Stealing Kathryn Read online

  With a roar of fury he burst away from the bed and the object of his dissatisfaction. Ever since he had stumbled upon her the first time, he had been utterly obsessed. He’d tried time and again to stop, to carry on his work elsewhere, to fill his time with better sources of fear and focus.

  But always she lured him back, with her infuriating perfection and needful body. She craved so many dark and wonderful things; she had the deepest of fears and yet faced them with such unbelievable courage. She was utterly fascinating.

  And he wanted her.

  Not just in this realm he was limited to, but beyond it. In the real. He would take her—yes! Yes, he could keep her then, keep her for his very own, and no one could stop him. No one would dare to stop him.

  He reached out for her, pulling her to her feet and into the fire. Her dress immediately caught flame at the hem and she screamed, struggling to brush away the flames.

  “Tell me where you live and I’ll make it all stop,” he promised her.

  “Stop it! Please!”

  “Tell me,” he coaxed her as the flames leapt higher against her.

  Drowning in terror and flame, she did.

  Ripping out of the horrifying nightmare with a gasp, Kathryn instantly tried to beat out flames that no longer existed. Her sudden movement nearly toppled her out of the plain wooden chair she’d pulled up to her sister’s bedside. It took her a moment to shake off her disorientation, to realize she had fallen asleep while watching over Jillian. She hurriedly left her chair to lean over her sister’s bed. Jillian was shivering weakly, her breath rasping in a sickening staccato rhythm.

  “Hush, now. Rest, love,” she crooned gently to the sick girl.

  Kathryn rubbed the grit of weariness from her eyes as she turned to the bedside table. It took her a moment to focus on the paraphernalia there. There were bottles of medicine, a thermometer, and a large china basin with rags soaking in water and melting ice. The bottle labels were a confusion to her for a moment as she tried to get a grasp on her weary concentration. Then she found what she was looking for. She tumbled two small aspirin from one bottle into her palm, hoping to keep Jillian’s fever down. Then Kathryn grabbed a glass of cool water and turned back to Jillian, maneuvering herself behind the frail ten-year-old’s head and lifting it until she could manage to wrangle the medicine down the child’s throat.

  Jillian accepted the pills well enough for someone who had occasionally been too weak to swallow, and it gave Kathryn a glimmer of hope. What she wouldn’t give for the simplicity of children’s liquid medicine right then. But in the bush of Australia you had to make do with what was in your supplies, and the colorful syrup had run out a while back.

  “There now, what a good girl you are,” she praised Jillian softly, stubbornly believing that the child could somehow hear her. She spent a moment stroking her sister’s thin, pale red hair. Then she slid gingerly from the bed.

  Kathryn waited anxiously for several minutes until she was certain the child had quieted again and was resting as peacefully as she could. Then she straightened stiffly, her hands pressing into the aching curve of her lower back. She looked at her watch, trying to determine what day it was as well as the time. She had called for help almost twenty-four hours ago, but things took time out in the bush. But it should be soon. Hopefully very soon.

  Kathryn felt her exhaustion with sudden acuteness. Dizziness washed through her and she touched fingertips to her forehead in an attempt to steady herself and her swaying vision.

  “Father,” she prayed fiercely, “give me strength.” She gritted her teeth as a harsher wave of vertigo spilled over her.

  Kathryn…

  Kathryn gasped softly when the low, thick whisper reached her ears. She whirled around drunkenly, taking in the madly tilting room to see who had spoken her name.

  A macabre chill rushed her flesh.

  “Papa?” she asked breathlessly, widening her eyes in an attempt to focus.

  But no one was there but her and Jillian.

  Kathryn reached to grasp one of the spiraling bedposts, clinging to it as she searched herself for a store of strength she might not yet have tapped.

  There was none.

  Kathryn fought back tears.

  She must find the strength!

  Somehow.

  She was the only one left for her desperately ill family to depend on.

  She waited, breathing deeply, for the room to stop pitching and rolling around her. She dared not close her eyes. She would surely succumb to the persistent, lurking need to sleep that had harried her every step these last days. She simply did not have the time or the luxury for sleep. And anyway, whenever she did fall asleep, there was nothing there for her but terrible and disturbing dreams. Sometimes, like before, all-out nightmares.

  Slowly the room righted itself, becoming once again the firm, solidly built expanse of sturdy antique furnishings it had always been.

  Taking another deep breath, Kathryn took a moment to tuck a straggling tendril of hair back behind her ear. She slipped a palm against her slightly rounded stomach, wishing it would settle as the room had. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten anything, but it seemed very unimportant when the lives of her family were at risk.

  Then she took the firmest steps she could manage to the door. She was halfway along the hallway when her vision blurred again and the floor fell away with sickening speed. She collapsed to her knees and hands, jarring her joints as she realized the floor was still very much where it was supposed to be, it was merely her head and her vision leaving much to be desired.

  “Get up, Kathryn Louise Macdonough,” she commanded herself fiercely. “You’re the daughter of Connor Macdonough, the granddaughter of Fiona Macdonough. You shame the Macdonough name if you quit now!”

