Raven's Cove - Jenna Ryan (16 page)

“You answered.” The creepy voice brought to mind acid sizzling on snakeskin. “I’m delighted. And on the second ring at that. You must have been awake. I wonder why. I have a gift for you, Jasmine. No, not another feather. Not yet. This is better. Think of it as part of the man I am. Or do I mean the man I was?” The slime-over-ice tone roughened. “You decide.”

Her eyes traveled up one wall, across the ceiling and down the other side. “Where…?”

“Shut up,” the voice commanded. “You don’t talk, you listen. You do as I say, or maybe I’ll scrap my plan and, feathers or not, be done with you now. This is about death, remember that. It’s about death and me and you. And payback. Don’t forget that part, because you were and still are the cause of my suffering.”

“But I…”

“SHUT UP!” The voice shouted at her now. “Look out your window, Jasmine. Look at the fog. See what’s inside it. See what you’ve done to me!”

She couldn’t move, could not make herself run. She could only stare through the glass at the fog and the entity taking shape within it.

Her breath hitched as a face came into view. A man’s twisted, tortured, horror-struck face. No body, no neck, just a disconnected head bobbing in the fog outside her third-floor bedroom window.

Her phone hit the carpet. The head bumped the glass. She heard the voice laughing up at her from the floor. The hideous sound punched through her fear and released her panic in a single terrified scream.

* * *

R
OGAN REACHED HER SO
quickly that when she turned to run, she crashed right into him.

His hands came up to steady her. “Jasmine, what…? Son of a bitch!”

He saw it hovering outside the glass. Thank God he saw it before it vanished.

He wore his jeans, but no shirt. After a quick look outside, he grabbed the boots he’d left by the bed and dragged her with him across the floor.

“Find Riese. Stay with her. Lock yourselves in.” Raising his cell, he drew her into the corridor. “Meet me outside the house,” he said. “Under Jasmine’s window.” He turned her toward the staircase. “Riese’s room. Go.”

“Rogan, wait, you’re not—” but he’d already vanished “—dressed.” Exasperation warred with terror. Common sense overrode both.

Riese left low lights burning in the main corridors. Jasmine knew the woman’s room was situated somewhere on the second floor and, like hers, had a view of the cliffs. Beyond that—all she could do was start knocking.

It took her three tries before she received a mumbled response. Using the side of her fist, she banged harder. “Riese, it’s Jasmine. Wake up!”

Something struck the wall with enough force to rattle it. She heard voices, then a bleary-eyed Riese, wearing a short black robe with a dragon on it, opened the door.

“Jasmine?” She sounded as if she’d just smoked a pack of cigarettes.

There was another bang and a curse. Jasmine saw Boxman fumbling his pants on while holding his gun under one arm.

“I was trying not to wake her,” he growled. “Rogan’s—somewhere. You two wait here.”

Riese stood aside so Boxman could hop out, pulling on one boot and carrying the other. Then she waved Jasmine in and leaned against the door to close it.

“I was dreaming about Zack Efron when I suddenly heard the
Star Wars
theme. Then Boxman started banging around like an elephant and muttering about a missing gun.” She combed her fingers through her two-toned hair. “There I was, picturing Zack in Darth Vader’s cape, because I sleep the sleep of the dead even when my bed’s shaking like a bowl of Jell-O. …”

She rambled on while Jasmine crossed the floor and opened the window.

“Is your room directly below mine?” Leaning out, she looked down, then up, but couldn’t see anything except layers of white. “Riese? Is that my room?”

“Uh, maybe.” Riese crisscrossed uncertain hands. “Yes. Pretty sure, yes. Why?”

“I saw a face.” Jasmine leaned out again, but still couldn’t see the ground or the roof. “What’s on the fourth floor?”

“Attics. Uh…” Riese tapped her shoulder. “Where did you say you saw a face?”

“Outside my window. It was a head—disembodied.” She pushed the hair from her face, held it back. “That sounds crazy, but I swear it was there, bobbing in the fog. It wasn’t a normal face, either. It was all slack and distorted.” She took a final upward look. “There’s nothing there now.”

“From the description you gave, there was nothing there before.” Snagging the belt of her robe, Riese hauled her in. “You had a nightmare. I’ve lived here forever, and I still have them from time to time.”

“I wasn’t dreaming, I was standing.”

