“I’m sorry,” he said. He glanced at the body on the floor, then down at her bruised neck and shook his head. “No. Indeed, I am not.”
She looked down at Brian, the pool of blood still slowly growing around his corpse, the axe sticking jauntily out of his back as if he were a log that Lachlan couldn’t quite split on the first go.
This is my kitchen, she thought, tearing her eyes away from the body and looking up at Lachlan, who was studying her closely as if she might faint. Maybe she would, there did seem to be a strange buzzing sound coming from inside her head. She rested her hand on the counter just in case. Lachlan was breathing hard, his bronze skin flushed with his newly regained health and the exertion of saving her. His hair was a wild black tangle, matted slightly to the side of his head from the profusion of blood, his eyes fairly glowed a deep electric blue.
Piper couldn’t stand another second of any of it. Her mind went blank and she reached up and grabbed Lachlan by the back of the head, flinging herself at him and kissing him with a pent up fervor that shocked them both. Lachlan, still half in a blood lust, picked her up with one arm around her back and carried her away from Brian’s corpse, out into the back garden, not breaking the kiss. He hauled her down the hill, the garden lights winking on as they passed.
When they came to a little decorative hedge, he laid her down on the grass behind it, his hands roaming hungrily over the length of her. She tore at his sopping shirt, refusing to register what it was dripping with, pushing it roughly off his shoulders and digging her fingers into his steel chest. It was a surprisingly balmy night, or maybe it was just the overload of adrenaline coursing through her, but Piper was more than happy to wrench off her blood spattered sweater a second later. Lachlan seemed confused by the snap and zipper on her great-grandmother’s trousers and she almost screamed in frustration. Now he’s going to be a gentleman? Why doesn’t he just tear the damn thing apart with his massive, capable hands? In an agony of desire, she pushed his hands away, wriggling out of everything as fast as she could. Kneeling in front of him in her ridiculous thermal undershirt, blood had soaked all the way through to stain even that, she shoved him backward onto the grass and straddled him. He gripped her hips and pulled her closer, trying to say something through her fevered kisses.
She ignored him, knowing that he was going to say what they were doing was wrong, or at the very least a bad idea, but she didn’t care. She bit his lip to keep him quiet and he growled as he gripped her behind. His skin was hot and smooth and his muscles tightened as she ran her hands over his chest and down his stomach. She dragged her undershirt over her head and pressed her breasts against him, trying to find a way under his miles of kilt. Finally, he took her by the shoulders and firmly lifted her away from him, forcing her to meet his gaze. He was breathing heavily and he squeezed her upper arms while he caught his breath.
“No,” she said pitifully. “I know it’s a terrible idea. I don’t care. Please, Lachlan. Please.” She wanted him so badly she would have continued begging. She didn’t have a shred of dignity left and she didn’t care. All she wanted was Lachlan. He slid his hand behind her and flipped her onto her back, arranging himself so he was on top of her, and deftly whipped off his kilt, pulling it over them for warmth. He leaned in and kissed her deeply, then pulled away.
“I was only trying to tell you how beautiful I think ye are,” he said. He smiled. “Yer right, though. This is a terrible idea.”
Then, sinuously sliding his hands up to wrap her legs around him, he slid into her with a velvety force that caused her to stop breathing. Heart wrenching happiness overwhelmed her and she held on for dear life. Lachlan could feel her urgent longing and he wanted more than anything to stay there with her forever, but his need and hers was too great. They clung to each other, wild and ardent, until Lachlan fell spent beside her. Shaking with rapturous pleasure she flung her arm over him and gasped, gazing unseeing at the stars twinkling overhead.
It was several long minutes until they could breathe normally, and Piper began to realize they were outside, in the grass. And while it might have seemed comfortably warm earlier, it was positively chilly now. Lachlan pulled her close to him, chafing her arms to warm her. Reaching out for an item of clothing to pull over them, she grabbed her blood soggy sweater. No, she thought, reality swarming in on her like angry bees. She dropped the sweater and wiped her hand on the grass, trying to push it all aside, snuggling close to Lachlan to help her forget.
