Blood Marriage (21 page)

The desperate sound raced out into the dark corridors of the castle. Echoing screams mocked her in return. A wicked laugh rumbled from the scarlet hood. A black glove stroked her cheek. Elizabeth jerked away.

She raced down the corridor past the entrance to the kitchens, plowing into a black-hooded figure emerging from the tower stairs, knocking it to the ground. Behind her a malevolent stirring of air told her she was pursued, yet there was no sound save that of her own wheezing gasps and her boots pounding the stone floor. 

Panic pumped through her veins, her joints burned, her vision dimmed. She'd made the center of the Great Hall when her cloak tie pulled suddenly taut against her throat, choking her and nearly wrenching her from her feet. Once again the stench of decay rolled over her. She managed to turn her head enough to glimpse red as she was reeled, terrifyingly, deliberately, slowly, backwards.

It was playing with her, like a cat that'd caught the tail of a mouse. Horror engulfed her. Every muscle in her body trembled as she strained forward, yet was pulled relentlessly back. She tried to scream, but the cloak tie strangled the sound, trapping the terror inside.

Fingers stroked the back of her head. A fetid sigh of anticipation stirred her hair. For an instant Elizabeth relaxed, allowing herself to fall back into the malodorous cloud. The cloak-tie garrote at her throat slackened, allowing her to gulp in one precious breath. Then, with every remaining ounce of strength within her, she lunged forward. The tie snapped. The cloak was ripped from her shoulders. Elizabeth stumbled forward. And ran.

Just steps from the castle's entrance she skidded to a stop. A burly figure filled the doorway, blocking her exit. This one wore no hood, but the burning torch he held before him blinded Elizabeth to his identity. 

Behind her the scarlet-caped creature hissed. Its black-cloaked companion, the one Elizabeth had knocked to the ground at the bottom of the tower stairs, came to stand beside it.

Elizabeth backed slowly away from all three until her heels struck the rotted boards of the main staircase. Her chest was heaving, her breath coming in ragged gasps. The room grew dimmer, her vision once again failing as her panic rose. Soon she would be plunged into darkness, left blind and defenseless with these three.

Scarlet hissed at Elizabeth, but advanced on the man in the doorway. Black-hood turned toward Elizabeth. 

"Stop!" The man in the doorway waved his torch.

The hooded ones continued advancing with identically purposeful indolence. An eerie creep of hungry expectation.

The man tossed the torch. It stained a brief circle of flame as it tumbled through the air. Scarlet leapt clear of its path and the torch landed on the stone floor in the center of the Great Hall. Its flame sputtered, almost extinguishing, then exploded back to life. 

Elizabeth put one foot on the staircase behind her, testing it for a place that would hold her weight before bringing the other foot up to join it. Black-hood chuckled.

"Stop or I'll fire!" The man raised an arm. Torchlight flickered over the barrel of a gun and glinted off the familiar silver piping of his footman's livery. 

Scarlet side-stepped the torch, advancing. 

Fire exploded from the man's hand. Ear-splitting thunder roared through the castle. But it was the black-hooded one who dropped, yelping as it hit the ground, writhing and moaning. Scarlet's laughter rode the gun's echoing roar. 

Elizabeth lifted a trembling foot onto the next step, fighting to remain calm, to remember the safe spots Nicholas had shown her. She'd made three steps when the second shot rang through the great hall. It too missed the scarlet one, pinging off a wall, and then puffing through the air near Elizabeth's cheek. 

She dropped to her bottom, stunned, just as a third hooded figure flew down the stairs behind her, soundlessly launching itself into the air, hurtling with impossible power and grace across the room. It tackled Scarlet, twisting as it struck so that Scarlet fell on top of its body rather than beneath. They hit the floor in a tangle of silence.

Still a fourth hooded figure rose up, silhouetted in the doorway against the night sky behind the footman. Elizabeth called an inarticulate warning, but too late. The footman was seized from behind, forced out of the doorway, into the castle, and wrestled to the floor.

"Elizabeth! Run!" came a shout from somewhere in that mass of fighting bodies.

The gun roared again. The bullet thudded into the stairs near her foot, shaking the rotting boards and sending a puff of foul-smelling debris up into Elizabeth's face.

