She was too terrified to take a peak to confirm it, but it sounded probable.
And then her phone began to ring.
The shock went through her like a lightning bolt, spiking to the tips of every extremity.
She came to her knees, fishing for the device and she saw the men turn as one and stare in shock and horror directly at her.
She fumbled to cut the call and saw in that instant that it was Pete. An instant later she regretted the action; her cover was blown anyway and answering him would have at least given her a prayer.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck…” she was whimpering under her breath as the shouts went out below her.
She went from her knees to a blind rush, a crashing and skidding run back up the valley, slipping-and-falling-and-running-and-stumbling in one protracted movement of terror.
Her shins running with blood, her forearms and elbows gashed and skinned, she was halfway back up her path.
She’d gotten away!
She was going to make it. She knew it now, and it buoyed her, giving her more clarity on the escape path. She fell less and ran more.
Even men couldn't catch her, not with that cliff to scale—not unless they were freaks. Abnormal.
And that was when it hit her right between the shoulder blades. She went down in a tangle of limbs, heavily, and headlong into a rock.
A rock half the size of a brick had knocked her wind out and the skull-crunching end to her run dazed her so that she smelled the acrid delirium of near unconsciousness.
In a dream world of terror and concussion, brutal hands grabbed and lifted her easily to her feet, and she looked into the eyes of death. Ice blue ferocity stared back.
At his first glance at her, the man pulled back as if he’d recognized her, then he frowned a menacing scowl.
The man said something that sounded for all the world like a recording going backward, for it only vaguely resembled any language she’d heard before. Her head was swimming and she was sobbing in terror, expecting a clout.
He shook her violently and asked again.
She shook her head dumbly. Numbly. Unable to speak even if she had comprehension or words.
He asked a third time, fierce eyes boring into her mind.
The second man caught up, then the third. They surrounded her, all evidently startled at her appearance.
A shout came from downstream, a second shout. One of the men turned and shouted his reply.
“I’m sorry…” she found herself mewing between trembling lips. “So sorry. So, so sorry.”
It was pathetic but she didn’t care.
These robust hairy blocks of muscle had her now as their plaything. That much was clear. And their deserted little valley made her as isolated as any woman has ever felt. No amount of screaming could improve her situation, so she kept quiet, only whimpering and crying quietly.
A fourth man arrived, huffing from the effort. He was older and gnarled.
The man who had her by the shoulder in his iron grip let her go and she thought she might faint now, thought she might prefer fainting to facing this, but her body let her down by staying upright, swaying in delirium.
She’d stuffed the mobile phone into her jeans pocket and hoped it would not ring again. Not now, at least. How much battery was left?
It was an odd thought at this moment, but a practical one.
Whatever the next few hours had in store for her, if the battery would last and they didn’t find it on her, she had a fighting chance to come out of this alive.
Alive!
This was the first time that she’d ever faced the possibility of having to consider her life’s imminent termination, and by the look of these mountain men, it seemed a distinct probability.
Something in this older man’s bearing and the way the others deferred to him told her he was the leader. But instinct warned that he was the most dangerous cutthroat of the lot.
Then, as he studied her there was shock in his yes and he stepped back, almost swaying with the fright of it. His very soul moved behind those predatory blue eyes and a misty curtain of gentleness unfurled.
She guessed that age had worn the edge off of a lifetime of murderous ways, but she detected that there was more to it than that.
Regardless of why he was having this reaction, whatever it would take, instinctively she knew that he was the one she needed to win over. She was suddenly prepared to do anything, absolutely anything it would take to do so.
He growled something at her in a strange throaty language, staring, transfixed by her, shock still in his eyes. Shock and perhaps a hint of creeping horror, but certainly no fear.
For all his shock, she saw that this was a calm man, a man with a creased face that spoke of a life fully lived, of death faced too many times to fear less. She could read it written in the furrows that ran every which way, like roadmaps back to old horrors and treasures in equal measure. But there were smiling lines there too, around those eyes… or perhaps that was too hopeful. Perhaps he had just squinted a lot in bright sunlight, she cautioned her optimistic thoughts.
He took her gently by the shoulder and his shock leaped into her. She’d felt that touch only once before from a man thirty thousand feet in the sky, not very far from where she was confronting it again, under very different circumstances.
In that hand, was terrifying power and more.
In this instant, that moment, she saw that he felt the electricity too, and he pulled his hand back from her and looked away as if she were a ghost.
He turned and stalked away down the river, saying something over his shoulders.
The men had seen the interaction and didn’t touch her again, but the man who had lobbed the rock and then first grabbed her gestured with an open palm for her to follow the leader down into the gut of the valley.
This is going to be bad! the voice in her head kept repeating like a vindictive brat. Really, really, really bad.
Chapter 17
Cottage, Kingman’s Cove Road,
Fermeuse Town, Newfoundland
Latitude: 47°48'08"N 46°57'52.00"N
Longitude: 52°48'21"W
It was about 4 p.m. when Tegan’s phone began to ring, plugged in, resting on her bedside table.
