Sandra Hill (28 page)

“Are you ready?”

He nodded.

“Once I hit the window, the noise may attract the others, so there will be no time to hesitate. What are you going to do, Sammy?”

“Run like hell.”

She tried to smile and cracked her lip even more.

“If I am not able to follow,” she said, her voice choking up, “tell your father…tell Zachary that I love him.”

She cracked the window open then, shoved Sammy through, and immediately heard shouts upstairs. It took her a bit longer to get through the window, and by then the basement door had been broken down and there were orders to go after them.

Britta began running in the opposite direction from Sammy, what she had planned all along. It was not an easy exercise with her injured ankle. She could hear the men coming after her, the distance closing between them. Then there was the sound of gunfire.

She glanced right and left. On the one side was a steep hill, which would only slow her down more. On the right side was a steep incline leading to a rocky beach. The ocean or a lake, she could not be sure.

Her best choice lay in running forward, but then she felt a sharp pain in her back. It must be a bullet from one of the weapons. The pain drew her up short. She stumbled. Fell. Then rolled over and over and over, each rock and sharp bramble digging into her already bruised flesh. She could feel a warm substance—blood?—running down her back. She crashed to the bottom, striking her head on a boulder. The pain was excruciating, but soon it eased.

She thought she saw a flock of black birds flying overhead. A sign of death in Norse legends. The ravens of death. Berserk warriors often saw the vultures in the midst of battle.

With a long sigh, she surrendered to her destiny. The Norns of Fate had won.

So, this is death.

You win some, you lose some…

The next day, Cage drove Zach to the small Bella Rosa police station near a private airfield fifty miles from San Diego. Cage drove because Zach’s hands were shaking so badly.

Cage’s Jeep was first in a caravan, followed by vehicles holding other SEALs, police, FBI, CIA, State Department, and Department of Defense reps, and Zach’s family: his father and mother, who had put aside their differences for this occasion, Danny, and his grandfather and grandmother. And the news media, of course, who couldn’t be kept away.

Zach had gone through absolute hell the past four days. The first twenty-four hours were bad when Aljazeera had shown an interview with Arsallah, who played the meek-and-injured-party card, pleading for some of his evil cohorts to be released from prison. Like that was ever going to happen. The tangos in question were the worst of the worst. Arsallah had forced Sammy to repeat his demands, interspersed with anti-American insults. Britta had sat in the background, looking a bit bruised but not too bad. He had assumed by the tilt of her chin that she’d declined Arsallah’s “invitation” to speak that time.

But then yesterday, Zach had received a manila envelope containing photos and a tape. These were bad. Really bad. But at least they were not body parts, as he had feared.

They must not have fed Sammy and Britta much or given them more than a minimum of liquids since their capture, because their faces were drawn and haggard. Sammy had bruises over every inch of exposed skin. Britta…poor Britta…had one eye swollen shut, a bleeding, puffy lip, cuts and bruises, and possibly a broken ankle. Her chin had still been raised defiantly as she gave her canned bullshit talk to Arsallah’s cameraman.

On the day of their escape, Britta had somehow managed to get herself and Sammy out of the basement they had been kept in. Sammy had hidden in the garage of an abandoned gas station till the next morning, fearing that he would be caught by Arsallah’s men. Which gave Arsallah’s men time to leave the area. Hell, they’d probably left the country by now. And Britta, well, she had not yet been found. Zach had been warned to expect the worst.

When they got to the police station, Zach told Cage, “Hold everyone off. Let me have some private time with Sammy first. Okay?”

Cage nodded and squeezed his shoulder.

Zach opened the door.

Sammy saw him first and screamed, “Daaaa-ddyyyyy!” as he rushed forward and launched himself into his arms, hugging him tight with his legs straddling his chest. The boy was squeezing so tight that Zach could barely breathe. But who the hell cared about that! Tears ran down Zach’s face and onto Sammy’s neck. Sammy’s tears wet Zach’s neck, too.

Pushing his way into an interrogation room and slamming the door with his foot, Zach sat down and just held Sammy in his lap, head pressed against his heart. His clothing was filthy, and he smelled like he’d wet his pants a time or two, or worse, but he was whole and alive, and that was all that mattered.

Finally, Sammy pulled his head back and said, “I escaped.”

“I know you did. You’re a brave boy…I mean, little man.”

