The Ruby Brooch (The Celtic Brooch Trilogy) (35 page)

A malignant odor lingered in the air. Pregnancy made her olfactory sense more acute, but even if she hadn’t been pregnant, she’d have recognized the smell of unadulterated fear—blood and decay. She reeked of it.

“We rode to the top of a cliff.” Her voice wobbled. “The cliff overlooked the Deschutes.” She touched her throat, remembering the chokehold. She gagged. “Three men jumped us. You know those men…those men in my pictures.”

The crowd gasped and started murmuring. Henry held up his hand again, silencing them.

“We fought.” The memories came back in a rush, and her hands flittered in front of her face, trying to push them away. “They shot Cullen.” She pressed her shaking fingers against the muscle burning in her arm as if she could staunch the blood flowing from Cullen’s wound.

“Go on.” Blue veins pulsed on the sides of Henry’s head.

Kit ran her tongue over her lips. Her mouth was dry, thick with trail dust. Sarah handed her a cup, and she turned it up and gulped. Water dribbled down her chin. She moved in slow motion, wiping her face and speaking at the same sluggish speed.

“Cullen lost his balance.” Her voice sounded distant as if she stood outside of herself, an observer, not a participant. “The man they called Jess, pushed Cullen, and he fell off the cliff.

She covered her eyes with her forearm. Relieving the horror stopped her heart as it had originally. After a pause, her heart restarted with the shock of a defibrillator, instantly reminding her of the urgency. “I searched the riverbank for several miles, but I couldn’t find him. I came back to get you, Henry. We have to go
now
.” She stood, but Henry drew her back onto the bench.

“You just fell off your horse. You’re not going anywhere.” His eyes were dark and intense.

“I have to go.” She tried again to stand, but he pressed on her shoulders.

“John and I will go, but you’re staying put.”

She sucked in a shuddering breath and steadied herself for a battle with Henry. Sarah scooted him aside. “Let me bandage that cut on your cheek.”

 Kit grabbed Sarah’s arm and dug her fingers into the woman’s soft flesh. “Don’t let them leave without me. They don’t know where to go.”

“What happened to the men who attacked you?” John asked.

“They’re dead.”

Questions scribbled across his chiseled face. How could she admit she’d killed three men when she couldn’t reconcile it in her own mind?

“Draw us a map. We’ll find him,” Henry said.

“You either take me with you, or I’ll follow you. I’m not staying behind.”

Henry frowned. “You’re beat up and you’ve had a hard ride. Think about your baby.”

“The baby’s fine, and other than getting smacked in the face, I’m not hurt. Please, don’t leave me behind.”

Henry glanced at the sky. “Near impossible to track him at night, especially if it rains.”

“We should wait until first light,” John said.

Another wave of panic swamped her. “Are you crazy? He’ll be dead by morning.” She shook Henry’s arm. “You can find him. You did before. I know he’s still alive.”

“Not even Henry can track in the dark,” John said.

Her gaze shot upward. The edges of another storm cloud churned the sky into an ugly gray. Her heart raced, thudding in her ears. She heard what John
wasn’t
saying. “You don’t believe he’s alive, do you?” 

“Never lied to you before. Won’t start now. Cullen would have made it to shore, if he’d survived.”

Kit whipped around to face Henry. “Is that what you believe, too?”

Henry shoved a shaking hand through graying hair. Their eyes met for a moment and she saw worry, but also something much deeper and that scared her. Henry was afraid.

She stiffened. “I’m packing medical supplies, and then I’m leaving again.”

This can’t be happening.

She shambled away, her legs wobbly from the fight and hard ride. She was going back to search and neither shaking legs nor disingenuous friends were going to stop her. 

Sarah hurried after her. “Kit don’t go. Think about your baby. The men will find Cullen.”

“I don’t have a choice. My husband needs medical care. I have to go.” Her stomach fluttered like it had earlier. A moment of indecision hit her hard. She fell silent. Then the answer came. This was not a time for second-guessing. “Ask Adam to wipe Stormy down and give him some food and water. I need to leave as soon as I pack.”

