The Legend of Lady MacLaoch (30 page)

Rowan looked at the professor, his insides twisting, but he had to ask, had to know what else. “What? What else would cause tha’?”

Peabody just shook his head and said, “Hurry.”

CHAPTER 43

W
e felt his presence before we knew he was behind us. Following the brothers’ lead, I looked up the hill toward the man who was ambling down to us in a white dress shirt, full kilt, and tartan socks, a long walking stick in hand. And I wanted to throw up again.

Gregoire waved at us as he picked his way carefully down the hill, walking as if hurt. I prayed he would trip in his fancy dress shoes and save us all the trouble.

Turning to the brothers, I caught the movement of something ducking just behind the stone building. Alarm bells went off in my mind. “Get to the boats,” I said, putting my arm out to herd them in that direction.

“What is it, lass? It’s just Gregoire—ye will have no need tae be afraid of him. Besides, we are with ye,” Bernie said, taking my outstretched hand and patting it in what I can only assume was meant to be a reassuring gesture.

“You’d be surprised what that man is capable of,” I said matter-of-factly. “Please, we can discuss this on the way back—please just trust me and get into the boats. We need to go.”

“Oy, man,” Angus called, greeting Gregoire. “How are ye? Ye are looking smart for a leisurely stroll, aren’t ye?”

“Good afternoon, gentlemen and lady,” Gregoire said, curtseying, jesting that we were the royal court and he our subject. I noticed a strawberry bruise on his temple, as if someone had clobbered him with his royal chieftain fist. “The weather has turned, but nothing a nip won’t take care of, and as long as it does not rain, my wedding day will be marvelous.”

Bernie and Angus exchanged a look, and I groaned.

“Well,” Bernie said, seeing that things were becoming strange even for him, “we were just leaving, so we’ll let you tae yer stroll in peace.”

“No, no, gentlemen, I’m afraid you’ll need to leave your charge with me. She and I have a date with history, do we not, dear?” he said and winked elaborately, nearly upsetting himself. He was indeed three sheets to the wind, if not closer to ten or twelve.

“I think not. Let’s go,” I said, confident that I would be successful that time in rounding the brothers into the boats.

“Ha ha!” Gregoire laughed, yet the sound was completely devoid of happiness. He pulled an old revolver from his sporran.

“I’m so done with guns,” I said.

Bernie and Angus put their hands up in a placating manner. “Now, Mac, we’re not going to cause trouble, so just let us go, aye?”

I watched as Gregoire processed the words. He was slow, excessively drunk.

“Nope,” he said, popping the
p
. Something behind us seemed to distract him just then—his eyes widened in shock, then squinted in anger, and he yelped, “Not yet, ye fool!”

Something hard struck something else hard, with a sickening
thunk
, behind me. I turned and staggered backward as Kelly dealt a blow with a wooden paddle to Bernie, Angus already crumpling to the ground, blood oozing from his head.

“Oh . . . ” I said, not fast enough to catch Bernie as my knees went weak and I fought the rise of bile in my throat. Bernie and Angus, I was sure, could not have survived such brutal blows.

Kelly’s face had changed—he was truly grotesque. A putrid purple and yellowy-blue bruise covered the left side of his face, and his nose angled strangely. The colors stood in such stark contrast to his pale skin and red hair that I had a hard time looking away. He tossed the paddle down and yelled at his father, his voice constricted through his broken nose, “What’d ye mean she’s to be your wife?”

I sent up a prayer for the old fishermen but could not wait to see the outcome of their argument. I didn’t care that Gregoire had a gun—he wouldn’t shoot me if he wanted to marry me alive. I bolted for the boats.

“Get her!”

I pushed myself as fast as I could go, but I was a whole foot shorter than my aggressors. Sometimes it’s athletics and sometimes it’s simple physics, but longer legs will cover more ground than shorter ones.

It felt like I had been struck by a Mack truck, I was hit with such force. The blow knocked me clean off my feet and into the water. I barely caught my breath before my head went under. A hand caught a fistful of my hair and held me there.

