She stared at the bed, half-stunned. Dougal coughed and spat red on the sheets. More blood seeped between his fingers where they covered his eyes. He tried to shout for help, but the noises came out more like a pig squealing than like words.
Maureen staggered to her feet. Weapons. Weapons lay all over the fucking place. She needed something with range. She didn't dare let him get his hands on her again. Her head still spun, and her left eye refused to track with the right.
She groped around the brown lump supporting her, knocking a lamp and other trash to the floor. Her knuckles brushed something heavy and cold. She hefted it for throwing before she found a hilt nestled in her hand.
Blinking, shaking her head, she forced her eyes to work. The damn thing looked like Brian's knife, the heavy bent one he had used to kill Liam. They must be more common than she thought. She jerked it from its sheath, gripped it with both hands, and made her legs cooperate well enough to stagger back to the bed.
"Got to stay clear of the arms," she muttered to herself. "Hit and run."
His head tracked the sound. She swung at his leg and spun away with the weight of the heavy knife. Blood splashed like a fountain. Instead of either attacking or defending, Dougal dropped his hands and stared at her with ruined eye-sockets.
"How?" His crushed larynx turned the word into a croak.
"Schizophrenia," she grunted. The heavy blade chopped into his groping arm.
"Depersonalization."
He jerked again. Fingers flew loose in a red spray.
"Dissociation." The words spat out of her mouth with each gasping breath of effort.
"Delusions of persecution and conspiracy." The blade stuck in his chest. She threw her weight against it, snarling the last word, to pull it free.
"Blunting and incongruity of affect." The steel glanced off his skull, laying bone open to the sunlight.
"Hallucinations." One of his hands flopped to the floor.
"Withdrawal from reality." The knife carved through his belly and swung her like a spinning discus-thrower with its momentum.
She stopped, gasping for breath. "Also . . . occasional . . . violent . . . behavior . . . against . . . authority . . . figures. You really should study more psychology."
Hands on her knees, she panted and cleared her head. Her inner voice told her she should have waited and regained her strength. She was almost too weak to kill him.
Almost, she snarled back. She straightened up and studied the carnage.
Splatters of gore painted a Jackson Pollock canvas across the bed and floor. She traced a line of teardrop spots up the wall, arcing across where they had been flung by the swinging blade.
Death as Art, her critic offered. Performance Art.
The canvas included her body. Her arms dripped red to the elbows. Splashes and smears of blood covered her breasts, her belly, and her thighs. She ignored the scratching noises of a severed hand twitching on the floor, and swabbed blood out of her eyes with her bathrobe from the night before.
Dougal was still alive. Arms and legs spouted red, great gashes tore his chest and ripped through his belly, but he still lived. She was a lousy killer.
She straddled his slippery body like a lover and hacked at his neck until his head sprang loose in a gush of blood. She snarled in triumph, grabbed his hair, and held the head up like a trophy, miming Perseus with Medusa's crawling snakes.
Then she flung the blade away and stood up to carefully set the head on one corner post of the bed. It hissed and rattled its teeth at her as if it still tried to talk with no breath to form the words. Staring into the gouged eye-sockets, she smiled.
"Welcome to my reality, Dougal MacKenzie."
Her wrists burned from the iron bands, and her ankles, and her throat. Where had the bastard hidden the keys?
She wiped her hands and feet: she didn't want red smears to disturb the impromptu beauty of the bedroom, didn't want to leave anything to show her wandering through the scene. Just Dougal's corpse, and the bed, and the splattered blood, with his severed head presiding over all. Art.
His clothing lay, cleaned and neatly folded, on a chair. Servants, again, coming and going without waking her. Once the bastard had finally let her sleep, they could have marched a frigging brass band through the room and she wouldn't have twitched an eyelid. She didn't even know if she'd slept one night, or two, or a goddamn week.
The keys were in his pants. She clicked the locks free, using a mirror over one dresser for the one around her neck. Each ring of steel left red circles behind, like narrow bands of sunburn.
