Even In Darkness (Between) (5 page)

“Aiden!
It’s okay, I’m okay.”

His
eyes flew open wide as he focused over my shoulder. “What are you—”

An electric spasm ripped through my body
as the taser prongs pierced my clothing. My muscles seized up and I lost all control of my body, pulsing in agony. I flopped forward against Aiden. He circled his arms to try and stay upright, but the snow was slick under his feet, and he couldn’t keep his balance with my dead weight flung against him. We crashed backward through the fence and toppled over the edge of the cliff toward the icy waters below.

The last memory I have is of falling
through empty space with Aiden’s scream ringing in my ears.

Chapter 6

Complete darkness engulfed me. The sensation of falling had abruptly ceased, replaced by a soft, floating feeling. I flung my arms out in front of me, blindly trying to make contact with something, anything, to orient myself.
My feet touched ground.

Aiden?
Are you there?
Even in my head, my voice wobbled with panic.

I’m here
, but I can’t see you. Are ye hurt?
He sounded near and far away at the same time. I couldn’t make sense of it.

Blinking rapidly, hoping my eyes would adjust enough to capture some light in the black void around
me, I took a tentative step forward. Strong arms found me, held me, caressed me. I clung to him like a drowning woman.

“What’s happening? Why can’t I see?”

Aiden’s hands wandered over my body, through my hair, tracing the contours of my face like he was memorizing the shape of me. I took a hiccupping breath and noticed that his natural woodsy scent was gone, replaced by something unfamiliar.

“Don’t be afraid,”
a deep voice whispered. It didn’t sound like Aiden.

I
shoved against him. “Who are you? Where are we?”

Though it was impossible to see, I felt his grin. “
I am your lover and you are right where I want you to be, precious. Now let us see who emerges the victor, shall we?”

Before my brain could process
what that could possibly mean, I was falling again.

***

I hit the ground with a thud, landing hard on my right shoulder. Pain lanced down my side as I rolled to a stop. Sharp edges of wiry grass bit at my face as I struggled to right myself. Light burned my eyes and I instinctively clamped them shut to protect myself. I pushed my hair out of my face and took a deep breath, then tried again, squinting to let just a fraction of light in this time. Blurry shapes and shadows were all I could make out, which only added to the panic clawing inside me.

A
iden!
I screamed in my mind, but he didn’t respond.

Questions whirled through my brain like a tornado: Am I dead? Is he dead? Did I die and he lived? Did he come forward after three hundred years, only to be left on
Earth alone? What have I done? Where the hell am I?

Oh, God. It was my stupid fault. I knocked us off the cliff. I sent us hurtling to our death, or my death, or what?

“This can’t be happening!” I wanted to scream, but I was so beyond freaked out that only a squeak came out. Pressing my hands to my eyes, wishing I could see clearly, I tried to make sense of the madness. If I’m dead and Aiden’s not, will I be able to hear him the way that he could hear me before? But wait, after we fell, he said he couldn’t see me, that he was in the dark. So maybe he died, too. But if he did, where is he? And why won’t he answer me?

The acrid scent of cannon smoke assaulted my nostrils, making my lungs burn.
Cannon smoke?
I recognized the smell from the day of Aiden’s death, when the English had blown up the castle with the Scots’ gunpowder and Aiden had taken his own life.

Confusion pummeled me from all sides
. If I was dead, why would I cast this scene?

Casting!
I just about smacked myself on the forehead.

Taking a deep breath, I envisioned the beautiful meadow where I’d first met Aiden, and waited for the familiar shimmer to pass through me
to indicate that I’d changed the environment.

Nothing happened.

An explosion of cannon fire to my left made me jump. I raced to try it again. Still nothing.

My arm ached where I’d landed on it—another mystery. If I was dead, nothing should hurt, right? It didn’t the first time. I reached up to massage my shoulder. The fabric under my hand was coarse, thick,
unfamiliar. The intense brightness that had stolen my vision began to recede. I looked down at myself and saw that my jeans and sweater were replaced by a drab, eighteenth-century wool dress. Did Aiden cast me in this? Why would he do that? And if he did, where was he?

Tears pooled in my eyes while I fought to keep hold of my sanity.

I stood
up with some difficulty, as the heavy skirts felt odd, tugging at my hips, the corset tight around my chest. The scene before me was just as I’d remembered: three English warships in the loch, the castle on fire, debris from the explosion littering the ground. I swung my gaze from side to side, looking for Aiden. When he’d been my transporter, he’d always been beside me, looking over the scene like a ghost, unable to touch or interact with anyone but me. But now, he was nowhere to be found.

I was
caught in this reenactment of his worst memory, alone.

Squinting through
the smoke, I spied Aiden’s bleeding body lying crumpled next to a boulder at the water’s edge. Instinctively, I moved toward him, my dense skirts and the uneven ground making it impossible to walk quickly. I knew I couldn’t touch him. I knew I couldn’t affect anything that had happened in the past. I knew my hand would pass right through, but I reached for him anyway.

My fingers
landed on hot, solid flesh.

I jerk
ed back like he’d burned me. My palm was covered in his blood. What in the hell? Everything I knew about the Between realm was turned upside down. I couldn’t cast, I couldn’t find my transporter guide, and now this.

Aiden’s groan snapped me out of my shock. He was reaching for his pistol. Instantly, I knew what he intended to do.
He was going to load the gun, point it at his temple, and pull the trigger. The last time I was here, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I couldn’t touch him. I couldn’t stop it. I just had to stand there and watch it happen.

Not this time
.

I yanked
the pistol of out of his grasp and buried it in the waistband of my skirts. Aiden swore and tried to focus bleary eyes on me. There was no recognition there, but his face was riddled with pain and he seemed to be going in and out of consciousness.

