Shrike (Book 2): Rampant (25 page)

Dusk falls as I arrive home, the winter gloaming creeping across the clouds like a whisper.

Magda sits in the same chair, sketching in a notepad. When I walk up behind her, she turns. "He's sleeping."

I look at the paper in front of her. She's drawn his hand, which dangles over the side of the sofa, fingers brushing the parquet. I'd know his hand by the long fingers, the angle of his joints, the shape of his palms, even if the life version weren't right in front of me. The sight of the drawing affects me oddly, and my breath hitches in my chest.

Magda sees where my gaze falls and gives me a small smile. "You can have it," she says.

Taog's hand twitches, and he stirs. "Gwen?" 

His voice is still hoarse from coughing, and I come to kneel beside him. 

"Hiya," I say. I brush the hair back from his face. "Feeling any better?"

"Aye," he says, and I know he's lying.

"Any word from Shannon?" 

Magda's watching the two of us with something like longing on her face, but deeper, more tender. Love, maybe. She never looked at me and Angus that way. With Angus her eyes held only daggers, her tongue only poison. It gives me a warm glow knowing that she approves of Taog. 

At my question, she shakes her head. "I will go upstairs and ring her."

The glow in my chest feels like it's become a supernova. 

"I thought of something," I tell Taog as I hear Magda's steps on the stairs.

"What's that?"

For the first time in a long time, when I look at him, I let my guard completely down. I try to let the fear I feel fade to the background, though I don't try to wipe it from my face. I don't want to hide. I want him to see me. 

"Maybe we've been going about this all wrong," I say. 

"What do you mean?" 

He's watching me now, his hazel eyes assessing my face. He reaches a hand out and takes mine, folding it against his chest as he did earlier. 

"We've both been so frightened, Taog. Of Britannia. Of Granger. Of every bloody thing out there that could jump out and say boo at us. Before there was Angus between us, and he was just a wanker by the end, but we let other things take his place when he left." I take a moment to rub my thumb against the back of his hand, feeling the vein there, listening to the pulse of his blood. His heartbeat is faster than it should be, and I'm not sure if it's the illness or my words causing it. "I don't want to keep being afraid. I'm better when I'm with you. You challenge me to be better. You believe in me."

Taog blinks a few times as if he's trying to rid them of tears. It surprises me, this sudden emotion from him. "I do believe in you. I always have."

For a moment we're quiet, then he speaks again.

"I don't want to be afraid anymore either, but I'm not sure I can help it." His gaze drops to his hand, where I can still see a rusty stain of blood. "I think I'm very ill, Gwen."

"I know." A frown creases my forehead, and I let it. "We'll get you whatever you need. I promise."

He smiles then, that crooked half-smile I love so much. "I'll be by your side, whatever happens."

"I know you will." 

Maybe it's not the time to kiss him — but at this moment, we've waited far too long, and I'm not going to wait until the last minute ever again. I lean over him, my fingers tightening around his, my free hand tangling in his hair.

My forehead touches his first, and we stay like that as seconds tick by, sharing breath. I can almost smell the illness, that acetone harshness of fever. I don't care.

I lower my lips to his, and he loops his other arm around my waist, pulling me half on top of him. He kisses me back with a hunger that sends tremors snaking through me. Our conjoined hands are sandwiched between our chests. I can feel his heartbeat, and he can feel mine. There is no steadiness to this kiss. Our lips tremble together, almost flutter with the nerves of a thousand missed moments. And still it washes over me like a wave upon the sand. This man. This love. 

I love him.

If anyone comes near him to harm him, I will watch them burn.

As it is wont to do at inopportune moments, my mobile rings.

I pry myself off Taog's chest, and he coughs, turning away so he doesn't cough on me.

It's the little things.

I didn't hear Magda come back down the stairs, but she's hovering in the corridor with an about-time smirk on her face that says she's been there for a minute. She waves her own mobile at me, but gestures to mine. 

I pick it up and look at the screen. Trevor.

It's amazing the visceral reaction that can happen from six little letters on a series of pixels behind glass.

My last conversation with Trevor went so poorly that I have to resist the urge to toss my phone at the window. Not out the window. At it. Glass and all.

