The Adept (33 page)

“Everybody all right?” he asked.

At Adam’s steady, “Yes,” Peregrine leaned shakily forward from the backseat, his face pale and inquiring.

“What happened?” he asked.

“We almost hit something,” said McLeod.

Peregrine glanced at Adam. “Did you see what it was?”

“Not clearly,” Adam said. “From the general outline, it might perhaps have been a deer.”

Certainly, the image resonating in the back of his mind was that of a horned shape in flight. Beyond that, however, he was not prepared to speculate out loud. McLeod shot him a curious side glance, but probed the matter no further.

“Well, whatever it was, it’s gone now,” the inspector said. “And so, I fear, is our transportation.”

He shifted the Volvo into reverse and slowly pressed down on the accelerator, but the fear wheels only spun. The big car remained anchored to the spot.

Scowling, McLeod killed the engine and got out of the car, gingerly working his way down the slippery slope to inspect damage to the front end. He came back along the left side, steadying his balance on the fender. As he came even with Adam’s door, Adam rolled down his window and handed him the big electric torch. McLeod was longer at the back of the car, and did not look happy when he rejoined them.

“Well, we aren’t going anywhere without a tow truck,” he announced. “Even if I haven’t torn out the underside by going over that bit of wall, we’re mired up to the axle in front, and the rear wheels are dug in. Sorry, Adam.”

“No matter,” Adam murmured. “No one else could have done any better. I should have given you warning. At least no one’s hurt. We’ll simply have to go the rest of the way on foot. Let’s have a look at that map, Peregrine.”

Peregrine handed the map forward, and Adam consulted it briefly under the dash light, then glanced back out McLeod’s side and out the rear window at the light show still visible ahead and behind the embankment of the road.

“I don’t see how we could be much more than about a mile from Urquhart Castle,” he said, his brow furrowed in calculation. “That’s no great distance to cover on foot, even in this storm. In fact, going the rest of the way on foot might even be an advantage—give us more of an element of surprise. It’s beastly weather for it—but it’s no better for our comrades at Urquhart.”

The brief flash of his grin in the dim light was almost predatory, and McLeod answered it with a grim chuckle.

“Aye, that’s true enough,” the inspector said. “Mr. Lovat, if you’ll be so good as to pass my bag up here, we’ll arm ourselves for the hunt, as it were. Adam, do you need yours as well?”

“No, I have what I need,” Adam replied, as Peregrine wordlessly passed McLeod’s bag forward and looked at him in question. “I believe I do have an extra torch, however. You might fetch that, Peregrine.”

Peregrine did as he was bidden, lifting the black doctor’s bag onto his lap and gingerly opening it. He was peering into its shadowed depths, trying to spot the torch, when Adam leaned back over the seat and shone the big torch into it, at the same time extracting the second torch and handing it to Peregrine. During that brief moment of illumination, Peregrine caught just a glimpse of small boxes and vials and plastic-sealed disposable syringes—the usual paraphernalia one might expect in a doctor’s bag—but also several oddly-shaped items wrapped in what looked like white silk. He looked up in question as Adam snapped off the torch.

“Tools of my various trades,” Adam said, by way of explanation. “But I won’t need any of the rest of that tonight. You can put it back behind the seat.”

Wide-eyed, Peregrine obeyed. He was curious, but Adam’s instruction precluded further discussion. Besides, McLeod had just pulled a very serviceable-looking automatic from his bag. Upholstering it, the inspector shoved an ammunition clip into the butt, then pulled back the slide to chamber a round, letting it snap back with a deadly- sounding click.

“Browning Hi-Power,” McLeod said, thumbing on the safety and sticking it determinedly into the front of his waistband. “It’s a 9mm automatic—fires the standard NATO round. Gives me fourteen shots before I have to reload.”

As he pulled two more clips from the bag and stuck one in each coat pocket, Peregrine gaped in dismay.

“Do you really think you’re going to need that?” he asked.

“I hope I won’t,” McLeod replied. “But I want to be ready, if I do. We know that they’ve killed at least once. You saw the body on the dock.”