He shook his head. “No, I’m a little boy.” He hesitated, his bottom lip quivering. “Britta didn’t escape.”

“Well, now, we don’t know that for sure. We just haven’t found her yet.”

“They hurt her bad. Real bad.” He began to weep again. Between sobs, he revealed, “Sometimes…sometimes she let them hit her when they was aimin’ for me.”

That didn’t surprise Zach. Still, his eyes welled with tears again.

“She broke Daoud’s nose with my baseball bat when he came to capture us.”

Ah, so that’s whose blood it was.

“Her ankle mighta been broken. Do you think she coulda run with a broken ankle?”

“I think Britta could do anything she wanted.”

“We’re gonna get her back,” Sammy said, patting his shoulder as if he sensed his father’s despair. “I jis’ know we are.”

Zach wasn’t so sure.

“Oh, and I forgot to tell you. I hit Hakim across the shin bones with my hockey stick.”

“You did? What a brave boy you were!”

“Oh, I forgot another thing,” Sammy said. “Britta said to tell you somethin’ if…if she didn’t come back.”

It felt as if a vise were squeezing his heart. He didn’t want to know. Because if he listened to the message, it would be like admitting she was dead, and he wasn’t ready to accept that.

“No, Sammy, don’t tell me. Let’s wait for Britta to tell me herself.”

Sammy brightened at that scrap of hope.

Zach only wished there were someone to give
him
hope.

Home, not-so-sweet home…

Britta attempted to open her heavy lids, despite the pain that ravaged her body.

“Britta! Britta! Can you hear me?”

Son of a troll! It was Mother Edwina of St. Anne’s Abbey.

Either Britta was being plagued with that bloody dream again, or she had reversed her time travel. Both notions posed great threats to her sanity. So she did the only sensible thing: She succumbed to the pain-sleep again.

Whether mere hours or days had passed, Britta did eventually open her eyes again, and this time wider than a slit. She was still on an abbey cot, still in pain, but not so much as before. “Thirsty,” she choked out.

With Mother Edwina’s help, she sat up, propped against some rolled-up blankets, and drank thirstily from a cup of water. “What happened?” she asked through cracked lips.

“You fell off a cliff when you and Sister Margaret were on your way to Jorvik.”

“No, I mean this time.”

Mother Edwina tilted her head in confusion. “There was only the one time.”

“What? When did I fall off the cliff?”

“Three days past. You have been in a pain-sleep since you were brought back here.”

“Three days? That’s impossible. I was in WEALS for more than three sennights.”

“Wheels? What wheels?”

The blood began to drain from Britta’s head as the certainty of her situation hit her. She was back in time. It was as if all the other had never happened…the time travel, WEALS, and most of all, Zachary. Had she dreamed it all? If so, how could she have dreamed in such detail? No, it had been real. Britta’s heart constricted at the enormity of her loss. Dazed, she shook her head to clear it, and it felt as if knives were cutting into her scalp. Her brain could not handle the strain of unraveling the turmoil, not now, and she fell back into the pain-sleep.

Days went by, and Britta was able to sit, then move about with a makeshift crutch. Her face and body were battered and bruised. She had a broken ankle. But she was alive. The trouble was, she felt no joy in the living.

One sennight after her “return,” whilst still bedridden, her father sent a message informing her of a new groom he had procured for her…
procured
being a key word. The man was a Norse merchant of much wealth but no lands…Tume Ivarsson. The young man delivering her father’s message warned that this would be her father’s last effort to deal with her amicably—as if he had ever been amicable to her—and the consequences would be on her head if she did not yield. Later, Britta realized that her crafty father deliberately put none of his threats to parchment.

Britta yearned for normal family life, due to that blasted Zachary, no doubt. So, despite the danger, trying to be amicable, she went to Father Caedmon and asked if he had ever in his travels made the acquaintance of Tume Ivarsson.

Father Caedmon recoiled at mere mention of the man’s name.

“What?” Britta wanted to know.

“Amongst other things, he is a slave trader.”

She told her father’s emissary no, but told him to ask her father if he would accept a groom of her choosing. She received a reply later that day via the red-faced messenger, “Never!”

The fact that she’d received the reply so quickly gave Britta fair warning. Her father was nearby. Oh, he would not attack the abbey outright, not wanting the powerful Papacy on his back, but her father was the master of deceit. She re-called the attack on Sister Bernice that had prompted her initial flight from the abbey and her time travel.

