The Curse of Clan Ross (31 page)

“Sorry. Go on.”

Bottom lips disappeared.

“Well, it’s not every day we get to tell it, ye ken?” Excitement was good. Excitement made them talk faster. “The tomb was wrought with Love and Sacrifice. Simple as that.”

“Yes, ye see ye only need Love and Sacrifice to make it work for ye.” Mhairi, possibly, gave her a pitying look. “Unfortunately, ye are the one to make the sacrifice, both last time and this.”

“The first time,” the other chimed back in, “ye had a fear of closed spaces, and yet ye went in the tomb to try to help people ye had never met. A lovely sacrifice.”

“And I believe it was the hope of reuniting Ivar and Morna’s love that was the other element,” Margot said.

“This time, their love will be that same element, but the sacrifice ye make will be quite different, we think.”

As knowing as these two seemed to be, they couldn’t possibly understand what Jilly was giving up or why.

She turned to the couple.

“I think you two should go in ahead of me. If I go first, I may be gone before you get inside. If you grab me as soon as I’m through, I shouldn’t leave without you.”

Ivar nodded and hopped onto the barrel and into the hole. Morna climbed onto the barrel and Jilly handed her the water, axe, and candle she’d thought to bring along.

Once Morna was inside, Jilly leaned on the barrel but couldn’t manage to lift her leg.

Dear Lord, this was it. She was really going. Would she be able to come back?  If the Muirs were correct, there would need to be some sort of sacrifice, and hers would be all used up. Coming back would be for selfish reasons alone. What would she be sacrificing?  Toilet paper and flushing toilets?

Not too noble.

“We need ye to give this Lorraine and Loretta a message, Jillian. Can ye do that for us?”

Mhairi and her sister were looking rather smug. When they neared eighty, Jilly knew just how they’d look. Like Muir rats.

“What’s the message?” Getting away from those two made scrambling for the hole a lot easier.

“Tell them they’re not quite finished yet,” one said.

“They’ll understand,” sang the other.

As Ivar pulled Jillian into the darkness, Morna’s hands gripped on to one of her arms like an insta-vice.

From below, the voices of the Muir twins murmured together in what sounded like a chant but there was another noise. Someone large and angry was clamboring down the passage toward the room.

“Get ye gone, Jillian. He’s coming!”

Jillian closed her eyes and prayed that she would be gone before Montgomery could order her to come out. She’d not be able to defy him to his face and fearing the resulting damage to his soul, it would kill her to stand by and watch.

God was watching. He had to be. She believed in the worth of Montgomery’s soul more than anything she’d ever believed in before, and God would make it right. She couldn’t continue to breathe and believe otherwise.

The workroom door crashed into pieces.

Forward. Home. Lorraine. Loretta. Please!

The air shifted around her. And if not for Morna’s hold on her, Jilly’s very soul would have leapt free from her body in answer to the receding echo of an anguished roar...from very, very far away.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

The lit hole at their feet went dark. No one moved.

Breathing. Morna and Ivar were breathing at least. Jillian never wanted to let out that final fifteenth century bit of air. If she did, she’d die.

Loud, pounding heartbeats later, it came out with an unholy howl. When it was gone, she dropped to the floor like a sack of Idaho potatoes and waited for the black fire in her veins to burn her up.

Like a witch.

Oh, that was good. A fitting finish. “Go ahead,” she whispered to God, “finish me then.”

Breathing. Nothing more. No one seemed inclined to speak while Jillian waited for God’s response. Hours could have gone by while she waited, thinking nothing at all. Just waiting. Until...

Ivar was pounding on the wood that plugged the modern day floor, but it sounded odd. She knew they had arrived in her own time; she could smell the dust and decay that had been missing those long hours she’d been entombed, waiting for Montgomery—

No, she wouldn’t do that now. She wouldn’t go there now. Later was always a better time to cry.

She stiffly shifted to her feet and realized it wasn’t Ivar pounding on the floor. He and Morna were still breathing, somewhere in the darkness, and very close to each other. The pounding was from the outside.