In the dwindling light, she saw Sarah’s worried face. The expression caused something to corkscrew in her heart and Kit imagined the look mirrored hers. “You have faith that can move mountains. Move the one standing in my way so I can find Cullen.”

Sarah closed her eyes and her lips moved in silent prayer, and Kit felt a twinge of hope.

Henry stopped her before she reached her wagon and wrapped his burly arm around her shoulders. Her throat constricted, and she waited without breathing for him to speak.

“I’ll be ready in ten minutes. Get your rain gear.”

A sudden breeze, smelling of pine, stirred the damp hair on her forehead, and in that singular moment, facing the unknown and a possible rainstorm, Kit realized she was profoundly afraid. More afraid than she had ever been in her life. What if she couldn’t find him?

She shook her head, refusing to believe she had lost him, too.

Chapter Thirty-Six

KIT AND HENRY returned to camp twenty-four hours later. She sat in her saddle in a catatonic stupor.
We need to search the other side of the river,
she had begged Henry, but he had said it was pointless. How could searching for Cullen ever be pointless?

Sarah offered her food. Knowing she needed nourishment, Kit grudgingly accepted child-sized portions. Her hands trembled so badly she couldn’t hold a fork so she ate with her fingers, one small bite at a time. Cullen probably wasn’t eating, so why should she? Food made her sick anyway.

Another flutter. Too early in her pregnancy to feel the baby, the women said, but she knew Cullen’s son was also grieving. He wanted to hear his father’s laughter. He wanted to feel the tickle of his kisses on her belly. He wanted to hear the roar of his huge heart beating with love.

Sounds she would never hear again and neither would their child.

Physical torture could hurt no worse than the pain of losing her life’s breath.
Please take me instead. Give me back my husband, and I will take his place.
But as she begged for release from the agony of living, she realized her child’s life depended on her own. How could she surrender when someone so small, so fragile depended on her?

She couldn’t.

Tears clogged her throat, choking her. She grew weaker in her despair. Sleep was her enemy, or maybe the enemy was sleep’s companion—waking up. That was the true enemy, wasn’t it? The moment of full consciousness held the weight of a crushing stone placed on her chest to torture her with life’s reality—Cullen was gone. Knowing that God-awful pain would assault her, Kit feared sleep, avoiding it until she dropped from exhaustion.

Come back to me.

If she had not traveled back in time for her own selfish needs, Cullen would still be alive. If not for her, he wouldn’t have gone to the top of the cliff to see the view.

A day passed, then another, and another. And although the wagon train had traveled sixty or more miles from where she had seen him last, she wandered off into the woods, searching the ground for his footsteps or a piece of his plaid shirt. Cullen’s vine had so intricately intertwined with hers. Severed, they shriveled and died.

Henry found her curled under a tree a mile from camp, sobbing in a bed of pine needles. He picked her up, brushed the needles from her hair. “You can’t wander off, missy. You’ll get hurt.”

“Cullen’s hurt. Doesn’t matter what happens to me.” Grief gripped with such tenacity she could barely speak.

Tenderly, he carried her back to her camp, crooning, “Come back to us, little missy, come back to us.” He sat her in her rocker and patiently watched over her.

Mr. Cameron’s fiddle came alive, and she squeezed her hands against her ears. “Make him turn it off.”

“What?” Henry asked.

She wagged a pointed finger toward the music. “
Make him turn it off
.”

He lowered his head, and his eyes lifted over the rim of the wire glasses riding low on his nose, but he said nothing.

“Don’t you hear it?” She slammed her palms on the rocker’s arms and jumped up. “Don’t you
hear
it
?” If Henry wouldn’t end it, she would. She stormed into her tent, grabbed her guitar, and ran out swinging the instrument by the neck. “I want the music to stop
now
.” Henry moved faster than a gun fighter on a draw, catching her arm mid-swing before she bashed the guitar against a tree.

He rescued the instrument and held it over his head. Kit danced around, trying to take it back, but he held the guitar much too high for her to reach. “Don’t destroy the music.”

“Music died when Cullen fell off that cliff. I never want to listen to it again.
Give
it to me.” She pounded her fists against his barrel chest, her voice a dark keening wail. “Bring him back, Henry
. Bring him back
.”

