Chasing the Sunset

chapter ELEVEN



When an hour and a half had passed and Maggie still had not returned, Duncan went looking for her, leaving a worried Kathleen with Ned. No one at the restaurant or the hotel remembered seeing any lone woman fitting her description, and they would have remembered. Duncan walked quickly back to the surgery.

“Where could she have gone?” he wondered aloud.

This felt wrong to him; no matter that Duncan had been raised with white men, the blood of Celtic mystics and Indian shamans ran strongly through his veins, and he was more finely tuned to his environment than most people ever are. He had a fine level of intuition accented by good observational skills, and he also had a little something extra, a . . . knowing, if you would, that he had come to trust.

Something was wrong. He felt lingering traces of evil here in this place. This evil had touched Maggie somehow, and it had something to do with her disappearance.

He did not know what it was, he did not even know how he knew, but he knew. Duncan tramped back through the snow, his piercing eyes alert and scanning his surroundings. He stopped in the alley, knelt beside a trampled snow drift. Boot prints were all around it–a woman and at least one man. He tore off a glove and touched his finger to something he saw there, then brought it to his nose. Blood. It was Maggie’s; he knew it with a bone-deep certainty that he could not ignore.

Duncan walked back farther between the two buildings and saw drag marks on the ground, and more boot prints from the same man–he could tell it was the same track by the wear pattern of the boots. He headed for the sheriff’s office at a fast run, his well conditioned body performing as he expected it to. He was not even breathing hard when he got there . . . but his heart was pounding furiously, not from the exertion, but from fear for Maggie.

The sheriff and Duncan had already formed a friendship of sorts, enough of one so that the man trusted Duncan’s judgment. Without hesitation, he sent a deputy out to Nick’s, telling him what had happened, and began a systematic search of the town.

But Maggie was nowhere to be found.

The only thing that they discovered was that a man traveling alone had checked out of the hotel and departed a day earlier than he had planned. The man was the only stranger who had passed through Geddes as far as anyone could tell. He may or may not have had something to do with Maggie’s disappearance, and he had not even left a hint as to where he was headed.

Duncan chafed at the delay; he could not leave his patient, and Doctor Fell was still out at the Booker farm helping with the delivery. Sheriff Vanderiest had someone out looking for the man who had been staying at the hotel, but his deputies were not trackers, they mainly broke up fights and such, and the drifting snow was fast covering up tracks which might have led them to Maggie.

Duncan knew that he could find her. He could track a flea over a mile of rock; when he was seven he had tracked and brought home a two-year-old who had been lost for days. Everyone involved in the search, even his father, had already given up the boy for dead and was planning to go home the next morning.

Duncan knew somehow that this was not the case; he felt that he had some mysterious union with the boy, some invisible thread that bound him irrevocably to the small child. He was still too young and inarticulate to explain this with any coherence to his elders, so he did the only thing that he felt he could do. He left his father sleeping and quietly slipped from the camp. He knew that his father would not leave him there, and the entire party would be forced to wait either until he came back or until they found him.

He had dreamed that the boy was alive and in a small cave halfway up the side of a canyon–and when he found the child, that was exactly where he was.

He refused the praise that was offered him upon his return to camp because he did not feel he deserved it; the boy himself had called Duncan to him, somehow. When he tried to explain this to them all, everyone laughed except his father, who took him aside when his hurt showed on his face and then was quickly hidden behind a mask of indifference.

“There are more events in this world than just those that are readily explainable and easily understood,” he told Duncan in his thick brogue. “You scared them, that is why they all laughed. What cannot be explained must be untrue, to them. You can see things that others cannot, feel things that they never will, and this will always be so, son. You were given a gift, though you might not consider it that at one time or another in your life and it comes to you both from my people and from your mother’s.” His father had looked off into the mountains, his profile outlined against the harsh beauty of the peaks. His expression made him seem as if he were very far away from where Duncan was right now.

“I am the seventh son of a seventh son, and your mother was the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter. This is a powerful sign, and your fortune was foretold to me by my granny who was a great seer, when I was but fourteen years old. It was the reason I came here to this strange land, never to see Scotland again. You will be a healer, she told it to me long ago, and you will be a great one. You will be gentle yet strong, a giant of a man, and you will have the gift of sight, and you will never know when this gift will manifest itself.”