“Jillian dear!  Are you there?” The muffled squeak of a woman’s voice was familiar enough to make out the words.

Wonderful. A Muir welcoming committee.

“Step off the door, dear. Pull it up inside.”

Ah, yes. She remembered how this worked.

Her mind and body seemed to be functioning well enough while her soul hemorrhaged. They must not have read the memo yet, the one about her will-to-live account maxing out its overdraft.

She found the edges of the contraption and got her fingers beneath it. Ivar was there helping her lift it away.

Lorraine and Loretta were below, fluffing dust out of their blue hair.

“Did you bring anyone with you, dear?  Any luck—” A blue veined right hand—Loretta’s then—froze mid-fluff.

Ivar’s blond head popping into the hole must have been answer enough, and Jillian felt a gleeful sense of vengeance when both Muir’s swooned into a blue, decidedly unlady-like heap.

#  #  #

Walking into the Great Hall once more, without the smells of food and pine-flavored wood smoke, Jilly was cold, no matter what the temperature. She’d never feel warm again and it was not all due to the fact she’d left her leather jacket in the past.

She stepped around the space that had once been filled with the worn wood table Monty had stroked so solemnly while he told her about watching his father and grandfather build it with their own wonderful hands. All things that had once been a part of living here and breathing this giant cube of air were now encased in glass and velvet, unmoving, beyond her reach.

She stepped closer to the great cabinet opposite the hearth. The light danced off the corners of silver weapons, gold leafed trinkets, and Windexed glass.

Bones. She was staring at the bones of lives gone by. And she could only wonder where Monty's bones now lay. She felt like she should lie down with them. With him.
 

Awareness pricked the back of her neck. She knew without looking that Quinn stood just inside the doorway behind her, watching and waiting with a patience his ancestor wouldn't have shown.

But that wasn't it.

He wasn't the one whispering from her immediate left. No one was there, of course, unless one looked at the wall. Remembering what waited for her attention, she hesitated, not sure she could handle looking at it once again, knowing what she knew.

 She turned and glanced past it, a bit further left, at the tomb from which she'd just been taken. Odd how much one could hate an innate pile of stones, but she did. Such a guilty monstrosity!  She wished she had the heart to wrench every rock from its place to make sure it ruined no more lives.

That was it. That was just the boost of hard emotion she needed to steel herself before looking just six feet to the right of the tomb.

Amid the ricochets of bright morning light, her eyes sought and found that face she'd left in the past, with her jacket. Although the sculpture had gone from smooth, pale gray to a mottled, pocked slate, the image stood out clearly.

To the sides of the torso, the stone had been chipped away, but the lower body of the kilted man was still held fast in time, his plaid suspended mid-flutter, and she wondered if a good blast on Highland pipes might break the spell. Hands on hips, Monty seemed to be leaning ever so slightly forward, as if his determination alone would free his lower half. A slightly irritated brow was the only hint the man was not pleased to be posing for such a statue.

Jillian laughed at him.

But the statue did not turn toward her and join her in the joke. Maybe if she laughed harder...

By the time Morna and Ivar joined her, she was hysterical. They took her away to the manor house, bathed her, choked her with enough food to get some down a throat clogged with tears, and tucked her into bed.

She watched it all with amusement, detached, like a spirit hovering in the rafters.

It was full-on night when she once again looked through her own eyes, and he was once again before her; her grey Montgomery, slightly irritated, but in good humor, the flashlight accentuating the deep grooves of his smile.

How could he be so flippant when she was in such a state—pieces of Jillian Rose...
Ross
, broken into small chunks, loosely contained in her borrowed nightgown?
 

How could he possibly be so oblivious to her presence when he'd called her back to him?

He
had
called her back to him, so loud and clear it had wakened her from a nap that had gone from late morning into the dark of night.
 

It had been easy enough to get in. The door broken by the Muir Sisters had not been completely repaired yet. And she knew the path to the Great Hall well enough once she was through the more recent additions.

"I brought you some water, and a candle, just in case,” she told Stone Monty. “Don't know if you can figure out the flashlight, even if you do get your huge hands free."