Feeling a little queasy, Peregrine nodded. Until that very moment, even through the ordeal of the ferry crossing, it had not truly occurred to him just how dangerous this might be. The banshee had threatened a peril of its own, of course, but somehow that did not represent the same kind of danger as bullets.

“Take heart,” Adam said, “if I’m right in my speculations, our gun-toting thieves are going to have a lot more on their minds than worrying about us.”

With that assurance, he flung open his car door to the storm, McLeod doing likewise. As the two climbed out, Peregrine unhooked his seat belt and followed.

Chapter Twenty-One

THE TEMPERATURE
had dropped even more since leaving the ferry at Kyle of Lochalsh. They stayed reasonably dry at first, in the gear they had borrowed from Dunvegan, but the full force of the wind hit them when they climbed up the slippery embankment and emerged on the road, chilling to the bone, and the wind-driven rain stung exposed hands and faces like icy needles.

Shivering, Peregrine hunched deeper into his collar and pulled a fold of his borrowed scarf closer around his neck and lower face to keep out the rain, wishing he had thought to borrow proper gloves. His fingerless ones were not much good; besides they were soaked through already.

Adam was not even wearing gloves, though Peregrine knew he had some, for he had heard Humphrey mention putting a pair in the pockets of the green waxed jacket, back at the airport. He was carrying his electric torch in one bare hand, with the other thrust into a coat pocket; and whenever the exposed hand got too cold, he would shift the torch to the other hand and shove the frozen one into a pocket to thaw. McLeod, likewise, was gloveless—though at least his torch was one of the long, metal-cased police ones, long enough to clamp under one arm while he burrowed both hands into his pockets—a bit awkward, but it would keep his hands supple enough to handle his pistol, if need be.

This perception led Peregrine to wonder what Adam was going to do for a weapon, when they eventually reached Urquhart Castle. He had a feeling that the narrow, hand-length black object he had seen Adam slip into his jacket back at the airport, might be a weapon of some sort; but he was virtually certain it was not a gun. Whatever it was, Peregrine doubted whether it would be effective defense against fairies; Adam certainly had not produced it when threatened by the banshee. And Adam’s torch, no bigger than his hand, was hardly a weapon—though McLeod’s might qualify.

Not that the torches were much use in
this
rain. As they trudged single-file along the right-hand shoulder of the road, Adam leading and McLeod bringing up the rear, Peregrine decided that one of the worst things about being out in the weather, besides getting cold and wet, was that one’s glasses got streaky and fogged. McLeod would be contending with the same annoyance, though Peregrine was pretty sure the inspector only needed his for reading. Peregrine briefly considered simply pocketing his spectacles, for the rain was so heavy that he could only see a few feet past Adam anyway; but he put his head down instead, deciding it was better to see things through a blur of rain, if there eventually
was
anything to see, than to remove the glasses and be sure of seeing nothing. Not that he was eager to see anything like the banshee again . . .

The rain continued to pelt down steadily. Like automatons, the three of them trudged along for nearly a quarter of an hour, the eerie light-show ever before them and to then right, thunder rumbling almost continuously above the wail of the wind. They met no traffic. As they got colder and wetter, they began to encounter pockets of hail that battered down across then shoulders like a rain of hard gravel.

“Adam, is it my imagination,” McLeod called hoarsely from the rear, “or is this getting worse?”

“Well, it wasn’t
hailing
before,” Adam replied.

Before Peregrine could comment, a louder ramble punctuated the general thunder and lightning, even reverberating through the soles of their boots. At the same time, greenish light flared down at the level of the loch, ahead and to their right, giving a fleeting glimpse of black water and also, to their astonishment, the ragged silhouette of a ruined medieval castle. Ahead, but twenty yards or so, the castle’s modem-day car park opened off the road into a flat, paved plateau overlooking the ruin.

“Look! That must be it!” Peregrine cried, pointing ahead with a cry of excitement. He started forward impulsively, but McLeod caught him by the sleeve.

