Raintree: Oracle (Raintree 4)

She’d barely had time to be angry with Ryder for not telling her the truth about Cassidy, but considering what she’d seen in the vision it was hard to blame him. He was a father protecting his daughter. She could argue that Cassidy didn’t need to be protected from her or her Raintree family, but Ryder didn’t know that.

She lost sight of him for a moment when he crested a small hill. What if she went over that hill and he was nowhere in sight? How would she know where to go? She topped the hill and there he was, farther ahead than he had been before. Lights from a small cottage glimmered directly before her. The front door stood wide-open. It was a nice enough evening, not too hot or too cold, but somehow she knew the open door was not normal.

Echo reached the cottage a few minutes after Ryder. He knelt beside a woman who was lying on the floor in an unnatural position. As she watched, he cradled her head and lifted it carefully. The woman was still alive, but a deep gash in her head was bleeding badly.

Ryder glanced back at Echo. She could see the pain in his eyes, the anger. “It was Maisy who took my daughter. Help me find her.”

Maisy? The librarian? That was wrong on so many levels. Echo shook her head. “How can I do that?” It wasn’t near cold enough to snow, and even if she could control the weather with her emotions, it was hardly a gift she’d honed.

Without rising, he offered his hand. She took it.

What she saw in his frantic and disjointed thoughts made her jerk away from him.

“Don’t,” she whispered.

“That’s not what I asked you to see. Where’s Cassidy? Where’s my daughter!”

“I don’t know.”

“Is she safe?”

It was the older woman on the floor who said as she tried to sit up, “Cassidy is fine, for now. You will not see her again until the first night of the full moon. Tomorrow night.”

“I can’t leave her with that woman for a full day!” Ryder shouted. The rafters shook, but

the injured woman was unmoved.

“It does not matter what you do or say, you will not see her until that time.” The woman grimaced. “Maisy will not harm her until then. She wants...she wants...” Pain and terror filled the woman’s eyes. “She wants what Sybil wanted, and she is willing to do...the same.”

Echo realized that this woman was Sybil’s mother, Cassidy’s grandmother. She cared for and loved the child her own daughter had tried to kill. She held the hand of the man who had killed that daughter.

The injured woman continued. “You must find a way to save Cassidy without...” Suspicious eyes cut to Echo. “Without doing what you think must be done.”

“There’s no need to talk in circles around me,” Echo said. “I saw more than enough when I took Ryder’s hand.”

She didn’t want to think about what she’d seen, what might be.

Ryder without control, without the talismans that kept him, as he said, dampened.

Without the stone at his neck and the leather band at his wrist, Ryder Duncan was a monster.

Chapter 16

Rye called Bryna’s gentleman friend to collect and care for her. He refused to tell McManus anything about what had happened, and so did Bryna. Fortunately, the old man was accustomed to keeping secrets, and did not balk when others protected their own.

It was odd to see the man he normally knew as one of three friends who drank together and told bad jokes and argued about politics in this position. McManus held Bryna’s hand. He comforted her, and did not press to know more as he helped her pack a small bag. He walked out the front door with that bag in one hand and Bryna’s arm caught in the other.

There was no sound of an engine after they’d disappeared from view. They would walk. McManus’s little cottage was not far away.

With Bryna in good hands, Rye was free to concentrate on his daughter and her kidnapper. Was Maisy working alone, or did she have an accomplice? Or two, or twenty? He didn’t know what he was up against, and he did not dare ask anyone in Cloughban for help. He would have trusted Maisy, if Bryna hadn’t told him what she’d done. Why hadn’t he seen the danger for himself? What other truths hid from him?

He fingered the stone that lay heavy at his throat. Once he removed the talismans he’d know without doubt whom he could trust. He would see all.

Echo stood silently near the door. Poised to run? He couldn’t blame her. This was not her mess, not her concern. Bryna and McManus were long gone when he finally looked squarely at her and said, “Go.”

She shook her head. Stubborn woman.

“I don’t need you,” he insisted.