Dual Release (10 page)

Ancient words whispered through her brain. She couldn’t remember them all, but she remembered it being beautiful. Opening her eyes, she directed her gaze to Donnell. Somehow the old woman freed him from a curse. At least that’s how she envisioned it as having happened.

Did she believe in curses?

Looking at the statue, she decided she did. That had to be the only explanation. Now what? She struggled to remember the words spoken that set him free but couldn’t. Damn. Did she need to speak them again to break him out of that prison or was it a one-time deal?

Totally confused, she curled into a ball on the cot. Unstoppable tears rushed her. She needed to rest. No. What she needed to do was think but at the moment she couldn’t as her thoughts convoluted into a taut bundle of pain that sent short bursts of fiery spikes throughout her head. The forthcoming migraine couldn’t be stopped. The events of her night combined with her exhaustion equaled a massive headache. She reached for his hand, hoping he was somehow alive in that strange stone prison. The light became too much to bear and she lost the battle to keep her eyes open.

Cait dug out a pill she always tucked in the tiny pocket within the front pocket of her jeans. She hated to take it but if she didn’t and the migraine persisted, she’d never work out a plan of escape for them. She moved to the sink, palmed some water and downed the medication. Grabbing a towel, she lay on the cot and covered her eyes. Not sure if she did it hoping to comfort the man cursed to stone or for herself, she kept her hand on his. It was best to let the medication take effect if she wanted to get anything accomplished.

Silently she prayed.
Please keep Donnell safe.
She lay still and waited for sleep.

Donnell couldn’t move. His mind was fully awake but his body failed him. He knew both eyes were open but no sight filled them, only darkness. Cait? Was she near? Had the same befallen her? No. He felt it had not. This was the curse that had taken his family. Somehow he understood this to be true. Dour. Had he been stricken as well? He prayed not. If one of them was to remain free, he hoped it had been his
brathair
. Digging deep, he tapped into that special connection he had with his twin and sensed the same had happened to Dour.

How? Why?

He’d been freed then recaptured by its solid tomb walls once again. What had he done to deserve such treatment? Donnell struggled with the issues. Though he willed his body to move, it refused. He could take no air into his lungs but somehow he didn’t need any at the moment. Every part of him sat motionless in this eerie location, hovering between life and death.

Would death be better? The thought toyed with his consciousness. Was this how he was to remain? Awake but trapped, unable to move, listening to those around him without the ability to speak or respond? His rapidly fired questions skidded to a halt.

Could he hear someone outside his prison? Donnell strained to listen, hoping at least that part of his body functioned. He inwardly cringed. Cait’s soft whimper reached him and he ached to soothe her angst. She cried. He tried desperately to move, to brush away her fears, but his hands would not respond. His lips refused to say the words that wove through his thoughts.

This was not good. She was alone. Anger brewed but there was naught he could do. He could not protect her locked inside here. Donnell attempted to flex his muscles, to expand his cage but nothing happened. He couldn’t even grit his teeth in frustration or ball his fists. He wished for her safety and prayed to the gods to keep her from harm.

If any of the gods in the heavens be listening, please keep this wee lass out of harm’s way. She deserves no pain at the cost of knowing me.

Her image floated behind his eyes. He’d tasted her, sampled her womanly gifts and hungered for more.
Och.
Was this how he was to spend eternity? Wanting a woman he could never have again? A woman with perfect breasts that jiggled when she laughed and teased him when she rode his shaft. For a second he relished the beauty of her face when she reached her pleasure. Aye. That was a vision he prayed to see again. But if not, then he hoped this one memory never faded and kept him company until his mind finally quit and he found peace within this strange resting place.

If his mouth worked he’d love to savor her flavor upon his tongue. He liked the feel of her hidden pearl between his fingertips when he rolled it to bring her joy. That subtle intake of air she took each time he licked it then sucked it, increasing her desire. If his cock could respond, he knew just thinking of sex with Cait would have him hard and ready for her sheath. A sheath he knew fit around him nicely. Snug, tight and wet. Just the way he liked his Cait to be.

