Haunt Me Still (14 page)

BUT IF LILY
was the Cailleach…if she’d been there beneath the Cailleach’s blue veil all evening, where was Sybilla?

Lily held a pale hand out to the Winter King, who stepped forward and was presented to the crowd. The Cailleach’s consort.

Before the crowd could cheer in approval, a single voice rose through the square: “
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
” from near the back, a burning baton streaked straight toward the stage like an arrow, catching the edge of Lily’s robe, which caught fire in a quick whoosh.

I reached the stage in two steps, tossing her to the ground, smothering the flames. Ben was not far behind.

It was over in an instant. Lily sat up. The fire had torched one side of her robe and singed her hair, but other than that she was fine. Around us, chaos erupted.

Ben turned back to the spot where the dark-haired man had stood, but he was gone. I gripped Lily’s arm, as if she might also disappear. “You’re hurting me,” she whimpered.

“Who was he? The Winter King?”

She glared at me in mute fury, and I shook her. “
Lily.
He tried to kill Eircheard. And someone’s just tried to kill you. Where are Jason and Sybilla?”

“Do you have to ruin
everything
?” she wailed. “Get her out of here,” said Ben tersely. “And that goddamned knife, too.” And he pushed into the crowd.

.

.

Still gripping Lily, I began weaving through the crowd, but she made no move to resist.

“Where are we going?” she asked grudgingly. “ramsay Lane,” I said. “Just under the castle.”

Loosed into a spontaneous dance party on the street, the crowd made the going frustratingly slow.

A little way up, Lily motioned to a doorway opening onto one of the closes that ran down the side of the hill. “Shortcut,” she said sullenly, “if you want it.”

I hesitated, looking from the chaotic street to the quiet close. “Jesus,” she said, pulling me through. “This’ll take sodding days.”

Inside, the sound of the crowd cut to a distant hum, and our pace quickened. Twenty yards in, a raucous party of drunken spectators erupted into the small space from a side door, whirling us apart as they folded us into their dance. It was a moment before I realized what they were singing:

Glimpsing Lily, I reached for her, but she was spun away. I heard light laughter and someone shoved me against the wall. There was a scream and then the crowd was running off, half uphill and half downhill, and I could not see her in the fray. “Lily!” I shouted, turning about wildly, but in a matter of seconds, I was alone in the dark in an Edinburgh close.

“
Lily!
” I called again. But she was gone.

. The crowd had scattered in both directions, so I had no idea which way to head in pursuit. Knowing it would be futile, I tried them both. Above, the royal Mile still surged with a dancing crowd. The lower street was mostly empty.

My mobile buzzed.
It must be Lily.

Thank God.

It was a text, and therefore succinct:

Lily 4 knife. Hilltop. Midnight. Alone.

I stared at it, dread sinking through me. Up on the hill, Lucas Porter had laid out a stark choice: Lily or me. Someone must die. But that was when they thought they had the knife.

Now it seemed they were willing to trade Lily for the blade.

Or was I part of the trade as well?

There was only one way to find out: alone on a hilltop at midnight, with a ritual blade a thousand years old.

My call to Ben had rung twice when another text came through, from an unrecognized number. I cut off my call to Ben and pulled it up:

I looked up. The windows lining the small space all seemed curtained and dark, even opaque. But suddenly they seemed like staring eyes. Canceling the call to Ben, I made my way quickly down the hill.

As promised, there was a car just at the end of the close, where it came out on the main road that wound down the hill toward New Town. A black Mercedes. The driver’s door was unlocked and the keys were under the mat. As I started the car, I found that the GPS was already programmed for Dunsinnan. Shaking, I pulled out into traffic.

Ben called four times on the drive north, but I didn’t dare answer.
Watching & listening.
The car was probably bugged, and for all I knew, they were monitoring my cell calls. But I couldn’t turn the phone off, in case I heard from Lily or her abductors. From that direction, though, there was silence.

What was Lucas up to? Why engineer Lily bringing the knife to Edinburgh only to pull them both back to Dunsinnan? How did the Winter King, the dark-haired man, figure into it? Where were Sybilla and Jason?
What happened to Lily?

I looked at the knife on the leather seat beside me, gleaming now and then in the lights of the motorway.
Nothing is but what is not,
it seemed to whisper.

Other words kept playing through my head:

Behind that, oddly, I heard Ben’s voice: “
An angel is like you, Kate, and you are like an angel.
” Whatever had possessed him to say that, it seemed heavy with irony now.

I drove north as fast as I dared.