  Somehow, after this empowering speech, she managed to drag herself back up to her feet, using the wall as her main support. She slid herself along it so that she could tell right from left and up from down while using it for the stability her betraying eyes would not provide. She finally reached her father’s door.

  “Kathryn.”

  The whisper was louder this time. Nearer.

  She convinced herself that it had been her father after all, even though it sounded nothing like him. But the sickness could very easily have put that rough, mournful lilt into his words…couldn’t it?

  Kathryn shrugged off another foreboding chill. She had been living in a stranger’s body for well over a week now, exhaustion robbing her of all that had felt normal. A new, strange feeling seeping into her bones was not all that new or strange an occurrence to her anymore.

  She pushed herself into Connor Macdonough’s room and moved to the bed, steeling herself for the weakened image of her father. The preparation did not work. As she bent to change the cloth on his forehead, now heated through with his fever, her eyes misted with tears.

  Her father had been a large, robust man. He filled rooms with his very presence and had made stone walls vibrate with a mere laugh. But now her poor papa was but a shadow of himself. In just a week he’d lost a noticeable amount of weight from this wretched flu. His hands, which until now had still been able to toss her around despite her twenty-two years of age and full-grown womanhood, were now knobbed joints and thin, translucent skin. His merry cheeks had lost their natural color, only the occasional spike of fever making them blush.

  Kathryn cursed the pilot of the supply plane that had come out to them a little less than two weeks ago. He had brought this vile sickness with him, his simple sneezes and sniffles dooming her father and sister to suffer. The nearest medical help was much too far to drive to by conventional means, and all that rough country and dust while strapped in a car would do her family no good. No, the best thing was to wait for an airlift. Which should be soon. Hopefully very soon.

  Kathryn laid the fresh cloth on her father’s forehead, biting her lip brutally hard. She wouldn’t let herself think about the worst. Help was coming. She would go
downstairs and call once again, pestering the authorities with all she had to make them come for her family.

  The only other option would be to give up…and to bury them next to her sweet, unfortunate mother. The hard life out in this wild country had claimed her mother’s life three years earlier.

  Pain of that too-recent loss flooded her, but again she fought back the despairing thoughts. Now was not the time for mourning. Right now, she had to keep her already foggy head as clear as she could if she was to complete her rounds and make her call to civilization.

  Then, maybe, she could rest.

  For a small while.

  “Kathryn!”

  “Yes, Papa, Kathryn’s here,” she murmured automatically. She looked down at her father’s face.

  He was as still as death. There was barely breath enough in him to sustain his life—never mind to speak her name in that strong, growling whisper.

  “Who is here?” she demanded in sudden panic, clutching her father’s bed linens to steady herself as she looked around the room wildly. “Who is here?”

  Fear tightened her throat and her heart began to pound. It made her overtaxed body work harder than it should, making her weak again as vertigo struck with a vengeance.

  The air became thick around her suddenly and her nostrils flared as she tried to suck in a breath. She smelled something tart and tangy, like nutmeg. Nutmeg and a rich, dank, musty odor like a room long overdue for an airing. Her skin prickled and the hairs on the back of her arms and neck rose as a tingling sensation of stinging heat crept over her.

  “Kathryn.”

  The voice was upon her now. Behind her. Coming into her ear with warmth and nearness as if the speaker was just at her back.

  She spun around, terror clutching at her.

  There was no one.

  But she could feel heat! The heat and warmth of a person. The electric aura of a powerful, unexplained presence.

  “Oh my God, I’m going out of my mind!” Kathryn tried her damnedest to get a grip on herself, telling herself it was just exhaustion toying with her mind, fearing she was finally succumbing to the same illness as her family.

  Then heat and a suffocating thickness washed over her. Her vision went black, with spots of green floating before her. Then the spots went a luminescent yellow, like cat’s eyes did when caught between shadows and candlelight.

  A scream caught in her mouth, barricaded at her lips by something that felt like a chilled, smothering hand.

  “Kathryn, my beauty.”

  There were disembodied fingers at her throat, soft and warm—

  No! Cold now! So cold!

  The ghostly caress stroked her. She trembled helplessly as that chill touch drifted over her everywhere, her neck and throat, her breast, belly, and hip, touching against her flesh as though she did not wear any clothes at all. Kathryn tried again and again to scream, to struggle, but she was paralyzed everywhere but her mind. Who was doing this to her? Why could she not see? Had she somehow fallen asleep without realizing it and now suffered another cruel nightmare?

  No! It was all too real. Too sickeningly real.

  “Perfect.” The cloying, hoarse vocalization rang with undertones of demented pleasure. Then those fingers were at her throat again, gently palpating the wildly rushing pulse they discovered there.

  “Sleep,” the voice commanded, as rough as sand, then as smooth as glass, “sleep!”

  Kathryn crumpled lifelessly into the waiting demon’s embrace.

  “Light. Now.”

  Cronos nearly jumped out of his clammy skin when the command came out of the darkness.

  He had not even heard the Master return.

  The torch flared brightly, revealing the bulk of the Master, the fact that he was once again cloaked, and that he held a great object within the cloak’s folds.

