Spirited Away (13 page)

Andi didn't think she'd sounded more ridiculous in her entire life. Thank God no one knew but her own self.

When she reached the bailey, Kirk was already there, waiting. The grin on his face spread ear to ear.

They shared this excitement, and she felt indebted to him for her path in life. He'd led her as a teen, and now worked side by side with her as an adult.

He rubbed his hands together. "Right. Let's get on it, shall we?"

Together, they got to work.

After several moments of studying the area, Kirk wiped his brow. "Quite bizarre, I'll say. It's as though the roots wormed their way throughout the skeleton and scattered them on purpose." He knelt in the overturned soil and looked up. "I'll retrieve, you bag. Then we'll switch." He grinned.

"Not sure my old knees can stand it for too long."

Kirk paused over the first bone. "Nothing's been touched, right?"

Andi leaned forward. "No. I'm the only one who's been here and I did all the logging without touching anything—except the bone fragment that had been knocked loose and flung near the surface."

Kirk nodded. "Right." He leaned forward and, very carefully, lifted the first, and most obvious.

The head.

With both hands supporting each side of the skull, Kirk gasped. "Damn me, but this is weird." He glanced over his shoulder. "This chap met a grisly end. Could be a pick-ax made this hole in his head." He shook his head. "And there's a bloody vine wrapped about the skull." With sure hands, he removed the vine. "A yew garrote ..." He stopped his movement. He didn't budge, just ... held the remains and stared.

Andi noticed his breathing becoming more rapid, his hands beginning to shake. "Kirk? What's wrong?" When he didn't answer, she spoke louder. "Kirk?"

He didn't even flinch.

Just as Andi was about to lower herself into the grid, Kirk drew a long, exaggerated breath.

"Kirk? What's wrong with you?" she asked again, worried. "Let me help—"

"No. I'm ... feeling a bit ill." He set the skull back in the spongy black soil, rose from the grid, and stood. He turned in a circle, as though slowly taking in the Dreadmoor estate.

Andi placed a hand on his arm. "Kirk?"

He didn't answer. Instead, he walked to the perimeter of the grid, bent over at the waist, and vomited.

"God, Kirk," Andi said. "You should leave. Maybe you ate something that didn't set well in your stomach?"

He lifted his gaze, watery and red. "Aye. Mayhap so."

Even his voice sounded strange. "I'll call you a cab, okay? Don't worry about all this." She indicated the area with a wave of her hand. "I can handle it. Don't even give it a second thought. You need to rest."

Within fifteen minutes, Andi settled her mentor into a cab and watched them pull away from the barbican. Too bad, she thought. Kirk had been so excited to work the initial removal.

"He'll be fine, lady," Will, the barbican guard, said. "More likely than not, he's gotten hold of a bit of poor meat. A few more times of emptying his belly, and some rest, and he'll be good as new."

Andi smiled at the guard. "Thanks, Will. I hope you're right."

With that, she turned and headed back to the grid.

Chapter Nine

Andi wiped the sweat from her brow and stretched her aching back. She'd been at the cutaway for nearly nine hours straight. Retrieval was a tedious task, especially when doing it alone. Yet the satisfying sense of accomplishment always overwhelmed her when doing a project like Dreadmoor.

Well, no other project had ever come
close
in comparison to Dreadmoor, she thought.

But to find ancient bones and relics always fascinated her, got her blood sizzling. No one understood. Kirk, maybe. But it was akin to sifting through history one small bit at a time, or like reading a mystery novel and having the plot unfold one thin layer by one thin layer until all layers lay before you. Exposed. Ready to be gone through. Poor Kirk. He would have totally enjoyed himself.

She'd been more than a little disappointed when Tristan hadn't shown up today. Not that he'd agreed to—he could be quite elusive at times. But she thought he might drop by the site.
No, Monroe. You
wished he might,
her inner voice chided. How that voice annoyed her.

With several bones retrieved and bagged, Andi felt she'd done a thorough job for the day. And although the remains had been disseminated and scattered within the tree's root system, now exposed aboveground, a few had remained unearthed and entombed in the damp, black soil. None of the others, she'd noticed, had been secured with the yew vine, as the skull had been. She wondered if it'd been a ceremonial burial. That's something she'd definitely have to check into.

