Waking the Dead (14 page)
Blayne screamed again, exultant this time, and then moved with a speed and strength that was beyond anything a human could match. Nick caught a fist to his jaw and staggered out of the way, tasting the bright, warm copper of his blood. It filled his senses so that as he slammed against the low wall, he felt no pain. Just darkness and John’s name dying on his lips as he called out a warning.
Chapter Eleven
Fred -- Blayne -- shouldn’t have been able to move so fast; John knew that as certainly as he knew anything. And yet he had. So fast that John had found himself flat on the ground, unsure what part of Blayne had hit him but sure, at least, that it had connected with his right cheek, which was throbbing.
He groaned and rolled onto his side. Josh was lying crumpled a few feet away, almost near enough to touch, and Nick -- John’s heart gave a sickly throb until he saw him, half propped up against the wall and stirring now, one hand rising to touch his face gingerly.
“All right?” John asked Nick, forcing himself to his hands and knees and crawling closer to Josh.
“I think so. Josh?”
“He’s out cold.” John was afraid to move the boy too much, in case he was hurt in ways he couldn’t see, but he touched Josh’s face. “Josh? Come on, lad. Wake up now.”
Nick came over and dropped to his knees beside them. “Josh? Joshua.”
Another thirty seconds or so of persistence on their parts, and finally Josh blinked and groaned. He opened his eyes, closed them again.
“Josh,” Nick said firmly.
Josh opened his eyes again. “Nick?”
“Yeah. It’s okay. Just take it easy. Don’t try to --”
But Josh was already trying to sit up. Nick made a frustrated sound and helped him, shifting to give the boy something to lean against. “Is he really gone? Is that -- I mean. I don’t know.” He sounded half addled, and with good reason from what John could tell.
“Out of you and gone from here, but not gone altogether,” John told him. “He -- both of them -- they’re inside that poor man.” He shuddered. “I’m not sure they liked being apart. I’m thinking this is better for them.”
“It’s not better for Fred,” Nick said. “Josh barely kept his head above water, and if I had to guess, I’d say what he can do helped him with that.” It made sense, and John gave Nick an encouraging nod. “But Fred… he didn’t seem that strong a personality to start with, and he’s got two spirits in there now.”
“So he’s drowning.” John swallowed and tried not to think of how that would feel. He’d fallen overboard once and sunk deep, but he’d got back to the surface. Somehow, he wasn’t sure Fred ever would.
“Is that boy drunk like that man who just barged into me?” John turned. Marion Macready was staring down at Josh with her thin face pinched with disapproval, gray hair pinned back in a bun as tight as her lips. “All that yelling and that man nearly knocked me flying when I came to see if I could help…”
Came to nose around and get a juicy bit of gossip to pass on and wave under my mother’s nose the next time you see her
. Josh, who must have been listening in, gave a small snort of laughter, and John frowned a warning at him.
“No.” Nick was running a hand through Josh’s hair, no doubt checking to see if he’d given himself a goose egg when he’d fallen, and he seemed to only be half paying attention to what he was saying. “He slipped on something. You know what tourists can be like.”
That was funny, because some of the islanders still didn’t think of Nick as much more than a tourist himself, and
“Sorry,” he said. “I think I must have hit my head.”
Nick gave a short shake of his own head in John’s direction to tell him Josh hadn’t, that it was just a convenient excuse he’d borrowed from Nick’s thoughts.
“Well, it’s just not right. Those tourists need to look after their own so that they don’t cause trouble like this. Drinking and carrying on, knocking people down… It’s a disgrace is what it is.”
“We’ve got matters well in hand,
“He got into a car and drove off like the devil was chasing him.” She fingered the worn clasp of her handbag, sunlight glinting off the wedding ring rolling loosely on her thin finger. Her husband had died when John was a child, and it’d soured her disposition, or so his mother had said when she hadn’t known John had been listening. At eight, it hadn’t left him sympathetic, but now, with Nick in his life, he could feel pity for her. If he ever lost Nick… Well, there was no sense in thinking about that now.