His Cait? Donnell paused.

The woman was not his to claim,
especially
not in his current condition. Images of Cait traipsed through his mind. His desire for her increased and tormented him. He knew he could not have her. This magnificent woman would not be his to kiss, to hold. He longed to be nestled between her luscious thighs and share the release of their mutual essences mixing together within her heat. Aye. Now there was a thought that brought him momentary gladness. If his lips worked, he’d be smiling, thinking of Cait.

Donnell focused on the woman he’d known for the span of a night. No other came into the center of his thoughts. Thinking of her brought him peace. A peace he prayed would see him through however many years he’d be trapped alive but dead within the limits of this curse.

Jenny kept her distance and had even followed the van without using headlights for the last hour. The road they traveled was desolate, with little traffic flow in the wee morning hours. She hoped that by extinguishing her headlights the driver of the van would think the car turned onto a side road. That was if he even had noticed them at all. With Dour as her navigator, they’d kept a great deal of distance between them and focused only on the van’s red taillights as their beacon in the dark. Luckily, she had enough moonlight to keep the car on the road.

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed he’d managed to relax into the seat and had even loosened the intense grip he’d held on the dashboard for most of the ride. From the white color of his knuckles, she’d half expected his handprints to be forever embedded in the dash.

He’d been filled with questions and she’d done her best to answer them. Most were about the car. Typical guy questions, how’d it work, what did the steering wheel do, the radio, the gearshift, the dashboard, how did the window operate, and most importantly what did it eat? That last one made her laugh. But then she’d realized he was comparing it to what he knew—horses. After that, she tried to see things more from his confused perspective. How would she feel if she’d been awakened from a curse after a couple of centuries? Deciding she’d be scared shitless, she thought his questions through more carefully and held her laughter so as not to discourage him from learning about this new world.

When the van turned and stopped at a guarded gate, Jenny pulled the car off the road and waited. She didn’t want to drive past and be seen so she chose the first accessible location to hide and watch—a grove of trees. The moonlight filtered through the branches. Each crunch under the tires made her stomach sink as she hoped she wasn’t doing any damage to the car. Cait would kill her. She parked as deeply in the underbrush as she could without getting the car stuck and without hitting a tree.

“Stay here,” she commanded Dour. Carefully, she climbed out through the open window so the inside light wouldn’t come on if she opened the door. This wouldn’t have been an issue if the switch on the light worked and she could’ve turned it off and gotten out through the door. But the car was old and several things no longer worked.

Catching sight of movement in the car, she leaned back inside and spoke on a hurried whisper to Dour. “Don’t get out. I’m getting Cait’s binoculars.”

“
Mi
brathair
be in trouble and ye want me to do nothing?” he grumbled and she could tell he wasn’t happy about being told what to do. She wasn’t sure if he didn’t like being told what to do or that it came from a woman.

“For the moment, yes,” she commanded in a low tone, trying not to lose her temper. “We need to think this through and not act on impulse or it might get them killed.”

She waited until he reluctantly agreed. Jenny turned and walked to the trunk. The moment she opened it, a bright flash at the compound stunned her and she immediately focused on the van, searching for any sign of Cait. Being too far away to see much, she prayed Cait and Dour’s brother were safe.

“What happened?” Dour questioned as he hung as far out as the passenger window allowed.

She would have openly laughed at the sight of such a large man squeezing out such a small hole if they weren’t in such a predicament. For a second, she wished she hadn’t shown him how to roll the window down in the first place. Was he stuck? She hoped he wasn’t. Good thing she didn’t show him how to open the door. With the way he listened to her, he’d probably be storming the enemy by now without a plan of attack and blowing any possibility of saving Cait and Donnell.