Even the mirror wore dots of blood from the slaughterhouse. She stared at her face, at her naked body, at the drips and smears of blood painting her, and suddenly the slimy feel and smell disgusted her. She staggered to the bathroom, weak and vaguely sick.
Bath, she thought. Rinse his blood, his touch, his semen from my body. She knelt by the tub and spun knobs, splashing the first hot gush of water over her arms and letting the crimson tendrils swirl down the drain before setting the plug.
"Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?" she murmured, flashing back to Shakespeare. She flopped back on her heels and waited for the water to rise.
Coffee twitched her nose again. An insulated pot waited, on a marble counter by the fireplace. Her clothes lay on a chair nearby, cleaned and folded. They'd even cleaned her boots. She drew a cup of caffeine, hot and black, and swallowed the heat of it to settle her belly, and stared at the fire.
Fire. Her memories of Brian and Liam, of the winter alley, played like a videotape in her brain. With all she'd done, was Dougal really, truly dead? He hadn't burned, and those teeth kept clacking curses at her . . . .
She rummaged through cabinets and drawers, dumping towels, bottles, tins, and boxes on the floor. Oil, scented, for massage, and rubbing alcohol. A shelf of booze: brandy, whiskey, rum, vodka, unopened bottles without tax seals on the corks. She carried armloads of bottles back into the blood-drenched room--once, twice, a third time--and smashed them on the bed, the wooden paneling, and the floor.
Swinging the knife with grunting frenzy, she hacked chairs into splinters and piled them over the body. The severed hand tried to clutch her when she threw it on the pyre. She buried it with drawers jerked out of a tall oak dresser.
The water had nearly filled the tub when she dropped the knife and sheath on the bathroom floor. She shut the taps and searched in vain for matches. Finally, she growled in frustration and grabbed a flaming log from the fireplace. The coals didn't even warm her hand.
The alcohol caught fire with a greedy surge of flame, leaping blue tongues spreading across the soaked cloth and dripping to the wooden floor. Yellow flame joined the blue as the oil caught, and the silk, and the wood. She stared at the hungry blaze for a minute, as the pieces of Dougal twitched in the pyre. Smoke billowed up, and the smell of burning hair filled the room.
She turned and studied the bathroom door. Nearly three inches of ironbound cross-ply oak and a frame set in solid stone, it looked like it was designed to hold against battle-axes. She closed it behind her and set the latch. Fire could gnaw on that for hours before breaking through.
Blood. Her reflection in the mirrors disgusted her, the sticky runnels and smears of drying crimson. Soaking in that would make her puke. She flicked levers in the shower and felt the water grow hot immediately, and sluiced Dougal from her body, out of her hair.
Muffled thuds shook the wall, as if something had exploded in the bedroom beyond the stone. She thought of windows blowing out and letting in fresh air, just like Backdraft.
Let fire purify his bed of the stains of rape.
She shut off the shower, dumped bath oil in the tub, and slipped into the lavender-scented water. She looked up, through the skylights, and saw tendrils of black smoke drifting across the morning sun.
She scrubbed, and scrubbed, and scrubbed, Lady Macbeth and her spots of blood. "Out, damned spot! out, I say! What, will these h
ands ne'er be clean?" And then she realized it wasn't his blood she sought to wash away.
She stared at her belly, underneath the foam. Nothing she did to her skin would cleanse that.
Was she pregnant?
The crackling fire beyond the door answered her. It said, "The moon is right." It said, "You can ask your body, ask the flow of blood to your womb and the balance of your glands." It said, "You have the power to cleanse yourself of his seed, just as you have purified this room."
Something scratched at the door, as if that severed hand was fighting to escape from the flames. A crash shook the floor, and the scratching stopped.
She climbed out of the tub, steaming, only half clean. The outer half. The part the world could see. Dripping on the tile, she finished her coffee and stared at the mirror. Maureen stared back, pink and naked and defenseless.
Smoke seeped around the door to the bedroom, puffing and sucking back as the fire searched for fuel and oxygen. There was a solution. Open the door and let the fire burn her clean of him.