At this point, his father had turned to him and smiled a broad, loving smile. “She also told me that my son would know a wondrous love and that his wife would bear him seven children, and that all these children would have the sight in varying degrees . . . but the strongest would be the seventh, and she would have an amazing destiny. She would begin the first step toward this destiny on her third birthday, and many would witness it. She said much more than that, but I dinna think you will be old enough to hear it all just yet.” He winked at Duncan. “Fair burned my ears off, it did.” His father had clapped a hand to Duncan’s shoulder. “Let’s be goin’ back to yer mother, boy. I have a hankering to see her pretty face.”

Duncan had disbelieved this prophecy of his ancestor, though he never said so out loud. He did not want to be disrespectful of his father’s ancestors; they were undoubtedly sacred and wise, and were owed much respect. But this prophecy could not be true. He was not a giant and was not likely to become one; he was skinny and small for his age and he had so far showed no signs of becoming anything else. And if this ancestor of his was wrong about the one thing, then it stood to reason that she could be wrong about the rest of the prophecy as well.

When his mother died and they moved away from his beloved mountains, Duncan thought for a time that he would die, too. He did not, of course, for grief rarely kills children, and in his tenth year, he began to grow . . . and grow, and grow. When he finally stopped growing, he was eighteen, and at least a foot taller than any man he stood beside. He believed his great-granny’s prophecy—and he could still track anything that moved over any terrain.

Duncan paced with Kathleen, reminding her of some big cat who had been caged by mistake and now could not be still until he found his way out. Ned, mercifully, had come awake only long enough to take a drink and another dose of laudanum. Duncan was glad that he did not have to explain to the old man that his niece was missing and that the only ones looking for her so far were a couple of green deputies that could not find their rear ends with both hands.

He near wore a hole in the floor of the surgery with his pacing, until finally Kathleen snapped at him to sit down, she was tired of craning her neck back to look at him, it was giving her an aching head. He was going to go and wear a hole right through the floor into the room below, she said, if he did not stop pounding on it. Surely the poor floor could not take the strain of him galumphing back and forth like some great beast for hours and hours.

Duncan did not think that the floor would fall, but he could see that he was making Kathleen even more nervous; her eyes darted everywhere, her hands played together in her lap, and she almost twisted one strand of her hair completely off. He thought briefly of sending her to the kitchen of his living quarters downstairs, but he knew she would bristle up like a little hedgehog if he suggested it. It would be nice, though, he thought wistfully, if he could have some more of those pies and cakes like the ones that she had brought with her. And it would certainly calm her down. He put the thought out of his mind when he caught her glaring at him. He was definitely out of favor at the moment, there would be no more pies and cakes and cookies for him for quite a while, not if she had anything to say about it.

Nick showed up at almost the same moment as Doctor Fell, and he had brought extra horses, a nice little string, all with the stamina of mountain goats. Duncan explained the whole situation to the older man while he saddled one of the mares, the biggest one Nick had brought. She needed to be big to accommodate the weight of his big body, and they were going to be moving fast. Nick was not happy to have his company, but Duncan was going, and there would not be any argument about it. Nick would have set up camp with the devil himself if he thought it would get Maggie back, and Duncan had said with certainty that he could find her, even off of this cold trail. Something in his eyes when he said it made Nick believe him.

“Did you bring a rifle?” he asked the thin-lipped Nick, and was met with an affirmative. Duncan hurried; whoever had taken Maggie had a big head start.

The wind was excruciatingly cold and it battered them unmercifully, stirring up flurries of

snow. Duncan pulled his mare up into the alley where he had found the footsteps and closed his eyes.

“This way,” he said firmly after a while, opening his eyes, and Nick looked at him strangely but followed him anyway, the two extra horses trailing behind him. They might need them before the night was over.

Nick was stiff with terror, and his fear for Maggie was eating away at the insides of him. They had to find her–he could not stand to think of her hurt or cold, or mistreated. The idea of her fear drove him mad. It had been months since she had felt that paralyzing fright and he did not want her to go backwards into that living hell. She did not deserve to live with the fear that had crippled her for so long.