"What are ye about, Jilly?"

She turned to find Quinn standing near the dais, one boot resting upon the edge, his left hand braced against his bent knee, his right holding a flashlight trained on the floor near her feet.

"Oh, hello," she said and turned back to Monty.

"Good even," said Quinn.

"I'm leaving him some water. And some light. I don't suppose air would do him any good."

"But the other things will?"

"He'd do it for me.” That was the best she could explain. "Once I'm gone...once I'm gone, I'd appreciate it if you could make sure he has them. Light and water, that is."

"Are ye goin' home, then?  To America?” His tone was cautious, like a cop trying to talk someone away from a cliff. He had no idea she’d already flung herself off the edge. “Ye might consider taking some time to...recover first."

Recover? She thought about the meaning: to get something back. "No, I don't think so."

"Lass...Jillian—"

"Don't!"  Fire erupted in her belly and she bent over. "Don't ever call me that. Please," she begged her bare feet, begged the stone beneath them.

A heartbeat later, she was hoisted into the arms of Quinn and she buried her nose against his chest to keep from looking at his face. She would never look at his face. If she found some hint there of the other man, who knew what would happen.

"Don't touch me. Let me down. He doesn't want anyone to touch me!"

She heard her own words being analyzed in her head, but she didn't care. He wasn't dead. She wasn't a widow. Somewhere, stored in the airwaves, bouncing around the hall, was the image of a very much alive Montgomery Constantine Ross. If she just held very still, she may catch a glimpse. Maybe the voice that woke her up consisted of some very old sounds still vibrating through that same magical air.

Then she looked around at the cold dark hall that held not even a sparkle of dust for the beam of her powerful flashlight. There was no magic here.

"Let's get ye up to the manor, then. Ye're cold as ice, ye are."

 "I was there, you know. I really was there."

 "Of course ye were there, lass.” Quinn grunted. “Did ye think we suspected ye of hiring players for the parts of Ivar and Morna?  They're real enough, and sure as it rains in Scotland, they didna come through by their own.”

He paused for a moment, after they’d stepped out of the Great Hall then changed directions, heading down into the depths once more. Maybe he was going to have her try the tomb again, but it wouldn't work. No sacrifice.

He passed the workroom and went deeper still, two flashlight beams gliding across uneven rocks lit the way, swinging to the rhythm of his gait. When they were both standing in the dungeon, it looked eerily like it had before, without the doors of course.

"Wait here."

She watched his back as he fumbled around at the rear of what was once her own cell. When he returned the handle of his light was in his mouth, his arms gripping both sides of a large chunk of stone, which he lowered to her feet.

He took the light from between his teeth.

"This is why ye looked so familiar to me that first day on the tour, aye?"

He illuminated the bust of a woman whose head was the only thing protruding a few inches from the rock. It looked eerily like her.

"This was the green fairy. The old Montgomery couldn't tempt the original artist to come back from the warmth of Italy, so he hired another to do this. It didn't hold up nearly as well as the one in the hall. Different stone and all that.”

Quinn shifted his light to her face for a moment and then back at the stone.

"Sometimes folks tell of the green fairy, or the fairy with the green feet. Down at the pub, ye can buy a drink called the Green-Toed Faery. Most tourists think it was named after a frog, not a faery with green toes. I should have suspected something when ye were wearing those ridiculously colored boots. I should have remembered this stone."

Tears were rolling down her cheeks now. She had been there. She hadn’t lost her mind. Now, if she could only convince herself she was here.

“So aye, I ken ye were there lass. I ken just what it is like to live without yer heart.”

“Without your soul,” she whispered. Perhaps she wasn’t as alone in her pain as she felt.

“Aye, lass. Without yer soul.” He set the rock against the wall and came back to her. “Carry the torch, Jilly. And ye and I will help each other up out of this tomb we find ourselves wanting to remain in, aye?”

Jilly forced herself to look up into his face and was both relieved and disappointed to find little of her husband there. She had to admit, however, that he was a handsome bugger.