A thrill of horror shot through me. I could feel the same tremor run through Jamie as his muscles tightened.
It must have shown on his face. Geilie cried out sharply and leapt back. She fired as he lunged at her. His head snapped back, and his body twisted, hands still reaching for her throat. Then he fell, his body limp across the edge of the glittering pentagram. There was a strangled moan from Ian.
I felt rather than heard a sound rise in my throat. I didn’t know what I had said, but Geilie turned her face in my direction, startled.
When Brianna was two, a car had carelessly sideswiped mine, hitting the back door next to where she was sitting. I slowed to a stop, checked briefly to see that she was unhurt, and then bounded out, headed for the other car, which had pulled over a little way ahead.
The other driver was a man in his thirties, quite large, and probably entirely self-assured in his dealings with the world. He looked over his shoulder, saw me coming, and hastily rolled up his window, shrinking back in his seat.
I had no consciousness of rage or any other emotion; I simply knew, with no shadow of doubt, that I could—and would—shatter the window with my hand, and drag the man out through it. He knew it, too.
I thought no further than that, and didn’t have to; the arrival of a police car had recalled me to my normal state of mind, and then I started to shake. But the memory of the look on that man’s face stayed with me.
Fire is a poor illuminator, but it would have taken total darkness to conceal that look on Geilie’s face; the sudden realization of what was coming toward her.
She jerked the other pistol from her belt and swung it to bear on me; I saw the round hole of the muzzle clearly—and didn’t care. The roar of the discharge caromed through the cave, the echoes sending down showers of rocks and dirt, but by then I had seized the ax from the floor.
I noted quite clearly the leather binding, ornamented with a beaded pattern. It was red, with yellow zigzags and black dots. The dots echoed the shiny obsidian of the blade, and the red and yellow picked up the hues of the flaming torch behind her.
I heard a noise behind me, but didn’t turn. Reflections of the fire burned red in the pupils of her eyes. The red thing, Jamie had called it. I gave myself to it, he had said.
I didn’t need to give myself; it had taken me.
There was no fear, no rage, no doubt. Only the stroke of the swinging ax.
The shock of it echoed up my arm, and I let go, my fingers numbed. I stood quite still, not even moving when she staggered toward me.
Blood in firelight is black, not red.
She took one blind step forward and fell, all her muscles gone limp, making no attempt to save herself. The last I saw of her face was her eyes; set wide, beautiful as gemstones, a green water-clear and faceted with the knowledge of death.
Someone was speaking, but the words made no sense. The cleft in the rock buzzed loudly, filling my ears. The torch flickered, flaring sudden yellow in a draft; the beating of the dark angel’s wings, I thought.
The sound came again, behind me.
I turned and saw Jamie. He had risen to his knees, swaying. Blood was pouring from his scalp, dyeing one side of his face red-black. The other side was white as a harlequin’s mask.
Stop the bleeding, said some remnant of instinct in my brain, and I fumbled for a handkerchief. But by then he had crawled to where Ian lay, and was groping at the boy’s bonds, jerking loose the leather straps, drops of his blood pattering on the lad’s shirt. Ian squirmed to his feet, his face ghastly pale, and put out a hand to help his uncle.
Then Jamie’s hand was on my arm. I looked up, numbly offering the cloth. He took it and wiped it roughly over his face, then jerked at my arm, pulling me toward the tunnel mouth. I stumbled and nearly fell, caught myself, and came back to the present.
“Come!” he was saying. “Can ye not hear the wind? There is a storm coming, above.”
Wind? I thought. In a cave? But he was right; the draft had not been my imagination; the faint exhalation from the crack near the entrance had changed to a steady, whining wind, almost a keening that rang in the narrow passage.
I turned to look over my shoulder, but Jamie grasped my arm hard and pushed me forward. My last sight of the cave was a blurred impression of jet and rubies, with a still white shape in the middle of the floor. Then the draft came in with a roar, and the torch went out.
“Jesus!” It was Young Ian’s voice, filled with terror, somewhere close by. “Uncle Jamie!”
“Here.” Jamie’s voice came out of the darkness just in front of me, surprisingly calm, raised to be heard above the noise. “Here, lad. Come here to me, Ian. Dinna be afraid; it’s only the cave breathing.”
It was the wrong thing to say. When he said it, I could feel the cold breath of the rock touch my neck, and the hairs there rose up prickling. The image of the cave as a living thing, breathing all around us, blind and malevolent, struck me cold with horror.
Apparently the notion was as terrifying to Ian as it was to me, for I heard a faint gasp, and then his groping hand struck me and clung for dear life to my arm.
I clutched his hand with one of mine and probed the dark ahead with the other, finding Jamie’s reassuringly large shape almost at once.
“I’ve got Ian,” I said. “For God’s sake, let’s get out of here!”
He gripped my hand in answer, and linked together, we began to make our way back down the winding tunnel, stumbling through the pitch dark and stepping on each other’s heels. And all the time, that ghostly wind whined at our backs.
I could see nothing; no hint of Jamie’s shirt in front of my face, snowy white as I knew it to be, not even a flicker of the movement of my own light-colored skirts, though I heard them swish about my feet as I walked, the sound blending with that of the wind.
The thin rush of air rose and fell in pitch, whispering and wailing. I tried to force my mind away from the memory of what lay behind us, away from the morbid fancy that the wind held sighing voices, whispering secrets just past hearing.
“I can hear her,” Ian said suddenly behind me. His voice rose, cracking with panic. “I can hear her! God, oh God, she’s coming!”
I froze in my tracks, a scream wedged in my throat. The cool observer in my head knew quite well it was not so—only the wind and Ian’s fright—but that made no difference to the spurt of sheer terror that rose from the pit of my stomach and turned my bowels to water. I knew she was coming, too, and screamed out loud.
Then Jamie had me, and Ian too, gripped tight against him, one in each arm, our ears muffled against his chest. He smelled of pine smoke and sweat and brandy, and I nearly sobbed in relief at the closeness of him.
“Hush!” he said fiercely. “Hush, the both of ye! I willna let her touch ye. Never!” He pressed us to him, hard; I felt his heart beating fast beneath my cheek and Ian’s bony shoulder, squeezed against mine, and then the pressure relaxed.
“Come along now,” Jamie said, more quietly. “It’s but wind. Caves blow through their cracks when the weather changes aboveground. I’ve heard it before. There is a storm coming, outside. Come, now.”
* * *
The storm was a brief one. By the time we had stumbled to the surface, blinking against the shock of sunlight, the rain had passed, leaving the world reborn in its wake.