Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Rowan’s breath shot out as he doubled over.
TJ smoothed his hand over Rowan’s back. “That was from my folks. They didn’t like you getting my sister pregnant and marrying her without Pop’s consent.
Mom, though, wants the baby to be named”—he paused, looking at something written on his palm—“Fredrick if it’s a boy and Francine if it’s a girl. ”
He gave Rowan a pat as if that settled it.
I loved my brother, I really did, but when he socked my husband only hours after we’d survived a mythic battle? I returned the favor.
I dropped his rucksack and lunged. My fist caught his cheek. “You mouth-breathing pissant excuse for a human being! He’s injured—”
TJ blinked in surprise. He grabbed a handful of my sweater absently as I tackled him into the cosmos bed. Pink and white petals blew up into the air. I sat on him and tried to sock him in the face again. TJ dodged to the side again and again.
“Whoa!” he shouted.
“And,” I said as I again punched air, “I’m not”—punch—“PREGNANT!”
He was surprised enough to forget his defense and said, “What?” as I clipped his jaw.
“Ow! Stop it!”
“You stop it! You hurt him! I’m not pregnant, and if you were born with ears that worked properly and an actual brain between them, you’d have asked! Goddamn you—”
“You OK, man?” TJ looked beyond me to Rowan.
I slapped TJ across the head for good measure and looked back at Rowan myself. He was on all fours on the gravel, one hand clutching his abdomen. He’d gone ashy and was struggling for a breath.
“Shit.” I scrambled off TJ and gripped Rowan’s shoulders in time to catch him from fainting face-first into the gravel. I murmured to him, “Rowan? Honey?” As he went to dead weight, I caught his head on my thigh and pulled him into my lap. “TJ,” I hollered, “you damn shithead!”
TJ, whom I sometimes forget is an army medic who buzzes into active war zones to save people, had his cell phone to his ear as he came toward us.
“What do you mean he’s injured?” TJ asked, putting his fingers to Rowan’s neck to make sure he’d just fainted and wasn’t dead as a doornail.
As soon as I realized he was talking to me and not his phone, I said, “I mean, he got hit yesterday, hard, in the stomach, and it made a huge bruise. And why the hell are you here at all?! Mother and Daddy said you wouldn’t be here for another day!”
He shouted back, “I caught a ride!” TJ cursed as he lifted Rowan’s shirt and then gingerly rolled him to check his back too. “He’s got cuts all over him. What the hell was he doing?”
“He was… A tree fell,” I improvised.
“You suck at lying.” He gave Rowan’s abdomen a gentle tap-tap with his fingers.
He cursed again and said, “Yeah, you still with the rig?” I almost responded before I realized he was talking to the person on the phone.
“Roger that. Stand by.” He pushed some buttons on his phone. “Can you get a geo-locate on me?”
I piped up. “Tell the paramedics we’re at Castle Laoch. They’ll know how to get here. At the Circle Garden.” Panic slithered in. All I could think was how shitty it would be for Rowan to survive everything, only for a single punch from my jackass brother to kill him.
TJ said, “Yeah, you heard that? Know where Castle Loch—”
“Laoch.”
“Right. You know where that is?” he said into the phone, then: “Roger that, ten-four.”
TJ hung up and tucked away his phone before gently tapping Rowan’s face, then his collarbone, calling his name. He checked his eyes, pulling his lower lids down.
“How long did they say? Sometimes they have an ambulance sitting at Glentree. Was it there? Shit, TJ, this feels serious. He’s unconscious, Tee.”
TJ put his ear to Rowan’s chest and tapped. He stood abruptly and went to his pack and rummaged through it. He extracted another bag, the guts of the pack: his medic bag. He unzipped it, dropped it next to us, put his stethoscope to Rowan’s chest, and tapped again.
I heard the distant purr of a machine and thanked the heavens that the ambulance had indeed been at Glentree. Only the purr of the motor got louder and turned into a chop chop chop as it closed in quickly. As I recognized it as the sound of a helicopter, TJ’s phone rang.
