by L. L. Muir
“Where is it?” Jilly blurted. Her heart was breaking for these people that lived and suffered so long ago. If her presence here could bring Ivar and Morna together again, she was anxious to get the ball rolling.
Or maybe the quickest way out of the nightmare was at the bottom of the delusion pool and she only needed to dive in.
Quinn turned his back and fumbled around against the wall. A muffled clank and a curse built the tension from Jilly’s toes up to her shoulders. When he turned back to them, he held what looked like a dusty metal tennis visor without the elastic. He held it close to his body as if he feared the women would snatch it and run, which strangely enough, Jilly felt the urge to do.
The necklace closely resembled its replicas for sale in the souvenir shop except for two chunks of white held to it with prongs, like diamonds on a ring. Bones. Pieces of them, anyway. They had to be. Around the outer edge were the familiar Celtic symbols.
“One from a Ross and the other from a MacKay, I would think,” said Loretta or Lorraine. Jilly could not pull her eyes away from the morbid jewels long enough to study hands.
She no longer felt the urge to touch the thing but she kept open the option to jump through the hole in the floor and run away; there was a sinister pressure in the stagnant air around her. Waving at her from the back of her mind was her grandmother’s conspiracy.
Had it only been two weeks since she’d walked through the doors of the genealogical library in Salt Lake City? Had she known the sisters for only days and not years?
Just as they might have done for any other visitor, the Muirs had listened to what leads Jilly had on her grandmother’s family, had patiently written down the dates and names she knew, and ordered microfiche to dig deeper into her ancestry. She’d been immediately comforted by their gentle words and kind encouragement. With these two as her champions, she’d felt nothing was impossible, that other relatives could be found.
Little did she know.
It was only after she told them her birth father’s name of Ross that Lorraine and Loretta revealed the animated, obsessive sides to their natures. At first, Jilly had been charmed by their stories of mysterious curses and star-crossed lovers. Compared to her own unhappy grandmother, the Muirs showed a unrepentant zeal for life, an optimism to which Jilly had never before been exposed and she’d been caught up in the wrinkly whirlwind.
When they took her under their fragile wings, a lonely orphan from a lonelier state was powerless to turn away from them. When they had insisted she accompany them on their last tour of Scotland before they were too old to travel, her first reaction was suspicion. After all, hadn’t she been warned away from Scotland all her life? Too bad she hadn’t taken it more seriously.
There was one secret, however, that Jillian kept to herself -- every warning about the country and its people drove Jillian crazy with curiosity until Scotland became a mysterious gift she was dying to open. And now, it was all hers with no one left to forbid her from ripping off the paper.
The sisters had immediately played the “pity” card and convinced her they’d feel ever so much safer if there were an able-bodied young woman along, just in case. If ever Jillian MacKay had an Achilles Heel, it was her need to be needed. And that need, combined with the bright bow tied around the country, had made her such an easy recruit.
Until now, though, it had all been a game. It was easy to come to love these women while she worked out just who was patronizing whom. Looking back, Jilly chided herself for never imagining the game could turn dangerous.
“Jillian.”
She turned to find Lorraine looking as disturbed as she felt.
“Don’t touch the necklace, dear. I’ve changed my mind.”
Laird Ross looked at the necklace curiously, then up at Lorraine. “Do you sense something, then?”
“I do,” both sisters volunteered.
“Must be a woman’s ken. What say you, Miss MacKay? Have you changed your mind as well?” Quinn bit his lip.
He looked like a child who suspected he was about to be turned away at the gates to the amusement park. Perhaps he was a romantic after all.
“I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you, honey,” Loretta said. “Enchanting this necklace was clearly not The Lord’s work.”
The Devil’s then? Well, that was a cheery thought.