“Drove where?”
“How would I be knowing where, John McIntyre?” she snapped. “With these new roads all over the island, he could have been going anywhere.”
John blinked. New roads? She couldn’t be meaning the small housing development on the outskirts of town; that was a single road and fifteen houses he’d helped build.
“It used to be that I could walk around this town blindfolded and not get lost,” she went on. “Now, there’s new shops, new faces, changes every five minutes --”
“Will you just tell me which way he went?” John kept himself from raising his voice with an effort. “Please,
She looked fleetingly surprised, and he wondered when the last time she’d been told she mattered was. “Well, he went up
Left… John followed the road in his head. Up to the stones; back past his and Nick’s house… och, the man could’ve gone anywhere.
“Thank you,
She bridled, a flush staining her wrinkled face. “I’ve got eyes and I use them, that’s all. Now get that young man to bed and let him sleep it off.”
With that parting shot, she left, her back straight, her steps hurried as she went to find someone to share her tidbit of news with.
Before any of them could say anything, John’s cell phone rang. “Oh for God’s sake, what now?” he muttered, reaching for it and flipping it open. “Hello?”
“Uncle John? It’s Cait. We’ve got it -- the list of people who were involved in the
“Aye, we’ve got him, he’s right here, and back to himself again.” John stood and helped Nick get the boy to his feet as Caitrin babbled her relief into his ear.
“Where are you? We’ll come there.”
The thought of her out on the road, where Blayne and Toran could get their hands on her, made John’s blood run cold. “No,” he said quickly. “No, we’ll come back to you. Stay where you are, do you hear me?”
Caitrin sounded taken aback, but she agreed, and John hung up the phone. “Cait’s got the information we need -- I told her we’d come there. I don’t want her out with those two running around like madmen.”
“Okay.” Nick nodded, looking resolute. “Then let’s go. We don’t want to waste any more time.”
*****
Bonnie’s hotel room was crowded with five of them in it. John opened the window, ignoring Bonnie’s raised eyebrows as he hadn’t bothered to ask permission first, and breathed in deep. The room smelled of perfume, expensive, pervasive, and he felt as if he couldn’t get enough oxygen into his lungs.
Crowded. Aye, but it was even more so inside Fred’s head, the poor bastard. John swung around and put out his hand. “Let me see it.”
Silent for once, she passed him the small notepad the hotel had considerately put in each room, each page mostly taken up with a line drawing of the hotel and its full address. Caitrin had needed two pages to write five names.
“That family’s gone,” he said, tapping the first name on the list. “It dwindled to a single son, and he died in the trenches at sixteen. Old enough to enlist with a few blind eyes turned, but he didn’t leave anyone behind. And if Robert Sinclair is the one I’m thinking of --”
“He was a lawyer,” Caitrin put in.
“Aye, it’s a tradition in that family. But they’re all long gone from the island. The last of the Sinclairs moved to
“What about the others?” Nick asked. “And, you know, John, the way everyone on the island’s related, the spirits could probably find a distant cousin easily enough.”
“No.” Josh shook his head. “They wouldn’t do that. They think they’ve got right on their sides, and that would… I don’t know. It wouldn’t seem fair to them. Direct-line descendants, and I think they’d feel happier if they were men, too.”
Caitrin sniffed at that and Josh rounded on her. “You want to be a target? Do you?”
“No,” she said, looking startled. “It’s just… they’re being so…”
“They think they’ve been wronged,” Nick said. “They don’t see themselves as the villains here; like the people who killed them, they see this as justice.”
“But it
isn’t
,” Caitrin said. “It was a misunderstanding back then, and the people alive now had nothing to do with it!”
“The sins of the fathers,” John said. “Visited on the sons.”
Into the silence that fell, he read out the last three names. “Robinson, Hailley, and Quinn.” He tossed the notepad down on the nightstand. “They’re all around still, and I know who they’ll go for first.”
