Crimson Twilight (2 page)

the stronger my imagination grew until I discovered

that I was able to travel into the stories... to actually

become part of them.

I wish I could say that I listened to my teacher

and respected my gift, as I ought to have. If I had, I

would not be telling you this tale now.

But I was foolhardy and confused, showing off

with bravery.

One afternoon, curious about the myth of the

Arabian Nights, I traveled back to ancient Persia to

see for myself if it was true that every day Shahryar

(Persian: شهریار, "king") married a new virgin, and then

sent yesterday's wife to be beheaded. It was written

and I had read, that by the time he met Scheherazade,

the vizier's daughter, he’d killed one thousand

women.

Something went wrong with my efforts. I arrived

in the midst of the story and somehow exchanged

places with Scheherazade – a phenomena that had

never occurred before and that still to this day, I

cannot explain.

Now I am trapped in that ancient past. I have

taken on Scheherazade’s life and the only way I can

protect myself and stay alive is to do what she did to

protect herself and stay alive.

Every night the King calls for me and listens as I spin tales.

And when the evening ends and dawn breaks, I stop at a

point that leaves him breathless and yearning for more.

And so the King spares my life for one more day, so that

he might hear the rest of my dark tale.

As soon as I finish a story... I begin a new

one... like the one that you, dear reader, have before

you now.

Chapter 1

“I say we fool around again,” Sloan Trent said.

Jane Everett smiled.

They’d spent the night before fooling around—even though it had been their wedding eve— so she assumed they’d fool around again a great deal tonight.

Which was nothing new for them.

They’d finally made it out of the shower and into clothing and were ready to head downstairs. But Sloan was still in an amorous mood. He drew her to him, kissed her neck just below her ear, and whispered, “There’s so much time in life that we can’t fool around… so you have to fool around when the fooling around is good, right?” He had that way of whispering against her ear. His breath was hot and moist and somehow had a way of creating little fires that trickled down into her sex, generating an instant burst of desire.

“We’ve just showered,” she reminded him.

“Showers can be fun, too.”

“We’re supposed to be meeting up with Kelsey and Logan and seeing a bit of the castle before we get ready for the ceremony.”

“You never know. Maybe Logan and Kelsey are fooling around and showering, too?”

He pressed his lips to her throat and her collarbone, drawing her closer, making the spoon of their bodies into something erotic.

She wasn’t sure what would have happened if it hadn’t been for the scream.

More a shriek!

Long, loud, piercing, horrible.

They broke apart, both of them making mad leaps for the Glock firearms they were never without, racing out of their room to the upper landing of the castle’s staircase. Of all the things Jane hadn’t expected as her wedding approached, it was for the minister to be found dead—neck broken, eyes-wide-open—at the first floor landing of Castle Cadawil. Logan Raintree and Kelsey O’Brien, their co-workers and witnesses for the wedding, rushed up close behind them.

They all paused, assessing the situation, then raced down.

Reverend Marty MacDonald lay on his back, head twisted at that angle which clearly defined death, his legs still on the steps, arms extended as if he’d tried to fly. Sloan looked at her, shaking his head sadly. She felt as if all the air had been sucked from her lungs. Her blood began to run cold. Her first thought was for Marty MacDonald. She didn’t know him that well. She’d met and hired him here, on the New England coast, just a month ago when she’d first seen the castle. She and Sloan had been talking about what to do and how and when to marry, and it had suddenly seemed right.

But now. The poor man!

Her next thought was—

Oh, God! What did this say for their lives together? What kind of an omen—

“Tripped?” Logan Raintree suggested, studying the dead man and the stairs.

Logan was the leader of the Texas Krewe of Hunters—the mini-division within their special unit of the FBI. Many of their fellow agents liked to attach the word “special” with a mocking innuendo, but for the most part the Bureau looked upon them with a fair amount of respect. They were known for coming up with results. Jane had known Logan a long time. They were both Texans and had worked with Texas law enforcement before they’d joined on with the Krewe.

Kelsey had come into it as a U.S. Marshal. She’d been working in Key West, her home stomping grounds, until she’d been called to Texas on a serial murder case. She and Logan had been a twosome ever since. One weekend they’d slipped away and quietly married. They told no one and it had become a pool in the home office, had they or hadn’t they? If so, when?

Sloan had profited $120 with his guess. Sloan wasn’t a Texan, though he, too, had worked there. Jane had met Sloan in Arizona during the curious case of the deaths at the Gilded Lily. He’d been acting-sheriff there at the time. Six-foot-four, broad-shouldered, wearing a badge and a Stetson, he’d been pretty appealing. That case put some distance and resentment between them, until solving it drew them together in a way that would never end.

“Tripped?” Logan said again, and she caught the question in his voice.

Logan and Sloan, and all of the members of the Krewe, worked well together. Logan and Sloan both had Native American mixes in their backgrounds, which brought a sense and respect for all beliefs and all possibilities.

Jane loved that about both men.

Of course, she loved Kelsey, too. She’d known Kelsey her whole life. Having grown up in the Florida Keys, Kelsey also had a keen interest in everyone and everything. She was bright, blonde, and beautiful, ready to tackle anything.

“So it appears,” Kelsey murmured.

“Did you see anyone?” Sloan asked the maid, whose horrified scream had alerted them all.

The maid shook her head.

“I’m trying to picture,” Sloan said, “how he tripped and ended up here, as he is.”

“He had to have come down from far up,” Kelsey noted.

Sloan rose and started up the winding stone stairway. “He’d have had to have tripped at the top of the stairs, rolled, and actually tumbled down to this position.”

“Anyone can trip,” Kelsey said, laying a hand on Jane’s arm. “I’m so sorry.”