She'd been troweling for close to most of the day, and her back and knees were killing her. Deciding to cover the site and get a bite to eat before starting on the dungeon, Andi secured the tarp and collected the bagged bones. Maybe by next week she'd have made enough progress to start retrieving the weapons, and maybe something to identify who the body actually belonged to. And, more importantly, how the poor soul died. She could almost bet that thin yew vine coiled around the head had something to do with it.

Beware.

Small hairs on her neck stiffened at the now-familiar whisper. Although she knew it'd be useless, she turned slowly, to see if anyone was about.

There wasn't.

Still, she acknowledged the voice. "Beware of who?"

Only the crash of waves at the base of Dreadmoor echoed on the breeze.
Figures.

Scanning the bailey, she took in the sight of Dreadmoor. Thick, gnarled oak trees shot up from the ground, centuries old, their leaves rustling with each brisk wind. The sun had broken through the clouds, shooting golden beams of light between the branches. The castle stood majestic, gallant against the whitecapped North Sea. How breathtaking the place was. To her, anyway.

To someone else, long, long ago, it'd become a grave.

"La-dy? Are you still down there?"

"Yes, Heath," she called, grinning to herself. What a cute kid. "Still in one piece, too." Heath had crossed himself a dozen times or more before entering the dungeon earlier, but he'd then jumped the stairs two at a time, all the way down.

She looked up in time to see the young boy, followed by Jameson, carrying a small cardboard box of her tools. The hard part had been getting the generator down the steps. But at least they'd managed it.

"Where shall we put these, Dr. Monroe?" Jameson looked about the room with distaste.

Andi hurried over and took the burden from his arms. "Thanks, Jameson. You're a lifesaver."

"No doubt." His dry tone cracked her up. "Does this conclude our labors for the day?"

She grinned. "For now."

"Hmm." He gazed at her with a critical eye. "I vow you have a lot of work ahead of you, young lady, what with the bailey project and the dungeon. I will be upstairs, preparing the evening meal, should you need me." With that, he turned and walked away.

"What about me, lady?" Heath held out a small box. "What's all this stuff, anyway?"

"They're my digging tools," she explained, "used for unearthing old relics and treasures."

"Crikey!" He looked about him quickly, as though attempting to thwart any unwanted ghouls from knowing their plans. "And bones, too, I bet. Bloody bodies and limbs everywhere." His voice dropped to a whisper. "Can I come watch sometime? You might need someone to watch your back."

Andi looked down into Heath's wide blue eyes and smiled. "Sure, kiddo." She bent down lower, so that only he, not the ghouls, could hear. "Do you have a sword, perhaps? Something to defend us with?"

Heath's grin stretched wide. "You mean against the ghastly knight ghost? Against Dragonhawk?"

He gave a nod. "Aye, lady, I'd do me best." He scratched his thatch of dark hair, then stood as tall as his four-foot frame would allow. "I promise nothing would harm you. I can yell loudly, if anything were to try and get you."

She smothered a grin. "You got a deal."

Heath turned and flew up the stone steps, but stopped halfway up and spun around. "Will you be all right down here, all by yourself?"

"You bet." Andi waved him on. "You'd better go before your grandma comes looking for you."

"Aye. See ya!" he said. He crossed himself again, then disappeared through the door, leaving Andi alone.

She walked over to the stack of boxes and placed the small one Heath had been carrying on top. She turned to face the generator. It'd been filled with gas, once they'd managed to get it down the steps, and was ready to go. She could hardly wait to get started.

Tristan watched from the shadows of the dungeon in his invisible state. He couldn't have torn himself away had he tried. Andi's hair, not much longer than her shoulders, glossed with a healthy, rich shine. The kind of tresses a man relished to touch, let slide through his fingers, rub against his skin. He frowned at that thought. Not just any man.
Him.
But that bloody well wasn't going to happen, not in his sorry state of existence.