Now what?

A bullet whizzed past us and, for the first time, it occurred to me that the English soldiers could see me, too. Holy crap! I had to get us out of there. Only, I had no idea where to go, since Aiden’s memory had abruptly ceased the last time I’d seen this. A small white building stood down the hill a bit, and I decided to carry him there, out of the path of the soldiers, until I could figure out what to do next. My heart hammered against the corset squeezing my ribs. With my fingernails biting into my palms, I made another attempt at casting, praying that this craziness would end and that Aiden would come back to me.

It didn’t work
.

Out of the corner of my eye, I
saw a thin, red-haired boy in a kilt darting across the field to hide behind a tree. I recognized him instantly: Willie, Aiden’s younger brother.

Only, it couldn’t be him! Willie is dead, I told myself. I saw him die. I…
well, I didn’t see it, exactly. But he was the only one guarding the cellar door when Aiden came out to chase the Spaniard who had betrayed them all. Aiden had given Willie a dagger and showed him how to use it to kill an enemy. Two Englishmen had crossed the lake and made it to the castle, but only one had come out. I thought for sure that meant Willie had taken one out and been killed in the process. But maybe not. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe Willie had escaped. My heart leapt with joy at the thought, and I started to call out to him. A hard yank on my skirt distracted me.

“
Give me back my pistol, ye thief!” Aiden’s voice was loud enough to be heard by the soldiers. Another bullet flew past us.

Shit, I ha
d to get him out of there. Grabbing Aiden underneath the arms, I tried to drag him, but he weighed a ton. I could hardly move him an inch by myself.

“
Willie!” I called out as loudly as I dared, hoping he would hear.

His astonished face peer
ed around the tree at me. “Who are you?” he asked.

“Never mind that right now. Come help me get your brother
to safety.” He hesitated and my patience completely snapped. “Now, dammit! Or I’m going to come over there and beat your scrawny ass!”

Apparently recognizing a woman at her limit, he scrambled across the ground to my side and took Aiden’s other arm. The two of us dragged him to the outbuilding, which I now recognized as the church we
’d once run toward, laughing and chasing one another. My heart squeezed painfully at the memory, but I shoved the emotion aside. I couldn’t think about that now. For whatever reason, I was in Between again, but it was not the realm I knew. And though I was relieved to be able to save Aiden from shooting himself, I had absolutely no idea what to do next. Part of me wanted to believe it was all just some terrible hallucination, that none of this was happening, but the pain in my shoulder was all too real, as was the blood streaming over my wrists from where I supported Aiden.

Willie
swung open the door to the church and we carried Aiden inside. Sweat snaked a path between my breasts and it was all I could do to keep from ripping off the infernal corset so I could breathe. Propping Aiden against the closest pew, I dropped down beside him and rubbed my aching shoulder.

Willie pointed his dagger
in my face and waved it around like a wand. The exertion of moving Aiden had brought some color back to his cheeks, but his eyes were wild with fear.

“How do ye know my name?” he demanded. “Are ye a spy? But then, why would ye help my brother?”

I felt a rush of sympathy for him. He was just a kid—twelve years old, if I remembered correctly—and his home was nothing more than a smoking cavern of ruins, his brother was bleeding and unconscious, the rest of his family was probably dead, and his only ally was some strange woman who’d just threatened to kick his ass. I wanted to pull him into my arms and comfort him, to tell him everything was going be all right. But everything was clearly not all right and with Aiden half-dead at my feet, I couldn’t spare the time to pretend like it was.

“
Put that away,” I ordered, waving a hand in dismissal. “I’m his wife.”

Willie’s face scrunched up in
angry disbelief. “You lie! My brother is not married.”

“Yes, he is! Twice over as a matter of fact and I’m getting pretty damn sick of having to justify that.” A growl of frustration ripped out of my throat. I was
really starting to lose it. “Look, I’ll explain everything later, I promise, but right now we have to think.” I stood up and rubbed my eyes to try and reset my brain. “Bandages. We need bandages. We have to stop the bleeding.” Willie helplessly shook his head, but he did at least tuck the dagger into his kilt. “Maybe I can make a tourniquet with the hem of my skirt. That’s what they always do in books.” Ignoring Willie’s perplexed expression, I bent down to examine the fabric of my underskirt, but Aiden’s voice stopped me.

“Water,”
he whispered, smacking his dry lips together. His breathing had become labored and his pupils were dilated. Moving him may have been too much for his body to endure. He’d been shot in the shoulder and pierced through the thigh with a bayonet. Blood covered his body like a crimson cloak. After all this, was I going to lose him anyway? And what would that even mean?

“There’s plenty of water where you’re going, traitor,” a deep voice called from the shadows. A red-coated soldier emerged from a door to the side of the pulpit, his gun trained on us. His steps were calm and measured as he walked toward us. “In fact, I’d venture to say you’ll be fairly sick of it by the time we get to England for your hanging. Perhaps I should just take care of you now.”

Hanging? Oh, God.

But it wasn’t the threat in his words that caused my chest to seize in fear. When he came near enough for me to see his face, my entire world stopped. He was the spitting image of Aiden, only with dark hair and dark eyes.

The anti-Aiden.

All of a sudden, everything clicked into place. I’d always known that time was not the same in Between as on Earth and Aiden had even guessed that the child he’d unwittingly fathered could be fully grown by now. Staring into his dark eyes, I knew without a doubt that I was looking at Aiden’s son.

It was too much. All of it was too much.
Straining against the corset constricting my ribs, I struggled unsuccessfully to pull air into my lungs. Stars swam in my vision. My legs buckled beneath me.

“You’re the spawn,” I choked out
before everything went black.