The window would not budge.
Struggling with all her strength, she pulled and pulled but she couldn’t raise it. Hissing, she went to her night table, struck a match to the lamp. Going back to the window, she held the light aloft to see what might be preventing her. The moment she saw the nails in the bottom frame she knew Daniel had hammered it shut. She knew that was what he’d been doing when she heard the hammering.
“Damn it, Danny!” she snarled. “You’re going too far with this!”
She had a good mind to go to his room and roust him, berate him for not trusting her. But then realizing she had been about to go back on her word to him not to open the window, she guessed he’d had reason not to trust her.
Unable to stand being in the suffocating room any longer, she blew out the lamp and put it back on the night table. She opened her door and padded barefoot into the hall, careful not to make any noise for the last thing she really wanted was to wake her brother despite her momentary desire to do so.
The parlor was marginally cooler than her room but it was still overly warm. She desperately wanted to fling open the front door and sit on the porch to let what night wind there might be wash over her sticky body. Sitting on the settee, she drew her knees up and stared into the darkness.
It wasn’t just the heat that was keeping her from sleeping. Thoughts of Cail wanting to court her made her uneasy. She didn’t want any man in her life. Not ever again.
Not after Kurt.
“Stop thinking about him! Get that bastard out of your mind once and for all!” she snapped and hopped off the settee. Going to the door, she took a deep breath, twisted the lock and pulled open the portal. The sweet mist of fog washed over her and she closed her eyes, drawing in the night scents and the soft wind playing about her face.
It was cool on the porch as she settled in a rocker and drew her legs up into the perimeter of her arms. No, she had no fear of Duncan Daughtry for she had no intention of allowing any man—ghostly or not—to ever seduce her again. Once had been enough and she would bear the scars of that night for as long as she lived. It had taken her months to get over the trauma of it and—at times—she wasn’t sure she truly had.
Just as she had yet to get over Kurt.
Lord, how she had loved that man, she remembered although the flash of his handsome face across her mind’s eye made her sick to her stomach now. She had fought the attraction for as long as she could but in the end he had been too skillful, too persistent and she had given in to his slow hands and whispered words, his honed body and practiced moves. A naïve virgin such as she’d been had never stood a chance against such blatant sexuality and relentless pursuit.
Lowering her head to her knees, she felt tears burning behind her eyes. It wasn’t just that he had fooled her so expertly or used her so brutally there at the end. What hurt her the most was that she had enjoyed those first few moments between them until his true nature had shown itself.
Shuddering at the memory of her begging him to stop, of him laughing at her protests, of him pinning her down, forcing his way savagely into her unwilling and unprepared body, of her screams, of his laughter.
“Lorna, what the hell are you doing out here?”
Jerking her head up, Lorna felt her heart skip a beat as the figure of a tall man came at her out of the fog. His words were distorted, muffled and it took her a moment to realize it was Cail coming toward her.
“You shouldn’t be out here!” he said as he stepped up on the porch.
“What are you doing roaming around the rectory at this time of night?” she countered, feeling guilty for having been caught outside.
“I wanted to make sure your doors and windows were locked,” he said without an ounce of apology in his voice. “And here I find you sitting on the porch where anything could jump out at you.” There was anger in his voice.
“Or anyone?” she asked. She didn’t want to put her feet on the porch floor for she was sitting there in her nightgown—her only protection being her arms wrapped around her legs to keep him from seeing too much of her.
“He comes out at night,” Cail said. “What if he were to call to you?”
“I’d ignore him,” she said.
“Aye, that worked real well for the women he’s already taken!” Cail snapped. He shot out a hand to grab her by the arm, pulling her none-too gently to her feet.
“What the hell do you .…” she began, trying to pry his strong fingers from her flesh.
“What’s going on out here?”
Groaning for Daniel was now standing in the door, belting his robe around him.
“I found her out here on the porch,” Cail said. He ushered Lorna to the door.
“Lorna!” Daniel hissed. “You promised me!”
“It was hot,” she defended as she managed to snatch her arm from Cail’s grip.
“You need to be more careful of my woman,” Cail told Daniel.
“Your woman? How dare you!” Lorna snapped. She barely felt her brother taking her by the arm to pull her back inside the rectory. “I am not .…”
“Go to your room,” Daniel ordered. When she would have argued with him, he shook her, his teeth gritted. “Do what I tell you, Lorna! Now!”
It was dark there on the porch but Lorna could see the furious gleam in her brother’s eye. She didn’t want to create any more of a scene than there had already been. Pulling out of Danny’s grip she did as he told her, cursing under her breath with every step she took. She went into her room and slammed the door as hard as she could, angrier than she could ever remember being in her entire life.
The moment strong arms went around her she gasped and would have screamed but a cold hand covered her mouth as she was taken backwards to the bed.