I PULLED INTO
the lay-by at the foot of Dunsinnan Hill with no more than fifteen minutes to spare before midnight. Slipping the knife from the seat, I headed quickly up the hill.

The path seemed longer and steeper, the stand of pines more ominous, in the dark. My footsteps thudded softly on the grass along the field and into the heather, my breath shortening as I ran. The moon hung high overhead, dimly lighting the way. Just below the summit, I paused, my heart thudding wildly in my chest, and not only from the climb. In my hands, the knife was cold.
Stupid not to have a backup weapon,
I thought suddenly. Though where I would have gotten one, I didn’t know. When I handed it over, I’d be unarmed.

What choice did I have?

I set my shoulders and peered over the rim. The cairn seemed to have grown. Then I realized that it was not the cairn I was looking at; it was wood, stacked into a high cone. Other than that, the summit was empty.

At the base of the stacked wood, a red gleam kindled into life. And then a breeze lifted, and the bonfire caught with a whoosh, orange and yellow flame licking upward through the cone. From behind it, a lone figure stepped into the light. A woman with pale hair falling to the middle of her back, her face lined with the fine-china crackling of fair skin in old age. Lady Nairn, in a shimmering blue gown. In her right hand, she held a knife with an angled back and a blade that seemed to ripple in the firelight.

What was she doing here? Where was Lily?

In a low voice, she began to hum, walking in a wide circle with the knife pointing outward and down to the ground, stopping at each of the cardinal directions to cry out in words drowned out by the wind and the roar of the fire. Slowly, she walked to the center, raising her arms to the moon. Her voice rose into a strange keening that soared into the night and seemed to wrap around the moon like a slender cord, drawing it down toward the hill.

On the far side of the summit, horns rose over the rim, branching into antlers, as if she were pulling a stag up from the deeps of the earth even as the moon dipped down. The head that followed, however, was not that of a stag, but of a man. He rose over the lip of the summit, naked and in his prime, his member erect, and strode down toward her carrying a cup, which he held high. It was his eyes I could not look away from. Fringed with feathers, they were the unwinking golden eyes of an owl.

What I had seen in Edinburgh was a play, a good-natured performance. This was the real thing. It wasn’t Lily who was the witch in the household, it was Lady Nairn.

I must have made some sound, because they both turned toward me, Lady Nairn’s eyes meeting mine.
She is Artemis,
I thought,
Diana, the Lady of the Hunt, and I will be torn apart by her hounds.

Even as that thought crossed my mind, a cry of loneliness condensed and distilled rose in waves toward the moon. To my right, a wolf leapt onto the rim of the summit, its throat arced back in a howl. To my left, others answered. And then other figures rose into view. One of them was the dark-haired man. The Winter King. From the startled anger on Lady Nairn’s face, he was as much an intruder as I was. “
Run!
” she cried in a deep voice, looking straight at me.

As if blocked, somehow, from entering the bowl of the summit itself, the wolves and dark figures who stood with them began to pour around its edges, heading toward me, erupting into a cacophony of yipping and howls. I stepped back, stumbling and falling, scrambling up and away. Something nipped at me from behind, and I turned, knife in hand, as someone lunged at me. I was hit on the head, and the world went dark.

IT WAS THE
cold I became aware of first, dimly and far away, as I slid back into consciousness. A clinging damp cold. A throbbing ache in my head. And grass prickling my cheek.

For a moment, I lay still. Hearing nothing but wind, I opened my eyes. I lay in the bowl of the hilltop, just near the rim. Thin fingers of steely light pierced a cloudy sky. This far north, in November, dawn came late. I must have been here for hours.

Lily.
Her name tore through me in a silent, white explosion. She’d disappeared after the Samhuinn festival, and I’d come here with the knife. Where was it? Where was she?

I sat up. I seemed to be alone. Off to my left, a pile of gray ash, thinly smoking, was all that remained of the bonfire. In the grass, my hands were sticky, and a musty and metallic scent rose thickly around me.
Blood.
I looked down. I was red up to the elbows with it.

Just before blacking out, I’d slashed out with the knife. What had I done?

In panic, I began to wipe the blood from my hands on the grass when I heard a shout from over the hill, and then thudding footsteps. I stumbled backward, but there was nowhere to hide. A man rose over the rim, stopping as he saw me.

It was Ben. “Kate—
Jesus.
” He crossed the grass in three strides. “Where are you hurt?”

.

Words would not come; I just shook my head. It hadn’t occurred to me to think about that. Was the blood mine?

Gently, he opened my jacket, and I saw that it, too, was covered in blood. His hands slid down my front and around my back.

