We were sure we’d gotten most of the cult—and I think we did capture or kill most of the major figures—but a few escaped. Apparently they’re still better organized than we’d hoped.”

  “They always are,” said Judith, “whoever they are. And if Ross was getting orders, then there’s at least one or two more who I can hold to account for all this.”

  “You won’t be the only one,” William said, and his arms tightened about her, offering a promise that she didn’t want to make him speak aloud. “We’ll have to find them, of course.”

  “Or him,” said Judith. “Ross said only one other man knew what he was doing up here.”

  “I’m not sure if that makes things easier or not.”

  “Well, I hear your people are good at finding things out.” Judith looked up at William and smiled, then raised her head to brush a light kiss across his lips. “You managed better than any other mortal in my lifetime.”

  “Something to remember,” he said lightly, “in my old age.”

  She expected that to sting, and it did, a little, but no matter. Pain passed like all other things. “I’d not tell your grandchildren much more about that, though,” she replied, managing the same joking tone he had. “You’ll quite scandalize them.”

  “Someone has to,” said William, and he sighed. “Shall we?”

  “The world waits,” said Judith.

  * * *

  They left early in the morning for Aberdeen. Trains didn’t enter into it this time—Judith’s carriage was waiting when William reached the castle, with a pair of sturdy horses in harness and one of the local young men at the reins, still blinking and surreptitiously rubbing his eyes. They were on their own schedule. Judith, William suspected, just wanted to get under way as soon as she could. He didn’t blame her. Ross’s final delivery into the hands of the men at the central office couldn’t come soon enough for him either, though probably for different reasons.

  The man himself was lying in the carriage when William boarded, taking up all of one side to keep the weight off his wounded leg. His wrists and ankles were manacled together. A faraway look in his eyes and a slackness about his mouth suggested that his bonds weren’t the only things keeping Ross from being trouble.

  “Been much of a conversationalist, has he?” William asked, sliding onto the bench next to Judith.

  “Not to me,” she said. Judith wore the same bottle-green hat and dark coat in which she’d come up to Aberdeen the time before, and from the green velvet at her hem and cuffs, the same dress as well. She sat tucked up against one wall of the coach, with her hands folded primly in her lap and her back so straight that William wondered if she could manage that posture all the way to Aberdeen. He longed to reach out to her, to touch her in reassurance, if only briefly, but witness and custom kept his hands at his sides.

  He’d left the castle shortly after they’d gotten back the previous night. He and Judith had arrived walking a good distance from each other and speaking formally of plans for the journey. Judith had paused at the door, and William had waited himself, but they’d both known she couldn’t invite him in. Whatever the rumors about them might be, it would do no good for her to have dinner, let alone spend the night, with the Englishman who’d be taking a local boy off to prison the next day.

  That local boy couldn’t do much in the village now, even if he was conscious of anything that happened, but he’d be answering questions at D Branch. It would be best for everything to appear impartial.

  William met Judith’s eyes and smiled, as sympathetically as he might have done to any comrade in arms. It was as far as he could go, and as far as she could accept. By her answering grin, faint and weary as it was, he knew she understood.

  “Campbell said Ross talked in his sleep,” Judith went on as the coachman snapped the reins and the carriage lurched forward onto the road.

  “He’s more than earned a few bad dreams,” William said, glancing at the figure across from him, who looked back in sullen lethargy. “Anything specific?”

  “Not that Campbell could make out. Of course, I doubt he was listening very closely.”

  Outside, Loch Arach dwindled behind them. William saw a flash of light as the rising sun glinted off the lake, and then the village was gone. Gray rock and dark trees shot up on either side of the carriage. The land had shut them in. It was an absurd thought, but William couldn’t banish it as quickly as he would have liked. He rubbed at the back of his neck.

  “Kenneth’s a fair hand with the horses,” Judith said, sounding like she spoke offhandedly. “I could swear he practices on the sly. I don’t travel nearly often enough for his liking—though, of course, we all keep the road in good condition. There’s none in this part of the country that’d take that charge less than seriously.”

  “Your faith in human nature is slightly reassuring.”

  Judith shrugged. “All parts of human nature. The railway didn’t get here very long ago, and the roads were most people’s way out. They’d do what was needful—and the man who didn’t would hear of it.”

  On the other side of the carriage, Ross shifted and muttered. Like Campbell before him, William couldn’t have said what the words were, if they were words at all.

