Finn was shaking his head.
“No, no, no! That is not what happened. We were hungry, we came upon your place and begged for food.”
“That’s not how I remember it,” Sarah said. John fidgeted and she forced herself not to look at him. She wanted to reassure him, like she had so many times in the past for misfortunes that mattered not at all in the big scheme of things. Her whole body ached to tell him everything would be okay, to please not fret. But she knew not only that the words were a lie and would likely be seen as one even by John, but that they were the trigger by which this madman would pull to end all their lives.
“Do you remember this?” Finn wrenched the shirt away from his shoulder to reveal an angry red mark the size of a tangerine, puckered around the edges on his upper arm. He covered the wound roughly, as if suddenly embarrassed to have shown so much. He walked to Sarah and held the knife to her chin.
“If the brat moves, shoot him,” he said over his shoulder.
Suddenly, Finn reached down and grabbed David by the shirtfront and jerked him to his feet. With his hands behind him, David was defenseless but he met the gypsy’s stare.
“Bet you live in a big mansion back in America, huh?” Finn spoke with his face mere inches from David’s. “Bet you have three cars, don’t you?”
David stared at him. “Go to hell,” he said.
Finn flushed angrily. “Hold ’im,” he said. The same man who had hit David set his gun aside and held David from behind.
Sarah tried to put herself between David and Finn.
“Please, don’t,” she said before Finn checked her hard in the jaw with his elbow. Blood gushed out of her mouth and she collapsed to a sitting position on the bed.
“Mom!” The anguish in John’s voice brought Sarah out of the daze of pain that clouded her head. She looked up and saw Finn position his knife against David’s chest and then draw it slowly from one side to the other, through his thin jacket and the soiled tee shirt beneath it. Blood blossomed in large crimson blots in the knife’s trail.
Sarah heard David moan loudly at the same time she saw the blur of brown and blue as John launched himself onto Finn’s back in a flurry of fists and kicking. She heard Finn’s grunt of surprise and saw him reach up to dislodge the boy from his back, his hand still holding the knife dripping with David’s blood.
It all happened so fast.
She reached for the butt of the Glock in Finn’s waistband that was now eye level with her and without bothering to pull it free from his trousers fired three rounds. He screamed and jerked convulsively. She wrenched the gun out as he fell, the knife clattering to the floor ahead of him, and shot the armed man in the doorway. She turned her attention to the gypsy holding David and pointed the gun at him.
“No, missus!” he cried, looking at his rifle as he spoke and clearly gauging his chances of reaching it.
John scrambled off Finn’s thrashing body and grabbed the rifle. He picked up the dead gypsy’s gun too and then turned back to Finn and fished the knife out from under his twitching body. He stood there, panting, holding the two rifles and the knife in his arms as if trying to remember something.
“Untie him,” Sarah said to the gypsy near David. The man nodded vigorously and quickly untied David who put his hands to his bleeding chest. “John, give your Dad some of that bedding and help him press it against his wound. David, you look like you’re going to pass out?” David collapsed into a sitting position onto the bed.
“I’ll live,” he said hoarsely. “Is he dead?”
She jabbed the muzzle of the gun in the direction of the remaining gypsy.
“Check him,” she said.
The man held his hands up and stepped over to Finn’s body, now quiet. He knelt down, listened to his chest, and then looked up at Sarah.
“Dead as a cod,” he said.
“John, see if the door will lock,” Sarah said, holding her gun steady on the gypsy. “You,” she said to the gypsy.
“Name’s Mick.”
“I don’t care what your name is,” Sarah said. “Move to the front door. Don’t touch the doorknob.”
They could hear loud voices outside the bedroom door.
“Finn? You okay in there?”
“I’m not gonna hurt you, missus,” Mick said, grinning at her.
Why was the bastard smiling at her? Were they all demented?
John sat on the bed where his father was lying and held a folded up sheet to his wound. The collected rifles and knife were in a pile at his feet.
Sarah stood in front of the back window and braced her arms together, holding the gun on the man.
“You are going to tell anyone outside that door to back off,” she said to him. “You are going to tell them—”
“Mom, look out!
Sarah heard the noise behind her and instinctively turned toward it. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Mick, the gypsy, moving fast in her direction but she could only deal with what was in front of her—a large, bearded man pointing a shotgun at her from the window.
Sarah dove to the floor while firing blindly at him, three, four, rounds. The man took two in the chest that she could see before his gun clattered to the bedroom floor and he fell back outside.
She heard John yell out: “You got ’im! You got ’im!” and she turned to see the gypsy, Mick, lying not six inches from where she was—John’s fixblade knife in his hand. She looked up and saw David sitting on the bed, staring in her direction, a gun in his hand.
Sarah got to her feet and went slowly to the bed. She put her empty gun down on the floor with the other weapons and wrapped her arms around her husband and son.
“Come on, Mom,” John said, standing up. “We can’t quit now. There’s about a hundred gypsies out there.”
“How are you doing?” Sarah asked David. She touched the blood soaked pad he was holding to his chest.
“It hurts like shit,” he said, wincing. “But I don’t think anything major got cut. John’s right,” he said, nodding at the back window. “We’re not home yet.”
“I know, I know.” Sarah leaned over and picked up a rifle, cracked it open to check it was loaded and stood up. “This back bedroom is not safe,” she said. “We can’t see what’s going on. We need to get away from that window.”
“I dunno,” David said, frowning. “Feels awfully exposed in the front room. Maybe we should stay—”
“Oy! Mrs. Woodson!” A voice called from the back window. “Don’t shoot, missus! It’s me, Aidan.”
Sarah looked at David, her mouth open.
“Don’t look at me,” David said.
John ran to the back window before Sarah could stop him.
“Aidan, hey, It’s me, John! What are you doing here?”
“Oy, John, Donovan says to tell your mum not to shoot him. We’re here to save ya!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Sarah sat on the front porch steps of Dierdre and Seamus’s cottage. A month had passed since the killings at the gypsy camp. Since then, Sarah and David and John had left Cairn Cottage and moved into the McClenny’s farm. There was nothing left for them back there and Dierdre and Seamus’s place was untouched. They brought their horses, Rocky and Dan and the two ponies with them. The pony trap sat on the side of the barn. When the snows melted, they would all learn how to drive it.
It was only March, with plans for planting Dierdre’s garden still long weeks away, but the larder was full of the food that the gypsies had stolen and stacked in boxes in a barn. Sarah felt guilty every time she pulled a can out of one of those boxes but David brushed away her concerns.
“The people they stole that food from are long gone,” he told her.