In the Mists of Time (17 page)

“Oh everyone's out of there,” Alan said, striding down towards her. “I saw Angus myself. The minister took him off to the car while—”

“What car?” Louise interrupted.

“The car from the big house. One of their guys drove some folk up there to sleep. The bloke from the newspaper, actually.”

“Thierry…” So Angus and Thierry were both safe. “Good. Thanks, Alan. Anyone hurt in all this?”

“Nothing too serious. We were pretty well prepared. Not looking forward to the clear-up job tomorrow, though. I hope everyone was bloody well insured.”

“And not with London and Scottish,” Louise murmured, contributing, she supposed, to the trashing of the reputation her guests had talked about. An idea niggled somewhere at the back of her mind for future mulling.

“You should head off home,” Alan said. “That's where I'm headed. The tide's turning, so that should be the worst of it.”

“Except for what it drags with it,” Louise murmured. “I'm just going to check on Aidan's new cottage…”

“No point,” Alan said. “There's nothing you can do now except get washed into the sea for your pains. Check it tomorrow.”

Louise froze in a half turn. “Hell, Chrissy isn't there, is she?”

“She was in the village, but I think she went back to the big house with an earlier carload.”

There was nothing else for it but to go home. It came to her that she was avoiding it. She wanted to be doing something active and useful, not staring at her father's sick body and thinking…

“Don't go back past the harbour,” Alan urged. “Come this way.”

She sloshed with him up to the High Street, where the wetness became little more than large puddles, listening to stories of damage and rescue. She left Alan at the pub and walked on, exchanging quick updates with those she met on the way. It struck her suddenly, as she walked towards the church, that no one tonight had looked at her as they had last night. She was only gossipworthy when nothing more important was going on. And, frankly, she only
cared
about that gossip when nothing more important was going on.

He
was more important. Thierry was more important.

The thought came to her from nowhere, like a light bulb switching on by itself. She actually paused in midstep, mulling it over until she realized it made perfect sense. Impulsively, she turned, gazing through the darkness in the direction of Ardknocken House. She couldn't see it from here, of course, but the hill behind it rose up blacker and sharper than anything else.

She frowned as something more caught her eye, and peered through the still-pelting rain. Something white and grey, almost silver in places, swirled around the hill, drifting lower.

How can it be doing that? Shouldn't the wind be blowing it the other way?

Not if it was
their
mist. Spreading downward towards Ardknocken House. Even as she watched, it seemed to speed up, almost galloping until it enveloped what she could see of the hill.

Her heart began to beat faster. It must have covered the house. Thierry would go out there to talk to it. Thierry, who liked mist but couldn't see through it.

Abruptly, Louise changed direction, heading for the hill.

As she walked, she called her mother. There was no change in her father, and the water coming into the garden had slowed. She'd told the guests to leave it and come in. One of them was boiling water on the gas hob in the kitchen for tea.

“Angus is up at the big house,” Louise said. “All the harbour cottages are flooded. If you're all right there for another hour, I'll head up there and see if they need any help at Ardknocken House.”

“Good idea,” her mother said.

Louise wasn't so sure, but she couldn't leave Thierry out there on his own. What if the mist took him, as she was pretty sure it had taken Ron?

“I can't believe I'm even thinking that,” she muttered aloud.

* * * * *

When Thierry had delivered his charges over to Chrissy, who was organizing accommodation, he tracked down Glenn. Thierry discovered him lugging a camp bed into Len's old room for the new family he'd brought up from the village.

“The mist is back,” Thierry said curtly. “I'd warn the lads to stay away from the girls.”

“You mean it might be my lucky night again?” Glenn said wryly.

Thierry, who was pretty sure every night was lucky for Glenn, said only, “Watch out for them all, if you can. I'll try and lead it away from the house.”

“You do know how mad that sounds,” Glenn observed, stretching out the bed.

“Yes. And I notice you're not trying to stop me.”

Glenn straightened, frowning. “Don't go by yourself. Give me ten, and I'll come with you.”