“Shh…” He put the guitar in his chair and cuddled her, his body shaking.

She laid her cheek against his chest, and her tears soaked his shirt. “Why did God take him too? Weren’t my parents and Scott enough? Why Cullen? Why?” Her loss and failure and heartache were eating her alive. She would not survive the cannibalism this time. “Nothing is left for me.” She slid out of his arms and fell to her knees, into an abyss of abandoned hope. “Nothing. No husband, no family, no name, nothing.”

Henry knelt beside her, tears streaming down his cheeks. “John, Sarah, the children, me. We’re your family now.”

“Don’t you understand?” She shoved him away. “Everybody who loves me dies. I don’t want anybody to love me ever again.”

“I’m not afraid to love you.”

“But, I don’t deserve—”

“Your pa wouldn’t abandon you now and neither will this old soldier.”

SEVERAL HOURS LATER, she woke, confused. Then she shuddered as memory and consciousness collided. She buried her face in her pillow. Her tears mingled with Cullen’s scent, and she cried harder knowing she was washing away his musky smell. The scent, once gone, would never come again.

She didn’t even remember how she got to her bed. Did Henry carry her?

Thank goodness, the music had stopped. The only sound now was her breathing, irregular, agitated. She rolled out of bed, feeling a sharp cramp in her abdomen and muscle spasms in her calves. Cramps and spasms? A result of the fight? She’d probably be sore for a few days.

She took tentative steps over to Cullen’s desk and lit the lamp. Her sketchpad lay open next to the book of poems by his favorite poet Robert Burns—
The Parting Kiss: Sorrowing joy, Adieu’s last action, Lingering lips must now disjoin.

She swallowed a throat full of tears, and noticed the sketch she’d drawn of him only a few hours before he disappeared.
Every now and again
, as an unknown poet had written,
God makes a giant of a man
, and he had made Cullen Montgomery an irreplaceable giant.

How would she ever live without him?

In deep despair, she sat in his chair. Her father’s chair had never fit her, but Cullen’s embraced her just as she was. With a heavy heart, she crossed her arms on the desk and lowered her head. She’d never again allow the joy of music to filter into her soul, but she would draw the ugliness, the evil that invaded her life and destroyed the best part of her.

I’ll draw pictures of hell and the devils who live there.

By the time the sun peeked above the horizon, dozens of sketches littered the floor, some ripped in half, a few crushed into wads and thrown across the tent, several folded into airplanes and intentionally crashed into the ground. Her emotions were still ripe and the cramps were worse. What was going on with her stomach? Sarah had made sure she drank plenty of water so she wasn’t dehydrated. She’d eaten most of her dinner the night before only because Henry stood guard, treating her like a child who couldn’t leave the table until her plate was cleaned. She was probably still hungry. Sarah should be awake, and she’d fix something light that wouldn’t make the cramps worse.

She pushed the chair away from the desk and stood, but immediately doubled over, letting out a sharp scream.

Adam ducked his head inside the tent. “What’s wrong?”

Kit dropped to the floor, her hands clutching her belly. “Get your ma.”

A few minutes later, Sarah wrapped her arms around Kit’s shoulders. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m bleeding.”

Sarah’s sharp intake of breath added shudders of fear to Kit’s growing anxiety. “Let’s get you to bed.”

“I haven’t taken care of my body, and now I’m bleeding?”

“That doesn’t mean you’ll lose the baby.”

“I can’t let that happen. I’ve lost Cullen. I can’t lose his baby too.”

They walked to the bed, and Kit sat. “Lie down and rest. Stay off your feet. I’ll fix some tea.”

“I don’t want tea. I want my doctor.”

“We don’t have a doctor,” Sarah said.

I have a doctor.
A solution unfolded in her mind. “I’m going home.”

Sarah fluffed her pillow and smoothed the sheets, ignoring Kit’s pronouncement. “The baby will be fine, but you have to eat more and sleep.”

“I won’t risk anything else. This entire trip has been nothing but risks, and I’m through. I’m going home.”

Sarah stopped what she was doing. “When?”

“Now.”

“But how—”

“I’ll take Stormy, Tate, and Tabor.”

“Don’t do this.”

Kit’s heart rate accelerated.