Eyes of the Cat (35 page)

“Aye, dear, I’m afraid I’ll have to for a bit. I’ve some tricky business to deal with now, and I’d prefer you well clear of it,” Alan apologized through the grill. “’Twas nice of Uncle Angus to leave the key in the lock, though,” he added, deftly pocketing it. “Makes me feel doubly bad over the trap I’ve decided to set for him. Your thinking my father and I were twins gave me the idea, in fact. We do seem much alike, I suppose—save for the nose. His was broken in a Pawnee raid years ago; that’s why it looks rather like a squashed potato. But our claymore combats are fought in partial armor, you see. With my helmet’s visor down, I dare say Uncle Angus will never suspect ’tis me inside it.”

Before she could gather enough breath for a good, solid scream, he was down the passage, down the steps, and downright depressingly out of earshot.

“Bloody hell,” Tabitha said, borrowing the curse from the dark haired cause of it, and nearly giving into tears until remembering her own key. Fishing it out of her bodice, she felt for the keyhole on her side of the door.

And felt.

And felt.

And felt…

“Bloody hell!”

The previously fought off tears won a brief skirmish as she realized why her grandmother Elspeth hadn’t been able to use her skeleton key to save herself when she had been imprisoned in this same tower.

A one-holed lock. It could only be opened from the outside.

Or had that been done since Elspeth’s time?

No, she remembered now. That was part of the story. A part that the castle MacAllisters had never realized, in fact, having never found out about the key.

Elspeth’s cat, Caliban, had initially been shut in the tower with her, and to alert her lover of her danger, she had ripped loose the hem of her frock and used it to tie her secret key around the cat’s neck. The tree had been so much smaller then, Caliban had to leap down almost one and a half stories to reach its top branches. But he had made it to the ground, outmaneuvered several pairs of kilted legs, and somehow found his way to the Comanche encampment where Jeremy Earnshaw was staying with his blood brother, the Panther.

“Otherwise, Elspeth would have been burned, never having the chance to produce Zachary Earnshaw, who helped produce me, thereby allowing me the chance to be here and go through the whole nightmare all over again,” Tabitha mumbled to herself, sinking down onto one of the chambers main furnishings—that pile of straw so musty she was sure it hadn’t been changed since her grandmother’s stay.

“Though, of course, there are a few minor modifications with my situation,” she continued, hurriedly vacating the straw when several mice and one genuine rat ran out of it. “Elspeth was here awaiting her own death and worrying if a particular man would be able to rescue her in time. I’m here awaiting a particular man’s death and worrying if I’ll be able to escape in time to kill him
first
, for being so impossibly pigheaded!”

Alan had no idea what he was walking into. Worse, neither did she. There was a trap being set, all right—she could feel it. But whether it was being baited by Alan or
for
him, she no longer had any idea.

“I thought I finally had everything so neatly pieced together, but it’s all breaking apart on me,” she complained, staring at the iridescent spider again, but seeing, perversely, only taunting images of squashed potatoes floating in vats of sticky brown beer.

“Why did he think that was Alan on the prairie?”

It was back in the bedchamber, wasn’t it, that Alan had told her how, when Angus had first found Heather’s body with Wild Horse nearby, he had thought for one awful moment that he was looking at his nephew? But if Angus knew Wild Horse and Heather were together, why would he make such a mistake? Unless…

“Well, that explains the beer, anyway. I guess I owe Uncle Angus an apology,” she muttered, kicking through the straw and upsetting several more rodents as she paced about the cell.

Someone else had obviously been out on the prairie that day. Someone who was probably a better shot than he was a card player, and who had mistaken Wild Horse for his son even before Angus had. Then, to cover his own act of vengeance, that same someone had arrived back at the castle with a full blown story of how he had seen Alan and Heather engaged in some heated conflict—that it had looked as though they were on the verge of killing one another. A ridiculous story, of course, but it had been good enough to send the already worried Angus riding out to survey the situation for himself.