  Cronos had to stay the urge to run forward and get a better look at the Master’s new treasure.

  “What is it, Master?” Cronos crowed, his gleeful face turned respectfully to the floor in hopes that his properly respectful subservience would win a response. “Is it a pretty treasure?”

  “It is my prettiest treasure yet, Cronos,” the Master said, his voice rolling around the room in such a way that the shadows seemed to shift eagerly to absorb it. The Master rarely deigned to speak to him, never mind use so many words in this place.

  In this way, Cronos knew the Master was pleased with that night’s plunder.

  “To the treasure tower, my lord?” Cronos asked eagerly. He dared not move without permission and there was no telling if the routine would be the usual one if this was so special a spoil.

  “Lead.”

  Cronos almost fell on his face as he scurried to obey. He felt the Master’s dark presence behind him, overwhelming and just shy of treading over him.

  It wouldn’t be the first time.

  Cronos’s toothpick legs had to coordinate their steps three times faster to stay ahead of the Master’s ground-devouring stride. One misstep on Cronos’s part and he would be a loud crunch beneath his employer’s heavy foot.

  But he did not mind. There would still be new treasure to see! Joy! What joy it was to see the Master’s new treasures. Sometimes Cronos was more ecstatic than even the Master was about his acquisitions.

  They traveled swiftly up out of the depths of the dungeons, Cronos lighting the way as they took spiraling stairs up and up and up.

  Cronos’s pallor was nearly blue-gray from lack of oxygen by the time they reached the treasure tower’s main floor.

  He doused the torch. Here there were large sconces embedded in the smooth marble walls, and nearly a hundred candles in stands between the mid-chamber’s massive marble columns.

  Now no longer dependent on Cronos to light the way, the Master strode past him, his cloak whipping the little toady hard in his wake.

  Cronos caught the flailing fabric hard in the side of his head and his valiant efforts to remain upright failed. He received a face full of marble floor, loosening several already damaged teeth.

  The Master was oblivious.

  He took to another flight of stairs, his steps a ringing clang against the ornate black iron.

  When he reached the uppermost level, he traversed the long hall to a set of colossal double doors. So huge were they that it seemed it might take five strong men on either side to push them open.

  But all it took was a momentary glitter of intent from malachite eyes. The doors swung soundlessly, easily open and the Master was not even forced to break his stride as he entered. The room beyond the intricately carved doors gleamed gaudily back at him, the bright resplendence of it making him narrow his eyes.

  There was ornate paneling upon the massive, curving walls, constructed of the purest gold and crafted by a brilliant artist who had incorporated into the design his adoration for the four seasons of the years. Golden suns and filigreed autumn leaves in multicolored gold glistened all around him.

  The entire circular floor, enormous in diameter, was carpeted with a single hand-woven rug. It was a tapestry of silken threads that had taken a madwoman all 101 years of her life to design and create. Every god and goddess known to any man, woman, or child in her world had been depicted within its weavings. Every beast of superstition and legend, every imaginary creature from all manner of folklore. The Master even saw several representations of himself crafted amusingly into the loom.

  Then there was the ceiling. It was streamed in multihued satin bunting. The dye master who had colored each magnificent bolt had been a genius out of his time. He had managed to create a palate of colors that might never again be rediscovered or even named.

  The Master strode past mounted things, things encased in protective glass, crystal, and amber. Each a treasure with remarkable history.

  But they were old curiosities to him now, and presently not attractive enough to gain his attention.

  In the center of the unique museum was a bed. It was roughly three times the size of most lar
ge beds, with feather-stuffed ticks full of the softest quills from the most unique and rarest birds. But its true value came from the fact that none of the birds had been harmed or killed because of its creation. Each feather had molted out naturally and been painstakingly collected.

  The bedspread was knitted lace made of delicate, strong webbings of silk, in a style used this once and never again.

  The Master laid his latest and by far greatest treasure upon the very center of this bed.

  Kathryn.

  She slept. He had commanded it to be so. Enchanting her into a repose like those of Aurora, Snow White, and countless other sleeping princesses of fairy tales and lore. She was a beauty beyond all their combined beauty—if a bit wan and bedraggled from her exhaustion. But all this would be remedied soon enough and she would far surpass the radiance of anything else on display in the room. He could tell just by looking at her. He was satisfied to see she was exactly as she had portrayed herself in her dreams. Her honesty was just one more sparkling detail to add to her perfection.

  “Kathryn.”

  The name rumbled from deep in his chest like an ensemble of bass range instruments brought together to serenade a waiting heart.

  Her rich, earthen brown hair would be long and naturally coiled, he knew, when not crammed into the vicious twisted tail hanging askew at the top of her head. Her face was long and strong, yet somehow delicately boned with its femininity. The eyes, when opened, would be fathomless and dove gray. She bore the lips of a seductress, able to create a luring smile or a heartbreaking pout, and when parted invitingly they could boil blood. Any and all of these would come naturally without malice, intention, or cunning. Altogether she was the ultimate jewel, made to far outshine the thousands adorning her compatriot treasures in the room.