Mystical Warrior (16 page)

“Holy Christ,” Kenzie whispered. He raised pain-filled eyes first to William and then to Trace. “I thought she’d only been raped. One time. I thought some man had caught her alone in the woods and that … that she had …” He dropped his gaze to the floor and shook his head. “She called herself a whore.”

Mac sat up on the couch, cradling his arm against his side. “You didn’t know Fiona had gone missing for nearly seven months?” he asked softly.

“Nay,” Kenzie said, not looking up. He ran his hands through his hair and then held his head as he stared at the floor. “What kind of hell was she forced to endure for seven months?” He looked up, his haunted gaze focused inward. “I thought I killed the bastard who’d raped her, but … hell, it appears he was only the first of many.”

Trace quietly closed the footrest on his recliner and stood up, then limped over and pulled the highlander to his feet. “I’m sorry,” he said softly. “But you need to realize that what didn’t kill your sister only made her stronger.”

“And now she’s fighting to remain strong,” Mac said as he limped over to them. “And if you truly love her, you’ll not only let Fiona go forward on her own terms, you will help her. But only when she
asks,
Kenzie, and then only what she asks for, instead of what you believe she needs.”

Although he hated like hell to admit it, Trace found himself agreeing with the drùidh. “Your sister is a lot stronger and smarter and more capable than most
men
I know,” he
added. He grinned, trying to lighten the mood. “And a hell of a lot prettier.”

“Aye,” William said, even as he glared at Trace. “Fiona proved her mettle today.”

“She called herself a whore,” Kenzie whispered, apparently unable to get past that. He looked at Trace. “You’re attracted to her, Huntsman, and she seems to trust you. Ye must help us show Fiona that she isn’t a whore.”

“You’re not getting it, Gregor,” Mac growled. “It’s you who needs help, because you obviously can’t let go of your guilt for leaving home to go find your destiny.”

“I didn’t leave to find anything but freedom,” Kenzie hotly countered. “And I abandoned my family even though I suspected our father was starting to lose his mind.” He waved angrily toward the ceiling. “Fiona was twelve! You heard her; she grew up the day I walked away and left them without protection. I was the worst kind of coward, running from my responsibilities.” He spun away from them, his hands clenched at his sides. “I sold my soul for the dream of becoming a warrior, wanting to be some village’s hero.”

Trace snorted. “Welcome to the club.”

“You were fifteen,” Mac said. “What did you know, other than your dreams?”

Kenzie threw his head back and stared at the ceiling. “I must go apologize to her,” he said. “And ask her forgiveness and beg her to let me make this right.”

When he started toward the kitchen, all three of them moved to block his path. “The only thing you’re going to do,” Trace said, nudging him down onto the stool beside the woodstove, “is call your wife and tell her you’re going
to be late getting home from work tonight.” He limped over and grabbed the bottle of Scotch off the table beside his chair. “And like those two smart women upstairs, the four of us are going to toast our good fortune that we all survived to fight another day.”

“Here’s the thing,” Fiona said, smiling when Gabriella took another sip of tea and started gasping for breath again. “I’m worried that having freedom and knowing what to do with it are two very different things.”

“Wh-what do you mean?” the girl choked out with a violent shudder. “Freedom means we can do anything we wish now,” she said before lifting her cup and taking a noisy slurp.

Waiting for her friend to catch her breath again, Fiona sipped her own tea, relishing the warmth spreading through her slowly relaxing muscles. “But what is it we want?” She shot Gabriella a grin. “Other than to have children, that is.”

“I told Maddy that I might like to be a nurse, like she is,” Gabriella said. “Only Maddy said there wasn’t any reason I couldn’t be a doctor.” She snorted and then immediately covered her face when tea shot out of her nose. “Omigod, that burns,” she muttered, wiping her nose on the back of her sleeve. “Only William walked in just as I asked Maddy how I could go to school to be a doctor and raise children at the same time, and he said that it wouldn’t be a problem because I wasn’t allowed to talk to boys.”

