Chapter 13 #2
She paused at a fork in the tunnel. The main entrance to the mine was just to her left, yet she had to pause to catch her breath.
She leaned a hand against the stone wall of the tunnel, inhaling deeply.
Skylar was at the entrance to the main shaft, and Shawna wondered if she should tell her quickly what was happening. But as she paused, she heard a tap.
Tap.
Then, in a deep, low, unearthly tone…
Her name.
“Shawna…”
A whisper she might have imagined. She started to spin around.
But she smelled something before she could turn. Before she could look.
Something cold and wet and clammy landed over her face before she could see anything.
A sickly, sweet smell seemed to overpower everything else, and she felt herself falling, and falling, and falling...
And once again, the darkness was absolute.
A knife flashed in lanternlight in the tunnel. But before it could touch Shawna’s flesh, the hand that wielded it was drawn back.
“Fool! What are you doing?”
“She is to die—”
“Not here, not now! Take her.”
Arms reached out for Shawna, but the tunnel shaft was suddenly flooded with light from the entrance to the main shaft. “Hawk, Shawna! Hawk, Shawna!”
“Someone is coming! Hurry!”
“Leave her!”
“We must have—”
“We’ll find another opportunity. Come on, we cannot be caught! We’ve got the other lass, but he wanted M’lady MacGinnis very especially. We’ll take her when the opportunity is better! We must not be found here!”
The two figures hurried down the shaft of the tunnel.
Just outside the main entrance, Skylar anxiously played her lantern around in circles.
She prayed that her husband and Shawna would quickly emerge.
“What in God’s name can be taking her so long?
” David demanded irritably. He had come to know the mine shafts very well.
He was very familiar with the tunnels that led from the caves by the loch, bordering the cliffs where the miners dug.
He’d been in them often enough, and still, with the lantern gone, the darkness was almost overpowering.
And he could hear the water as the tide filled the tunnels. Hear it rising.
As if reading his mind in the darkness, Hawk spoke from the void at his side.
“She didn’t lead me here. I was the one determined to get into the shafts before day broke.”
David leaned against the wall of the cave. “You said you saw her moving.”
“I thought I saw her moving.”
“If we both die, this property all reverts to the MacGinnises.”
“But you’re alive, and Shawna knows it.”
“Aye, but since no one else is aware that I do live, my death a second time around would not be much of a bother.”
“She’s innocent. I swear it.”
“Knowing full well that she duped me the night that I did ‘die?’”
“Ah, well, now, there’s the crux of the matter, eh? Lady MacGinnis duped you—so perhaps forgiveness is difficult? David, do you really believe that Shawna intended to lure me to injury or death now?” Hawk queried his brother.
“Sweet Jesus! I don’t want to believe such a thing. My god, every time I see her…” He paused, inhaling harshly. “She was involved, Hawk. She was involved in what happened. And until I know exactly who else was involved and how, I have to keep up a certain guard against her.”
“She is a part of you, David. You can’t deny it.”
“Aye, she is a part of me,” he said softly, but then added with angry passion, “Yet I will deny it if I discover that she is lying to me now in any way or keeping any secret from me whatsoever regarding her kin.” David frowned and leaned over the hole, ready to argue with his brother.
But in the darkness, he could see shadows, and the shadow of the water rising was not pleasant.
“I’m going to reach down for you,” David told Hawk.
“Wait ’til it rises a bit more,” Hawk said quietly. “I’ll have a better chance of reaching you.”
“In a few minutes, the current may be too strong.”
“All right. One minute then.”
“One minute…”
David twisted around, bracing his legs around the rocky edge of the gap, then falling forward with his length, reaching out his arms like an acrobat.
He could barely make out his brother’s form, but he trusted that Hawk could see shadow the same as he did himself.
He could hear the water now, for the strength of the tide was causing it to rush by in bubbles and whispers.
He heard movement as Hawk jumped within the water, using it to make himself as light and buoyant as possible, then jumping with all his strength and energy.
At his first attempt, their fingers met and slipped. He heard Hawk swearing as the force of the water carried him northward, and out of reach.
“Hawk!”
“Coming back, coming back…”
“Hawk!”
“Ready.”
Again, David heard the sloshing movement, saw the shadow of his brother beneath him. Again, Hawk leaped.
Their hands met, grasped. Their palms were slick from the water. He swore. Grasped harder.
Their grip became firmer. With all his strength, he lifted.
Gritting his teeth, he inched back against the stone, levering his brother’s body upward.
