Fire on the Island (18 page)

Callum and Jack
sat at a small table in patio chairs, feet propped up on a cooler. With an ice
cold bottle of Newcastle in each of their hands, their attention was directed
toward Jeremiah, who sat sprawled out in a reclining deck chair. He had brought
along his guitar and a small portable amp and was teasing out a wailing stream
of blue notes—something Isla had come to realize he did to help him work
through his thoughts.

Isla pulled out
a chair and placed it across from the men, turning it around to straddle it.
Folding her arms over the back of the chair, she rested her chin on her
forearms and silently regarded Jeremiah.

It was as if
man and instrument were one and the same. His left hand slid deftly up and down
the neck of the guitar, bending the strings as he picked the notes with his
right—creating the classic bluesy sound that he loved so much.

As the muscles
flexed in his wrists and forearms, Isla found her gaze drawn to where his hands
stroked the guitar, his fingers long, thick, and muscular from years of
playing. She had no idea why she found them so unbelievably sexy, but she did.

Her gaze
drifted up to his face, and she found that his eyes were closed. He followed
the rise and fall of the tune with subtle movements of his head, slight changes
of the expression on his face. Whenever he would get really deep into the song
and he would pick a particularly complex riff, his eyes would squeeze shut
tight, he would bite his lip, and his face would twist in an almost pained
expression.

Suddenly his
eyes opened, and she was caught in his deep hazel gaze. She could feel herself
blush at being caught staring, and he confirmed it by smiling knowingly at her
and finishing the song with a long slide down the entire neck of the guitar.

"Hey
there, pretty lady," he drawled.

"You make
a lot of faces when you play," she pointed out, still flustered.

"It's not
blues if it don't look like it hurt a little bit," he said, flashing those
wolfish teeth at her again.

Callum removed
his feet from the cooler to dig out another beer, flicked the cap off with his
bottle opener, and passed it to Isla. She smiled gratefully at him. "I
need this after the day I've had."

"Did
something happen at work?"

Not ready to
explain the nightmarish kayaking trip yet, Isla simply explained that they'd
had a difficult tour. Jack shrugged and excused himself to go check on dinner.

When he
returned to tell them the food was ready, they all rose to help him carry the
dishes to the patio table. They ate in easy companionship, entertaining each
other with stories and jokes. Once the food was finished and the dishes were
done, they reconvened on the patio and sat in pensive silence, each lost in
their own thoughts.

It was Jack who
finally broke the silence. "So, what did you want to talk to us about,
Jeremiah?"

He took a long,
slow sip of his beer and glanced over at Isla. She drummed up a smile for him,
even though her heart wasn't in it. "Well...I don't know if you noticed
that some...uh...strange things have been going on around the island."

Jack nodded
solemnly while Callum—being Callum—chose the sarcastic approach. "Hmm,
like disappearances, suicides”—he narrowed his eyes at Isla—“wolves. No,
nothing’s strange there.”

Jere chuckled,
then sobered quickly. "Isla and I think we may have discovered the cause
of it all. But it's not my story to tell," he said, wrapping a supportive
arm around Isla's shoulders.

Breathing in a
shuddering breath, Isla opened her mouth to speak and then clamped it shut so
hard that her teeth clicked.

Sarcasm
forgotten, Callum leaned forward in his chair, his face a mixture of interest
and profound concern that was mirrored on Jack's. "Love, you know you can
tell me an' Jack anything, right? Nothing could make us love you any
less."

Her eyes welled
but the tears never fell. Instead, she squared her shoulders and began to
speak. "It really is a long story," she said apologetically.

"We have
all night," Jack assured her.

Nodding, she
took another deep breath. "It all started in 1991, when my mother tried to
kill me."

Callum drained
his bottle in one chug and slammed it down on the table. "I'm gonna need
another beer."

Jack and Callum
sat in intense silence as Isla related first the appearance of her
signa
and her attempted murder, and the strange events that had begun to happen
around her. She and Jeremiah took turns explaining the hypotheses from Jere's
research and the information they had learned from Mhairi.

There was a
long, tense silence as they tried to absorb all that they had just heard.
Finally, Jack covered Callum's hand with his own, where it lay on the patio
table, and gave Callum a short nod.

Leaning back in
his chair, Callum steepled his fingers together and pegged Isla with an
inscrutable gaze. "So," he started slowly, "you're telling us
that, first of all, you're a witch. You have supernatural powers imbued upon
you from some unknown source to assist you in the fight against soul-sucking
demons. Do I have this about right?"

Isla gave him a
curt nod, but said nothing.

"And the
good doctor here," he continued, "makes his living researching and
writing about paranormal activity." Callum flicked his eyes over
Jeremiah's ashen face. "Rumors of a witch on the island brought you here,
unsure of what you'd find. What you did find was a woman who has powers that
even she didn't know about. And, the rest is history, yes?"

Wincing,
Jeremiah rubbed his tired eyes with the hand that was not occupied holding
Isla's. "That about covers it."

"Right
then. I'll allow it."

Isla, who had
just taken a nervous sip of her beer, had to slap a hand over her mouth to keep
from performing a classic spit take. Looking over at Jeremiah, she saw her own
surprise mirrored on his face. She narrowed her eyes at Callum. "You'll
allow it? Just like that?"

Jack finally
broke his own silence. "Isla, love, we've known you for ten years. In all
of that time, do you think we wouldn't realize there's something different
about you?"

Isla ducked her
head and studied her fingernails. "I didn't know," she said in a
small voice.

"Oh,
honey, of course you didn't. You had no one to teach you any different. You
were just you, and you'd always been that way. You had no reason to think
anything was unusual about yourself."