Gaby went through to take a look. The screen said Gunrunner Pete, and Gaby frowned. This didn’t look like Tegan’s regular phone. Then she remembered that Tegan was obsessed with checking it yesterday, and she’d meant to ask her if it was a work phone.
Pete was the man.
Tegan had said nothing about him, and that said it all. Gaby knew that there was trouble in paradise. She’d guessed they’d had a tiff or some other poor communication, so she resisted answering and went back to the kitchen.
“You should just give her a call,” she urged John.
“She’ll be fine,” he responded, not looking up from the book he was reading.
“I’m really surprised that she took off and hasn’t checked in all day.”
“Leave her to work it off,” he said.
“But I am actually gettin’ a little wurried. I have a bad feelin’ John, and you know my bad feelin’s are always true.”
“She’s fine.”
“T’is very unlike her, John.”
“Probably PMS.”
“John!” she scolded.
“Well, it happens.”
“Even so, she’s ne’er done this before though.”
“Strung out about her man, that’s all.”
“You t’ink so?” Gaby probed.
“Sure. Haven’t you noticed?”
“Hard t’ miss…” There was a long pause and John kept reading. “That was d’e man now… on d’e phone.”
“You answer?”
“Course not.”
“Doesn't she have her phone with her?”
“T’is a second one. Probably a work phone.”
“Ahhh.”
He was so cool, that it began to rankle Gaby.
“I really
have a bad feelin’, John. I just know there’s somethin’ very wrong.”
“Oh, come on now!” he said irritably, putting the book face down on his lap. “She’s pissed off, probably getting cabin fever out of the city… or love sick and irritable. She’s gone for a drive or visiting… how must I know? Let it be.”
He picked up his book.
“Well, what’re we gonna do if she doesn’t come back?”
“Call the police,” he said offhandedly.
“Well, do you know their number?”
“I’ll look it up if it comes to it.”
By sunset, even John was becoming concerned. Dinner time came and went, and the food had no flavor for worried taste buds.
John looked up the local police number and lodged a call.
The officer asked how long the daughter had been missing.
“Since at least eight this morning,” John confirmed.
“And it’s not yet ten in the evening?” The officer’s tone said the worry was unnecessary.
“Well… she didn’t say where she was going,” John emphasized.
“And your daughter is?”
“Sorry?”
“Her age?”
“Forty-two.”
“She lives at home?”
“No,” John was becoming peeved. “I told you at outset that we are up from Maine on vacation.”
“Indeed, you did sir. I apologize,” the officer’s tone didn’t match his words. “Perhaps she’s out for a drink, or with friends?”
“She doesn’t drink or know anyone up here.”
“Well, we can’t open a missing persons docket, sir. Not until at least twenty-four hours have elapsed, and then only under certain circumstances.”
John saw that it was clearly the end of the conversation, so he let it go and faced Gaby’s censure for falling short of her Irish sense of forceful imposition of will.
With that done, all there was for them to do was to keep trying the phone that never rang and always went directly to voicemail.
The sun rose on a sleepless night.
Gaby harassed John into calling the police again, even though it was technically still an hour short of the twenty-four-hour deadline.
“B’Jesus, John… just tell them we saw her last at seven in d’e morn’n.”
The lady constable logging the call was much more sympathetic than the tired sounding man of the night before.
She took all the details, ooh-ed and coo-ed right on cue to empathize with John’s suffering. She promised to circulate the vehicle’s registration details and get a missing persons APB out on the wire with all haste.
The agonizing pace of the morning with no feedback or change in Tegan’s phone status had gnawed at John and Gaby’s nerves.
They were both shifting into desperation.
From time to time, they tried Tegan’s phone and it went directly to voicemail.
From time to time, her second phone rang and they both crowded to check it. Always it was Pete, and neither of them were in the mood to talk to a stranger who could not help. Not under these circumstances.
As the hours agonized by at glacial speed, their emotions descended through every facet of the human experience.
Just before noon, two constables arrived at the house and a docket was lodged.
By sunset, a police counselor arrived at the house with a U.S. Consulate representative, and the local doctor was soon called to administer sedatives.
Through the long second night, Gaby prayed for her daughter, for any message from her, for any hint that she was alive.
Fitful sleep overtook John and her just before sunrise, but it was interrupted by a call from the police to say that Tegan’s car had been found parked at the tip of the most northerly peninsula of the west coast, almost sixty miles away.
“What in Christ’s name,” John spat, “possessed her?” Fear was manufacturing anger.
“No need t’ blaspheme!” Gaby shot back, her nostrils flaring as if she was angry, but she wasn’t. She was terrified.
He looked at her and saw past the bluster.
In that instant, she was the bride he’d married half a century ago. It was the prospect of losing their most precious gift, Tegan, that was making them tear into one another and that realization sunk his heart. He took her in his arms and swallowed her into the vastness of his polar-necked chest.
