Just as suddenly as the quake began, it passed.
A gentle ringing settled into the darkness for the space of three breaths before noises permeated the muffled void.
Screams. Running footsteps. Cries and chaos.
Not a quake, Cecelia realized with alarm.
An explosion.
“Is everyone all right?” Francesca asked, even her unflappable demeanor pale and shaken as she gripped their hands almost painfully.
An acrid scent clung to the air, like char and smoke but more bitter.
Cecelia did a swift self-assessment, checking to make certain her limbs all worked. They, too, trembled but were otherwise unharmed.
“I think so.” Alexandra struggled to her feet, dusting some of the plaster from the ceiling off her skirt. “Cecil?”
“I’m not hurt.” She and Francesca helped each other up and turned to Genny, who’d taken shelter behind the chair. “Genny?” Her voice seemed over-loud in ears that refused to unplug.
Fingers curled over the chair’s back before Genny used it to pull herself to a standing position. Her eyes were as round as saucers. Plaster flecked her hair, causing her to look like an angel in a snowstorm. “What … just…?”
“I’ve been to enough dig sites to recognize the percussion of a bomb,” Alexandra said unsteadily, her amber gaze fixing on Cecelia, though she addressed them all. It was the terror and the tears in her eyes that affected Cecelia more than her words ever could. “Ready yourselves for what we might find when we go out there, ladies.”
Cecelia’s limbs were jolted with energy as she surged for the door. “Jean-Yves,” she cried desperately. “Phoebe!”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Cecelia didn’t give in to tears as she raced through swirls of sun-sparkled plaster dust. Distraught women poured into the hallway, creating an obstacle course of hysterical humanity.
She delegated their safe escape to Genny and sprinted down to the main floor, keeping a clawlike grip on her resolve as Francesca and Alexandra flanked her. Their boots made delicate crunching sounds when they hurried over fragments of the grand chandelier and cracks in the marble floors as the cries from belowstairs beckoned them.
They fought the tide of panicked, soiled students, some with minor injuries, racing up the stairs, and directed the crowd toward the front door, praying another detonation wasn’t imminent.
A numb sense of calm engulfed Cecelia when she took in the damage to the school, protecting her from the heartrending sounds of fear, grief, and pain. Smoke and dust choked her, but she could neither feel nor see heat from any lingering fires.
That didn’t mean they weren’t smoldering somewhere.
The farther they moved underground, the more it became apparent that the damage centered on the west side of the manse, above which a crater had been carved into the structure where the office of the residence had once been.
Cecelia ached to run back upstairs and pick her way through the rubble of what had been her aunt’s home. To scream and scream and scream until all her terror and agony conjured up the two most innocent people she knew. She needed Jean-Yves and Phoebe to be alive, but she simply couldn’t step over other injured bodies to find them.
Her conscience wouldn’t allow it.
At a time like this, she couldn’t thank the stars enough that her band of Rogues were of one mind in a crisis.
That this wasn’t their first brush with death or tragedy.
Alexandra was a doctor of archeology, not medicine, but a decade of fieldwork had granted her a great deal of opportunity to learn more than her share of emergency medical training. She had her gloves off and sleeves rolled up before any of them as she checked an older woman slumped in the hallway. The duchess’s soft, doe-like features became grim as she found no breath or pulse. She closed the old woman’s eyes and moved into the switchboard room where the wall-sized panels had toppled over, trapping a few ladies inside the room and landing on the leg of one screaming girl.
Francesca, who was strong and muscled for all her wiriness, was already directing those who stayed belowstairs to help lift the panels with the strength of their flanks rather than their backs.
Cecelia joined the effort, heaving with all her might and weight, but the panel refused to budge more than an inch, which caused the poor trapped girl to yelp with pain.
“Let it go,” Francesca directed. “We’ll have to use a different strategy to move it.” She shook out her arms as though they could take no more.
“No!” Cecelia cried over the injured girl’s plaintive sobs and the pleas of the imprisoned women in the room, begging to be let out. “No, they cannot be trapped in there. You lift! All of you. Lift!”
Alexandra nearly collapsed after a herculean effort, her features red and her shoulders trembling. “It’s too heavy, Cecil, we need leverage.”
“They can’t be left in there,” Cecelia panted, turning so the entirety of the weight was pressed against her back. “You don’t know what it’s like! They can’t be trapped belowground! Help me!”
Sweat and tears burned her eyes, blurring her vision almost as much as did the steam of exertion and dust gathering on her spectacles. Something in her back twisted and seized, but she let the agony fuel her as she pushed and strained with a desperation bordering on the hysterical.
Trapped underground. Was there anything worse? To fear that you might never see the sun again. That you stood in the room where your bones would be forgotten.
She knew what it was like. The terror and despair of it.
She had to get them out of the basement.
Help me. Help them. Please. Please … Please! Cecelia didn’t know if she prayed or screamed or both, but a beam of light appeared in her periphery and a tremendous blur of dark blue and gold flew forward and took the place at her side.
Cecelia didn’t register the terse, growling words, but the women behind the panels backed away, and Alexandra and Francesca joined in the effort once more. She could only make out male thighs the size of Stonehenge boulders bunching beneath fine blue trousers as they took up the burden next to her and heaved. The weight disappeared from her shoulders a few seconds before a mighty crash shook the basement.
Cassius Gerard Ramsay scooped the injured girl from the ground as if she weighed no more than a sack of grain.
The panels lay where he’d heaved them to the side, allowing the women trapped in the room to file out one by one beneath Francesca’s direction into the hall, where those who were able dashed toward the stairs.
Ramsay stepped out of the rubble and made for the exit, pausing only to lock and hold gazes with Cecelia for a breathless moment. He made a very quick assessment of her body from head to toe that left her still and trembling before returning his striking gaze back to hers.
Fire and ice. Fury and … distress? Relief? Vexation?
She hadn’t the chance to interpret before he strode away with all the alacrity his wounded burden could tolerate.
One of the other women, a middle-aged mother with the bones of a bird, leaned heavily on the wall as she fell behind the others making their getaway.
Cecelia did what she always had in a crisis, wiped her mind of all but the task at hand. Reaching for the woman, she draped the thin arm around the back of her neck and half carried, half dragged her up the stairs and out onto the lawn.