Eyes of the Cat

by Mimi Riser

  The cat’s glowing gaze narrowed into a smug, feline sort of grin. “Yes, I know. It’s a specialty of mine,” he seemed to say. “Now run along. I’ll catch up with you as soon as I’ve repaired my weaponry.” He began an industrious sharpening of his claws on Dunstan’s thick shoe leather.

  Securing her makeshift toga with the gilt pin, Tabitha threw the longest edge over her shoulder and groped her way through the dark passages that led out of the keep and into the fresh night air she needed to wash Dunstan’s stink out of her nostrils. The cat never did follow. But then, she was beginning to get used to that.

  By the time she reached the outside door, she had barely enough strength left to shove through onto the ramp and down to the inner courtyard below. After staggering half a dozen steps over soggy turf, her knees gave way in front of a narrow bench deep in the shadows of a wall. She collapsed onto it, feeling like a burst balloon. The adrenaline that had been keeping her on her feet and masking pain had finally fizzled out, leaving her all too aware of how horribly she hurt.

  There was something wet and sticky trickling down her face, and both eyes were starting to swell shut. Her torso burned where he’d raked her, and the bite on her shoulder was throbbing and oozing more sticky stuff. Worst of all was the pounding ache in her head. It felt like a war zone in there, like someone was setting off blasting caps inside her skull. Or cannon fire, or gunshots or—

  Pow! Pow!

  It took two shots in rapid succession to alert her to the fact that someone was firing a gun.

  Through bleary slits, Tabitha peered ahead into the gloom and saw a small, buzzing cluster of people standing a dozen yards away in a circle of smoky torchlight. None of them appeared to have noticed her yet. They were all too engrossed in the surrealistic burlesque show being performed high over their heads.

  Perched like a big yellow canary bird, and singing like one, too, Mary MacAllister was balancing on the narrow upper ledge of the nearby generator tower, offering a lovely rendition of an old Scottish folk tune for—Tabitha could only assume—the entertainment of her Texas cousin.

  Except, gauging by his body language, the Texas cousin wasn’t entertained. From his position on the long ladder, roped against the tower so it couldn’t be toppled, Alan apparently was either trying to climb onto the ledge with Mary, or coax Mary into boarding the ladder with him. Neither endeavor seemed to be progressing very well. Dunstan had been wrong, Tabitha noted, squinting up at the moon and torch lit pair. Mary did not have a loaded revolver. Mary had two revolvers.

  However, she was only holding one at the moment. The second was tucked into a holster of the heavy cartridge belt buckled jauntily over her billowy, yellow negligee.

  “O, ye take the high road, and I’ll take the low road, and I’ll be in Scotland afore ye—”

  Pow!

  Alan ducked as the third shot in several minutes whizzed past his ear.

  “For me and my true love will never meet again on the bonny, bonny banks of Loch Lomond,” Mary finished plaintively. She glanced sideways at Alan as the top half of his head peered warily over the ledge, her elegant brows suddenly knit together in some sort of mental distress.

  “Oh dear, I’m so sorry, Cousin Alan. That wasn’t right of me at all, was it?” She gazed at him with fretful concern.

  “Aye. But you missed me, so there’s no harm done. Just hand over the guns and come down like a good lass, and we’ll forget all about it,” he said soothingly as the rest of his head, followed by his shoulders rose cautiously before her view. With painstaking care, he began hoisting himself onto the ledge.

  Pow!

  The fourth shot drove him back to the ladder in a hasty scramble.

  “You silly thing. Men really are so stupid sometimes.” Mary fanned the gun smoke away from her face with a graceful hand. “I was referring to the song. You’re lower than me at present, so I should have done it, ‘You take the low road, and I’ll take the high road.’”

  And she sang the entire tune, with all its verses, over again, making the necessary corrections, and keeping Alan glued to the ladder with the aid of two more erratically aimed bullets.

  “There! That was much better and far more appropriate, don’t you think?” she asked, as the last notes drifted eerily away in the storm washed air.

  “Aye,” Alan agreed, a dangerous edge sharpening his voice. “And the best part is you’ve now emptied both cylinders.” With a quick, catlike motion, he swung himself onto the ledge and grabbed for her.

