Despite the situation, Brianna smiled. Mandy had very recently been introduced to the idea that numbers were infinite and had been enchanted by the concept. She wouldn’t stop counting until she ran out of breath or someone stopped her. Still, she wasn’t going to engage in pointless conversation with her prisoner.
“Okay,” she said, and reached for the grate. “We’ll see how talkative you are after twenty-four hours without food or water, shall we?”
“You bloody bitch!” He tried to surge to his feet but fell over onto his side, writhing impotently. “You—you just think about this, aye? If I’m without food and water, so’s your wee lad!”
She froze, the metal edge of the grate digging into her fingers.
“Rob, you’re not bright,” she said. She was amazed that her voice sounded conversational; waves of horror and relief and renewed horror were rippling across her shoulders, and something primitive in the back of her mind was screaming.
A sullen silence from below, as he tried to work out what he’d just given away.
“Now I know you didn’t send Jem back through the stones,” she clarified for him. She carefully didn’t shriek, But you sent Roger back to look for him! And he’ll never find him. You . . . you . . . “He’s still here, in this time.”
Another silence.
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “Okay, you know that. But you don’t know where he is. And you’re not going to, until you turn me loose. I meant it, hen—he’ll be thirsty by now. And hungry. It’ll be a lot worse for him by morning.”
Her hand tightened on the grate. “You had better be lying,” she said evenly. “For your sake.” She shoved the grate back into place and stepped on it, clicking it down into its frame. The priest’s hole was literally a hole: a space about six feet by eight, and twelve feet deep. Even if Rob Cameron hadn’t been bound hand and foot, he couldn’t jump high enough to get hold of the grate, let alone reach the latch that held it down.
Ignoring the furious shouts from below, Brianna went to retrieve her daughter and her jeans.
THE MUDROOM WAS empty, and for an instant she panicked—but then she saw the tiny bare foot sticking out from under the bench, long toes relaxed as a frog’s, and her heart rate dropped. A little.
Mandy was curled up under Roger’s old mac, thumb half in her mouth, sound asleep. The impulse was to carry her to her bed, let her sleep ’til daylight. Brianna laid a soft hand on her daughter’s black curly hair—black as Roger’s—and her heart squeezed like a lemon. There was another child to consider.
“Wake up, sweetheart,” she said, gently shaking the little girl. “Wake up, honey. We need to go and look for Jem.”
It took no little cajoling and the administration of a glass of Coca-Cola—a rare treat, and absolutely unheard of so late at night, how exciting!—to get Mandy into a state of alertness, but once there she was all eagerness to go and hunt for her brother.
“Mandy,” Bree said as casually as she could, buttoning her daughter’s pink quilted coat, “can you feel Jem? Right now?”
“Uh-huh,” Mandy replied offhandedly, and Brianna’s heart leapt. Two nights before, the child had waked screaming from a sound sleep, weeping hysterically and insisting that Jem was gone. She had been inconsolable, wailing that her brother had been eaten by “big wocks!”—an assertion that had terrified her parents, who knew the horrors of those particular rocks all too well.
But then, a few minutes later, Mandy had suddenly calmed. Jem was there, she said. He was there in her head. And she had gone back to sleep as though nothing had happened.
In the consternation that had followed this episode—the discovery that Jem had been taken by Rob Cameron, one of Brianna’s fellow employees at the hydroelectric plant, and presumably taken through the stones into the past—there had been no time to recall Mandy’s remark about Jem being back in her head, let alone to make further inquiries. But now Brianna’s mind was moving at the speed of light, bounding from one horrifying realization to the next, making connections that might have taken hours to make in cooler blood.
Horrifying Realization Number 1: Jem hadn’t gone into the past, after all. While by itself this was undeniably a good thing, it made Horrifying Realization Number 2 that much worse: Roger and William Buccleigh had undoubtedly gone through the stones, searching for Jemmy. She hoped they were in fact in the past and not dead—traveling through whatever sort of thing the stones were was a bloody dangerous proposition—but, if so, that brought her back to Horrifying Realization Number 1: Jem wasn’t in the past. And if he wasn’t there, Roger wasn’t going to find him. And since Roger would never give up looking . . .
She pushed Horrifying Realization Number 3 aside with great force, and Mandy blinked, startled.
“Why you making faces, Mummy?”
“Practicing for Halloween.” She rose, smiling as best she could, and reached for her own duffel coat.
Mandy’s brow creased in thought.
“When’s Halloween?”
Cold rippled over Brianna, and not just from the draft through the crack under the back door. Did they make it? They thought the portal was most active on the sun feasts and fire feasts—and Samhain was an important fire feast—but they couldn’t wait the extra day, for fear that Jem would be taken too far from Craigh na Dun after passing through the stones.
“Tomorrow,” she said. Her fingers slipped and fumbled on the fastenings, shaky with adrenaline.