Haunt Me Still (5 page)

STILL GRIPPING THE
knife, I stumbled through the mist, slipping and sliding down the ramparts and on down through the heather. A gorse bush loomed out of the swirling grayness. As I swerved to avoid it, someone grabbed me from behind. I swung around with the knife, but it was knocked from my grasp, thudding off into the heather. A broad hand clapped over my mouth, and I was forced to the ground and dragged from the path.

“You’ve kent what you shouldna,” whispered a voice in my ear. Broad Scots for
You have known what you should not.
Twisting around to look at my captor, I saw a wild-eyed, gray-haired woman, broadly built, at least twenty years my senior.

I lunged away, but she jerked my arms back so expertly that the pain nearly knocked the wind from me.

“Lie still,” she said, “if you don’t want to get the both of us killed.”

A few seconds later, I heard what she must have sensed earlier: hoofbeats coming fast down the hill. I twisted around to face the path, just in time to see a white horse emerge from the mist not five feet away. Spooked by the gorse, the animal whinnied and reared. The rider threw his weight forward, fighting for control, his focus so intent on the horse that I don’t think he ever saw us. But the horse did.

Its hooves crashed down no more than a foot from my head. Backing a few paces, it bolted. But not before I’d seen the rider’s face. He was the dark-haired man. For what seemed like eons, my captor and I lay in silence beneath the bush. At last, she raised her head. I sat up, but she shook her head. “Hush,” she said, her head cocked, listening. Footsteps were coming back toward us, up the hill. Footsteps, not hoofbeats. This time, she did not have to pull me down; I crouched next to her, as small as I could make myself.

Bent low to the ground, the man ran right past us. Then he stopped and looked back, reaching down to pick something up.

My book.
Hot panic flooded through me.

Stealthily, he crept toward us and then stopped.
Go,
I prayed with every sinew of my body.
Go, and don’t look back.

He turned and took one step away, and then another, and then without warning his hand darted out, grabbing me by one wrist.

Behind me, the gray-haired fury cried out. Shoving me forward so that I stumbled right into his arms, she darted across the heather, flapping like a broken-winged bird as she disappeared into the mist.

I jerked away from the hands grasping me, but he held tight. “Hello, Professor,” said a voice I knew, and I realized that his hair, though dark, was curly, and his eyes were green. It was Ben Pearl, and he was laughing.

“
You!
” was all I could manage to croak.

Something in my voice cut through his hilarity. “Are you all right?”

My breath came out in a sob. “Lily,” I gasped, pulling free at last.

“Your friend?” He nodded in the direction the old woman had run.

“
No.
Lady Nairn’s fifteen-year-old granddaughter. On the hill-top,” I said. “Dead.” I bent down, scrabbling through the heather for the knife.

“Whoa,” said Ben, crouching down with me. “Slow down.”

I sat back on my heels, brushing away a hot squeeze of tears. “up on top of the hill. I found a knife. And then Lily, lying there dead, with her throat cut. And a voice, or maybe two voices. Whispers. I don’t know. So I ran. The woman you saw, the gray-haired woman—I don’t know who she is—knocked the knife away and dragged me off the path, and then the dark-haired man nearly rode me down on a spooked horse….” I waved wildly in the direction of the hilltop. “And now I can’t find the knife.” The last sentence was nearly a wail.

Dropping to his hands and knees, Ben began combing the heather for it.

“Did you hear me? She’s fifteen. She’s
dead
.”

“I heard you.” Two minutes later he plucked the knife from a clump of heather. It gleamed darkly, a pattern of whorls in the steel catching the strange gray light, so that the blade seemed to ripple and undulate almost as if it were alive. “Jesus, Kate,” he said, staring down at it with a low whistle. “Where did you say you found the girl?”

“On the hilltop.”

He was suddenly terse. “Show me.”

“We need to call the police.”

He was gazing upward through the mist. Slowly, he shook his head. “Are you sure she’s dead?”

“
I saw her.
”

“Did you check her pulse?”

“She’s dead.”

“You said her throat was cut. But there’s no blood on this knife.”

“So maybe the killer used another….” My voice trailed off. There hadn’t been enough blood around the body, either.

I began running back up the hill. Ben followed.

It didn’t take long to reach the summit. For a moment we crouched just below the rim, listening, but all we heard was wind in the grass. Silently, Ben eased out the sharp-edged black pistol I had never seen him without and cautiously peered up over the edge. After a moment, he jumped up and strode over. I followed.

The cairn was there, and beside it the fire ring. But where the body had lain, nothing was visible but grass.

Other than Ben and me, there was no one, living or dead, atop the hill.

“
BUT SHE WAS HERE
,” I said. “I found her. Over there. By one of the pits. It was only a few minutes ago.” I pointed toward where I had seen her.

His gun drawn and ready, we slowly circled the hill just below the rim, Ben bending to look at the grass as we went. When we’d come full circle, he peered over the edge once again. “Stay here.”