“Not sure,” she answered as she hurriedly retrieved the binocular case, opened it and scoured the area with the binoculars. She got a glimpse of Cait and Dour’s brother being shoved toward a doorway into what looked like a hill. Was it some sort of underground facility? Jenny shook her head. How in the hell was she going to get her friend out of there? “It looked like some sort of explosion.”

Had Cait used that firecracker she kept in her emergency kit? Nah. It was too big an explosion for a single firecracker. It had to be something else.

“What do ye see?” he questioned impatiently, causing the car to rock a little as he tried his best to reposition. Jenny moved toward the passenger side and prayed he didn’t turn the car over with his efforts.

“Not sure,” she replied, letting go of the binoculars so they hung around her neck. “They’ve been taken into some sort of odd-shaped building. Could you stop trying to get out through the window? You’re not going to fit and you just might turn the car over. Then where would we be? I’ll tell you,” she stated sternly, not wanting to yell at him in case her voice echoed and somehow reached the compound. “We’d be without transportation when we free them and make our getaway, that’s where.”

Dour froze as if contemplating her words. Then the car rocked again as he wiggled himself back inside, grumbling as he went. “If’n this thing turned over, it’d be no trouble to right it with me sheer will.”

Jenny ground her teeth, trying to control the need to scream. The pressure of the situation threatened her resolve but she dug for the strength to remain in control. One of them had to be. If it were up to the antique giant, they’d rush the compound and either die trying to save the others or end up locked up with them.

Grabbing a backpack full of emergency supplies and a pair of blankets from the trunk, she returned to the driver’s side and handed the items to Dour through the window, then climbed back in.

“Where did ye get these? We are in the beast’s, um, car’s belly. It looked as if ye pulled these from its mouth?”

Jenny smiled inwardly. The front of the car opening probably did look like a mouth to this ancient Scotsman. “Almost every car has an area to store things called a trunk. In this model, it’s located in the front and the engine is in the rear.”

“Ah, the engine, the thing that makes the car go,” he said. She liked the way his thick Scottish brogue rolled across each word and his childlike wonder only added to his charm.

She shook her head.
Don’t go thinking about his charm.
What she needed was a plan. Jenny rifled through the backpack and pulled out a battery-powered lantern. It had four settings, high, medium, low and a very dim nightlight level, which was the one she chose. To keep it from being seen, she pulled the windshield screen from the rear seat and put it in place. She then leaned out the window with the binoculars in hand, trying to scout the area as best as possible.

“From what I saw, they have been taken into an area of hills. What be this place?” Dour asked.

“I’ve got a feeling it’s one of those underground bunker communities.”

“Underground bunker communities?” he questioned and it hit her just how much she needed to teach him about this new era. His world was long gone. “It looked to me as if they went into the side of a hill.”

“They did,” she answered. “I think it probably leads into an underground house of sorts.”

“Like a cave?”

If that worked for him, she’d roll with it. “Yeah. Like a cave.”

His brother was a prisoner in a van that had just entered a guarded compound. And from what little she could see, it looked heavily fortified. But it was dark and difficult to judge from this distance, even with the binoculars and the floodlights in the area near the guardhouse.

The way her and Cait’s luck had been running lately, they’d probably stumbled upon the very community the authorities had been combing the countryside to locate. Dozens of these types of underground bunkers had been sprouting up, especially in areas known to have been former mining locations. With the bad economy, many people were choosing to go off the grid and disappear into these communities in order to survive. Whole families were moving into these groups and building new lives. Hoarding supplies, relocating and prepping as if the world were coming to an end. It was a little too creepy in her opinion.

According to a recent news report, a gang was suspected to have infiltrated one of these compounds and taken it over. But authorities weren’t able to find it. So far it was mere speculation by the media. Looking around at the barbed wire and the occasional shadow of a person perusing the perimeter, she’d bet money it wasn’t a figment of some overzealous reporter’s imagination. Nope. Her gut instinct screamed they’d landed in a bad situation instead of a group of harmless families trying to survive.