But the interruption was for the best, she knew. She stepped away from Dale and shook her head. “Neither Hazel nor I are going back to the car. We’re all going to hike up to the headwater and stop Roberts. If we’re lucky, we’ll find the source of the stones—” she touched her pocket “—and maybe…”
The graves. They all thought it, but not one of them could say the words. The wind chose that moment to howl through the trees like the tortured damned and Tansy flinched.
“Fine.” Dale cursed. “Have it your way.” He finally backed off and nodded, though his eyes stayed that deep, intimidating color they took on when he was really upset.
Or really turned on. The memory brought frantic blood chasing through Tansy’s body, remembering how it had been between them. And though it was un
wise and probably destructive, she let the memory come and drive away the feeling of damp, rotting earth and the smell of old blood and new fear.
At least it made her feel warmer, for a little while.
WHEN THEY REACHED the headwater, it was almost anticlimactic. There was no sign of Roberts, nor any evidence that he’d been there. There was nobody to claim the broken watch and the locket. Though Trask had been unable to identify the items, his mention of missing boat crews had started Dale wondering.
What if fishing off Lobster Island wasn’t as dangerous as the numbers suggested?
What if it was living
on
Lobster Island that killed people?
“Now what?” Standing at his shoulder, Tansy asked the question for all of them. The woods thinned at the edge of the river, allowing the gray daylight to filter through, along with more of the rain and the wind.
Harriet, it seemed, was in a hurry to reach Lobster Island, after all.
“I don’t know.” Damn it. He’d been so sure this was the key. They would reach the headwater, find Roberts and he would lead them to…what? Dale wasn’t even sure anymore whether he was looking for the source of the pseudo-PSP or the bodies of his parents.
Part of him feared he would find both.
“Are we sure this is the right place?” Hazel asked, joining them at the water’s edge.
Trask nodded. “Yeah. But I don’t see any of the stones.”
The older man had been growing increasingly more agitated as the trek wore on. Dale understood, as he was feeling it, too. There was a growing sense of danger coming from all directions, along with the confusion that came from not knowing enough.
Tansy often fretted because she wanted to know more, always more. Before, he’d found it irritating, an invasion.
Now, he understood how she felt.
“I see one!” Hazel’s excited shout yanked their attention upstream, to where she hung off an over-reaching limb, straining toward the water. “I’ve found one of the rocks!”
Trask cursed and started toward her at a run. “Damn it, Hazel, be quiet and get back! You’re going to—”
Fall in.
The branch broke and Hazel overbalanced with a cry. She splashed ungracefully into the waist-deep water, surfaced once, and disappeared.
“The slicker!” Dale yelled to the running Trask. “Her slicker’s filled with water.” Damn it, he knew he should’ve left the things behind. But turning them inside out and rubbing them with dirt had camouflaged the bright colors enough that he’d thought it safe to keep them on in the cold, cutting wind.
Now, it seemed that he’d been wrong.
“No kidding,” snapped the veteran lobsterman.
He tore off his own jacket and plunged into the river after Hazel.
He stumbled and went under almost immediately. Dale was halfway out of his own jacket when he saw his uncle surge back up, clutching Hazel around her torso.
Both of them were coughing and spluttering, but unhurt when they dragged themselves ashore.
“God, are you okay?” Dale knew his question was inane, but didn’t know how to articulate the things he was feeling.
Feelings were Tansy’s department.
“Well, I won’t worry about getting wet from the rain anymore.” Huddled against Trask’s solid bulk, Hazel attempted a smile through lips that were already beginning to tremble from the cold. “I feel stupid as hell, though. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Hush,” Trask ordered. “You’re about the least stupid person I’ve ever met.”
As a declaration of undying love, Dale figured it left a bit to be desired, but Hazel glowed at the compliment.
“Dale, they’re going to freeze in about five minutes,” Tansy murmured, nudging him in the side. “Damp is one thing, soaking wet is another.”
He nodded. “Yeah.” Raising his voice over the freshening wind, he said, “Go back down, both of you. You’ll catch your deaths if you stay up here.”
The words seemed oddly prophetic.
“I’m fine,” Trask declared, standing up and
staunchly wringing out the tails of his shirt. “That’s my wife we’re searching for. I want to stay.”