“You’re in one piece,” he said. Taking a bandanna from his pocket, he wet it in the dew-soaked grass and began to wipe my hands and wrists clean. “What happened?”

Brokenly, I told him what I could remember—Lily’s disappearance, coming up the hill with the knife. And now, the knife missing.

“Let me look,” he said quietly.

So I sat there, holding my aching head and once again watching him comb the hillside for me. This time, though, he would not find the knife. I was certain of that.

Lily.

My pocket began to vibrate and then to dance with a light, catchy drumming, pierced by the unmistakable scream of Mick Jagger and the shake of maracas: the opening of “Sympathy for the Devil.”

“Your phone, presumably,” said Ben.

I shook my head. I had never put that ringtone into it. Besides, I had switched it to vibrate last night, before coming up the hill.

Ben shoved his hand into my jacket pocket, pulled out the phone, and handed it to me.

The phone recognized the call as coming from Lily. But I had never programmed her number into my address book.

“Put it on speaker,” said Ben.

With shaking hands I answered it. “Lily?”

“You didn’t come alone.” The voice was full of reproach. I recognized it, though I’d only heard it in a snarl before. It belonged to the dark-haired man. The Winter King.

“Where is she?”

“Think of the knife as down payment. Reference to a certain manuscript. You will find it and deliver it in two days’ time. And then we release Lily.”

“
Two
—that’s not enough time.”

“It’s what there is.”

“And if it can’t be found?”

“Ah. I think you already know.
She must die.
”

“We have to know that she’s still alive and well,” said Ben.

“Still not alone,” came the reply. “Be careful about that.” But he put Lily on the line.

“Kate?” Her voice was wobbly. “Are you all right?”

“I want to come home.”

“We’ll get you out of there as soon as we can.”

Her voice sank to a whisper. “I’m sorry.” With that, the phone went dead.

I was still staring at it in mute anger when a siren spiraled upward from the valley floor, piercing the quiet. Ben walked to the edge of the summit and quickly returned. “Police, coming toward the hill,” he said.

“How would they know? Who else—” But even as I looked at him, we both knew who could have sent them. The people who’d taken the knife. Who’d taken Lily.

The traces of blood still on my hands seemed to burn with cold fire. Even if DI McGregor believed the manuscript-for-ransom story, she’d lock me up and look for it herself. But she wouldn’t find it. And Lily would die. “We have to go.” I started for the path, but Ben caught my elbow.

“Not that way. Unless you mean to wave and say howdy as we pass the police on the way down.”

“There is no other way.”

“This hill has other sides.”

“Have you
looked
at them?”

In answer, he strode across the shallow bowl of the summit to the southern rim. For an instant, he looked back. And then he disappeared over the edge. Following in his wake, I saw a narrow ledge of grass just below the rim. Beyond that, a cliff sheered away into a tumble of gray rock far below. But the grassy ledge sloped down to the east, and Ben was already following it. At the end of the rock face, we found a narrow trail leading steeply down through the grass edging the western side of the cliff. “Where the sheep goes, there go I,” said Ben with dark hilarity, plunging down the path.

It curved this way and that. In places, we slid more than walked as the path dropped a hundred feet or more. At last we neared the bottom of the cliff, turning into a wide meadow halfway down the hill. The trail dipped and rose again, and then Ben stopped so suddenly that I ran into him. Three ravens rose screeching into the air, wheeling angrily overhead.

“Don’t look,” he said sharply. But I already had.

Just ahead, beneath a length of blue silk shimmering like snake-skin, someone lay sprawled in the shadow of a fall of boulders at the base of the cliff. The rocks were smeared and splattered with blood. I’d seen that gown before. It was Ellen Terry’s, or a copy of it. I’d seen it last on Lady Nairn, her arms raised in wild praise to the moon.

Brushing past Ben, I stood over her for a moment. “She was the Lady of the Hunt last night,” I said. “I thought it was me who was going to be torn to shreds.”

I twitched aside a corner of the gown. It lifted with a light clatter as the dried husks of a thousand beetle backs shifted upon each other.

She lay with her head flung back, her hair cascading over rock thickly splattered and pooled with blood. Her throat had been slashed so savagely that the head had very nearly come off and was twisted at an impossible angle. But the hair was not a smooth pale blonde. It was dark gold, falling in ringlets.

Sybilla.

Beside me, Ben had gone still as the stones around us.

On my hands, the blood still lining my nails and the deep grooves in my knuckles burned like acid. I glanced down, seeing them once again as I had seen them on waking: sticky and thickly smeared with Sybilla’s life. Or her death.

What had I done?