The Bloodline Feud (Merchant Princes Omnibus 1) (5 page)

Lights. A jingle, as of chains. Thudding and hollow clonking noises – and low voices. She stumbled out into the sudden expanse of a trail – not a wide one, more of a hiking trail,
the surface torn up and muddy.
Lights!
She stared at them, at the men on horseback coming down the trail toward her, the lantern held on a pole by the one in the lead. Dim light glinted
off reflecting metal, helmet, and breastplate like something out of a museum. Someone called out something that sounded like: ‘Curl!’
Look. He’s riding toward me, she thought
dazedly. What’s that he’s
–

Her guts liquid with absolute fright, she turned and ran. The flat crack of rifle fire sounded behind her, repeated short bursts firing into the night. Invisible fingers ripped at the branches
overhead as Miriam heard voices raised in hue and cry behind her. Low branches scratched at her face as she ran, gasping and crying, uphill away from the path. More bangs, more gunshots –
astonishingly few of them, but any at all was too many. She ran straight into a tree, fell back winded, brains rattling around inside her head like dried peas in a pod, then she pushed herself to
her feet again faster than she’d have believed possible and stumbled on into the night, gasping for breath, praying for rescue.

Eventually she stopped. Somewhere along the way she’d lost her slippers. Her face and ribs felt bruised, her head was pounding, and she could barely breathe. But she couldn’t hear
any sounds of pursuit. Her skin felt oddly tight, and everything was far too cold. As soon as she was no longer running, she doubled over and succumbed to a fit of racking coughs, prolonged by her
desperate attempts to muffle them. Her chest was on fire.
Oh god, any god. Whoever put me here. I just want you to know that I hate you!

She stood up. Somewhere high overhead the wind sighed. Her skin itched with the fear of pursuit.
I’ve got to get home,
she realized. Now her skin crawled with another fear –
fear that she might be wrong, that it wasn’t the locket at all, that it was something else she didn’t understand that had brought her here, that there was no way back and she’d be
stranded –

When she flicked it open, the right-hand half of the locket crawled with light. Tiny specks of brilliance, not the phosphorescence of a watch dial or the bioluminescence of those plastic
disposable flashlights that had become popular for a year or two, but an intense, bleached blue-white glare like a miniature star. Miriam panted, trying to let her mind drift into it, but after a
minute she realized all she was achieving was giving herself a headache. ‘What did I do to make it work?’ she mumbled, puzzled and frustrated and increasingly afraid. ‘If she
could make it – ’

Ah. That was what she’d been doing. Just relaxing, meditating. Wondering what her birth-mother had seen in it. Miriam gritted her teeth. How was she going to re-create that sense of
detached curiosity? Here in a wild forest at night, with strangers shooting at her in the dark? How – she narrowed her eyes.
The headache. If I can see my way past it, I could
–

The dots of light blazed up for a moment in glorious conflagration. Miriam jackknifed forward, saw the orange washout of streetlights shining down on a well-mowed lawn. Then her stomach rebelled
and this time she couldn’t keep it down. It was all she could do to catch her breath between heaves. Somehow her guts had been replaced by a writhing snake, and the racking spasms kept
pulsing through her until she began to worry about tearing her esophagus.

She heard the sound of a car slowing – then speeding up again as the driver saw her vomiting. A yell from the window, inarticulate, something like ‘Drunk fucking bums!’
Something clattered into the road. Miriam didn’t care. Dampness and cold clenched their icy fingers around her, but she didn’t care: She was back in civilization, away from the
threatening trees and her pursuers. She stumbled off the front lawn of somebody’s house and sensed harsh asphalt beneath her bare feet, stones digging into her soles. A street sign said it
was somewhere she knew. One of the other side roads off Grafton Street. She was less than two miles from home.

Drip
. She looked up.
Drip
. The rain began to fall again, sluicing down her aching face. Her clothes were stained and filthy with mud and vomit. Her legs were scratched and felt
bruised.
Home
. It was a primal imperative. Put one foot in front of another, she told herself through the deafening hammering in her skull. Her head hurt, and the world was spinning around
her.

