Curse of Soulmate--The Complete Series Page 6

  “All your kind are the same. So don’t even mention it.”

  “My kind? Mrs. Hanson . . .” Madeline raised her voice in defense, but Mrs. Hanson cut in.

  “You want to find John Dee’s grave, right?” Mrs. Hanson smiled.

  “Yes, I do. But I wasn’t . . .”

  Mrs. Hanson raised a hand to cut Madeline off.

  “What you want to find in the grave is not my problem. I knew you were coming. You’re just like the others. Greed will not bring anyone any good.”

  “But I didn’t . . .”

  “You do not have greed in you. I can see that. But you have grief. The grief you are carrying is horrible—and it’s contagious. So stay far from me. Greed is easy for me to handle. I can help with that. But you will have to sort out the grief yourself.”

  She had no idea what the old lady was prattling on about. But something weighed heavily in her chest. It hurt. But there was no time to think about it. She had a task at hand, and her friend’s life depended on it.

  “Where can I find the grave?”

  “Fosse Way. It’s guarded by Roman soldiers. But I have to warn you, young lady, these soldiers cannot tell the difference between greed and grief. They will judge you by your actions. So be careful.”

  Mrs. Hanson turned around and disappeared suddenly behind the door. Madeline looked down to the dog and found that it, too, had gone.

  She walked away from the manicured garden.

  Right, so plan C then.

  Chapter 17

  Fatigue dragged at Madeline. The fact the she’d only slept a couple of hours a day in the last week was one factor in her exhaustion, but hunger was gnawing at her as well.

  She got into her car and programmed the GPS for Fosse Way. The machine couldn’t locate it. Was it a road, a district, or a city? Madeline just wanted to see how far it was from her current location.

  She didn’t have her laptop with her, so she used the phone Ciaran gave her instead. It was a smart phone with some data capability for temporarily usage. Ciaran wouldn’t settle for anything less, of course. Madeline smiled to herself, remembering the look on his face when he had programmed her phone.

  Google maps suggested that Fosse Way was a highway which connected several different towns and ran for more than 350 km. There were smaller sections of the road that deviated from the main road, and part of it was called Roman Road. That had to be it. She didn’t have much time to research, but Mrs. Hanson had mentioned Roman soldiers. That narrowed things down a lot for her.

  She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. “Just a quick search, and I’ll be back in London in no time,” she muttered to herself. At least if she had to encounter Zen sometime tomorrow, she would have something to show him so she could stall for more time.

  As the GPS had become useless at this point, Madeline used Google Maps and hit the road. By her gauge, it would take a couple of hours to get to Roman Road.

  “I could use a blue dot right about now,” she said out loud. Nothing. She shook her head. She’d thought the psychic dots weren’t random, but they were really playing tricks on her.

  After a couple of hours, she could see signs pointing to her destination. She veered off the highway, bearing in mind that she could come back to it at any time.

  The smaller roads were a bit bumpy, but she figured as long as there were signs of civilization, she would be fine. It was going to be getting dark, so she knew she’d better find Roman Road soon, wherever it was. She was about to give up and turn around when she finally saw it—a small, narrow country road with stone walls running along it.

  Wow. That was the only word Madeline could think of. The walls must have been more than a thousand years old. They were only knee-high, a meter at most. But they went on and on, black stones stacked together, forming what seemed to be the walls of time. If they could talk, Madeline bet they could tell stories. They had witnessed the history of a thousand years or more. Many people had lived and died here. Behind the stone walls were endless green fields, ditches, and marshes. Madeline was amazed. She was just a few hours outside vibrant London—and this!

  The walls were mysterious, but there was no sign of a graveyard or even a single tomb. She didn’t see how John Dee could be buried here.

  The air seemed to have grown thicker, and the wind had stopped blowing. It was eerily quiet. Something kept urging her to go ahead. An ancient voice. A haunting chant.

  Something was watching her.

  Urging

  Pushing.

  Clouding her judgment.

