by Jess Raven
“Adriana,” I heard Jack’s voice as he approached down the corridor. He was bare-chested and zipping up his pants as he walked. “Jesus, Adriana. What the hell are you doing here?”
I couldn’t bear to even look at him.
“I followed you from New York, obviously.” She planted her hands on her tiny hips and pouted at him. “Figured I couldn’t trust you to take care of yourself, and clearly I was right. I found that beautiful car I arranged for you, destroyed. I thought you were hurt, Jack. I was so worried, I trudged through all that mud, all the way up to this awful wreck of a house. My Blahnik’s are ruined, and my hair. Christ, I hate this fucking country. Does the weather never stop?”
Ignoring her pathetic pity-party, I pushed my way past him.
“Darcy,” I heard him say, but I couldn’t listen. I didn’t even want to hear his voice.
“Don’t bother,” I replied. I held up one hand as I turned away, fighting back tears. “Just don’t, okay, please.”
I power-walked back down the corridor to retrieve my clothes in a truly perverse version of the walk of shame.
“Darcy, let me explain,” he said, jogging up behind me.
“There’s no need,” I said tightly, snatching up the strewn pieces of my clothing from where they’d fallen in the heat of passion. “Adriana already explained everything.”
“Adriana is my PA,” he said stonily.
“Yeah, I know what she is, and I know what this was, between us,” I said. “One night of conscience-free fantasy fulfilment. That’s fine, that’s what we agreed. I’m a big girl, Jack. I’ll be just fine. Besides, you weren’t that great a lay,” I lied, snatching at the tattered shreds of my pride along with my still-damp underwear. “I’ll have Bronach on the market just as soon as the police are done collecting their evidence on John-Joe’s death, and you and Adriana can go back to your happy little fucked-up New York lives.”
“Last night meant nothing to you?” he asked, and I thought I heard the smallest crack in his voice. Wishful thinking that would get me nowhere.
“Not a thing. Call it scratching an itch. Urgh, on second thoughts, no, forget that metaphor. You better not have given me some horrible sexually transmitted disease.” I crawled under the table to grab my skirt, probably flashing him my bare ass in the process. “What the hell was I thinking, letting you get me so drunk? Here, you might need this,” I said, brazenly peeling his shirt off my naked body and throwing it at his chest.
He caught it and clutched it, and for a moment, the bastard actually had the nerve to look hurt. I guess the bad-lay jibe had been a real punch to his raging man-ego. Un-fucking-believable.
“Very well,” he said, “if that’s how you want to play this. But it’s still the middle of the night. Surely we can all be adults about this and wait ‘til morning. I’ll make sure you get home safe, at least.”
“You are some piece of work, you know that?” I laughed sarcastically.
“I don’t understand,” he pleaded. “What happened?”
“What happened? I woke up to the truth, Jack.” I dragged the skirt up my thighs and buttoned my blouse, hastily shoving my bare feet into my shoes. I snatched up my coat and bag and started walking. “I left your arms and the fantasy evaporated, and if you think I’m spending one more minute in this place with you and your fucking psycho wife, you’ve got another thing coming, asshole. I’d walk five hundred miles just to get the hell away from you right now.” I snapped open the hall door and marched out into the storm.
You idiot, Darcy. Shoulda listened to your gut when it told you this prick was gonna take you for a ride. I pictured myself at that mirror, all sex-blissed and squishy, feeling the love connection, and I wanted to puke.
“Did you say my wife?” I heard him shout. “You said my wife.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Darcy,” he called. “Hear me out.”
No. I was out that door before he could pawn me off with his lame-arse excuses, my sole objective to get myself back home. Then I could shut myself away from the world. Then I could let the tears come, and wallow in my own bloody stupidity.
“Yes, go, you fat, ugly slut!” I heard Adriana’s shout and straightened my spine. Sticks and stones, right?
“Adriana,” Jack growled a warning, but it was too late.
She was on me like a woman possessed, tackling me down into the muddy grass, ripping at my hair and clawing at my face with her fake nails.