“You’re going to have to talk to at least one if you want to conceive a child.” Fiona drained what tea was left in her cup. They were each on their third cup of the Scotch-laced tea—and they’d each taken a good swallow directly from
the bottle while they waited for the woodstove to get hot enough to boil the water. That one swig had gone a long way toward calming Fiona’s nerves, but hadn’t done much to lessen her embarrassment.

She couldn’t believe she had spoken so crudely downstairs, much less that she’d actually told Kenzie some of what she’d gone through a thousand years ago.

What must he think of her? What must they
all
think of her, knowing she’d spent months serving every need a man had? She wondered if modern wars had women who traveled from battle to battle, cooking and washing and tending the wounds of the warriors by day and warming their beds by night.

And if so, had Trace had ever sought them out?

Fiona reached for the simmering kettle on the stove. If he truly had changed his mind about her continuing to live here, he certainly must have changed it back again now that he knew why his kiss hadn’t shocked her.

“What do you want to be?” Gabriella asked.

“Be?” Fiona repeated, at a complete loss as to what they’d been talking about.

The candle cast enough light for her to see the girl’s frown as she held her cup out for a refill. “Other than to have another child, what do you want to do with your life?” Gabriella asked. “You have to earn a living if you don’t intend to get married.”

Fiona picked up the Scotch and added some to each of their cups. “I have no idea.” She set the bottle back on the table and suddenly grinned. “But I like children; maybe I can take care of other women’s children while they go out and earn
their
livings. Surely there’s a need for such a
service. In fact, there’s an interesting television show every weekday in the afternoon that I’ve been following, and on it, a woman is trying to find someone to watch her two-year-old child so she can go to work.”

But then Fiona frowned again. “Only the child’s father—she isn’t married to the man and he just found out he
is
the father—is trying to take the little girl away from her, claiming she’s an unfit mother. It seems the person she had been leaving the child with drank too much, and the little girl wandered off and got lost for an entire day.”

Wide-eyed and utterly intrigued, Gabriella leaned forward in her chair, not even noticing that she spilled tea on her bosom. “There’s a television show that follows people around, letting us see what’s going on in their lives?”

“I started watching it when I lived with Matt and Winter, and Winter explained that it’s only pretend. You know, like a play. Didn’t you have minstrels come to your village and act out stories of great battles or what was happening at court?” Fiona leaned back in her chair with a smile. “I saw one once, when Matt and Kenzie and I snuck down to a nearby village. That was the only time Papa ever took a switch to me, but it was worth it. I don’t think I’d ever laughed that hard in my life.”

“Then you should write to that woman and tell her that
you
will take care of her child,” Gabriella said, waving her cup and spilling the tea on her lap this time. “And that way, the father won’t take the little girl away from her.”

“I can’t write to her; it’s only pretend.” Fiona leaned forward again, warming up to her idea even as she formed a plan. “But I could put a notice in Eve’s store that says I’m willing to take in children who live here in Midnight Bay.
Why, there’s no reason I couldn’t watch three or four babes. Damn,” she said, plopping back into her chair again. “I would need to ask Trace first, wouldn’t I? He might tolerate having animals around, but men feel differently about children.”

Gabriella waved her concern away. “He won’t even be here during the day when they are. Hey!” she cried, standing up and spilling her tea all over the floor. “If I move in with you like he suggested, together we could probably watch
ten
children. And we could even make enough money to buy a vehicle of our own.”

Fiona shook her head. “I’m certain we need to ask Trace first.”

Noticing that all of her tea was gone, Gabriella grabbed the bottle of Scotch and poured some into her cup, then sat down. “We can still live together, though, can’t we, and take care of each other’s children while we become working women?”

“I doubt a modern husband would let an unwed mother live with you, Gabriella.”

Gabriella grinned. “Just as soon as you figure out how to have a babe without a man, you can tell me, and I’ll do the same.” She lifted her chin. “I don’t need a husband to live happily ever after any more than you do.”

“Oh, Gabriella,” Fiona said on a soft sigh. “There’s more to marriage than just cooking and cleaning and having sex. Remember that powerful yearning your mama spoke of? Well, it’s all tied up with love. You’ll always feel like something’s missing if you have no one to be … intimate with. Unlike lions in Africa, women need someone to hold us in the middle of the night when we’re frightened and to share
our joys and sorrows.” She leaned forward. “Can I tell you a secret?”

