Haunting Desire (21 page)

“I miss her,” Shealy said. “Every day.” Eyes blurred with pointless tears, she looked down into Ellie’s face. “You miss her, too, don’t you?”

Solemnly, Ellie nodded.

“Well, we have each other now. And we’ll have to remember her by telling our own stories.” The barest hint of a smile tilted Ellie’s lips. “And when we find Dad, we’ll make him tell us stories as well.”

Ellie heaved a great sigh and leaned back against her. Shealy pressed a kiss to her head and held her.

They all fell silent for a while as they ate their sparse meal. Shealy found herself looking back at the way they’d come, praying that soon Tiarnan would stride from the forest, big, strong, and unharmed. She could no longer hear the shouts or cries, and the worst fears began to crowd in. He’d said he’d come for her. . . . but what if he didn’t? What if he was hurt, mortally wounded, dying. . . .

To stop the morbid thoughts, she looked back at Liam.

“Tiarnan told me you’d been at war with Cathán for most of your life.”

“Aye. It will be a good day when Tiarnan puts an end to that vermin.”

“Why were you at war?”

“The bloody Book of Fennore. He thought we had it. Ha. Little did he know that fighting for it would land his sorry arse dead in its center.”

There was a certain poetic justice to it.

“Tiarnan said he damaged the Book and that’s how you all ended up here.”

“Aye, and that’s true as well. But Tiarnan . . . he feels responsible for everything, y’ see?”

She nodded, thinking of the torment she’d seen in his golden brown eyes so many times. “He does seem to carry a lot of baggage.”

“Y’ve no idea. He was our leader, and he was a good one. But even a good leader must lose when winning is impossible. Cathán never relented and his numbers grew because each time he conquered, he made new subjects. Our people died, if not from battle then from the cold or hunger. There was hardly anything left of us when Tiarnan made a match between our sister and a man we thought an enemy. I did not agree with it, but I trusted Tiarnan, and in the end he was right, wasn’t he?”

Shealy didn’t know, but Liam’s voice had grown wistful and his eyes took on a shine that might have been tears. He was too proud to shed them, though. Instead he went on in that soft and solemn voice.

“Everything might have been good after that if we hadn’t been betrayed.”

“By Eamonn?”

Liam shot her a startled glance. “He told y’ about Eamonn?”

She nodded, and Liam’s gaze became thoughtful. Evidently Tiarnan did not talk about his deceitful brother much. She couldn’t blame him.

She wanted to ask Liam more about this traitorous brother, but Liam’s closed expression made her hold her questions in. Speaking Eamonn’s name had obviously brought to the surface all the emotional upheaval that went with his betrayal.

“It destroyed what was left of the leader Tiarnan once was,” Liam said at last, his voice low and distant. “He hasn’t the heart for it anymore. When we first came, I worried that he’d give up altogether.”

Shealy thought about this for a moment. What Liam said seemed to explain much about the serious man who’d set her blood on fire. She sensed his reluctance to take charge and yet . . . yet he’d agreed to come with Shealy to find her father.

Liam looked at her, as if he’d heard her thoughts. “It’s a good thing, y’ coming. Y’ve given him something.”

She blushed as memories of the night before and just what and how much she’d given to Tiarnan filled her thoughts in aching detail.

“I don’t think it’s me,” she mumbled.

“Aye, it is,” Liam said with certainty. “Tiarnan was younger than I am when Cathán killed our father. After that, he became chieftain. Chieftain, at war, and younger than me. Yet sometimes he still treats me like I’m a child. It’s not right, not for either of us. But today . . .” He looked at her with raised brows. “Today he tells me to go with Shealy. Not stay beside him so he can watch over me, but go so I can take care of this woman who’s come from nowhere and changed him.”

“I think you’re reading more into it than there is, Liam.”

He shook his head. “There are few things I know, Leary. But Tiarnan is one of them.”