The next day, Father Caedmon set off for the minster in Jorvik for some priestly duties and to seek church backing if her father should dare breach the nunnery walls. The ringing of the bells and constant chapel services were lessened in his absence. Thank the gods for that.

It took more than a month for Britta’s ankle to heal, and by then her other injuries were fading. Not so her heart. She missed Zachary and Sammy and her life in the future. At night, she wept for all she had lost.

Britta soon learned what her father had meant by “consequences” if she failed to surrender to his sinister matchmaking. A young nun named Sister Gloria had foolishly left the abbey courtyard to fetch a stray lamb. She had only gone a short distance when captured by her father’s men. Her body was returned to the gate the next day. She had been repeatedly raped, but that was not the worst part. They had slit the tendons behind each knee so that the young woman would be a cripple for life. Days later, when she was able to speak, Gloria told them that Britta’s father had personally said this was the condition Britta would be in when she wed, if she did not yield soon. A woman did not need to stand to be mounted or to give birth, her father had said.

“Is there no one we can approach to protest?” Mother Edwina asked Britta.

Britta shrugged. “We have no proof. My father has friends in high places. The only weapon we have is the Church, and he has made sure there are no witnesses to his sins. Even if we were able to get an audience before King Aethelred’s court, believe you me, they would make Gloria sound like a delusional lackbrain, especially since she suffers those screaming fits. There are two Norse noblemen, Thorfinn of Norstead and Steven of Amberstead, who might help, but how would I contact them? And how long would it take?”

A week later, Britta, now physically healed, had an idea.

“We must needs prepare for an assault from my father.”

“
What?
” Mother Edwina was in the abbey kitchen supervising the harvesting of honey from the hundred and more cone-shaped hives on the abbey grounds. Honey was an important product here at the nunnery, their only source of income…or rather, the honeyed mead that they produced from a long-ago Margaret’s recipe.

Right now, there were a dozen nuns working on at least a hundred honeycombs. Cutting off the caps with heated knives. Draining the honey into pottery jugs. Placing the remaining honeycombs over coarse cloths bleeding into pots near the hearth fires; this would be the second extract of lesser-quality honey. Then the honeycombs would be washed, saving that water rinse for sweetening in the kitchen. Finally, they would mash the clean wax combs for winter candle making. It was a long, messy, arduous process.

“I have had dreams,” Britta began.

“Do not speak of the dreams again. Nor time travel. Nor any of your fever-induced fantasies. ’Tis not proper for a nun.”

“I am not a nun.”

“You will be if you stay here much longer.”

The other nuns and novices, working diligently, remained silent but interested in the conversation. Not much happened in a convent, and she was giving them much fodder for talk when they were back in their cells.

“Heed me well, Mother. Danger looms. And it is not just because my dreams tell me so. We live daily with what he did to Sister Gloria. I have gainsayed my father at every turn. He will not give up.”

Several of the nuns shuddered.

“Let me give the women here some defensive training in the military arts.”

Mother Edwina cringed. “Well, mayhap you could do a little training.”

“We would not have to kill anyone, would we?” one young novice asked.

“Only if they try to kill or rape you first.”

Mother Edwina looked rather green at the prospect.

“I have been trained as a warrior, and lately, whilst I was at…well, just lately, I have learned new fighting skills. In the best of battles no one dies, but I tell you, my father and brothers must meet the raven, or they will ne’er stop. You are not to worry. I will take care of them.”

“You would kill your own blood kin?” Mother Edwina inquired.

“I would…if necessary.”

More gasps.

For the next two sennights, Britta tried her best to teach fighting skills to nuns and novices from age thirteen to sixty, with little success. It was one thing to teach the women at The Sanctuary how to fight; they had incentive. These nuns would rather turn the other cheek, no matter the affront. Also, they had been sedentary for a long time and got winded just throwing spears made out of broom handles…and then only several paces away.

“No pain, no gain,” a motto she had learned from the commander back at WEALS, meant naught to these ladies.

Sister Conception muttered in a most un-nunlike manner, “The only pain here is you…a pain in the arse.”

Nor did they understand the SEAL refrain, “The only easy day was yesterday.”

“I mucked the stables yestermorn, scrubbed the stone floors of the scullery, changed bed linens, and hauled firewood,” Sister Egbert said, not even bothering to lower her voice. “What is so easy about that?”