The Highland Dragon's Lady (23 page)

As Reggie rushed forward, the shape in front of her blurred and shrank. She couldn’t follow the process and didn’t think she wanted to. One minute a huge blue dragon was lying on the cave floor in a spreading pool of blood, and the next a slender young man was lying there in what now looked, relative to his body, like a
lake
of the stuff.

A person only had so much blood. She’d never been trained in nursing, the way Miss Heselton had, but she knew that, and by the time she reached Colin’s side, her heart felt the size of a small raisin.

No
, she thought. It was all she could think, a steady and arrhythmic chorus in her head:
no
no, no no no, no.

Edmund was behind her. He’d gotten into the cave during the quick, awful fight that had taken about a year, tried to aim his rifle at Janet Morgan’s new form, and been unable to get off a shot without the risk of hitting Colin instead. Both creatures had been enormous, but they’d been so closely locked in their struggle that Reggie had barely found a chance to hit Janet with a skull, and had seen no further opportunity.

She’d stood on the side like the most useless of females in plays and novels. She might actually have wrung her hands. Now she knelt by Colin and tried not to think how much that image must resemble another from the stage: Woman by Her Dying Beloved.

At least Colin was breathing and his eyes were open. They focused on her as she drew closer, and he managed to lift an eyebrow. “Verra stylish, Miss Talbot-Jones.”

“Hush up,” she said, but he’d given her an idea. “Edmund, go grab my petticoats.” The slash on his side didn’t look too bad, in her extremely inexpert opinion. She couldn’t see ribs or organs, and the flow of blood was relatively slow. “Should I help you turn over? Your back—”

“Back’s fine. Wings dinna’ translate across.”

“Ah,” she replied and said a prayer: quick, silent, and incoherent except for
thank
you
. Now she only had to worry about the wound in his side and the blood he’d already lost, and the fact that, now she had time to notice anything but bleeding, both of his arms hung from their sockets at absolutely wrong angles. “Well—hang on.”

With a visible effort of will, Colin smiled. “Dinna’ worry yourself, lass,” he said, and his speech was growing both more accented and more slurred. His eyes were glassier too. “I’ll be all right. You’re to thank for that. Knew there was a reason I love you.”

“I—you—” Reggie shook her head. “No. You don’t tell me that here. Not like this.” There were too many of those plays in her memory, too many melancholy songs.

“However you want,” said Colin, and then his eyes closed.

Reggie made an incoherent and extremely loud sound of alarm, and reached for him, but Edmund put a hand on her shoulder. “He’s only gone under. Still breathing fine, see?” he said, handing her a petticoat which he’d already torn in two. “For the best—we’ll have a job to do getting him home.”

“Then let’s get started,” said Reggie.

* * *

“You need to sit down, Regina,” Pater said. “And you need to eat.”

The drawing room was not far from Colin’s door. It had been easy for Mr. Talbot-Jones to take his daughter by the wrist and draw her away from where she’d been wearing a hole in the carpets. He evidently hadn’t acted out of impulse, for a covered tray sat on one of the tables, giving off an aroma of toast, and a cup of tea steamed beside it. There would, Reggie knew, be two lumps of sugar in it and exactly as much milk as she liked.

Eating felt impossible. She only knew she had a stomach because it felt so damned awful.

She sat, though.

“I’m all right,” she said, as she’d been saying for the last hour. She’d said it to Mater in the middle of an embrace and a scolding. She’d said it to the Heseltons as they stared. She’d said it to the maids who had washed her and put her into a tea gown while she complied, boneless, with their directions. Say it enough and it would be true.

Physically, it was.

“Once you eat a little,” Pater said, “you’ll feel more inclined to go on.”

He wasn’t going to give up, and toast was not a difficult food. Reggie broke off a small piece, softened it in milk, and managed to swallow. The next bite was easier. She looked up at Pater and actually saw him for the first time since she’d come back. “How did you know?”

“My valet told me,” he said with a faint smile, “when you were being born.”

The thought of her father being nervous—too nervous even to eat—made Reggie smile herself, and either that or the toast and tea eased the taut wires of her nerves a little.

“Dr. Brant is very good,” said Pater, “and so is Miss Heselton, though I fear she’ll not be with us long.”

“Oh?”

Mr. Talbot-Jones nodded. “She’s only stayed this long because of her brother, really. We’re too strange for her nerves or for her conception of the world, even if Edmund…well.”

She wasn’t the only one who worried. Reggie reached over and put a hand on her father’s arm. “He’ll be all right, Pater,” she said, remembering her glimpse into his mind. “He’s a sensible chap, though I’d never say it to his face. And he’ll find his way.”

