She’d looked very much like her granddaughter Brianna. By reflex, he closed his eyes, breathed deep of the cold Highland evening, and thought he felt her there at his side. If he opened them again, might he see her standing in the smoke?
I’ll come back, he thought to her. No matter what, a nighean ruaidh—I’m coming back. With Jem.
SANCTUARY
IT WAS NEARLY AN hour’s drive over the narrow, twisting Highland roads from Lallybroch to Fiona Buchan’s new house in Inverness. Plenty of time for Brianna to wonder if she was doing the right thing, if she had any right to involve Fiona and her family in a matter that looked more dangerous by the moment. Plenty of time to get a stiff neck from looking over her shoulder—though if she was being followed, how would she know?
She’d had to tell the kids where Roger was, as gently and briefly as possible. Mandy had put a thumb in her mouth and stared gravely at her, round-eyed. Jem . . . Jem hadn’t said anything but had gone white under his freckles and looked as though he was about to throw up. She glanced in the rearview mirror. He was hunched in a corner of the backseat now, face turned to the window.
“He’ll come back, honey,” she’d said, trying to hug him in reassurance. He’d let her but stood stiff in her arms, stricken.
“It’s my fault,” he’d said, his voice small and wooden as a puppet’s. “I should have got away sooner. Then Dad wouldn’t—”
“It’s not your fault,” she’d said firmly. “It’s Mr. Cameron’s fault and no one else’s. You were very brave. And Daddy will come back really soon.”
Jem had swallowed hard but said nothing in reply. When she’d let him go, he swayed for a moment, and Mandy had come up and hugged his legs.
“Daddy’ll come back,” she said encouragingly. “For supper!”
“It might take a little bit longer than that,” Bree said, smiling in spite of the panic packed like a snowball under her ribs.
She drew a deep breath of relief as the highway opened out near the airport and she could go faster than 30 mph. Another wary glance in the mirror, but the road was empty behind her. She stepped on the gas.
Fiona was one of the only two people who knew. The other one was in Boston: her mother’s oldest friend, Joe Abernathy. But she needed sanctuary for Jem and Mandy, right now. She couldn’t stay with them at Lallybroch; the walls were two feet thick in places, yes, but it was a farm manor, not a fortified tower house, and hadn’t been built with any notion that the inhabitants might need to repel invaders or stand off a siege.
Being in the city gave her a sense of relief. Having people around. Witnesses. Camouflage. Help. She pulled up in the street outside the Craigh na Dun Bed-and-Breakfast (three AA stars) with the sense of an exhausted swimmer crawling up onto shore.
The timing was good. It was early afternoon; Fiona would have finished the cleaning and it wouldn’t yet be time to check in new guests or start the supper.
A little painted bell in the shape of a bluebell tinkled when they opened the door, and one of Fiona’s daughters instantly popped an inquiring head out of the lounge.
“Auntie Bree!” she shouted, and at once the lobby was filled with children, as Fiona’s three girls pushed one another out of the way to hug Bree, pick up Mandy, and tickle Jem, who promptly dropped to all fours and crawled under the bench where folk left their wraps.
“What—oh, it’s you, hen!” Fiona, coming out of the kitchen in a workmanlike canvas apron that said PIE QUEEN on the front, smiled with delight at sight of Bree and enveloped her in a floury hug.
“What’s wrong?” Fiona murmured in her ear, under cover of the embrace. She drew back a bit, still holding Bree, and looked up at her, squinting in half-playful worry. “Rog playing away from home, is he?”
“You . . . could say that.” Bree managed a smile but evidently not a very good one, because Fiona at once clapped her hands, bringing order out of the chaos in the lobby, and dispatched all the children to the upstairs lounge to watch telly. Jem, looking hunted, was coaxed out from under the bench and reluctantly followed the girls, looking back over his shoulder at his mother. She smiled and made shooing motions at him, then followed Fiona into the kitchen, glancing by reflex over her own shoulder.
THE TEAKETTLE SCREAMED, interrupting Brianna, but not before she’d got to the most salient point of her story. Fiona warmed and filled the pot, purse-lipped with concentration.
“Ye say he took the rifle. Ye’ve still got your shotgun?”
“Yes. It’s under the front seat of my car at the moment.”
Fiona nearly dropped the pot. Brianna shot out an arm and grabbed the handle, steadying it. Her hands were freezing, and the warm china felt wonderful.
“Well, I wasn’t going to leave it in a house the bastards have a key to, now, was I?”
Fiona set down the pot and crossed herself. “Dia eadarainn’s an t-olc.” God between us and evil. She sat, giving Brianna a sharp look. “And ye’re quite sure as it’s bastards, plural?”
“Yes, I bloody am,” Bree said tersely. “Even if Rob Cameron managed to grow wings and fly out of my priest’s hole—let me tell you what happened to Jem at the dam.”
She did, in a few brief sentences, by the end of which Fiona was glancing over her own shoulder at the closed kitchen door. She looked back at Bree, settling herself. In her early thirties, she was a pleasantly rounded young woman with a lovely face and the calm expression of a mother who normally has the Indian sign on her offspring, but at the moment she had a look that Brianna’s own mother would have described as “blood in her eye.” She said something very bad in English regarding the man who’d chased Jem.