Even Vampires Get the Blues (9 page)

“Where?”

“Dunstan Moor. It's in the Lammermuir Hills. They're shooting a movie here, and Finn is part of a historical group that's providing extras for the movie, and we decided it would be fun to join in. Since he didn't think it was a good idea me meeting with the fence on my own, we arranged to meet him here.”

“On the set of a movie?” I asked, more than a little incredulous.

“It's not as movie-like as you'd think. Evidently the primarily filming was already done, and they're just doing a few more battle scenes—”

I sighed. Only my cousin would think nothing was wrong with meeting a fence in a location where there were plenty of witnesses to watch. “Dunstan Moor. Got it.”

“You're coming? You'll bring help?” she asked, her voice plaintive.

“Police, paramedics, or both?” I asked.

There was silence on the other end of the phone. “Neither, silly! I need an emergency dry cleaner!”

I lost my patience then. “Honest to god, Clare, you act like the dress is more important than you being shot!”

“Of course it is! It's a Versace, you idiot! Bring help! I'm going to save this dress at all costs.”

“Can anyone tell me why . . .” I asked half an hour later as Paen and I stopped in front of Clare. She stood with a familiar dark-haired, dark-eyed man, both of them leaning over a small, portable plastic table spread with a wispy, gauzy bit of fabric in green, blue, and gold that I assumed was the all-so-important dress in question. We were a good fifteen yards away from a brightly lit area around a cluster of trailers. Beyond, half hidden by a couple of scrawny trees, blinding arc lights cut through the night as someone yelled instructions via a bullhorn for people to charge and retreat at specific cues. I paused, trying to see into the darkness. Something tugged at my consciousness, as if it was trying to get my attention. I scanned the area, slowly turning to locate whatever it was that called to me, then decided it was the location itself. Like my office, this land was founded.

“Can anyone tell you why what?” Clare asked.

“Hmm? Oh, why were you wearing a Versace gown to meet with a fence? On a movie set, yet?”

“They're having a ceilidh here after the battle shooting.”

“Ceilidh? Oh, a party?”

“Yes. They've been making some sort of a Scottish historical movie, and since it's almost over, the movie people are letting the extras use the area for ceilidhs for the next couple of nights before they leave,” Clare answered, waving toward the man next to her. “But I can't let anyone see the dress like this! Just look at it! Even if I could pretend the bullet holes were meant to be there, the blood has stained the fabric!”

“Hi, Finn,” I said, smiling at Paen's brother. I'd only met him briefly before, just a quick introduction before we had set off for the castle, but now I had a chance to study him covertly. I could see a physical resemblance between him and Paen—they both had the same forehead, and similar dark, curly hair, but the fundamental difference was something not quite so obvious.

Finn had a soul.

Why does your brother have a soul? I thought Dark Ones didn't have them?

Paen shot me a glance, but didn't answer. I wanted to ask him again what the problem was with mind-talking, but since it made him so uncomfortable, I let it pass.

“Hello, Sam. What did you think of Castle de Ath?”

“It's big. And old. But nice. I liked it. Clare, what exactly happened?”

Clare wrung her hands in a delicately helpless manner that had Finn murmuring soft little platitudes in her ear. “Oh, it was awful, Sam, just awful! I arranged to meet Raul the fence, and he turned up with another man, a very evil man.”

“The evil man shot you?” I asked, eyeing her. She had obviously borrowed a spare costume from an extra, since she was clad in a plain-spun ankle-length skirt and green bodice.

“He shot my dress, yes.” Clare nodded. “Oh, stop making that face. Yes, I realize he meant to shoot me and not the dress, but you know how I am with wounds—I heal so quickly that the bullets did more damage to the dress than me.”

“It's because you're a faery, Clare. Immortal. It's not that you heal fast—you just don't get injured.”

Clare glanced quickly at Finn. “You'll have to excuse my cousin. She's normally very nice, but there are times when she's absolutely unreasonable.”

“Ah?” Finn asked, looking at me.

I rolled my eyes and turned to Paen. “Is Clare a faery?”