Terror won over caution. Elizabeth bunched her skirts in one hand and scrambled blindly up the decaying steps on hands and feet. Twice her foot crashed through worm-eaten board, but she pulled free. She reached the top of the stairs and could barely hear the grunts and thrashing below over the pounding of her own heart. Every instinct screamed to her to run and hide, but as she glanced down at the four shadows battling in the torchlight below, a thought froze her in place. 

Had it been Nicholas's voice she'd heard telling her to run? Was he among the snarl of bodies struggling below? What if he needed help? Elizabeth hiked her skirts above her knees, dropped again on all fours and scrambled backwards down the stairs. 

She'd gone only a few feet when a cold hand seized her ankle.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Elizabeth flipped onto her hip, sending a cascade of wood fragments bumping down the stairs toward the combatants below. Her fingers dug desperately into the worm-eaten steps above her, sharp splinters piercing the tender flesh beneath her nails. She kicked hard with her free foot, striking frantically at the creature crawling hand over hand up her bare calf. It slithered up the stairs on its belly, pushing itself forward with its good leg, dragging a useless limb behind it like a reptilian tail. 

Terror made her merciless. Again and again she kicked viciously with her free leg, pounding at the hands holding her other limb, her boot scraping and bruising her own flesh as she attempted to dislodge the creature. Black-hood flopped from side to side, dodging the blows, but never let go or stopped its relentless climb.

The sudden sickening crack of breaking wood stilled Elizabeth in mid-kick. For a moment she forgot how to breathe. Her attacker froze as well. The stairs moaned and swayed beneath them. The sharp shriek of wood splintering made Elizabeth tighten her grip on the boards above her and thrust out with her free leg, bracing her foot against the edge of a broken step. 

With a shuddering roar the stairs beneath her attacker collapsed. A gaping hole swallowed him, dragging her leg in after him up to the knee, the force of his weight wrenching one of her hands from the rotting boards. She flailed out with that hand, searching wildly. Her knuckles banged along one wooden baluster and she grabbed another, her fingers wrapping its base. The muscles in her legs and arms strained and burned with the effort not to be pulled down. She wouldn't be able to hold on long. 

Vulgar curses erupted from the yawning hole. Her attacker's hooded head slipped out of sight as his hands slid from just below her knee, scraping down her leg to her ankle. He was falling. His iron grip released her ankle and for an instant she thought she was free. Then her dress yanked violently. He'd caught himself in her skirts. 

For several long heartbeats Elizabeth was braced over the hole, one knee bent into it, afraid to move or breathe lest the rest of the stairs collapse and send her plunging to her death. Yet in the back of her mind was the cold realization that even if Black-hood didn't drag her down into the darkness beneath the stairs, he'd already killed her. Even now, the injuries to her legs were bleeding both inside and out. The result for her would be, as it had been for her brothers before her, a slow agonizing death. Surely the quick end of a bone crushing fall would be preferrable. Yet something within her refused to give up. She tightened her grip on the baluster and gritted her teeth. 

The curses died away and her dress wrenched tight against her body. Black-hood began to climb once more, hand over hand, his fingers gouging deep into the flesh of her calves, then her thighs. As he slithered up her, Elizabeth held on with all her strength, waiting. The top of his hood crested the hole. She flexed her foot, bending her knee back as far as it would go and kicked hard. Her heel connected with something soft, the gut perhaps. Black-hood's head snapped up, its hood fell back, and it unleashed a gap-toothed howl. 

Randall?

Then he was gone, the crash and thud of his body hitting beneath the stairwell sending a wave of mixed revulsion and relief rolling over her.

Elizabeth pulled her leg from the hole. The desire to curl into a ball, give in to hysterics, let the trembling and burning in her muscles ease was strong. Instead she rolled away from the hole and scrambled crab-like up a few steps.

Below her a sea of inky darkness surrounded the island of light created by the torch still burning on the stone floor. The man from the doorway had lost his gun. It lay near the edge of the torchlight. Though she could not see the foes, grunts and thuds told her the fight raged on. A body thumped against a wall and air rushed from someone's lungs. Seconds later a burly silhouette stumbled to the castle entrance. Outlined for a moment in the dim light of the doorway, his footman's silver and black livery was plain. One hand was crossed over his chest gripping his other arm above the elbow as it dangled limp at his side. Blood dripped from the fingers as he staggered out into the night. No one followed.