Then it struck Jilly funny and she began to laugh. The theme music from Disney’s Peter Pan echoed in her head and she nearly broke out singing, “Think of a wonderful thought…”
They’d come that far. They were trying something not tried before. The necklace had lain inside its stone box all these centuries, hidden from the very people who might allow two souls to rest in peace together, and it seemed a pity to not at least try. Her laughter had driven away the creepy feeling and the fact that four somewhat reasonable adults were standing inside said box, hovering over the beam from a flashlight, divining whether or not one of them should try on a necklace that may or may not be a dangerous fashion statement. It was the silliest thing in the world.
The Muirs were not amused.
Laird Ross was grinning. Apparently his vision was good enough to see the silliness too.
“Nope. I’m going to try this.” Jilly put her hands behind her, not yet ready to touch the thing. “But before I do, I need to know your best guesses for what will happen. Do you think their souls will just be reunited? Or do you think it will change the past in some way? You don’t suppose they’ll be…”
“Teleported?” Laird Ross answered. Lorraine’s eyes widened. “We did get Star Trek in the UK, aye?” he added.
Loretta smiled her wrinkliest smile and patted his hand.
Lorraine frowned. “If they’re brought through time, there won’t be enough room for all of us in here.” She wasn’t kidding. The woman was shuffling around examining the floor space. “Loretta and I should wait below.”
Yellow streaks did not look good on periwinkle sweaters, but Jilly could hardly blame her. Besides, standing alone in a small space with Quinn, who looked a bit more like his ancestor in those shadows, sounded more pleasant than anything so far. When she glanced up at him, he was smirking as if he’d read her mind. He reached up and pulled a thick web of dust from her hair and it was all she could do not to sigh like a teenager.
Just as Jilly had decided to spend a good hour’s worth of the flashlight batteries studying the color of his eyes, he handed her the light, maneuvered the necklace around his forearm and bent to lower Lorraine through the hole.
“I think you should concentrate on Ivar and Morna as you put on the necklace, Jillian dear,” came a suggestion from beneath the floor. After both sisters were safely out of the tomb, she faced Quinn over the hole. She was about to suggest a kiss for luck, but all thoughts of flirting were swept from her head when the light flashed on the torque held steady once again in the Scotsman’s hands. She took a deep breath, pushed aside that creepy feeling hovering in the plethora of shadows, and nodded.
The man took the flashlight from her and held out The Curse of Clan Ross. The moments pulsed by while she repeatedly told her hand to lift.
Take it. It won’t bite...surely.
Suddenly, a calm came over her, a feeling of rightness. The torque was meant for her; she suddenly knew it. And whatever might happen, after she put it on, was meant for her as well.
The half-moon of tarnished silver seemed to meet her half way. Quinn hesitated for a second before he released it.
Jilly looked back and forth between the mounted bones, wondering which belonged to which family, imagining that if she concentrated, she just may know. She turned it in her hands and raised it toward her neck.
Quinn stepped back against the wall with the light once again trained on the ceiling, providing the most illumination possible. She only noticed from the corner of her eye; she couldn’t take her gaze from the...thing...in her hands.
The metal ran cool between her fingertips, like barely restrained liquid, thrumming
against the tiny ridges that created her fingerprints.
Was it testing her? Should she say something aloud? Assure the thing she was indeed of Immediate Blood?
Put it on. I need to put it on.
She raised the living, breathing crescent to her neck and pushed it past her skin. The second the cold metal fell against her collar bone, the flashlight died.
“Shake it,” Jilly suggested.
There was no response. The torque seemed to have lost its animation in the darkness, so she let her hands drop away.
“Here. Hand it to me,” she said as she reached forward, careful not to step in the hole. “I’m right here,” she said in frustration when she couldn’t connect with Quinn’s searching arms.
At least they’d better be searching.
“This is not funny, Quinn Ross. Lorraine!” she hollered down the hole, but her voice was incredibly loud in her own ears.
She squatted down and steadied herself with one hand on the floor while she felt for the panel that covered the hole. It had been tipped against the wall just to her right. She could feel nothing but the wall.