“Go,” he said. “Yeah, put it down in the flower bed. Yeah, the circle one.”
Wide-eyed, I looked around us. “Here?!” I said, thinking of the Coast Guard chopper out where Eli worked; it wouldn’t fit here.
TJ ignored me, and within moments, a frightening mechanical creature peeked over the trees. The helicopter was something out of the wet dreams of every child who wanted to decimate their opponent on the G.I. Joe battlefield.
“Good Christ, TJ, is that what I think it is?”
He didn’t respond to me; it was obvious the black war bird he usually rode around in when he was saving asses was about to land in the Circle Garden…
or on a castle turret. My head was definitely going to roll off from the force of the wind under the rotating blades as the bird paused high over top of us.
TJ stood as I ducked over Rowan’s face, protecting him from flying debris, and tried not to think about what it meant if TJ thought it pertinent to have his taxi driver come get us.
I watched from under my arm as the flag atop the castle’s parapet flicked and snapped in the wind until it gave up and ripped off.
The thunder of the rotor wash pounded through my chest and roared around us.
The expert behind the stick slowly set down, gentle as if he were lowering a snail into the garden—with a tornado attached to its shell. The blades relaxed to a whine.
Everything from there on was a blur of TJ running, the copilot assisting, and Rowan being braced for flight.
When he was moved from the ground to the backboard, his eyelids fluttered, and he groaned.
We were in the chopper and airborne in under a minute.
I advised them on the nearest hospital, over the ridge, where our lone surgeon was in residence.
The same hospital I flew with Rowan to the year before when he’d needed his bullet wound stitched shut.
There was radio chatter of Rowan’s description mixed with acronyms, numbers, and the occasional unconscious and pain stimulus.
The drone of the engine and helicopter blades became white noise as I watched TJ go through his expert motions of listening to Rowan’s breathing, checking pulses, and monitoring his blood pressure.
If the pale gray of Rowan’s face didn’t scare the piss out of me, I would have found the quick trip humorous.
We were on the hospital’s concrete helipad two minutes after we left the garden, and for the second time in my life, I never again wanted to see that chipped white paint of the air ambulance cross on the tarmac or the weeds that were still crawling up through it.
We were out. Rowan was put onto a waiting stretcher. TJ was running alongside the stretcher, yelling things over the rotor wash to the surgeon. Once inside, I was stopped at the surgery doors and asked to sit in the waiting room.
No matter how many times it happened, I would never get used to that feeling of despair when those doors shut on me.
This time, though, my brother was there. Seeing him through the window on the helipad, I stood and hurried back outside. By the time I reached him, the chopper was airborne, and he was walking back to me, the sober, all-business brother in place.
I started the conversation. “You piece of shit—”
“He didn’t fall out of a goddamn tree—”
“How could you? Two seconds you’re with us, and you put my husband in there.” I whipped my pointer finger to the squat concrete building behind me in case he was as dumb as I thought he was.
“He should have been in the hospital yesterday. And don’t fucking lie, Nicole. What the hell?”
I took a deep breath, and guilt crawled into my stomach. I knew Rowan should have gone to the hospital. Even though we were inland, I could smell the faint brine of seawater.
“Well?” he asked. “He’s got level three contusions on his abdominal muscles, and when I hit him, yes, it ruptured something, probably a hematoma.
And by the skin color there, I’d say that hematoma formed less than twelve hours ago.
Did he catch a missile without his flak jacket on?
It sure as hell wasn’t my damn love punch. ”
I shook my head and crossed my arms. In the distance behind me, the purply Highland hills towered as my backup. “Love punch? That’s what you’re calling it?”
“He has internal bleeding, but yes, let’s focus on me.”
My hands flew up; the tears were there before my palms touched my face. “I knew we should have taken him,” I said through my fingers.
“We who? And why didn’t you?”