Jane closed her eyes for a minute. She wanted to believe it. Tripped. A sad accident. Marty MacDonald had been a loner, a bachelor without any exes to mourn him and no children or grandchildren to miss their dad or grandpa. But did that mitigate a human life?

The housekeeper who’d screamed was still standing, staring down at the corpse through glazed eyes, her mouth locked into a circle of horror.

Jane felt frozen herself.

They were used to finding the dead. That was their job. Called in when unexplained deaths and circumstances came about. But this was her minister—the man who was to have married her and Sloan. She didn’t move. The others still seemed to have their wits about them. She heard Sloan dialing 911 and speaking in low, even tones to the dispatch officer. Soon, there would be sirens. A medical examiner would arrive. The police would question them all. Naturally, it looked like an accidental death. But Jane always doubted accidental death.

But that was in her nature.

Would the police doubt so, too?

She felt a sense of hysteria rising inside her. She could wind up in an interrogation room on the other side of the table.
Did you do this? I think I know what happened
,” a hard-boiled detective right out of some dime novel would demand. He’d be wearing a Dick Tracey hat and trench coat
. “What was it? You were afraid of commitment. Afraid of marriage. You don’t really love that poor bastard, Sloan, do you? You didn’t think you’d get away with killing the rugged cowboy type of man he is. Tall, strong, always impossibly right. So you killed the minister. Pushed a poor innocent man of God right down the stairs!”

Whoa.

Double whoa.

She didn’t feel that way. She’d never felt for anyone like she did for Sloan. She was in love with his mind, his smile, his voice. The way he was with her, and the way he was with the world. They shared that weirdness of their special ability to speak with the dead. They also shared a need to use their gift in the best way. She definitely loved him physically. He was rugged and weathered, a cowboy, tall and broad-shouldered, everything a Texas girl might have dreamed about. He had dark hair, light eyes, sun-bronzed features, and a smile that could change the world.

Except that he wasn’t smiling now.

“You just now found him?” Sloan asked the maid.

The woman didn’t respond.

“Ms. Martin,” Sloan pressed.

Jane had noticed the maid’s nametag too, identifying her as Phoebe Martin. At last, the woman blinked, focused, and turned to Sloan, nodding sadly, like a child admitting an obvious but unhappy fact.

“Is anyone else here?” Sloan asked her. “I mean, besides you, me, Logan, Kelsey, and Jane?” He pointed around to all of them, using their first names. That was a way to make her feel comfortable, as if she were one with them. In situations like this, people spoke way more easily to authorities when they felt as if they were conversing with friends.

The maid, an attractive young blonde woman of about twenty-seven or so, shook her head. “Right here, no. I didn’t see anybody. I was coming from the kitchen and saw him lying here. But, yes, yes, of course, others are around. They’re always around. The castle is never left empty. The caretaker, Mr. Green, is somewhere about.”

“Anyone else?” Jane prodded gently.

Ms. Martin nodded solemnly. “Mrs. Avery is in her office along with Scully Adair, her assistant. And the chef came in about an hour or so ago. So did two of the cooks. Lila and Sonia are here. They’re with housekeeping.”

Jane knew that Mrs. Denise Avery managed the castle. She’d dealt with the woman to rent the rooms they’d taken for the weekend, including the chapel and ballroom. The castle was actually owned by a descendant of Emil Roth, the eccentric millionaire who, in the late 1850s, had the building disassembled in Wales and brought to the coastline of New England. The owner, another Emil Roth, had been born with more money than he’d been able to waste. The Roth family had made their fortune in steel, then banking. The current Roth was gone, Jane had been told, to Africa on a big game photography hunt. Mrs. Avery was a distant relative herself. And while the current Emil Roth spent money, Mrs. Avery tried to make it.

“Miss Martin, perhaps you could gather them all here, in the foyer,” Sloan suggested.

“Gather them,” she repeated.

“Yes, please, would you?” Jane prodded.

“The police and the coroner will arrive any minute and everyone should be here when they do,” Sloan said.

Phoebe Martin looked at them at last. “Police?”

“A man is dead,” he said. “Yes, the police.”

“But… he… fell,” she said.

“Possibly,” Logan said.

“Probably,” Jane said firmly.

Phoebe’s eyes widened still further. “Pushed!”

“No. All we know is that he’s dead,” Jane said. “The local police need to come and the death investigated. The medical examiner or the coroner must come, too.”

“Pushed!” Phoebe said again.

“There is that possibility,” Kelsey said. She glanced at Jane and grimaced sorrowfully. “But, he probably just fell. No one was there, right? We were all in our rooms, you just came to the landing and found him, and the others are in their offices or on the grounds working. Poor man! He fell, and no one was here. But we still have to have the police.”

“The ghost did it!” Phoebe declared.

“Ghosts are seldom vicious,” Kelsey said.

Phoebe’s gaze latched onto Kelsey. “How would you know? Ghosts can be horribly malicious. Ripping off sheets. Throwing coffee pods all around. Oh, you don’t know! It was
her
, I’m telling you. She did it!”

Phoebe was pointing. It seemed she was pointing straight at Jane.

“What?” Jane demanded, her voice a squeak rather than the dignified question she’d intended.

But then she saw that they were all looking behind her at the painting on the wall.

She’d noted it before, of course. Just about a month earlier while driving through the area after a situation in the Northeast, she’d seen the castle. It was open three days a week for tours, and she’d been there for the Saturday afternoon event. Mrs. Avery had led the tour and introduced them to Elizabeth Roth via the painting, a young woman who’d lost her fiancé on the eve of their wedding. Elizabeth, the daughter of the house, had been found dead of an overdose of laudanum on the day her wedding should have taken place. It was said that she was often seen in the halls of the castle, wringing her hands as she paced, praying for the return of her lover.