“You know, after all this crap I can’t believe you guys would play such a stupid joke. I know you’re there.”
And suddenly she knew nothing of the sort.
Very carefully she got down on her knees and felt the floor, trying not to panic while she searched the dusty stone for the hole. She found nothing but a rough ring cut in the stone, in the center of which was...stone.
Someone had put the freaking hole back in the donut!
The floor was not nearly as dusty as she’d expected. Holding her hands out to the sides she felt the rough walls she feared would still be surrounding her.
Calmly, surprisingly calmly in fact, she stood and pointed her toe, and using it like a blind man’s cane, she swept the entire floor to be sure it was solid. When her hands found the small alcove, she lifted the necklace from her skin and set it back where it belonged, but nothing happened.
Her holy crap moment had arrived.
Sitting down might be a sign she was giving up, so she paced. It was a pathetically small path around that donut hole, but it was a comfort to do something.
She clicked her heals and repeated, “There’s no place like home.” Three times. She didn’t try another set of three for fear of sounding foolish, in spite of there being no one to hear her. In her need to be calm, cool, and collected, being cool seemed doable, for the moment.
She wished she had something other than her fists with which to pound on the wall and suddenly remembered the crowbar from Lorraine’s pants. If she didn’t have anything that might move that stone out of the floor, she was at the mercy of whomever knew she was inside.
A bit more frantic, a bit less cool, she found the necklace and pulled it back on.
Something happened the first time I put it on; whatever happens now can’t be any worse.
Then, picturing thick blue veins on a frail left hand and enunciating clearly, Jilly screamed the name, “Lorraine!”
CHAPTER SIX
Castle Ross, 1495
Montgomery Constantine Ross stood upon the dais of the Great Hall and gritted his teeth in what he hoped resembled a smile. It was his wedding day, for pity sake, the day his clan would finally stop hounding him to take a wife. In the future, they would only be hounding him for offspring.
Or so he had hoped.
Insisting his wedding be held in his hall, to chase a sad memory away with a happier one, had been truly clever on his part. Hanging festoons of flowers around the tomb was the daft idea of Sorcha, his mistress, and he was beginning to wonder if she were harboring a bitter thought or two when she’d suggested it. Once the boughs were hung and his wedding altar turned into a shrine to his supposedly dead sister, it had been too late to relocate the cursed things.
Father McRae blethered on in Latin, standing bravely with his back to the tomb, which the Gordons eyed nervously as if the structure might well conceal the only portal to Purgatory.
Which, in a way, it did. Life for Montgomery had certainly been Hell just before the dark stones had been gathered for it.
His Gordon bride stood to his left. He’d not been instructed to take her hand yet, and he feared he’d have to do a bit of stretching to reach it if she continued to edge away from him as she was doing. She was a comely thing. Not fragile, thanks to God. And other than an odd whimper when she’d been pushed up next to him, she’d not made a sound.
Quiet. An un-Gordonly quality to be sure. Perhaps in time he’d be able to forget from whence she’d sprung. In a very wee while, she’d be a Ross, by damn. With any luck, by the morrow she’d be on her way to bearing his first son.
Further off to the left stood his sister, Morna. No doubt her wee husband stood beside her, but he was likely lost in the folds of her skirts.
Monty had hoped Morna would have forgotten the events that put her in the arms of The Runt, but since she’d arrived the day before, she’d looked her brother in the eye only once. Today her attention was not upon the ceremony, but upon their sister’s tomb. Unfortunately, her memory was proving to be as good as his own.
After today, however, with or without his sister’s approval, he would take a grand step away from the past. If Morna couldn’t make the best of her life, that would not stop Monty from making the best of his. Even his clan had ceased to see him as a monster, and he’d give them no reason to resurrect the notion.
That was, unless he had to kill someone.
With the sounds coming from the tomb behind Father MacRae, Monty prayed whomever was playing this cruel jest would fall and break his neck on his own. He had heard a muffled voice cry, “Away,” but the holy man had shown no signs of hearing it, and Montgomery did not dare look sideways at his Gordon bride to see if she’d done so.
