Surrender (THE DRAGONFLY CHRONICLES) (35 page)

Jackson shook his head. “I…I was yanked away. You were left. I couldn’t get back to you. I couldn’t find you. Not even here, in this circle.” He swallowed hard, his eyes momentarily searching the star-speckled sky. He opened his mouth and then closed it again. “I couldn’t believe that I’d lost you.” He looked back at her.

The breeze shook through Kailin but she resisted when he tried to pull her into his arms again. “Jackson.” She wet her lips and tried to ignore how numb they felt. “You did lose me. When you helped them take Anthony. You didn’t even know me, but you lost me.”

Something changed along the shadows of his face. A hardness slipped over the relief that had pulled Kailin into the last amazing kiss. The farewell kiss. She waited, hoping he would say something, anything that would make the past irrelevant, make all that happened before dissipate with a simple explanation. He’d been working with Anthony. It was a trick to fool the real villains. He and Anthony had planned it all out over ales and darts. Anything.

Jackson nodded though it looked like it took its toll. “You’re right, Kailin. I’m sorry. I didn’t know you. Choices had to be made, hard choices.”

Tuto screeched from his perch on the slab, lifting off and circling Kailin. Pressure against her leg was punctuated by a low growl. She jumped forward on a gasp.

“A wolf!” Jackson yelled and shoved Kailin behind him. In quick succession he pulled his pistol and cocked it.

“Wait!” Kailin said, grabbing his arm.

They stared at the large beast. Its black fur appeared almost gray in the moonlight. Yellow eyes reflected back at them. It seemed to watch Jackson’s gun while trying to side step its way around him to Kailin. Its black lips peeled back, showing long white canines.

“Where the hell did he come from? I’ve been out here for months. I would have noticed a monster that large,” Jackson said evenly.

Months? He’d been out here for months?

There was no time for questions. Kailin slapped her pants pocket, searching. “The tooth.” It was gone. “My mother had a fang in her pocket when she…disappeared. I took it and threaded here.”

Tuto screeched again in his tight circle. His talons reached down to pluck at the beast’s head. The wolf ignored the bird and kept its eyes locked on the weapon.

“Put the gun down,” she whispered.

“Down?”

“I think he’s supposed to protect whoever brings him through.”

“What?” but Jackson lowered his gun and the large wolf’s back end sat.

“I watched my mother tie an owl feather to me as a child, before she sent me. Anthony said Tuto just showed up in the tomb when I did. I think I brought the wolf through with me because of the tooth.”

“Damn.” Jackson ran a hand through his hair. “What are you going to do with a pet wolf?”

“I…I don’t know.”

Kailin moved forward, her hand outstretched. With a small forward thrust, the beast rubbed its head in her palm. “Hi there.”

What a bizarre…day, month, who knew. Exhaustion suddenly weighed along the taut muscles in Kailin’s body. Emotions were tiring and she’d been bombarded with fear, fury, loss, sadness, disbelief, regret, bitterness, and probably a few more. It was all too much.

An animal scampered off in the woods beyond the stone circle, and the wolf’s ears perked up. It tipped its nose to the breeze.

“Go ahead,” she said and flapped her hand. “You’ll be less scary when full. I hope.” The wolf turned and trotted off into the forest as if he understood her words. Kailin shook her head and slumped down in front of the dying fire.

Jackson grabbed a blanket from on top of the stone slab and shook it, placing it around her shoulders. He threw some brush and dry heather onto the chars. His movements were strong, quiet, undemanding. Kailin replayed the pre-wolf dialogue through her mind. She let out a long exhale and watched Jackson blow life back into the last shreds of fire. He added strips of wood and finally larger branches. He moved about the campfire as if he’d been making them his whole life.

“Is that it?” she asked as the wood spit and cracked.

“I have some oatcakes and some dried fish on a line over that way.” He nodded to the line of trees.

Kailin swallowed her temper. “No, I mean, is that it? Were we done talking when the wolf announced itself?”

“I think we were.”

“You said that you are sorry. Nothing more, no explanations, no reasons?”

Anger welled once again inside her while she waited. He settled across from her.

His eyes met hers over the flames. “Would any suffice, fix the fact that I helped kidnap your father?”

“No, but you knew that, knew that the night we…we were together.” She played with the cuff of her shirt, realizing it was still turned inside out from that night.

