Zach's Law (11 page)

Why, she wondered, had he said what he did just then? Had some Scottish forebear of his own gifted Zach with a presentiment of danger? There had always been danger, of course, but why did she feel now as though it were much closer and far more deadly?

She gasped suddenly as a dizzying wave broke over her, only dimly surprised that she was somehow being granted a second gift of vision. The image flashed with lightning swiftness, and a moan broke from her lips in a sound of anguish.

No. No, it wouldn’t happen.…

The image was gone, and she was left staring at the closed door. Vaguely, she wondered at the arguments that it was possible, given knowledge, to change the future. Either she had been given two differing glimpses of the future, or else … or else both would take place. Unless she could somehow change at least one of them.

There really was no choice for her.

She found herself standing before the computer, and sat down quickly. She turned the machine on, her thoughts centered on the man who meant more to her than her own life.

“Forgive me, Zach,” she whispered into the silence of the cabin. “I have to do
something
.…”

Her fingers were steady and sure on the keys, and her brow furrowed as she concentrated intensely on remembering the sequence. Swiftly, she typed out the proper access codes.

   An hour passed, and Teddy paced the cabin. The computer had been off for half of that time, and her nerves had stretched to the screaming point. She was no longer thinking of what she had done, that was past and unregretted.

She thought instead of what had driven her to it. She had wondered, in the beginning, how people survived the awful ache of love, and Zach’s physical possession, though blunting
the pain, had left the yearning intact. She thought she would never lose that, even if Zach one day learned to love and trust her completely. The thought of it held no terrors for her.

But what
did
terrify her was the possibility that Zach would go forever beyond her reach, leaving only the terrible anguish of knowing just a part of his love. If he sent her away, or walked away himself, at least there was the belief that she would somehow be able to hold him in her arms again. But if he were taken from her by an act of violence—

She frowned a little, something nagging at her. After a brief hesitation she went over to kneel by her luggage and purse. A moment’s digging brought out the case of tranquilizer darts that Zach had returned to her purse. She held it thoughtfully, then scrabbled through the luggage he hadn’t bothered to check in the beginning. The dart pistol was just where she’d packed it.

Acting on nothing but the need to be prepared,
she readied two darts and loaded the pistol, then put it and the case in her purse. Then she carried the purse to the table and left it there before beginning to pace again.

God only knew if she’d have reason—or a chance—to use the pistol, but having it ready made her feel just a bit less helpless. And she was an accurate shot, there was that.

The pacing didn’t help and she stopped, swearing softly.

Teddy shivered, hugging herself for a warmth that never came. She was wearing jeans and a flannel shirt of Zach’s that swallowed her but bore the faint musky scent of him. And she was afraid.

She was desperately afraid.

When the first shot came, she literally jerked under the emotional impact of it. Then she stood frozen, hearing the second shot and the third. Before the last echoes had died away, she was tugging open the door and running, completely forgetting the pistol in her purse. Half a dozen steps from the cabin door she
paused, looking around in an effort to get her bearings. Impenetrable forest surrounded her, but a fourth gunshot jerked her to the right and sent her racing, only one thought, one agonized question in her mind.

She hadn’t realized they were so close, and burst through into the clearing surrounding the house without being able to stop herself. Immediately a whining bullet chipped bark from the tree to her left, and from her right, rising with a crash from the undergrowth, lunged Zach.

Between one heartbeat and the next, Teddy knew with haunting despair that she herself had blindly invited the reality of the image she had seen with such distortion. With every fiber of her being she had known that Zach could take care of himself, would be canny and cautious, but that he would instantly and without thought shield her with his own body from danger, yet she had rashly placed herself in just that position.

A sharp report and the hollow thud of a bullet striking flesh, and scarlet blood …

If only she had remained in the cabin.

And in that instant, between one heartbeat and the next, she twisted violently in an irrevocable attempt to change what had to be.

