“De ones who blackened de magic were. I was just…” Her voice trailed off as she searched for a word.
Kris had no problem helping her. “A dumbass.”
Jamaica inclined her head. “I had been hurt. I felt powerless. I went searching for a way to change dat.” Her eyes sparked. “I found it.”
“What did you do?” Kris asked.
The woman lifted her chin. “T’ings I will never, ever say.”
“You left the cult?”
“I left Jamaica.” She looked away. “I had little choice.”
“Because?”
“Obeah is still illegal dere.”
“Illegal? How can they do that?”
“Jamaica is not America,” she pointed out. “To practice witchcraft is to beg for trouble.”
Kris had done some stories on witchcraft, but only that practiced in the United States, where such things, while not commonplace, were tolerated. She could understand how, in certain countries with certain backgrounds, that tolerance would be nil.
“So you left Jamaica,” Kris said, “and you came here.”
“Eventually.”
There was a story there, too, but Kris had interviewed enough people to know that you had to stick to one mystery at a time if you wanted to discover anything at all.
“Why here?”
Jamaica shrugged and stared out the window. “Dey say one of my ancestors was from Scotland. Long time back.”
“Ancestor,” Kris repeated. “Buccaneer? Plantation owner?” Basically some white guy who came and took what he wanted. History was full of them.
“Yes,” Jamaica answered, still staring outside. “I always wanted to see dis place. Once I did, I never wanted to leave.”
“You don’t practice Obeah anymore?”
“No.” Now Jamaica’s gaze met hers. “I swear.”
“I believe you,” Kris said. But did she?
Something strange was going on at Loch Ness. Kris doubted it had anything to do with witchcraft. Because real magic was hooey. Problems cropped up when people believed in it.
Jamaica appeared to believe.
The door opened, and a flood of college-age tourists flowed in, chattering about the loch, the village, where they would stay that night, and what they would order right now.
Kris backed out of the way, lifting her nearly empty cup to indicate she’d been waited on. Right behind the kids, a family complete with Mom, Dad, the requisite boy and girl got in line. Jamaica would be busy for a while.
Which was fine. Kris wanted to find out more about Obeah and about Jamaica herself.
Sure, Jamaica had said she no longer “did dat”; she claimed she’d only sacrificed animals. However, there were a lot of missing women in Drumnadrochit, some of them were dead. What if—?
Nah. There was no way Jamaica was sacrificing people. Because if she was, she certainly wouldn’t have told Kris about her witchy-woman past.
Unless …
She planned to kill Kris, too.
Kris rubbed between her eyes. Now she was being foolish, paranoid. Although, after being bonked on the head and tossed off a cliff, she did have good reason to be. Still—
Innocent until proven guilty.
She needed to get to her computer.
Kris hurried back to the cottage. Though it was broad daylight, she still got a little spooked when she lost sight of the village and the village lost sight of her as she trotted across the deserted fields.
She felt again the same way she’d felt on the way into Drumnadrochit—as if she were being watched.
Kris glanced to the rear. No one.
She faced front. Nothing.
A quick peek at the hills made her shrug. Anyone could be up there, doing just about anything, and she wouldn’t see them.
Just like in the trees. Thick, numerous, even in the bright sunlight, the shadows reigned, dancing between the trunks and making her think all sorts of strange things.
Then there was the loch. Boats of all kinds floated there. Someone could be watching her from one of the decks with binoculars. Would that make her skin prickle as if a thousand ants marched across it?
Maybe. But what she really didn’t like was the large gray rock in the water. The one that shone like monster skin, appearing and disappearing beneath the turbulent waves.
Kris shook her head. Even if the rock wasn’t a rock, it didn’t have eyes. At least not where she could see.
“You’re losing it, Kristin.”
What was wrong with her? Wondering if Liam had thrown her in the loch. Thinking Jamaica could be a human-sacrificing witch. Believing that whenever she walked to and from the village someone was following her. It was probably lucky she didn’t have a gun.