It didn’t work. With a deep sigh, she sat up, and pulled on her thermal shirt, the least bloodied of her clothing. Lachlan reached up and rubbed her back. When the shirt brushed against her neck, she grimaced in pain.
“I’m sorry I did not get to you sooner,” he said, his voice rough with emotion.
“I’m glad you got there at all,” she said with a shiver. “I thought you went to the forest.”
“I did start for the forest,” he admitted, and she could tell he felt bad about it. She squeezed his hand and lay back down next to him. “But I began to think about the pendant, and how if I was getting stronger, maybe Brian was getting weaker without it. He’d want to look for it, and I knew he’d go to the stables. I went there first, and then saw the wee garden lights were on.” He shook his head. “I should have stayed with ye. If I had thought it through I would have realized he’d come back. I’m sorry, Piper, my love.”
“Do not say you’re sorry one more time,” she said, wanting to squirm with joy when he called her his love. It was enough to blot out the fact that there was an axe riddled corpse in her kitchen. Well, almost enough. She hugged him hard then sat up again and pulled on the rest of her clothes, tossing the kilt at him. “We have to go deal with the kitchen before Mellie goes in there and is traumatized for life.”
Lachlan wrapped the kilt around him and reached over and touched Piper’s arm.
“Piper,” he began hesitantly. “Were you able to find the answer in the witches book?”
An icy sliver of pain started in the middle of her chest and started to grow outward.
“What do you mean?” she asked, a catch in her voice. She swallowed hard.
“Piper,” he said.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “Brian’s dead. You have the pendant. You won’t get sick. You can stay now. I - I thought now you would stay.” She gestured pathetically at the grass where they had just lain. He pulled her to him. He took her hand and guided it to the pendant hanging around his neck.
“I want to be with you always,” he said.
“Then do it,” she interrupted vehemently, the painful ice in her chest growing and spreading.
“I cannot, Piper.” He squeezed her hand around the pendant. “This is not my time. I was sent here by evil means. This pendant. We don’t know how it works, by what treachery it was devised. I cannot live under such a sentence, not knowing if it may lose its power, or if it may change me somehow.”
She tugged her hand free of the hateful pendant and wrapped her arms tightly around his waist, thinking maybe she would just never let go.
“If you can send me back, you must,” he said quietly into her hair.
Chapter 20
The trip from the stables to the back of the castle was uneventful. The darkness outside was like no other darkness Evelyn had ever seen. There were no garden lights, no porch lights, not even a candle flickering in a distant window. Halfway across the lawn she looked up, and the stars were out in force. She blinked at their sparkling beauty and almost tripped over a fallen branch. Daria hissed at her to keep quiet, then proceeded to laugh at her when the hem of her dress got caught in the branch. Evelyn felt more and more uneasy about their mission.
When they got to the kitchen entrance, Daria motioned for her to stay outside while she made sure the coast was clear. Evelyn squeezed herself against the stone wall, preparing for crashing pots and pans, screams, and possibly even musket fire. Or flying arrows? She remembered Lachlan’s axe and imagined a dozen guards swarming o
ut wielding similar weapons at her. She was about to start running back to the stables when Daria stuck her head out the door and whistled softly.
“Come along, get in here.”
Evelyn scrambled into the kitchen. Daria was holding a candle with her hand up in front of the flame. The kitchen was just as huge as in Evelyn’s time, but that was where the similarities ended. The marble topped counters were gone, the giant stainless refrigerator was gone. The sink was in the same spot, but was now just a huge copper basin. There was a long plank table in the center of the kitchen, and the walls were lined with wooden counters and benches. The fireplace had a low burning fire lit in it, with a huge cauldron hanging over the banked flame, something that smelled like ham and onions bubbling merrily away in it. Despite her trepidation, her traitorous stomach growled. Daria laughed at her again and they made their way to the little door leading to the wine cellar. The desolate hallway she’d passed through in modern time was now a well stocked pantry. Evelyn brushed against ropes of garlic and onions, bumped into sacks of apples. A barrel of flour was sitting half in front of the door and they had to carefully squeeze past it to get to the staircase.