Father Donovan's voice joined the chorus in her head, the babbling of schizophrenia. "Suicide is a mortal sin," it said. "So is abortion. The baby didn't rape you. The instant egg and sperm are joined, the soul is formed. You have a human child inside you. Thou shalt not kill."
Her coffee-cup smashed the mirror.
"This! Baby! Isn't! Human!" The growl of the fire swallowed her scream, turning it into a whisper.
She dried herself, and dressed herself, and shoved the sheathed knife into the waistband of her jeans. The cold leather rode against her belly, against the unanswered question of her womb. Meanwhile, Padric still waited for her, somewhere out in the tangled stone of the keep and outbuildings. She refused to look at the unbroken mirrors. The woman they showed was a victim, not an avenger.
The other door was still cool to her touch. She braced her foot against it and slipped the latch, nervously. Dougal might yet laugh at her from the flames, if the fire had spread to block her other exit.
The landing yawned at her. Worn stone stairs spiraled down around a central column, no hand rails, irregular treads guaranteed to trip any stranger trying to fight his way up. No connection into the bedroom. The stair should lead to the kitchen, to where the coffeepot lived.
And to the dungeons, as well, the faint cold distant dampness told her.
She paused at the next landing, hand on the lever latch, unease tugging at her mind. She couldn't remember the way they'd come. How many landings had they climbed, how many sets of stairs, how many twists and turns?
Smoke seeped through a crack and tickled her nose. She looked up. The door lay directly under the landing to her bath, back into the tower.
No thanks.
Down two more flights of stairs, a heavy door led off the opposite side. She tested it, gently, blocking with her foot, and found cool, clear air. A breeze blew into her face, and she thought she heard a growl overhead, the sound of a predator seeing fresh meat: more oxygen to the fire. Chimney effect. People who expected sieges shouldn't live in perfect chimneys. She closed the door behind her.
A short passage brought her to the kitchen--to empty chaos of food half-ready and pots boiling over on the wood-fired ranges and crocks of milk and flour dropped on the floor by fleeing cooks. She carved off a chunk of fresh bread and layered it with butter, chewing on that while gathering dried sausage from a hanging garland and tossing apples into a cloth bag for a picnic lunch. Cheese, and bottled water, and more bread followed. God, she was hungry.
Wine. Bottles of wine waited, racked, probably for cooking, but she wasn't picky. Maureen grabbed one, the memory of her thirst wakening and calling out for alcohol. She dragged the cork free with her teeth and swallowed red nectar.
And suddenly she realized the urge was weak. Wine was nice, yes, but not necessary. Maybe Dougal had forced her through withdrawal and out the other side. She set the bottle down and lifted both her middle fingers to salute him.
She stared at her wrists, at the red circles that had grown into welts like warming frostbite. The iron bands had drained her power, bound her soul. Dougal wouldn't have taken them off until he was sure she'd use her power for him.
Now they were gone. She felt different, free, as if she was emerging from a dark, damp tunnel into daylight. She wasn't afraid. She didn't need the drink.
She remembered a time like that once. A time when she thought and acted like a normal person. A time when the world smiled at her. A change had started when she unlocked the iron bands. The magic of the Summer Country seemed to blend with her mind and was working to heal her madness.
This is where you belong, she thought. Madness is like a weed, a plant out of place. When you march to a different drummer, the world calls you crazy. Your blood tried to change the world into the Summer Country and retreated into madness when it failed.
Doors led into pantries, into twisting stone passages, into damp stone stairways that probably led to wine and root cellars. Maureen fumbled her way out through a labyrinth of afterthoughts and additions until she finally found sun and sky and an open yard. She looked up.
The round stone tower of the central keep loomed overhead, four or five stories of defiant fortress. It belched flame and smoke like a blast furnace. Chimney, indeed. The idiot had built a chimney and filled it with fuel and lived in it. That was why so many real castles had cold stone floors and arrow-slits for windows. It made them damned hard to burn.
