Haunt Me Still

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  “Strip,” said my captor.

  One spirit must die, another must rise. “No.” I slid around the table, backing against the far wall. Tossing the furniture aside, he strode toward me, the blade gleaming dully in his hand.

  “Ian.” Carrie stood in the doorway. “She must be a vessel of the Goddess. She must consent.” At the sound of her voice, he stopped, panting a little, his body still poised to spring.

  “Consent!” I burst out. I was watching the knife in his hand. Somehow, I had to get it away from him. “You think I’ll consent to a rape?”

  Carrie looked at me coldly. “If you consent, it will not be rape.” Ian, I thought, backing into the alcove made by one of the windows. It was the name of the man Lily had talked about with shining eyes. This was her beau? The Winter King? “Have you touched her?” I asked, my voice thick with disgust.

  His mouth curled in a faint leer. “Nothing that she did not want. And not as much as she wanted.”

  With scryers, Joanna had said, virginity was at a premium. The purer the vessel, the clearer the sight. Which meant he was toying with me. “She’s fifteen,” I said shortly. “She doesn’t know what she wants. And I’ll bet she didn’t know what you were up to, either, or she wouldn’t have let you anywhere near her. She probably still doesn’t know.”

  “Do you know what you want?” He gazed at me with the calculating eyes of a cat, the knife weaving in the air as he spoke. “It took two months to stack the tower next door for the bonfire. Nine sacred woods, three stories high. It will collapse eventually and bring down this whole tower and everything in it as well, in a cataclysm of fire. You’ll want to be gone by then, if you want to survive. But to get out, you have to get past me. For a price.” His voice lowered to a dark caress. “So what is it you want, Kate? How badly do you want to live?”

  I glanced out the window. Five stories down, the wind whipped the loch to an angry froth. The boiling lake, I thought. And the burning tower. Double, double toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble. I knew how cold the water was. How deep was it?

  “You’ll die,” said Ian. “I’m offering you life.”

  “It’s not life that she wants,” said Carrie, walking forward with another offer. In one hand, she held what looked like a necklace with a rectangular silver pendant and some papers. The manuscript. In the other, she, too, held a knife. The one I’d knocked from Ian on the stairs. “I can tell you what you want to know. Shakespeare’s past, or your own.”

  I stilled, hearing my voice rasping on the hill. What have I done? She’d known. She’d known the entire time she’d held me on the plane, like a mother holding a child. I realized that betrayal with the force of being slammed into a wall of cold stone. “Even if I were in the market,” I said through clenched teeth, “what reason would I have to trust any word from your mouth?”

  The pendant she was dangling was a flash drive. “Lucas’s raw footage,” she said. “He filmed Sybilla’s death. Auld Callie’s and Eircheard’s, as well.” She dropped it on the table, tossing the knife down next to it and spreading out the papers. “The fruit of the knowledge of good or of evil. Of innocence or guilt.”

  Looking at that small silver rectangle, listening to Carrie’s voice, other certainties began to drop into place, pieces of a puzzle floating of their own accord into a picture that made appalling sense. Carrie may have masterminded much of the killing, but she’d been with me when Eircheard died. The hand that held the blade had not been hers. And even bound and on his back, Eircheard could have swatted Lucas aside like a gnat. I looked at Ian, rage making the very air around him seem to ripple, like the quivering of heat around a mirage. “That was you, wasn’t it? You killed Eircheard.” I could feel my hands pumping into fists. I’d promised Eircheard as he lay dead in the library that I’d kill Carrie, but that was when I thought she’d wielded the knife. It had been Ian, though, now standing before me with the killing blade in his hand, a mocking leer on his face.

  Lunging for one of the chairs, I shoved it into Ian and darted toward the table, reaching for Carrie’s knife. I almost had it when Ian caught me, dragging me to the floor and pinning me down with both hands.

  I must have knocked his knife away with the chair, I realized, even as his hands clamped in a chokehold around my neck.

  He leaned in as if for a kiss. “Put out the light, and then put out the light.”