“I hope so. You’re both quite young, whether you realize it or not.”

“Trust me,” said Reggie “after this fortnight, I realize it.”

A knock at the door made them both turn. Reggie’s stomach contracted again, and this time her lungs did too. Pater was the one to call out, “Come in.”

Miss Heselton opened the door but didn’t step inside. “Dr. Brant sent me,” she said, “to say that Mr. MacAlasdair is asleep and in stable condition. He’s lost blood, but fortunately the…cave-in…didn’t damage any major organs.”

“Oh, thank God.” Reggie was already on her feet, toast in one hand.

“Dr. Brant also says he isn’t to be disturbed,” Miss Heselton said. “He’ll check back in tomorrow and let us know when Mr. MacAlasdair can receive visitors.”

Reggie sank back down. She couldn’t be disappointed; she was too thankful. And, she realized now, she had no idea what she would have said in any case.

She heard Pater thanking Miss Heselton, and the other woman talking about finding her brother and having some tea to calm her nerves, and then the door shut again. Absently, Reggie lifted the toast back to her mouth.

“I’m not going to question your judgment,” Pater said, once Reggie had taken a few more bites. “You know Mr. MacAlasdair well, and—and I can’t deny that you have a certain facility for seeing beneath the surface of people. He seems an honorable man to me, and if you agree—”

“He’s a good man,” said Reggie.

Pater hesitated, then smiled. “I’m glad to hear it. Just be certain. You know your mother and I wish for a certain…continuity…regarding this house, and I can’t deny that either, not now, but we also want you to be happy. Foremost, we want you to be happy.” He sighed. “It’s occurred to me that perhaps that hasn’t been as evident as it should be.”

“But I knew it,” Reggie said and stood up to embrace her father.

* * *

Two days later, after Mater had said several things about Reggie’s state of dress and the questionable wisdom of running off into the forest and meant
I
am
so
glad
you’re all right
by all of them; after a celebratory dinner of which Reggie had been able to eat very little and two nights when her exhausted body had taken over and dropped her into ten hours of dreamless darkness; two days later, she stood by Colin’s door and chewed on her lip.

Reggie hadn’t gone down the tree to visit him. Mostly, that had been because she was too tired, which she hadn’t been able to understand. She hadn’t done anything more strenuous than move rocks, and she couldn’t see why she’d kept dozing off, or why her whole body felt rolled and ironed. “You’ve had a shock,” said Miss Heselton, in one of her more human moods, when Reggie had brought it up.

Yes, Reggie thought. She’d had a number of them, and not all either physical or mental.

One of those shocks had played its part in keeping her out of Colin’s room. True, she’d been tired. True, Dr. Brant had said Colin wasn’t to be disturbed, and as he had more than a head injury to worry about, Reggie hadn’t been able to justify violating that order. But adding up those two reasons didn’t give her a whole.

You
don’t tell me that here. Not like this
, she’d said.

She’d thought she was worried about tempting fate. Now that Colin was recovering, Reggie wondered if he’d actually
want
to repeat that particular sentiment to her, without relief and blood loss as factors.

The door to Colin’s room swung open, and Dr. Brant stepped out. On his face, professional satisfaction mingled with the expression that had deepened more and more as he’d come to Whitehill: the one that said
I
don’t know what on earth is going on here, and I don’t want to
ask.

He smiled at Reggie, though, and when he said, “I think Mr. MacAlasdair would appreciate your company—just for a little while, mind,” his voice was positively avuncular.

That might have been a good sign. She would have read omens in the flights of birds, if there’d been any around—and if birds would ever seem completely innocent again.

“Much obliged,” said Reggie.

She wouldn’t ask Colin. She’d wrestle Janet Morgan herself before she brought up what he’d said and whether he’d meant it, or still did. She rubbed her hands against her skirt and stepped into the room.

“I’m here,” she said as the door swung shut behind her. “Even properly dressed, for once.”

“Pity,” said Colin, and he grinned. He was sitting up already, wearing the same dressing gown he’d had on when they’d met. Oh, he was paler than he had been, and his eyes were shadowed, but a stranger would’ve seen no dramatic difference.

“It’s indecent, you know,” said Reggie, sitting down in a chair by his side. Words came more easily than she’d feared. “Not me—you. You should at least look a little like you’ve almost died, not like you just got tiddly last night.”

“I didn’t have to,” said Colin. “Morphine’s a marvelous invention.”