  It turned dark quickly. She wanted to turn around, but she couldn’t seem to sync her mind and her actions. It wasn’t possible to turn the car around on this narrow one-lane road. It was so narrow that two cars couldn’t pass at the same time.

  Madeline checked Google Maps to see how close she was to the main road and discovered the phone was totally dead—the battery was drained.

  No worries, she thought as she turned on her GPS and programmed in her address in London as the destination. The machine flashed once, twice, and then it went blank.

  Madeline glanced out the windows. It was completely dark now. The chanting still hovered in the air, and the wind started to weave through the stones and trees, making eerie flute-like sounds. She needed her blue dots, but she knew very well from experience that they wouldn’t come to her when she needed them most.

  She had to turn the car around somehow.

  Madeline saw a broken part of the wall and veered toward it. In the beam of the car headlights, it appeared to be a grass field on the other side of the wall, not a swamp or a river. She was close to the gap in the wall when the car was suddenly pushed forward. A loud bang echoed in the interior of the car when it hit the stone wall, making her head ring. Still having momentum, she managed to steer back to the road, scraping the side of the car along the stone wall. It sloped down a bit. Maybe it was her imagination, but the car seemed to keep speeding forward. She hit the brakes.

  It didn’t work.

  She kept hitting loose stones and tree logs, and the car swung from one side to another, but it kept moving forward.

  For a very brief moment, Madeline thought she saw a line of Roman soldiers marching along the wall. She shook her head. She knew fatigue was dragging at her now. Her head seemed to weigh a ton, and her mind was drifting, unfocused.

  She hit the brakes again. It didn’t work.

  She saw the Roman soldiers once more. One soldier turned around and looked straight at her. His eyes were evil and red. She pressed the accelerator.

  It worked.

  As she zoomed past, the soldier raised his body-length sword and his metal shield and threw his weight at the side of the car.

  The car hit another log, jumped in the air, and almost flipped over.

  Madeline drove faster. She didn’t realize that she was crying. Her headlights shone on armory, weapons, and marching soldiers.

  There was lightning sparking from the sky and flashing on the road right in front of her car. Madeline veered off the road.

  But then she saw her blue dot. And another one. Many of them, flying over the sky in a flock. But it was too late now. The car flew over a wall, landing on a slope and rolling until it hit a large rock and lay motionless.

  Am I dead? She couldn’t move for long time as she was pinned between the seat and the airbag.

  Then she heard footsteps. Madeline kicked hard and wriggled to free herself. She stumbled out of the car and looked up to the top of the ditch. Lightning cast light into the darkness of stone and trees. She saw the soldiers and their shadows. She heard them murmur in their search for her.

  Which way is London? She scanned the vicinity aimlessly. The lightning created a spotlight right where she was standing. Thunder roamed across the sky. Madeline yelped and jumped aside to hide.

  Too late. They had seen her.

  The shadows moved toward her. They called her name. She ran. They chased. She kept running.


  Madeline fell, rolling on rocks and tree branches. She scrambled up and kept moving.

  She heard her name again. But this time, the voice sounded familiar. She knew that voice.

  Lightning again, and in the brightness of the flashing light, she saw Ciaran running toward her. It was him. She couldn’t be mistaken. She recognized the shape of him, and the sound of his voice.

  “Madeline!” Ciaran shouted.

  He rushed forward and grabbed her to stop her from running. They both tumbled and rolled on the hard rocks.

  Ciaran helped her up. Madeline grabbed on to him. She felt like weeping. In fact, she was. Ciaran held her tight for a very brief second and pushed her to continue running.

  Madeline was dazed. “Why are we running? You’re here. We’re safe.”

  Ciaran pulled at her. “Run!” he said.

  Madeline didn’t quite get it, but she went with him.

  Lightning, thunder, and now pouring rain made it impossible to tell what they were running toward. Madeline guessed he was trying to get her to run toward the light. It felt right, running to the light.

  She still heard footsteps and saw shadows. It was not clear to her who they were running toward and who they were running from.

  A barrage of large stones flew toward them.