His teeth came down on his bottom lip, the one Kailin knew tasted like security and heat and delicious frenzy. She shook her head and dropped her gaze to the orange-yellow flames.

“You planned to take the orb too,” she said.

He tossed another log onto the fire making the carefully erected triangle collapse. The flames hissed around the assault before turning to lap at the new fuel.

“Yes.”

Kailin’s laugh came out like a choke. “Bloody awful, huh, to find out that the only person who can make the orb work is the one it’s gifted to. Even though you did seduce me, if you’d stolen it away during the night, you wouldn’t have been able to do anything with it.”

Jackson straightened so fast it was as if he jumped, though Kailin was fairly certain his boots didn’t leave the ground. His long stride crossed the fire in the space of her gasp. He grabbed her upper arms, his breathing ragged. He opened his mouth to say something.

Say something! Say anything!

Instead Jackson raised his hand to her face. With one curved finger he caught a tear as it welled out of her lower lid. The second tear really wet his finger. They came then, tears, more tears than Kailin could remember releasing ever before. The sound of the fire and night breeze in the trees played in the background as she wet the front of Jackson’s linen shirt. He’d pulled her into him, letting her rest her face against his heart.

Kailin didn’t shake, she didn’t wail or snort. She just…surrendered, released everything as if she had liquefied and he was a cup to catch her. Fight, fear, and ice bled out with her tears, leaving hollow, weak Kailin. She’d never been so lonely before.

Chapter Fourteen

Kailin breathed in the dewy, just-dawn air. She no longer smelled the tang of char from the campfire. She held aside a long, damp pine limb and paused to take in the rugged castle in the distance. Framed against a mountain, it always took her breath away. Dawn reflected against the surrounding walls beyond the small village.

The wolf following her growled low a split second before a voice broke the silence. “Foolish.”

Kailin let the branch slap backwards into Drakkina’s pinched face. The pine needles slipped through the witch’s ethereal form as she walked more than floated behind Kailin out onto the soggy moor. Drakkina shook her head. “Daughter of Gilla, Kailin, you could have been taken, used by the dark. Or worse,” she said as if the thought had just come to her, “you could have been killed.”

“But I wasn’t.” Kailin trudged forward. Tuto made advancing circles overhead to keep watch while the new addition loped behind.

“You know he’s still following you,” Drakkina said.

Kailin glanced at the large black beast. “I know. He showed up with me. Must have threaded with me because I took a fang from my mother’s robes.”

“Actually the tooth was given to your baby brother. The wolf is his guardian, but I’m not talking about him,” Drakkina said.

Kailin paused in her stride. The wolf belonged to the baby like Tuto belonged to her. Regret flattened her stomach again, but she started walking again. She’d just have to care for the wolf since her brother was gone.

“Jackson Black is following you,” Drakkina continued.

“Tell him to stop. I have friends here who will loan me a horse.”

Drakkina pointed at the distant castle. “Actually they are kin to you, through Serena and Keenan and their son William.”

Kailin tripped on a clump of heather and looked back at Drakkina. The witch shrugged. “Your eldest sister made her home close to the original.”

Kailin felt her throat contract. “What year is this?”

“In which calendar?”

Kailin frowned. The witch was playing with her. “The one created by Pope Gregory XIII in the sixteenth century.”

Drakkina slipped an ancient-looking pocket watch from her waistband. “Eighteen-seventy-two.”

Kailin tripped again.

“You really need to concentrate on the terrain,” Drakkina chided.

“How long have I been gone?”

Drakkina ticked off time on her fingers. Kailin examined the melted patches of snow. It was spring in the Highlands. “It’s April or May, isn’t it?” She spun to look at Drakkina. “I’ve been gone for months!” She’d been so encompassed by her misery over Jackson that she hadn’t even thought about time, except that he had been waiting for her.

“You’re lucky you made it back to your own century. It was your first time travel spell after all. You could have landed in a very inhospitable locale or time. You know volcanoes blasted fire around here in the past.”

Kailin exhaled loudly. Frustration rushed through her, frustration over her own inward narcissism and over the witch’s toying. “Tell me Anthony is safe.”

Drakkina paused for dramatic effect.

“Drakkina!”