  “I had a driver once,” William said, “who greatly resented me for wanting to keep all four carriage wheels on the road. Not a young man, oddly enough—I think he was in his eighties at the time.”

  “Less to lose?�
�

  “That could be,” William said and laughed, but his own words, even his feeling of amusement, took second place in his concentration.

  He couldn’t have said why. Instinct was an itch in the palms of his hands, the urge to shift forward in his seat, a restless twitch of one booted foot. He checked on Ross again. The man’s eyes were closed now. He wasn’t trying to sit up. His wrists and ankles were still bound.

  William made himself count to ten.

  The carriage went around a turn, sliding Judith toward him. Her weight against his side and the smell of her hair and skin were calming, no matter that the contact was brief. He fought back the urge to reach for her. After a second, she made herself move back to where she’d been, putting a few inches between them that seemed like a much longer distance.

  He cleared his throat. He could have said a hundred things, asked her a thousand, if Ross hadn’t been in the carriage. Now he couldn’t think of anything. With that blank face in front of him, William’s mind went just as blank, save only for the sense of unease that kept plaguing him.

  Slowly, he slipped his pistol out of its holster and placed it on his knee. There he could hold it, keeping his finger well away from the trigger—wouldn’t do for Ross to die before D Branch could ask their questions—and yet feeling better for the metal beneath his palm.

  “The cuffs are good,” said Judith mildly. “I checked myself.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” said William, and indeed it hadn’t occurred to him to question the manacles. “What did you give him?”

  “Morphine, I wouldn’t doubt. It was McKendry who did that. I admit I didn’t take much interest in his comfort.”

  “How long ago?”

  Ross opened his eyes. They still didn’t quite focus. His tongue slid out of his mouth, tapped at his upper lip, and then retreated. He kept watching the other side of the carriage.

  “Midnight, roughly?” Judith hesitated and looked back and forth between Ross and William. “There are the two of us here. And we did make sure he’d nothing else on him.”

  “I know. I just—”

  Ross smiled.

  Stopping mid-sentence, William heard Judith’s sudden, sharp inhalation and knew she was thinking along the same lines he was. Nobody in the carriage could have thought any differently.

  That was not the smile of a drug-addled man. It was too deliberate and too knowing. There was still a haze about Ross, a sense that he wasn’t quite himself, but his eyes weren’t vacant anymore. They narrowed as he looked at William, and his smile widened.

  Ross opened his mouth and said a word.

  William didn’t know it. He couldn’t have spelled it. He wasn’t even sure he could have pronounced it. Ross’s mouth looked like it bent in the effort, all odd angles and distorted muscles. William only knew that the word began with M and that hearing it made the backs of his eyes hurt.

  Beside him, Judith snarled like no human woman ever would have. William glimpsed her face and saw, in the seconds before she caught herself, her canines extend and her eyes start to glow.

  No spell William had ever heard of took only a single word. He knew that, just as he’d known earlier that Ross was bound and drugged, and yet fear tightened his stomach and his chest.

  “What was that?” Judith bit off each word, leaning toward Ross. “You will tell us—”

  “You’ll find out,” he said quietly. “I expect it’ll be harder on you this way. I wish you’d been sensible.”

  He smiled again.

  And then he stopped. His mouth fell open like that of a man who’d been hit unexpectedly, and his eyes went huge with fear and more than fear—shock, William thought, and betrayal. “No,” Ross mouthed. “But—no.”

  Judith cried out in pain and revulsion. When William turned to look, she had one hand pressed against her temple. She closed her eyes, then obviously forced them open. “What in God’s name are you—”

  Then Ross started screaming. As William hastily rapped on the ceiling of the carriage, hoping that stopping was the right idea and knowing only that he wanted Judith away from whatever was hurting her, Ross thrashed in his bonds like a fish on a hook. He had the same mindless look in his eyes as a wounded animal, and in that split second William pitied him. Whatever he’d done, whatever he’d given himself to, he’d gotten a reward that William wouldn’t have wished on any man.

  Pity didn’t last very long—between one blink of the eye and another. After that, there was nothing to pity.

  Ross unfolded in blood.

  A sound from all around them took up his shrieking. It mingled with the screams of the panicking horses, the shouts of the driver, the rough sounds of dirt under speeding carriage wheels, and the wet noises of a human body…

  William couldn’t say what that body was doing, and he didn’t want to. After a lifetime as investigator, soldier, and sometimes assassin for D Branch, he’d never seen anything like what happened to Ross MacDougal. He hoped he would die before he ever saw it again. He looked to Judith and saw the same horrified disbelief on her face. Two hundred years and this was foreign to her too.