“Who?” Bonnie asked. “How can you be so sure?”
Caitrin gasped, her hand flying up to cover her mouth. “Rory? Rory Quinn?”
“The one at the bonfire last night?” Josh grimaced. “They would have seen him in my head, wouldn’t they?”
“Maybe,” John said. “And from the way the car was headed, they remember where his family used to live.”
“Are they still there?” Josh asked.
“No,” Nick said. “They’re not, but the spirits wouldn’t know that.”
“Then we can maybe catch up with them,” John said. “Josh, you stay here with Caitrin.”
“No way,” Josh said immediately. “What if I remember something that could help?”
“Then you call us on the phone.” Nick was impatient, John could tell, but trying to seem reasonable. “I need to know you’re safe. Your mother would kill me if I let anything happen to you, and I already have.”
“Okay, one, you didn’t ‘let’ something happen to me, it just happened. It wasn’t your fault.” Josh stood up straighter; there was a stubborn look on his face John was intimately familiar with when it was on Nick’s. “And two, you can’t keep me safe if you leave me here, can you?”
Nick sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “No. But if we let you come along, there’s no one to keep an eye on Caitrin.”
“I don’t need looking after,” Caitrin said, outraged. “If Josh is going, so am I.”
“Let’s just pack a picnic lunch,” John muttered. He turned to Bonnie. “What about you? Are you coming, too?”
She licked her lips. “I -- I should, shouldn’t I?”
“No,” Nick said. “I really can’t think of a good reason for you to be there. You’d just be one more target if the spirits decided to change bodies.”
“I couldn’t go through that again,” she said, her voice faint and quavering. “I’m sorry, but you don’t know, you just don’t know --”
“I do,” Josh said. “And I think you should stay here.”
“Really?” she asked eagerly. “You don’t think I’m being --”
“Oh, for the love of God, get yourselves down to the car, if you’re coming!” John said and headed for the door. As long as he had Nick with him, the rest of them could do as they pleased.
By the time he stepped outside, Nick was right behind him, with Josh and Cait not far behind. “I have an idea,” Nick said, keeping his voice low.
“Aye? Well, let’s hear it.” John looked at Nick, really looked at him, and knew immediately that he wasn’t going to like whatever it was Nick was thinking. “Or maybe not.”
“No, listen.” Nick put a hand on his arm and stopped him from walking, which gave Caitrin and Josh time to join them. “Some of the people responsible for Blayne and Toran’s deaths are buried at the graveyard, right?”
“Right,” Caitrin said. “A few, at least.” She looked expectant, as if she had no idea where Nick was headed with this, but Josh nodded.
“They’re pretty freaked out,” Josh said. “I think it might work.”
“
What
might work?” Caitrin sounded exasperated.
“If I can contact some of them -- their ghosts -- and get them to talk to the other two…that could be the solution to our problem.”
“You want to raise
more
ghosts?” John said, and heard the incredulity in his voice. “We don’t have enough of them running around?”
“They have to be reminded of who their real enemies are,” Nick said, “and shown that they’re dead.”
“What makes you think the ghosts of the villagers are still around to
be
raised?” John snapped.
“Because I think they knew what they’d done.” Nick’s eyes looked as haunted as Fred’s had been. “John, think; after the brothers were dead, the villagers must have gone back to the cottage. I know they didn’t do autopsies as such back then, but they’d see not a mark on the old woman and they’d remember how nervous she was… Once they calmed down they’d start to put it all together.”
“I’ve seen them do it,” Caitrin agreed. “Time and again. They’ll rush into making an assumption and then someone will point something out, and you’ll see people’s faces change, not much, just a bit and by the next day --”
“The same woman who told you Tessa Rowland was no better than she should be will be asking you for the knitting pattern for some woolly booties because she wants to make sure Tessa’s poor, wee fatherless bairn doesn’t have cold toes. Aye, you’re right.” John looked at Nick, who was grinning. “What?”