Page 92 of Disturbing the Dead
I should be able to fight. I don’t know whether I could beat Mrs. Wallace in a brawl, but I’m strong enough to fight back. Yet I can’t do more than grip the cord around my throat, that knee plus the cord giving me no leverage however much I struggle.
I manage to twist, trying to see Mrs. Wallace, to let her see my face, to hope she might not be able to murder me if she sees my face.
A makeshift torch that Mrs. Wallace stabbed into the earthen wall illuminates the darkness, but it’s a poor light, with a sputtering flame. When the knee slams into my back, my head jerks down and I see Mrs. Wallace… lying on the ground behind me.
I also see the legs of the person hauling me out. Two trousered legs set in a wide stance.
The thud I heard was Mrs. Wallace being knocked out.
Knocked out? Or murdered?
I can’t worry about that. I just need to fight. Selim must have come to retrieve his artifacts and found us here, and I underestimated the danger.
Hands grab mine and wrench them from between the cord and my throat. I twist again, looking up, and I see a face over my shoulder. A face set in a twisted mask of determination.
It’s not Selim’s face.
It’s Lord Muir’s.
I see his face… and then I don’t see anything at all.
TWENTY-NINE
I wake gasping and grabbing for my throat. When my fingers touch fabric, I panic, thinking it’s the cord. Then I realize I’m touching bandages, and I’m not lying on the cold dirt of the tunnel floor. I’m in a bed.
I exhale and relax.
Lord Muir didn’t kill me. Someone stopped him. Mrs. Wallace woke up or someone came into the tunnel and Muir fled, and I’m at the town house, recuperating. My eyelids feel leaden, but I crack them open to catch a sliver of dark curling hair and brown skin.
“Duncan,” I croak.
My voice is strange. From the strangulation, I guess. I force my eyes open another fraction, looking up at the face…
At the face that does not belong to Duncan Gray. It’s a man I don’t recognize. I struggle up.
“Whoa, whoa!” the man says. “Easy now, Ms. Atkinson.” He smiles. “Glad to see you’re back in the land of the living, but you need to take it easy.”
He has a thick Scottish brogue, but it’s wrong. The cadence, the word choices, the phrasing.
Then I realize exactly what the man said. What he called me.
Ms. Atkinson.
I bolt upright and stare at the man in scrubs, a gleaming modern hospital room behind him.
I’ve returned home.
I’m in my own time.
No, no, no. I have to get back. I have to see whether Mrs. Wallace is all right. I have to tell Gray who attacked me. I need to…
I need to…
The thought sputters out as something floods through my veins. It should be relief. I am home. I am finally home.
It’s not relief.
It’s horror.