Hazel closed her eyes, and a look of exquisite pain washed across her features.
Tansy faced Trask, hands on hips, crowding into his personal space with her jaw thrust out and her eyes blazing. “Your wife is dead.” When Trask fell back a step, Tansy advanced. “Hazel is here, not Suzie. Hazel. She needs you, Trask, and you’re damn well going to get your head out of your past and give her what she needs, got it?”
“Tansy, this isn’t necessary,” Hazel said quietly, climbing to her feet. “Let him go. He needs to find his wife, and Roberts must be stopped. I’ll walk back down and lock myself in the jeep. Take this, you’ll need it.” She handed the shotgun to Tansy.
With as much dignity as she could muster, bedraggled and sopping wet, the island’s doctor turned and stomped back down the path, squishing as she went.
The others stood motionless for a moment. Dale stared at Hazel’s retreating back, wondering what had just happened and feeling somehow guilty for it. Tansy stared at Trask, jaw clenched, fury in her eye.
Finally, Trask cursed and strode after Hazel, seeming more powerful soaking wet rather than less. At the verge of the heavy growth, he turned back. “Take care of yourself, boy.” Dale felt the punch of his uncle’s concern and felt a small, scared wish that it hadn’t taken fifteen years for him to return to the is
land. Then Trask jerked his chin toward Tansy. “And take care of her, you hear?”
And that small, scared boy’s wish coalesced into a man’s determination. Nothing was going to harm his Tansy. Nothing.
He locked his jaw and nodded once. “I will.”
When Trask and Hazel had been swallowed up in the sulky forest mist, Dale turned to Tansy. “Think the gun is any good now that it’s been in the river?”
“I don’t know.” She handed it to him, then opened her palm and held it up. Dull purple glittered, reflecting the gray light off broken amethyst facets. “She gave me this, as well. She was right, she’d found one of the stones.”
As though her words had unlocked the secret, a breath of warmer air blew across them, sweeping aside the rain and the wind. A gap in the clouds allowed the sun to struggle through in a single spotlight-beam of radiance that lit a cliff face across the river upstream of them. Tansy gasped and grabbed Dale’s sleeve, but it was unnecessary.
He saw it. A glitter of purple fire cascading down from the dark, gaping mouth of a cave. He cursed under his breath as the knowledge washed over him, and the memory of Hazel’s words.
Curtis was incoherent by then…kept rambling on about lightning bolts and Ali Baba’s cave.
The teenagers, Dale’s parents and God only knew how many others in between had been murdered to
protect the location of the cave. And if they didn’t get out of here, fast, he and Tansy would be next.
“COME ON. We’ve found the stones and missed Roberts. Let’s head back and regroup.”
Tansy braced her feet in the mud as the feeble sunlight guttered and died. “Shouldn’t we investigate the cave?”
Dale’s face darkened and the sky rumbled behind him. “Absolutely. Positively. Not. Let’s go.”
She allowed him to tug her down the path they’d cut through the bracken, but she took one long look back over her shoulder. The gray sky cast no sparkles on the runoff, but she’d seen them. The gems drew her just as surely as the cave repelled her. Like the forest, it seemed old and evil. Waiting.
She shivered as the rain began again and a fat drop slid down the back of her neck. Trying to hurry, she scrambled along the sloppy track behind Dale, feeling the mud suck at her boots with every step. Feeling as though something dark and evil was chasing them down to the beach.
“Faster!” she shouted to Dale, sensing the storm building more violently than she could have imagined, knowing that the hurricane had finally arrived. “We’ve got to get down to the— Aah!” The mud gave way beneath her right foot and she fell to the side. Kept falling as her leg plunged through into emptiness. “Dale!”
“Damn!” He grabbed her arm and yanked her
back to solid ground. They stared at the hole, breathing heavily. He cursed. “Another pit trap.”
By poking the ground before they stepped on it, the group had avoided two more of the booby traps along the way. They’d missed this one, which was just to the side of the path they’d cut.
His fingers gentled on her arm, though he didn’t move away. Tansy’s urgency of a moment ago shifted, becoming a new, warmer urgency. One she didn’t trust.