“Easy, laddie,” the inspector warned, quickly switching off his torch. “That’ll be Urquhart, right enough, but you can see for yourself there’s something bloody peculiar going on down there. It’d be poor tactics to go rushing in before we’ve had a chance to take our bearings.”

Beside him, Adam likewise had turned off his torch, and distractedly drew the other two men closer—for his attention was still on the lights below.

“Noel’s right,” he murmured. “Let’s see if we can get a better look from the car park. And no more torches, if we can possibly manage without,” he added, pocketing his. “With the lightning flashes, and what’s going on down there, I think we can see well enough, if we keep to the edge of the road. But there’s no sense announcing our arrival before we’re ready to act.”

Bending their heads to the wind, the three managed the few remaining yards to the near end of the car park without incident. A railing brought them up short along the downhill side, and they lined up along it, crouching to peer down. The eerie green light continued to flicker in, cold flashes along the cliffs fronting the loch, apparently coming from behind the south end of the castle.

“Well, whatever it is, it certainly isn’t lightning,” Adam said.

“Aye,” McLeod agreed. “Apart from the sound, if I didn’t know better, I’d say there was artillery fire going on down there.”

“Unfortunately,” Adam replied, “it may well be akin to that. When we start down, we’d better be prepared for a fight.”

Even as he spoke, a deep, sonorous boom shivered the air, echoing up from the water’s edge like the aftershocks of an explosion. All of them ducked instinctively as green sparks fountained upward behind the shoreline bluffs and hung there, whizzing and darting like a swarm of incandescent bees. The glow was enough to illuminate the trail down to the castle quite clearly.

“I believe we may be just in time,” Adam murmured. “Unless I miss my guess, someone has just opened up Scot’s Fairy Cave! Let’s have a closer look.”

The fence at the edge of the car park was a two-rail affair of tubular steel, with bars as thick as a man’s wrist. Ducking his head between the two, Adam swung up a booted leg and wormed his way through, aware that McLeod and Peregrine were following as he started down the footpath toward the castle. Avoiding a potentially noisy flight of wooden steps, they skidded down the embankment to one side, clinging to the railing to slow their descent, then clambered unceremoniously over the barrier at the kiosk where tickets were usually sold.

They kept their heads down as they trotted down a long, gradual slope almost to the level of the castle walls, guided by the railings that ran along either side. At the bottom, the path made a sharp left down a slippery flight of timber and concrete steps and then continued along a wooden catwalk that led toward the bridge spanning the castle fosse, but Adam led them to the right instead, down another short flight of steps, heading for a small outbuilding set just outside the south rampart.

They paused in its shadows to peer ahead, for beyond that, a muddy path led downward among storm-tattered trees toward a narrow crescent beach. Beyond the beach, the black waters of the loch frothed with the storm. Between lightning flashes, the whole area pulsed with a fey, greenish light that shimmered and snapped like static electricity.

“Listen,” McLeod whispered, as the wind brought them the faint, mechanical thrum of a diesel engine. “D’ye hear that?”

Silently the three slipped along the side of the building and crouched again at the end, peering ahead for a glimpse of the source of the sound. From their new vantage point, they could just make out the bulk of a powerful speedboat drawn up close to the crescent-shaped beach. A man in black oilskins and cap was at the helm, holding the craft steady, with its prow nudging the rough shingle, a stone’s throw below the mouth of a horseshoe cave.

Adam tugged at Peregrine’s sleeve to get him down as the three of them cautiously dashed across the path and took cover farther to the right, behind some bushes, where they could get a better angle on the cave. The entrance was raw as a wound. The huge stones flanking the opening and scattered across the beach looked as though they had been newly quarried. Inside the cave, the air was dense with flecks of bright green light, whirling and flying like sparks from a blacksmith’s forge.

“The records say nothing about a cave here,” Peregrine whispered. “Do you really think they just now opened it?”

“Almost certainly,” Adam replied.

The man in the boat was watching the entrance expectantly. “The rest must be inside,” McLeod muttered, warily scanning around them, in case all were
not
. “Care to estimate how many that might be?”

