Revenge (Book 3 of Lost Highlander series) (18 page)

Pietro saw to his amazement that a crack was opening up into a passageway in the wall. When they had wedged it open enough to squeeze through, she beamed at him. “We shall have to hurry as someone will think of this eventually, but it goes all the way to the lake.”

He kissed her on the nose when they were safely inside the darkened passage and had the wall shut up again. “I’m sorry I thought ye were daft,” he said.

She shrugged. “I do like to tease ye,” she admitted.

Piper opened her eyes. She was lying flat on her back, several yards away from Lachlan. Chills seeped into her throbbing back as if she’d been forcibly tossed onto the cold ground. A sliver of moon showed through the treetops and she was glad it was still night. It seemed somehow safer under the cover of darkness. She crawled over to Lachlan, who was rubbing the back of his neck.

“Are ye all right, love?” he asked. “I feel as if we were thrown about that time.”

She nodded. It had been rough, but they had made it. She was certain of it this time, knew she had navigated perfectly.

“Do you smell smoke?” she asked, standing up to test her legs.

“We are no’ far from the castle,” he reminded her. When he stood up, he turned in a circle, his head back. “But I do smell it, and I think it’s no’ coming from the castle.” He pointed into the forest to the north and started heading that way.

“Wait, do you think we should go in that direction?” she asked. If pressed for a better idea, she would have to admit she didn’t have one. She had rather foolishly hoped Daria would be standing there waiting for them. “Maybe we should go to the castle, and uh, ask around.”

He gave her a long look and held out his hand. Reluctantly, she forced her feet to move and they walked carefully through the underbrush, trying to be as quiet as possible. Her nerves were rattling, she was deeply shaken, and not just from the rocky tumble through time, but from a sick sense that something was wrong, something beyond Daria stealing the baby.

Just the other night Piper had been overwhelmed with the need to go into the crypt to look for bones. The memory of her attempted tomb raiding made her shrink into herself with shame, but at the same time knew the compulsion was too strong for her to have overcome. She simply hadn’t been in control. As with the first time she had followed the strange urge into the crypt, she knew this time Daria must have been behind it as well.

But why? Her intent in wanting the bones had been to destroy Daria by either going to her or calling her to them. There seemed to be no logical reason for Daria to want to help her meet that goal. There was nothing logical about any of it. Piper hated feeling out of control, like she was being led around for some unknown purpose.

 As they trudged toward the smoke, her sense of foreboding grew. Her feet became heavy, moving slower and slower until she had stopped completely, Lachlan only noticing when he was forced to tug on her hand from ahead of her. He stopped and looked at her questioningly.

“Are ye frightened?” he asked, his voice hushed.

“No,” she said, matching his low voice, which only served to heighten the eeriness. “I mean, yes of course. But, do you think she’s trying to get us to find her?” Lachlan looked at her like she was an idiot and she continued, not sure how she could make him understand. “The other night. I didn’t just want to visit Fenella in the crypt. I was called there.” She looked down, unable to watch the emotions that were crossing his face, see the fear in his eyes. If he was afraid of her, of what she might be capable of, she couldn’t stand it.

“And ye think it was Daria that called ye?” His voice was carefully neutral and she didn’t know if she was grateful or if she would have rather heard the fear, horror, revulsion— whatever he was feeling.

“I don’t know,” she admitted. “Who else?”

“What else?” he corrected.

She outwardly shivered and jumped the two steps that separated them to cower in his arms. She held onto his waist, shaking in the cold night air. A breeze blew the smell of the smoke over them and she knew they were close. He stroked her hair and pulled her shawl more tightly around her shoulders.

“It may no’ be a bad thing,” he said. “Perhaps what speaks to ye, is different than what speaks to her. And different yet from what I am allowed to do. I believe what Agnes taught me. What is in yer heart is what is strongest.”

