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“Who? Martin? Where else would he be?” Della’s voice rose to a shriek.
“He”—Rafe nodded in my direction—“saw him in the tower.”
Rafe’s gaze was fixed on me with a rare intensity. “He’s right. I went to the top of the tower and saw…” Fear choked off my words. Fear and the sense that when Rafe lookedatme, I was somehow stripped bare.
“He saw Martin.” Rafe entered the kitchen, his face the very definition of grim. He stopped next to me, as if to protect me from some unseen danger. “Martin can break free of the grave, and we have less than a week to stop him or the whole world will know of our failure.”
Margaret gasped and Della hugged herself, grimacing. “The world?” I managed.
Rafe gave his mother a look of raw grief. “Martin has vowed to overcome death itself. He may be successful, but it’s possible his power will prove insufficient. If so, he’ll destroy anyone with enough power to stop him and will subjugate the rest.”
“We won’t allow that to happen,” Della said, her words a balm against the stark image Rafe had cast. “We will not. We cannot.”
I could only hope she was right.
Chapter Eleven
"You should wash up, Rafe.” Della spoke calmly, as if she could will away our distress. “You need to eat something. There’s warm water in the bowl.”
“I’ll go out to the pump.” With his cane tapping across the floor, Rafe left us. Although I no longer felt hungry, I swallowed the last bit of meat pie and wiped my bowl clean with the crust. Margaret and I needed to know more about Martin and to do that, I needed to find the right approach.
“Rafe accused Stevenson of establishing the Witches’ Council for his own gain.” I kept my tone casual, hoping to stir the pot without ruffling feathers.
“That was Martin’s argument.” Della carried my empty dinner bowl to the counter.
I folded my hands, wondering if I should offer to help wash dishes. “We did our best to keep Martin’s death a secret, but Mrs. Morrison said she’d seen it in the stars.”
With her back to me, Della responded slowly. “Well, it was going to come out sooner or later.”
“They must be very confident of that clairvoyant’s skills.” Margaret brought her bowl to the counter. “Not sure that’s a gamble I’d take.”
Margaret’s common-sense observance made me appreciate her all the more. “You make a good point. What would Martin do about this, I wonder, if he was alive?”
The thump of Rafe’s cane announced his return. “He’d have retaliated.”
“How?”
I rose, giving up my seat for him. Rafe settled into it, his hands and face still damp from the pump, his gaze directed at the floor. “Stevenson takes his fishing boat out most mornings, early. Martin would have found out when he was sailing, and what direction he’d headed, and then sent a storm.”
Margaret set a bowl down hard on the counter. “That’s completely against the rules.”
Rafe snorted, and even I had to laugh. “I don’t get the impression that Martin Gallagher had too much patience for rules.”
Della took the other seat, her expression warming to something like a smile. “You’re quite right. Martin made a good life for us out here. He got to be his own boss, and it gave him a chance to right some of the bad decisions he’d made in his youth.”
Bad decisions like stealing the Ferox Cor?The words were on the tip of my tongue, but I could not force them out. Della became slightly more forthcoming, as if she’d finally decided to trust us – though not enough to talk about the Ferox Cor.
She told us how she and Martin had come to this isolated spit of land. “They wanted a weatherwitch up here,” she said. “So Martin took the job.”
“How old were you, Rafe?” I still wanted to know why Madam Munro’s information listed Rafe as a child. If I was fishing for other reasons – like making sure he and I were the same age – I couldn’t be faulted.
There was an agelessness about him; while I could tell he wasn’t a child, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he was either eighteen or thirty-eight, or anywhere in between. As to why I hoped we were near each other in age, the reason would make me blush. I’d become much too interested in Rafe Gallagher.
Much, much too interested. It wasn’t just his power and his dark good looks that attracted me. The glimpses he’d given me of the real Rafe Gallagher, the artist, the one whose smile I’d seen only once, me intrigued beyond measure.
In a sense, I was like a hermit crab. I could survive on my own, but I was stronger if I scuttled into someone else’s shell. I’d relied on my family and the Witches’ Council. And now, apparently, I wanted something similar from Rafe.
The object of my affection didn’t deign to answer me, but his mother tilted her head, her smile bemused. “Oh, Rafe was just a baby. We’ve been here twenty-two, maybe twenty-three years.”