“No, I think I need to go now. I'll take whoever can be spared.” With that, Thierry left the room and ran back downstairs. Everyone looked busy, as he knew they would be. It didn't matter. He'd never had any real intention of taking anyone with him. He wouldn't go as far up as the waterfall, and in any case, he thought he knew this mist now. He needed to talk to it, for everyone's safety, and if he was honest, for his own curiosity.

Chapter Fifteen

The wind and rain still howled with fury, although at least the thunder seemed to have passed. Thierry strode through the ground at the back of the house and on up the hill, the wind pushing him all the way, as if helping him—or rushing him to his doom.

He kept up his pace, ascending into the mist until he could barely feel the rain or the wind at his back. As if he truly were in a separate, isolated world where the normal laws of nature didn't apply. When he judged he'd gone far enough, he turned and looked back. He couldn't see the house. He couldn't see anything, yet somehow he knew the mist was still growing and spreading, like a mirror of its infinite existence, stretching so far into the past that he'd never see its beginning. Its end, he thought grimly, was another matter.

“I'm here,” he shouted into it. “Come back up here, speak to me!”

He peered into the thick greyness, turned a full three-hundred-and-sixty degrees before he thought he glimpsed that face again, swirling into shape as though trying to form and solidify. It rushed on him, and his fists clenched involuntarily, even as he knew there was nothing anyone's fists could achieve in this situation. Not even Glenn's. So he stood firm, and the face uncurled and vanished. Or, at least, hid.

An image flashed through his mind of the mist swarming downhill into the village, hindering and confusing people already battered and exhausted by the storm. Real? Or his own fear?

“Draw back,” he said, turning slowly, speaking to all of it. “They're too weak to feed you. I came up here for you. Can't you do the same?”

Something like breath tickled his ear, chilling him, sending a shudder through his whole body.

“Not yet,” it seemed to say inside his mind, and yet he heard it with his ears. At any other time, he would have been fascinated by this weird perception. Right now, he had more to worry about. Why not yet? Because it was waiting for…

“Louise,” he said in sudden terror. “You've gone after Louise.”

“You should be together.” The mist seemed to send the words shivering through him.

“Not now!” Thierry exclaimed, his voice both appalled and pleading. God knew, they were honest-enough emotions. “Her father's dying, she doesn't trust me and the whole village is in chaos. You mustn't make it worse for them!”

“Worse? Foolish man, it's what I'm for, what they need me for. I give them fertility, let their crops and their children grow.”

“Nonsense,” Thierry said brutally. “They've managed without you for thousands of years!”

A hint of confusion caught at his mind—the mist's confusion, surely, so at least he could reach it—and then vanished. “They need me again,” it whispered. “
You
need me again. To love her.”

“Oh no,” Thierry said, suddenly positive. “I don't need
you
for that. In any case, that isn't it. It's you who needs me. Us. Why? What are Louise and I to you?”

“The future and the past,” the mist said dreamily, its voice seeming to spiral around him like tendrils of mist. “United in your love, the fruit of your loins. Your child will be my child, and through him, I will once more hold sway among men. The old gods are not dead. Worship us, sacrifice to us, and we will make you strong, give you immeasurable power…”

“You really have been asleep too long,” Thierry observed. “You have no power.”

The mist seemed to close around his throat. He felt it inside his mouth, cloying, choking.

“I took your enemy,” it whispered harshly, deep inside his head. “For you.”

“Ron,” Thierry said with a sudden surge of grief and pity for the man who would have hurt him, and yet was only doing his job. “You really did kill Ron.”

“So easy to get him lost in me… And in return, you will make me a son,” the mist said proudly. “You and the woman who are my favourites reborn.”

Maybe he should have been fighting, though he wasn't quite sure how in hell you fought a misty deity. In any case, curiosity won. “Who were they? Your favourites?”

“Your ancestor was a powerful priest, a seer, a keeper of the stories. I loved him well…in my corporeal form.”

A wild idea began to form in Thierry's head—no less insane than what was happening now. “And Louise?” he prompted.

“Her ancestor was my daughter. Now you and she have awakened me and must make me strong, make me a son…”

“I won't fuck her for you,” Thierry said deliberately. “Only for me, and her.”

