Deadly Gift (15 page)

“I am. Of course I am.” Kat stood and hugged Bridey. “If you and my dad are Irish, then I’m
very
proud. Even if it means I have to worry about meeting a banshee someday.”

Caer had started out of the room, but she hesitated and turned back. “The thing is, people fear banshees, just as they fear death. But everyone dies. Death isn’t evil. It’s a part of life, a natural progression. We never really like to go anywhere uncertain, unknown, alone. So a banshee is there to help a person make the transition from life to death, to hold their hand.”

“Hey, a death ghost is a death ghost,” Kat said, laughing.

Caer shrugged and smiled. “Well, I’m off to see to your dad.”

Zach rose, as well. “I’ll just say good-night to Sean myself.” He walked over to Bridey and bent down to give her a kiss. She caught his hand and smiled up at him lovingly. “Zach, it’s good that you’re here. So good.”

He squeezed her hand in return, a little troubled, because she felt warm.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

“A wee bit tired,” she told him. “But I’m old. I’m allowed to be tired.”

“Maybe the doctor should check on you, too, next time he’s here,” Zach said.

“As you wish,” she agreed.

“Definitely, Aunt Bridey,” Kat said. “Now I’m worried about you, too.”

“I’m all right, but since you’re worried, you can help me to bed. And I
will
see the doctor. Maybe I’m coming down with a winter bug,” Bridey said. “Zach, you go on now. Good night and God bless.”

“God bless, Bridey,” he said. Kat nodded, and he left them alone so that Bridey could get ready for bed.

He caught up with Caer outside Sean’s door.

“Death isn’t always such a natural part of life, you know.”

She spun around to stare at him.

“There’s not a thing in the world that’s natural about murder,” he said.

“No,” she agreed, her eyes on his unwaveringly. “There’s nothing in the world that’s natural about murder.”

T
he house seemed to moan and whine and whisper by night.

Caer lay on her bed in the near darkness, her fingers laced behind her head as she stared at shadows on the ceiling caused by the night-light. She listened, and tried to define each noise that she heard. The wind played against the wooden shutters on the window, a sound she had come to know. There was a tree whose branches danced against the upstairs wall. Sometimes the place settled, with a kind of ticking sound. But she knew that, too, and it seemed natural now.

Tonight the wind was rising, and it sounded like a mournful cry. It was low, at first. A lament, a soft keening that was barely audible. But as the wind picked up, sweeping across storm windows and shutters and eaves with a greater fury, the pitch of its cry picked up, as well, like someone screaming far away, perhaps in a distant dimension.

All those sounds…

Caer listened to them and identified them, certain that the others in the house were resting well.

Then she heard a new sound.

This one was furtive. Slow. It was a creaking, and it was coming from the main staircase.

She told herself it meant nothing. People got up and moved around, even in the dead of night. There was nothing unusual about that. It wouldn’t be Bridey roaming about in the wee hours; she had water and whatever she might need right in her room. She was old—and she wasn’t stupid. Wandering alone in the dark could mean a fall and a broken hip. She stayed put.

But Kat might be restless by night, and she might have decided to go downstairs and make tea. And God knew about Zach. For all she knew, he might tiptoe around the house for hours every night.

It wouldn’t be Sean. For one thing, he’d taken his medication and would be sound asleep, though he was growing stronger by the day and probably wouldn’t need a nurse much longer. No matter; she’d been hired, and she was staying. Most of all, though, it wouldn’t be Sean because his room was downstairs, and she wasn’t hearing someone climbing the stairs but someone descending them.

Amanda might be the midnight prowler. This was, after all, her home. She might decide to wander down to the kitchen. Or—perhaps even with real concern—she might have decided to go down and check on her husband, to see how he was doing.

Another creak.

Another slow step.

A shadow seemed to shoot across the ceiling, but it was just the light flickering. But
why
had it flickered?

She continued to watch the darkness for creeping shadows, the natural consequence of light and darkness meeting.

She had excellent hearing, and she needed to use it.

Creak.

She held her breath and listened. Waited.

Creak.

Yes. Someone was on the stairs, moving very slowly.

