The Gathering Darkness (9 page)

After his unwilling confession, which hinted to me that he did have some sort of feelings for me, neither of us spoke for some time.

As I bounced along, clinging to Marcus like he was my life preserver, the sky darkened completely.

“How close are we?” I asked.

“Not close enough. I can’t see that well anymore.” He stopped. I could tell by the way his shoulders heaved up and down that he needed a rest. I slid off him, landing on my good foot.

Marcus raked his eyes over the area.

“Don’t you have a cell phone?” I asked with despairing hope.

He shook his head. “I left it on the boat.”

“Well that was smart,” I mumbled under my breath.

“I’m going to yell out to see if anyone can hear me.”

With his hands cupped around his mouth, Marcus yelled at the top of his lungs, but the only reply was his echo and a distant caw.

“It’s no use,” I said. The yelling just made me jumpy.

“I’ll make a fire. We’ll have to stay here until morning.” He gave me an apologetic look that I could barely see.

“Great,” I mumbled and then looked around the ground for anything useful. “What can I do?”

“Tear some loose bark from that tree.” He pointed at a white birch.

The tree was maybe a dozen feet away. As apprehensive as I was about leaving his side, I didn’t want him to know it. So, keeping him in my sight, I hobbled over to the tree and ripped off an armful of loose bark. He had the leftover newspaper shredded into bits, and a small pile of sticks arranged in a pyramidal formation by the time I returned. A bundle of fallen sticks lay on the ground beside him. He built us a sufficient campfire of our very own, and although it was only a dim glow, he brought light to me once more.

However, the prevailing gloom hovered near the fringes of the light, waiting to quell the last ember and plunge us into darkness once again.

With Marcus’ help, I lowered myself into a sitting position on a patch of dry moss. He sat down beside me and stared into the flames. Except for the crackling of burning sticks, the forest was quiet. So when I spoke, it was very low, so as not to disturb the forest.

“What did the others do when you left to find me?”

He hesitated, and an amused grin spread across his face. “I don’t think anyone noticed me leaving.”

“They must have noticed by now?” I was annoyed at his casualness of the situation.

“By now, they’re probably thinking we’ve run off together. I mean, that would be the obvious assumption, wouldn’t it?” An eyebrow rose in anticipation of my reply as he continued to stare into the flames.

“Oh. I hadn’t thought of that.” He was probably right.
What would everyone think of me
?
What would Evan think
?

“You’ve ruined my brother’s night by getting lost, you know. I’ll never hear the end of it.” He chuckled quietly.

“This sucks.”
Or does it
? I asked myself.

His expression darkened. “What, you’re not having fun?”

“Not funny.” I stared gloomily into the flames, feeling their warmth kiss the front of my body.

Marcus stirred the fire and then tossed on the last of the dried sticks and a big fallen log he’d found nearby. Cinders soared into the night sky, casting a brighter glow upon us—swelling our circle of light—pushing back the darkness somewhat. I sneaked a glance at him out of the corner of my eye. This impenetrable country boy was perfectly content out here in the wild.
He must really like me to have run through the woods to find me
, I thought to myself.

“How’s your ankle?” he asked suddenly.

Crap! He caught me looking at him again.
Embarrassed, I quickly turned my face away. “I think it’s swollen, and it stings, but it’s no worse.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw him nod. I was also aware of the fact that he was looking at me again.

A sudden gust of wind swept over us, blowing across the flames, causing them to lick at the ground. I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself despite the warmth of the fire.

“Here.” Marcus took off his over-washed flannel shirt and handed it to me.

“But you’ll be cold.”

“I’ll be fine,” he assured me.

As I reached for the shirt, I allowed myself a few seconds glance at the muscled arm that held it out to me. That’s when my eyes rested on something unexpected. The breath caught in my throat, and my eyes grew wide. I stretched my neck out toward his arm to get a closer look. When Marcus turned his head toward me, I saw my shock mirrored on his face.

Shyness aside, I reached over and shoved his T-shirt sleeve up. A tattoo of double spirals encircled his biceps. “Why didn’t you tell me?” My voice was higher pitched than usual.

He shrugged. “It’s just a tattoo, no big deal.”

“No big deal?! It’s the exact same symbol as the pendant we just found!”

“I figured if I told you, you’d freak out, like you’re doing now.”

“Freak … of course I’m freaking out.”

“Brooke, it’s just a coincidence.”

“No way. This is too weird to be
just
a coincidence.”

He looked down at my hand where it covered his view of the tattoo. Aware for the first time that I was touching him, I pulled it back, but the sleeve stayed bunched up around his shoulder.

Instinctively I grabbed my new Celtic relic and held it up in a way so that I could see both, his tattoo and it, in my vision at the same time. As if we needed it, the light from the fire intensified. It gleamed off the shiny bits of metal peeking through the burnished surface of the pendant, casting a warm glow over the black ink around Marcus’ arm, and it brought a spark of warmth to his eyes, which were looking intensely into mine.

With a fever spreading over my skin and a yearning pull in my gut, I jerked my gaze back to the object in my hand. Each double spiral in the tattoo was equal in size to the pendant.

“So, what do you think it means?” he asked, the serious edge in his voice betraying his casualness of the situation. “Day and night, huh?” There was a nervous ring to the short laugh that came after his last remark.

“Or,” I pointed to me then to him, “Day and
Knight
?”

Wordless, he nodded.

All this time, he had to have been pondering what I’d told him about the symbol. I dropped the pendant to my chest and looked back at the tattoo. It looked slightly raised, as if it were still healing. My eyes narrowed in suspicion. “When did you get it?”

“Last Sunday.”

“The day I came to Deadwich,” I said.

He nodded.