“Exactly. At a third-floor window. I don’t know of any ladders in town that reach that far up, and even if one could, nobody could climb it without making enough noise to wake the dead, or get down fast enough that Rogan—I assume he’s out there—wouldn’t see him doing it. And the ladder itself would have to be an extension—huge and cumbersome, right?”

“Right. Right… No, wait.” She swung back. “He used a rope ladder. He dropped it from the attic window, climbed down, freaked me out, climbed back up, pulled the ladder with him. It works. Or, no—better still, a full head mask. Attach it to a rope, lower it. I’m already talking to the killer on the phone, so now there’s a creepy face to match the creepy voice. I freak—dammit, that’s what he wanted—and he laughs. Score another one for him.” Spinning, she made an angry sound.

Riese shook her head. “If you’re right about this, Rogan and Boxman are looking in the wrong place.”

Fighting frustration, Jasmine raised her eyes to the ceiling before sliding them sideways. “Do you have a gun?”

“Hello, uncle with a gun shop. But we can’t just run around the house waving loaded weapons.”

Probably not the smartest thing to do, Jasmine agreed.

Spotting Riese’s landline phone, she crawled over the bed to pick it up. Rogan answered halfway through the first ring.

“Stay where you are, Jasmine.”

She stared at the handset. “How could you possibly…? Never mind. Did you find anyone?”

“Six in the morning, mood I’m in, you’d have heard the guy screaming if we had.”

“What about the attic? He might have attached a mask to a rope.”

“I had the same thought, so I went there first. No floor dust, no footprints, no mask, no rope.”

“Same as the old house.”

“Exactly the same. We’ll keep looking. Do me a favor and don’t leave Riese’s room.”

She smiled into the phone. “You take all the fun out of a foggy autumn morning.”

If he said something back, she couldn’t hear it over the shriek of instruments that blasted from the clock radio beside her.

Riese jumped in and killed the sound, but not before it blew a hole in Jasmine’s left eardrum.

“Gotta love Ozzy.” She curled into a cross-legged position. “Listen, what say we go downstairs and make pancakes before the other guests wake up?”

Jasmine tested her ear for sound. “Do you have ice cream?”

“Buckets. Come on. It’s something to do, and the guns are down there anyway. Not sure where the key to the case is, which could be problematic, but if we have to break the glass, we have to break the glass. I also have my trusty bat, and as long as we’re in the kitchen, there’s the cast-iron skillet. Come on, I’m starving. The dinner I made last night sucked.”

Because cooking was better than sitting and she’d already messed up by following Rogan to the woods, Jasmine let Riese loan her a pair of black leather boots and listened to her nervous commentary as they made their way along the corridor toward the rear stairwell.

“A little Ozzy’d be great about now, don’t you think? This carpet’s so dense, our feet aren’t making any noise. But then I remind myself, no one could get into this house once I’ve set the alarm.”

Jasmine opened the stairwell door. “Are you sure you set it last night?”

“Absolutely. Midnight comes, alarm goes on. You have a fob on your key ring.”

“Yes. Rogan and I used it, and we reset the alarm afterward. But people aren’t always conscientious. What if one of your guests didn’t reset?”

The other woman sent her something between a smile and a grimace. “Don’t you just hate what-ifs?” When a door slammed, she hopped back two full steps and clutched Jasmine’s arm. “Was that high or low?”

Jasmine’s eyes went up. Prying Riese’s hand free, she whispered, “We need to keep moving.”

A clatter erupted above them. A second later, a gun went off, and one of the stairwell lights blew apart.

Jasmine gave Riese a push, then hissed and yanked her against the wall as someone, a man, judging from the grunts he emitted, hurtled past. She felt air on her cheeks and the brush of a jacket. Amid more grunts and thumps, the runner knocked into Riese, who stumbled and sank her fingernails into Jasmine’s arm.

With little more than a thread of visible light, she lost her perspective as well as her balance. She bounced off a chest, Riese a shoulder. More grunts and shoves followed, but after receiving an elbow to the ribs, Jasmine was more irritated than intimidated.

She caught hold of something, possibly a jacket, and let her body weight do the work of impeding whoever had shoved them aside.

“Riese!” she shouted.

“Above you. He’s all twisted around. I’ve got his pant leg, I think.”

And he had a gun.

A door slammed open below. Someone started up. Long strides, had to be a male.

“Ro—gan!”

Jasmine stammered out his name as the man they were holding grabbed her wrist and gave a vicious twist.