That sounded like a load of hogwash mixed liberally with wishful thinking, but Piper wanted to believe it as much as Lachlan sounded like he did. He and Agnes found a way to travel across time without being plagued with strange visions or being ordered about by sinister whispering voices. Good for them. But she had failed.

She gritted her teeth together as her pulse raced. Pressing her face against Lachlan’s strong chest, she fought the fast rising tide of anger that threatened to drown her. He murmured soft words into her hair and she worked to relax and shake off the rage. She didn’t want to seek out the maker of the fire deeper in the woods, but stay here huddled with him against the wind and all other bad things that seemed so eager to have a piece of her.

“We must go find Magnus,” he said finally.

She pulled away and gasped, feeling like the most selfish person on the planet, of all time. She did not have the luxury of having an emotional breakdown when Magnus was with a madwoman.

“Stop.” Lachlan placed his finger between her furrowed eyebrows. “Ye must stop torturing yerself.” He ran his finger down her nose. “When I was in the village with Evelyn to get yer gift, we went into Sam’s book shop. There were a lot of books about positive thinking that I found to be most interesting. That is what we must do, aye?”

“Aye,” she said gloomily. Just her luck to have found a new age eighteenth century Highlander to love. “I’ll visualize the outcome I want to have happen,” she said, shaking her head.

His eyes lit up. “That is what the books said to do,” he agreed.

Piper tried not to laugh, and stood on her toes to kiss him. “I don’t know how anything that led me to you could be truly bad,” she said.

He set out again through the trees and she walked along beside him, trying to keep her skirts from snagging on the thorny bushes and low hanging branches. He had succeeded in making her feel slightly better, but a miasma of unease continued to surround her.

Lachlan stopped after another ten minutes of trudging, and pointed through the trees. She saw nothing but darkness, but trusted his highly honed senses. He motioned for her to stay put while he snuck up and got a better look at who had made the fire. She made a face that told him he was crazier than her by far, if he thought she was going to stay alone in the creepy woods for even five minutes. After a momentary scowl, he shrugged and nodded his chin for her to follow.

When they got close enough for Piper to see the small banked fire and several men gathered around it, with one man pacing back and forth in an agitated manner, Lachlan stopped short and swore under his breath.

He looked down at her. “”Tis possibly worse than we feared.”

“Who is it?” she asked, thoughts racing to bandits or marauders, a whole team of wicked scoundrels who were under Daria’s control.

“My brother,” he groaned.

With a resigned look, he crashed the rest of the way to the fire. The men sitting around it all leapt to their feet, drawing various weapons, but Quinn had seen Lachlan before they did and slumped with relief, hastily waving his arms at them to sit back down. When they recognized Lachlan, they all visibly relaxed, and began to murmur excitedly to each other.

“Dear God, but ye are an answer to prayer,” Quinn said, clapping Lachlan on the shoulder and looking like he might cry.

“I have never seen ye so glad to see me,” Lachlan said, looking around at the heavily armed men with consternation. He gripped Quinn’s arm and moved him further away from the group. Piper ran after them, smiling a greeting at Quinn, who gave her a tense but sweet smile in return. “Did I no’ tell ye to get back home as quick as ye may?” he asked.

“Aye, and we did,” Quinn said. He wiped his hand over his face. “But yer addle pated idiot from the future has ruined everything.”

“Pietro?” Piper interrupted, eager to have news of him. “Is he all right?”

“He is sick in the head, and a pain in my arse,” Quinn said bitterly.

Lachlan started to say something but Piper put her hand on his arm to stop him.

“Sick in the head?” she repeated. “Do you mean crazy, or he gets headaches?” She looked meaningfully at Lachlan and his face fell, echoing the feeling in her stomach. They hadn’t even considered that Pietro might get sick.

Quinn threw up his hands. “Both,” he said. “He seems to get better, but then worsens again. He acted like he could barely walk or I would have shackled the foolhardy simpleton.”