Except she did. Tucked into a drawer at the cottage.
However, she didn’t think she should walk around Drumnadrochit packing. But she could carry the—
“Damn,” Kris muttered. The silver knife resided in her backpack up on the bluff from which she’d taken a nosedive. Should she run up there and retrieve it or shouldn’t she?
“Shouldn’t,” Kris decided. The last time she’d been there she’d nearly died. Revisiting the scene of the crime would be a good way to experience a repeat performance. Although …
She could take the gun.
Kris let out a derisive breath of air at the circular nature of her thoughts. She wasn’t going to shoot anyone with a silver bullet any more than she’d have been able to stab them with a silver knife.
Kris glanced again at the loch, but the dark gray hump was gone. She watched for a few minutes, waiting for the water to draw back and show it again, but it didn’t.
Could the tide have changed the level of the loch that quickly? Did a lake even have a tide?
The cottage came into view, and Kris had the sudden urge to run into the house, slamming, then locking the door behind her. Or perhaps falling onto the green grass and kissing it as if it were a long-lost friend.
She did neither. If someone was watching her, she didn’t want them to know that she knew it. She didn’t want them to think she was afraid.
Kris had been on her own a long time. She’d worked in television. And if there was one thing she’d learned, it was this: If you ran, you got chased. If you were afraid … they chased you faster.
So she strolled up the walk, reached into her pocket for the key to unlock the door, then remembered she had no key, the door was broken, and she’d completely forgotten to tell Effy about it.
“Fan-damn-tastic,” Kris muttered.
She shouldn’t even go inside. If the loch, the trees, the damned empty fields scared her, a house she’d left unlocked for over an hour was really going to be fun.
She should walk back to Drumnadrochit and insist that Rob come out here and fix the thing immediately.
Kris glanced over her shoulder, her gaze drawn to the loch, the trees, the still-empty road. The breeze that was actually quite warm gave her a nasty chill.
“Maybe later,” she said, and reached for the door. She paused, frowning, with her hand on the knob.
The door had already been fixed.
*
Kris stilled, then stared at the door for a very long time, before stepping back and staring some more. Liam wanted to join her, both on the porch and inside.
He peered at the bright sunlight, and he wished it would go away. While it blazed, he was stuck at the loch, unable to do anything but his cursed duty. It seemed like he’d been doing it for eternity.
Of course he hadn’t been doing a very good job this morning. Instead of trolling north and south, then patrolling either shore, he’d watched Kris’s house until she’d come out and then he’d watched her.
From the way she kept gazing at the trees, the loch, the hills, she knew he was there. He should be ashamed of himself, but he wasn’t.
Someone was killing women. They had tried to kill her. They planned to blame it on Nessie.
Liam couldn’t allow that
to happen.
*
“Hello?” Kris stepped inside.
No one answered. Had she really thought they would?
Her gaze swept the living area and kitchen; she peered into the shadowy bedroom and bath. From where she stood, she couldn’t see any mad killers lying in wait.
But that was the thing about mad killers. They never let you see them until it was too late.
Kris let out a shaky laugh. The last time she’d checked, mad killers didn’t fix broken doors.
A shiny new key lay on the counter. But no note had been left identifying the culprit.
The sole explanation was Liam. He’d broken the door; he was the only one who knew about it besides her. He’d either fixed it or told Rob Cameron to do so.
She was still going to explore the bedroom and bathroom.
“And I’m taking my gun with me,” she announced, yanking open the drawer of the coffee table, relieved to find the weapon still in residence.
Taking it along as she’d promised, Kris strode to the bathroom and slammed the open door against the wall as hard as she could. No one yelped. Or shot her. She did the same to the bedroom door, with similar results.
A cavity search—shower, closets, darkness beneath the bed—revealed no bodies, live or dead, unless you counted the bugs.