Chapter Four
When on the night wind he had slipped past her into the house, he’d had no intention other than to await her in her room, to watch her sleep when she returned to her bed. He wanted to listen to her quiet breathing and to study the gentle contours of her face. He wanted to keep her safe from those he knew would use her, abuse her, take from her all that she cherished and replace it with ashes and dust.
Her anger as she came into the room pushed those gentle thoughts from his mind and had reawakened within him his own fury.
“Shush,” he whispered in her ear as he sat down on her bed, drawing her squirming body into his lap. “I’ll not hurt you. I am here to protect you.”
Lorna stilled. She was staring down at her arms being crushed together by an unseen force, restricted by a ghostly band of strength she could not overcome. The coldness over her mouth pressed against her lips and cheeks but she could not discern a shape keeping her silent.
“If I release you, will you swear to me you’ll not cry out?”
Why she trusted her phantom visitor she couldn’t say but his words were soft and he had made no attempt to manhandle her. He simply held her still on his lap. As best she could, she nodded beneath the constriction of his hand. The moment the pressure was gone from her face and body, she leapt away, spinning around to confront him.
There was no one there.
Leastwise nothing she could see.
“Show yourself!” she demanded, backing well away from the bed, putting distance between her and it. Her lips were quivering but she was determined to face her tormentor.
The curtains she had thrown back on the window let in only marginal light but there was enough residual nightglow for her to make out the room’s furnishings. She squinted, trying to discern movement, shape near the bed.
Very slowly he began to materialize before her. First his body was a vague, shimmering outline that began to fill in with undulations of somber color. A pair of long legs encased in dark brown pants was following by a blue checked shirt open at the throat. Curly black hair formed in a queue held back with a rawhide thong. Dark features—those of a sun-bronzed man in his late thirties—filled in amid the oval of his face. Strong hands rested on the knees of hi
s pants and a pair of pale green eyes gazed back at her with sadness.
“Duncan?” she asked, though she would have sworn the ghost was a much younger man.
“Nay, my lady. I am Chrysty,” he answered. His voice changed now that she could see him from a soft whisper to a strong deep tone laced with a highland brogue. “Although I was there when Allyn was burned at the stake—Duncan, too.”
Lorna drew in a quick breath. This was the demon that had entered Allyn McCorley’s body when Kirkland Tabor had executed the young man thousands of years before. This was the entity who had followed them to Serenia.
“I thought .…”
“I died just as the lads did—burned to death by a distant ancestor of Reynolds Tabor’s for daring to touch one of their women. I am always here. I will always be here. Allyn comes out now and again to claim a Hill woman, Duncan even less often,” he said. “I’d just as soon he stays in the Abyss. His grief makes him hard to control and he is not as gentle with the women as Allyn.”
She moved cautiously to the desk and pulled the chair out, perched on it as she stared at his devilishly handsome face.
“His grief over Sara you mean?” she asked and watched his full lips twist.
“Aye. The fool loved her. She doesn’t deserve anyone’s pity and I’ll tell you now, the child she was carrying may not have been Duncan’s.”
“You might as well call her a whore as say that,” she said.
“That was what she was,” he said. “She had her first man long before she lay with Duncan.”
“So now you take your anger out on all the women of the Hill to have your vengeance?”
He moved so quickly she never saw him do it. One moment he was sitting on her bed and the next he was hunkered down before her, his pale eyes glittering as he stared up at her.
“That is what the Elders would have you believe, lassie,” he said, his gaze wandering her face. “But that is not the way of it. The women come willingly with me to be rid of their menfolk.”
Moonlight suddenly speared through the window and she realized he was so close she could see the faint growth of beard that shadowed his face. She wondered if this was the way he’d looked the day he’d been murdered.
“It is save for the welts and bruises and cuts that faded after death.”
“My brother said Allyn and Duncan were wrongly accused and tortured.”
“They did. I died cursing my accuser and all the inhabitants of the settlement for believing her lies,” he told her. “I swore to return to take my revenge on those who killed me but it was a careless pledge. I never thought it would come to pass.” He shook his head. “Always be sure you know what it is you say for your words may well come back to haunt you.”
“Words spoken in anger always do,” she said quietly.
“Aye, that they do,” he agreed.
“You didn’t sell your soul to the devil to return?”
He laughed—throwing his head back so she got a good look at the strong column of his neck. “Nay, I did not but there are those who have and still do. It was one of the Dark Ones who was there that day that heard the curse and saw a way to get Her own revenge on the people of Tabor’s clan.” He sighed deeply. “It was Her, the goddess. She was the one who brought me back and bound me to do Her bidding.”
“Morrigunia?” she whispered.
He shook his head “Nay, another. One you would not know and One whose name I may not speak.”
“She brought you back to seduce the women of Tabor’s lineage?” she asked.
“No. She brought me back to right the wrongs done the women who suffered at his hands, to punish the men by taking their women from them. The men of the encampment where I was killed were a breed unto themselves back then and they still are to this day. They are not what you think. Don’t let their good manners fool you, Lorna. They are the true evil on this mountain. Evil the goddess would stamp out once and for all.”