He grew quiet again, and Shealy knew that inside he turned this new revelation over and analyzed each side of it. He might know Tiarnan, but even after so short a time, so did Shealy. And Liam was very much like his brother. Letting him mull his conclusions, Shealy looked down at her little sister. Ellie dozed fitfully in her arms, startling with a gasp or small cry before slipping back into uneasy sleep. Shealy worried about her. Children were resilient, but Ellie had been through too much. She was too young, her language not yet developed enough to talk about the brutal murder of their mother that both of them had witnessed. How would she cope? How could Shealy help her through this?

A roaring bellow echoed across the land, interrupting her thoughts. It sounded like a bear or a lion and yet nothing like either. It rumbled with bone-chilling dimensions, at once piercing and earth shaking.

“What was that?” Liam asked, rising to his haunches and peering over the boulders.

Easing the child into a firmer grip, Shealy inched up beside him and did the same. Nothing moved as far as they could see, but the roar came again, louder, more riveting. The sound was so primeval that it struck them with instinctive terror—the kind that made a person bolt blindly into peril just to escape.

In the distance the treetops shuddered and Shealy’s heart thumped with fear at what might be out there, strong enough to shake a tree that size. More of the three-headed creatures? Something worse? They were both so gripped with horror by the predatory roar that echoed again and the ominous shudder of branches that followed, that neither one of them heard the intruders approaching from behind until it was too late.

Liam spun, reaching for his weapons even as a blade flashed out and the point pressed against the soft flesh of his throat. Caught squatting, there was no way he could fend it off. Beside him, Shealy kept her body angled so that Ellie was protected, but she glanced back, taking in the group of men that surrounded them.

“Drop it,” the one holding the sword said to Liam.

For a moment, Liam shifted his weight, and Shealy knew he was gauging his odds, playing his next move in his head.

“Try it,” the man with the sword said. “You’ll get a few of us, but not all, and we’ll make sure you live long enough to see her and the child gutted.”

Whether it was a bluff or not, the visual was there and reluctantly, Liam let his sword and ax clatter to the rocks. He glanced at Shealy with a look of misery and she knew that he thought of Tiarnan and how disappointed he’d be to find Liam had failed in his one task to protect her and Ellie. She wanted to reassure him, to tell him that this wasn’t his fault, but even if she’d been able to say it, he wouldn’t believe her. She could see that.

A new man shouldered through to the front of the group, and the others fell back to let him pass. When he reached the one holding the blade to Liam’s throat, he motioned with his head to move away. It was obvious the sword wielder didn’t agree, but he followed orders and stepped to the side.

At this new man’s feet, an enormous wolf waited, tongue lolling, teeth bared. Shealy couldn’t tolerate being on the same level as those sharp teeth. Cautiously, she stood. Liam, looking like he’d been carved from stone, stood as well and stared at the newcomer with an expression of revulsion and hatred that seemed oddly personal. Did he know this man?

Shealy shifted her attention from Liam, glancing over at the wolf, who’d calmly sat, and then back to the newcomer. His face was in shadow, but she glimpsed an intricate pattern of tattoos that circled his throat, disappearing beneath his shirt to reemerge at his arms, where they snaked down to his wrists.
Chains
, she realized. The tattoos were of chains, binding him at the throat, the wrists. . . . She glanced down, taking in the muscled legs that showed where the short pants ended. The chains were there as well. She would bet they went all the way down, inside his boots, to loop around his ankles. The chains, though only an illusion, gave him a look of dishonor, but she couldn’t pinpoint just how she’d come to that. From head to toe, he was fearsome with a sinister air that went above and beyond the weapons and aggression they all wore like second skins.

He was tall and broad, though not as big as Tiarnan or Jamie. Still, muscle and brawn packed his frame, and the menace in his eyes added another two feet and fifty pounds to his appearance. Beside him, the huge wolf shifted, watching her with pale eyes and a curled lip. The fixed stare made her feel like a slab of ground beef with a slice of cheese on top. The wolf let out a low growl and the man clicked his tongue sharply at it. Dutifully the animal dropped its frigid gaze to her feet. Still, she could almost see the cartoon bubble over its head as it contemplated her toes and compared them to little sausages.

Her heart thumped painfully in her chest, forcing sluggish blood through veins that had narrowed from fear. Her pulse drummed in her ears. She curled her fingers into her palms, trying to stay calm, trying to control the fight-or-flight instinct that screamed
run, run, run
in her head. She wanted to cower, but she stayed put, Ellie held tight in her arms. The child had awakened, but she didn’t squirm or make a sound.

