Storm Child (Dangerous Friends Book 3) Read online

  STORM CHILD

  Jennifer Young

  Author Copyright Jennifer Young 2017

  Cover Art: Elle J Rossi www.ejrdigitalart.com

  Editor: Christine McPherson

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment and may not be resold or given away.

  This story is a work of fiction. The characters are figments of my imagination and any resemblance to anyone living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Some of the locations used are real. Some are invented.

  Police Scotland is a real organisation but the personnel, structures and procedures in this story are entirely fictitious. All other organisations are imaginary.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  As always, there are many, many people to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for their help and support in producing this book, particularly Christine McPherson, for editing and Elle Rossi for cover design

  A special mention also goes to the fellow writers who have provided moral support and constructive criticism along my self-publishing journey, in particular the great support network generated by the Romantic Novelists’ Association. There are too many to name you all, but I must give special thanks to my ever-helpful and constructive Beta Buddies - Amanda, Kate B, Kate S, Liz, Lorraine, Pauline, Sally, Sara and Suzy - for general and specific support.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  About Jennifer Young

  Chapter 1

  The deer came out of nowhere.

  Snow, heavier and hours earlier than forecast, swallowed up the tarmac ahead of us. A vile wind swatted flakes off the sparse verge of the moorland road, smearing them across the windscreen as the wipers tried in vain to beat them down. And on the whitening expanse ahead of us, there was a deer.

  Marcus jammed on the brakes, jerked the steering wheel. Losing its grip on the surface, the car slid sideways. The animal’s brown flank flashed across the windscreen as we skidded past and, bouncing onto the road in a flurry of snowflakes and confusion, a second deer turned its wide-eyed, fearful stare on us.

  I screamed. Beside me, Marcus — normally so calm — swore, and spun the wheel again. Caught between the two panic-stricken beasts as if on some nightmare fairground ride, the car slid on its wild way, swung around once more, and rocked like a drunk, backwards, forwards, sideways. I closed my eyes as my stomach lurched, my body jolting as we dropped, bounced, rolled off the road. With a rush, the airbag burst from the dashboard, slamming me back against the seat and at last, in silence, we came to rest.

  ‘Bronte! Are you all right?’

  I opened my eyes. All I could see from the window was whiteness, all I could feel was the protesting hum of the still-running engine, and all I could think of was that somehow we were still alive. ‘I’m fine. Shaken. You?’

  ‘Me, too.’ Marcus’s voice, as always, was even and steady.

  Pain shivered through me as I turned to look at him, sitting upright in the driver’s seat with a frown creasing his face. He, like me, must be catching his breath, mentally checking each part of his body for damage, wondering what the hell we would do next. ‘Thank God you were going slowly.’

  He nodded, but his mind was elsewhere. Silhouetted against the weird white world into which we’d emerged, his profile betrayed concern.

  ‘What now?’ I wiped a hand across my eyes, but the maddening white dervish-dance of the snowflakes didn’t clear. Later, when the narrowness of our escape dawned upon me, I would give way to shock.

  Marcus felt beneath the airbag, found the ignition, killed the engine. Silence, now absolute, stifled us. ‘We get out.’

  ‘Out?’

  ‘We can’t stay here. This is set in for the night. Didn’t you see the forecast?’

  ‘But we can’t go out in it!’ I looked again at the nauseous whirl of white, as if it might change. ‘It would be insane!’

  He dragged his phone out of his pocket, flicked it on, and shook his head. In this dip between the mountains, we’d rarely managed to get a signal for the whole weekend. ‘We don’t have a choice.’

  ‘Someone will come past.’ Even as I spoke, I knew I was being wildly optimistic. Even in good weather, hardly anyone passed along this remote stretch of road. The storm that swept so viciously down from the hills had been forecast, and we’d been running for home ahead of it. No-one would be mad enough to take this route now.

  ‘It’s unlikely. And if they do, they won’t see us down here.’

  I massaged my jolted neck with chilled fingers, turning to try and make sense of what little I could discern in the wild world outside. We’d landed right way up, six feet below the road, and any tracks we’d left to point towards us must already have been scrubbed from the tarmac by the scouring wind. Marcus was right. If we stayed where we were, we’d freeze to death.

  ‘Can we get to the cottage? It’s not far.’

  ‘It’s a couple of miles. That’s our best chance, if we stick to the road and don’t lose one another.’ Indecision beset him, but only for a second. ‘Let’s get up to the road. If anyone does go past, I damn well want them to see us.’ He wrenched open the driver’s door, allowing a violent white devil of snow inside. ‘Come on.’

  I tried my own door, fighting the air bag. ‘It’s jammed.’

  Striding round the car, he lent his considerable strength from the outside, while I shoved from within. As the door grated open, he reached an arm in to help me out. ‘Sure you’re okay?’