An indefinite time – perhaps thirty minutes, perhaps an hour – later, she saw a familiar sight through the downpour. Soaked to the skin and shivering, she nevertheless felt like a
furnace. Her house seemed to shimmer like a mirage in the desert when she looked at it. And now she discovered another problem – she’d come out without her keys!
Silly me, what was
I thinking?
she wondered vaguely.
Nothing but this locket,
she thought, weaving its chain around her right index finger.

The shed,
whispered a vestige of cool control in the back of her head.

Oh, yes, the shed,
she answered herself.

She stumbled around the side of her house, past the cramped green rug that passed for a yard, to the shed in back. It was padlocked, but the small side window wasn’t actually fastened and
if you pulled
just so
it would open outward. It took her three tries and half a fingernail – the rain had warped the wood somewhat – but once open she could thrust an arm
inside and fumble around for the hook with the key dangling from it on a loop. She fetched the key, opened the padlock – dropping it casually on the lawn – and found, taped to the
underside of the workbench, the spare key to the French doors.

She was home.

WALK ON THE WILD SIDE

Somehow Miriam found her way upstairs. She worked this out the next morning when she awakened sprawled on her bed, feet freezing and hot shivers chasing across her skin while a
platoon of miners with pickaxes worked her head over. It was her bladder that finally forced her up and led her, still half-asleep, to the bathroom, where she turned on all the lights, shot the
deadbolt on the door, used the toilet, and rummaged around for an Advil to help with the hangover symptoms. ‘What you need is a good shower,’ she told herself grimly, trying to ignore
the pile of foul and stinking clothes on the floor that mingled with the towels she’d spilled everywhere the night before. Naked in a brightly lit pink and chromed bathroom, she spun the
taps, sat on the edge of the bathtub, and tried to think her way past the haze of depression and pain.

‘You’re a big girl,’ she told the scalding hot waterfall as it gushed into the tub. ‘Big girls don’t get bent out of shape by little things,’ she told
herself. Like losing her job. ‘Big girls deal with divorces. Big girls deal with getting pregnant while they’re at school, putting the baby up for adoption, finishing med school, and
retraining for another career when they don’t like the shitty options they get dealt. Big girls cope with marrying their boyfriends, then finding he’s been sleeping with their best
friends. Big girls make CEOs shit themselves when they come calling with a list of questions. They don’t go crazy and think they’re wandering around a rainy forest being shot at by
armored knights with assault rifles.’ She sniffed, on the edge of tears.

A first rational thought intruded:
I’m getting depressed and that’s no good.
Followed rapidly by a second one:
Where’s the bubble bath?
Bubble bath was fun.
Bubble bath was a good thought. Miriam didn’t like wallowing in self-pity, although right now it was almost as tempting as a nice warm shower. She went and searched for the bubble bath,
finally found the bottle in the trashcan – almost, but not entirely, empty. She held it under the tap and let the water rinse the last of the gel out, foaming and swirling around her
feet.

Depression would be a perfectly reasonable response to losing my job,
she told herself,
if it was actually my fault. Which it wasn’t.
Lying back in the scented water and
inhaling steam.
But am I going nuts? I don’t think so.
She’d been through bad times. First the unplanned pregnancy with Ben, in her third year at college, too young and too
early. She still couldn’t fully articulate her reasons for not having an abortion; maybe if that woman from the student counseling service hadn’t simply assumed . . . but she’d
never been one for doing what everyone expected her to do, and she’d been confident – maybe too confident – in her relationship with Ben. Hence the adoption. And then, a couple of
years later when they got married, that hadn’t been the smartest thing she’d ever done either. With twenty-twenty hindsight it had been a response to a relationship already on the
rocks, the kind that could only end in tears. But she’d weathered it all without going crazy or even having a small breakdown.
Iron control, that’s me.
But this new thing, the
stumbling around the woods being shot at, seeing a knight, a guy in armor, with an M16 or something – that was scary. Time to face the music. ‘Am I sane?’ she asked the Toilet
Duck.

Well, whatever this is, it ain’t in the DSM-IV.
Miriam racked her memory for decade-old clinical lectures. No way was this schizophrenia. The symptoms were all wrong, and she
wasn’t hearing voices or feeling weird about people. It was just a single sharp incident, very vivid, realistic as –

She stared at her stained pants and turtleneck. ‘The chair,’ she muttered. ‘If the chair’s missing, it was real. Or at least something happened.’