It was freezing cold out here and the wind buffeted them fiercely, and he wondered if she was warm. Hypothermia could be so gradual that a person did not notice it; it just consumed the body’s reserves and agility until they fell asleep and never woke up again. He hoped that she was warm and dry.

He wanted to be with her one more time, to tell her . . . his body suddenly flooded with emotion, and Nick caught his breath at the pain of it.

He loved her. He loved Maggie. Only now, when she was gone did he know it.

He had to find her, so that he could tell her. He had to hold her in his arms one more time, so that he could tell her what he felt, so that he could rock her against his chest and press his cheek to her soft brown hair. He needed to mold her softness to him and kiss every spot on her curvy frame, worship her with his body the way that he worshiped her with his mind. Nick realized that he had loved her for a long time, and he had been too afraid to tell her so.

Maggie was more alive than any woman he had ever met, and he was more alive when he was with her. She greeted every new day with joy and a sense of adventure, and that had been something that was missing from Nick’s life for so long that he had not even realized he had been lacking it. He had been bored before her, and lonely, and he wanted fiercely to tell her so. She was not afraid to wring the last drop of pleasure from her life, and when he remembered the mousy, frightened thing she had been when they first met, Nick marveled at the depth of the changes time and care had wrought in her.

Maggie had forced herself back into the light, after being kept in darkness and dread for three long years, and he admired her so much for that. She had heart, his sweet Maggie, and enough nerve for two women. He called her face up in his mind, the way that she had been this morning, the way she had put her head back and let the snow kiss her sweet face even in the depths of her fear for her uncle, and Nick’s eyes squeezed shut from the hurt in his chest. She suited him all the way from the crown of his head down to the soles of his feet, Maggie did, and he would not settle for anyone else now that he knew what perfection felt like. So they would just have to find her, he thought grimly. No one else would do.

Nick wished that he had not wasted so much time in running away from his feelings for Maggie; in a strange kind of way, he was in debt to Duncan for making him realize just how much Maggie meant to him. He still did not really know what had happened on that catastrophic night that he had found them in the stables, but he had a good suspicion. It did not matter now. He had promised to trust Maggie, and he would. As far as he was concerned, the scene in the stables had never happened, and he would never bring it up to her ever again.

Kathleen and Tommy had been a bit more downcast over his and Maggie’s conspicuous avoidance of each other after the night he had found her in the stables with Duncan than one might expect them to be. He was not a stupid man . . . and Kathleen was quite vocal in her hatred of slavery. As a distraction, finding Maggie in Duncan Murdoch’s arms had done the trick–it had sure got his full attention. He still felt murderous whenever he saw Duncan standing too close to his Maggie, whenever he appeared to be speaking intimately to her. He knew that Maggie liked the man and he liked her, and the good doctor was just a little too handsome and masculine for comfort. Nick would bet all his money that Duncan had left a long trail of broken hearts behind him in St. Louis.

If they found her...

Nick forced that unwelcome thought away, and followed Duncan’s big horse, close on his rump so that he did not lose him in the snow that was falling, thicker and thicker, from the dark sky. He was trusting that the man knew what he was doing.

They had to find her. He refused to believe that he could discover the one woman in the world who made him complete only to lose her to some capricious whim of fate. Destiny would not be so cruel as to take her from him. Nick tried not to think about all the other people who had been taken from him before, like his parents, like Mary . . . He shook off the shudder that rippled through his body and fixed his eyes on Duncan’s broad back. They had to find her . . . or he would die in the trying. He did not want to live without his Maggie.

Duncan rode with his eyes slitted almost shut against the wind and snow. He could feel Maggie’s dread and fright, and he was following that mental trail the same way he would follow a physical one. They were getting close; he knew it as surely as he knew the sun would come up every morning. The fool who had taken Maggie, and he was positive that the man staying in the hotel had taken her, was not even bothering to hide his tracks. The man was over-confident, and a bit stupid, to say the least, and Duncan was heartened by this. It was going to be a lot easier to best a stupid man than a smart one, though Duncan had seen a lot of not-too-bright men come out on the winning end of a fight, usually because of brute strength. There were two of them and one of him, though, and he was not a big man, Duncan could tell by the length of the tracks he had found in the alley.