Nodding, Callum
spoke up. "And we live in Scotland, m'dear. Jack and I have seen enough
strange things in our lifetime to know that there are plenty of unexplained
phenomena in the world. Hell, this isn't even the strangest thing we've heard
this year!"

Stunned into
silence, Isla glanced at Jeremiah, who merely shrugged.

"I said it
before, and I'll say it again," Callum said fiercely, "nothing you
could do would make us love you any less."

Giving them a
watery smile, Isla rose to hug first Callum, then Jack. She returned to her
seat, sighed and leaned into Jeremiah. "You boys are the best."

"There is
a missing piece to the story, though," Jack said thoughtfully.

"What's
that?" Isla asked.

"Jeremiah,
you said that you had been researching the
bruixi
off and on for several
years before you came here, which was why the rumor of a witch on the island
intrigued you so."

When he paused,
Jeremiah nodded. "I had come across veiled references while researching
other projects, and my curiosity was definitely piqued. So I kept an ear to the
ground for more information, which eventually led me here."

"Mmm,"
Jack grunted, tapping his chin with the tip of the finger. "The question
is why, though. What was it about the story that intrigued you so? You'd have
to have run across quite a few legends and myths in your line of work. Why this
one?"

"That's a
fair question. And up until about a month ago, I wouldn't have been able to
answer it. I think I have an idea now."

Isla glanced
over at him sharply, narrowing her eyes. He smoothed a hand down her arm, reassuring
her. "I haven't hidden anything from you, darlin'. This is just an idea
I've been chewing on. Now seems as good a time as any to talk it out."

He seemed to
wait for her to relax before he began. "When I was twelve years old, I had
my first paranormal experience. I guess trying to explain it was the main
reason I became interested in the field of parapsychology."

"What did
you see?" Isla asked in a sharp tone, bordering on accusatory.

"I was
never completely sure what exactly I
saw
. After it happened, the memory
almost immediately became very hazy, as if something was blocking it out. I've
only recently been able to remember more detail."

"Do you
think that the sudden clarity is associated with coming to the island?"
Jack asked.

Jeremiah nodded
slowly. "I do, but I'll get to that. Let me tell you what I remember
first. I was on a tour of the St. Louis Cemetery #1 in New Orleans. You know,
one of those where they walk around and tell you about all the ghost stories
associated with the graves and such."

When the others
nodded their understanding, he continued. "I was actually getting pretty
bored. I had been expecting it to be, you know, scary. Anyway, I saw a
suspicious looking guy skulking around, so naturally I had to follow him and
see what he was up to."

Callum snorted
out a laugh at that. "An investigator is born."

Jere gave him a
lopsided grin. "Pretty much, although that night I definitely came to
regret it. When I finally caught up to him, he was just kind of standing
there—almost like he was waiting for me to catch up. In hindsight, I should
have probably taken that as a bad sign. I immediately had the feeling that
something was off, like I was in the presence of something not quite human.
Then it proved me right by showing me its fangs and creepy swirling eyes."

He turned to
Isla. "Actually he looked an awful lot like the guy from the lake, but he
had a different symbol. He approached me, and I realized that I couldn't move.
No matter how hard I tried to send a signal to my arms and legs to work,
nothing happened.

"So he
stepped up to me and put his hands on my head. What happened then is still
really fuzzy, even as the rest of the memory has come back. He did some sort of
demon mind meld thing on me. I tried to fight it, but I could just feel my
brain checking out. He raised a ring of fire around us, just like at the lake.
It was so real, I could feel it burning me."

He gave Isla a
grateful smile when she squeezed his hand. "So how did you get away?"

"I didn't
see much of it. All of a sudden, he was snatched backwards out of the fire and
I was alone. When the fire disappeared, I saw him a few feet away, basically
being strangled by a woman. She had a mark just like Mhairi's, except it was on
her face." He placed his own hand on his left cheek. "Just here. But
it was moving, writhing almost, and kind of...glowed."

"This is
where it gets really weird," Jere said, this time earning a laugh from
Jack.

"Relatively,
of course," Jack pointed out.

"Naturally,"
Jere acknowledged. "So this woman had her hands around his throat, and she
was probably a buck ten soaking wet, yet she seemed to have complete control
over this creature. She stared him down until I saw flames literally shoot out
of her eyes and basically—for lack of a better term—zapped him. He went up in
smoke, and all that was left was a small white snake on the ground, with opaque
eyes just like he had.

“The lady
turned to look at me, and I actually recognized her as a gypsy fortune teller
from the park. I used to be kind of scared of her as a kid. So then, she picks
up the snake and stuffs it in her bag. Then she winks at me and smiles, and
that was kind of the last straw for my poor twelve-year-old self. I bit the
dirt, hard. When I woke up, I was alone and scared shitless."

"You said
this happened when you were twelve. You're positive about that?" Isla
asked.

"Completely.
Why?"

"If you
were twelve, then this would have happened—"

"Halloween
night, 1991," he finished for her, understanding dawning. Jere rose to
pace angrily around the patio, raking a shaking hand through his hair.

Callum looked
at Jack then turned his attention back to Isla. "What are we missing
here?"

Visibly
steeling herself, Isla reached out to grab Jeremiah's hand and pull him back
down into his chair, linking her fingers with his. "Halloween night '91
was the same night my mother tried to kill me."

"Bloody
hell," exclaimed Jack. "What are the odds of that?"

Jeremiah turned
fierce eyes toward the pair. "Probably a billion to one. This was no
coincidence. We're like pawns in some twisted game!" Isla saw the rage
that bubbled up, white hot and angry, but he seemed to hold it together.