“Yes,” Paen said, poking a finger through a hole in the dress.

“Oh!” Clare gasped, her silvery eyebrows pulling together in a frown as she glared at Paen. “Do you think I'm going to listen to the opinion of a
vampire?
”

“Moving on,” I said, not bothering to argue the obvious with her. “Who was the man who shot you? And why exactly did he try to kill you?”

“I don't know who he was, but I wrote up a report for you while Finn was sweet-talking the wardrobe mistress in order to get some club soda to remove the bloodstains. I know how you like reports,” Clare said, pulling from her purse a small notepad.

“Hmm,” I said, quickly scanning the pages. Paen moved to stand behind my shoulder so he could read it as well. I was momentarily distracted by the feeling
of him so warm and solid behind me, but I firmly squelched the desire to turn around and run my hands over his chest again. “Finn was called away by some friends, so you met with Raul alone. . . . He said he'd brought someone who wanted to talk to you. . . . The other man had a monkey on his shoulder? A spider monkey?”

“I didn't ask him what sort it was,” Clare answered, tsking over some new atrocity to the dress. “But it was small, so I guess it could be. It had on the cutest little sailor suit.”

“Huh.” If it was Beppo, then that would explain why the shopkeeper thought I was insane when I mentioned his monkey. But what was the man who was in Paen's castle doing shooting Clare? I read further in the report. “You chatted, he asked you about a statue—”

“Statue?” Paen asked, his voice rumbling close to my ear. Goose bumps ran down my arms at the nearness of it.

“A bird statue,” Clare said, dabbing at the dress with a grubby bit of paper towel. “It's all there in the report. He asked me where the statue of the golden bird was.”

“Are you sure he said a bird statue?” Paen asked.

“I thought the same thing,” Finn said quickly. “Clare said she was sure—it was a golden bird.”

“A falcon.” Clare nodded. “I told him I didn't know anything about any falcon statue, gold or otherwise. He snarled something rude that I won't repeat, and told me I was lying, and that he would kill me if he had to in order to get it. I told him that wouldn't do any good because I didn't know where
the statue was, but he shot me anyway, then both he and Raul ran away. I knew I was better off here than anywhere else, so even though Finn wanted to take me to the hospital, I called you instead.”

“What do you mean you're better off here?” I asked, confused why she would think a movie set out in the middle of the wilderness was the location of choice after a shooting.

“It's nice here,” Clare said with a shrug. “It's pretty country. I like the way it makes me feel.”

I looked around. There wasn't much to see in the darkness, the Lammermuir Hills being a remote and exposed area that was known for its wild beauty, sheep grazing, and grouse. I understood what it was she felt—this land was founded. . . . No, more than founded. It was a lodestone, a holy place to faeries and elves. I didn't bother mentioning the fact to Clare, though. She had a soft, protective security blanket of denial wrapped around her that she clearly wasn't going to shed until she was ready.

“Interesting,” I said, glancing at Finn. “Do you have anything to add to Clare's summary of events?”

“Only that I wish I'd been here to catch the bastard who shot her,” Finn said. “A friend of mine wanted my opinion on some weaponry, so I left Clare watching the filming.” He shot her a reproachful glance. “She was supposed to tell me when the fence came so I could be with her just in case of trouble, but I wasn't of much help on the other side of the field. I heard the shots, and found Clare lying bloody on the ground. I couldn't leave her to chase after the bastards, so I told Paen I needed his help.”

“Finn told you he needed help?” I asked Paen. I'd
been with him every minute since I had the phone call from Clare, and he hadn't used a phone once. Which meant . . . “Oh. That sort of message. You've got mind-mail.”

“You asked me if my statue was of a hawk,” Paen said slowly, an abstracted frown on his face as he turned toward me. “A brass hawk or a falcon. Am I correct in assuming you know what this man was talking about?”

“Yeah, I think I do.” I nibbled my lip for a moment while considering how much to tell the expectant faces watching me, and then decided that since it didn't have anything to do with one of our cases, there was no real reason not to explain how I came by it. “It's at the office, downstairs, locked in Mila's safe.”