Again the mist thickened in his nostrils. “I don't care for whom you fuck her. Just find her and do it. Now.”

Thierry laughed. “You're being ridiculous.”

“Am I?” the mist whispered, no longer harsh, but soft, seductive. Something that felt like the tip of a tongue brushed against his ear, subtly arousing. “You've wanted her for days, ever since the last time you had her. Do you remember that? On the beach, in the open, inside her while I protected you from view. And she was as urgent as you, so eager to be taken, to be loved. Your seed was not sown then, the time was not right, but it is now. And you're ready for her.”

The mist goddess was right. Whether at the memory or her words or just her sheer will, he was aroused, all right. Bone hard, his cock strained against his jeans. Something that felt almost like a human hand brushed over it, and he couldn't prevent the groan that escaped him.

“Bury it deep inside her heat,” the relentless voice whispered in his ear. “Take her. Let her hold you, caress you, pleasure you. Let her grant you the sweet release you crave. She wants you too.”

“Sex is just sex,” he croaked.

“Sex is everything. Pleasure, release, new life. Find her.”

Abruptly, Thierry sat down. “I'm not moving.”

Laughter teased him, the very sound vibrating every oversensitized nerve ending. “It will only get worse, you know.”

And suddenly it did. His vision turned red with it. His hips lifted of their own accord, desperate for any kind of comfort. He wanted to screw someone, anyone, anything. His own hand would do as long as it was quick… With a groan of pain, he closed his hand over the rock-hard bulge in his jeans, but before he could get near the zip, his hand was whipped away.

“Oh no,” said the mist goddess. “Don't waste it. It's for her, for me. Find her. She's looking for you. Go to her, love her.”

“Fuck off,” Thierry said between his teeth.

The goddess's face, beautiful yet almost icy, formed in the red mist in front of him. It looked much more solid than last time. Did that mean he was losing? “You are a curious man,” she mused. “Why do you fight so hard against what you and she so clearly want?”

“Because if it happens again, it does so on our terms, not yours.”

Another wave of unbearable lust swept over him. It would have been a relief just to come in his pants like some overdesperate teenager. The thought made him laugh, and that helped, though only marginally.

But something else was tugging at his lust-addled mind, something the mist had said a few moments earlier. “What do you mean she's looking for me?”

“She's close, around the other path. Because of her blood, she can see through mist, through me, but she can't see round corners. Help her find you. Throw her on the ground and take her. Take her with power and fury; bury your seed deep in her womb…”

“Shut the fuck up,” Thierry said shakily, and was rewarded with another intense tide of lust that threatened the zipper on his jeans. “She's leading you away from the village, that's all. She's not looking for me.”

“You really are a foolish man.”

He wanted to be. He yearned to be wrong, to know that she wanted him, cared for him, loved him. He closed his eyes. This feeling had begun with sex, and in truth, sex was so much part of it he couldn't separate lust from the care that went with it. It was all for Louise. Did a moment's uncertainty, an instant's suspicion, really matter in the face of that?

The force of his desire was confusing him.

“Many in the village are having a most pleasurable time,” the mist goddess mused. “Tangled in each other. Screwing. Fucking. Having sex. Whatever you want to call it these days, they're doing it. In so many different ways. I can show you if you like.”

“You think watching other people will turn me on?”

The goddess laughed, vibrating through his all but shaking body. “You're already turned on, my stubborn one. And here is your chance for happiness.”

No, no, no no! How the hell do I fight this if she's here?

“Thierry.” She walked out of the mist almost as he'd first seen her, aethereal, golden, beautiful. Only now her hair was drenched around her lovely face, which was not remotely calm, as on that first meeting, but tight with anxiety.

“Louise—”

He held out his hand, unsure if he was warding her off or drawing her to him. Whatever his intention, she stumbled towards him, seized his hand and fell to her knees in front of him.

“Thierry,” she whispered. “What are you doing up here?”

