“Almost there,” she repeated to herself in a whisper, and her movements became surer, a little smoother and faster.
And then suddenly she saw the edge of what had appeared to be a jutting place in the rock, but was actually the lip to an opening in the wall, just to the right of the stone ladder. Three more hand holds and she would be high enough to crawl in; one more and she would be able to peer inside.
Her fear vanished like the smoke in the storeroom below, and her quivering lips curved slightly. Kirsten Carson would never do something so daring.
Finley pulled up another length and held her breath as her eyes came above the level of the rock edge, ready to behold any number of ancient and stolen goods. What she saw was a monster.
Wild, yellow eyes protruded from a sunken and elongated skull; cracked, red lips stretched around a gaping mouth with a few yellow, broken teeth. He was squatting on his haunches facing the opening as if to pounce on her, his fists clenched.
Finley flinched, slipped, and screamed as her hands slid away from the rock.
Chapter 10
Finley had just reached the opening to the cache when she gave a short, hoarse scream and her hands slipped from their holds.
“Finley!” Lachlan shouted and braced himself. Even if it killed him, he would not let her body touch the stone floor.
But before her skirts could billow, before her arms stretched out in flight, a thin appendage, like a tree branch, shot from the opening of the cache and seized Finley by some upper part of her and snatched her into the side of the cliff as quickly and efficiently as a spider drawing its prey into the cage of its body. The stone shaft was tomb silent for a heartbeat of time, and then a hellish yowling filled the channel, bouncing from the rock, swelling with echoes, raising the hair on Lachlan’s neck.
He leaped onto the stone ladder three handholds up and ascended as if it was of no more effort than walking down a cobbled lane. He was level with the cache in a moment, and yet the screaming did not cease even for an instant. He didn’t know of a creature that could hold its breath for so long.
At least if it was screaming, it wasn’t eating Finley.
Lachlan threw himself onto the stone ledge, already shouting her name. “Finley! Finley! Fin—”
He understood at once why the screaming had gone on and on—it wasn’t only the creature vocalizing fear and outrage, but Finley, too, was shouting, each one leaving it to the other to carry on while they drew renewed breath. Little wonder the result was so piercing and discordant; it sounded like two cats lashed together inside a kettle.
“Stop! Stop!” Lachlan shouted, scrambling to his feet to step to the center of the small chamber between where Finley and the—man?—were crouched, each with their back to a wall of stone or piled goods, each staring across the stone floor as if looking upon a demon from the very depths of hell itself.
“Stop!” Lachlan roared. His own chest still heaved within the uneasy silence buffeted by gasps and sniffles. He looked to Finley. “Are you hurt?”
She wouldn’t take her eyes from the man, but she shook her head.
Lachlan turned at last toward the person crouched to his right and had to steel himself against an exclamation of shock. It was a man, or perhaps at one time had been a man. Only a score of thin, greasy black strands crossed the top of his head, and his long, thin, knobby fingers, like fat buds on winter-emaciated twigs in spring curled up over his temples and the blackened ovals of his fingernails pressed into the skin at his crown.
His eyes bulged like eggs in his face, his lips and cheeks billowing in and out like sails with the effort of his breaths. He was dressed in an ancient tunic, impossibly long and impossibly dirty, and for an instant Lachlan’s mind went to the image he held of his grandfather, Archibald Blair. The tunic sagged between the man’s knees to the floor between his raw skin boots, and his knees were like skulls themselves, disproportionately large in comparison with his skeletal legs, the creases and follicles stained by what was perhaps peat.
“Finley, do you know this man?” Lachlan glanced at her only long enough to see her head shake slightly again. “All right, friend,” Lachlan said softly. “We’re nae going to harm you. I’m in your debt for saving—”he paused for half a heartbeat; my wife? my woman?—“my lass, here.”
The man’s eyes watched Lachlan while he spoke, narrowing more and more until they were barely slits in his leathery face. Then they opened so wide, Lachlan wondered that they didn’t come free from his face altogether.
“Tommy?” he whispered. “Tommy, ’s’it you?”
Lachlan froze. The only Tommy he knew was—
“Do you mean…Thomas Annesley?”
The man dipped his head, like a seabird swallowing a fish. “Have I changed so much that you doona recognize me?” He edged up to a crouch on his feet and then hesitantly stood straighter, although he didn’t entirely rid himself of his stooped posture, and Lachlan didn’t know if the affectation was physical or mental.
“You seem to barely have aged, Tommy,” the man whispered, sidling nearer, reaching up a hand hesitantly and then drawing it back. “I thought you…I thought…” He reached out again, and this time touched the very upper part of Lachlan’s temple; he only felt the brush of it on his hair. “I thought you was dead. But you doona bear even a scar. Where’ve ye been, Tommy?”
“I’m not Tommy,” Lachlan said, and his voice sounded queer to his own ears. Did he look so much like the man who sired him? No one had ever mentioned such a thing to him. “My name is Lachlan Blair.”
The man cried out and fell backward, as if he’d been shot, skittering away from Lachlan until he crashed into a wall of piled crates and stacks of unknown composition, causing some of them to topple and slide and tumble over the edge. Splintering and breaking sounds echoed up from below.
“You’re aBlair?” the man said in a horrified whisper and glanced at the edge of the cache as if considering following the detritus over the side.
“Finley?” Lachlan called out.