“The man who raised you is safe. Worried, looking for you, but safe. He’ll just love your new pet.”

Kailin closed her eyes. “Can you get word to him that I’ll come home soon? That I’m well?”

“Do I look like a messenger?” Drakkina asked and pointed toward the sky. “Send your bird.”

Kailin could hear the roll in Drakkina’s eyes. She’d already turned back toward the soaring mountain behind Kylkern Castle, home to the Macleans. Kailin made her legs plod on. Silence ensued, but she knew the witch still followed, just as she had since Kailin had left the stone circle an hour before. She had escaped the pain of being close to Jackson in the pre-dawn darkness, alone, without a word. Left him there with her tears. It was time to move forward, enough wallowing in anger and regret.

“And send Jackson home,” Kailin instructed.

“First your father, now your warrior,” Drakkina complained. “I don’t pop in and out to deliver messages.”

“I’ll send word to Anthony through Tuto, but”—Kailin turned to stare at the semi-floating woman—“please…” She let a shadow of her pain settle onto her features. “Tell Jackson Black to stop following me. I need—” She shook her head. “I don’t know what I need,” she mumbled.

Drakkina snorted. “Love. None of you know what you’re doing, and yet I’m expected to just sit back and let it all unfold. As if the temporal world didn’t depend upon you.”

“Umm…” Kailin stared. “I just need to not see him right now. I need time.”

“Time.” Drakkina laughed with a tinkling of mild hysteria.

“Just tell him to go home. Whatever he calls home.”

“He probably won’t listen to me.”

“Be persuasive.”

Drakkina huffed, but the tingle in Kailin’s birthmark melted away as the witch faded.

Several horses left the village of thatched houses before the castle. Apparently she’d been spotted.

“Uh, perhaps you should stay in the forest nearby,” she said to the wolf. With a little flick of his full tail, the wolf loped off into the woods. Kailin shook her head and turned back to the riders.

The Macleans. Kin? Kailin would have to look further into that. Drakkina may be unpredictable but so far she hadn’t lied. After what Kailin had witnessed in the stone circle of the past, it was very likely that her siblings had been sent to different time periods. But where had the baby boy gone? What was his name? The demons had held him, covered him. Hopefully her brother had lived. Drakkina should know.

“Hail!” one of the riders called.

Kailin switched the satchel with the orb onto the other shoulder and held up an arm. “Hail, Macleans of Kylkern. Dr. Kailin Whitaker. I am in need of a rest and a horse.” She recognized the chief at the lead, William, named after his great-grandfather. “And a hot cup of tea.”

“Ah, Kailin lass, ye know that we only serve tea with a splash of good Highland whisky in it. Perhaps then ye will explain the beastie watching ye from the thicket.”

She laughed and would have blown off his tam o’shanter with her magic but she didn’t want to draw any demonic attention to these good people.

“Plus, after what Judith just read in your mind,” William said and shook his head, “I’d say ye have a mighty need for that whisky.”

Kailin’s smile faded but she nodded. “So be it.”

****

“He was sitting out there for months, waiting for ye,” Judith reminded Kailin as she pushed up onto the sturdy Highland horse.

“Waiting for me,” Kailin asked, “or for the orb?” She glanced at the lump in the leather bag hanging near her leg.

Judith frowned and huffed. “I don’t doubt
your
magic.”

Kailin touched her friend’s hand. “You can see what I can do with your own eyes, your own interpretations. I cannot see in your head. I don’t mean—”

“I know.” Judith smiled. “Ye want to believe me but your own”—she flapped her hands—“your own worries about being accepted make it difficult.”

A blush heated her cheeks. “No secrets from you, huh?”

“Nay,” Judith laughed but then grew serious. “I’m telling ye. He only thought of ye, only searched for ye. Not some magic stone, just his little fire. If ye’d let him explain instead of leaving.”

“He had all night.”

Judith nodded, her eyes straying to her husband talking to William. “Men have to work past their own foolishness too.” She turned her gaze back to Kailin. “Jackson Black has reasons—”

“Reasons for lying to me, seducing me, kidnapping my father, plotting to steal the orb from me.”

Judith closed her eyes as if she were holding onto her wild, Highland temper. She opened those bright brown eyes. “Aye, reasons. And not for me to tell. But ye should ask him, listen to him. Then decide.”