  She skipped lightly out of reach. “Ah, you can count to twelve, I’m so impressed! But it hardly matters. I’ve lots more cartridges.” She giggled, and then bit her lip in concentration as she fumbled with the revolver in her hand, evidently trying to determine how it opened for reloading.

  Alan made another grab. “Give me that! You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “No, no, no—don’t help me. I want to figure it out for myself.” Mary danced three more steps away.

  Easily working her way around the ledge, she continued fussing with the weapon, always staying just beyond Alan’s reach and cheerfully chortling to herself. “Ah ha! So that’s how it opens. How cunning. Now, I wonder which end of these is the front?” She slipped one of the cartridges out of the belt and squinted at it.

  “Mary, those aren’t toys. Give them to me!” Alan was obviously doing his best to overtake her, but the narrowness of the ledge put a man of his size at disadvantage compared to the slender redhead.

  “Don’t call me Mary.” She pouted, turning the bullet this way and that. “I told you before, I’m Cassandra.”

  “Cassandra, then,” he growled.

  “No… After hearing you say it, I don’t think Cassandra will do, either. It’s too cumbersome.” She paused, and he must have thought he had her, but it was only a tease. “I think I’ll call myself Monique, instead. That way I can keep the same initials, and I won’t have to change my monograms. I do believe in being practical.”

  “Then be practical now and come down from here. You shouldn’t be playing with Geordie’s Colts. He’s going to be very angry with you.” Alan almost slipped as he missed another grab.

  “He’s angry already, but it won’t do him any good. These aren’t his Colts any longer. They’re mine.” Monique laughed, pausing again to let Alan make up the distance he’d lost by slipping.

  “How do you figure that?” he bit out.

  “Because last night I had three aces, and he only had two.”

  It was Alan’s turn to pause. “Five aces total? You cheated him?”

  “Don’t be absurd.” She smirked. “No one has to cheat Geordie at cards. It’s too easy to beat him honestly.” Clumsily, she began to fill the Colt’s chambers. “One of my aces was a One-eyed Jack. One-eyed Jacks were wild last night,” she explained—and gave a startled shriek as part of the tower wall abruptly fell away behind her and she toppled inward.

  Several moments of tremendous banging, scuffling and crashing ensued, punctuated by enraged feminine screams and a few genuine shouts of pain—none of them from a woman’s throat.

  Inching along the outside ledge, Alan peeked through the opening, winced at what he saw, retraced his steps, and hastened down the ladder.

  He made it to the ground only seconds before Simon Elliott staggered out the bottom door of the tower with Mary-Monique slung over his shoulder. The lanky blond’s tie was gone, his collar was crooked, and his jacket was torn. He had a bump on his forehead and a scratch on his cheek. His cargo was hissing and spitting like an alley cat, furiously trying to reach one of her two revolvers, which were jammed into the waistband of his trousers.

  “I’m afraid not, little girl. I’ll give them back to you when you’re old enough to learn how to use them properly.” He delivered a swat to her upturned derriere that made her eyes pop.

  “Beast! I detest you,” she hissed from her inverted position.

  “That’s quite all right. You’re not one of my favorite peo
ple either.” Grinning, he swung her down to her feet with a little jolt. “Now, why don’t you go to your room. It must be way past your bedtime. Would you like me to come along and tuck you in?”

  She gave him a glare that would have flayed the flesh from his bones if eyes were razors, stormed several paces toward the keep, saw the figure huddled on the bench, and went whiter than the satin sheet it was wrapped in.

  “Oh my God! Tabitha, what happened to you?” She raced to her side.

  Tabitha glanced up into Mary’s blurred, stricken expression and tried to smile, but the current state of her face wouldn’t allow it. “I enjoyed your performance. Almost applauded,” she joked through swollen lips.

  With a laugh that sounded more like a sob, Mary sat next to her. “Honey, I’m so sorry, I wasn’t quick enough,” she whispered, gathering the girl into her arms.