Suddenly there was the sense of chaotic stillness below. Then a hand reached into the torchlight, picking up the gun. A figure rolled in from the other side, its scarlet cloak blood bright in the torchlight. For one terrifying instant, the lower half of its face was visible beneath the hood: lips stretched taunt across monstrous teeth bared in a wide feral growl, something dark smearing the chin and dripping from dagger-like incisors. Then the creature rolled over the torch, extinguishing its flame.

Renewed panic flooded through Elizabeth washing away the last shred of her night vision. Had Nicholas been one of the fighters below? If so, why didn't he call out to her?

Wood creaked. Someone was on the stairs. Elizabeth fled, hugging the banister up the remaining steps to the second floor, sheer horror driving her upward through the darkness, heedless of the danger of sharing Randall's fate.

The wood floors of the second story had withstood the years better than the stairs. But as Elizabeth blundered blindly down the hallway boards sagged and cracked beneath her feet. Gulping back terror, she forced herself to slow, to reach out to find the wall. When Nicholas had brought her up here on their honeymoon, he'd cautioned her to walk close to the wall where the floor was safer. Now, she felt her way through the dark, her palms scrapping along the rough stone.

Something scudded across her shoe, stirring her skirts. Fighting hysteria, she increased her pace, shuffling down the hall at a frantic speed, her hands batting wildly against the stone. Then the stone evaporated and she fell through a threshold, landing with breath-stopping force on her side, raising a smothering cloud of decaying wood and decades old dust. She rolled onto her back.

Stars winked down through a patch of missing roof near a corner chimney. Elizabeth struggled to her feet. She knew this room. It was the master's chamber. Nicholas had shown it to her when they'd explored this part of the castle. He'd pretended to ponder the number of Devlins who'd been conceived here, then asked teasingly if she'd like to add to that count. Despite feeling the soul-deep melancholy of knowing -- as they both did now -- that she would never bear him a child, she'd played along, wrapping her arms around his neck and daring him to put his ancestors to shame.

Now, in the same room where two days ago she'd known such happiness, hopelessness washed over her. She'd made a fatal mistake. Apart from the main staircase, the only other exit from this floor was a narrow set of stone steps at the opposite end of the hall, a servant's pass that led down to the kitchens. In her reckless panic she'd gone the wrong way.

Behind her there was no sound, no sense of swift pursuit, yet Elizabeth knew something was coming, coming with the deliberate care the rotting woods and crumbling stone of old ruins demanded. There was no hurry. She was trapped. She had nowhere left to go.

Out in the hall a board creaked. The sound sent Elizabeth scurrying across to the room's single window to behold an at once a mockingly beautiful and utterly hopeless view. The exterior walls of the castle fell in a long, lethal drop to the ground below. In the distance, the moonlit forest that had been so frightening on her journey here, now seemed a sanctuary, infinitely desirable and completely unattainable. A movement drew her eye. 

At the edge of the trees a large, black shadow moved with canine grace, then melted into the leafy underbrush. Suddenly Amanda stepped out of the trees, swiping a white net through the air. She stomped her foot on the ground and then, net still swinging, ran back into the cover of the forest. Hope surged in Elizabeth. Where Amanda was, surely Leo would be as well. She thought of calling out to her friend, but doing so would reveal her to her pursuer and possibly put Amanda in danger as well. Yet simply knowing that she might find help if she could make it to the edge of those woods, as utterly impossible as that might be, gave Elizabeth courage. She wouldn't give up. There had to be a way out. But it wouldn't be through the window. Elizabeth looked up at the ceiling above her.

Stars twinkled through the hole in the roof, beckoning her. Elizabeth shook her head at the impossibility of what she was thinking. But there was no better choice. Staying where she was was hopeless.

Elizabeth climbed up on the windowsill and took a deep breath. Then with all her strength and faith, she launched herself at an exposed ceiling beam near the patch of night sky above. Her fingers clamped around the old wood, digging into it, driving new splinters beneath her nails. A shower of dust and wood bits rained down on her, choking and blinding her. Tears poured from her stinging eyes. She coughed, fighting for breath, but held on. She hung there, her feet swinging back and forth, the beam creaking in rhythmic protest.