He’d been rather clever in choosing a Gordon to wife. Since all the furor Isobelle’s witchery had caused, he’d needed to cool tempers in order to keep that alliance strong. Morna was driving the Gordons to distraction mourning the loss of both her true love, and her sister. This new marriage would draw attention away from her, for a wee while at least. And hopefully, when the Gordons took notice of Morna once more, she’d have weathered the worst.
Montgomery had wrestled with himself over telling Morna that Isobelle was alive and well, but with the current sentiment toward witches in Scotland, he had to let the farce continue, even if Morna suffered for it. Witches did not suffer, he reasoned, therefore Morna proved her innocence with her misery.
Better a living, unhappy sister, than a dead one. One could say it was the new battle-cry of Clan Ross.
Equally unhappy was the Gordon miss. Etha or Ethel, or some such name, stood next to him in abject misery, inching away from him even now as if her were a leper.
Well, good. She had no business being any happier than he. And a certain air of sacrifice seemed...appropriate for Ross weddings of late. Let a Gordon be the one to sacrifice this time.
Monty reached out, took her arm in a gentle hold, and hauled her up against his side. Eda, or Etha, or whatever her name was, shook beneath his fingers, but she at least stayed put.
God’s blood, what was that scratching? If Ewan thought it amusing to break into the tomb and play ghostie, he was risking all to do it.
Montgomery turned his frown to his left and saw Ewan standing by Morna, his chin on his chest. His ears and the tip of his nose -- the only skin visible in his golden mass of mane and beard -- were bright red. He must have heard it, also. When his cousin looked up, Montgomery took one look at the man’s bulging eyes and knew he had no part in the mischief afoot.
Father MacRae faltered when someone pounded on the black stones. He looked around in question, then his gaze settled on Montgomery, who immediately felt as if he were once again a youth sent to confess his sins.
“Away,” cried the muffled voice, definitely from inside the bloody cairn.
He didn’t need to look to know what was ha
ppening behind him, and in the wake of his fleeing and surprisingly fleet-footed bride, Monty vowed that whoever had broken his way into that tomb would be sealed inside with the rest of its secrets.
Montgomery took a deep breath and turned in time to see Morna collapse. Gratefully Ewan was there to ease her to the ground.
“It seems, Laird Ross, that Isobelle’s ghost is none too keen on you taking a Gordon to wife,” said the priest, the long hairs protruding from his nose waving as he huffed in amusement.
The look in the old man’s eye raised the suspicion that the priest knew full well what had happened to Isobelle.
“Send for me if you ever get a woman willing to fight a spirit for yer hand, son.” The insolent man made him a jaunty bow then walked leisurely out of the emptied hall.
MacRae had the gall to laugh aloud before he was out of hearing. A holy man may not fear ghosts, but he should at the very least feel in jeopardy of a good kick in the arse. Montgomery had little enough love for The Kirk and only a grudging respect for the priest he’d known his life through, but he was the one to see to this auld mon’s bread and the protection of his backside. A wee bit of respect was all he expected, aye?
Intending to remind the clergyman of just that, Montgomery started to follow.
“Monty. Laird. Where do you go?” called Ewan.
“Get everyone out of the keep, Ewan. None will set foot back inside for a fortnight. Perhaps in the quiet, Isobelle’s ghost will move on.”
Montgomery exited the hall in time to see the Gordons ride off after Emma, or whomever, and realized they intended to leave Morna behind. With her beauty, the Gordon Runt would be back for her in a day or two, but Montgomery couldn’t begrudge the man taking a quiet breath while he could.
Morna had just suffered yet another shock. Perhaps it was her due, to finally be told of Isobelle’s escape, but he did not look forward to his youngest sister’s reaction. In fact, he might just wait and tell her a moment or two before she would ride off with her wee husband.