“What’s really ridiculous, though, is that the idiot is still telling that story to any new ears he can catch across the poker table. If it wasn’t so appalling, it would be comical,” Tabitha mused aloud, reaching down to scratch between velvet ears as four black paws fell into step along side her.

“Not now, angel, I’m trying to think. Why don’t you make yourself useful and chase some of these mice. Their squeaking is starting to annoy me-
ee
!” she finished on a squeak herself. Not because she was so startled to see him. The realization she’d been so
un
startled was what surprised her.

“Hullo, Caliban. I suppose I must have been expecting you to show up about now,” she purred to him.

He purred back as she scooped him into a mutually satisfying hug.

“My father once told me all about you incredibly clever little wildcats with the courage of a panther and a life span of thirty or more years, but I never quite believed him until now. Did you know there aren’t any of you left in Scotland? You may be the last of your kind. Is that why you’ve lived so long, because you can’t bear for your breed to die out? I’ve heard that some of your relatives actually made it to forty, but you must be over fifty by now. That’s like a person living well past a hundred. No wonder they all think you’re a demon!” She shook her head as Elspeth’s cat leapt out of her arms and padded to the window.

Her stomach suddenly feeling like a lead weight, she padded after him. The tree
was
her only option, of course. She had realized that the moment she’d discovered the skeleton key wouldn’t get her out of the cell.

“Yes, I suppose I’ve been expecting this, too— Caliban! What’s the matter with you?”

Back arched in front of the window, he was blocking her exit, hissing and spitting as though he thought he really was a demon.

“Believe me, I’m well aware that even if I survive the climb, the final drop will probably kill me. But at least it’ll be faster than being tortured to death in the dungeon. Which is undoubtedly what Uncle Angus will do to me, if I let him carve up Alan with a claymore. I appreciate your concern, but there’s nothing else I can do. So be a good boy and get out of the way.”

Tucking up her skirt to protect it from the branches, and closing her eyes to protect them from the sight of her own coming demise, she fumbled the agitated cat aside, squirmed through the window crevice, and blindly groped her way down…down…dizzying down to the last, long leap.

And a startled gasp when that leap landed her, once again, in a waiting pair of muscular, MacAllister-Comanche arms.

“Alan!”

“Guess again,” a rusty voice spoke close to her ear.

Very slowly, as if delay itself might change what she knew she would see into what she wanted it to be, Tabitha opened her eyes and peered into the dusky face of Wild Horse with its squashed potato nose—a face that seemed to lay for an instant over another, covering it like a translucent mask. The underlying image was gone almost before she could blink, but it had been visible long enough for her to be certain it was a face she had seen twice before. Once that morning, when her wits were too scattered to fully recognize it, and once in an old tintype of his parents her father had shown her—the same day, in fact, he had told her the story of Elspeth and the Panther.

“I don’t have to guess. I know who you are,” she whispered, thinking how miserable it was to know so much, and feeling not the least vindicated by the revelation that all her original fears had been correct. There
was
a diabolical presence and a form of possession at work here. Someone
had
been toying with her mind. And a trap had been set for an unwary quarry. It was all just as she had suspected. The only little point she had missed somehow was that this evening’s quarry would turn out to be herself.

“You’re a perversion. A paradox. A freak of fate,” she told him. “How it happened, I can hardly even imagine—and I know more of the story than most—but you’re Jeremy Earnshaw’s mind in Wild Horse’s body. That’s who you are.”

“Clever girl.” He lowered her to her feet and rested his hands on her shoulders. “Now you get to ask me a question.”

“Only one?”

The face above hers stretched into a mirthless grin. “Well, one for starters, and we’ll see where that leads us.”

I know where it’s leading, Tabitha thought, staring up at him and realizing that she was looking straight into the eyes of genuine, cold-blooded insanity.

“Then, for starters, I want to know where Wild Horse is,” she said, amazed that she could speak the words so calmly when her heart was trying to hammer its way out through her throat.

