If she sat there much longer, she'd make his decision for him. He knew how to find his dearest siblings without her help.
His gut ached. His gut refused even the thought of food. The simple act of drinking water felt like it tore his chest and belly into shreds. Maybe it would be easier just to die, like a gut-shot deer in the woods.
As the humans would say, "Up yours!" he thought. Next week, he'd be better. The week after that, he'd be back to normal. He'd been through this before. He would survive.
Survive. He smiled. The full moon would rise tomorrow night. So much for Maureen's prophecy. Live one more night and he would break the doom she'd laid upon him.
The sister still knelt there, her back toward him. Sean drew the knife and stole forward, as silent as a cat. Who needed magic when his enemies were fools?
Something snagged his ankle, and he fell. Instinct and training tucked his fall into a roll, but his gut stabbed him and broke the silent flow. He staggered to his feet in a rustle of leaves and cracking twigs.
She still knelt there like a statue.
Sean shifted his weight to move again. A vise tightened around his leg, and he jerked his concentration away from her defenseless back.
It was a vine. A green vine wrapped around his ankle and up his leg, its tendrils questing upwards. He snarled and hacked the vicious thing loose from the ground, ripping its thorns out of his pants and flesh. Red blossoms of blood tracked the cloth where it had twined.
Even cut loose, the thing twisted like a mad snake in his hands. He shuddered and threw it across the clearing.
The dead leaves rustled as if disturbed by a thousand insects. Smooth green curls and loops twisted out of the forest floor, searching. Sean knew they searched for him.
He backed away. Gritting his teeth with concentration, shuffling his feet to avoid hidden traps and snares, he edged further and further away from the silent figure kneeling amid the briars.
The forest quieted.
So. Sean chuckled silently. He'd wanted a balance. He hadn't been able to decide between his hates. Now it looked like Brian and Fiona had just moved up to the top of the list.
And it looked like Dougal didn't own this part of the forest any more. Sean wondered when the bastard would find out. And how.
Chapter Twenty-Four
All Maureen could do was run. Buddy Johnson was stronger than she was. He was faster. Above all, he was meaner, and she fled through the backyards of her childhood. Sweat drenched her. Hedges tore at her skin and lashed her eyes. Again he caught her and dragged her into the overgrown yew bushes behind the Ford's old carriage house. Again he stripped off her shirt and shorts and pinned her naked body against the peeling clapboards and rough fieldstone of the empty building.
And then it changed, as she stepped aside in a surreal jiu-jitsu move. Time and again, she cycled through the pain and terror of the chase until he caught her and groped her and forced her down on the prickly dead needles under the yews. Each time, she turned into mist and slipped away.
Heat boiled in her belly. Her power flowed across the years and she seized him like a doll, pulling one leg from the other until he split from crotch to forehead like a wishbone. "Make a wish," she whispered savagely, in her dream. "Make a wish."
She threw the bloody pieces away and twisted her world onto a new path.
* * *
Maureen woke slowly to warmth and softness. Images floated through her head, the fragments and remains of dreams--hot, wet, erotic dreams of Brian's touch, Brian's kisses, Brian enfolding her and covering her naked body with his. She smelled the sharpness of his male sweat, felt its touch on her skin, felt the drying sticky residue of him on her bare thighs.
Her thoughts drifted in the place where such things were possible, away from the panic his actual touch would bring. In her dreams, she controlled things. She made the moves. She made the rules. She acted on him. That killed the memories.
She stretched lazily, like a cat, basking in the feel of silk sheets on her bare skin. A bed like this was a work of art.
Then her stomach growled and disturbed the peace.
She opened her eyes. Dark beams arched overhead, alive with the deep golden brown of ancient varnish. Sunlight in tall windows shot beams of warmth across the room to fall on match-board mahogany paneling, splashing light on the steely gleam of hanging swords and lances, bringing out flashes of glittering blue and green in the tapestries, firing red sandstone into glowing coals.
Dougal's bedroom.
Tapered columns of golden oak stood at the four corners of the bed. The canopy and hangings they had once supported were gone; magic or technology took away the need to wrap the sleepers within a tent, as if they were camping inside the cold, damp castle. Her bathrobe hung, waiting, on the nearest post, and she smelled the fresh birch-smoke of a new-laid fire in the bathroom. She even sniffed a hint of coffee. Good coffee.
Coffee that she didn't have to make, didn't have to wait for. Servants were a wonderful idea.
Dougal grunted beside her, rolled over, and settled back to the slow, steady breathing of sound sleep. She turned to him. He lay face up, naked and half-covered by the sheets. Her eyes narrowed, comparing him to her dreams of Brian. She shook her head, gently so she wouldn't wake him. He still looked like a shaved chimpanzee stitched back together after a bad car wreck.
So it was done. She remembered dreams, but her brain had shoved the rest off into a corner and walled it up with stone. Somewhere deep inside her belly, sperm and ova played their game of blind-man's-bluff with the calendar. She studied his face, relaxed in sleep.
