Highland Shapeshifter (14 page)

Nails scraped on the cement floor. Lenore’s mouth went dry, throat tight. The scream jolted her eyes open, heart pounding.

“No,” Bekah hiccupped, horror coating her voice raw.

Instead of coming to them, the trogs had gone to the yuppie with a broken leg by the door, a dozen clawed hands slashing into him. Bekah screamed for them to stop, shooting up to her feet. Col grabbed her, holding her back. Within seconds the monsters had ripped through the man’s stomach, pulling out organs and ropey intestines, shoving handfuls into their mouths like starving hyenas. And the guy was still screaming.

Lenore was going to be sick.

She was yanked off the floor and shoved forward, not toward the door where the Morlocks fought over scraps and torn limbs—an arm, severed at the elbow flew in the air where an acrobatic beast snatched it in his teeth—but the other direction, toward, a dark hall. Col held onto the yuppie woman by the arm though she no longer needed any prodding either as they flew down the dark hall, running as fast and far as they cold before the Sifts noticed they were gone.

Chapter Seventeen

Lenore never ran so fast. Ravenous troglodytes chowing down on a person in front of her was pretty damn motivating. And a pretty damn good reason to swear. Dammit, dammit, dammit. They ate him alive. They ATE him. Shit. They ate him.

She reached the wide door at the end of the hall first and slammed it open into gray daylight and rain. She wasn’t all that sure that if it had been locked, that would have stopped her as hopped up on adrenaline and fear as she was. They ate him. It—there weren’t even words to fit how awful that was. She had to get in touch with her grandfather, get his government friends involved and nuke the damn building. Holy shit. They ate him.

She ran up the watery cement stairwell and into a filthy alleyway between the backsides of close tenement buildings laced with grated balconies and iron seesaw steps going up at least eight stories and garbage melting into the street from the rain. The Sifts hadn’t exactly holed up in the ritzy part of town.

They ran on and on, putting as much distance between them and the man-eaters as they could, Col and Bekah following Lenore as though she had a clue where she was going. She didn’t. Just away, as far from the Morlocks as she could get. Feeding frenzy or not, they’d notice they were gone soon enough if the door slamming behind them didn’t give them a clue.

Finally her energy waned, her legs felt like rubber, and she shoved a hand out to a wall, pressing her other arm across the painful stitch tearing through the muscles in her side and promptly threw up. Long tremors rode across her pitching body.

Bekah leaned over, hands on thighs, heaving in air, and Lenore lost any shred of patience she ever had. She rammed the woman back against the wall and braced her arm across her throat.

“No more games. Tell me what the hell is going on.”

Glaring, Bekah shoved back but Lenore was taking none of that and pushed back.

“My sister is gone and I just watched a man be eaten alive.”

Bekah eyes blazed. “He was my friend.” The steam deflated her and she went flaccid beneath Lenore’s arm, her voice quiet. “He was my friend.”

Lenore swallowed, and eased up just a fraction. She felt Col’s presence standing behind her.

“Spill it.”

“Matthew. He had a name. Matthew. Get off me and I’ll tell you everything. It’s what we were trying to do in the first place.” Rain flattened her short hair to her scalp.

Lenore let her up and glanced at Col and did a double-take. Somewhere during their flight through the alleys he’d picked up a ratty old blanket and now had it swathed around his waist and the end flipped over his shoulder like the fashionable little Scotsman he was. Good gravy, the blanket was even plaid.

Lenore nudged Bekah to get moving. She could talk as they walked because staying in one place while Morlocks/Sifts were around wasn’t an option.

“Well?”

“Where to begin?” Bekah looked skyward between the buildings.

“You said these horrible monsters could be exterminated. Sifts. What are Sifts? Start there.”

“How about I start with
his
brother.” She stabbed a finger toward Col. “The man who made it possible for creatures such as these to exist in the first place? By destroying the balance of all magic, Shaw Limont decided the near extinction of the human race. How about I start with that?”

“Shaw?” Col shook his head. “Nay. In my time there were never creatures such as these.”

“No,” Bekah said. They rounded a corner and ended up in an area Lenore recognized, close to Starch’s bar. “It will take nearly a millennia for dark magic to produce the Sifts, but when it finally does, it’s the beginning of the end. They reproduce like maggots and eat their weight in pounds every day. The human race will become little more than cattle. You just saw that right?”

Saw it, heard it, smelled it. It was forever seared behind her eyelids. “How do you know this?”