I dropped my hands and said with some heat, “I don’t know if you noticed the scorched earth around us when we met?”
“Hard to miss. Forest fire?”
“Something like that. Look, it isn’t very easy to explain.
And knowing you, you’ll have to see it to believe it, so I’ll save the explanation for later.
Right now, I need to contact Marion; she’ll want to know why all the second-floor windows have been blown out.
And maybe Clive,” I mumbled, seeing as the clan historian had been Rowan’s right-hand man these days.
I returned to the hospital’s side entrance, wiping my tears, TJ behind me.
“Nicole… Pipsqueak,” he said, using his nickname for me, “if he sneezed today, whatever it is would have ruptured. I just happened to be the sucker who burst it. Don’t be pissed at me.”
I turned on him at the doors. “I’m not— No, wait, I am. Of course I’m mad at you! You punched my husband!”
“He deserved it! No one in our family knows who he is! He’s some Harry Potter wank who’s convinced you to stay up here in the boondocks in some ancient pile of rocks he’s pretending is some functioning, historically important castle.”
I was taken aback, way back, as in back the train all the way up to the station. “Everyone thinks that?” I hadn’t realized my family had been worried. But then I remembered I was talking to TJ, so I amended, “No one thinks that!”
“Yes, they do. Mother and Daddy— No, check that: Mother is pissed. If you weren’t in another country, she’d be sending you pie.”
“Oh,” I said. That was bad. Despite being raised to be a good Southern woman, my mom wasn’t a baking sort of gal.
She rebelled against her debutant nights and her pie days when she married my father, a farmer who liked to cook and never requested her presence in the kitchen.
So when Mother stepped into the kitchen, it was a loud pronouncement that she was doing something she hated; therefore, everything that the kitchen produced under her hand was ire in edible form.
“What kind of pie?” It mattered.
“Pecan.” The word was a sharp metal dagger, and he knew it.
“Oh,” I said, not liking the taste of even imaginary guilt-pie.
“Yeah,” TJ said, gaining steam. “So, now you’re lying to me about him being hit before.
Did you hit him? You’ve got a nice slice on your head.
Did he hit you first, and you got pissed and nailed him back with something big?
You’re all ready with the lies and not even a day into your marriage.
Fuck yeah, I nailed him. When he’s better, I’ll do it again! ”
TJ really knew where my big red button was and loved to jump up and down on it. “FUCKER!” I shouted as the receptionist inside—on the other side of the glass entry doors—heard me and looked up concerned.
“Tell me I’m wrong. Did you hit him?”
“Ugh! You don’t understand!”
“Explain then!” he said, throwing up his hands.
“Ugh!” I responded again. “TJ, I can’t just explain everything like it’s instructions on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich!”
“Try!”
“Fine!” I marched through the double doors into the waiting room and to the reception desk. I recognized the two women there from my last visit. “Hi,” I said with an aspartame smile.
They gave kind but wry looks in return, first at my brother and then at me. They immediately updated me: “He’s still in surgery.”
TJ rested his elbow on the high reception counter and said to me, “Waiting.”
Still looking at the women, I threw my thumb at him. “Would you be so kind as to tell this moronic paramedic who I am?”
The receptionist closest to me answered, “Nicole Ransome Baker, or Mrs. Rowan Douglas James MacLaoch.”
“Ah, right,” I said as TJ scoffed. “I meant, y nickname, please.”
She crinkled her nose. “He won’t understand.”
“I know, but let’s tell him anyway.”
“Yes, well, in that case. You’re the Minory lass.”
I looked at my brother. “See?”
“Minory lass? Grandpappy’s real last name? So, what of it?”
I waved her to continue, and she eagerly complied. “She saved the laird of Castle Laoch, Rowan Douglas James MacLaoch, by being his one true love and marrying him because she was destined from birth to break the curse.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. I turned to him, smiling. “Still think you know what’s going on here?”
He looked from the woman to me. “What kind of cult have you been sucked into?”