  Othello’s words, while killing Desdemona. The opposite of the language of God. Not fiat lux, “let there be light,” but fiat mors. “Let there be death.”

  “You’re beautiful when you’re angry, Kate. Not smart, maybe, but beautiful. Wild cat, wild Kate.” His face began to go dark. Around the edges of things, lights began to glow like fiery haloes. It wasn’t my death that he wanted, though. Not yet anyway. It was darkness. If I lost consciousness, I realized, he’d do what he wished to my body and count it as consent when I didn’t fight back.

  In one last burst of strength, I hurled him off, rolling away, scrabbling for the blade that I knew had to be on the floor somewhere. Even as he pulled me back toward him by the feet, I saw a glint of steel, and my hand closed around the black hilt…. Nothing is but what is not.

  I slashed out at him, and the blade caught his arm, trailing a bright line of blood. He flinched, and I scrambled to my feet, keeping the knife before me as Ben had once taught me. In a knife fight, he’d said with unusual seriousness, the only defense worth having is an offense.

  “Ian!” Carrie cried, and once again I saw her knife soaring through the air toward his hand. I couldn’t let him catch it. As he reached for it, I launched myself into him, hitting him square in the chest with the full weight of my body, unbalancing us both so that we crashed to the floor. With a thud, my knife drove into his belly up to the hilt.

  The other knife clattered harmlessly to the ground, and a wild, deep cry split the room. For a moment he gripped me hard. Then he jerked away. I stumbled to my feet, the knife in my hand rippling red in the firelight.

  Pushing himself up, Ian gripped his belly, blood welling through his fingers.

  A loud rumble filled the room, and the floor lurched. Grabbing at the windowsill to stay upright, I dropped the blade. Ian staggered into the table. For a moment, there was silence. Then the wall behind him disappeared, collapsing in a sheet of flame. The floor rippled and bucked, dropping him to his knees, and the room began to tilt. Across the room, Carrie stepped back into the doorway, clinging to the door frame. In the center, Ian was still gripping the table. Another jolt, and the floor heaved again, tilting farther. Before I could reach it, the knife slid away from me, heading toward Ian. Bellowing with rage, he scooped it up and threw it. I ducked, and it sailed through the window into the night, plummeting down to the lake.

  Ian began throwing everything he could lay his hands on. Papers, pens, books. There was a glint, and the flash drive on its chain snaked through the air. I reached for it, and it brushed my fingers. It clattered against the stone, but before I could grab it, it slid down the outside of the wall and disappeared.

  Inside, the floor lurched a third time and disintegrated. With one last wail of fury, Ian slid backward into the flames, his cry lost in the roar of the fire. Where he’d stood, loose pages of manuscript floated on the heated air like slow butterflies bursting one by one into flame.

  47

  FROM THE DOORWAY opposite, a wail rose from Carrie. “What have you done?”

  The heat in the room was intense; the cold wind sweeping over my back was all that made it bearable.

  “Did you not think the spirit of Shakespeare worth calling forth from the deeps?” Carrie went on.

  “That’s what all this killing was for? To conjure Shakespeare?”

  “Not the man,” she said with contempt. “The spirit who possessed him. The man was dross, merely. Do you know what Dee wrote?” She held out a page from the manuscript. You are a servant of the great, no more, a bit player who glimpsed the Great Rite not once, but twice: both
times, uninvited, from the shadows, and both times, stole its fire for yourself.” She looked up. “fire and power that was meant for me and mine: for Arran’s daughter. For Dee’s son. And it lit, instead, on the poor clay of a glover’s son.” A narrow strip of floor along one wall was all that remained of the room. She began advancing across it.

  “You seriously mean to suggest that spying on some magical rite explains Shakespeare’s genius?”

  “I would have called it forth again. Made it light upon my son.” Ian was her son? “He was an artist,” she said. “A visionary. A conduit of power.” It was what Lily had said. A genius, she’d called him. He’ll change the way stories are told…make a new kind of art altogether.

