We hobbled like a three-legged man, making all the speed we could manage. Any moment now, I believed, I would feel the pain as a bullet tore through my back. My muscles flexed in involuntary expectation.
The next bullet made shards of stone fly nearly ten feet out in front of us. Fright atrophied my muscles.
Two or three militiamen followed us onto the dock. A couple more took position out by the road where we’d left the carriage. They knelt, cocked their guns and waited for the order to fire a volley.
“Oh, God,” I was praying. “Oh, God.” I wanted to be home in my gun shop, warm and safe with only dreams of the adventures these old guns had experienced. I didn’t want to be smack dab in the middle of everything myself.
The militia was closing the gap between our two parties much too quickly.
O'Malley reached the dinghy where the skinny man handed him a gun. A long gun. A rifle. As Caleb and I limped forward, it looked as if he was aiming at us, right up until he pulled the trigger and a millisecond later, I heard a grunt and cry from our rear. Then, from behind me, I heard a gun drop, clatter on the stone jetty and discharge.
The ball passed close enough I felt it stir my hair. There was a thud as a man went down.
O'Malley stepped into the boat and started reloading the rifle.
For some reason, the sight of Ethan’s sergeant calmly doing his job like a farmer or a house painter almost made me think everything was all right. Sane. Until, as if we were caught in a slow motion nightmare, Caleb stumbled and fell to the ground, taking me with him.
“Sorry,” I said, nearly breathless with exertion. What was wrong with me? I should have been able to hold him. Now I’d hurt him again.
“I’m sorry.”
He grunted, a quick sound full of pain. “Leave me,” he said. “Get in the boat.”
“I won’t go without you.” I hadn’t enough breath for more than that. God! Caleb hung upon me, a dead weight that prevented me from getting to my feet. I might as well try to lift one of the carriage horses.
“Missus,” O'Malley cried warning, and I looked up in time to see the most daring of the militiamen make a dash toward us. He brandished a sword in front of him. It looked ten feet long and adequate to slash either of us from a distance. I imagined the steel parting my flesh. I imagined it buried in Caleb’s unprotected back.
Without any thought at all I lifted the pistol in my left hand, the one not trapped under Caleb’s body, and pulled the trigger. I couldn’t have missed if I’d tried.
The explosion was loud in my ears; the recoil nearly broke my wrist. My whole head filled with the sharp reverberation, echoing across the harbor. The soldier’s sword slid from his spasming fingers.
The blade careened for several feet, struck an uneven stone and slipped into the water of the bay.
Two down.
I shoved the empty gun into the deep pocket of my cloak and tried once more to help Caleb. His legs churned as he struggled to find purchase on the stone jetty. He’d gotten onto his knees and was trying to inch forward like a baby learning to crawl. I put my hand down, thinking to push myself up, then lift him. Put it into hot, thick wetness—red and steaming in the cold. Bright red. Bright, bright red, stinking of copper and acid.
“Caleb,” I screamed, now seeing the hole in his uniform jacket.
Finding the source of that stream of red flowing around his body. Pints and pints of Caleb’s blood. I barely heard the bark of the blunderbuss as Jon let fly at the two closest soldiers. It was point blank range. One man dropped, the other staggered, his momentum broken although he kept coming.
A wild fury had overtaken me. I couldn’t see—not really.
Everything was a blur of blood red, the dirty green of the sea and the clear blue of the horizon. I called for power. Here was blood. Power needed blood, didn’t it? There should be power in plenty upon this dock. So what was it waiting for? Home. We had to get home.
As from a distance, I knew the tall, skinny man had loosened the rope holding the dinghy to the jetty. O'Malley crawled halfway out of the boat and took Caleb by one arm, pulling him to safety.
Jon frantically worked at the blunderbuss, preparing another charge.
Dimly, as if from another world I heard him yelling at me. He wanted me to jump. Jump into the boat.
I thought I heard thunder. Thought I saw lightning. Thought I smelled wood smoke on a freezing winter wind. Knew I hammered furiously at the curtain of time.