Duncan turned and shouted to Nick over the howling of the wind. Nick gave a shrug that

showed he could not hear, and rode up beside Duncan, holding his hat on his head.

“Is there a barn or deserted house around here close?” Duncan said, leaning over to practically scream it in Nick’s ears. “I think that is where they are headed.”

“The old Quimby place,” Nick said. “It is about a mile down the road. When you get to that big oak tree that is been hit by lightning, you bear west. But how . . . “

Duncan ignored the question that he knew was coming, turning his horse in the direction Nick had indicated. He gave his horse a little kick, making her move just a little faster. They were getting close to her now. He could feel a swell of rising terror make his hands shake, and an adrenaline rush that left him trembling, and he knew these things were coming from Maggie, that he was reading her emotions so clearly that he was sharing in them. Duncan tried to separate himself from what he knew Maggie was feeling, but it was difficult. As always when he tracked, there was an invisible bond between him and the person that he hunted, and he tried to send Maggie a sense of peace and of hope. Duncan thought, just maybe, that the exchange of emotions went both ways. He would bet that she needed to feel both of those things about right now, and hoped that she received them.

Duncan closed his eyes. Maggie was in great danger, and it was growing. He rode grimly toward the old Quimby place, Nick solidly beside him, picking up on Duncan’s urgency and pushing his own tired horse to greater speeds. Their horses were exhausted, and if they’d had time, they would have stopped and switched their saddles to the fresher mounts. But Duncan felt a desperate need to get there quickly, and he did not want to waste the time involved in changing mounts, so they rode on, going faster and faster until their horses were nearly galloping dangerously through the trees that failed to shield them from the falling snow and stiff wind. Nick’s face was white with fear; he knew that if his horse stumbled and went down, they would waste precious minutes, and he had been infected with Duncan’s compulsion to go ever faster. He felt in his heart that they must hurry, and catch up with them soon or lose Maggie forever.

When Maggie came to, she was thrown face down over the back of a horse, tied to the saddle in such a way that she was unable to move. The small horse she was lashed to had a peculiar, skittering gate, and Maggie was bounced around unmercifully. Her head thumped painfully against the saddle with every stride that the horse took, though she tried to keep still. She had little success, and a sob of hopelessness forced its way from her throat even as she attempted to hold it back. She could hear David cursing as he tried to control both the animal he rode and the one he led, the one she was tied to, and she kept still, hoping that he would not realize she was awake. The longer she could escape his notice, the better.

She was dangerously cold; one of her gloves had slipped off, and the scarf Kathleen had forced on her was trapped uselessly between her body and the rigid leather of the saddle. But no external temperature had ever made her feel as icy as the thought that raced through her mind right now.

No one would know where she was, or that David had taken her. They all thought him dead, just as Maggie had.

She had thought him dead when he had seen him last; he lay there on the floor before her, covered in blood. He had not seemed to be breathing, and she had been so shocked at her own actions, thinking only of running away before someone came and caught her. She had fled . . . and now he was here, alive, and he had taken her back.

It was the vivid landscape of her nightmares, come to life. She could only imagine what terrible retaliation he had planned for her. He had ever been one to save up his griefs and then exact a punishment that far exceeded the real or imagined slight. Maggie shuddered in dread,

thinking of some of the other chastisements he had forced on her. She could not go through that again, she could not . . .

Maggie tried to think, but it was nearly impossible. The wind shrieked around her like some wild thing, and she shivered almost uncontrollably now. Her head hurt so badly . . .

Maggie tried to lift up her head enough to see where David was taking her, but it was useless. Because of the way that she was tied, she could only lift her head off of the saddle a few inches, and her vision was blurred. Add the blowing snow into the equation, and visibility was nearly zero. Maggie realized that the blurred vision came from the blow on the head he had given her, and she vaguely recalled hitting her head again, hard, on the ground as she fell.

Nick.

Just the thought of him, of his dear face, made weak tears spring to her eyes, but Maggie brushed them resolutely away. Now was not the time; she had to think of some way to help herself. Maggie managed to wiggle around until her scarf touched her bound hands. She pulled, and strained, and tugged it from its position beneath her; it dangled for a moment before it dropped to the ground, the dark maroon color shockingly visible against the white background of the new fallen snow. Anyone who came this way would be bound to see it lying there. She just hoped that David did not turn his head and see it there on the white of the snow.

