Verse of the Vampyre (24 page)

His eyes were slits of concentration, his mouth a straight line; Peter used the point of his sword to shove a pewter
quaich
in Derek’s path. It clattered noisily on the flagstones.

Grace, sticking to the edge of the hall, moved around the duelists, starting back toward the room where they had left Catriona. She thought that Catriona’s blunderbuss might come in useful, although she shied mentally from the idea of shooting anyone. She told herself the main thing was to keep Catriona from using it—not that there weren’t plenty of other weapons available, and Catriona was probably adept at wielding all of them.

Once she had the gun, perhaps she could find her knapsack and the rope and other goodies that Monica had packed…

The blades chattered against each other and broke free.

She watched Peter grab the end of a faded tapestry and yank it down. His attempt was clearly to tangle Derek in its folds, but the other man ducked nimbly away.

Grace threw one last glance at Peter over her shoulder and raced on.

She reached the sitting room in time to find Catriona on her hands and knees. She had the blunderbuss. Raising her head, she saw Grace and fired. Grace ducked back with a yelp. There was a chunk out of the door frame about the size of her fist.

She tore back to where Peter and Derek were still whaling away at each other.

“Peter!”

He spared her a quick glance, then had to fight hard to push back Derek. Apparently he had registered the shot and recognized the source of her panic.

“Up.” He sounded breathless.

Grace ran for the main staircase. Derek tried to intercept her, and she pushed a suit of armor his way. It made a horrendous din, breaking apart as it rolled down the stairs.

Derek half fell, but clumsily regained his footing as Peter lunged for him. Peter wasn’t fooling around, Grace realized. He would have skewered Derek if he’d connected.

She ran up to the landing, but had to stop and watch. Peter was fighting furiously, fighting for his life and hers. Both men were fast and agile. Peter had a slight advantage of height, but Grace realized for the first time that Derek was younger by several years, and in this game that might mean the difference. Her hands clutched the banister so tightly her knuckles ached, but she didn’t feel the pain.

Both men were moving more slowly, their swings wide and less focused. Sweat shone on their faces.

And then it was over so fast she didn’t see it coming.

Peter took an incredible chance, dropping down beneath Derek’s two-handed sweep, and thrusting up. Derek cried out, at the last second managing to deflect the blow, so that the sword pierced him over his hip instead of sliding through his gut.

Grace felt sick, which was probably nothing to the way Derek must have felt. He swayed, crumpled, and rolled down the stairs to the bottom. Peter dropped his sword and bounded up the staircase, panting and white-faced.

“Go!”

A shot rang out behind them, and the wall splintered.

Catriona, her hair Medusa-like, appeared in the hall below. She shrieked like a Banshee in Gaelic.

Racing up another flight, they fled down an unlit hall. At the end of the hall was a door. Peter tried it. It was locked. Apparently there was no time to waste on picking locks; he delivered a swift hard kick to the door. It gave with a splintering crash. Too much of a crash. Grace looked down and in the paling darkness she saw that there was no floor behind the threshold.

There was…nothing. The ceiling of the great hall was beneath them—a story or so down.

She looked up. A large portion of the roof was gone, too. An icy moon shone hazily through the skeleton of broken beams and sky.

“We’re trapped!”

“No.” He pointed across the nonexistent floor to a trefoil recess. “See that? Make for it.”

“You’ve got to be joking! Am I supposed to fly?” From down the hall she could hear slow, deliberate footsteps.

“The ledge goes all the way around.” Peter’s voice was calm, but she could feel his urgency.

“It’s only about a foot wide!”

“It’s wide enough. For God’s sake,
go
.”

She went—even more afraid of Catriona than of falling to her death.

Glued to the rough stone, Grace inched her way along the edge toward the alcove. She tried to reassure herself that if the structure had lasted this long, it would probably hold up for one more night.

“That’s it,” Peter encouraged. “That’s the girl, Esmerelda.”

Ah, yes. The old Esmerelda routine. Wasn’t Esmerelda the girl Quasimodo carried off to the bell tower of Notre Dame Cathedral? Or was that Esmeralda with an “A”? Grace tried to focus her thoughts on anything but the fact that she was about a hundred feet up in the air on a ledge about the width of a balance beam.

“Don’t look down,” Peter warned.

But it was impossible not to look down.

She had an amazing view of the entire island. The sparkling black water stretched out for miles. She could see the roof of Lady Menteith’s Tower powdered white with frost several feet below them; and to the south, the harbor, which seemed to be lit up. The rumble of a motorboat engine drifted on the breeze cooling her sweating face.

The Donnies were preparing for escape in the launch.

A rusted nail snagged in her sweater and for a second she was off-balance. She caught herself, pressing back against the grainy wall, her heart tripping and skipping.

“Steady,” Peter said.

Great, she thought dizzily. If I don’t die in the fall, I’ll probably get tetanus.

Soaked in perspiration and trembling, Grace made the last few sliding steps, and crawled into the recess.

Her fingers brushed something cool and metallic. She heard the silvery whisper of metal on rock. The Peeler!

Peter’s decision made more sense, but they were still trapped up in the rooftop.

Catriona appeared in the empty doorway.

She said conversationally, “I wondered if you’d forgotten this place.”

“I like what you’ve done with it,” Peter remarked, equally offhand. He was midway across the ledge. There was only room for one in the trefoil recess, and apparently he thought it better to keep Catriona focused on him.

“So glad you approve,” Catriona replied, “since you’ll be spending eternity here.”

Grace screamed as Catrina fired.

She waited for Peter to sway and fall.