I cried out, winded, and stunned. Jack was leant over us, trying to drag her off me, but her clutches were so tight in my hair that he only succeeded in lending her traction, and I felt the sickening pain as a chunk of roots tore from my scalp. She snarled in my face and glared at me with eyes that struck icy terror into the marrow of my bones. Just as I thought I’d glimpsed them at the pub, those eyes had no irises, just a starburst of black veins across solid white.
Jesus Christ, she was some kind of demon.
Panic flooded my veins, and the rush of pain and adrenaline kicked my survival instincts into high-gear. Directing my knee hard up into her stomach, I delved a hand into the bag hanging from my shoulder and found what I needed. I shoved the little can of pepper spray in Adriana’s face and depressed the nozzle with everything I had.
Such a pathetic hissing sound it made, but boy was it effective.
For a split second she was stunned, enough that she released her grip on my hair, and I witnessed her eyes bleed back to that normal, human, chocolate brown they’d been earlier. As I rolled away, the screaming started, then the choking noises and the hacking cough. Adriana curled up on herself and shielding her face with her hands, she wailed like a banshee. Jack looked ashen. He had one hand on her shoulder, the other prising at her fingers, trying to get her to show him her face.
I staggered to my feet and tripped into a dead run across the lawn, my mind racing like a rabbit on speed, frantic for an escape.
Taking my car was out of the question. I’d only get as far as the fallen tree. Adriana’s car would be on the other side, but unless she’d left a key in the ignition, I hadn’t the first clue about hotwiring the damn thing.
I could keep running, but what if they came after me? In these dainty shoes, I hadn’t a hope in hell of out-running an athletic man like Jack. I’d experienced his stamina, up close and personal. As for his demonic wife? My mind refused to even process what I’d seen back there. I just knew that having that thing chase me across the countryside in the pitch dark was a definite no-go. Knowing my luck, I’d fall in a ditch and break my neck.
The wind had died down some, though, and that opened up another possibility: the row-boat. I was a strong swimmer, competent enough with a pair of oars, and the village was just a short stretch across the relatively sheltered bay. Liam and I had crossed it many times as children. I could do this. Thighs burning, I sprinted up the hill to the cliff top.
The wailing and panicked choking grew more distant the farther I ran, reassuring me Adriana was still incapacitated at the front of the house. I thought I made out her voice once or twice, shouting, “I can’t see,” and “what happened?” I stole a glance over my shoulder and confirmed that, as yet, no one had followed me. With any luck, Jack would be distracted taking care of Adriana long enough for me to get away. I had no idea how he’d react to me pepper-spraying his psycho-bitch wife, but experience said that if you messed with family, they’d turn on you quicker than piranhas on a drowning cat.
For all I knew they’d murdered John-Joe. Adriana had mentioned him to me in the toilets at the bar. Poor John-Joe. I peered over the cliff to where we’d seen him earlier, broken on the rocks, but there was nothing there, just the crashing waves on the jagged black stone far below.
His body was gone.
Maybe, in my panic, I’d misidentified the spot, but no, it had been right where I was standing, a stone’s throw from the defiled cairn. Was the body washed out to sea in the storm? Whatever the reason, I couldn’t delay. If they had murdered John
-Joe, then for all I knew, I was next. God knew I’d provoked Adriana to violence, and those eyes, they were unnatural.
I scrambled back down the eroded stone steps, clutching onto the dune grass for dear life. Sheets of rain lashed my face, and my cheeks burned with a genuine windburn, mixed with chagrin at everything I had allowed to happen. Only hours before I had been in this same cove with him, willing him to look at me with those jewelled green eyes and tell me I was beautiful. How the tides turned.
Just across the bay, the village of Crooke lay huddled in a cluster of twinkling lights and fishing boats bobbing in the swell. The promise of sanctuary, tantalisingly close yet agonisingly far away.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Some people say Fate puts you in a particular place at a particular time for a reason, that certain events in our lives are preordained to happen, regardless of free will. Fate wasn’t something I’d ever given much thought to before that night. Sure, I believed in shitty luck. I’d had my fair share of that. Mostly, events in my life had taught me to trust no one and always expect the worst. That way you didn’t leave yourself vulnerable to disappointment.