Instead, I steady my breathing and answer. "Trevor."

I hear him swallow before he speaks and wonder how much worse it is than what I think. 

"Ross tried to hang himself in prison," he says.

My hearing fuzzes out. The sounds of Magda's and Taog's breath and heartbeats fade away, as does the pitter of rain on the patio outside. I see Ross, on my first day at Hammerton, Inc. His hair was longer then, almost to his jaw and so curly I wanted to take hold of the end of one of his ringlets, pull it back as far as it would go, and see how much it would bounce. He showed me to my office, checked to make sure de Fournay was in hers, shut the door, sat down, and looked me right in the eye.

"Right," he said. "First thing you need to ken above all else. Don't. Cross. The. Queen."

"The Queen?" I remember looking at Ross as if he were utterly mad, because the only Queen I knew was a doddering old lady who had a herd of corgis to stampede the corridors of Buckingham Palace.

"Annamaria de Fournay. Your boss and our CFO. Cheese her off and she will skin ye alive."

And then he got up, looked me over from head to toe, shook my hand, and grinned. "I'll buy you a pint later."

And that's how Ross adopted me as his mate.

Now Trevor's words ricochet through me like bullets in a tunnel. Ross tried to hang himself in prison.

Ross, that kind, curly-headed man who befriended me at my first real job. My mate who bought me a pint and a plate of chicken and chips and told me everything I needed to know — or at least everything I thought I needed to know, then — about Annamaria de Fournay, aka the Queen, aka the woman whose brains I would pick out of my hair three years later whilst staring listlessly at the bodies of my dead parents, slain by her hand.

Ross tried to hang himself in prison.

"Gwen?" Trevor's voice sounds through my mobile, and I pry my sticky tongue from the roof of my mouth.

"I heard you. When?"

"An hour ago. I just got word."

"Where is he now?"

"Infirmary at the prison, under heavy guard."

I close my eyes and feel dizzy. The pull of the force I felt on Arthur's Seat is still here, and it gives me a slight feeling of vertigo. Confusion roars inside of me like the sound of a distant train in a valley, the sound seeming to come from everywhere and nowhere. Again I question what I know about Ross's innocence or guilt. Could he have done this thing? Could this suicide attempt have been out of remorse for having done a thing, or from despair that no one believed he hadn't?

"Can I see him?" My voice comes out smaller than I like, and I bite my tongue until I taste blood, feeling the tender skin knit itself back together until it's whole again.

"I'm afraid not, Gwen. No visitors." Trevor's voice holds real sympathy for the first time in a while. Not aggravation at me or at anyone, just a bone-dry weariness and pain.

"Okay." I don't know what else to say. "Thank you for telling me." 

The words are stupid, and I hate them as they leave my mouth. Thanking someone for this type of news, for the image I have in my head of Ross's lank curls, lacking all their spring just like the rest of him. Taog watches me from the sofa, his eyes dark and unblinking. Magda stands, still frozen, in the corridor. They don't have to ask if it's bad, and they don't need my hearing to guess how bad.

"You should know that the media found out."

If I could pinpoint the beginning of a headache, it would be now. "How?"

"Same way they found out about Glyn Burns." This time it's anger that I hear heating the signals between Trevor's phone and mine. I feel it against my ear, that anger, and it kindles the same in me, spreading across my field of vision like a haze of red.

When I found Glyn Burns and dialled 999, usurping Rosamund Granger's voice to do it, I didn't think one of the sodding EMTs would tweet a picture of his martyred body, spreadeagled and naked against bloodstained azure velvet. But some arse did, and it spread like cancer through social media, garnering hundreds of thousands of retweets and reposts on every channel imaginable. 

That someone did that to Ross, guilty or no, it makes me want to crush something in my bare hands.

"What are they saying?" The smallness has crawled out of my voice, taken its leave. In its place is stone and hard oak and the barbs of the thistles that are my country's flower.

"They who?"

"The media."

Trevor sighs then, as if he doesn't want to tell me but knows I'll just find out anyway the second I can pull something up on my laptop or smart phone. "You're not going to like it."

"I don't like any of this. Tell me."

