Stealing Kathryn. Jacquelyn Frank
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