Lucy's Liberation [Elk Creek 2] (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (2 page)

He pulled back the sheet and looked at Ethan’s smooth, young face. The lad looked right peaceful for someone who’d gotten bushwhacked and shot in the back.

Kelly couldn’t imagine what poor Clint and Kate were going through. He knew how he’d feel if one of his wee ones turned up dead.

He shook his head as he pulled the sheet further down. There wasn’t much damage to the body. Anyone would barely know anything was wrong with the lad if he hadn’t been declared dead by the town doc and sheriff.

Ethan sneezed.

“God bless, ya, la—” Kelly gawked as the body rose to a sitting position, the eyes blinking as if to bring the room into focus.

“Why is it so cold in here?”

“Faith and
begorra
!” Kelly backed away from the table, stumbling over a chair before making it to the door.

“Hey, wait!”

Kelly would do nothing of the sort!

He was outside and running down the mostly empty streets before Ethan’s
corpse
could utter another word. He was so befuddled and shocked, he didn’t pay heed to where he was going and nearly got run down by a horse and wagon coming from the opposite direction.

“Whoa! Whoa!”

Kelly turned, stopped, and threw his arms up in front of his face as if that would save him.

The horse leading the carriage stopped short, rearing up, whinnying, and blowing rollers as Thayne Malloy pulled back on the animal’s reins.

“Doc Malloy! Oh, thank goodness it’s you.”

“You’re lucky I saw you in time, Kelly. What in the hell are you doing running around in the middle of the street like a madman?”

“You have to come back with me to the icehouse. Ethan…he…Oh, saints preserve us, he’s alive!”

“Now hold on a minute, Kelly. What are you going on about?” Thayne put the reins aside and climbed down from the wagon to make his way over to Kelly.

“I’m telling you, the lad’s alive. He sat up and asked me why it was so cold.”

Thayne arched a brow.

“Don’t look at me like I’ve lost my mind, Doc. Just come with me and see for yourself.” Kelly turned and headed back toward the icehouse. He stopped at the doors and turned to see if the doc was following him. “Well. What are you waiting for?”

Thayne shrugged and went after Kelly.

Kelly kept up a steady stream of chatter while he led the way through the storage floor as if to give himself courage before going back into the office. He was glad that someone else was by his side and could corroborate his claim. He didn’t want to be the only one going crazy around there.

When they got to the room, Ethan wasn’t on the table.

Kelly turned and gaped at Thayne. “He was just here. I pulled back the sheet and was just getting ready to unwrap him so that I could dress him.”

Thayne squeezed his shoulder. “I believe you, Kelly.”

Kelly could tell from his tone that the doc actually did believe him, which was good, since now that he had left the icehouse, he wasn’t so sure of what he had seen or heard several minutes before.

Until he noticed that the clothes he’d brought in were no longer in the chair at the same time a sneeze sounded from across the room.

Thayne looked at Kelly and Kelly looked at Thayne before Thayne put a hand on the butt of his gun and a finger to his lips. He motioned with his head that he was moving to the area of the room where the sneeze had originated.

Kelly watched as Thayne tiptoed across the room and peeped around the towering wardrobe.

Rather than pull out and point his gun, Thayne got down on his haunches and held out his hand as if talking to a wee one. “It’s all right. You can come out. We’re not going to hurt you.”

Kelly slowly made his way around to the wardrobe and saw Ethan sitting in the corner on his heels, half clothed and violently shivering.

“Ethan, you’re among friends,” Thayne said.

Ethan looked from Kelly to Thayne before he…he smirked.

“You think the shooting left him daft, Doc?” Kelly asked.

Thayne shook his head. “I don’t know what to think, Kelly.”

From the look on his face, however, Kelly thought the doc had his ideas.

“W–what…” Ethan paused to clear his throat. “What shooting?”

Thayne looked back at Kelly before answering. “You were found out by the old well, shot in the back.” He waited as if for Ethan to respond. “Do you remember anything?”

“I n–n–need a m–m–m–mirror.”

Thayne looked at Kelly. “Does Simon have one in here?”

“Well, sure, there’s one inside the wardrobe, but…” Kelly peered at Ethan.
What a barmy request to make.

He watched while Thayne helped Ethan to his feet and quickly ran around them to open the left-hand door of the wardrobe so that the lad could take a gander at himself.

When Ethan stood before the mirror, though, he gawked at his reflection as if he had never seen it before, raising a hand to touch his own face. It was the darnedest thing.

“No, no, no… This isn’t happening.”

The words left his mouth in a whisper right before the lad wobbled on his legs, staggered back, and passed out in the doc’s waiting arms.

“Well, what do you suppose we should do with him, now that he ain’t dead?”

“I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the reasons
why
he’s not dead.”

Prentice Teague lay as still as possible, still trying to wrap
his
mind around what fresh hell he was in and wondering whether or not it would be wiser to continue to play possum or open his eyes before these two lunatics tried to get rid of his body.

I am not dead. I am not dead. I am not dead.

Of course, he wasn’t
him
either. He was…someone else. Some young man he had never set eyes on before. Some guy with longish dark-chocolate hair and warm, if also confused, brandy eyes—miles away from and different than Prentice’s once-familiar wheat-blond hair and hazel-green eyes.
That
Prentice, however, was gone. He didn’t know where or how, but he was gone and no longer of this world.

He squeezed his eyes tight as the memories assailed him. It all came back to him in a rush then, his trip to the Summerland, his meeting with Thayne and Cade’s mother and father, their sentencing him to…to this
place
.

