Free The Rousing: A Celtic in the Blood Novella by Jess Raven, Paula Black

open. He looked right at me with those sea-green eyes. I could have sworn his mouth tipped up in a grin. A swell of raw emotion rose up in my chest like a wave and I beamed back at him with a smile that rivalled the dawn breaking out at sea.

     
     

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

     
     
    “His body needs rest, Miss McShane, and if you don’t mind me saying, you look pretty dead on your feet yourself. Go home, get some sleep. I’ll call if there’s any change in his condition.” The nurse gave my upper arm a reassuring squeeze and smiled. Her version of a gentle dismissal.
    I picked up my bag from the floor and glanced at Liam as I rose stiffly from the chair beside his hospital bed. Tucked beneath starched white sheets, the colour was already returning to his face, thanks to the bags of O-positive being drip-fed into his arms. His neck was stitched and bandaged, and he’d suffered severe blood loss, but the doctors were confident he was going to make it just fine.
    In the aftermath of the storm and all that had happened, I’d wandered the cliffs aimlessly for a time, in shock most likely, until finally some practical part of my brain kicked in with a plan. I went back to the house and retrieved my bag from the front driveway where Adriana had attacked me. The hall door was wide open, and I spotted her inside, sitting on the floor, staring into space with her arms wrapped around her knees, rocking back and forth. Her face was a mess, red and horribly swollen from the pepper spray, her make-up streaked like coloured molten wax, but what I could see of her eyes looked normal. I had no explanations for what had happened to her, or how much of her behaviour had been down to her apparent possession by the spirit of the Dearg-Due, but I was keeping a cautious distance between us, nonetheless.
    I pulled my phone from the bag and squeezed it, offering up a silent prayer before flipping open the case. My prayer was answered. By some miracle, or perhaps just on account of the storm having run its course, three healthy bars of signal popped up. I dialled emergency services, not having the first clue how I was going to explain the dead body and the three casualties of the night. A terrible accident, I said.
    A short time later, the helicopter touched down in the grass. The roads into Bronach remained impassable due to the fallen trees, and the rocky shallows of the cove were deemed too dangerous for the coastguard.
    They bundled up Jack and Liam onto stretchers, threw a blanket over Adriana’s shoulders and airlifted them to the regional hospital. Poor John-Joe went home in a body-bag. The paramedics came to the same conclusion Liam had, that some wild animal, a feral dog perhaps, had attacked the victims. There was no other plausible explanation for the bite marks on their necks, and I wasn’t about to set them straight and earn myself a prolonged stay in the regional psychiatric unit. Adriana didn’t speak for the entire journey, other than to say she was ‘fine’ and to tell them to keep their hands off her.
    That was the last I’d seen of either her or Jack. The hospital had been a whirlwind of consent forms and emergency surgery to patch Liam back together. As they’d wheeled him into the operating theatre, I thought I spotted Jack, on a bed, being pushed through a set of double doors, but I couldn’t be sure.
    The last twenty-four hours I’d spent folded into that uncomfortable chair at Liam’s side, surviving on watery coffee and vending machine sandwiches. He’d woken eventually, as though from a nightmare, but seeing me, the relief washing over him was a visible thing. We talked about what happened in hushed whispers, setting our stories straight for the inevitable questions the police would have. I only hoped that Jack and Adriana would have the sense to keep their mouths shut. So far as I knew, Jack’s wife hadn’t seen any of the supernatural goings on at the cliff top. She could have me prosecuted for the