“He gets better?” she asked, keeping her hand on Lachlan’s arm. They needed all the information they could get about all the various aspects of traveling. She was kicking herself for not having thought of it before they left him here. “Is there a reason or a pattern that you can tell?”

Quinn nodded and thought about her question seriously before answering, then shook his head as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was going to say. “It seems that the lass’s affections make him stronger for a bit.”

Oh, this was interesting. Evie was going to eat this right up when she told her. “Her affections?” she repeated. Quinn shrugged and looked embarrassed. Piper realized what he meant and flushed. “Oh. But then he got worse again?”

He nodded. “Bella isna exactly …” he trailed off and looked at the tree branches rustling overhead. “She isna always so verra caring, I suppose ye could say. I canna be sure, but it seemed her proximity had a healing effect on him.”

Piper turned to Lachlan. “Did that happen to you, before we found out about the pendant?”

He looked as put on the spot as if she’d asked him if her gown made her ass look fat. “I dinna remember,” he stammered. “We hadna yet …”

She rolled her eyes and reached for Lachlan’s pendant. He leaned down so she could pull it over his head and she held it out for Quinn to see. “He needs this, in case true love isn’t enough,” she said. “Where is he?” she asked, looking around.

It was just Quinn and four men sitting around the fire. No sign of Pietro or Bella.

“The bloody tosser has run off after Bella, and probably gotten himself and all of us killed,” Quinn said, starting up his pacing again. Lachlan grabbed his arm to stop him, completely confused.

“Start at the beginning lad,” he said in an encouraging tone that melted Piper’s heart.

From her few observations of them together, she had thought that Lachlan was too hard on his brother and it was nice to see him showing some patience, even in light of things seeming to be fairly badly screwed.

Quinn told them a harrowing tale of being ambushed on the road and having to hide at Quinn and Lachlan’s aunt’s farm while Pietro tried to regain his strength. Bella was either taken by force or ran away back to Castle Glen, and without Lachlan, they had no recourse to claim her. Rather than start a war, they had decided to just let her go.

“But then the daft, brainless bugger took off a few hours ago and we have no’ seen hide nor hair of him since, but the men have been watching the castle and something has them quite stirred up down there.”

Lachlan was silent for a long moment, while Piper wanted to scream. Finally, he put his hands on her shoulders, looking apologetically into her eyes.

“My love,” he said. “I am verra sorry, but I must go collect my wife.”

Pietro trailed his hand along the wall as he stumbled forward in the pitch dark, sure at any moment he’d be smashed in the face by a low beam or unlit hanging lantern. The passage was narrow. He could hold out his hands and touch either side without straightening his arms, and their breathing echoed around them, along with the muffled sounds of their feet on the dusty floor. Bella skittered confidently ahead of him as if she had night vision.

“Do ye come through this often?” he asked, feeling as if he had just used the world’s oldest pickup line in the world’s strangest context.

The dark closeness didn’t mix well with his headache and he couldn’t wait to breathe fresh air again.

“When I was a wee lass, my cousins and I roamed the passages all the time,” she said, her voice floating back and getting lost behind him. He turned around to make sure he hadn’t somehow overtaken her, but it was just a trick of his fever and he kept walking. “My father does no’ even know about all of them,” she said.

Good, he thought, hoping this would buy them some time. Even with all the things she had demanded her maid go fetch for her, they wouldn’t have long before she was discovered missing and a search party dispatched.

“I wish ye had been a crofter’s daughter,” he muttered.

She laughed and stopped so that he walked right into her. “Me too,” she said, sliding her arms around his middle and pulling him close. “All the time.”

He ran his hands up her arms and neck, carefully cupping the sides of her face. In the dark, her skin seemed even softer and he stroked the edges of her jaw, enjoying the velvety smoothness beneath his fingers.

She sighed and he twined his fingers into her hair, leaning down slowly to kiss her. Their noses bumped, then he felt her full lips parting against his as he tilted her head back to delve more deeply into her mouth.