There they stood, sobbing together in grief and terror, until there were no more tears left to come.
“Come,” he said gently. “Let us go find her.”
He led Gaby out to the car and they began to drive.
The sun was well up by the time they arrived at the windswept cape where Tegan’s car had been found.
They arrived to less fanfare than they’d expected; just three parked police cars, a policeman, and a uniformed woman coordinating the search.
Very quickly, they established that a team of volunteers had begun a search of the paths that led into the forest and back along the coast.
“What if ti’s the gang, John?” Gaby asked through quivering lips.
It was the question that had gnawed her from the first moment that she’d said she had a bad feeling, but she hadn’t wanted to give fate any ideas.
It was the question John had been too afraid to ask.
They surveyed the police for an opinion and were assured that no motorbike activity had been reported and no evidence for any could be found.
The radio kept crackling with incidental feedback of progress… nothing to report.
The water and rocks below the cliffs were inaccessible from above and impassable at sea level—a helicopter was called for, but one would not be available for another two hours at a minimum.
The backwoods were given a fast and cursory search.
A river was followed down its course to a cliff where a loudhailer was used to call out, but no reply was heard so that it was abandoned in favor of covering more ground quickly and letting the chopper cover that detail.
The search pushed steadily southward, inching its frustrating way two, three… five miles from the point, and then the chopper came clattering swiftly overhead, thrashing the air around them into a storm.
The pilot hovered a moment level with the police coordinator and gave a thumbs-up before beginning to trace the coastline at what looked like walking pace and felt a lot slower through the sky.
Gaby was agitating to head out into the woods to join the search, John wouldn’t let her.
“You don’t know the area, Gaby… You hate hiking and wouldn’t get very far, and you know nothing about these paths. Leave it to the experts. We want to be here for her when they bring her in.”
“But I c’n feel her John, she’s in a world of trouble.”
He was convinced that with the chopper on the task it was only a matter of time and they’d be on their way home.
The coordinators were continuously talking to the chopper pilot and the two parents were crammed in shoulder-to-shoulder, desperate to grab and cling to any news.
“…Roger that, control. Juuuuuuust coming up onto the Botany Bay inlet now…”
The sound from the rotor wash was making it difficult to hear what was being said.
“Wowee!” the chopper pilot exclaimed. Somebody’s been doing a cleanup.”
“Chopper, can you repeat.”
“I say again, quite a pile of trash collected on the beach he… oh… hang on… What’s this… Looks like a hull… like the hull of a boat. Very hard to get a bead on it, it looks like planking… like some kind of a boat driven in under the cliffs here. No reports of a missing raft or lifeboat?”
“Nothing I’m aware of,” the coordinator confirmed. “Is it significant?”
“I’m not sure. Looks like it’s been there a while. Quite covered up, so it’s either been hidden or just been there a while.”
“You want us to take a closer look?”
“Sure, log it, but I don’t think its priority.”
<
br /> “Could you take a flight up the brook there?”
“The what?”
The sound quality was dreadful with the rotor wash.
“The brook… there’s a little river at the back of the beach.”
“Oh, yeah… okay, I see it.”
“Can you just run up it to see if there’s anything of interest.”
A minute later the chopper reported a clear run and the intention to return to the search pattern southward down the coast.
By late in the afternoon, the search party mustered back at the parking lot, shoulders hunched in defeat.
The chopper broke off and flew to deal with a more pressing matter, and promises were made to deliver a drone and get a more intricate look before sunset.
“What good can a drone do if the chopper found nothing?” Gaby was sliding fast into full defeat, her eyes rheumy with despair and pain.
“Perhaps get closer to the areas of interest the chopper picked out,” John repeated the motivation that the head of the search had offered.
Chapter 18
Viking Encampment, near Biscayan Cove
Latitude: 47°48'08"N
Longitude: 52°48'21"W
“The likeness is unsettling,” Raol confided. “I confess that I am deeply shaken.”
“Do you not think it is a trick?” Pátrekr ventured cautiously, trying to sway his leader toward the sentiment of his men. “The skræling? So many attempts to trick us already with dark magic.”
Dúlf had instantly seen it when he’d apprehended her—that the woman was Ragna, Raol’s wife, a copy of her clearly lifted from the leader’s mind and made into flesh; sent to tempt and bend him to surrender them to the savages.
The whole situation turned the blood in his veins to ice.
All the men felt the same discontent, and insurrection was rumbling through heavy beards.
“It would have been better if you had done it right there and then,” Dúlf had admonished Pátrekr.
Pátrekr had been the first to apprehend this wraith.
“You should have butchered her and removed that face before Raol could see it. Now she is here among us and Raol is helpless in her sight. It puts us all at dire risk.”
The situation was desperate.
Raol could not take his eyes off the woman, strangely dressed as she was in brightly colored fabric that hugged her frame in a manner no man alive had ever seen.
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