  His hands went cold. He grabbed his gun.

  The shrieking sound was high-pitched now, a saw blade from the air around them. That air itself was deforming. The other side of the coach wasn’t there; instead, there was a room, and in front of it, a human head pressing against some reddish barrier like cheesecloth that distorted and blurred all features. Other shapes lurked behind it. Most of them were much less human. Maybe they’d been human once.

  The room expanded to either side, going beyond the blood-soaked carriage. The world twisted.

  Outside, the coachman gave one cry of mortal terror, a panicked cry to God. Then the carriage was tilting, going over on its side—and space was twisting with it.

  He was falling.

  They were falling.

  They were all falling: off the road, perhaps, or perhaps through a different place entirely. One thing stopped connecting to another.

  The man behind the barrier was coming through, almost as entirely teeth and flaring mad eyes as the demons around him. He reached out one hand, and a knife was in it, black fire flaring along the blade.

  Judith was snarling. He saw light—he didn’t know from where—glint off green scales on a human-shaped arm.

  How much time did it take to transform?

  William aimed, as well as he could with the way that the world kept skipping around him, drew a breath, and fired as rapidly as he could: one, two, three, four, five, six. They punched little holes through the not-quite-air and made subdued popping sounds.

  A drop of Ross’s blood fell from the ceiling and hit William squarely in the middle of his hand, flowered red, and ran in all directions in rivulets.

  One bullet grazed the intruder’s cheek. Two hit the things directly behind him, which roared in pain and outrage. The other three bullets sprayed a route down the man’s shoulder and along his chest. As the air became air again, William could still see the bullets’ flight and the trails they left behind.

  He could see the knife too, when it left the man’s hand. He knew the man was aiming for his heart.

  Space still warped between them. The knife didn’t fly entirely true. William almost dodged completely. But not quite.

  Damn, he thought as he felt the blade sink in just below his ribs, burrowing forward with a mind of its own. This is going to be a problem.

  Then, darkness.

  Thirty-six

  Judith screamed. In dragon form, it came out as a roar, which scared Ross’s ally and his pack of demons into brief stillness: a useful effect, but not her intention. She had no intention, hadn’t since she’d lunged toward William and the stranger, too late and too slow to stop the knife. She just screamed.

  The carriage smashed into the ground at the base of the hill. It lan
ded in two halves, several feet apart from each other, all the edges severed with surgical neatness. The back, where Judith had burst the walls during her transformation, was a splintered contrast; so was the tangle of blood and leather and bone at the front, where the horses and Kenneth, poor lad, had been. Between the two were five demons—more-than-man-sized gray horrors with single eyes, four arms each, and too many teeth. William lay in front of them, almost at Judith’s feet.

  She thought she saw his chest move. She couldn’t wait to find out.

  The magician was slumping back toward his allies, blood pouring from his torso. His wounds might have been fatal. She didn’t wait to find that out either.

  Burn, God damn you all.

  She didn’t bother with control this time. Flame sprayed from her mouth in a swelling cloud, enveloping the demons and the coach behind them. The wood caught; so did the flesh of humans and horses, and Judith snarled at the scent of it. The magician didn’t make a sound when he died, just charred and fell.

  The demons stood unharmed in the middle of the flames and then rushed forward.

  Judith sprang to meet them, landing at William’s side. The first swipe of her clawed foreleg knocked two of them back against the smoldering wreckage of the coach, and one, as she’d hoped it might, landed with a spike of broken wood through the back of its head, struggling faintly and then moving no more. The other was getting to its feet, but it would take a few moments.

  She whirled to meet the rest, just as one sank its claws into the side of her neck. The wound wasn’t likely to be serious—she had far more between her veins and the air than a human or a beast would have—but Judith snarled at the pain and felt blood begin to flow. She shook herself, but the demon hung on, and then the other two were on her.

  They weren’t humans, she thought, in an insight as painful as the wound to her neck. They didn’t fight the same way—and they didn’t need weapons. Judith’s experience wouldn’t serve her as well in this battle. It might even be a drawback. Aside from the rat-things, much smaller than these and vulnerable to fire, she’d never been in a real fight as a dragon—and she knew she wouldn’t survive for long in human form.