Her lightning movement threw Zach off-balance, and he, too, was twisting in midair, reaching out for her, a raw, despairing terror tightening the muscles of his face. And he almost got her, his outstretched hand reaching her arm. But he jerked her around before he pulled her down with him, and when her back was to the house, in that fleeting second another shot rang out.

Zach wasted no time. With an arm around her waist he hauled her back into the undergrowth, his big automatic bucking in his hand. The sound of it was deafening as he fired behind them and tried to pin down the gunman. Then the house was lost from sight, and he lifted her into his arms and carried her swiftly through the woods toward the cabin.

“What the
hell
are you doing out here?”
he demanded in a furious, shaking voice. “Dammit, Teddy, you could have been killed!”

“I was worried about you,” she said very softly, staring up at his white face.

He said something violently explicit between gritted teeth.

She had left the door open, and Zach carried her inside and set her on her feet, reaching back to slam it shut behind them. “We’ve got a few minutes at least,” he said, still angry. “I winged the bastard just before you came diving into it, so I doubt he’ll come hunting us in a hurry—”

Teddy felt very peculiar. She was cold and couldn’t seem to feel the floor beneath her feet, and the most appalling weakness was spreading throughout her body.
Shock
, she realized vaguely.
I’m in shock
. She looked down at the floor as the sound of the door slamming shook the cabin, and bemusedly watched tiny splashes of scarlet color the rough wooden planking beside her boots, and she idly wondered why her fingers were red, too, and why
her arm was so heavy and why Zach’s voice seemed to be fading into the depths of some bottomless cave.…

“Teddy!”

He caught her as she swayed, lifted her, and carried her to the bed where he covered her with blankets. When she opened her eyes, Zach was ripping her left sleeve from cuff to shoulder. He swore steadily in an odd monotone and seemed a bit clumsy when he hurried to get the first-aid kit. Teddy thought about that from the distant reaches of her vast detachment.

Zach wasn’t clumsy.

How odd.

She came back to herself with a painful suddenness that made her gasp. Her arm was still heavy, but now it throbbed with fire and she could see why when she looked at it. The gauze Zach was using to wipe her skin was stained bright red, and there was an ugly gash that ran from her elbow almost to her shoulder. Fascinated in a horrified way, she saw that the bullet had torn into her sleeve just above the elbow,
plowed a furrow up her arm, and torn its way out at her shoulder.

She remembered the moment she’d been shot. She had been off-balance, yanked around by Zach’s lunge, her arm thrown up. She remembered the burning sensation in her arm, barely noticed at the time. And she realized that if she had not jerked backward and twisted, if Zach had not been forced to twist his own body in order to reach her, he would have caught the bullet squarely in the center of his back.

It almost made the pain go away.

Trying to shake off the weakness of lost blood and shock, she murmured, “I’m fine, Zach. It’s just a scratch.”

He sent her one look from glittering gray eyes, then concentrated entirely on the task of cleaning and bandaging her wound. His face was ashen, the scar on his cheek a livid slash, and his hands trembled slightly.

Teddy wouldn’t have willingly put him through this for anything she could think of,
but her heart leaped in joy when she realized that he really did care about her, whether he knew it or not. He had seen uncounted battlefield wounds and had suffered a few himself, yet the sight of what was in all honesty a slight injury to her had shaken him badly.

In silence, he cleaned and disinfected the wound, being amazingly gentle under the circumstances, then bandaged it very carefully. Teddy found that the pain was only a dull throb, although she had no idea how badly it might hurt when the shock wore off completely.

“It didn’t harm anything vital,” she said finally, watching his face.

“No,” he agreed. “But you … lost a lot of blood.”

Trying to ease the pain revealed by his bleak look, she said, “Only a pint or so. I’ve given that much at the blood bank.”

“Not in shock, you haven’t. And not because of a bullet.” His expression remained the same, but now Teddy could tell that something
terrible was going on inside Zach. He was holding her arm in his hands, staring down at the neat white bandage, and his long fingers quivered. In a strange, wondering tone, he said, “The bastard shot you.”