He leaned back against the wall and continued to watch. The girl checked the gear and busied herself preparing her tools. The young lad Heath had been as taken by her as Jameson. Witless, the both of them. Maybe he would tell the youngster one day he need only cross himself but once, and not the scores of times he had done that day, although he was quite sure the boy did it just to jest at Andi.

He found himself amazed by her confidence, her intelligence. On her hands and knees, she crawled around on the damp and dirty floor of his dungeon, looking at something that interested her under the strange beast she had called generator. He might be over seven hundred years old, but he wasn't completely dim. More than once, he and his men had watched something other than rugby on the tele with Jameson. Tristan knew the beast would cast the entire chamber in light. Saints, but his brothers would've loved to see such.

Unable to help himself, Tristan continued to watch as Andi studied her items. She stood and moved from one thing to another, each with more interest than before. She bent over at the waist to pick up something she'd dropped, giving Tristan a full view of her backside. Damnation, but her hose fit considerably different than they had her first time at Dreadmoor. The wench had longer legs than any woman he'd ever seen. Long and slender, with the cutest little ...

"Bloody dolt," Tristan muttered. What was he thinking?

Andi spun around. "Who's there?" She could have sworn someone had cursed. She looked over the entire chamber. Empty. Maybe that devil Heath was playing tricks on her. She crept over to the tallest stack of boxes and slowly peered around the side of it. No one. She turned, baffled. Now she heard things, spawned, no doubt, from Heath's stories about the "ghastly knight" who roamed the halls of Dreadmoor, rattling chains and lopping off heads. Along with her own ghostly encounter, of course. "Too many ghost tales, Andrea." Shaking her head, she went about her business.

She wondered if Tristan knew such yarns existed about his hall. He probably didn't care. If anything, it raised his ego-meter up a notch or two.

Just exactly who was the lord of Dreadmoor? She'd find out tonight Hopefully.

With one last glance around, Andi knocked the dust from her knees, wiped her hands on her thighs, and headed up the steps. Just as she reached the top she turned and looked back down the way she had come.

And blinked.

She could've sworn she'd seen a knight in chain mail.

Tristan paced before the hearth, perplexed.

"Perhaps, my lord, you should have refrained from being, let's say, so charming to the young woman." Jameson covered a yawn.

"Charming? 'Twas naught but courtesy, which I sorely regret doing the like now. The wench wanted answers, and an endless stream of them, no less. I merely gave her a choice few."

"My lord Tristan," Jameson said. "I hardly would call giving her a small history of your family lineage, albeit vague, anything but courteous. If you'll excuse me for saying so." He flicked a bit of something from his sleeve.

Tristan stormed back and forth, arms crossed over his chest, frowning. "Nay, old man, I'll not excuse you aught." He knew Jameson was right, but he would be the last one to admit as much. He stopped and pointed an accusing finger. "I cannot continue speaking with her, Jameson. 'Tis too difficult to lie. I don't lie. Sooner or later she's going to see straight through that pitiful façade. You answer her questions from now on." With that he disappeared through the wall.

He heard Jameson sigh. "As you wish, my lord."

Had Tristan been alive and able, the thundering of his stomping down the corridor would have been loud enough to awaken the entire keep. He went through the motions, hoping he at least gave a good showing of it, even if only to himself. Involved in making such a good showing, he didn't notice the slender form trotting up the passageway until too late.

Andrea ran right through him.

She stopped in her tracks and sucked in a gasping breath. Just like before, she slowly turned to look behind her. She rubbed her arms vigorously with her hands as if a sudden chill had crept over her.

After a moment she shook her head, then shrugged. Resuming her previous pace, she started back down the passageway.

Tristan stared as he watched her retreat down the corridor. He almost summoned the strength to ignore her, but by God's thumbnail, he just couldn't help himself. Damn his own arse.

He turned and followed her.

Down the long passageway and across the great hall, Tristan watched as she rushed along, fearless of any ghosts or ghouls who might be lingering close by, himself included. In truth, she seemed as excited as a child. Without hesitation she pushed the heavy oak door open and stepped inside. He thought she'd quit the dungeon for the eve. She hadn't even had supper. Tristan followed, intrigued.

* * *