Above all else was the sound of feet as someone thudded onto the jetty. Behind me. If I could not go home, I could get revenge. I turned and lifted the other pistol—the one I’d held in reserve. I found a soldier looming over me, so close that in an automatic gesture of warding him off, I pushed at him with my empty hand. Straight into the bayonet he thrust at me. Its tip cut across my palm, and the blood, my blood this time, gushed from the cut. Strangely, I felt no pain. In a knee-jerk reaction, I pulled the trigger and suddenly my eyes were filled with a shower of red.
Then I was falling…falling. Quiet descended on the jetty. The last thing I heard was Jonathan Harriman, in a bewildered voice, saying,
“Why does Ethan call her Boothenay? I thought her name was Annabelle.”
Chapter 22
I spun helplessly in a maelstrom of power and of pain, around and around, tossed like flotsam caught in a whirlpool. Power was the bottleneck that trapped me betwixt and between, far beyond any hope of taking control. Control? Hardly! I barely had cohesive thought, let alone a plan of action.
Time passed. I don’t know how much time. I fought madly, mindlessly, to break free of the despair drowning my soul. I know the struggle seemed to last an eternity. It may have been no more than an instant.
As strange as it sounds, the glue that held me together was the pain.
Somehow, I stemmed a fracture that threatened to split me into a million parts and cast me adrift, lost in the slipstream of time. Only the pain prevented that from happening. And where I was, so was Caleb.
Somehow I kept a grip on him, one that kept trying to slide away, growing increasingly feeble.
I heard voices. Once I heard O’Malley, his tough Irish brogue thick with grief, cursing and vowing revenge.
Jonathan Harriman spoke during this passage. He sounded stricken, surprised at the turn of events. “Don’t worry,” he said to me—to Belle—as if he thought to give comfort. “I’ll take care of you. It’ll be all right.”
Be all right. Sure.
And overpowering all of the other voices, Annabelle Winthrop’s washed back and forth in my mind. First she sounded loud, then quiet.
Quiet, and back to loud.
“I told you,” she said. “I told you to watch over him. I told you to be ready. You let this happen, Boothenay Irons. It’s all happening again! Why were you not prepared? You are such a fool!”
Her angry, accusatory words stabbed at me. My mission was kaput.
I’d failed the test that gave meaning to my power. She was right. I was a fool.
Caleb and I had found in each other a soulmate that night as we made love. For an instant, I seemed to see us again. Joy, in a dance as old as mankind.
Only I knew now that it hadn’t just been between Caleb and me. Of course it had not. There had been another couple present, body and soul. Perhaps their presence had intensified our feeling—and perhaps our love had intensified Ethan and Belle’s as well.
Which made what was happening now all the more agonizing.
Ethan Delaney was slipping away, and when he went, so would Caleb. I knew it. Belle knew it. I would lose them both.
Unless I could find my way home. That’s the trouble with riding time’s slipstream. You require a solid entity for an anchor so you don’t get lost.
Belle spoke again, softly, as if she’d gone farther away, yet every word was distinct. “You must go before it’s too late,” she said.
I knew she was right, if I could only find the way.
“I’ll sho
w you the way!” This time her speech resounded in my head like a scream. “Take hold of him and go. Now. Save him. Save yourself.”
I whimpered. I know I did, but her anger sparked a response in me.
I tightened my grip on Caleb’s life force, holding him close to my heart.
“I don’t know how to get home,” I said, trying to talk rationally. I must try to keep my direction or we didn’t stand a chance. “I thought the blood…”
Belle sounded scornful. “You need blood? Here’s blood!”
Her fingers, my fingers gouged at the cut the militiaman’s bayonet had slashed across my left hand. I shrieked with the intensity of the pain.
Out of the darkness, I heard my father’s voice. A beacon, leading me home.
Chapter 23
“This is going to need stitched,” said a calm, female voice.
Calm on the outside. Underlying the layer of control, I sensed distress.