As soon as humanly possible, Hawk released his grasp on David, caught hold of the stone ledge, and propelled himself upward and out of the void.
He landed beside David. For a moment, they lay together, panting, breathing.
“Son of a bitch!” Hawk muttered, then said in the darkness, “Brother, you are one competent white man.”
David smiled to himself with vast relief. “Thank you. You’re quite an acceptable American heathen yourself.”
“Which part is worse, the American or the heathen?”
“I shouldn’t have had you come here,” David said.
“Because of this?” Hawk queried.
“Someone is determined to rid the world—or Craig Rock, at the very least—of Douglases.”
“Umm,” Hawk mused. “I should have stayed home in the middle of the Sioux conflict.”
“You’ll go back to it anyway, and you know it.”
“Maybe it will all work itself out while I’m here abroad.”
“Aye, and maybe the Scots will awaken one day and love all things English.” He sat up suddenly, realizing that Shawna had not come back.
“Lady MacGinnis left us.”
Hawk leaped to his feet, reaching for his brother’s hand. “Something has happened to her,” he said worriedly.
“Aye, the greed of her kin,” David said, but he was up as well. He was glad of the darkness then, hiding the worry that surely played upon his features. She had come here with Hawk, and he had nearly been killed. She had gone for the rope to save him. she had never returned.
“No, David, I don’t believe that—” Hawk began, then broke off with a shrug.
David was condemning her for what had happened here today. But it didn’t matter. He was already hurrying along through the tunnel, moving swiftly and easily despite the darkness.
“Get up.”
Shawna blinked, aware of the voice nearby and overwhelmingly aware of feeling ill. She swallowed, praying that she wasn’t going to vomit.
“Shawna, get up.”
“I can’t.”
Her head was spinning. The more it spun, the more afraid she was that she was going to be sick.
“Shawna—”
Light flooded into her eyes. She blinked and cringed against it. Who had come, who was talking to her? Someone who intended to kill her?
Death seemed a mercy at this moment.
“Shawna!”
Her name was spoken harshly. David. He was kneeling before her, holding the lantern above her face. She couldn’t see his features. The light was all but blinding her.
“What happened?”
It was another voice. A kinder, gentler voice.
The kinder, gentler voice of a savage. Hawk.
He was hunkered down on her other side, and she could see without being blinded by the glare of the lantern.
“I—I don’t know. I paused to catch my breath…oh god! You’re—you’re all right.”
“Aye, my brother lives.”
It was all that he said, yet she was aware that he believed his brother was fine despite her efforts to harm him. Angered, she leaped to her feet. She instantly wavered, feeling again the dizziness and the nausea. She nearly fell— and would have, had Hawk not caught her.
“Shawna, what is the matter with you?” David demanded skeptically.
“Shawna?” Hawk inquired.
“Shawna, talk to us!” David warned. “We’ll not play games here as we did five years ago!”
“You must…you must leave me be,” Shawna whispered to Hawk. “I’m…sick.”
She pushed away from him, staggering along the tunnel. When she burst out of the main shaft, Skylar, who had been waiting and watching from the very edge of the entrance, came hurrying after her. “Oh my god! What’s happened, are you all right—”
She broke off as her husband emerged, followed by David.
She spun around nervously, trying to assure herself that they remained alone by the mine’s entrance.
“David, you can be seen here. Hawk, what’s going on?
Shawna, tell me! What has happened?” she demanded, her voice rising anxiously at the sight of them, Shawna gray, Hawk soaked and muddied, David disheveled and caked with coal dust.
Without waiting to hear the men’s answer, Shawna hurried to the nearest bushes. Her stomach constricted in vicious torment, and she was violently sick, so much so that she fell into the long, cool grass once her retching had stopped.
“Poor thing!” she heard. She tried to sit up.
The effort was too much. She fell back as Skylar knelt down beside her.
She’d had the presence of mind to bring a bucket of water from the mine entrance and dipped her handkerchief in it to bathe Shawna’s face.
“There…” she murmured. “You’re not…well, you’re not… ”
“Not what?”
“Expecting?”
“Expecting what?” Shawna inquired, then realized just what Skylar Douglas thought she was expecting.
“No, oh, no! I was attacked, drugged!”
“Drugged?” Skylar demanded, alarmed, and Shawna realized that neither Hawk nor David had really told Skylar anything.
“We were tricked in the tunnel. Led toward a gap in the flooring that led to the caverns below that fill with high tide from the loch. When I ran for help…someone drugged me.”
“With wine?” came a sardonic voice.