"Most of the think pieces are quite vitriolic, Gwen. Ross is the most hated person in Scotland right now, including Granger. She's vanished, but he's visible. He's caught and cornered, and they want him strung up."

It's about what I expected, but still it makes my teeth make contact with one another as if that'll do any good to calm me. "I see." 

I don't pay much attention to Trevor's closing salutations, and I get off the phone feeling sick. I relate the news to Taog and Magda with as much dispassion as possible, but both of them see right through it. Magda comes up and kisses my cheek, squeezing my shoulder. 

To their credit, neither tell me it's going to be all right.

I look at Magda, her mobile dangling forgotten from her hand. "Please tell me you have good news from Shannon."

She gives me a blank stare for a moment, but recovers quickly. "She said the doctor wants to run more tests, but it looks like Taog has influenza and bronchitis." Magda turns to Taog. "If you cough up any more blood, you have to go and get x-rayed."

"I think I am okay with that." The dryness in his voice betrays his discomfort. He's worried. I'm worried. We're all bloody worried.

And still, when I look at him on the sofa, I can feel his lips on mine. I'm glad for that, for that brief stolen moment we wrested from today. 

Hope. It flickers, but I won't let it die quite yet.

I return from my nightly patrol at four in the morning, but I can't sleep. Taog's laboured breathing keeps me awake, and I can think only of Ross.

Why couldn't one of my powers be telepathy? It'd be a bloody sight more convenient if I could just peek into Ross's mind and know if he'd helped de Fournay plant that bomb. "Oi, Ross, don't mind me, just popping in to check if you're a psycho. Och, you're not? That's great. I'll have the nice bobbies see you right off."

But I can't. I have to rely on my own intuition and evidence and Trevor and all of his protocols and procedures. Which he won't show me. Or keep me abreast of.

I've stayed my hand when it comes to looking at the news and the blogs about Ross's suicide attempt, mostly because I can't stomach the idea of remembering those words later. If he's innocent, how will he go through life in society knowing that people greeted his attempted suicide with a cheerful
good riddance
? If he's guilty, I reckon he already knows.

Sometime just before five thirty, I decide to break into Trevor's office and see for myself.

I stop by a bakery and buy a full sack of scones and doughnuts. My plan is simple: turn up, see myself in, pretend his office is unlocked, and rummage through his case files. If anyone asks, I'll tell them I'm waiting for him. 

I say a quick hiya to the constable at the desk when I arrive at St. Leonard's, offering him a savoury scone, which he takes. Sure enough, it's a quiet time of day, with the sky still dark as midnight and the morning bustle not yet started.

Trevor's office is locked, but I learned from my first breaking and entering attempt: my Ullapool library card will open the door straight away. I do my best to look frazzled, juggling the sack of baked goods in one hand and pretending to fumble with the door with the other. One quick flick of the heel of my hand against the card sends the door swinging open, and I hurry in as if I'll drop the sack if I don't set it down. 

No one's really paying attention to me, not the desk constable or the few other bobbies I see milling around. They all know me by sight by now. Just Gwen, the lass who's so keen on the sergeant she brings him scones all the time. Most of them have forgotten by now what the initial reason I met Trevor was — my killing of Mick Hamilton when he and Darren Forbes broke into my flat and tried to murder Magda and me. Adrenaline, Trevor told me then. I threw that same reply back in his face later when I slammed him against a wall to prove a point.

I've gotten a slightly better hold on my temper these days. Sometimes. When I feel like it.

I don't know when to expect Trevor, so I turn on the light in his office and get to work. Leaving the light off would look more suspicious. Or perhaps they'd think I was in here in just me knickers in the dark waiting to really surprise the sergeant. 

That's not exactly what I'm going for. Light on is good.

I open the drawers on his desk one by one until I get past the inevitable office supplies — I'm a bit surprised to see that  he keeps them almost as organised as de Fournay did — to the case files. I assume there are also electronic copies, but paper's a hard habit to break in bureaucracy, and Sergeant Trevor McLean has several years on me.

The bottom drawer is packed with them. Rosamund Granger's takes up three stuffed folders, but I make myself keep searching for Ross's in spite of the itch I have to pick up Granger's and rifle through it.