“Come on, we need to get moving,” she called over the rising wind, and the rattling sound of raindrops hitting their yellow rubberized slickers like drumbeats.
But Dale didn’t move. He stayed there, fingers now caressing her arm as he stared down at her with unreadable emotions crowding his eyes.
Dale? Emotions? Confusion pricked deep in Tansy’s chest. But before she could ask, he said, “I am so sorry I got you into this, Tans. So damn sorry.”
And like a punch in the gut, she finally understood that part of his need to drive her away came not from the fact that he wanted her out of his life, but because he was afraid for her. He wanted her safe.
He cared.
But just as she was thinking it was too little, too late that she had learned her worth on Lobster Island and she deserved better than scraps of his heart, he kissed her.
And all other thoughts fled.
His taste, familiar yet not, exploded across her lips and tongue like the flash of lightning that glowed red through her closed eyelids. Thunder chased on the heels of its lightning, but she could barely hear it over the pounding of blood in her ears as Dale crowded close to her.
Dale,
her mind whimpered as her body flared to life.
Dale.
Everything was cool and wet—from the rain, from the air. Except for their mouths. The heat lay there, in the slippery junction of bodies otherwise held apart by rubber rain suits and history.
She sank, almost unwillingly, deeper into the kiss when he slanted his mouth across hers, seeking more. Always more. This was the one place he never held back from her.
Straining closer to him, she felt cold, wet clothing stick to suddenly heated places with a torturous friction. When the rain cascaded down on them amidst a mutter of thunder, neither of them moved. The touch of their lips heated the rain to a warm shower, and the contrast of hot and cold was maddening.
Like the man himself.
Remembering her vow, and her worth, Tansy eased away from Dale with real regret. He stared down at her, eyes huge and dark, then shook himself, face suddenly fierce. “What the hell are we doing?”
Tansy ignored the twinge of hurt. Hot and cold. That was Dale. “We’re getting out of here,” she yelled over the wind, then jumped and shrieked when
there was a strange
zzzzzt
sound and the twisted tree beside her jerked and toppled over. “Lightning!”
“Hell!” Dale knocked her down and covered her with his body as two other trees were cut down with wet-sounding thwacks from invisible machetes. “It’s not lightning. He’s shooting at us!”
“He’s what? Who?” Tansy yelled over the wind and the rain and a scattering of wild shots, unable to believe this was actually happening to them. They were being
shot
at, for God’s sake.
“Roberts,” Dale yelled back, keeping his head below the level of the knee-high leafy ground cover. “We found him. Or he found us. Come on!” He bellied backward off the path, staying low and moving fast.
Tansy followed, expecting at any moment to feel the heavy thud of impact, feel the delayed burn she imagined would come with a bullet wound. Her heart hammered in her ears, or maybe that was the ever-nearing thunder and the voice of Harriet as the hurricane descended upon Lobster Island.
They huddled behind a larger tree at the edge of the path and Dale peered around it. He held a hand back. “Give me the gun!” he yelled over the storm and the river’s rush.
She passed it to him. “It’s wet.” There was no telling whether it would fire now. But it was their only hope.
“It had better,” Dale called back, confirming her thoughts. “He’s over there, between those two big rocks.”
Tansy risked a look, figuring from the brief lull in the firing that Roberts must be reloading. She saw the rocks but not the man. “Are you sure?”
“Trust me.” He clasped her shoulder in a brief squeeze, so the two words took on much more meaning. Then he let his hand drop and jerked his head back toward the cave. “When I say the word, I want you to run for the cave, got it? I’ll cover you.”
A bullet smacked into the tree beside Tansy’s hand and she jumped back, feeling the sting in her fingers. “Dale, wait! I…”
“It’s our only chance, Tans. We’re sitting ducks out here, and the storm is only going to get worse. We’ve got to get across that river and up to the cave. It looks dry and we can defend it. I’ll be right behind you. I promise.” He gave her a not-too-gentle shove. “Now, go!”
Lightning flickered above them, and in its flash Tansy noticed something new in his eyes, though she couldn’t have said exactly what it was.
Without another word, she turned and ran for the cave, trusting Dale to guard her back.
Gunfire erupted from the rocks on the other side of the path, quickly answered by the shotgun’s deep-bellied roar. Thank God it had fired.