“Here, Mr. Irons,” she went on. “Hold this pad tight around her palm. It’ll help staunch the bleeding.”
Who was that? Curiosity touched me, and with it, came a bare nudge toward life. Mr. Irons, she’d said, so that meant my father. Or my brother. I suppose someone might also call him Mr. Irons.
I didn’t open my eyes. Couldn’t open them. I didn’t possess enough energy to work those muscles. My head was already tilted back, so I simply let my eyelids fall open.
She had long, blond hair, wide blue eyes and a straight nose over a generous mouth.
Scott’s latest squeeze. I knew with complete certainty she would one day soon be my sister-in-law. For now, the question of what she was doing as she leaned over me was vexing enough that I roused a little more.
“Hello, Sonja,” I said.
She jumped at the sound of my voice. “She’s awake, Mr. Irons, Scott. Boothenay is awake.”
My dad sighed and his face swam into my line of sight. Tears stood in his eyes.
I managed a faint smile.
“That’s my sis, the mogul of magical mysteries. Takes more than an out-of-body sleuthing expedition to keep her down.” Scott’s words were careless, the timbre of his voice heavy with fading fear. “From the sound of things, she’s no more brain damaged than she ever was.”
My smile grew wider.
“And did you get Doc’s mystery straightened out while you were gone?” he asked, as if it didn’t matter.
“Caleb!” I’d like to say I snapped into a sitting position as memory flooded back, but it didn’t quite happen like that. Weak as a wilted lettuce leaf, I struggled onto an elbow, managing not to fall and crush Caleb as I leaned over and peered into his face.
He lay beside me looking peaceful. Calm and still. I thought he was dead.
“He’s okay,” Scott said, clutching my shoulders when uncontrollable trembling threatened to shake me to pieces. “He’s just asleep, Boothenay. He’ll be all right.”
I still had hold of Caleb’s hand, warm and relaxed in mine. “At least his body isn’t dead,” I said, with some bitterness. I knew I was lucky to have gotten him this far.
“Caleb is fine.” Dad squatted down beside me. “When you—” He faltered. “—returned, he spoke to us. He said we should look after you.”
“Really?”
He gave me a little shake. “You don’t think I’d lie, do you?”
“No. Of course not. You might keep things from me, though.”
“Well, we’re not,” Scott said. “I swear, Booth, if you ever do this again, I’m going to call whoever it is people call when they’re at their wits’ end, and have you hauled off to the loony bin the minute as you get back…if you get back. I don’t think I can handle this crap another time.”
“I didn’t ask you to baby-sit,” I snapped and maybe that was true, yet there was a greater truth. “No, don’t mind me. I’m sorry, Scott.
Sorry, Dad. We’d have been lost without you. The blood, my blood, carried your voices to me. That’s how I found the way home.”
“Speaking of blood,” Sonja interjected, “may we please call 911
now? I really think you need stitches in that hand. How on earth did you do it anyway?”
I looked down to where blood had already soaked through the pad Dad had tied on. My fingers curled in obedience at my brain’s command, I noted with relief, even if it did hurt like crazy.
“Bayonet,” I said.
Sonja’s eyes opened wide. “Excuse me? For a minute I thought you said bayonet.”
“I did.”
“That does it,” she said. “She’s wandering. I’m calling 911.”
“No, you’re not. Scott, take that phone away from her. If there’s anything we don’t need around here, it’s a bunch of curious bystanders.
If I need stitches, Caleb can do it later.”
“How can you bear to wait?” Sonja exclaimed. “Doesn’t your hand hurt?”
“Of course it hurts.” What did she think I was? A super ninja woman who doesn’t feel pain? “But no more than I can stand. I’ll wait on Caleb.”
“But…” she tried to argue.
“Please.” Weariness dragged at me. “I’ll have it taken care of, I promise. Just for now, though, I’d like to be left alone for a minute.”
Dad recognized the desperation in my tone. He shooed the others out, leaving me with Caleb. I turned my attention to him. Not that I didn’t trust the others’ judgment, mind you, but I wanted—needed—to see for myself.