“Ha,” said Reggie. Sitting near him, watching him smile and talk, she felt the iron bands that had been around her heart for two days loosen and fall away. “Trust you to enjoy dire injury. I suppose it’s a new experience.”

“I’ve had a few of those lately,” said Colin. Wounded, he’d lost his unearthly speed. When he reached over and took Reggie’s hand, she actually saw the motion. “And you’ve been worth all the others.”

“Just because I saved your life—” said Reggie, reaching for a joke to steady herself, because she thought the chair was starting to float.

“No,” he said and coughed. “Although perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. I don’t mean to, er, importune you with my feelings. If you don’t share them, that is. No harm done.”

The chair was definitely floating. That was all right. Reggie smiled and didn’t think she’d be able to stop any time soon. “You really are a prize idiot,” she said and leaned forward to cup his face in one hand. “Do you think I’d have gone tearing into a haunted cave—in my underthings, no less—for just
anyone
?”

“You?” he asked, his eyes shining like a summer evening. “Yes. Absolutely.”

“Right. Hold still,” said Reggie in, if not the sternest voice, the sternest one she could manage just then.

Colin lifted an eyebrow and watched her stand up. “Why?”

“Because I don’t want to kill you by accident,” she said and bent down to kiss him, carefully and for a very long time. Despite her orders, he did move—cradling her head in his hands and stroking her hair. She wasn’t inclined to complain, even when she broke off.

“I love you too,” Reggie said. “And I think we’re both very lucky that you heal fast.”

She left the room laughing, not conscious of her feet on the carpet and only barely so of Edmund’s knowing grin when he saw her face. One day soon, Colin would come out of the room with her; not long after that, their life together would begin. No matter how long that ended up being, Reggie knew it would be worth everything that had come before.

Read on for an excerpt from the next book in Isabel Cooper’s Highland Dragons series:

Night of the Highland Dragon

“Loch Aranoch?” The girl shrugged, flipping a straw-colored braid over her shoulder, and went on, her accent almost too thick for William to understand. “Aye. They’re all queer up that way,” she added, in the just-for-your-information tone at which girls of twelve seemed to excel in every place and generation.

Her brother elbowed her in the side. “No such thing,” he said to William, like a man attempting to correct the foolishness of his juniors and womenfolk. “It’s only that ’tis a very small village, ye ken.”

“And backward,” said the girl, refusing to be squelched. “Havena’ even got the telegraph in.”

“Have you gone there?” William asked.

The boy shook his head. “The farmers come in for the market day, some of them. We’re there with the wool, so we’ve a chance to talk at times.”

“Mostly with their daughters,” said the girl, and she received another elbow for the information—sharper, if her indignant squeal was any sign.

William smiled and reminded himself to be patient. Youth was youth in all corners of the world; shouting or snapping wouldn’t get him the answers he wanted, and he would have found the bickering funny another time, if he hadn’t been thinking about murder.

Neither of the youngsters knew his thoughts, any more than they knew about the body in the woods. William wanted to keep it that way as long as possible. With luck, he’d be long gone before they heard rumors about the dead boy. With more luck, nobody in Belholm would connect him or his questions with those rumors—at least, not where his quarry could hear.

He focused on the siblings again. Elsie and Tom Waddell lived at the edge of the forest, like all the poor-but-honest woodcutters in fairy tales. By local standards, they weren’t poor—their father owned a healthy flock of sheep as well as his house and farm—but William hoped they were honest and that they knew the land well enough.

Under his gaze, they left off their argument. Tom, a few years older, had the grace to look embarrassed. “Sorry, sir. We’re not very much acquainted with them up at the Loch, to tell the truth. I wouldna say anyone is much. But they’re fine folk, I’m sure of it,” he added with a glance at his sister. “Will you be wanting to go up that way?”

“Perhaps,” said William, and he took a measuring look northwestward, where the mountains rose to meet the bright autumn sky. In theory, there was a lake somewhere beyond that line of hills, and a village nearby where “backward” people lived, “queer” individuals who were nonetheless “fine folk”…except that one of them might be a killer.

One of them might be a victim too. The dead boy might not have been local. By English standards, or at least by William’s, Belholm was a small village, but it was big enough for the train to stop there twice a day, and there were plenty of farms on the outskirts where people kept to themselves. Nobody had reported a missing man, whether son, husband, brother, or farmhand, and William wasn’t in a position to go making that sort of inquiry.

Even if he had been, he wouldn’t have been able to give much information. The body he’d found had been almost unrecognizable. He’d made out sex, species, and rough age, but that had been all. Animals had done some of the damage—by the time William had arrived, the poor chap had been lying out for three days, in a forest full of scavengers—but the worst of it had come from human hands. The killer, whoever he or she was, had pulled the boy apart in a manner that called to mind the killings in Whitechapel a decade back, or the dissecting table.