Maybe Nick would come for her; perhaps he was already searching. Surely, after an hour or so, Duncan and Kathleen had gone looking for some sign of her. How long had it been before they had realized that she was not coming back? Just how much of a lead did David have on anyone who might be searching for her?

Maggie realized that they were slowing down, then suddenly her horse came to an abrupt halt, jolting her on the saddle and startling a cry of pain from her. She heard the sound of a stubborn door creaking open, then she was being led out of the wind and into the building, whatever it was.

Even as Maggie blessed the surcease of wind that threatened to freeze her into a solid ice block, she feared what would happen now. She forced herself to go limp, playing dead and hoping that David would leave her alone as long as he thought her unconscious. He cut the knotted ropes from the saddle; Maggie could only assume that they were frozen and too stiff to handle. He left the ropes binding her ankles and wrists, then dragged her off of the horse by her hair and threw her onto the ground. Maggie felt a rib crack and tried to stay limp, but her face must have betrayed her. David laughed and drew back his boot to kick her viciously, close enough to the broken bone that Maggie curled up into a whimpering ball, flashes of light behind her eyes as she gasped through the excruciating pain and fought to stay conscious for real.

“I know that you are awake,” he crooned in a tender voice that frightened her far more than if he had shouted. “Come, my darling wife, open your eyes.” And he kicked her again with his boot, in the very same spot, making her scream in agony.

Maggie opened her eyes and looked into his hated face, because it was futile not to. He would just keep hurting her until he forced her to do what he wanted. She stared dispassionately at him, showing not a trace of fear, and that bothered him. He grew uneasy looking at her expressionless face. He wanted her to cringe and cower before him as she had before.

Maggie was shocked at the difference in David’s appearance. Being in the middle of a snowstorm was not sufficient excuse for the extent of the change in him. He had always been fastidious about his looks, but evidently that was a thing of the past.

He had lost twenty pounds at least, and his face was haggard and unshaven. His whiskers grew in patchy fuzz, some of the hair gray, the rest of it brown. His clothes not only hung on him, they were filthy and encrusted with what looked like the dirt of weeks. His eyes had a hunted expression that had never been there before, darting here and there, never lighting very long on any one place. He could not be physically still either, his fingers playing with the frayed edges of his coat, tugging at his collar, pinching at his whiskers.

He was nowhere near the intimidating sight that he used to be, and Maggie realized with a shock that she was not really afraid of him anymore. Oh, she was afraid of what he might do, she was afraid of his physical violence, but he did not strike the abject terror into her that just the very glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye used to do. He was a pathetic specimen of a man altogether, and confidence suddenly surged into Maggie, bringing reserves of strength with it. She felt hope rising in her, and she felt almost peaceful all of a sudden, as if a warm hand had reached out and clasped her shoulder.

This man was not the monster of her dreams.

He was just a man, a rather paltry one at that . . . and men, unlike monsters, could be defeated.

She was not the same girl that he had married. Maggie had turned into a woman in the months that she had been away from his spurious influence . . . and she was strong. Strong enough and smart enough to get away from him as long as she stayed alert and luck was with her.

“Finish untying me, David,” she said now, calmly. “I cannot feel my hands and we need to get a fire started. You do have flint to start a fire with, do not you?”

He gaped at her. She held out her wrists to him, shaking them impatiently, raising her eyebrows imperiously. He scurried over to cut the rest of the ropes from both her hands and her feet, and Maggie remembered how he had always bowed down to the people who had treated him like dirt.

She pulled off her one remaining glove and rubbed the circulation back into her wrists and ankles while looking around. They were in some abandoned outbuilding, one that obviously had not seen occupation for a long, long time. A pile of waist-high, nearly rotten wood lay in one corner, and she put out her hand for David to help her up, concealing both her distaste at touching him and the pain that she felt in her side. The room spun crazily for a moment, then righted itself as she stood upright with difficulty.

All of the wood was not too rotten to use, she informed him in a haughty voice once she had inspected it. He hunkered down and put the knife he had used to cut her free by his foot, striking sparks off the flint he retrieved from his saddlebags and catching the ultra-dry wood on fire just as it lay, without moving any of it.