With Jack Pembroke, I’d expected the worst. Before I ever laid eyes on the man, I’d blackened him with the tar-brush of my own prejudice. Then, when he turned out to be nothing at all like my pre-formed ideas of him, he disarmed me, left me naked, defences down. He planted inside me the seed of that wretched thing that is hope. Hope that life might just have a little slice of happiness carved out for me, a reward for everything it had asked of me until then. Like life owed you something. Right. That’s what hurt the most. Life had stolen my mother from me too young, raped my father’s wits, and killed my capacity to ever openly trust another person. Life had smothered the carefree joy I remembered from my childhood. Life was a slow, ruthless killer. I had no one to blame but myself. I’d mistaken Jack Pembroke for my antidote, when really he was poison to my soul.
As I stumbled down the steps towards the little row-boat tied up in the bay, I felt crushed by the disappointment I’d promised myself never to feel again. My chest hurt, like that seed of hope had been ripped from its bed and now I was bleeding out all the shattered expectations I’d managed to keep shored-up for so long. One small slip-up and life was rubbing my nose in it. Always expect the worst and you won’t be let down. Trust nobody but yourself. Well, life had shown me good. It really couldn’t get much worse than this, I thought.
I was wrong.
I looked out to sea and saw a dark shadow moving across the waves towards me. As I stared, it coalesced into the distinct form of a man in a small boat. The oars sliced through the water, powering in to shore, cutting across the white-tops. The silhouette grew, gaining definition until there was no mistaking the identity of the oarsman. I’d have known the shape of those broad shoulders and the curl of dark hair at the nape of his neck anywhere.
“Liam,” I shouted. “Oh my God, Liam. What the hell are you doing here?”
“Darcy? Is that you?” my brother called over his shoulder. There was a note of panic in his voice, a momentary hesitance. “Thank Christ. I came to get you,” he said finally. “You never came home, sis. The road in to Bronach is blocked with fallen trees. I feared the worst.”
He lifted one oar and steered the boat around until he was facing me.
His expression was grim for someone who’d just discovered his missing sister had survived one of the worst storms in Crooke’s living memory. Then again, I must have cut a miserable sight, shivering in my thin skirt and blouse, with my hair bloodied and plastered wetly to my swollen, scratched-up face. In contrast, Liam was insulated from the weather by a heavily-padded black parka, gloves and a beanie hat. He put his back into the oars with renewed vigour and heaved the boat into shore, hopping out into the shallows to drag the vessel up onto the shingle.
It was only then, staring into the boat, that I discovered the truly grisly explanation for Liam’s grim face.
“Oh God,” I breathed. “It’s John-Joe.”
Flopped across the bottom boards of the boat, John-Joe’s half-naked body lay face-down, bloated, slick with seawater and battered black and blue. Dead, his pale, hairy back streaked with blood, he resembled a harpooned whale.
“What’s he doing here?” I said shakily. “Why is he in the boat Liam?”
Worst case scenarios swarmed in my head. Liam had come good on his threat in the pub. He’d killed John-Joe, after all, and was back to dispose of the evidence. He hadn’t come here looking for me at all. My brother was a murderer and I ...
“Darcy. Darcy!” I felt Liam’s gloved hand on my cheek as he turned my face from the gruesome sight. He gripped my jaw and forced me to look at him. “Darcy, keep it together,” he said. My whole body went leaf in the wind, trembling in his grip. “I hit something on the way over," he said ardently. "It was him. He was floating, face down, out in the bay. I dragged him into the boat, but he was already gone. He must have been washed out to sea. I think something attacked him, Darcy. A wild animal or something. His neck is ripped wide open.”
"A wild animal?" I asked, incredulous. Ireland didn't have any wolves or bears or big cats outside of zoos. I stiffened and my own voice sounded frigid to my ears. "Tell me the truth, Liam. Did you kill him?"
