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Blood gushed. Elisabeth screamed. The man toppled soundlessly into the mud, clutching the hilt protruding from his neck.
Brendan fell back, panting through his teeth. Blood from his shoulder soaking his sleeve, his arm, dripping off his fingers. Gore streaked his face and chest like a savage’s war paint.
Killer sniffed at him, his stump of a tail wagging with joy.
“Arrah, now,” Rogan muttered, climbing off the box. “Helena! A little help, if you please?”
A woman appeared from the back of the wagon dressed in a short jacket and leather breeches, emphasizing a combination of lean strength and feminine curves. Dark hair pulled off a narrow face, firm jaw, lips pressed white. She sprang from the box, her gaze traveling over the bodies with barely a flicker of an eyelid.
“Is he dead?” she asked, nudging Brendan with the toe of her boot.
“Not . . . yet,” came the raspy, painful answer as Brendan rolled over, staring up at the woman. His face broke into a cutting smile. “Out of the frying pan. Into the fire,” he muttered just before he passed out.
The clack of beggars’ cups in the square below the cathedral. Monsoon rains against a leaky roof in Algiers. A clatter of muted gunfire.
As he drifted awake, the noises coalesced to a steady creaking rattle, every jolt of the noisy, bouncing torture device sending pain scything its way from his neck to his fingers, flashes of it spearing his vision with streaks of brilliant light.
For a heart-stopping moment he was in the dilapidated cottage south of Glenlorgan where the traitorous St. John had held him for four excruciating days last winter, humiliation and degradation taking on many varied sadistic forms.
A hand touched his forehead. Without thinking, he lashed out, connecting blindly with the nearest body, his mind already plotting escapes, revenge, anything to keep the man away from him before . . .
“Ow!”
“He’s awake!”
Voices. More than one. St. John’s brutes? Did they come for him? He wouldn’t go willingly. Not again. Never again. He lurched up, fists flailing. Pain arced through him, his shoulder burning, nerves raw and throbbing.
“Hold him before he hurts himself.”
“Rogan!”
“He’s torn the stitches. Be careful.”
“Gods, that was a clean jacket.”
Hands held him down. A knee across his chest. He couldn’t breathe.
“Brendan, it’s me. Elisabeth. You’re safe. You’ve been hurt, but you’ll be all right if you just hold still.”
Was it a trick? Was he hallucinating? He surrendered, the price of fighting too high.
The dreams seeped out of him, first the panic and humiliation, then more slowly the despair, the boiling frustration when he knew Sabrina was in danger because of him, when he knew his sister would die because she’d cared enough for him to answer his summons.
She couldn’t die. Not another corpse. Not another ghost. There were too many already. Their voices deafened him. Their eyes followed him in his sleep. “Can’t . . . breathe . . . can’t . . . talk . . .”
“You can get off him now, Rogan.” A woman’s voice. Confident. Cool.
The crushing weight on his chest was lifted, leaving him gasping and retching. He rolled onto his side, fresh needles of pain lancing from his shoulder into his brain.
Hands gentled him. A damp cloth wiped his face. “The bullet’s out, but you lost a lot of blood. You need to rest quietly.”
“Elisabeth?” The memories rushed in like water. The men in the tavern. The fight on the road. Being manhandled into the wagon where someone held him down while someone else dug into his flesh over and over and over until unconsciousness had claimed him.
“He’s burning up.”
“He’ll survive. His kind always do.”
He moved his head. So far, so good. No horrible, gut-wrenching agony. He was in a wagon, a canvas roof above him stretched over wooden ribs. Trunks, cases, blanket rolls, traveling valises packed neatly along the sides.