Teddy caught her breath, staring at him, as aware of the danger filling the small cabin as if it were a visible thing. Menace literally came off Zach in waves, cold and deadly, like an Arctic wind howling off a glacier.

In the back of her mind, memory stirred, and she recalled something a psychologist friend had once told her. One man in perhaps ten thousand was a throwback to those old Scandinavian berserkers, whose blood rages had been awesome and uncontrollable; that such a man, pushed too far, became something more dangerous than any man-made weapon could ever be. On those rare occasions he was beyond rational thought, existing briefly in an icy, remote place where violent action was the only solution to inner rage and anguish.

Zach was going back up to the house, she
realized. In a blind, murderous rage, he was going after the man who had shot her. And there wouldn’t be any caution this time. He was a ticking time bomb, and the dear Lord only knew what would be destroyed by the explosion.

Teddy gazed at him, at his still, white face and blank eyes, seeing his muscles bunch in preparation for action, and she rolled the dice one more time. If she had reached him, if he
did
care for her deeply enough …

“Zach?” Her voice was calm and soft, nothing in it indicating that she was attempting to call a man back from hell.

After an agonizingly long moment he looked at her, and the blind glaze slowly left his eyes. His muscles gradually relaxed, the tension seeped away. And he was there, he was sane. On a rough sigh he murmured, “Teddy.”

She was enormously relieved and deeply shaken. She had hoped to coax a wild wolf to walk by her side, but she had never even dared to dream that the mere sound of her voice calling
his name could keep him from tearing out the throat of a mortal enemy.

And she wondered if the fool in the house would ever know just how close to death he had come.

Gesturing to the arm he was still holding gently, she said, “I can hardly feel it.”

After a moment Zach lowered her arm. He got up and went over to her luggage, moving gracefully again, and bent to rummage among her clothing. “You’ll have to dress warmly. There isn’t any heat where we’re going.”

She watched him. ‘Where are we going?”

“A little farther up the mountain. That stuff’s coming in tomorrow, and Ryan’s not about to let me or anyone else end his career without a hell of a fight; as soon as his men return, he’ll be coming here after us.”

“You know him,” she said, surprised. “I mean, personally.”

Zach returned to the bed with one of her flannel shirts and a thick sweater. He sat beside her and began getting her out of the torn and
bloody shirt she was wearing. “I know him,” he admitted. “We tangled a few years ago when he tried his hand at a little industrial sabotage.”

“Did you know he was here? I mean—”

He shook his head. “No. But I know now what was eating at me before. I heard three voices, and only three have been recorded on the tapes. What bothered me was that none of the three sounded like the leader, and yet he seemed to be nearby. Ryan was there in the house all the time; one of his little habits is that he never speaks when he’s in a house or car and possibly under observation or electronic surveillance—when he’s on a job, that is. He’s careful. Very careful.”

“So when you went to the house earlier—”

“For once he hadn’t left with his men. And since I’ve been listening more than watching, I never knew there were four men in the house.” Zach slid her injured arm gently into the sleeve of the flannel shirt and began buttoning it. “Damn Hagen.
That
is what he so conveniently
forgot to tell me: that Clay Ryan was the ringleader of the bunch. No wonder he was so insistent that I was the only one who could do this job.”

“Why?” Her voice was briefly muffled as he pulled the sweater over her head, then emerged clearly. “Because you’d caught this Ryan before?”

It seemed at first that Zach wasn’t going to answer. He eased her arms through the sleeves of the sweater and then settled the ribbed hem around her hips with a smoothing movement that was almost a caress. She was sitting up easily, apparently bothered little by weakness, but she was pale, and Zach knew that she
was
weakened by shock and the loss of blood.

It hurt him to see her like that.

He got up and went to efficiently gather together what they would need, stowing blankets and food in a duffel bag, rolling up the sleeping bag, and selecting ammunition for his handgun and rifle.

“Zach?” she prompted.

Packing away the tapes he’d made from conversations in the house, Zach finally answered in a conversational tone that attempted to lessen the effect of what he was saying.