Bekah spun back, amber eyes glinting. “I’m from the year 2083 where
that
—” She pointed back the way they’d come. “Is everyday prime time reality.”

~~~

Lenore and Col stared at Bekah, stunned. Col squinted and ran a hand down his wet hair, sluicing away rain water. “Are ye sorcerers then? Ye have the power to open time rifts. Ye could send me back.”

 
“No.”

Lenore steered them out onto a main street where a few people were out, giving them a wide berth and uncertain looks beneath umbrellas. Not every day a half-naked blanket-swaddled Highland warrior steps out of an alleyway.

“No?” Col stopped in the middle of the street, arms folded over his wide glistening chest.

A car honked, splashing water onto them.

Lenore grabbed his arm, pulling him onto the sidewalk.

“So, the future gets bad, end of the human race bad,” Lenore repeated, trying to make sense of it all. “Because my sister goes to the thirteenth century, making it possible for a crazy witch to capture and turn Shaw to the dark side. Magic goes out-of-whack. Endgame is that the monsters gobble up the human race. That about the gist of it?”

Bekah sloshed through a puddle. “Crude, but accurate. Yes.”

Lenore didn’t mean to be unfeeling, but, geez, the entire human race reduced to sheep? She didn’t know whether to be snarky or run off a cliff howling. Everyone had their own coping skills. “You obviously traveled through time, so why here? Why not go all the way to the beginning and take out the witch?”

“Because we can’t. We don’t have the ability to travel more than a hundred years into the past.”

That explained why the yuppies were here, but not why they had done their best to stop Col. It seems they were after the same goal. To stop Charity. And why the Sifts wanted to make sure Charity made it. Without Charity’s involvement there was a great possibility that the Morlocks would never exist. She could live with that, she really could. She told Bekah as much.

Except Charity was already gone. Back to yesterday to catch a ride on the High Sorcerer’s time rift.

“Because Charity Greves had to go. She had to.”

“Why?” Lenore and Col said at the same time.

The rain lashed out harder and they ducked beneath a storefront awning. “Because…” Bekah blinked water droplets from her lashes. “Charity comes back. A few years from now. With child.”

“Toren’s child?” Little frown lines bracketed Col’s mouth.

‘Yes, your brother’s son. And this man is crazy freaky intelligent. A sorcerer in his own right, the only one left and he has an understanding of magic and science beyond…” Bekah’s hands dropped. “We think the Sifts are also of your family’s magic, moon sifters, like your other brother Shaw. Probably created somehow from his dark tainted magic.”

“Why?” Col’s face hardened. “Why would you make that leap?”

“Because like a moon sifter, they too can open time rifts. Though not as far into the past as a true rift born of a sorcerer.” She pressed slender fingers against her temple. “Charity Greve’s son figured it out, learned how to harness the DNA, the essence from a Sift and send us back—to this time. It’s our only hope.”

“To stop Col from stopping Charity.” Lenore rubbed the back of her throbbing head, felt the lump beneath her matted hair. “Why bother if nothing will change?”

Bekah’s eyes slanted up to Col and dread bubbled within Lenore’s belly. “We were just going to stop him long enough.”

“You meant to talk to him first,” Lenore said.

Col’s eyes went hard as flint. “Why Bekah? Now that Charity is beyond my reach, what do ye have need of me for?” He sighed and lowered his head so that his chin nearly touched his chest. “Ye meant to send me on my way back to my rightful time after ye told me all of this. Ye want me to stop my brother. Ye need me to stop Shaw from being coerced by the witch.”

Bekah nodded. “Yes. By whatever means you can. Yes.”

Col spun away, out into the rain, his back to them. “Stop him from turning to dark magic. And if I couldn’t? Couldn’t stop him?”

Bekah’s tone was steel. “Then you would have to kill him.”

Chapter Eighteen

Col couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Kill his brother? Kill Shaw?
His brother
.

Nay.

They could not ask that of him. He’d missed the opportunity to ride back on Toren’s sorcerer time rift anyway. Charity had already used her little healer’s spell to go back to two days in her past…
Healer’s
spell
.

He swung back around to face the women. Charity was not the only healer in her family.

“Can ye perform this same spell? Get me to the night Toren came?”

Lenore’s face puckered. “Yes, but it won’t do any good. Unlike a rift, the spell zings you back into your own body in whatever place and condition you were at then. You’ll be transported back to Starch’s storeroom, tied to a pipe and drugged to your gills. Sure, you’ll remember everything that has happened til now, but how is that going to help when you can barely think or move? I don’t think you remember how bad you were out of it. There’s nothing we can do.” She grimaced, pressing her hand to the back of her head. Her beautiful eyes shimmered. “I’ve lost her, Col. I’ve lost my sister.”

It took two strides to go to her and wrap her in his arms. Gently he cradled the back of her head and found the roughened rise of skin. Poor brave wounded lass.

He felt her sorrow and loss. He’d lost his family as well and counted Charity as a friend. Yet she would return, with Toren’s son, his nephew. That made Charity his family too. All he had left.

If the solution was lost to them, he’d vow to at least take care of Charity and her son, mayhap discover a way to root out the Sifts before they can be created and overtake humankind, from this here and this now. They were monster of this future, were they not?

He could do that. He would. With Lenore.

His heart clenched on that, the one sunny spot of this entire mess.

He was keeping her, would make her his. For he already belonged to her.

“I can get you back two days,” Bekah said it so quietly, he wasn’t certain he heard her correctly.

Lenore pulled back from him, staring hard at the woman of the terrible future.

Bekah swallowed, water dripping from her hair and clothes. “I can get you back. I can get us all back.”

~~~