She had to say, having the gun in her hand made her feel better. Of course if anyone had leaped out, they could have grabbed the thing easily from her hand. If she didn’t drop it first and shoot off a toe.
That accomplished, Kris pocketed the key, locked the front door, put the gun back where she’d found it, and turned on her computer.
She tried to raise Mandenauer. It was like raising the dead. Impossible unless you knew how.
Kris rubbed her eyes again. What was wrong with her? There was no “knowing how” to raise the dead. All that talking with Jamaica about magic and sacrifice and ancient religions was screwing with her brain.
She almost wished she would hear Mandenauer calling her name from the computer. She bet he knew all there was to know about Obeah.
But the computer remained just a computer, so Kris cracked her knuckles and began to surf.
Most of what she discovered Jamaica had already told her. There seemed to be a dearth of info on Obeah, which was most likely a result of the respect—i.e., fear—in which it was held. Considering that many in Jamaica considered Obeah to be a dangerous form of sorcery and refused to even speak the word out loud, it followed that those who knew the most about it—Jamaicans—were not being interviewed for scholarly books, Web sites, or seminars.
She did find one thing when she tried a search on sacrifice, witches, and power. She didn’t much like it.
“The more you give, the more you shall receive,” she read. “The greater the sacrifice, the greater the gift of power.”
At first she considered that meant sacrifice an elephant, you were in damn good shape. Unless the poacher patrol found you. Then you were fucked. As you should be.
But the more she uncovered, the more she read about just what a sacrifice meant, the more Kris figured they were talking about something other than size, and it scared her.
“Intelligence,” Kris muttered. “Ferocity. Cunning. If they’re easy to kill, what kind of a sacrifice is that?”
Therefore, the harder the life was to end, the greater the gift to the god.
So a lion netted more oomph than a lamb. A gorilla more juice than a mouse.
“And a person…” Kris lifted her eyes to the window, through which she could see the distant drift of the dirt-shaded loch. “That’s gotta light you right up.”
She was letting her imagination run away with her. Something she’d never been accused of until she came here. Kris dealt in facts. Facts never lied.
She tapped the screen of her laptop. These were not facts. You could sacrifice a whole baseball team to Obi and still not have enough juice to fuel your Magic 8-Ball. Because—
“Magic isn’t real,” Kris said.
Of course whoever was killing people might not know that.
CHAPTER 16
Did she truly believe that Jamaica was sacrificing women to the snake god she had tattooed on her ankle?
Not really. If Jamaica had anything to hide, she wouldn’t have told Kris about her past at all. And she’d have covered the damn ankle.
Kris Googled Jamaica Blue anyway. All she found were coffee sites, one of them Jamaica’s own. Kris hadn’t expected anything else.
She could ask Alan Mac what he knew about the woman, but he already thought Kris was paranoid, with a side order of nuts. What would he think if she started talking about witchcraft, human sacrifices, and snake gods? Nothing good.
Kris spent the rest of the day answering e-mail. It took the rest of the day because the Internet had decided to flicker on and off at will. Frustrating, but nothing she could do about it beyond curse impotently. During “off” times, she made notes about what she’d learned thus far. She even took a nap, the lock on the door and the knife on her night table allowing her to fall asleep.
Unfortunately, the stray thought that whoever had fixed the door might have kept a key for themselves woke her up. She needed to find out who had done that. If it was Rob or Liam, she was all right.
“Or not,” she said as she readied herself for the return to Drumnadrochit. Where was it written that old men and hot guys couldn’t be murderers?
Nowhere that she’d ever seen.
Kris headed to the village long before the sun went down. She didn’t plan to be out alone in the dark, even though she hadn’t been any less wigged about it in the daylight. She told herself she needed the extra time to stop at Effy’s.
A short while later Kris entered Drumnadrochit for the second time that day. She passed by the coffee shop and was surprised to discover a Closed sign perched in the window. She could have sworn the place stayed open later.
