The Highlander's Promise by Heather Grothaus

Author:Heather Grothaus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyrical Press
Published: 2019-12-11T03:43:18+00:00

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

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