  It had to be from the Roman soldiers, Madeline thought. She could see the holes the stones made in the mud, the walls, and tree trunks around them.

  Ciaran grabbed Madeline and pushed her down to avoid the raining stones. He was covering her, Madeline knew.

  And then silence, as if the sound had been suddenly vacuumed out of the sphere.

  They stood up. She heard a whooshing noise, and then the stones commenced again. Both Ciaran and Madeline fell, rolling down a slope. Then she felt cold water. They might be in a pool, a pond, a lake—but it was cold.

  That was the last thing she remembered before the world went black.

  Chapter 18

  Thick embroidered curtains dripping with ropes and ribbons in royal colors hung around the bed and from the ceiling, looking down at Madeline.

  Have I time-traveled? Madeline blinked and glanced around.

  She was lying on a four-poster bed in the middle of a spacious room surrounded by walls covered in deep-colored patterned wallpaper and tapestries. Paintings in fancy frames were arranged on the walls at every corner of the room. Even the bedside lamps were ornate.

  Had it not been for the sight of Ciaran standing at the window in his modern clothing, talking on his cell phone, Madeline would have argued that this was a castle straight out of the fifteenth century.

  Ciaran murmured something in French. The language sounded like music to Madeline. Then, sensing Madeline’s gaze, he finished the conversation and turned around.

  He completes the scene, Madeline thought. Complementing the setting of the room, he looked like a king. His long hair was swept back, revealing a broad forehead and sculptured face—the face of a dark angel. He was too young to be a king, but she couldn’t settle for a lesser description.

  Within seconds, as quick and gentle as a cat, he was at her bedside.

  “How are you feeling?” Ciaran slid the phone into his pocket.

  Madeline moved her shoulders a bit. She ached everywhere. “I’ve been better . . . Are we in a castle? Is this your house?”

  Ciaran grinned. “Yes, we are indeed in a castle. But this is not my house. It’s Lumley Castle, converted into a hotel. It’s the closest place I could find where the helicopter could drop us as you didn’t want to go to the hospital, nor did you want me to contact the authorities regarding the incident last night. So the Queen Suite is what you have here.”

  “The haunted Lumley Castle?” Madeline’s eyes widened.

  Ciaran winked at her. “A commercial myth! Don’t disappoint me by buying into it.”

  Madeline was puzzled and about to ask more questions, but Ciaran raised a finger, gesturing her to hold on. He picked up the handset of the phone at the desk.

  “Yes, this is Ciaran. Yes, could you please bring it up here? Also, there should be a fax waiting for me. My assistant Lindsay would have gotten it by now. He’s in the Courtyard room. Could you bring me the document as well? Thank you. In the Queen Suite. Yes. Thanks.”

  Ciaran turned around, smiling at Madeline.

  “I didn’t know what you like for breakfast, so I ordered the whole lot. The doctor said you can have solid food when you wake. Also . . .”

  “Hold on a sec. What’s going on here? What happened last night?” Madeline gestured widely. Everything was confusing to her at the moment.

  “I should ask these questions, Madeline. What in God’s name were you doing in Fosse Way at that time of night? Your phone sent out a distress signal to me.”

  “How? It was dead when I was desperate to use it.”

  “There’s a chip in your phone. You’re using my company’s phone, remember? And don’t stress, I wasn’t monitoring your whereabouts. It’s a standard function in all company phones. Based on changing operating conditions and a lot of other variables, if the phone detects that the user is in possible danger, it will send distress signals to the central operator. I coded your signals to be sent to my phone instead of our operator.”

  “Got it! And thank you for coming after me.”

  “You didn’t exactly give me any other options,” Ciaran murmured. “You know what your logs looked like? Again, it’s standard data, I’m not spying on you. You went from London to Mortlake, then straight to the Roman Road during the severe storm warning hours. Then you circled on and off the ancient path, and on and off the road for hours. When I located you, you flew off a wall. Were you practicing for the Grand Prix?”

  Ciaran looked at Madeline gently, but there was no amusement in his eyes.

