The God of the Hive - Laurie R. King [8]
“I don’t know what you’re about, but kidnapping is a felony.”
“You’re merely making a house call. Or, boat call,” he amended. “I intend to pay you, generously. I swear to you, neither I nor the wounded man have done anything remotely illegal.” Yet.
She studied his face, and the anger in her own subsided with her fear. “If you’ve done nothing illegal and yet he’s been shot, why not go to the police?”
“As I said, the situation is delicate at present. A misunderstanding. And being far from home, difficult to clear up.”
“Where is home?”
“Manchester,” he said promptly, and then they were at the boat, and Gordon was reaching down to help the doctor aboard.
“Captain,” Holmes said before the fisherman could speak, “this is Doctor Henning. However, I think it may be best for everyone if we leave our names out of this. If she does not know our names, she need not worry about the consequences of speaking freely.”
Gordon stared at the petite figure at the other end of his arm. “This is a doctor?”
Chapter 6
The Reverend Thomas Brothers, seated before the peat fire in the Orkney cottage, smiled freely at the wording of the telegram MacAuliffe had brought him:
IF HEALTH PERMITS MEET ME TUESDAY ST ALBANS GUNDERSON HAS DETAILS.
Health did not permit, not really. But with Gunderson at his side, he might be able to make it—and the chance to actually meet The Friend after all this time made it worth the effort. Besides which, as any leader knew, it was never a good idea to reveal weakness to one’s lessers, not if one might need them for whatever the future held.
Three days, to make his way down the length of the country; three days to reconsider what failure meant.
If failure it was. One thing Brothers knew was that the Fates took a mysterious hand in all human acts. If his long and laboriously constructed Great Work had fallen apart, if the blood on the Stenness altar stone had failed to unite with the timing of the solar eclipse, if an accumulation of blood and Energies had spilt out for naught, then either the Fates were cruel, or he had not understood the demands of the Work.
He wished he had someone to talk this over with. MacAuliffe had as much sense as one of the sheep bleating outside the door, and Gunderson was little more than a useful tool. Yolanda would be the ideal ear, willing, if uncomprehending, but his one-time wife was dead now, in what he had thought would be a key element of his Work.
Which brought him in a circle again: What had happened?
Brothers shifted in the chair in front of the smoke-blackened stones, wincing as the sharp pain grabbed at his breast. The powerful homebrew in the glass helped take the edge off it, but the prospect of travel was not a happy one.
Gunderson would help. With all kinds of problems.
Chapter 7
The clever young man stood at the wide window with a glass in his hand, looking through his reflection at midnight London. Standing as he was, his head’s shadow engulfed most of the houses of Parliament, the white streak over his temple overlaid the face of its famous clock, his chest engulfed Westminster Bridge and the hungry, flat, greasy River Thames, while his raised right elbow rested on the palace of the archbishop.
God of all he surveyed.
His presence in this place was a quirk, an anomaly that would have surprised all who knew him, were they ever to be invited here. Grey and invisible minions of government did not live among the warehouses of London’s South Bank, no more than did men whose ambitions encompassed government as his reflection encompassed Whitehall. Not that any of his colleagues knew of his ambitions, any more than they knew of his home.
The building had belonged to his grandfather, who had lost it—or, from whom it had been stolen—along with the rest of the family inheritance. The grandson was on medical leave in 1917, following the bullet that left him with a streak of white in his hair, when his restless wanderings