The grin twisted into a slight frown. “You disappoint me. I was hoping you would ask who
you
were… Well, no matter.” He shrugged. “This question is a good one, too. And one I’m anxious to find an answer for, myself. Where do any of us go when we die?”

“Are you telling me he…his mind and spirit, that is, are…gone?”

“That’s a second question, by the way, and it’s really my turn now… But, yes,” he replied, looking quite pleased at his own benevolence in doing so, “the former occupant of this
 
fleshy prison is no longer with us. He escaped it the night you arrived. A lucky coincidence for me, since I had just managed to escape from my own beastly confinement in that wretched piece of metal. I was able to enter his body at the exact moment his mind departed, but right before his heart stopped beating… Though, if I’d realized what I was getting myself into, I might have thought twice about it. Did you know there’s a bullet lodged in this brain?”

His left hand pressed down harder on her shoulder as the right tangled in Wild Horse’s thick forelock. “How the man survived so long with what little mind he must have had left can only be one of the Devil’s miracles. The poor fellow must have suffered the most hellish headaches. I know I’ve had one since being in here.” He winced with the obvious pain of it. “Fortunately, it’ll soon be over.”

“You’re not planning on staying then?” Tabitha’s gaze flickered upward, then quickly down again, as a slight rustling overhead drew her attention for an instant.

“A
third
question? Oh well, I suppose I can afford to be generous.” He sighed. “No, I’ll shortly be free of earthly aches. I’m going to cut this walking torture chamber’s throat, and release myself into blessed oblivion,” he explained, his hands beginning to shift. “But first, I’m going to perform the same favor for you, my dear, darling…
disloyal
Elspeth!”

Before she could even gasp, his grip was biting into her windpipe, and razor sharp steel glinted a deadly arc upward from his belt sheath to her throat.

“I promised you this would happen, didn’t I, if you chose that heathen over me?” He made a slow practice slice from one ear to the other with the blade held a hairsbreadth from her flesh. “The thought of sending you to Hell has been my only solace these endless, empty years of blackness and cold—the only thing that’s kept my mind functioning through its torment. I could have killed you almost any time these past days, you know. I was planning on killing you this morning at that ranch I followed you to… But I decided I wanted you to remember first
who
you were. I want you to know the anguish of what you and your Comanche lover did to me!”

“They did
nothing
to you,” Tabitha strained out, her voice a scratchy rasp. “You did it to yourself when you secretly told the MacAllisters who had freed their prisoner. Then you sealed it by trying to kill him and Elspeth yourself when she was helpless at the stake. The Panther did the only thing he could to save her. And he paid dearly for it. They both paid!” Her eyes darted from his to the lower branches of the tree and back again. “But I’m not her. I’m only her granddaughter. Can’t you see that? I’m
not
Elspeth.”

“You may be right… Perhaps
Jezebel
would be a more appropriate name for you,” Jeremy Earnshaw’s rusty tones grated through Wild Horse’s clenched teeth.

Jerking her half off her feet, he swung the knife back for its fatal stroke, quoting righteously, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”—and screaming like a holy terror when the witch’s demon dropped out of tree onto his head.

The grip on her throat torn open by frenzied fangs and claws, Tabitha stumbled backward, grappling a dizzy moment for breath and balance. Then, like a snared bird escaping through a sudden break in the net, she turned and flew across the castle’s dark, deserted inner yard toward the gate to the outer court. Toward a blaze of torches where she doubted her attacker would follow. Toward a circle of kilts and fierce eyes gathered to witness an ancient ritual. Toward clashing claymores, old grievances, and fresh fears. Toward Alan, in the center of it all.

Only…

He wasn’t.

Bursting from the inner to the outer courtyard, she staggered to a gasping halt. The torches, eyes, ancient ritual, and grievances were there as expected. But the fear was her own, because in the center of it all stood a large stake piled high about with smoking brush. And tied to it was a girl not too unlike herself, who kept flickering in and out of the picture like a candle flame nearly snuffed by a draft, then catching itself and flaring high again.