Bent low to the ground, he slid silently across the grass, glancing into each of the pits in turn. At the last one, he straightened, motioning me over. They, too, were empty of everything but grass and wind.

“
She was here,
” I insisted.

Ben crouched down to the ground, scanning the grass with a tracker’s fine eye. “I see no sign of it,” he said after a while, sitting back on his heels. “A few footsteps—but nothing like the weight of a body.”

“She was here,” I said again. “It was Lily. She was dead.” I glared at him for a moment in silence, and then, feeling the hot swell of tears, I turned on my heel, speeding back down the hill.

“Where are you going?” he asked as he caught up with me. “Back to the house,” I said shortly. Lily would be there, or she would not. “And you?”

“I was looking for you. Now that I’ve found you, I don’t exactly know.”

I stopped. “You knew I was up here?”

“Lady Nairn told me that she’d told you not to come up the hill. So it was the first place I looked.”

“Not funny.”

“But accurate.”

Trained in some branch of the British special forces that he’d never identified to me in all our time together, he’d left it to found a high-tech security company. “As in guns,” he’d told me when we first met. “Not stocks and bonds.” That Lady Nairn would need someone like Ben made sense. The moment the merest hint of her show got out, she’d be hounded by paparazzi. No doubt she’d worried about Sir Angus’s collection as well, at least the part that she meant to move down to Hampton Court and back.

But it was Lily who had needed protection, I thought. And had not had it. Ben hadn’t even known who she was.

By the time we got down to the lay-by, dusk was quickly fading to dark. Ben drove me back to the house in silence.

I leapt out of the car as soon as it came to a stop and raced inside, taking the stairs two at a time, up one flight and then down a wide passageway toward the sound of the party.
I’d completely forgotten about Lady Nairn’s dinner.

The company had already gathered in the old great hall, now laid out as a comfortable drawing room, filled with sofas and chairs, a fire of some sweet-smelling wood crackling in the immense fireplace. I scanned the room for Lady Nairn; she was holding court among three men in front of a long bank of windows. “
Where’s Lily?
” My voice felt ragged in my throat.

Around the room, conversation faltered and the clink of glassware and ice stilled as everyone turned to stare.

Lady Nairn’s eyes flickered across the room in the direction of a grand piano in a far corner. A man bent over it, laughing. Jason Pierce. Registering the silence, he straightened and turned, revealing Lily in green velvet at the keyboard, flushed with delight. “Oh,” she said. “It’s you.”

I felt a wash of loose-limbed relief, followed by a flush of confusion. The dead girl wasn’t Lily…but in that case, who was she?

At the piano, Lily launched into the dark, downward sweep of Bach’s Toccata and fugue in D Minor. “
By the pricking of my thumbs,
” she chanted, “
something wicked this way comes.
” flat-footed and heavy, silence smothered the room. “The play,” gasped a small white-haired woman, clutching at a silver cross on a chain around her neck. “You’ve quoted the play.”

“Worse than that,” said Sybilla fraser, her fingers wrapped gracefully around a champagne flute. “She’s quoted the witches.” Sybilla was draped in fiery silk that set off her golden hair and skin; her eyes were smoldering. She was, if anything, more beautiful in person than on-screen.

But I could not get the girl on the hill out of my head. Neither Ben nor I had found any trace of her. Maybe she’d been a dream. Or maybe I’d left someone up there, dead or dying, alone on the hill as darkness fell.

I turned to leave, only to find that someone had stepped into the doorway behind me, blocking my way. The gray-haired fury from the hill. In dark accusation, she raised her arm to point at Lily. At least, most people in the room seemed to think that she was pointing at Lily. But from my vantage, she was pointing straight at me. “You’ve brought evil into this house,” she said, her voice a low rumbling growl. For a moment, no one moved.

“The curse only works in a theater,” said Lily, rising. When no one answered, her bravura faltered. “Doesn’t it?”

“As of today,” said Sybilla, “this house
is
a theater.” She pointed at the door.

“
Out.
”

“Christ, Syb,” protested Jason. “She’s just a kid. And it’s not like we’ve started rehearsals. You don’t have to do the bloody fiend-like queen thing yet.”

Sybilla’s eyes flashed. “You, too. Out.”

“
Fiend-like queen?
” he scoffed. “You think that counts?”

Behind Sybilla, a large man with a paunch and grizzled ginger hair balded into a tonsure rose to his feet. “A quote’s a quote, laddie. And as the lady says, I gather we’re to rehearse in this room. Informal-like, but, still, rehearsal’s rehearsal. So out with the both of you.”

“Hell,” said Jason. Brushing by me and then past the gray-haired woman, he flung himself out the door. Eyes spitting fire, Lily followed.

The gray-haired fury never moved. With Lily gone, she was now clearly pointing at me.

“Does either of them ken the ritual to counter the curse?” asked the ginger-haired man of no one in particular.

It seemed an easy way out of the room. “I’ll show them,” I said. As I came to the old woman, she leaned in close. “Put it back,” she said in my ear.