They’d arranged us side by side on the big sheepskin rug someone had brought down from Dad’s room and placed on the shop floor.
Afraid to move us, I guess. A roaring fire kept the area toasty warm. It was a scenario that sounded like the introduction to a sexy tale of romance, as long as no one noticed the condition we were in. We may have given the impression of being laid out in a morgue.
I sat up.
Caleb slept on. In this relaxed state, he looked much younger than when Ethan’s suffering had reflected in his face. I’d become accustomed to the grimness, until I’d thought he’d always been that way. Now I remembered the first time we met.
Reluctantly, I released his hand. Somewhere along the line I’d also grown used to having him to hang on to. And in the end, I did manage to hold him long enough, and hard enough, to bring him home. My promises to Caleb and the vow I’d made to myself, were fulfilled.
Circle completed.
A sense of exultation bubbled inside of me. I’d done it. I’d taken him into the past—and brought him back. There had been times when I despaired. Times when I doubted I had any power, when I’d felt used, carried on the last tide of Belle’s desperate hope. I knew differently now. The blood had been mine, and so was the power.
“Why are you smiling?” Caleb had awakened. His drowsy green eyes looked at me as if I were some kind of hero.
“Oh, nothing. Everything. I’m just glad to be here. Glad I didn’t get you killed.” I hadn’t realized I was smiling. “I thought you were asleep.”
“I am.” He yawned and scrubbed his hand over his darkly stubbled jaw. His eyes opened wider. “How long…?”
I checked the date on my watch. “It’s December 23rd. Four thirty-three in the afternoon to be exact.”
Caleb shot up. “No way. Can’t be.”
I raised my brows. “Check your watch…not that one,” as he made to look on his wrist. “Check the antique one you carry in your pocket.”
“This old thing?” He pulled the silver case from his jeans pocket.
“It doesn’t even run.”
Then he held it closer to his eyes, as if he’d become nearsighted within the last five minutes, and brought it to his ear. His thumb polished a dent in the tarnished silver case.
“I guess I was wrong,” he said. “It does run…now. Do you know, I think this watch saved my life? I seem to remember… Well, I guess I don’t know what I remember, except the watch was whole before we went out on the jetty. After that, everything is a blank, until I woke up
here.” He frowned. “There’s something I don’t understand.”
“Just one thing?” I smiled a little. “Strange doings, no?” It was just as well he didn’t remember because, far from saving his life—Ethan’s life—the bullet that under other circumstances might only have grazed him had been deflected into his lung when it bounced off the watch.
That’s what killed Ethan. He’d choked to death on his own blood as he lay in the bottom of the dinghy while O’Malley and Jonathan Harriman rowed their guts out, trying to reach the ship. Belle had fought for all she was worth to save him, and so had I. In the end, she let him go and, while he still had a breath of life, I brought Caleb home.
Sometime, and I dreaded the moment, I’d have to tell Caleb all that.
I heaved a tired sigh, cradling my wounded left hand with the right. The full effect had decided to make itself felt—with a vengeance. I’d kept my hand beside me, hidden in the shadows up until now, and my movement brought the bulky, red-splotched bandage into Caleb’s sight.
He returned his battered watch to his pocket and, grabbing my hand, unwrapped the gauze strip.
“Why didn’t you say something, you little idiot?” he asked irritably when he’d made a brief examination. The exam consisted of poking, pulling and prying, which resulted in an increased blood flow, and a lot of sub-vocal swearing. Mine.
“I’ve got my medical kit in the truck,” he said. “I’ll fetch it.”
He hustled out and right back in on a wave of icy air, snowflakes melting in his dark hair, and carrying a traditional black doctor’s bag.
His piratical earring was back, I noticed, while the limp had passed on with Ethan.
“What’s the matter with the lights?” I asked, when he would have lifted me to take me upstairs.
In The Service Of The Queen (The Gunsmith Book 1) Page 27