  The blizzard slapped me in the face as I emerged. Legs like jelly; a heart that quivered; a brain that was only just beginning to grasp how perilous our position was. Despite the full set of cold weather gear I’d been wearing when we’d set out for a springtime walk, I shivered as I pulled my scarf around my face, reaching into my pocket for my gloves. But my body worked, after a fashion. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’ Once I was safely out, he went to the back of the car and tried the boot of his ancient Mercedes, once, twice. ‘Dammit. Jammed.’ He struck the metal with the flat of his hand in frustration, not wasting any more effort on a third attempt to open it. ‘Next time I’ll put my gloves and scarf in the back seat, not the boot. And the next car I have will be a hatchback.’

  I tucked my scarf into my jacket and pulled the zip up to my neck, but I couldn’t shield myself from an icy bolt of dread. Marcus was the calmest, most rational man I’d ever met, familiar with fear yet a stranger to panic, but now his brows puckered in concern. We had blankets in the boot. We had survival bags. We had everything we needed to save us, but the dent, right across the lock, rendered them instantly useless.

&n
bsp; He turned away from the futility of force. His was a big, solid car, and time wasn’t on our side. ‘Hold onto me, and don’t let go. We could lose one another in this.’

  I looped my arm through his as we clambered up the bank onto the road, and balanced on the edge of it. The wind hit us, a violent grip that would have thrown me off my feet without his restraining hand.

  ‘Too much to hope for a signal,’ he shouted above its roar, but nevertheless he got out his phone to check it once more, as if we had a prayer of making contact. Barely able to see the screen in the glaring whiteness, I did the same.

  ‘No service.’ He pocketed his phone. His gloveless fingers were already red.

  ‘This is April.’ The cold closed in on me. ‘This isn’t supposed to happen.’

  ‘We should have come down off the hill sooner.’ Marcus’s voice was grim. ‘I thought we’d allowed plenty of time to get ahead of it.’

  The weather forecasters had promised the Scottish Highlands a brutal twelve hours, an intense overnight storm with heavy snow down to low levels. We’d listened, and planned on being safely tucked up in the cottage we’d borrowed from friends long before it was meant to break, settled in front of the fire with comfort food and a glass or two of wine. Now the weather gods had played us false, throwing everything at us and catching us unawares, still two miles from safety.

  ‘What’s that? Is it a car?’

  The wind howled, loud across the bare hillside. ‘I don’t know!’ Marcus struggled to be heard above it.

  In a moment’s lull as the storm paused to regroup. a low groaning rose from somewhere out of sight.

  ‘Oh God, Marcus. You must have hit the deer. It’s in pain. It’s hurt. Oh, God!’ My heart turned in misery at the thought of the poor wounded animal, suffering in the snow, dying, slowly, in pain. ‘We have to put it out of its misery.’

  ‘Not just now. I care more about you and me than I do about a deer. Sorry.’ He paused, turned his head, waited for the wind to die away again. ‘Anyway, I didn’t touch it.’

  ‘But listen to it. Listen!’ The almost human moan persisted, dragged out from the gut of a creature in pain. I let go of him and put my hands to my ears to spare myself.

  He heard, turning towards the tortured sound. ‘Jesus! That isn’t a deer. That’s a person!’ He took a couple of steps along the road towards the sound, turned, and peered into the white heart of the blizzard.

  I pushed away the hair that the wind had whipped across my eyes, and stared in the same direction. The whiteout had eased, or my eyes had become used to it. Whirling snow obscured the detail of the landscape, but I could distinguish its bigger features, monochrome on the bigger canvas. Snow was building against the exposed side of the car and, ten yards beyond us, a slumped figure lay curled in a stream-dug gully, like an abandoned sack.

  ‘Stay here!’ Marcus was already scrambling down the bank.

  Ignoring the instruction, I followed him, slipping and sliding on the treacherous surface. The ground beneath our feet turned from snow to boggy slush as we slithered down to the bottom of the gully, but the worst of the wind roared above us, so that at least we could hear ourselves speak.

  ‘What can we do? Is he hurt?’

  ‘Keep listening for a car.’ Marcus dropped to his knees beside the figure, turned it over, brushing away the thin white coverlet of snow from a man — no, barely more than a boy — dressed in an inadequate jacket and jeans, shod in trainers. Blond hair was plastered across his mud-smeared cheekbones, and his wet clothes clung like an ill-fitting skin.

  I’d unlaced my boots in the car, anticipating comfort and security and the end of an adventure, and now freezing water seeped into them as I balanced on the side of the bank. The chill that struck me hard must have struck the young man harder; his eyes were closed, his face dirty white against the snow. His lips parted in a long moan, much fainter than before, as if he’d given everything and now he had nothing left.

  ‘It’s okay. We’re here. We’ll help you.’ Marcus was going through the motions, offering futile comfort. He’d slid an arm around the youth to lift him, but laid him back down again, a tacit admission of defeat.

  ‘Is he badly hurt?’

  ‘Hypothermia.’ Marcus sat back on his heels, looking up at me. His expression was serious. ‘I don’t know if there’s anything we can do for him. He’s far gone. We need to try and get him somewhere better than this, if he’s to have any chance.’ As he spoke, he was peeling off his scarlet jacket, trying to pull it round the youth’s shoulders.

  ‘The boot. If we can break open the boot, there are blankets and—’

  ‘It’s jammed hard. I don’t know if it’s worth wasting the effort. And even if we can get them, I don’t know if it’ll help.’