Peter jerked as a chip of stone grazed his cheek, but his footing never wavered. Catriona had missed. But there was nowhere for him to go. He was like a pop-up in a shooting gallery.

There must be something I can do, Grace thought desperately. I can’t just sit here and let this happen. But what could she do? She had no weapon. There was no room to move on the ledge, and beneath her was a dizzying view of the tower and, beyond, the loch.

Catriona took aim again.

“I am thinking it would be wise,
mo leannan,
to be looking to the immediate future,” Peter said, imitating the Gaelic phrasing.

Catriona didn’t lower the gun, but she looked around, as did Grace.

There were too many lights in the cove, Grace realized. Too many people moving around the docks for it to be simply the Donnies.

“It’s the coppers,” Peter said evenly.

Catriona stared across at him for a long moment.

Grace was afraid to breathe. Then, as lightly as a cat, Catriona dropped the gun and ran out along the opposite ledge. She stared for a long moment down at the tower.

It’s impossible, Grace thought. It must be nine feet across…

Catriona circled back again, raced at the ledge and leapt.

For a moment she seemed suspended in thin air, legs outstretched in a perfect grand jete like some supernatural element of the sky.

“She won’t make it,” Grace whispered, leaning dangerously out of the alcove to see.

“She will,” Peter said quietly.

Catriona landed on the opposite roof and rolled.

Sounds from below caught Grace’s attention. A mob of men with high-powered lights pounded at the entrance of the keep. The entrance bell rang, the chime rolling through the castle.

Farther out in the harbor, the launch had been stopped. Men were boarding from another, larger boat. She could hear the dog barking from here.

She looked back to the tower in time to see Catriona crossing the roof, running lightly, keeping low.

“She’ll take the skiff,” Grace realized aloud.

“Yes.”

Peter had moved along the ledge to the recess. He rested on the edge, half-in and half-out of shadow. She wondered if his legs felt as weak as hers. Not likely. Staring at him, she stated, “You want her to get away?”

His profile seemed carved of moonlight. “It’s simpler that way.”

Simpler for whom?

“She would have killed you,” Grace said.

His mouth twisted.

When she looked back, the tower roof was bare of anything but moonlight.

“I knew Chaz would have to have the last word,” Grace remarked, smothering a yawn.

The last rays of sunset filtered through the lace curtains and threw snowflake shapes against the walls. It was twilight—the gloaming—and they were back at her room in the inn after spending the remainder of the night and most of the day with the Edinburgh police, who had been tipped off about the activities at
A’ Mheirlich Saobhaidh
by Charles Honeyburn III during a last-minute phone call from Waverley Station.

Peter, lost in study of the twin beds, glanced up. “What’s that?”

“Chaz. Not that I’m not forever grateful, but calling the police was so…so…like him.”

Peter’s cheek creased. “But not like you?”

“Oh, well, maybe a little…once.” She swallowed the rest of it in another jaw-breaking yawn. “Perhaps you are a bad influence.”

“Mmm.”

There was a fine-drawn tautness to his skin and little lines of weariness around his eyes that she didn’t remember seeing before. She would have liked to reach out to him, to comfort him, although the idea that Peter would need or accept anyone’s comfort was probably ridiculous. She said prosaically, “Do you think the police will really let us leave tomorrow?”

“If I’m correctly interpreting the official noises, it sounds that way. They’ve got their hands full—literally. That haul from the tower must be worth several million dollars.”

“Do you think they’ll catch her?”

She couldn’t read his expression.

He said unemotionally, “They know who she is now. She’ll be on the run for the rest of her life.”

Grace just couldn’t get too broken up over it.

She mused, “I wonder why they didn’t destroy the Peeler? Since it incriminated them—” She paused at the quick look her threw her from beneath his lashes. “What?
What?
”

Reluctantly, he said, “You’ve got that part wrong. The bugle was their alibi. That’s why they were so desperate to get it back.”

“That can’t be right.” Grace was frowning. To her surprise, Peter reached over and gently rubbed the frown line with the edge of his thumb. They were so close she could smell the smooth texture of his skin, the warmth of his breath.

His mouth was a kiss away from hers. “It doesn’t matter,” he said quietly.

Grace’s eyes opened. “Yes, it does!”

He drew back. “Right then. Think back to that evening. How long was Theresa gone from the ballroom?”

“I don’t remember. I wasn’t watching her. I assumed she was with Derek.”

“Derek was with Ruthven, breaking into Sir Gerald’s study.”

“You mean there wasn’t time to steal the Peeler and kill Theresa?”

“It would be cutting it fine.”

“What about Catriona?”

“I was with Catriona.”

Grace preferred not to pursue this line of investigation. She wondered if Peter had been tempted even for a moment to throw aside his law-abiding existence for the lure of the old life.

“Even with the Peeler that will be pretty hard to prove. Ruthven’s dead and can’t corroborate. And from the way the police sounded I don’t think that Derek’s story about finding Theresa dead and puncturing her neck with his picklock is going to fly.”

Peter’s mouth twisted ruefully. “It’s such a stupid story. It’s probably true.”

“But why try to confuse the issue with fake vampire bites?”

“I think he was inspired by the wild rumors following the security guard’s death. He must have imagined it was a way to divert suspicion from himself. His affair with her wasn’t much of a secret; he had to know the police would suspect him. And as half the village believed Ruthven was running around playing vampire…” He lifted a dismissing shoulder. “Or perhaps it was sheer malice. By then Derek and Cat suspected Ruthven was behind her ’accidents.’ ”

“But Ruthven couldn’t have killed Theresa because he was stealing the Peeler?”