Something rumbled deep inside the tower, like bolts rolling around on a kettledrum. Sparks fountained into the sky, and then the smoke thinned to gray instead of black. More air, she guessed, less fuel. For all the smoke and burning, she still smelled the lavender of the bath, the onions and garlic and roasting meat of the kitchen. The tower carried the smoke straight into the sky.
Men and women bustled around the yard, hauling buckets of water and spraying thatched roofs with garden hoses against the slow rain of embers. She wondered why the hell they fought to save their prison and then realized it was probably the only home they had.
Someone spotted her and grabbed another's arm, and a spreading pool of faces turned towards her. They backed away, dozens of them, fear written in their wide eyes. "That's the one," she heard them whisper. "That's the red-headed witch who killed the Master. What kinds of pain will she bring to us? What are the games she plays?"
She shook her head and turned toward the castle gate and the forest beyond. She didn't want to think about the slaves. She didn't want to think about her belly, either. She'd only done what she had to do.
A man stepped out of a stone outbuilding and jerked to a stop, breaking her funk. She blinked twice before the picture registered, the mixture of terror and resignation on his face. It was Padric.
He carried a peregrine on his wrist, a beautiful huge bird of slate gray and a white breast mottled with black. He carried a pair of heavy scissors. He stared at her bare wrists and neck, and sweat beaded on his forehead. He crossed himself with his free hand.
Maureen pulled the knife from her waistband. The cold hiss of steel sliding out of its sheath overwhelmed the roar of the fire and the crowd fighting it. She felt the greasy warmth of blood on her hands, felt the frenzy of hacking Dougal into chunks of crawling meat, and almost vomited. Could she kill again, without the madness driving her?
He studied her face and blinked at what he saw there. "Please let me free all the birds, Lady, before you kill me." He snipped scraps of leather from the falcon's ankles and flung her into the air.
The peregrine circled, puzzled for an instant, and then climbed steadily into the sky. It was beautiful. It was free. Maureen followed it with her heart, until it dwindled into a speck and vanished in the smoke against the morning sun. Her eyes blurred.
Tears. She remembered tears in Padric's eyes last night or the night before, when she'd surrendered to Dougal. She remembered the blood on his face, and the scars from whipping. He was a slave.
She'd had to kill Dougal, t
o save her own life and soul. He'd left her no other choice. No one was forcing her now. She didn't have to kill again.
"Let the birds go, Padric. Then leave. You're free. We're all free."
She turned her back on him and sheathed the knife, knowing she was safe, and looked down from the hill into the tops of trees. It was good to smell trees again, and grass, and the slow fire of rotting leaves. The forest echoed the swells and hollows of the land beneath, spreading out on either side, and encircled a distant checkerboard of fields and gardens. Fiona's place, she guessed. Where Brian was.
Brian!
The name sent a jolt of fire through her and left icy darkness behind it. Brian, and Jo, and David. She'd forgotten them. They were out there, somewhere, all of them in danger. Whatever else she might think about Dougal, she didn't think he'd lied about that.
She turned back for Padric. The man was a tracker, a gamekeeper. He knew this forest. He could work off some of his karma finding them.
He was gone.
The door of the building stood open, empty. She stepped inside, through some kind of a clerk's room of books and tables and piles of records, and found nothing but an outsized chicken-coop lined with wooden perches and a workbench covered with scraps of leather.
The only man who could help her was fleeing for his life.
From her.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The forest set Maureen's teeth on edge, like someone scratching fingernails across a chalkboard. She felt weirdness twisting over her skin as she walked along.
A battle raged under the deceptive calm, as if the wild grapes tried to strangle the squirrels and the pines staged root-warfare against the foxes in their dens. The forest touched her and yet did not, reached out to her and pushed her away at the same time.
It was like setting her against Padric. That was how Dougal had ruled his land. He'd twisted the balances until the forest was at war with itself. It even smelled wrong.
Her nose wrinkled. The stench of death touched her again, thick and sickening. She angled further upwind, giving some colossal heap of carrion a wide berth.
The Summer Country Page 26