Liam's gloved hand dropped from my face. "Did I kill John-Joe?" he asked. His brows pulled together and he regarded me like I was some alien, unfathomable creature. "Of course I didn't bloody kill him. Darcy, what's gotten into you? What the hell happened here tonight?" His eyes narrowed on me like he was really seeing me for the first time since he'd arrived. "Did somebody hurt you?"
What had happened me? Between the storm and the dead body, the wild passion, and Jack Pembroke’s wife attacking me with those freaky demonic eyes, I started to wonder if I’d totally lost my mind. And now, here I was, accusing my own flesh and blood of murdering some harmless farmer, just for copping a drunken feel of my ass down the pub. Had any of it happened at all? Was I dreaming, delirious in my bed with fever? If I was, I needed to wake from this nightmare, and quick, because there was nothing dream-like at all about that cold body in the boat, with the smell of death and the sea on it, with its jugular torn out and its blood drained dry.
“Darcy, talk to me,” Liam pleaded.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A cry from the cliffs above stole the response from my lips. Shrill, hoarse and anguished, like the scream of a fox, the sound chilled my blood to ice-water.
Liam turned to see what had transfixed my eyes with terror. A female figure, clothed in grey and crowned by a halo of long, wind-blown hair, stood perched on an outcrop of rock. Her hands were curled into claws and her eyes, oh God, I knew those demonic eyes, and yet this woman definitely wasn’t Adriana. She was something altogether more dreadful. Hunched forward like a vulture, poised to swoop down on us at any moment, the corners of her mouth lifted in a macabre smile, revealing rows of sharp, pointed teeth.
I struggled to stifle the scream bubbling in my throat, and instinct had me backing away. One step, two, never taking my eyes off the cliff. She didn’t make a move, but then neither did Liam. I grabbed at the sleeve of his parka and tugged. We had time. We could dive in the boat and escape out to sea, assuming the creature with its sights trained on us couldn’t swim, or fly, or worse. Fear pulsed through my body, pounding in my throat until I thought it would choke me.
“Liam,” I whispered, “Liam, we have to get out of here.”
“You go, Darcy,” he said, without even turning to look at me. “I’m good right here.” His voice, calm as a slow breath, filled me with cold dread. The creature was doing something to him, influencing him, and before I could even react, he was striding forward, mounting the steps towards it.
“Liam,” I shouted. “Liam, don’t!”
I ran, grabbed onto the back of his coat and with all the strength I could muster, attempted to drag him back. But he was so much stronger than me. He shrugged me off him, and I tumbled backwards
down the slippery stone steps.
I landed hard, pain bursting through my head as my skull cracked against a jagged edge of the rocks. Momentarily stunned, I was forced to watch as Liam reached for the creature’s outstretched hand and she pulled him into her. I saw his woollen hat fall to the ground as her blackened fingernails raked his curly hair, closing in a fist that jerked his head to one side, exposing his throat.
“No,” I cried, “please!”
But Liam was docile in her hands, even as her tongue shivered across those pointed fangs and she spread her lips on the pulse at his neck.
Driven by pure desperation, on hands and knees I crawled towards the steps, still reeling from the concussion of my fall. All I knew was that I had to get to Liam before he ended up like John-Joe in that boat. I couldn’t lose him too. He was all I had left. My vision blurred, but still I saw with crystal clarity the moment when her pointed fangs penetrated skin, bleeding crimson ribbons down his pale neck. His pliant body jerked as she sealed her lips to his pulse and sucked from him in long, greedy draws.
A cry of pure anguish breached my lips. Liam was dying and I was powerless to prevent it. “Let him live,” I begged her, “please, let him go.”
“Let him go.”
Confused, I heard my words repeated back at me, not an echo, but the grim authority of a male voice I recognised instantly.
“Let him go,” he said, louder this time. “It’s me you want, not him.”
Squinting up at the cliff top, the image of Jack Pembroke came into focus. Wild-eyed, shirtless and buffeted by the wind and the sea-spray, he looked larger than life. This was no Colin Firth coming from the pond, this was crazy Heathcliff on the moors.
