Jacque crouched beside me and placed a warm hand on my shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” he said, looking down at me apologetically with dark brows drawn tight, “I didn’t mean to catch you with such force, but you were running wickedly fast.”
The pain exploded through two of my ribs, making my back bow. A second later, almost as if it were not my own body, I could breathe again. I was fine. Sucking in a sail-ful of air, but then I coughed and eventually gagged.
What had just happened? I curled my body around Jacque’s bent legs, trying not to vomit. Dear Lord, had I just imagined the pain? For it was gone. Completely. Utterly. Gone. My mind searched for information, trying to recall if I had truly been hurt at all. My strength was back. I swatted his hand away and sat up.
“What—what—what—?”
His face darkened as he looked at his hand that I had rejected. “What, Violet, is the question you want to ask?” His voice was too low, too emotionless.
“What are you doing here?”
“I heard about Lexington. I came as soon as I could.”
“Why?”
He looked at me incredulously, as if I were mentally slow, but then he arched his brow. “I could tell you that I’m supposed to be here. I was training those militiamen who fired on those British Regulars. But that is not quite the truth. I could tell you that I’m here to gather intelligence for my country or that I wanted to join the fight myself, but, again, that is not quite the truth. Each of those statements are a little truthful, but not—”
“So what is the truth, Jacque?”
After I had said his name one of his eyes slightly twitched, but he recovered to his cold countenance in a second. “To protect your husband.”
My mouth might have been gaping for a few moments before he murmured, “You have made your choice abundantly clear to me, and, honestly,” his shoulders slumped, “I don’t blame you. Mathew is the better man. He is kind and virtuous, and I am . . . ah, so old.”
“So you came to protect him? Really? Then why aren’t you with my husband now?”
“The British Regulars are resting in your Concord Commons for God knows how long. Their officer in charge is not a swift decision maker, so they might be there for a year or more.” His smile widened at his own humor.
“You think Mathew doesn’t need your protection right now, that nothing more will escalate while the Regulars are in the Commons?”
“Oui. Besides, I needed to,” he paused and swallowed, “tell you more about your current condition. Mathew should know too and soon. He will grow suspicious if you don’t.”
“What are you talking about? My condition?”
His lips pursed, and he talked with his voice thick with anger. “You never let me explain.”
“How on earth can you explain why you poisoned me? I know why. You were trying to trick me.”
“No trick.” His nose flared. “How has the running been lately, Violet? Didn’t you notice that you can run faster now? That you can see better? You can even hear better? Your ability to smell is massively improved, and sometimes, as odd as it sounds, you can hear, see, or scent a person’s emotions. Tell me you have noticed.”
I swallowed and straightened my back, not wanting to tell him anything.
His smile widened. “Violet, chér—er, Violet, you are not the same person you were before you drank the water I gave you.”
“Yes, I know. You poisoned me. I will never trust you again.”
He shook his head, a small smile still annoyingly visible. “I didn’t poison you.”
“I almost died, you liar!”
“You did die,” he said it so calmly I almost didn’t hear him. He leaned closer to me. “You know you did. You felt your heart stop. You couldn’t breathe anymore—”
“It was the poison you gave me. It made me—”
“For the last time, I didn’t poison you! I love you. Why would I want to kill you? I love you as I’ve never loved another person. I thought—I thought—it doesn’t matter what I thought. It just matters that you finally listen to me. I didn’t poison you, and from here on out you will never be poisoned. Or, more to the point, you may be poisoned but you will never die from it. I know.” He snorted.
I wanted to push him over. But I held my anger in check. “What are you talking about?”
He snorted again and shook his head. “The water you drank was the water I saved from the sacred Indian spring. You are immortal now, like me. You will never age either.”
I used my hands behind me and my feet to scoot away from him, shaking my own head.
“Don’t believe me?”
I laughed. “How could I? I never noticed that you were mad.”
At that he laughed very hard. He leaned his head back, as my husband had earlier, and actually fell backward because he was laughing so violently. I took a few more crablike crawls away from him, but then he straightened quickly, pointing a pistol at me.
I scrambled away, but he pounced. He pinned me down, the pistol’s barrel directly on my breastbone, right over my heart. He pressed the gun so hard into my chest that I could feel the earth beneath seem to make the same shape of the barrel through my back.
“Do you still wear the gem I gave you?” he whispered.
Panicked, I tried to push the gun away, my throat tightened and my heart pounded so loud I was certain he heard it. But no matter how much I fought with both my arms, his one hand remained steadfast to hold the pistol over my heart. His legs held mine down as well. I tried to buck him off, but my body just crashed more into his.
“Fighting me won’t help. I’ve had almost two hundred years to gain my strength, and at the risk of sounding like a braggart, you have no chance of escape. Violet, do you still wear the necklace?”
I nodded slowly, hoping this might be the answer to calm his craziness.
With his one free hand he gently slid his fingers along my neck, feeling for the silver, then retracted it from between my breasts. The sun just then peeked its way through the clouds and the dark blue gem glimmered like the Atlantic Ocean might if it were iced. He smiled wistfully at the blue diamond.
Then he looked down at me with that damned small smile. “Mayhap you still have affections for me?”
I wasn’t about to say anything, not sure what might free me or chain me closer in his iron-strong grip. He shrugged, as if my not answering didn’t matter. His legs tightened all the more against my thighs, pinning me further to the ground. One of his hands still held the glowing necklace fluttering in the space between us, and the other hand held his gun to my heart.
“This will sting,” he warned.
Frantically I tried to pry the pistol from him, but in the next second the excruciating bang from his pistol sounded in my ears. Gunpowder smoke filled my nostrils, then there was nothing.
Chapter Twenty-Three: The Rub