…or a sacrifice.

Save when a mission called for it, William wasn’t a gambling man, but he knew where he’d have put his money if he had been.

“Does the road lead anywhere else?” he asked and gestured toward the mountains. “Going that way, I mean?”

Elsie shook her head. “Who else would want to live up
there
?” she asked, wrinkling her freckled nose. “Bad enough to be this far away from everything, isn’t it? At least here there’s the train and the telegraph, and we’re getting the papers from Aberdeen every day now. Up that way is just Loch Aranoch and the devil of a lot of forest.”

“She’s right,” said Tom, albeit reluctantly. “If anyone else lives that way, they keep themselves to themselves even better than the folk of Aranoch. I suppose you’d get over the mountains eventually, but there’s plenty easier ways to do that.”

“And the people there are…strange? Backward?” William kept his voice light, sounding simply curious—if a shade tasteless—rather than as if he was fishing for information. So he hoped, at least: it had been a long few months.

“Ah, well,” said Tom, with a more stoic shrug than his sister’s, “they are a bit closed-mouthed, is the truth of it. And there are stories, of course, but that’s just fancy,” he added in the skeptical-man-of-the-world voice.

“Stories?”

“They
say
,” said Elsie, eager to contribute where her brother was too embarrassed, “that people disappear up there.”

Tom snorted.

Ignoring him, Elsie dropped her voice. “And I heard that the lady doesna’ ever grow any older.”

“The lady?” William asked.

“Lady MacAlasdair. She lives in the castle, and she’s been there years, but she stays young and beautiful forever. And how would ye do that?”

“Hair dye,” said Tom, “and rouge. And having
silly little girls
tell romantic stories about people they’ve not seen once.”

Ignoring Elsie’s violent outburst at
silly little girls
, William chuckled. “I see,” he said. “Have you met this young and beautiful lady?”

“Nay. She doesna’ come out of Loch Aranoch much, ’tis true,” said Tom, once he’d successfully dodged his sister’s foot. “But the gi—the
people
I’ve talked to say she’s in the village often enough. And they do say she’s comely.”

“And…people disappearing?”

“Stories,” said Tom firmly. “Stories, and maybe old men who went hunting in their cups and broke their necks, or a man’s wife running off with a peddler. There’s no one bathin’ in maiden’s blood up at the Loch, sir—and none who should believe it, Elsie.”

“Jolly good,” said William, and he laughed again, as if he were just as skeptical as Tom. A bit hard on Elsie, of course, but there was more at stake here than the feelings of one youthful maybe-Cassandra. “People
do
go there and come back again, I assume.”

“Oh, aye, of course. Not a terribly great many of ’em—”

“Who’d
want
to?” Elsie put in, sullen now.

“—but there was a painter came through the summer before last. He stopped here on the way back, and gave me sixpence for carrying his wee painting kit,” Tom added in what might have been a hint.

“I think I can do a bit better,” said William, and he dug two half-crowns out of his pocket.

Elsie squealed again, this time with delight. Tom just grinned and bobbed his head. “Thank you, sir. Very much obliged.”

“Think nothing of it,” William said, wishing he had the power to make the polite saying into a command. “I shan’t trouble you any further.”

He could ask nothing else. Oh, he could
think
of things to ask, but the children probably wouldn’t know the answers, and they might start wondering why he wanted to know.

A day or two from now, someone else—hunter, peddler, painter, or possibly but hopefully not another child out playing—would stumble over the body in the woods. Then the hue and cry would go up. Men would go around the houses and ask, and find out whether or not the poor soul had belonged to Belholm. They might even find out who he’d been. They
would
be Scots, those men, and they would have no connections to D Branch, nor prior encounters with the Consuasori, the Brotherhood of the Grey Duke, or any other of the mad and maddening cults that grew these days like mold after rain.

Nobody would be surprised at such an investigation, and the guilty party would take no particular alarm from it.

William couldn’t afford to seem interested.

Watching the children leave—they kept to a polite walk as long as he was watching, but he knew they’d break into a run afterward, eager to get home or down to the shops with their windfall—he went over the facts he knew.

Item the first: the boy’s ghost had managed to get itself to Miss Harbert, over in Edinburgh, before going on to whatever lay ahead. By the time the medium had been in position to receive, he’d been fading, but he remembered the essentials: the chloroform, the Latin, the sense of what Harbert and William knew was magical force, and, perhaps most importantly, the location. From what Harbert had said and William himself had encountered, remaining so long and so coherent when away from his body had taken both considerable strength from the ghost and some relaxation of certain boundaries from the other side.

