To Have A Heart (A New Adventure Begins - Star Elite 7)

“Move.”

“Which way?”

Mallory sighed when Callum didn’t answer. She winced when the loud retort of his gun being fired made her ears ache. She eyed the woods and picked the route she suspected she could climb through, and half-crawled toward it. When she stopped, Mallory found Callum directly behind her.

“We must get to Horace,” Callum whispered.

“Where is he?”

“It is impossible to tell in these woods. Just keep moving and try to find that path we were on. Once we locate that we can identify which way we need to go to get to him. We cannot allow them to take him,” Callum hissed. “He is our only way out of here.”

Mallory mentally retraced which direction she felt they had taken and carefully chose the next escape route. Crawling on her hands and knees, she twisted and yanked at clothing as she forced a path through the thick bushes. Her knees were sore. Her palms hurt from the sharp thorns and twigs, and she knew her face had scratches on it, but she wasn’t going to stop. She daren’t stop. Callum wouldn’t allow her to stop. Each time she paused to look back at him, he urged her on.

“Where is Sir Hugo?”

Callum shook his head. He couldn’t reply because of the hail of bullets that slammed into the tree directly above them. The guards were close enough to hear Mallory and had pinpointed exactly where she was hiding.

“We are almost out of shot,” Callum whispered when they stopped again several minutes later.

Mallory’s gaze dropped to his gun. “What do we do?”

Before he could answer her, the woods all around them came alive, but not because of any woodland creature. The number of shots being taken suddenly tripled. The loud booms blasted all around them as Callum and Mallory huddled together on the floor. Callum listened to the noise and knew something had changed. The last time he had heard such a cacophony he had been on a battlefield in the midst of war. The ground shivered beneath the force of the number of bodies hitting the ground. The trees groaned and cracked alarmingly. Bushes danced about as bullets tore through them. All about them, men cried out in pain as bullets sliced through flesh and ended lives.

Mallory clamped her fists over her ears and prayed she would live. She prayed that Callum would live. That they would see the rest of the day, and Horace too.

When the gunfire strayed closer than he would have liked, Callum threw himself at Mallory and hunched protectively over her. It was the only protection he could give her without a gun to defend them with. The only bullets he had left were the two he needed to keep – for now at least.

“I think reinforcements have arrived. There are more guns, but they aren’t all firing at us,” Callum whispered. “Men are still dying, which means someone is firing on them for us.”

“Sir Hugo?” Mallory wanted to cry at the thought that the man had been that meticulous in his planning.

Callum pursed his lips. “It might be the locals, or someone else Sir Hugo knows. That isn’t Sir Hugo. There are far too many guns being fired.”

Mallory threw him a filthy glare. They sounded all the same to her.

Callum grinned. “Do you not hear the blasts? Listen.”

Mallory sighed, but did as instructed because there wasn’t anything else to do. It wasn’t until she concentrated on the noise that she was able to identify two separate bursts of gunfire. It wasn’t constant as she would expect had it come from one source. One burst of gunfire was answered by another. The pause between the bursts was slight, but there. Someone was firing on Melrose’s guards who, if their cries were anything to go by, were being cut down where they stood.

Quite a while later, the gunfire began to ease. Occasional bursts filtered down to a single shot which was eventually silenced. Only when he was sure it was safe did Callum lift his head so he could emit a few strange noises. He waited. When nothing happened, he repeated the noises.

Mallory gasped when the bushes beside them immediately parted. It was odd the way the twisted branches eased open with nothing more than a slight rustle. A hard face appeared through the narrow gap. Mallory winced when Callum slammed a hand over her mouth to silence her scream. He winked at her and placed a finger over his mouth to warn her to keep quiet.

Mallory blinked owlishly at the stranger now grinning at them. To her consternation, he winked broadly at her before disappearing again leaving Mallory to stare blankly at Callum.

“It isn’t safe for us to move right now. They have a few gunmen to find. Don’t move, and try not to talk,” Callum murmured into her ear.

Mallory did just that. Unfortunately, with nothing much to distract her from the position she was in. Callum might not have even noticed how they were lying, but she was shockingly aware of how his weight was pressing her into the ground. She could feel every twitch as he moved to try to look for the stranger through the branches all about them. It reminded her that her life had been devoid of human contact. So much so, she wasn’t at all sure what she should say or do in such a situation. She knew that she should ask him to move not least because she was struggling to breathe beneath his weight, but he was protecting her from the gunfire. In fact, there wasn’t a part of her that was vulnerable to the gunmen. She was the safest person in the woods and knew it.

Until the ground beneath them began to tremble beneath a new noise.

“It’s a horse,” Callum said. “Someone is riding through the woods.”

Mallory winced.

“Get up,” he growled, rolling away from her.

Before she could move, Callum hauled her upright. The second his head appeared above the bramble, the woods around them exploded once more.