  Too fuzzy to figure out what she was talking about, and too shaky to sit upright, Tabitha collapsed against the silk clad shoulder. Its owner might be nutty as a fruitcake, but she was also acting sweeter than one. Why? Tabitha didn’t know and didn’t care. It was a relief to have the comfort.

  She felt Mary tense, and didn’t even have to hear his angry growl to know Alan was suddenly looming over them.

  “I thought I bid you stay in the room. What the devil are you doing here—dressed like that?”

  Tabitha battled back a scream. Oh yes, dressed like this, the way you left me—naked and defenseless—a sitting duck for the first drunk who decided to try his luck!

  With a furious moan, she buried her battered face deeper into the billowy negligee. “Make him go away,” she mumbled.

  Mary’s already tense form stiffened into steel. “With pleasure,” she muttered under her breath.

  Tabitha felt one of the woman’s hands shift and close around something small and hard beneath the folds of canary silk. How funny, I was as wrong as Dunstan. Mary hadn’t had two guns; she’d had at least three. The third one felt like a Derringer in a garter holster. Was that what the well-dressed Boston belles were wearing this year?

  “I think you’ve already done quite enough for one night, Cousin Alan,” she said with a curious, glacial calm. “Leave us alone now. I’m going to take Tabitha to my room.” She pulled both of them upright, holding Tabitha against herself with a lithe, athletic strength that was almost as surprising as the hidden weapon.

  Alan bit back a curse, obviously fighting to control himself, and just as obviously losing the battle. “Listen, lassies, I’ve had all I’m going to take from either of you. Enough is enough! Mary, you can go to your room, or go to blazes. I don’t care, just so long as you go there now and go alone. And Tabitha, you are coming with me!”

  A hand flashed out, yanking her away from Mary, his fingers not rough exactly, but digging into the bite wound on her shoulder with enough pressure to make her cry out. Mary flew forward and pulled her back, shoving her half behind herself and steadying the girl with her left hand while the right was still buried somewhere in the froth of yellow silk wafting about her in the cool night air.

  “If you want her, you’ll have to get past me.” She spoke with an icy poise that made her sound as though she faced situations like this regularly for sport. “Beating an innocent girl… I should have shot you when I had the chance,” she added in a tone softer than death.

  The innocent girl heard it, but the assumed beater’s attention was suddenly riveted elsewhere. He was staring at a now exposed swollen and bloody face—with an expression of unspeakable black rage fast darkening his own.

  “Who?”

  One word. That was all he said, but the sound of his voice sliced through Tabitha like a knife. His figure towered before her, fuzzy and wavering, his face a dim blur with two sparks of deep golden glow searing out of it. Squinting into them, Tabitha felt a furious wave of adrenaline wash through her, tightening her knees and drawing her upright. “You! You did it!” She grabbed onto Mary as her legs went watery again.

  Alan scarcely acknowledged the answer. He seemed to view it as hysterical raving. “Never mind. I’ll find out for myself.” His gaze burned over her, reading every mark, every drop of blood as though it were a volume of information, while she glared defiance back at him.

  Neither of them noticed they’d become the new show for the courtyard audience. Only Mary was aware of the growing number clustering about them. Her eyes never left Alan, but she knew the position of every kilted clansman, every tartan-shawled woman hovering near. The only person she missed somehow was Simon Elliott, who suddenly was just there, brushing against her right side and startling her so much her hidden hand nearly jerked free.

  “You’re right,” he whispered, grinning, as she quickly shoved the hand and what it held farther into the yellow folds. “That probably would not be a wise move.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She blinked at him with wide-eyed innocence and just the right amount of feminine pique.

  “Yes, you do.” He grinned again. “And you know I’ll be watching you closely from now on, too, don’t you?”

  She managed a very attractive, little blush. “All men watch me. They can’t help themselves.” She pouted prettily. “My beauty attracts them, like moths to a flame.”

  “Mmm…yes,” Simon murmured, smoking her from head to toe with a visual assessment that turned the blush genuine. “That’s another good reason for it.”

  He sauntered past her into the shadows, leaving Mary looking like a gambler who had just accidentally dropped all her cards face up on the table and was trying to convince herself that no one had seen.