Gabriella nodded vigorously.

“I came close once. I stayed with one particular warrior for almost a month, and we grew quite comfortable together. I even talked myself into believing he would take me home with him,” she said softly.

“And did he?”

“Nay; he was killed in battle.” She pulled in a shuddering breath. “And I moved to another man’s tent that very night.”

“What was it like being a wh—a camp follower?” Gabriella whispered, her cheeks turning pink. “I remember when William escorted Mama and me to her sister’s wedding when I was eleven. I snuck out of our tent one night to see what all the noise was down in the woods, as William had pitched our tent well away from his warriors. The camp appeared quite festive, with the women laughing and the men teasing them.” She frowned. “But I remember thinking, where are the children? If those women were having sex every night, how come they didn’t get pregnant?”

“They did,” Fiona told her. “But once a woman became too heavy with child to keep up with the demands of constantly moving, she was abandoned and left to find her own way home—if she dared go home at all.”

“But that would mean the men abandoned their children, too.”

Fiona snorted. “There was little way to know who had fathered the babes.”

“But why didn’t they let the women stay? As soon as they gave birth, they would have been able to keep up again.”

“Children were strictly forbidden in camp, as young ones are unpredictable and might get in the way. And sound carries on clear, windless nights; a crying infant could give away a battalion’s position to the enemy.”

“And when you became heavy with your babe, you were abandoned?”

Fiona nodded. “It took me three weeks to make my way back home, but I managed to get back just in time to have Kyle.” She dropped her gaze to her empty cup. “Only I had no strength left to get out of bed, and I wouldn’t stop bleeding,” she whispered. She looked at Gabriella. “I tried to explain to Papa how to take care of my son, but he had become so mad by then that he couldn’t remember from one feeding to the next that he had to give Kyle only goat’s milk.” She shrugged. “And then one night I went to sleep and Mama came to me in my dreams, and I simply didn’t wake up. And two weeks later Kyle died, and I held him in my arms again before he returned to earth as someone else’s child—because, he told me, he still had earthly lessons to teach.”

“And that’s when you became a hawk?”

Fiona poured more Scotch into her cup without bothering to add any tea. “Aye, within days of Kyle leaving me.” She smiled sadly. “I went in search of Matt and found him lying on a battlefield, bleeding to death. All the people in the village where he had been living had been slaughtered.”

“And you saved his life,” Gabriella pronounced. “And then you came to this century as a hawk with him, and Kenzie came here as a panther.”

Fiona shook her head. “Nay, I didn’t travel to this time with them, because I didn’t approve of why Matt was
coming here. He was seeking out Winter MacKeage—another powerful drùidh, although she didn’t know it at the time—to help him keep his promise to make Kenzie human again.” She waved her cup in the air. “I didn’t come to this century until William did, and then only to show him how to get here.” Fiona stood up when Gabriella gave a loud yawn. “Come on, my new roommate, it’s been a long day, and it’s time we got some sleep.”

Gabriella drained the last of the Scotch in her cup and stood up, only to giggle when she staggered and bumped into a table. “Oh, these old floors are really slanted. We’ll need to have Trace fix them before we bring children here.”

Fiona wrapped an arm around her unsteady friend and guided her to the couch. “I’m sure he’ll put that right at the top of his list of things he must do.” She turned Gabriella around and let her fall back onto the couch. “Just after he repairs his hidey-hole, digs his tunnel out again, gets his truck running, shovels the snow out of the driveway, and catches the skunks and puts them in the back of Madeline’s truck.”

Gabriella grabbed a throw cushion and hugged it to her face, then plopped sideways with a sigh. “If we ask him nicely, maybe Mr.—I mean, maybe Mac can use his magic to remove all the snow from the dooryard,” she murmured. She smiled up at Fiona. “Don’t you think he’s handsome? I know you don’t like men,” she rushed to say, “but if you did, wouldn’t it be exciting to fall in love with a drùidh?”

Fiona snorted. “About as exciting as childbirth.”

“You know who else is handsome?” Gabriella asked.

Fiona took the blanket off the back of the couch and tucked it around her. “No, who else is handsome?”