Hell with that, she thought. Balling her fist, she plowed it upward in the general direction of his crotch. She knew she’d hit the mark when the man released her and dropped to his knees, doubled over. She also knew the arm that circled her waist a second later belonged to Rogan.

Reaching past her, he grabbed the fallen man’s collar and hauled him upright. Or far enough upright for her to make out his features.

For the second time in two days, she found herself staring at Cyrus Bowcott’s furious face.

Chapter Thirteen

“I wasn’t running away, I was in pursuit,” Cyrus confessed through clenched teeth.

Jasmine watched Boxman, in his element yet again, lean over to offer a jackal’s smile. “We believe you, Cyrus. Or should I say Carl?” He raised his voice to Rogan across the kitchen. “Did we ever establish why the ex-cop who swears he’s not lying to us is using an alias?”

Jasmine stopped measuring out ground coffee. “Is that the point?”

“It’s
a
point,” Rogan replied.

He was still bare-chested, and although the ancient stove was lit and making weird clunking noises, the air remained frigid.

“I wanted to poke around town unnoticed,” Cyrus said. “Easiest way? Be someone else.”

Boxman pressed his face closer. “Thought you were doing that already by impersonating your twin brother.”

“We’ve had this conversation, Sergeant. Meanwhile, the guy I was chasing will have long since disappeared.”

Rogan’s gaze swept the shadows on the cliff. “Why don’t you take us through your morning,” he suggested. “What you saw, what you did and why.”

Cyrus grumbled, but obliged. “Right. 5:45 a.m. I got up to relieve myself, saw someone moving outside. Fog parted, I spotted a gun and a large pack. I got dressed fast, headed in the same direction as the movement. I circled the entire house, but there was no one to be seen. I figured maybe I’d been dreaming. So I headed back to my suite. Fog thinned again. I saw—I don’t know—something at one of the high windows. Then it was gone, and I figured okay, really seeing things. But I’m not prone to hallucinations, so I went inside, made coffee and kept watch. Sure enough, twenty minutes later, someone barreled past my window.

“I thought I might catch him this time. But he must have realized I was there, because he veered off. I heard a door, found the closest one. It wasn’t locked. I went in. I ran up a skinny staircase, then another, around some corners and finally down another set of stairs. Pursuit continued. I’d have caught him if I hadn’t bumped into a pair of female roadblocks.”

Rogan looked at Jasmine. “Were there two people on the stairs?”

After setting the coffeemaker to brew, she glanced at Riese, who merely held up her hands. “There could’ve been. Somebody shot out one of the overhead lights. …”

“It wasn’t me,” Cyrus said. “Examine my gun for bullets. Sniff it. The thing hasn’t been fired. Check me. No powder burns.”

Boxman braced his hands on the arms of Cyrus’s chair. “So what, you didn’t pull the trigger that took out the light. Doesn’t mean you’re not part of a killing team.”

“You’re loving this, aren’t you, Sergeant?”

“Yeah, pretty much.” Smiling while his prisoner glared, Boxman asked Rogan, “You wanna call the sheriff, or should we take it upon our legally entitled selves to lock him up?”

“For what?” Cyrus surged partway out of his seat. “Knocking a couple of women on their butts while in pursuit of a possible felon? Water in a sieve, pal.”

“Amount of water held depends on how we slant the knocking.” Rogan rescanned the cliff.

“I wouldn’t call it assault.” Riese pulled up the sleeves of her robe. “I’m not even bruised. What about you, Jasmine?”

Because she seriously wanted to laugh, Jasmine wondered if she was a victim of delayed hysteria. “Seeing as Cyrus isn’t my paying guest, I’ll simply say that some of the injuries I sustained likely came from Riese’s fingernails.”

Rogan’s lips twitched while Cyrus went one-on-one with Boxman.

“Listen to me, you jackass. I did not fire that gun, and I’m not working with a murderer. Not every former cop goes over the edge.”

“But you did buy yourself another phone.” Rogan’s eyes went from the iPhone he’d just dialed to the pocket of Cyrus’s jacket, which was ringing in short staccato bursts. “And you gave it the same number as the one you told us your brother accidentally took from a nightclub.”

“Of course I got another phone with the same number. Unless the laws have changed, that’s not a crime.”

“Laws haven’t changed.” Rogan gestured at his pocket. “Mind if I have a look?”