  “He was a killer,” I said aloud. “An artist in flesh and blood,” said Carrie. “A man who would shape the world by the force of his will. I thought you might have the imagination to help.”

  “You thought I would help?” I thought of Auld Callie, strung up in the tree. Of Eircheard, his body slashed in the darkness in the British Museum, his heart torn out. Of Sybilla with her throat cut and Ben’s face looking down on her.

  “You are no better than your petty-minded poet. Shakespeare.” She spat the name. “He took a gift of great power, the shadow of the language of God, and did what with it? Wasted it. Exhaled it on the public stage, grabbing at pennies here and there in exchange for doling out cheap delight to the grubby masses.” Her voice rose in contempt. “He could have shaped kingdoms and crowns. He could have seized wisdom from the deeps of time.”

  “He did shape kingdoms and crowns,” I said quietly. “Not the everyday England of Elizabeth and James. Kingdoms of the mind. He made new and bright worlds from nothing but words…. The shadow of the language of God: your words. It wasn’t angels or demons Shakespeare chose to conjure. It was people: audiences.

  “He offered humans a brush with the divine. And he harmed no one doing it…. An it harm none, do what ye will. Isn’t that the one rule of witchcraft?”

  “A rule made by those afraid of its old powers. But to celebrate life, you must also celebrate death. To create life, you must create death.”

  “You don’t create anything. You destroy only. But you can’t even do that, not with words alone. You can only make it happen by finding someone to do it for you: a terrible shadow of Shakespeare’s weird sisters getting Macbeth to do their dirty work by whispering on the wind.” I shook my head. “But you are also Macbeth. Your magic, your power, it’s nothing but a sham. An illusion. You are no better than Shakespeare’s bloody king, lured into acting as the robotic arm of evil.”

  She laughed aloud. “Watch….” She began to raise her arms, her voice a low, throbbing chant. “I conjure you—” The wind buffeted through the window, tearing her words away, so that I heard them only in snatches.

  Though you untie the winds…

  …trees blown down…

  Though castles topple…

  Even till destruction sicken…

  Outside, the storm slammed into the castle with a fury, buffeting the walls like some hammer of the gods, churning the water below into high waves clawing at the stone. Whipped to frenzy, the fire rushed upward in a thundering whirlwind of sparks and shooting flame.

  “Answer me!” cried Carrie, and in a sudden gesture of triumph, she brought her arms down to her sides.

  Behind her, the corridor imploded in a deafening roar. For a split second the fire darkened to glimmering red embers and then it billowed back, exploding skyward, almost, it seemed, in the shape of a raging man. With a wild shriek of triumph, Carrie turned, the blue gown floating out around her like wings, and walked into the flames.

  The heat rolling off the fire was scorching. I slid down the outer side of the window, dangling from the sill, letting the tower wall shield me from the worst of it. For a moment, I hung there, fighting to cling to the damp stone, though it was heating up by the second.

  No one would imagine I had survived that last cataclysm. I barely believed it myself. And if they did…what then? Between the storm and the fire, there was no way to reach me by land or air or water. Fire burn or cauldron bubble. I had a choice of deaths: water or fire. From far away, I heard the wail of sirens, weak as the mewling of newborn kittens.

  Even if I did survive, clinging to the stone till the fire died, what then?

  What part I had played in Sybilla’s death I did not know and never would; everyone else who had been there was now dead, and the flash drive with its footage had been swallowed up in the fire. All that remained was a trail of evidence that said, beyond the shadow of doubt, that I had been there.

  Whatever I had or had not done to Sybilla, I had killed Ian. He had been cruel, a killer, and very likely insane, but it was still a death. Blood on my hands.

  Around me, the wall began to steam, and I realized, as if from a distance, that my fingers were blistering where they dug into crannies in the stone.

  In the sky, a sliver of white appeared at the edge of the moon as the shadow began to slide off. Somewhere, I heard singing, a lone voice, rising like silver in the night, joined a few moments later by another. As suddenly as it had hit, the wind now calmed. Below, the angry waves were subsiding, the water cold and dark beneath a surface of red and gold. Out over the loch, snow began to fall in flakes large and slow as drifting feathers.