Neither of those was a good sign.

Item the second: the killing itself. Chloroform argued that pain hadn’t been a necessary component, but the killer had bled the boy thoroughly, then removed eyes, tongue, and hands. Symbolically, that probably meant sight, communication, and action—but William didn’t know whether the killer had been enhancing his or her own faculties or restricting someone else’s.

Item the third: tracks. There hadn’t been many in the physical world. Even in good weather, a footprint wouldn’t last for three days in the forest. William had a few resources most men didn’t, though, especially when he was certain he wouldn’t be seen. The equipment that let him look into the past—two silver chains, etched with runes and tipped at either end with onyx—was clunky and obvious, and the procedure not always reliable, but it had proved a godsend more than once in the last five years.

This time, the results had been mixed. As always, he saw the past through a thick haze, as bad as the worst of the London pea-soupers. While a clearer view would have been more
useful
, the blurred sort was often better for his peace of mind, as in this case: he’d seen the killer’s form stooping over the boy’s unconscious body and witnessed the slow process of the death, but the fog had hidden all details.

The killer was human, or human-shaped. He or she was tall for a woman, or middling-height for a man, and relatively thin, and moved like someone whose joints and muscles still obeyed them without a hitch. Otherwise, the murderer had only been a dark shape, and lost in more darkness soon after he or she had left the body.

Before the shape had vanished, it had headed up the road. It had gone up toward the mountains, where the children said there wasn’t much but a reclusive village with a strangely young-looking lady, past a forest where men had been known to disappear.

Up the road, then, was William’s destination too. If he left now, he might get there before sundown, but it didn’t seem very likely.

He adjusted his bag—clothing, the silver chains, guns and ammunition, and a book for the train—on his shoulder, faced the road, and couldn’t help but sigh.

He envied young Tom. He envied the boy’s parents, who’d doubtless had some part in his hardheaded skepticism. He envied any man who could look down the road that faced him now and tell himself that this was practically the twentieth century, that he was in Scotland, not Darkest Transylvania, and that really and truly, nobody around here
was
bathing in maidens’ blood or ever would.

Maidens’ blood would be fairly mild—especially as one could only go through so many maidens, even in a wholesome rural community.

As bad as the legends were, the truth would probably be worse. William had found that it generally worked that way.

* * *

The restful thing about Agnes, Judith thought as she watched the other woman pour tea, wasn’t that she didn’t ask questions. She asked plenty: she was asking another one right now. “I canna think it’s at all safe, can you? All of those wires right there in the house, and what if one of them breaks?”

That was the kind of question Agnes asked. That was the kind with which Judith could live very well.

“Then you die,” said Judith. She broke open a muffin, still steaming hot—even looking human, she had certain advantages over those with only mortal blood in their veins—and reached for the butter. “Probably most unpleasantly. You’ll remember I wasn’t very enthusiastic about Colin’s ideas.”

Besides, she could see perfectly well in the dark, and she had no need to keep her servants up at all hours.

“You never are that,” said Agnes.

“Not
never
. There’s been an occasion or two. I like his wife well enough—that has to count for something, doesn’t it?”

“More than many sisters would admit.” Agnes smiled. “Will they be coming back soon, do you think?”

“I don’t know,” said Judith.

She knew that Agnes wouldn’t ask
why
she didn’t know, or how long Colin had been away before, or how old he was. Most people in Loch Aranoch wouldn’t. Agnes was one of the few with whom Judith didn’t always hear the unasked question, one of the few who dwelt comfortably with the answers she would never hear, and therefore one of the few mortals Judith could come close to calling a friend.

That was why she told herself that the gray in the other woman’s hair was only shadows, and that she saw no lines at the corner of Agnes’s eyes. Judith was decent at lying to herself, though not as good as she once had been.

“Aye, well,” said Agnes, “it’s been a great year for visitors, in any case. Your brothers, and that friend of the doctor’s, and now Elspeth MacDougal’s son’s come back. I dinna know if you’d heard that.”

Judith shook her head. Mrs. MacDougal had been housekeeper at MacAlasdair Keep for forty years, before old age had made her retire to a cottage with her daughter’s family. She remembered the boy vaguely, as a towheaded youth running around the village; she thought he’d taken after the father, who she barely remembered more of.

“Come back for good?” she asked.

“He didna say. Not but what it would do them good to have another man about the house, with the third bairn on its way and the harvest coming in. But he’s been living well down in London—”