Rocks slipped under my hands when I tried to push back; the only ones that seemed rooted in place were the ones painfully cutting into my forehead. Legs planted on either side of me, Kelly held me under until my last bit of air bubbled out my nose and up to the surface. Then he held me under longer. I grabbed rocks and tried to smash his feet with them, only I was moving slower and slower, and then I stopped.

Violently my head was yanked up. Cresting the surface, I gasped and coughed, sucking in air and water droplets, careless of the painful pinching in my oxygen-depleted lungs.

Getting a second lungful of air, I mimicked my first action out of the womb and screamed my head off.

My scream was accompanied by the thundering of the clouds, shaking me to the very bone.

Kelly lost his grip on me. “Get the fuck off me, old man!” I heard him holler at his father.

I made my way to my feet, keeping an eye on Gregoire, who was whaling on his son with his walking staff—the gun tucked away, no doubt, in the fur satchel on his belt.

“She’s tae be my wife! But no’ if ye kill her!”

“Wife?” Kelly asked and swatted the staff away. “Ye daft? Ye are already married tae mum.”

A wicked smile crossed Gregoire’s face, making me wonder if he was really all that drunk. “Oh yes, ye are right, son, I misspoke. She is tae be yer wife—ye shouldn’t kill her, or ye’ll have the curse forever on ye and our family. Ye don’t want that now, do ye?”

Kelly looked at me, his bludgeoned face a bloated pout.

I began to shiver, the cold of the water having taken up residence in my core and adrenaline making my body shake. My muscles had been deprived of oxygen too long, effectively making me a human jellyfish. But I kept flopping forward, trying to get away.

Kelly picked me up under one arm and dragged me over to his father. “Pick up yer bloody feet!” he snarled at me.

“I can’t,” I said faintly.

“The fuck ye can’t! Don’t talk back to me!” He wrenched me higher, grasping both my shoulders and shaking me until it felt like my head was going to snap off and roll down to the water’s edge.

I heard Gregoire chuckle through it all, a tight, low sound. “Come now, Kelly, don’t damage your bride-to-be.”

Kelly stopped and glared at me through a puffy eye.

I gave him an equal, though less bloated and more bedraggled, look back, and wished for just a moment that looks could indeed kill.

Kelly threw me at his father’s feet as another blast of thunder and blinding lightning burst the sky wide open.

“Hurry!” Kelly said. “I wannae get out of ’ere.”

“All in good time, my boy,” Gregoire said and leaned over me. He pulled from his bag a long strip of plaid that was not MacLaoch plaid, and grabbed one of my wrists; as soon as the cloth touched my skin, hell broke loose.

Thunder rolled continuously while electricity arched and webbed through the spiraling clouds. Sleet in white sheets slammed down from the heavens.

I found I had the strength again to do simple things, like stand, which I did.

“Ho-no ye don’t!” Gregoire cried out, grabbing for my arm.

Kelly had an arm over his tender face in protection from the sleet. He was not trying to help his father.

After successfully standing, I felt that I could run. So I did that, too.

“Stop!” I heard Gregoire scream and then, seconds later, the distinctive pop of a gun, its sound miniaturized by the climactic weather beating around us.

I ran until I was halfway up the hill. For every two crawling steps forward, I slipped one back on the slick ground. Wind lifted me up one moment and whipped around to slam me down against my backside in another.

I kept looking back—I couldn’t trust my sense of hearing, with the thunder, to know how close my pursuers were. Kelly had wrestled the gun away from his father and was slamming it against the old man’s head.

I hoped they’d stay busy with each other. When Kelly was happy, he was a pervert extraordinaire; now that he was angry, something much darker, filthier, and vile moved in the depths of him. With renewed effort I pushed for the top of the hill—their boat would be on the other side.

I made it to the ridgeline before I was grasped from behind.

I lost my balance, and Kelly and I hit the ground in a tangle of arms and legs. Twisting and hitting, each of us wrestled for the upper hand. I came rolling onto my back, and in an instant Kelly was straddling me. Hands still free, we kept at each other; he tried to capture my wrists as I swatted at him. Panic was widespread within and around me, as if the wildness that I felt inside was being mirrored in my surroundings.