Quickly I told them all how I had come by the statue, emphasizing that I had Jake check it over for any bad emanations. “I assume the guy who shot you must be the one the statue was intended for,” I finished, glancing back at Clare's report. “He said he knew you had it, and would stop at nothing to get it?”

“Yes,” Clare answered, mournfully examining a portion of the dress.

“That's odd. I wonder why he thought you had it? You weren't anywhere near the antique shop.”

“He could have been using the collective you, referring to both you and your cousin,” Paen pointed out, looking toward the battlefield, which now rang with cries and shouts accompanied by the sound of clanging metal as the extras gave their all to looking like a horde of wild Scots defending their land.

“True. Well, whatever he meant, I'm not at all
inclined to give him the statue now that he tried to kill Clare. If he had asked nicely, I'd have had no problem giving it up, but not anymore. Now I want something.”

“Revenge,” Finn said, smiling his approval.

“Justice for my dress!” Clare snorted.

“Answers,” Paen said succinctly.

I nodded. “I want answers. How long will they be filming?”

“At least another hour. They just got started when we arrived an hour ago. Why?” Finn asked.

Clare gave me an outraged look as I scooped her dress off the table and laid it over the back of a chair. “I'm going to try to contact the essentia of this area and see what it can tell me.”

“The
what?
” Finn's face mirrored his confusion.

Clare explained briefly how I could communicate with locations while I made myself comfortable on the rickety portable table.

“I thought you could only do that with structures?” Paen asked, watching as I stuffed my purse under my head as a support. I folded my hands together and closed my eyes, trying to ignore the exposed feeling of lying on a table in front of three other people. Fortunately, the rest of the movie people were attending to the filming, so we were alone in our corner of their camp.

“This is a structure of sorts. It's a historic battlefield—didn't you see the marker when we came in?”

“I know it's a historic battlefield. My ancestors fought here. But there's no building for miles.”

“There's a ring of standing stones on the other side of the trailers, and beyond that, some sort of rocky
area that's the heart of the moor. It has enough history for me to look through its memories.”

Clare held a whispered conversation with Finn, telling him more about how elves can feel the souls of places. I ignored them, pushed down my consciousness's awareness of Paen standing so close by, and cleared my mind.

Normally it takes me several minutes to calm my thoughts enough to be able to hear the voice of the house, but this location, being founded so strongly in the beyond, took no time before it started talking to me.

Or rather, the men did.

“Whoa,” I said, my eyes opening a few seconds after I'd closed them. Surrounding us was a ring of men, their numbers growing as I stared at them.

“Sam?” Paen asked, a faint frown between his brows. “What is it?”

I looked around at the men, a good twenty or so of them ranging in age from early teens to late sixties, all of them dressed in ragged tunics, grubby bits of plaid worn wrapped around their waists, each armed with a huge, massive sword. “I think I just met the residents of Dunstan Moor. Hello, gentlemen.”

One of the men stepped forward and said something in a language I didn't understand.

“Ghosts?” Paen asked.

“That would be my guess. Unfortunately, we don't seem to speak the same language. Do either of you speak old Scottish?”

“It would be Gaelic, and I am reasonably proficient in it.”

“Good,” I said, taking his hand. It was warm and
strong and sent little excited chills down me at the feel of it. “You can translate, then.”

“Translate? Translate what?”

I opened my mind to him, willing him to see through my eyes. He jerked away at the touch of my mind. “What do you think you're doing?” His voice was low enough that only I could hear it, but it was rife with indignation.

I'm trying to let you see the ghosts. Mom used to do this with Dad whenever he wanted to see elf stuff. She said she just merged consciousness with him, and he could see things she saw.

“You are not a full elf, and I am not your father.”

We can do the mind-speak thing. I think it's probably a given we can do other things, as well.

“I don't want to—”

Afraid?
I interrupted.

“No, of course not.”

Then merge up, handsome. The ghosts are waiting.

He gave me a long, unreadable look before I felt the tentative presence of him in my mind. I smiled to myself over his reluctance to admit what was pretty clear to me . . .

“Stop that,” he growled.