Diana Gabaldon · @Writer_DG
16th Oct 2013 from TwitLonger
#DailyLines #MOBY #WRITTENInMYOwnHEARTSBlood #Book8 #OutMARCH25th #dontgetbetweenamothertigerandhercub
“Whassat, Mummy? Mummy, I scared, I SCARED!”
“And you think I’m not?” Bree said under her breath, heart in her mouth. “It’s OK, baby,” she said aloud, and pressed her foot to the floor. “We’re just going to get Jem.”
The car slewed to a stop on the gravel, and she leapt out, but dithered for a moment, needing urgently to rush toward the building, where sirens and lights were going off over an open door at the side, but unable to leave Mandy alone in the car. She could hear the rush of water down the spillway.
“Come with me, sweetheart,” she said, hastily undoing the seat-belt. “That’s right, here, let me carry you…” Even as she spoke, she was looking here, there, from the lights into the darkness, every nerve she had screaming that her son was here, he was _here_, he had to be…rushing water…her mind filled with horror, thinking of Jem falling into the spillway, or Jem in the service tunnel—God, why hadn’t she gone there first? Of course Rob Cameron would have put him there, he had the keys, he…but the lights, the sirens…
She’d almost made it—at a dead run, impeded only slightly by thirty pounds of toddler—when she saw a big man at the edge of the drive, thrashing through the bushes with a stick or something, cursing a blue streak.
“What do you think you’re _doing_?” she bellowed. Mandy, alarmed anew, let out a screech like a scalded baboon, and the man jumped, whirling to face them, stick raised.
“What the bleedin’ hell are you doing here?” he said, so taken aback that he spoke almost normally. “You’re supposed to be—“
Bree had peeled Mandy off. Setting her daughter down behind her, she prepared to take the man apart with her bare hands, if necessary. Evidently this intent showed, because the man dropped the stick and abruptly vanished into the darkness.