Why move so slowly? Anyone in this house had the right to be here and to wander around at will.

And yet…

She was certain the sound was coming from the stairs. A creeping sensation of fear and approaching doom began to sweep over her. She very quietly eased her covers down, and silently set her feet on the floor.

It was late, but Zach found that, as tired as he was, he couldn’t sleep. He tried for a while, then gave up. Something had been bothering him all day.

Eddie.

Why had he been the only one to go into the office that day?

Cal had napped, and Marni had gone shopping, but they had both sounded guilty talking about it. As if they’d been caught playing hooky. Then again, if nothing had happened that day, neither one of them would have felt bad. The business was extremely active in the summer; they put in tons of hours. There was no reason to feel guilty for taking some extra time off in the winter, other than the fact that they hadn’t been there when something had happened.

But Eddie had said that he had something to do. Cal hadn’t been able to figure out what it was, though, so it probably hadn’t been business related. So why had Eddie gone into the office to do it?

What he needed to do was go through Eddie’s work computer. Maybe the answer was to be found in whatever he had been up to online.

He rose and dressed warmly, adding a scarf, cap and his coat. Late at night, the cold bit most severely. He hit the tiny button on his watch that lit up the dial. Only midnight. Not that late. He would be back soon enough.

He started out the bedroom door, then paused.

His Smith and Wesson .38 Special was locked in his briefcase. Did he need it to go to the office at this hour of the night?

Hell, yes. Eddie was dead. Of course he needed it.

He retrieved the gun, tucked it in his waistband, then silently started out.

It was all that talk about banshees, Kat decided.

She wasn’t afraid of the dark, and she wasn’t afraid of being alone. At least, she never had been before.

Tonight, it seemed as if she was actually hearing a banshee.

A
banshee? It was as if she was hearing a hundred of them screaming, wailing, moaning, caterwauling in the dark. It was the wind; she knew that. The wind had started to pick up late this afternoon and had grown steadily stronger ever since. No rain, just wind.

Maybe there was a storm coming in. Maybe they would even have snow for Christmas.

The shadows seemed to be dancing an evil tango across the ceiling. It was the branches, bending and bowing to the wind, she told herself. But the howl of the wind was utterly unnerving. How could anything that sounded so much like a lonely scream of horror be natural?

The house itself seemed to shake. To breathe in and breathe out.

Kat tossed and turned. She needed to get some sleep. She needed to be alert and aware come morning so she could make sure her father stayed safe. He was doing well now, and at least he was home. He was back in the States, not across an ocean with
that woman
.

The one sleeping in the bedroom down the hall.
His
bedroom. The woman he had married.

For the thousandth time, she felt like crying. Her father had always been so wise. What had made him choose to marry such a tramp? She wished she could believe that Amanda was as harmlessly stupid as she seemed. The quintessential dumb blonde. No, that wasn’t fair; that was giving offense to blondes everywhere. But honestly…Her father was a smart man, one who loved culture and books. She wasn’t sure Amanda knew that books came in any form other than a shopping catalogue.

Suddenly her attention was arrested by movement along one wall. It was as if a giant black creature with huge bat wings had descended and was spreading its evil shadow over the room. She felt pure, icy terror grip her. She didn’t dare to breathe.

Flap, flap, scrape.

Relieved, she let out the breath she’d been holding. It was just the old oak outside her window. The wind had pressed a branch against her window, and that had been silhouetted by one of the outside lights, creating the shadow she had seen. Even now, the oak was moving in the wind.

Why didn’t the shadow move?

That question was playing through her mind when she heard the creaking on the staircase.

She burst out of bed. Someone was in the house. Eddie was dead, her father had been poisoned, and now someone was in the house.

She couldn’t just stand there, shivering in the night. Zach was down the hall, and he was licensed to carry a gun. She needed to get Zach, and quickly.

Weighed down by dread and a sense of terror greater than any she had ever known before, Kat found herself unable to run, but she forced herself to move, albeit slowly, despite the icy tentacles of fear wrapping around her limbs. She finally reached her door and started to open it. The old knob felt icy, and she could have sworn that there wasn’t just darkness around her, but a mist. As if something huge were
breathing
nearby. She swallowed hard and finally opened her door.