“Trying to talk to her. She wants us to make a baby that she imagines would then be hers. I think we can only beat her, send her back, by resisting, but, hell, Louise, I can't if you're so close. I want you so much it's killing me…” Realizing he was crushing her hand, he forced himself to loosen his grasp, but her fingers clung and her arms went around him.

“Thierry. If I wasn't here, if you weren't, there would be nothing for us to resist. Hold me tight and grit your teeth.”

Laughter tried to choke him, turned into something perilously close to a sob as he wrapped her in his arms and hugged her tightly, pressing his cheek to hers.

“Our love, our time,” Louise whispered against his skin, though he was sure the goddess heard.

“Push her over,” the goddess whispered. “Get those clothes off her and mount her. She's so desperate for you, she's trembling. Show her your manhood.”

Thierry smiled into Louise's hair. He didn't answer the voice in his head, just inhaled the vital, distinctive scent of the woman he'd grown to love so impossibly quickly. Maybe she was the one. Maybe this would last forever. Maybe not. Right now, the future didn't matter. The goddess and her past loves didn't matter here either, only the present moment with Louise clutched close in his arms, her cheek to his while they rocked together, lost in each other, while their lust blasted them like the storm they could no longer hear.

“Louise,” he whispered, closing his eyes. “Louise, I love you.”

Her arms tightened around his neck. “I love
you
.”

“Then fuck!” the goddess said furiously.

They held on to each other, neither moving beyond the sweet, gentle rocking. Thick, choking mist clogged Thierry's nostrils, his mouth, his throat. He couldn't breathe. The mist goddess was threatening to kill him if he didn't screw Louise at her bidding. He didn't care. It was a sweet way to die.

On the other hand, he was sure he wouldn't. His death would achieve nothing for the goddess. Nor would Louise's. The mist was already fading from his airways, letting him gasp in air. Realizing he could hear the wind again, he opened his eyes. The mist was swirling wildly, furiously, blown in one direction. A blinding flash forked across the foggy sky, closely followed by a deafening crash of thunder.

Rain splashed down on his head, on Louise's face and his own. The wind howled, gusting with impossible strength. Thierry's hair blasted straight out from his head until it felt as if his scalp would lift off his head. He hung on to Louise, pressing her face into his shoulder with one protective hand across the back of her head.

“It's like a battle,” he whispered with awe. “Between the gods of mist and thunder.”

There was a pause; then she said into his shoulder, “You spend too much time on video games. Maybe the real weather just dispersed our paranormal mist.”

Slowly, Thierry released her head, letting her see what he did—the last tendrils of mist disappearing over the peaks of the dark hills.

“Wow,” she said, awed, staring. “I think she—it—has really gone.”

Thierry moved his gaze to her beautiful face, and swallowed. The mist had gone, but his desire hadn't. For several moments, she focused on the distant hills as the rain and wind pounded on them and another fork of lightning lit up the sky. Then her gaze came back to him.

“Thierry…”

“Yes?”

“Would you like to make love?”

“Oh fuck yes,” he said desperately and pushed her onto her back in the soaking grass. He tore her jeans open, pulling them off one leg while she tried to reach and fumble with his zip. He did it for her and yanked his cock free.

He groaned as he pushed it inside her, and again as he thrust farther in. She closed around him like a wet, heated glove and bucked beneath him. There was no way to hold this back. Instead of cooling his ardour or hers, the storm seemed to feed it. Their sex had the same raw, natural power and fury as they strained and writhed together, giving and seeking joy with total abandon. They rolled in the grass, heedless of the rain and the wet, caring only for the pull and push of life-affirming sex, the wild friction that led them relentlessly towards massive, blissful release. His whole body was on fire.

She rode him, moaning and crying into the wind until he felt her begin to spasm around him.

Oh Christ, yes…
He thrust up into her hard and rolled her onto her back, hammering her as she came, hanging on to his last thread of control. He reared up, dragging his cock free, and shouted into the storm, his voice mingling with hers as the wind whipped at his cock and his semen.

Growling, he pushed back inside her and collapsed, panting on her blissfully heaving body, stretching himself, making hard little thrusts to give and receive every last modicum of pleasure.