Daria closed the door behind them and held out her candle. The stairs were much sturdier and the bannister wasn’t rickety at all and they were at the bottom in no time. Holding her light high, Daria found another candle on top of a barrel and lit it, handing it to Evelyn. Evelyn took a look around and as best she could see, the eighteenth century was far better organized. The wine racks were all in neat rows, no mazes or random barrel placements. They walked straight through to the back of the cellar, only to find a solid stone wall.
“No, there’s a door,” Evelyn said, looking at the wall in bewilderment. She turned and studied the walls on either side of her. “There’s a door.”
“Is it a magical door?” Daria asked. Evelyn scowled, wondering if she was being serious or if people were sarcastic in this time. She kept staring at the wall, then walked to the corner and inspected behind a stack of barrels that were wedged there, trying to move them so she could get behind.
“Look up at the ceiling,” Evelyn said, trying to budge the stack of barrels. “The walls don’t line up at the ceiling. This here is a fake wall.” She kicked the wall that in her time had a doorway in it plain as day. “They must have torn it down at some point. But there’s an opening behind it. We just have to move these barrels.”
“Yer mad if ye think ye can move those barrels. Each one weighs more than you and me combined.” Daria went to the other corner and began taking wine bottles carefully out of their cubbies in the wooden rack. “Come and help me, idiot, we’ll be able to move this rack when it’s empty.”
Evelyn’s feelings were hurt because Daria was right, and drunk to boot. It didn’t make her feel especially confident in herself when drunken crazy people could easily outwit her. They removed all the wine bottles, then slid the rack away from the corner. Even without all its bottles it was solid, sturdy wood and they were winded just from managing to get it a few inches out of the way. Petite Daria eyed Evelyn’s hips and raised a disdainful eyebrow, then wedged herself between the wine rack and the wall, disappearing behind the stone wall as if by magic.
No, she did not, Evelyn thought, smoothing her voluminous mountain of skirts, feeling gravely insulted again. That undernourished, probably has rickets …. She sucked in her gut and just barely made it through the opening, scraping her elbows as she forced her way past the stone wall. Behind it was a crude opening she had to duck to get through, and then there was the staircase leading up. Daria was waiting for her on the third step with a big grin on her face. Evelyn wanted badly to say I told you so, but let it go. They were close now, close to getting Sam and going home. A sick, acid feeling started churning in her stomach.
The stone staircase was still completely dark, still no handholds anywhere on the walls, but the steps themselves were in much better condition. Some of the steps were still too high, causing Evelyn to stumble, or too low, causing her to step hard and almost slip, but there was no crumbling or mini landslides. They carried their candles low, ready to extinguish them at a moment’s notice, but they came across no doorways or openings. It was just as Evelyn remembered, a straight climb all the way to the tower.
When they reached the landing, once again there was no door, just a solid looking stone wall. Evelyn felt like screaming.
“Are we trapped?” Daria asked. Evelyn wanted to punch her.
“No, just feel around. It’s a secret passageway, right? They’re not just going to have a door with a sign at the end.”
To Evelyn’s surprise, Daria began meekly feeling the stones on the wall, pressing at the mortar between each one. Evelyn did the same, starting at the opposite side of the wall. When they were just about to meet in the middle, Daria gasped and began digging at the mortar above one especially large stone. Evelyn helped dig away at the bottom. Sure enough, it came away easily, revealing a very thin facade of a stone, opening onto a crawl space just about the length of Evelyn’s arm. She reached through and pushed on the stone at the end of it, until it began to fall forward. Panicking that it would make a noise and alert every person in the castle, she desperately reached in with her other arm and grabbed it with both hands before it could clatter to the floor outside. She carefully dragged it through the crawl space and set it next to the first one. Cold air wafted into the landing from the other side of the short tunnel.
“That’s clever,” Daria admired the thin slices of stone. “Who goes first, then?”