“Leave. Me. Alone!” I hollered through my exertion to both avoid him and try to free myself from under him.

I wasn’t fast enough to see his change in tactics until it was too late. His wide hand smacked across my face, slamming my opposite cheek into the grassy rocks.

“Give me your hands, ye bitch!” he hollered.

Stars danced in my vision and I gasped at the pain that spiked in my skull. “Fuck—” I said, getting cut off as he smacked the other cheek.

It felt like my head was going to rip off under the force of the strike. Moments passed as my brain slogged a torrent of expletives and ringing of commands. In those precious moments, I missed Kelly’s tirade of yelling.

I finally heard him say, “I said to watch me!”

I looked up at him. He’d gone wild, crazy wild. His face contorted in anger as it screamed at me to watch. I still didn’t understand, until I realized his hands were at my button fly, the demand for my hands completely forgotten.

I felt my jeans pop open as he ripped at them and the cold, snapping wind made direct contact with the skin of my belly. Kelly wanted me to watch him as he raped me, and that wasn’t what I had planned for the afternoon.

A shock of cold rage poured in and filled me. Lady MacLaoch must have felt something very much like this in her final moments—rage, the kind of spitting-mad rage that consumes you from head to toe. The hot and moving feeling that anger creates when something has crossed a primal threshold, an attempted trespass that violates the very essence of you.

I grabbed his occupied hands and the second we made eye contact, I said, “I told Rowan that if you ever touched me again I’d break your balls with my knee and your face with my fist, and I keep my promises.” I slammed my knee into his crotch, making the connection the way a hammer does with a nail. Kelly coughed out his breath, pitching forward—as he fell, his face came close, and I kept the second part of my promise. My fist connected with the swollen tissue of his already bruised face and grindingly crunched his nose.

Kelly screamed, clutching his face as he staggered and slipped backward down the hill. I knew I had only a few moments, but I had to button my pants—the need to have that in place consumed me. My fingers shook, but I got each button secured. At the last button, I looked up—to see Kelly, a rock in his hand and intent written clearly upon his face.

Before my mind could tell me to roll out of the way or kick at his legs, or tell me anything at all, something unexpected happened.

The howl of a battle cry rose up from behind me—something in the sound made the hair on my entire body rise. The air quieted, sleet slowed its fall—it felt like the peach orchard before a tornado hits.

I watched as Rowan crested the hill behind me and descended upon his cousin. His elbow cracked across his cousin’s jaw just before he tucked his head, tackling Kelly like an all-star defensive end.

The sky opened up once again, rioting, feeding on our energy.

Sparing just one glance toward Rowan and Kelly before making my escape, I shuddered at what I saw. Rowan had become a dark shadow of the loving man I’d gotten to know; this was the take-no-prisoners, listen-to-no-pleas, kill-all-them-sons-of-bitches Rowan MacLaoch. It seemed that each one of his demons had come to the surface, and each one wanted to exhaust itself in battle with Kelly. To pummel his kin with practiced restraint until Kelly’s blood ran into the soil of the island as a sacrifice to Lady MacLaoch herself.

Employing a mixture of crawling and scrabbling, I made my way to the fishing shed before I breathed again. Only then did I remember Angus and Bernie. I looked to the place they’d fallen, prepared to see the bodies of my beloved fishermen. They were no longer there. Not on the shore, not in the churning water, not in the boats.

I looked back up the hill, toward Rowan and Kelly and, in the distance to the side of them, a different movement caught my eye. Lightning arched and disappeared in a roar of thunder. It was the MacDonagh brothers.

I watched as they made their way, hunched against the sleet and wind, to a low, flat-topped boulder. A brother on each side, they ripped at the grass covering its surface and then placed their hands upon it.

Realization dawned: as Secret Keepers, they were the final link in the curse breaking, and this was why they needed Rowan. As I watched them, the air above the rock became misty. A solitary fog began to form over the flat-topped boulder.