"There's just one thing," Dougal said, blocking her reach for her blouse. "I can't let you leave the keep without agreeing to be my wife."
Maureen screamed and threw herself at him, teeth and claws and toenails. One flailing hand connected, first the iron wristlet and then her fingers raking across his cheek. She felt his skin ball up under her fingernails, and she growled like an enraged jaguar tasting blood.
An arm clamped around her neck, lifting her off her feet to kick helplessly. Her vision blurred and turned into a dark tunnel. Her body went limp. She dove into darkness until the arm relaxed and let just enough blood through to her brain to keep a thread of consciousness.
"Stupid woman," a snake's voice hissed in her ear. "People you care about are in great danger. Your sister is lost and hunted by my animals. Fiona has captured Brian and holds his soul in her deadly little hands. The land is eating David, plants rooting in his flesh and sucking his life out through his sightless eyes. Only you can save them."
"You put them in danger." She could barely whisper, couldn't find enough breath to rain curses down on his head. "Only cowards take hostages."
"You can command this castle. You can be mother to mages and witches powerful beyond your dreams. You can be powerful beyond your dreams. What is so bad about sleeping with a man, about bearing children? Motherhood is the true birth of a woman."
The arm relaxed a shade further, and she could see again. She spat at the face in front of her and ground her teeth when she missed. Too far. At least she could see blood trickling from three parallel scratches across his cheek.
"I'd sooner fuck a warthog."
Dougal shook his head in disbelief. "What kind of a woman won't even help save her own sister? Padric, take all these silly luxuries away. The bitch doesn't deserve them."
This time they chained her to the wall, standing, so she couldn't sleep. They wouldn't even let her use the hole first, so she had to soak her pants and hang there, stinking, wet and shivering again, with her arms tearing out of her shoulder sockets.
Jo. Brian. David. Some sixth sense about lies said that Dougal had been telling the truth. That bastard had drawn them into this cesspool and dangled them like swords over her head. He gave her such lovely choices: "Fuck me or Jo dies. Bear my children or David will be eaten alive by some damned plant. Bury your own mind in the darkness of my will or lock Brian away from light forever."
Maureen wept. She wasn't sure whether they were tears of rage or grief or pain, or just her eyes rubbed raw by lack of sleep, but she wept until her cheeks burned from the salt.
Chapter Nineteen
"Follow water and you'll find Man. Great advice, sister mine," muttered Jo. "Great advice when you've got reliable Maine granite under your feet. No damn good in limestone country."
She stared up at blue sky, bright beyond the dark overhanging walls of the sinkhole, and at the shadows of trees. Her sinkhole--the Cynthia Josephine Pierce Memorial Sinkhole, she called it, about thirty feet across and thirty or forty deep. Say it was thirty feet to freedom. That was the width of her apartment. It might as well be a mile.
Viewed objectively, it was just about the prettiest place she'd ever seen. A Japanese garden's plunge pool sat under the waterfall, lapping at moss-covered rocks. Ferns and delicate bushes draped the walls and framed the outflow where the clear stream dove underground.
Even the rocks were beautiful, if she forgot that they had damn near busted her head when she fell in. She'd thought they'd busted her left arm, but it had healed too fast for that. Must have been sprained, instead.
The only thing the scene lacked was an elevator. There was no way out.
How long had she been down here? Three days? Five? They were all running together, as if somebody had photocopied yesterday and handed it back to her this morning, claiming it was a new assignment.
Back into the endless loop. She traced out another possible climbing route zigzagging up the sinkhole, from split stone to lump to gnarled root. Every try so far had ended with her stretched across the wall like a splattered spider, groping hopelessly for another hold while her leg muscles imitated a sewing-machine from exhausted tension. Then she'd fall and try to turn it into a jump out into empty air, to miss the rocks and splash into the dubious cold cushion of the pool below.
Speaking of work. "Bet you're unemployed by now, girl. Rob may believe in flextime, but he likes people to call in if they aren't going to show up. Especially with a deadline coming up this week."
She was talking to herself now, just to hear something besides the whisper of wind and the hissing water endlessly falling over the lip of her world and flowing away into darkness. Talking to herself, just like a bag-woman wandering the streets.
Staring at the sky made her eyes water, so she shifted her gaze lower in case something new and interesting had appeared in her gloomy realm. Like maybe a ladder.
Rob was the least of her problems. He wasn't even her worst problem back in the real world. David would have the cops out dragging the river by now. She shook her head. She'd spent all night worrying about that. Not a damn thing she could do about it, so she saved her energy for important things. Like food.
She gnawed the last shreds of flesh from the backbone of her last baked trout and then sucked on the bone for any trace of juice or flavor. She'd never thought that unsalted, unbuttered, half-raw, half-burned smoky fish could