Evelyn sighed. “What about a plan? Do we have one?”
“How far from the tower will we be when we get out there?” Daria asked. Evelyn thought about it with a sinking feeling. Here was where everything got hazy. She didn’t remember exactly where she came out because she had been scared, then been more scared by the arrival of Lachlan from yet another secret passageway. And the entire area was so close to the nineteenth century addition that she wasn’t sure if one of the hallways she remembered would even be there now. She felt bad about it, as if she’d somehow misrepresented the whole mission.
“I’ll just have a look,” she said, hoping that would be enough for Daria. Daria leaned against the wall and made a gesture for her to have at it. Getting down on her stomach and wriggling forward with her elbows, Evelyn managed to get to the opening at the other side of the crawl space. She was confronted by cool night air and a fifty foot sheer drop, straight down to the back garden. She was nearly overcome with vertigo and almost shrieked with terror. Scooting backward as quickly as she could, she struggled to regain her composure.
“What’s on the other side?” Daria asked, wide eyed.
“Nothing,” Evelyn said, swallowing bile and trying to get her heart rate under control. “It’s not built yet.” She started to feel a little bit hysterical and leaned against the stone wall, breathing deeply. Daria huffed and got on her stomach to see for herself. She worked her way halfway through the crawl space and Evelyn waited for her to come scrambling back, but instead she continued forward, alarmingly fast. With a renewed burst of fear, Evelyn instinctively grabbed Daria’s foot to keep her from plummeting to her death. Daria kicked at her hand and hissed something over her shoulder.
“There’s a walkway, idiot.” She kicked again and Evelyn let go.
“No there isn’t,” Evelyn said into the crawl space.
“Aye, there is, because I’m on it right now.” And with that, Daria slid sideways out of the opening. Evelyn waited for the scream and the splat, but Daria just peeked her head back around the opening. Her eyes shone in the light of Evelyn’s candle. “It’s narrow, but there’re handholds. It takes ye to the parapet wall. Just climb over that and yer right in front of the tower door.” She grinned and shot back out into the night.
Evelyn wanted to throw up. She closed her eyes, hoping this was just a bad dream after all. She was in a really crazy deep jet lagged sleep and none of it was real. Maybe she was sti
ll on the plane in her Benadryl and martini induced slumber. Then she remembered Sam’s hand on her face as he bent to kiss her and she knew that was real. She had to be brave and go save him, or if failing that, at least they’d be together when they got killed.
Working herself up to a near frenzy, she shoved out to the edge of the crawl space and tried not to look down. To the left was the walkway, a wooden board nailed into the wall, barely wider than her hand. She saw chinks in the stones that were probably meant to be handholds and tried reaching out to grab onto one. Her tons of skirts got stuck under her knee and she yanked them free, causing them to billow out of the crawl space like a lacy embroidered flag. They nearly caused her to go flying out after them, but she dug her fingers into the little cubby chiseled into the stone wall and edged out further. Now her knee and her left arm was out of the passageway and she paused there for a moment as her skirts whipped around her. She knew she had to hoist herself up in one fast, smooth motion and get her feet on the walkway but couldn’t seem to make herself do it. Daria hadn’t let her wear her hiking boots under her dress and she wiggled her toes in the most ridiculous excuse for footwear she’d ever worn. They were both floppy and stiff and didn’t differentiate between left and right. Socks would have given her feet better traction. Clinging to the wall, she kicked the slippers off. Her bare feet would have better gripping capability and the slippers would have probably tripped her up anyway.
Taking a deep breath, then another, she grunted and flung herself upward, grappling the wall with both hands, pressing against the wall with her feet one in front of the other. Standing there on the rickety four inch wide platform was worse than hanging half out of the passage, so she began edging forward. There was a gentle breeze that night and as it fluttered against her hair, it felt like a gale trying to blow her to her death. Daria popped her head over the parapet, causing her to jump. Her hand missed the next hold and she tilted forward. Panicking she threw her arms flat against the wall, digging her fingers in anywhere she could.
Lost Highlander Page 19