I shivered again and remembered I still held the shirt. Grateful, I slipped my bare arms into the warm sleeves. I wrapped my arms around my legs and lay my chin down on my knees and drank in the masculine, but fresh scent of Marcus. As I stared into the dying fire, I considered all that had happened in the hours since I’d gotten lost. Then I yawned.

“Why don’t you get some sleep? I’ll keep the fire going,” Marcus suggested.

“I am really tired,” I confessed before yawning again. “But, I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep out here.”

The truth was, this double spiral thing had me totally freaked out. It was somehow significant, and so was falling into the well to find it. And despite what Marcus wanted me to believe, I had a feeling he was just as freaked out as I was. It was no coincidence that our last names matched the symbol’s meaning. I yawned again. It couldn’t be.

I looked over at him. “Um, you can’t just sit there all night. Why don’t you lie down too?” I was grateful the fire had died down, because I felt my face flush with my sudden boldness.

“If it’ll make you feel better,” he said casually and then, to my surprise, he shuffled closer to me.

He lay down behind me and put his hand on my shoulder as if to guide me down.
How perfect
. My heart raced wildly. He wasn’t just going to lie down anywhere; he was going to lie down beside me. The side of my face came to rest against the musty-smelling moss. Marcus kept his body just far enough behind me so I couldn’t really feel him.

We can do better than this.

I sat back up, took Marcus’ shirt off and positioned it over us, then lay back down. His body had shifted, and this time, my head landed on his arm. From the initial surprise, I stiffened, but after a few breaths, I allowed my body to relax into his. With just our T-shirts between us, I could faintly feel his heart beat against my back. I smiled to myself.
That’s better.

I laid my hand across his arm, next to my cheek, and was rewarded by the comforting feeling of his other arm draping across my waist. He snuggled in a little closer still. My light was with me, and I felt warm and safe in the dark forest.

The flames flickered in the dying fire, imprinting images of all sorts in my mind, until every shape I saw became sinister and scary. I closed my eyes and concentrated on feeling Marcus’ warm body next to mine; the soothing thump of his heart beating against my back made me want to turn and press my heart to his.
Where did these feelings come from
? I told myself it was just because he’d saved me from doom, and I was grateful, nothing more. Then why did I get a tingle when he stirred slightly, flattening his hand out on my stomach? The kind of tingle that makes your heart stop beating for a second then flutter back to life; the kind of tingle you don’t want to end.

“Are you still cold?” he asked, stirring the hairs on the back of my head with his breath.

“No. You?”

“No.”

A few moments passed.

“Marcus?”

“Yeah?”

“What made you decide to come and look for me?”

He didn’t speak for a long moment. I held my breath waiting for his answer, and then he said, “You were gone too long. I thought you might be lost.” He paused. I heard him swallow. “And it was getting dark.”

“Oh.” Funny how he had been the only one who noticed I was missing.

“Thanks again for finding me,” I said softly. In answer, his arm tightened around me, and I fell into a dreamless sleep in the light of my protector’s arms.

I
awoke shivering. The morning air had a chill to it that nipped the skin on my lower back where my T-shirt had hiked up. Sometime during the night, Marcus and I had both turned. I was curled into a ball now against his back. My head lay on the moss, and …
oh, my God
… my arm was around his waist. His arm was on top of mine, his hand around my wrist, holding it closely to him.

My eyes sprung open to darkness. My face, which was buried under the flannel shirt, was pressed up against Marcus’ black T-shirt. My mind raced back to the previous night, searching for a reason why I would be hugging him, but my last memory before waking up was of falling asleep, facing the fire with
his
arm around me.

Careful not to wake him, I eased my arm out from under his. When I heard a soft groan, I stiffened, my hand hovering an inch above his side. When he didn’t move, I retracted my arm and rolled onto my back. It was then that I felt as if I had been beaten and left to die.

Every muscle in my body ached from the fall—and sleeping on the ground hadn’t helped. I clamped down on my teeth and sat up. Marcus stirred and looked over his shoulder at me.

“Oh, sorry. Did I wake you?” I asked, before I could think of something
not
stupid to say.

“Yeah,” he said with a morning rasp to his voice, “and I really wanted to sleep in today too.”

I rolled my eyes at him. “Well roll back over then, and I’ll wake you at what … noon?”

“I’d appreciate it, thanks,” he said in a sleepy whisper. His head rolled back away from me.

You can’t be serious
, I said to myself when it looked as if he really was going to go back to sleep. When I saw his shoulder twitch with a silent laugh, I smiled to myself.

I rubbed my eyes and looked at our surroundings for the first time. A thick accumulation of mist made it difficult to see the tree tops. Other than that, the forest didn’t seem as frightening in the morning light.

The raw dampness raised goose bumps on my arms, though, and I shivered again. I shoved them back under the shirt, not wanting to come out from under it just yet. To the left of me, our little fire that had once kept me warm and safe from the darkness was reduced to a pile of ash. On the other side of the ash, through the pathless forest, the well existed somewhere—or did it? I began to wonder if it was really there when no one was around to see it.

Get a grip, Brooke. You need to get out of this place and back to civilization. If that’s what you would call it
.

I glanced down at Marcus again. His back warmed my legs. His breathing had become steady again. “Are you seriously going back to sleep?”

“Just five more minutes,” he groaned.

I huffed in disbelief, threw the shirt off my legs and with a few muffled grunts and groans, pushed myself into a standing position. Marcus rolled lazily onto his back, stretching himself out. His head fell into the indentation in the moss where mine had been, his eyes still closed.

In a way, I wished I hadn’t gotten up. I wanted the chance to wrap my arm around him again, feel him against me and let him sleep if he wanted to. Already, as I stood stiffly hugging myself in the chill air, the memory of the warmth between us faded.