Maggie tried to disguise her amazement. Dear God, that pile of wood came nearly to her waist! He was going to burn the building down around their heads.

She looked at him closely as he muttered to himself and warmed his hands to the rapidly burning blaze. He had picked up the knife again, dropping the flint to the floor and leaving it there where it lay. He tilted the knife back and forth, studying the way the fire made light dance off of its sharp edge. He appeared as if he had gone past some point that, once advanced beyond, could not be returned to. He looked up at her, over the flames now nearly as high as Maggie’s head, and the red light flickered over his features, making him appear to be the devil he always was in Maggie’s dreams.

“Things changed after you left, Maggie,” he said, getting to his feet. “I could not explain where my wife had gone, and one of the servants sent the police around a couple of weeks later. They all hated me and I know that was your fault, too. The policemen found all that blood in the parlor, because the stain never quite came up, you know. That is something else you will have to pay for, my dear.”

Maggie inched away, toward the door. If she could just reach one of the horses . . . He had not even unsaddled the poor beasts, or taken their bridles off, but that could work to her advantage now.

“They asked me all these questions about where you were, and of course I could not answer them. I had told everyone that you had gone to stay with my aunt, but there was no aunt. When I could not produce you, Maggie, they got very suspicious, but they could not prove anything because they did not have a body. But that did not stop the gossip, and I could not get work anymore, Maggie. Everywhere I went, people whispered that I had killed my wife, and no one wanted to pay a murderer to take care of their finances. I lost the house when the bank called in all my notes. I had borrowed pretty heavily, you see.”

Maggie felt insane laughter bubble up inside her. All this time, while she thought she had killed him, he had been alive and living in St. Louis. While she was terrified of hanging for his murder, people had been whispering that he had murdered her. David smiled benignly at her now, but Maggie was not fooled. He’d had the same beatific expression on his face many times as he had beaten her into unconsciousness.

“I was going through my old papers about a month ago, looking for a client’s address who had a nasty little secret. I intended to get a little working capital from him, and that is when I found your uncle’s address. I had thought it lost forever. You had taken all his letters with you, you see, and I thought I had gotten rid of everything else. I am so very glad about my inefficiency in this case, else I never could have found him again. I knew that is where you would go. I used to read his letters and laugh sometimes. He was so sincere, and so loving, and I found it so amusing to know that I made you both so miserable by keeping you apart.”

David gave a tittering little laugh and leaned forward avidly, perilously close to the

growing conflagration. “Oh, dear, I am sorry. But just the thought of that common little man, perhaps lying in his bed at night and shedding a tear at the thought of you and your regrettable mental instability that kept you so tragically apart. . . It is just too, too amusing.”

Maggie felt a cleansing rage rise up inside her at his words. He was a monster that fed off the pain of others and he would not receive any pleasure from seeing one iota of anguish cross her features, not this time.

“I was the one who shot him, you know. Too bad he did not die–he would have, if not for that three-legged hell hound that attacked me. I had to flee before I could finish the job, I am afraid. Maybe he will die of complications instead. One can only hope.”

With a roar of fury, Maggie snapped. She had taken so much from this man; he had beaten and degraded her for three long years. She had lived in a hell of his making, existing in a pervasive fog of perpetual fear. She grabbed a burning branch from the fire and attacked him with it, heedless of the knife that he held and of the fire that licked at her skirts. She screamed out her wrath and hatred as she struck him hard across the chest with the flaming end of the bough. David dropped his knife and scrambled back away from her blows, cowering.

Maggie felt the rage cleanse her soul as she beat him backwards, toward the door. He had caused one too many hurts, pushed the knife in one too many times . . . this time, he would pay.

One of the horses whinnied in fright as they came too close, and Maggie’s attention wavered just long enough for David to jump up and grab her.

“I will kill you now,” he spat into her face as he grappled with her. Maggie dropped her makeshift weapon when he twisted her wrist, hard. “I really will kill you this time.”

Maggie knew that he meant it, and she did the only thing that she could think of. He was dragging her slowly, inexorably toward the knife on the floor and she knew what he meant to do with it when he got there.

She bit him, viciously, feeling sick as he screamed, but still she would not let go until he knocked her to the ground. Even as she went down, she spat at him and felt a weird kind of triumph, though she knew he was going to kill her. She had not given in to the fear this time. She had fought him all the way.