  Suddenly, I was aware of nothing but empty exhaustion. It was not physical; I could have clung to that wall for a while yet. But for what?

  I let go.

  It seemed to me that a silvery light rose around me, wrapping about me like a cool slip of silk. For a moment, I thought, it buoyed me up. Then I felt a shock of cold. And dark water closed over my head.

  48

  DARKNESS AND COLD swirled around me, smooth as glass, as if I’d fallen into the dark mirror. The next thing I remember is the shock of hands, a rushing, and air scraping across my body. I coughed and retched, and a face swam into view above me, ringed with the glow of the fire.

  Dark, wet hair and green eyes. The planes of his face chiseled with damp and fire.

  Ben.

  “Kate,” he said, his face very close to mine as he wiped wet hair from my eyes, wrapping his body around mine so that warmth flowed from him to me.

  We seemed to be on a rocky shore. The singing had stopped, and the silvery light was gone. The moon laid a long glittering path of gold across the dark water. From the other direction, red and blue lights flashed over the water. Emergency vehicles, I thought. Police.

  Behind Ben, other faces peered down at me. Lady Nairn, full of concern, and Lily, her face pale with relief and something I would not recognize till later: pride.

  “How did you find me?” I asked Ben.

  “I can call spirits from the vasty deep,” he said lightly, his mouth tipping into a smile.

  I frowned. “How?”

  “Lily told me where to dive.”

  Just beyond him, she’d bent to pick up something among the rocks. A silvery rectangle dangling from a chain. “I saw you,” she said, looking back with a smile. “In the loch.”

  But that is not possible, I thought, slipping back into unconsciousness.

  INTERLUDE

  November 4, 1606

  Hampton Court Palace

  NOT LONG AFTER the boy Hal Berridge had come to Mortlake to serve as his father’s scryer, Arthur Dee had walked in on the boy kissing Dee’s younger brother rowland—a particularly deep and passionate kiss. He’d reviled the boy as a catamite ever since, a Ganymede corrupting his little brother. He spat vile terms at the boy, aiming hidden kicks and blows his way whenever he could. Not only because of the allure he had for rowland, but because Arthur found himself also gazing at the boy, tingling when he walked by. Deep down, he knew it was not entirely the issue of sex that rattled him, however, no matter how startling he found the attraction. It was jealousy, and not of his body. Of his sight. With the possible exception of Edward Kelley, Hal Berridge was the best seer his father had eve
r employed.

  Though his father had been crestfallen, Arthur, for one, had breathed more than one sigh of relief when the boy left Mortlake for Hampton Court at the invitation of Lord Salisbury. Then, on the eve of the play in which Berridge was to star as a queen, Arthur discovered that rowland had made an assignation with him at the palace. Telling himself that he was protecting his little brother’s reputation, Arthur had got rowland stupendously drunk, left him snoring in the music room, and then gone downriver himself to keep the appointment.

  The exact spot turned out to be deep in a deserted wing of the oldest part of the palace. Arthur had arrived early to find the otherwise empty room warmed by a fire of apple logs scented with lavender. He had laid rowland’s cloak on the floor and retired behind the door to wait.

  The boy’s blue velvet skirts whispered sweetly against the flagged floor as he entered the room. Arthur stepped swiftly behind him, closing and latching the door. The creature had turned, and Arthur had enjoyed the flash of fear on the boy’s face.

  “Arthur—”

  “Don’t foul my name in your mouth,” he said, and lunged. Berridge managed to duck, and Arthur’s elbow hit his jaw with a glancing blow. The boy kept his feet, barely. As Arthur came back at him, he pulled a knife, which slid across Arthur’s arm, trailing a bright line of blood. A scratch, really, no more, but it made him shout with rage.

  He aimed another blow at Berridge’s head and this time connected with more force. Winding a fist into the long hair of the boy’s wig, he dragged him across the floor. When the wig did not come off, Arthur stopped and, with his other hand, tore at the gown, which ripped down to the waist.