Adam peered at the boat and the cave, calculating. “I’d guess maybe five or six more, if they all came in the boat—which is likely, since there were no cars in the car park. Given that men like these don’t like to share the loot, that also suggests keeping numbers to a minimum. If it
is
five or six more, do you think we can handle them?”

McLeod snorted softly. “Do we have a choice?”

“No,” Adam said, “but we do have the element of surprise.”

“For now, aye, but keep, your heads down,” McLeod cautioned.

He shoved his torch into his left-hand pocket and padded off down the slope, Adam and then Peregrine following. At the point where the path hooked right, he ducked to the left into a thick stand of wet elderberry bushes. A crouching, ten-yard scramble through the underbrush brought him to the base of a large, saddle-topped boulder, half the size of a small car. Beyond, the ground fell away brokenly toward the beach and the mouth of the newly-opened cave.

The wind had died down under the cliff, leaving the air cold and still, and the rain had petered out to a chill, saturating mist. The sudden, localized lull was ominous, like the zone of calm at the eye of a hurricane. As Adam flattened himself against the boulder beside McLeod, he wondered how long the calm would last.

A showery rustle in the shrubbery heralded Peregrine’s arrival. The young artist threw himself down next to Adam, his eyes wide with excitement.

“Have you seen anything yet?” he breathed, rearing up cautiously on one elbow to get a better look at the play of lights inside the mouth of the cave. Adam tugged him downward with a hiss of warning.

“Careful!” he breathed.

“But, what are all those flecks of light?” Peregrine whispered. “They’re flying about almost as if they were alive.”

“They
are
alive,” Adam murmured, “or hadn’t you guessed? Those are the denizens of the cave.”

“Fairies?”
Peregrine caught his breath and stared. “That’s right,” McLeod muttered, from Adam’s other side. “And they’d just as soon eat you alive as look at you. I’m serious, boy—don’t look at me like that!”

As Peregrine gasped at his two companions, speechless, Adam slipped the sapphire ring from his finger and held it out to the artist.

“Here. Take this and put it on,” he said. “Whatever happens from here on out, you’re going to need some protection. If we should come under attack from the Faerie Host—which is likely, before this is all over—the virtues vested in the stone should keep them at bay—at least for a little while.”

“But, aren’t you going to need this yourself?” Peregrine asked, gloved hand closing automatically on the ring.

“No, I have other weapons.”

Partially unzipping the front of his slicker, Adam reached his right hand deep inside. It came out clasping a small, black-sheathed dagger.

Or, no, not just a dagger, Peregrine amended. It was a
skean dubh
—the Highland blade customarily worn with a kilt, stuck in the top of the hose.

But even in the erratic light, Peregrine could see that this was no ordinary
skean dubh
. The sheath alone was a work of art, half the overall length of about seven inches and mounted with exquisite silver interlace at throat and tip. He could not see the details of the carving on the hilt, because of Adam’s hand, but the pommel was set with a clear blue stone nearly the size of a pigeon’s egg. When Adam unsheathed the weapon, slipping the sheath back into his pocket, the polished blade shone like quicksilver under the lowering sky, a pale blue light flickering about its edges like reflected moonlight—or like the reflection of powerful intent.

At the same time, McLeod had pulled the Browning automatic from his waistband, thumbing the safety off with a faint but audible click as he raised it, ready, beside his head. However, it was not the sight of the gun that made Peregrine blink; he had done that already, back in the car. It was the sudden flash of blue fire-off the back of McLeod’s gun-hand. A closer look revealed that McLeod was now wearing a sapphire ring almost identical to Adam’s.

Both men had in their eyes the intent, preoccupied look of hunters on the trail of dangerous prey. Gazing at his companions in owlish silence, Peregrine suddenly became keenly aware that he was seeing them in a wholly new light. During the past few weeks and even hours, he realized that he had come to accept, almost casually, that Adam and McLeod had powers and abilities he could not begin to understand. Now that they were preparing to close in on then quarry, Peregrine realized he hadn’t a clue what they might do.