“They say you’re the evil,” she told him. “It was to rid themselves of you that they sent for my brother.”
Chrysty’s smile was playful. “Your brother’s ritual didn’t work because it was aimed at the wrong men.”
Lorna frowned. “Danny said the troubles here increased after the exorcism.”
“They did. The men of the Hill stepped up their abuse of the women and I stepped up my campaign to protect those women.”
Cailean’s face passed over her mind’s eye and she thought of his highhanded attitude, the anger she’d seen festering in his gaze. Could Chrysty be telling the truth? Was the evil the men who had accused him and not the other way around?
“Let me tell you the true story of the Tabor clan and then you can decide,” he said. “It began with Reynolds Tabor, the first laird of Tremayne .…”
* * * *
On the day he came to the settlement where I lived, it was storming as though the end of the world might be at hand. The sky was black with clouds and hail the size of hen’s eggs fell from the heavens. He was there—I heard him say—on the prince’s business and he was looking for a man named Chrystian Brell.
I stepped forward for I had no notion why the prince’s agent would be seeking me. Had I known, I would have fled before the guards that had accompanied Reynolds Tabor could lay hands to me.
“Ye have been accused of the rape of Gemma McNease, daughter to Craig, the prince’s huntsman!” Tabor stated.
“Nay!” I denied, struggling with the hard hands holding me. Fear rippled through me like lightning. “I did not!”
“Ye will confess your sins!” Tabor shouted as his men dragged me toward the jail.
“I am innocent!” I kept protesting but my words fell on deaf ears. I was taken to the jail and shackled to the wall. I knew what the outcome would be as I hung there sobbing with fear.
I suffered for well over a month now but the end was at last in sight. There would be no more hot irons applied to my flesh. No more sharp implements to rend or pierce or pinch. No water poured down my throat or ice-cold dunks in the artesian well. No longer would I wake in the middle of the night as my torturer came strutting into the cellar, impatient to cause more pain, eager to hear at last the whimpers and pleadings I refused to give him.
From my jail cell, I stared out from between the bars to the place where I was to meet my gruesome death that morning. My hands tightened on the rusted bars, my knuckles bleeding white as I pull futilely at the iron uprights. Leaning my head against the cool, pitted metal, I close my eyes, striving to drown out the laughter. There would be no escape for me.
Gathered in the clearing that day was the entire village and they were making it a festive atmosphere. Steamed pudding sellers were hawking their wares alongside vendors of lavender scones, breads fresh from the oven and slathered with sweet clotted cream, sticky toffee, and hot, roasted nuts. Peddlers hoisted pitchers of lemonade and cold cider upon their brawny shoulders. Children ran around the adults, laughing and calling to one another as they played.
The year was 1591. It was a Saturday, the eighteenth of April.
It was a day of merriment.
It was a day of my death.
They came for me at ten of the clock when all had been made ready. With my hands bound before me in heavy iron shackles, they dragged me out to the place set aside for the execution and lifted my hands above my head to hook them to the fastener. A heavy chain was then wrapped around my chest and legs to fetter me tightly to the post. The chain would heat and sear my flesh—another torment added to those that had come before. Around my feet they piled the shorn branches from the black walnut.
There is little a victim can do except struggle against the heavy chain that holds him tight to the tall upright. The thick post to which his body will be lashed had been honed just that morning from a felled black walnut tree and so the wood was green. It would burn slowly—to extend his agony. It would burn hot—to intensify his pain. It would smoke copiously—with any grace at all he will suffocate long before t
he flames reaches his upper body.
Looking out over those who had come to see me die was the very reason I was in this sorry predicament. I stared into her periwinkle blue eyes—eyes far too old, far too experienced for her years—and saw revenge sparkling there. She could not have me and thus no one would. I had spurned her heated advances and now I would pay dearly for daring to do so.
A faint wind blew over those gathered and ruffled my hair. I am sure my eyes revealed the hopelessness of the situation when the torch was lit and the crisp white smoke spiraled into the air.
“Have ye any final words, Chrysty Brell?” the magistrate queried. It was a formality but it was one that must be allowed under the law.
“Aye,” I said, my gaze never leaving Gemma McNease. “I am innocent of these charges and each of ye knows I am but heed me well. I curse ye and yourn for all generations and I warn ye now I will return to make ye regret this day.”
The magistrate hastily motioned for the executioner to apply the burning torch to the faggots at my feet.
I had to shout over the roar of the flames.
“I will come back and it will be yourn womenfolk I’ll take from ye for what ye do to me this day! This I swear to ye! I will sell my soul to make ye pay!”
Already the brush had caught fire and smoke was streaming upward. The sound of the crackling flames was loud in the morning air for every throat had been silenced, every eye widened, every breath held as my curse rang out clear and strong.
“And ye, Reynolds Tabor, will know the full brunt of my revenge!” I shouted as my clothing caught fire. “Ye and yourn I curse for all time. I will see ye in hell!”
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