Inch by inch, forcing herself to move, she made her way down the hallway. It had somehow gotten longer, and it was frigid and filled with the same mist, as if someone were exhaling hot breath into the cold air. She could hear it inhaling, exhaling. Almost like laughter. She was moving down the hall, and it was moving after her.

Or it was in front of her. She wasn’t sure.

She fought the rush of terror that attacked her at the thought of being stalked by some dark, amorphous danger. She didn’t believe in ghosts, didn’t believe in banshees, voodoo or vampires.

But…

She could feel the evil, the menace, cold as ice, like the touch of the Reaper’s hand, coming out of the dark and slipping around her neck.

She wanted to close her eyes. She was terrified that a death’s head would suddenly appear before her, out of the mist, laughing in silent glee.

At last she reached Zach’s door.

The minute she grasped the knob, she felt stronger.

She pushed the door open, feeling almost normal. She wasn’t going to get hysterical, she told herself. Wasn’t going to blurt out that the banshees had been crying outside her window, or that the Grim Reaper had been breathing down her neck in the hallway. She would tell him the truth, plain and simple.

Someone was on the stairway.

“Zach?” she called softly.

No answer. For a moment, panic filled her again.
It
had already been here.
It
had gotten Zach.

She rushed over to his bed before she could flee back to her room and hide in her closet. Somewhere out there, she knew, real danger lurked. A danger to her father.

She reached down, trembling in fear at what she might find.

And then she knew.

Nothing had gotten Zach.

He just wasn’t there.

Eddie had been to dozens of Revolutionary War sites, and he had studied literally hundreds of maps. Nothing surprising in that, Zach thought. Eddie and Sean had spent days on end rehashing the Revolutionary War and participated in numerous reenactments.

Zach followed Eddie’s online trail for an hour, until he realized that the words were blurring on the screen.

He left the office, moving carefully down the steps.

They were icy by night.

He heard the crashing of the waves, the tinkling of the bells and mooring chains on the boats, and the whipping of the wind. Security lights blazed from nearby businesses, but beyond their reach the sea was pitch dark, except when the rolling waves lashed up and the whitecaps were caught in the multi-colored glow of the Christmas lights someone had strung along the docks. What should have looked cheerful instead created a miasma of eerie confusion across the surface of the water.

It was cold. He wrapped his scarf more tightly around his neck, pulled his cap low over his ears and hunched his shoulders as he headed toward the car.

As he moved, listening to the moaning of the wind as it rose and fell, echoing like a screaming harpy in the night, he was startled to hear something else.

At least…he
thought
he heard something else.

A footfall, coming from behind him.

He swung around. Flags on houses and boats, Christmas decorations, all of them being battered by the wind, created a confusion of shadows. He could have sworn that he had heard a footstep, but there was no one behind him.

Where could someone be hiding?

Not a hard question to answer, actually. A pursuer could have ducked behind one of the cars still scattered around the lot. Behind a light pole. Behind the giant Santa that was wavering like a trembling jellyfish in front of a souvenir shop.

But the sound had come from directly behind him. As if someone had followed him from the office.

There was no one there now. He slipped his hand beneath his coat and set it on the gun in his waistband, then looked around again, slowly, carefully.

No one. Nothing out of place that he could see. It was late on a winter’s night, the wind was growing wicked, he was tired, and his eyes were playing tricks. And still…

It was bizarre, feeling this uneasy when there was nothing there to be afraid of. He was smart enough to be afraid of what was real—deranged people carrying weapons, for instance. But he had never been afraid of the wind, and he didn’t intend to start now.

There was no one there. He was sure of it.

He told himself that the wind had torn something loose from somewhere, and he had heard it hit the pavement before blowing off again, this time to oblivion. Determinedly, he strode to the car.

The drive back to the house was uneventful, but as he left the car and entered the house by the kitchen doorway, he was startled to feel a sensation of unease again.

Now he was really being idiotic, he told himself. Even if there had been someone in the parking lot, they sure as hell hadn’t followed him here. And back there, the sound had been real, like a footstep on pavement.

Here, it was just…