  “The Roman soldiers chased me,” Madeline explained. She might have hallucinated it, but that was the only piece of information she had and could give at the moment. I sound like a lunatic, she thought.

  Ciaran gave Madeline a blank stare. He jammed his hands in his pockets and rolled up slightly onto the balls of his feet. Madeline knew that signaled a sarcastic remark was coming. But somehow, he swallowed it before it came out.

  Someone knocked on the door. Ciaran opened it to allow the staff to push in a breakfast tray—or a breakfast feast, by Madeline’s gauge.

  “I’ll take this. Thanks.” Ciaran took a piece of paper with one hand and grabbed a parcel that looked like clean clothes on coat hangers, wrapped in plastic, with the other. He walked to a wall cabinet to hang up the clothes, as if this was his room.

  Madeline stared. Those were her clothes he was handling. She looked down. She was wearing a comfortable white robe. And she was pretty sure by now that underneath the robe was nothing but her skin.

  Ciaran glanced quickly at the fax he held in his hand. Looking as if he had seen what he wanted to see, he put the piece of paper on the desk. Then he turned toward Madeline. “The bathroom is there.” He pointed to a door in the corner of the room. Then he reached out his hand. “Would you like a hand to get up? Although you had no internal injuries, you had a minor concussion last night. The doctor said you might feel a bit queasy this morning.”

  Madeline narrowed her eyes, looking down at her robe and then up at Ciaran. “The doctor?”

  “Doctor Thomas is our family doctor. He’ll follow up this morning to make sure everything is okay.”

  Madeline looked down again to her robe and back up at Ciaran. She was in a hotel, a private doctor had examined her last night, and in her delirium, she had objected to going to the hospital.

  Who exactly had put her in this robe?

  Madeline remembered her situation. “I’ve got to go. I need to be back in London.” Zen was coming at any time, and she’d found nothing to show him.

  “You’re not leaving until you tell me just what happened yesterday. I need answers, Madeline. You can’t just brush this off and leave.” Ciaran’s tone was firm
and authoritative.

  “I’ve told you all I know. Look, Ciaran, I appreciate you rescuing me last night, but I really have to go. Right now.”

  Ciaran stared into her eyes. “You said Roman soldiers chased you. Just so you know, they didn’t use guns in that era.” His eyes were intense now with a hint of anger.

  “Guns? What guns?”

  There was a knock on the door.

  “That must be Doctor Thomas.” Ciaran strode to the door and opened it to let the doctor in.

  The man entering the room looked more like a kind grandfather than a doctor. Ciaran fetched a chair and put it next to Madeline’s bed so that Doctor Thomas could sit down. Then he went to a corner of the room to answer an incoming call on his cell phone.

  “How are you feeling this morning, Madeline?” asked the doctor.

  “Just aching a bit. But I feel fine. Thanks for checking on me last night.”

  “Based on my visual examination, there are no internal injuries. However, I’d like to run a scanner through your body to confirm. Ideally, we should do a head scan as well. But that has to be done at the hospital or at our private lab.”

  Embarrassment rushed through her. Her entire body had been examined last night, and she didn’t even remember it.

  “Madeline?”

  “Huh?”

  “The scan will be quick and gentle. It’s better to be safe than sorry.” Doctor Thomas looked at her calmly, like a father. Something tugged at her heart. Yes, he was like the father she thought she should have.

  “Who was here last night when you examined me?”

  Doctor Thomas smiled. “Only Ciaran and myself. There wasn’t an army of people in this room if that’s what you’re worried about.” Madeline caught a flash of sorrow in the doctor’s eyes.

  “I’m feeling fine right now. I’m pretty sure of it.” Madeline wiggled her toes underneath the blanket and did a quick mental scan of herself. She did feel fine.

  Ciaran finished his phone call and came to the bed.

  “No scanning?” Ciaran asked.

  “No, she won’t agree to it.” Doctor Thomas shook his head with fatherly disapproval. Then he turned to Ciaran. “Lindsay was kind enough to deliver my medical bag this morning. So it’s time to take your bullet out.”