Paradoxically, the thought of the missing chair gave her something concrete to hang on to. Dripping wet, she stumbled downstairs. Her den was as she’d left it, except that the chair was
missing and there were muddy footprints by the French doors. She knelt to examine the floor behind her desk. She found a couple of books, dislodged from the shelf behind her chair when she fell,
but otherwise no sign of anything unexpected. ‘So it was real!’

A sudden thought struck her and she whirled then ran upstairs to the bathroom, wincing.
The locket!

It was in the pocket of her pants. Pulling a face, she carefully placed it on the shelf above the sink where she could see it, then got into the bathtub.
I’m not going nuts,
she
thought, relaxing in the hot water.
It’s real.

An hour later she emerged, feeling much improved. Hair washed and conditioned, nails carefully trimmed and stripped of the residue of yesterday’s polish, legs itching with mild razor burn,
and skin rosy from an exfoliating scrub, she felt clean: as if she’d succeeded in stripping away all the layers of dirt and paranoia that had stuck to her the day before. It was still only
lunchtime, so she dressed again: an old T-shirt, jeans that had seen better days, and an old pair of sneakers.

The headache and chills subsided slowly, as did the lethargy. She headed downstairs slowly and dumped her dirty clothing in the washing machine. Then she poured herself a glass of orange juice
and managed to force down one of the granola bars she kept for emergencies. This brought more thoughts to mind, and as soon as she’d finished eating she headed downstairs to poke around in
the gloom of the basement.

The basement was a great big rectangular space under the floor of the house. The furnace, bolted to one wall, roared eerily at her; Ben had left lots of stuff with her, her parents had passed on
a lot of their stuff too, and now one wall was faced in industrial shelving units.

Here was a box stuffed with old clothing that she kept meaning to schlep to a charity shop: not her wedding dress – which had gone during the angry month she filed for divorce – but
ordinary stuff, too unimportant to repudiate. There was an old bag full of golf clubs, their chromed heads dull and speckled with rust. Ben had toyed with the idea of doing golf, thinking of it as
a way up the corporate ladder. There was a dead lawn mower, an ancient computer of Ben’s – probably a museum piece by now – and a workbench with vice, saws, drill, and other
woodworking equipment, and maybe the odd bloodstain from his failed attempts to be the man about the house. There on that high shelf was a shotgun and a box of shells. It had belonged to Morris,
her father. She eyed it dubiously. Probably nobody had used it since Dad bought it decades ago, when he’d lived out west for a few years, and what she knew about shotguns could be written on
one side of a postage stamp in very large letters, even though Morris had insisted on dragging her to a range in New Hampshire to teach her how to use a handgun. Some wise words from the
heavyweight course on industrial espionage techniques the
Weatherman
HR folks had paid for her to take two years ago came back: You’re a journalist, and these other folks are
investigators. You’re none of you cops, none of you are doing anything worth risking your lives over, so you should avoid escalating confrontations. Guns turn any confrontation into a
potentially lethal one. So keep them the hell out of your professional life! ‘Shotgun, no,’ she mused. ‘But. Hmm. Handgun.’
Must stop talking to myself,
she
resolved.

‘Do I really expect them to follow me here?’ she asked the broken chest freezer, which gaped uncomprehendingly at her. ‘Did I just dream it all?’

Back upstairs, she swiped her leather-bound planner from the desk and poured another glass of orange juice.
Time to worry about the real world,
she told herself. She went back to the
hall and hit the ‘play’ button on the answering machine. It was backed up with messages from the day before.

‘Miriam? Andy here. Listen, a little bird told me about what happened yesterday and I think it sucks. They didn’t have any details, but I want you to know if you need some freelance
commissions you should give me a call. Talk later? Bye.’

Andy was a junior editor on a rival tech-trade sheet. He sounded stiff and stilted when he talked to the telephone robot, not like a real person at all. But it still gave her a shiver of
happiness, almost a feeling of pure joy, to hear from him. Someone cared, someone who didn’t buy the vicious lie Joe Dixon had put out.
That bastard really got to me,
Miriam
wondered, relief replaced by a flash of anger at the way she’d been treated.