Howling, David put his hands up to his wounded neck and then pulled them back, staring in disbelief at the blood over them. He backed away from where she lay on the cold ground. He recoiled even further when she smiled at him.

“You have scarred me for life,” he said, and backed farther away. Maggie bit back a warning as he backed right over the smoldering branch she had hit him with, and fell toward the gargantuan fire.

His arms windmilling, he tried desperately to keep from going into the flames, to no avail. Maggie watched in horror as his clothing caught on fire. He ran out the dilapidated door of the building, into the snow, the fire feeding off the oxygen he provided it with his panicked run and burning higher and harder. She watched through the open door until he fell to the ground and moved no more, still screaming, his body continuing to burn. When the screams stopped, Maggie finally backed away and retched out all her sickness before she staggered away and fell to the ground.

She lay back, closing her eyes, no longer able to stay conscious now that the danger had passed, and that is how Duncan and Nick found her, unconscious beside a fire that had now nearly reached the dry ceiling of the old barn. Nick had her scarf wrapped around his hand. They had forced their horses into a hard gallop after they had found it; they knew now that they were on the right track, and they could already smell the smoke.

Right in front of the deserted barn, they had passed the still sizzling, blackened body, and they had both looked in revulsion upon the thing that had once been a man. No one had

to tell them that this was the body of the man who had taken Maggie, and they did not stop for more than a moment. Duncan, who could smell the evil of the man even through the stench of burning flesh, spat on him as they turned away, and a bright yellow flame shot up where the liquid had hit, then flickered away.

Nick held her tenderly on his lap as Duncan looked Maggie over and checked her out. Nick looked upon the bloodstained, beautiful face of his lover. She was a fire in his blood, and in his heart, and in his soul and he knew that if she had died, part of him would die with her.

“I love you,” he murmured to her. “I love you, love you, and love you, Maggie.”

“She has got a couple broken ribs, looks like she took a couple of real hard knocks to the head, but other than that she is fine,” Duncan said quietly, his long fingers finished probing Maggie’s body, for the moment.

“I am going to see if something cannot be done about this fire before it burns down the barn,” Duncan said quietly. “I will be right back.”

Nick never took his eyes from Maggie’s face, and he nearly sobbed aloud when she slowly opened her beautiful green eyes. He pressed kisses all over her face, on her eyelids, on her nose, on her soft mouth.

“Nick,” she whispered. “I did not think I would ever see you again.”

“Me, too, darling,” he whispered back, unashamed of the silver tears glittering in his eyes and on the ends of his long black lashes.

“I have got to tell you something,” she whispered, taking short, sharp breaths because of the pain in her ribs. “I . . . I have been keeping secrets from you, because I was so afraid. I thought that you would hate me if you knew.”

“I would never hate you, never,” Nick said passionately. “I love you, Maggie. Whatever it is, I do not care. I will fix it, or I will find someone who can. Marry me, love. I adore you. My life was dull and lusterless before you came to me. Marry me, Maggie. I need you so,” he sobbed, pressing his face to hers. "I need you so." He pecked wild little kisses all over her face, then held her and rocked her back and forth as one would a child. It was as much to comfort him as her, for now that the danger had passed, the storm of emotion that he had felt for the last few hours had left him as weak as an injured child.

Maggie looked into his eyes and saw that he meant it, that it really did not matter to him what had gone before. He truly loved her, and though she was more tired and sore than she could ever remember being before, she felt a shaft of joy sing through her whole body. She raised herself up despite the pain and wrapped her arms around his neck, weeping.

“I love you, too,” she said between the kisses they shared. “I love you, Nick. I have loved you for so long.”

Duncan cleared his throat from his position over by the door. He held a rusted bucket in one hand.

“I hate to interrupt this, folks, but I need to talk to you about this fire. Do you think that we should try and put it out, or should we just let it burn itself out?”

“What fire?” Nick said, and went back to kissing Maggie, their passion radiating almost as much heat as the inferno behind them.

"I am the luckiest woman alive," Maggie whispered to Nick as she pressed her lips to his.

Duncan smiled wryly and went to make sure that the fire did not spread to the forest.