Kris continued on to Effy’s. She wasn’t there, and neither was Rob. Turning away, Kris looked up and down the still-bustling street. Where was everybody?
She hung around, figuring one or both of them had to come back sooner or later, but as it got to be later and the sun dipped below the western horizon, casting the loch and Drumnadrochit into shadow, Kris gave up and left for MacLeod’s.
She turned the corner just as a slim, dark, familiar figure approached the pub. Kris opened her mouth to call, Liam! but before she could, he slipped inside.
The scuff of a shoe on pavement had her glancing over her shoulder. Just past dusk, and the streetlights had not come on, but a golden glow spilled from the windows of several shops. Instead of being inviting, the contrast of flickering light and encroaching darkness made the shadows dance like demons around the bonfires of hell.
Kris hurriedly crossed the street and went in.
At MacLeod’s the lights were on and everyone was home. Except Liam. She didn’t see him anywhere.
Kris frowned. She’d watched him walk in only a few moments ago. Could he have strode right through the bar and out the back door?
Why? Unless he’d ducked around the corner to watch her from the shadows, scuffling his shoe just enough to make her paranoid.
Kris sighed. No one had to make her paranoid. She was already there. She glanced around again, certain she’d just missed him in the crush.
However, though Liam wasn’t tall, he was distinctive. Gorgeous shone like sun through the clouds. Right now all she saw was a storm.
Effy and Rob sat at the same table in the corner, drinking as they’d been the last time she’d seen them, and they appeared to be having the same argument, if the sloshing of Effy’s ale out of her glass and onto the table was any indication. Since Kris had been searching for them, too, she put aside the issue of Liam Grant and crossed to the Camerons.
Though people moved when she said, “Excuse me,” no one greeted her or even smiled. She felt a little out of place, perhaps because she was an American in a local Scottish bar.
No one would ask her, or any other foreigner with money, to leave. But that didn’t mean they had to welcome her into their place.
As she approached the Camerons’ table, Effy gave her brother an evil eye that seemed so out of place on her cherubic face Kris stifled a laugh.
“No fool like an old fool,” Effy snapped.
Rob took another swig of his ale and said nothing.
“Aaah!” Effy picked up her own glass, tilting her arm with the obvious intent of tossing the contents into her brother’s face.
Rob set his down with a click, pointed a finger at his sister, and said, “Dinnae,” in a voice as calm as the loch on a windless night beneath the moon.
Effy’s glare became even more evil, but she didnae.
Rob’s movement pulled up the long sleeve of his shirt, revealing the tattoo of a flipper on his wrist.
“Hi,” Kris said.
The two turned their heads at the exact same time, with the exact same tilt. However, Effy’s face welcomed Kris even before she saw who it was, while Rob’s held no expression at all.
Kris pointed at Rob’s wrist. “Can I see?”
Rob glanced down, then yanked the cuff of his shirt over the tattoo.
“It—uh—looks like a duck,” she said.
“If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck,” he took a hearty draw on his ale, “then it must be a duck.”
Did that mean it was a duck?
“There are a lot of tattoos in Drumnadrochit,” Kris observed.
“Is that so?” Effy asked. “Who else?”
Kris’s gaze lowered to Effy’s breast, but when she lifted her eyes Effy still appeared only mildly curious. Kris didn’t have the guts to ask about hers. Perhaps it had been a bruise.
“Jamaica has a snake on her ankle,” Kris blurted. “And Alan Mac has a…” She paused. Line wasn’t very descriptive.
“Never mind,” Kris said. What difference did it make if everyone in Drumnadrochit had a tattoo? It didn’t mean anything except the village had a high tolerance for body art.
“Join us!” Effy cooed.
Rob continued to drink.
“Actually, I’m … meeting someone,” Kris said. “I just wanted to ask—”
“Ye’ve got a man friend already?” Effy clapped her hands over her apple cheeks. “How lovely.”
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