  Beside her, Tabitha was struggling to keep her uncooperative legs under herself and marveling that it could be so hot and so cold at the same time. She realized she was probably suffering from shock, but somehow that knowledge didn’t make the symptoms any easier to deal with. The only silver lining in the cloud was that she could hardly see Alan anymore. The courtyard and everyone in it were swirling into one big patchwork haze.

  “Please, d-don’t let me pass out,” she moaned to Mary. “I don’t trust what will happen if I faint again.”

  “Stand back! Someone get her some water,” Mary ordered. She resettled her charge onto the bench and began fanning her.

  Tabitha felt her hair being pushed back off her face and shoulders, and cool air stinging the now exposed bite wound. She also felt Mary almost drop her and heard the young woman’s enraged shriek:

  “Oh my God, he’s bitten her! She’ll get rabies!”

  The noise yanked her back into enough reality to be disturbingly aware of Alan kneeling before her and glaring hard at something golden fastened in the sheet just below the wound.

  The kilt pin.

  “Dunstan.” Alan snarled the name like it was the vilest of curses.

  He snarled it just as its owner happened to be lumbering out of the keep in an absolute idiocy of bravado. Dunstan had tidied himself up a bit and decided, apparently, that if he acted as though nothing had occurred, no one would be the wiser. He was that stupid. Or that drunk. Or both.

  “Aye, cousin?” He staggered toward the cluster of people like a big, smelly, unknowing lamb on its way to the slaughter.

  Though “slaughter” was perhaps too pleasant a term for what it might have been if two men hadn’t leapt on Alan to hold him back.

  And then two more.

  And two more…

  In the end, it took seven hearty Highlanders several long, hellish moments to drag their laird to the ground. Even then an extra one was needed to keep him there. That one was Uncle Angus.

  “Hold, lad— Hold!” he bellowed, doing a powerful bit of holding, himself, with a heavy hand buried in Alan’s hair. “If he’s guilty, Dunstan will be duly punished. But by MacAllister law, nay by yours!”

  Straining furiously against the kilted tonnage pinning him to the damp earth, Alan gave a solitary, inhuman cry of defiance. It ripped through the great courtyard like the scream of a wounded
panther, almost shattering the walls and hitting Tabitha with the force of a bullwhip. In the dazed, dizzy state of her shock, she felt, suddenly, like she was reliving something—some ghastly, heartrending experience. But she couldn’t remember what. She only knew it was something that had happened right where she was then, in the castle’s inner yard, and that somehow she’d heard that cry before.

  “Even the laird canna change this! D’ye understand me, lad?”

  Tabitha heard Angus’s question and Alan’s answering snarl of “Aye” as if the voices came from another world. She stumbled through the next moments like she was barely in them, like the whole thing was some weird, wavering masque, and she was simultaneously one of the players and one of the spectators.

  Dunstan was led forward, mumbling some sullen, fretful nonsense about her being a witch and cursing him with her evil eye. Which Mary parried with “No, you idiot, I’m the witch, and if you don’t shut up, I’ll turn you into something worse than the disgusting toad you already are!” He had ended by accepting his fate stoically, however, not even trying to argue most of the accusations Tabitha had been required to state in front of all.

  That had been the eeriest part, having to stand and recite what he’d done while that sea of curious eyes splashed over her—that and Dunstan’s abrupt rousing to deny the part about the cat. His wounds were from her, he had insisted. She’d fought him like a cat, that was all. Even in her haze, Tabitha found that unnerving. Why should he lie about the cat of all things?

  “That’s not true! I was in no position to fight, that’s why he got as far as he did.” Foggy and fuming, she’d tried to make someone believe that. Good heavens, they were all staring at her like she’d just sprouted whiskers and pointed ears.

  “Forget it, honey. What difference does it make? You must have been so frightened, you didn’t realize everything that was happening.” Mary guided her back to the bench. “All right, you vultures, the show is over,” she declared. “Shoot that oaf, hang him, chop his head off, or whatever you do with mad dogs and get it over with, so Tabitha can be tended to and rest!”