Put it back?
Did she know about the knife? And if she knew about the knife, did she know about the body? “Did you see anyone on the hill this afternoon? A body?” I asked, low enough that no one else could hear.

She shook her head. “It’s the blade you should be worried about,” she said, and then she scooted me through the door in Lily’s wake. Behind me, it closed with a resounding thud.

“You
believe
all that voodoo twaddle?” growled Jason out in the passageway.

“It’s about respect, not belief,” I said shortly. “Tell that to Medusa in gray,” Jason retorted. “Auld Callie,” said Lily. Standing there in a green dress with faux-medieval trumpet sleeves, her flame-red hair floating about her face, she was near tears of fury. “She’s playing one of the witches. The kids in the village think she
is
one.”

Auld Callie,
I thought suddenly.
That’s the name of the woman who found Sir Angus.

“I thought I saw you this afternoon,” I said to Lily. “On the hill.”

“Well, you didn’t. You just saw Sybilla make a fool of me. And my grandmother
let
her.”

Had I been dreaming? Or was there someone else out there? The only way to find out was to go back. I started down the passage.

“Oh, no,” said Jason, grabbing my arm. “You’re not going anywhere till you get us out of this.”

His grip tightened. It was going to be faster to give in and show him how to exorcise the curse than to argue. Under my terse direction, Jason turned three times clockwise and then pounded on the door to the hall, asking to be let back in. Sybilla opened the door. “
Fair thoughts and happy hours attend on you,
” he said as he stepped back through it. Sybilla gave him a smile of incandescent triumph, and then, without acknowledging Lily at all, she shut the door behind him.

“Cow,” shot Lily. She spun around three times and crossed to the door, her knuckles pausing a few inches out. “What should I say?”

I glanced anxiously down the corridor. “You have to quote from one of the lucky plays. Jason went with
Merchant of Venice.
Why don’t you do
Midsummer
?”

She shrugged. “Sure.”

“An old standby is
Hand in hand with fairy grace, will we sing and bless this place
.”

She looked back, her sea-green eyes alight with mischief. “You should have said that up on the hill. It’s a fairy hill, you know.” Before I could respond, she rapped sharply on the door, which opened to reveal Lady Nairn.

“Enter, Lilidh Gruoch MacPhee,” said Lily’s grandmother, and Lily stepped through the door, pulling me with her. Around the room, the gathered company strained forward to hear.

Exhaling sharply, Lily blew a strand of red from her face, fixed Sybilla with her gaze, and began to speak:

Whirling on her heel, Lily strode from the room, slamming the door so hard that the antlers rattled on the walls.

The company stood stunned. She’d known, of course, what to do, I realized. One would, growing up in this house. Her question to me had been no more than a tease; she’d known exactly what she meant to say. She’d altered a few bits here and there, remembering sense rather than exact phrasing, but the words were recognizably Oberon’s—the king of fairies to his sleeping wife, Titania, the fairy queen. A love trick, you could say, if you were in a charitable mood. A magical practical joke with razored humiliation at its core, though, would be more accurate.

“But that’s not a blessing,” quavered the woman with the silver cross. “That’s another curse.”

Sybilla rose, coolly surveying the company, her eyes coming to rest at last on Jason. “And how does the curse end? Oh, that’s right:
Titania waked, and straightway loved an ass
.” Sweeping across the room, she disappeared through a narrow door onto a balcony.

With a groan, Jason strode after her. “Gallus lass,” said a deep Scottish voice. The ginger-haired man.

“Sybilla or Lily?” snapped Lady Nairn. She wore her hair swept back again today, and she was again in black, this time in a pantsuit.

“Take your pick,” the man said with a grin. “‘Gallus,’ from ‘gallows,’” he said in my direction. “A compliment in Scots. Cheeky, mischievous, daring.”

“As in ‘worthy of hanging,’ if you want to be literal about it,” said Lady Nairn darkly. “I will be raising gallows myself if we begin shedding actors before we ever get to rehearsals…. Kate, meet the gallus Eircheard.” His name sounded like Air Cart, though with the breathy back-of-the-throat “c” at the end of
loch
and
Bach
. “The king’s loyal servant Seyton in our production. And also the doomed King of Summer in the Samhuinn festival. Emphasis on ‘doomed.’”

He winked at me. “Marching merrily—if a wee bit hirplty-pirplty—to the sacrifice.” He took a few steps toward me, extending his hand, and I saw that he had the rolling gait of someone with a lifelong limp. One foot was encased in a strangely shaped and heavily built-up shoe.

“Eircheard,” Lady Nairn went on, “meet Kate Stanley. Whom you may
not
monopolize until you have given her the chance to escape upstairs and freshen up.” To me, she added, “I laid something out on your bed. I hope it fits.”

He raised his drink in my direction. “
Slàinte mhath,
” he said. “When you’re suitably tarted up to be given a drink, you can toast me back. I’ll teach you how.” His eyes bright with laughter, he turned away.

Before anyone else could stop me, I slipped out, running downstairs and out into the night.