You are already being prepared to go back.

Yes, but they had neglected to tell him that they were sending him home as someone else and that he wasn’t going to be
himself
.

How in the hell was this place
home
?

From the brief glances he had gotten before he’d unceremoniously lost consciousness—how utterly embarrassing, a weakness he never would have countenanced from himself or anyone else in his former incarnation—he was somewhere back in time, the Old West if his observations were correct, worlds and decades away from his twenty-first century origins.

They hadn’t sent him home at all. They had sent him right back to the place where he had died. They had returned him to the site of his biggest ignominy. Why didn’t they just exile him to Elba as Napoleon’s enemies had done him? It would have been just as humiliating.

Leave it to the Malloys to ship him here in this dustbowl of a hell on earth. They didn’t want to give him a second chance. This entire trip was a pretense to hurt him, to get their revenge on him for hurting their sons, for killing Aura. Plain and simple he was being punished for his transgressions, when all he’d ever done in his life was use his ambition to achieve power, wealth, and respect—all the things he needed to protect himself from his enemies and make sure that no one could ever get close enough to hurt him again.

“We have to tell Clint and Kate, only I don’t know how.”

“That is going to be an interesting sit-down.”

What Prentice couldn’t understand was why Thayne Malloy treated him so nicely. Prentice had, after all, tried to kill him and his brother Cade. He had in fact killed their aunt, but in his defense, it was only after she’d gotten in his way and tried to block him from finding out where Thayne and Cade were. Who could fault him for that?

You are beginning your reincarnation in a very inauspicious way, Prentice.

That voice…it was her, Thayne and Cade’s mother.

Yes, it’s me. And I’m Brielle, since we were never properly introduced. My husband,
Caith, and I are going to be watching over you until this is all over.

First name basis, huh? Nice touch. Not that it changed his mind about anything.

What, exactly, did Brielle mean by her cryptic message, though? Until
what
was all over?

Until you make things right.

The only way to make things right for Prentice would be getting his revenge on the people who had hurt him, and they—Brielle and Caith—had established that his plans for vengeance were what had gotten him in this mess in the first place. So, what were they giving him a second chance to do?

Haven’t you figured it out, yet, Prentice?

No, and his head started to hurt from the Who’s On First routine. His only escape, if he could call it that, was probably to open his eyes and deal with this Ethan situation.

Now you’re getting the picture.

The voice was male, deeper, booming and intensified his headache threefold.

What was he supposed to do now? Act like someone he wasn’t? Pretend to
be
something he wasn’t—some country bumpkin hick who didn’t have the sense enough not to get ambushed?

That’s harsh.

Harsh or not, it was true.

Besides, you won’t be acting or pretending. Just be yourself.

Be himself? That was a laugh.

Behave yourself, Prentice. We’ll be around
.

“I think he’s coming around.”

Prentice blinked open his eyes and watched as the two men—Thayne and the other man he had called Kelly—stepped back from the table where they had been hovering over him.

He had managed to get on the long johns that had been left in the office before Thayne and Kelly had returned and would have gotten on the rest of the clothes and left if he hadn’t felt like he had just woken from a coma and hadn’t used his limbs in
years.

Even now his arms and legs felt heavy and stiff, as if they didn’t belong to him.

Because they don’t belong to me!

Might as well stop crying over spilled milk and see what he was dealing with. The quicker he got out of here, the better for all concerned.

Prentice struggled to a sitting position.

Thayne stepped forward and put a hand on his back to steady him.

Prentice gritted his teeth at the man’s solicitousness. He didn’t know how much longer he was going to be able to take Thayne Malloy’s kindness before he exploded or lashed out.

He paused at the latter thought and flexed his psychic muscles, reaching out to see what he could sense and he…couldn’t sense anything! He couldn’t read Thayne’s or Kelly’s mind, not a hint or a morsel.

They’d taken away his powers!

You have all the powers you need for your purposes, Prentice.

“I thought you left me.”

Prentice watched Thayne and Kelly exchange wary looks and realized that he had said the last out loud when he’d only meant to respond to Brielle in his mind.

We will be around as required.

Great, just what he needed—a pair of meddlesome guardian angels.

“I’m sorry about running out before, Ethan, but, well…you scared the bejesus out of me.”

Prentice could just imagine.

Evidently this Ethan person had been killed and this Kelly person had been about to prepare his body for burial.

Had he woken up in the nick of time or what?

It seemed his guardian angels had a real vindictive sense of humor. It was a wonder they hadn’t just let these clowns bury him alive so that he could desperately claw himself out of his grave later.

What fun that would have been.

We did consider it.

“Why didn’t you just leave me where I was?”

“Out in the middle of nowhere to be crow’s bait?”

Prentice glanced at Kelly and realized that he had spoken his thoughts out loud again.

Hell, he needed to get a handle on this and real quick before these people had him committed and wouldn’t that just be poetic justice for Thayne and Cade?

Maybe that’s what Brielle and Caith wanted, him wasting away in some mental institution in the Old West, without his powers and at the mercy of their sons for his freedom.

We want only what’s best for you
.

Yeah, he believed that one. Just like his parents had wanted the best for him by enrolling him in public school with all the thugs and lowlifes. Not that his existence had been any less tortured in an affluent private school. It had just seemed wherever he had gone, emotional pain and strife had followed. If he hadn’t gotten it from the stuck-up cheerleader types, then their jock brethren had made it their business to make sure his life had been a living hell.