  In the white wasteland, my heart rebelled against nature. We couldn’t give up on him. ‘We could get him to the car. At least get him out of the wind.’

  ‘Good idea. We don’t have any better options. And then we have to go for help and hope someone gets to him in time.’

  ‘We can’t leave him!’

  ‘We can’t stay here with him. We’ll all die.’

  I stepped towards him. Chilled mud overtopped my boots as I sank deeper into the bog. ‘I’ll help.’

  ‘I’ll do it. He weighs next to nothing. There’s no point in both of us getting wet.’ He slid an arm under the youth’s body, lifted him up. ‘Come on, pal. Let’s get you into some shelter.’ And then a pause, as the wind dropped again to torment us with hope. ‘Bronte! A car!’

  I’d heard the low growling as the car ground a slow route through the thickening snow, and was already turning to scramble back up the bank, held back by the weight of my unlaced, waterlogged boots. Headlights, even in daylight, surely failing to pick out much in the heavy snow, confirmed that we were saved. I stepped out into the road, waved my arms, watching as it rounded the bend. ‘Stop! Stop!’

  The car slowed. Reaching me, the vehicle slowed to a halt. Relief coursed through me, warming the chilled blood in my veins.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ The driver wound down his window. ‘Got a problem, lass?’

  Almost drunk with sudden joy, I gabbled out our story. ‘We nearly hit a deer and came off the road. And there’s a man down there. He needs help, or he’ll freeze to death!’

  The car doors flew open. Two men, dressed for the weather, jumped out. ‘Where?’

  ‘There.’ I pointed down the slope to where Marcus was struggling to drag the man upwards.

  ‘We’re on it.’ One of them jumped down and took over, relieving Marcus of his burden, lifting the still, cold figure as if it were a sack, carrying it up to the car. The other stayed, a restraining hand on my arm. ‘Where did you find him?’

  I calmed myself. ‘Down there, trying to shelter. He’s badly hurt. He needs a doctor as soon as he can.’

  ‘Thank God you found him. We’ll look after him.’

  They had him in the car by then, one of them in the back with him, the other sliding into the driver’s seat. ‘Looks like you saved a life, hen. Well done.’ He slammed the door, turned the key in the ignition.

  I stared, bewildered. Encumbered by the cold, Marcus was clambering up the slope behind me. ‘But we—’

  ‘We don’t have room for you. We’ll send someone.’

  ‘Send someone?’ Marcus and I could both fit into the car. Not comfortably, but who would care about that when there were lives at stake? ‘No, wait! Don’t go!’

  The car shot forward, its wheels spinning on the slushy surface. The wind picked up again, the snow lashing my eyes so that all that I saw of them as they moved off was the last flicker of Marcus’s red winter jacket before our supposed saviours were gone, disappearing down the road and leaving us with no comfort but the tail lights of their car in the monochrome landscape.

  It was only a moment before those, too, disappeared into the storm.

  Chapter 2

  ‘What the—?’ Marcus appeared beside me, s
taring with equal futility into the whiteness.

  ‘They didn’t stop.’ I put my hand to my head, in bewilderment. ‘They said there wasn’t enough room. They—’

  ‘We have to move.’ He looked down at himself, soaked through, in walking trousers and a thick sweater. In offering assistance to the injured man, he’d been down on his knees in the bog, and without the protection of his jacket, he was already shivering. ‘It’s two miles to the cottage. We have a chance. A slim one, but it’s all we have.’

  ‘They said they’d send help,’ I said, still staring after the car even though it was long gone. ‘But it’ll be too late. Won’t it?’

  He avoided the question. Our chances of making those two miles narrowed with every second we stood on the road, caught in the trap of our indecision. ‘There was a house. We passed it, about half a mile back.’

  I cast my mind back to the cottage, standing alone in the bleak landscape, close to the road. ‘Yes. But it had no lights on.’ But at four o’clock on an April afternoon, why would it have?

  Two miles we might not manage to a place we could be sure of, or a quarter that distance to somewhere that might be deserted? All the while, as we frittered away precious seconds on the roadside, neither of us able to take the decision that might win or lose us our lives, the wind whipped up fresh funnels of fine snow to torment us.

  That decided me. It was the wind that would kill us, leaching away the warmth that was all that kept us alive. I felt it already, the chill that froze my feet inside my boots. I turned and seized Marcus’s arm as he stood shivering behind me, and he took a moment to respond.

  Those were the early signs of hypothermia.

  ‘Come on!’ Terror rose within me as I understood how desperate our position was. ‘Get walking!’

  ‘Follow the road.’ A sense of urgency returned to him. ‘We mustn’t go off the road.’

  ‘We won’t. Now come along. We don’t have long.’ I linked my arm through his. The lines of the landscape blurred into devilish whiteness as we stumbled along, guided by ghostly red and white snow poles. Around us, the wind sculpted snow into shifting dunes of white, covering the car’s tracks so completely that I questioned my judgement. Only Marcus’s missing jacket offered any evidence that there had been someone with us. ‘It isn’t that far. Half a mile isn’t far. It won’t take long.’