Something told Shealy that this man would view passivity as a weakness, and weakness as a request to be dominated, so she fought her own compulsion to shy away. Stiffening her back, Shealy said, “Who are you? What do you want?”

Her voice wobbled, betraying her, but she managed to get enough steel in the questions that it caught the man off guard. Behind him, the others murmured at her audacity. She raised her chin and waited for an answer.

The man didn’t give her one. He stared at her silently for a moment and behind him the others fanned out like cards from the bottom of a deck. Warriors, armed to the teeth, battle-scarred with hard eyes and harder bodies. She counted four, but suspected there were others waiting in the soundless twilight.

The men wore the strange mixture of modern clothes and the hides and fur ensemble that their leader sported, that all the men here on Testosterone Island donned. Some had jeans beneath their tunics, some had T-shirts with their crudely made pants. They all carried spears or swords, axes and arrows.
Like a bizarre caveman convention
, she thought with a dark twist of humor. If a T-Rex burst through the crowd, she wouldn’t even be surprised.

The tattooed man with the wolf—the one she suspected was the leader—took a step closer and now she could see a scar on the side of his face that ripped three parallel lines through his short hair at the temple. The tattoos on his throat stood out more clearly. Even tempered by the shadowed murk, the heavy chain links made him look savage and pitiless, more frightening than all the wicked blades combined.

Without lowering her gaze from the watching men, she took a tentative step back. The wolf growled in warning a moment before she bumped into something hard behind her. She couldn’t stop her gasp when hands came up, pinning her in place.

“And where is it you think you’ll be off to?” the man holding her said in her ear. He had a deep voice with a lilting accent.

The leader of this motley army stepped forward, boxing her in. She wanted to struggle against the hands that pinned her, but feared she’d drop Ellie if he jerked on her arms. The child clung to her, crying mutely. Perhaps it was the very silence of her distress that gave Shealy courage. No child should ever be so afraid, and it enraged her that these men had brought tears to her sister’s eyes after all she’d endured already.

“Do you get off on scaring little girls?” she asked the man holding her. “Does that make you feel like a big man, to make them cry?”

Her captor said nothing, but he eased his tight hold and she felt a small measure of relief.

The leader turned to Liam and stared at him with an unfathomable expression. Liam glared back with hatred. It was definitely personal.
Very
personal.

“I thought never to see y’ again,” the leader said to Liam in a voice that throbbed with some unidentifiable emotion. It made his words thick and guttural.

Liam responded to that by spitting in the leader’s face. Shealy sucked in her shock as the soldiers behind him moved up angrily, but the leader held his hand out, stopping them. He wiped the spittle away and said nothing, but the taut silence rippled with anger and restrained aggression.

“Who are you?” she demanded again.

His cold eyes shifted to her and he smiled, the baring of teeth as intimidating as the wolf’s.

She amused him. But not in a good way.

He grabbed her chin in a hard clamp and turned it, inspecting her scars with narrowed eyes. His wolf took advantage of his distraction and inched forward to sniff at her feet. Shealy bit back a whimper as memories of his pack mates trying to eat her alive surfaced. The leader made another noise with his tongue and the wolf backed off.

“I am Eamonn,” he said finally, still smiling with such chilling cruelty that Shealy shrank back against the man holding her.

“Eamonn the Traitor,” Liam said, ire giving his words a hostile edge that made the others take another step closer, hemming them in.

Shealy stared at the man numbly as she put the pieces together. This was the brother who had betrayed Tiarnan?

“I swore one day I’d kill y’,” Liam said. “I hope that day has come.”

The men behind Eamonn grumbled warnings, but Liam didn’t flinch and Eamonn stood stiffly, a mask of malice hiding his thoughts. But so close, Shealy saw the flash of pain in his eyes and realized that no matter what he’d done in the past, no matter what he planned to do in the very near future, Liam’s hatred wounded him. The black markings on his throat moved as he swallowed, but he didn’t respond to Liam’s threat. Instead, he looked back at Shealy.