Krewe of Hunters 7 The Unspoken (15 page)

“And the family supposedly knew nothing about it,” Sean said. “What if—”

Will interrupted him. “Hold on. That’s the second dive on the second day, right?” He hadn’t been the first to get to the
Jerry McGuen’
s hold. He’d been with Kat, hovering near her in case she stopped breathing as she stared at the salon.

“Yeah, second dive, second day,” Earl Candy said.

“What did you see?” Bernie asked Will.

Will nodded at Earl. “Go back to the end of the first dive, please.”

Sean glanced over at him, repeating Bernie’s question. “What did you see?”

“Maybe nothing. It just seemed that something changed. I wish I had a photographic memory, but I don’t. Can you tell whether anything’s off?”

Earl Candy set his digital video back to the end of the first dive.

He had an angle of the divers starting to go up and, as he followed, he had a shot of the hold as he went up himself. The blue-green darkness of the water seemed to swallow it up and even the bulk of the
Jerry McGuen
slowly faded away.

He fast-forwarded through the footage he’d taken on deck. Then the divers entered the water again and he followed Amanda and Jon down to the hold of the ship a second time.

“Hold it, Earl,” Will said, leaning forward to point at the computer screen. “There—that door. That bulkhead door. It was ajar every time we went down. Now it looks as if it’s closed tight.”

Earl ran the two different views of the hold again.

“Could be motion in the lake,” Sean commented doubtfully. “In the water, the motion one of us makes can become amplified, sending currents that displace it elsewhere.”

Will looked at Sean, who was looking back at him.

“Could be,” Will said.

“But we both think someone else was down there, don’t we?” Sean asked him.

“How? How are they doing it?” Alan was distraught. “We keep a boat there as security. We watch for anyone remotely near us on the lake.”

Will sat back, folding his arms over his chest and smiling. “I think I might know,” he said. He glanced around. “The answer should have smacked us in the face from the beginning.”

* * *

The drawing was completed and attached to the board. Logan doled out the various journals Kat had taken from Austin Miller’s house so that his writing could be read more thoroughly. Will and Sean were still out, but they all said good-night; morning would come soon.

Kat went to her room but walked through to Will’s. She cleaned Bastet’s litter box and gave her more food and water, telling her as she did that a cat as regal as an Egyptian Mau should have toilet trained herself. Bastet looked at her balefully, as if to say she disdained such activities.

Kat hovered there, wishing that Will had come back. She really wasn’t a coward, and she wasn’t afraid of being alone, but she couldn’t help feeling some dread about the things she saw in her dreams. She realized she
needed
to see them, but that didn’t make it any easier.

She remembered the way Austin Miller had appeared to her that evening, and how convinced he was that he’d been killed by a mummy. She’d tried to tell him the mummy had been a man and hoped he’d believed her in the end. “The curse was written on the tomb wall,” Miller had said.

“What respectable Egyptian with power and money would die without a curse on the wall? It was to stop tomb-raiders,” Kat had told him.

“But we’re tomb-raiders, aren’t we? We deserve to be stopped,” he’d said, just before fading away. He was such a new ghost; he might find tomorrow or in the days to come that he could maintain his soul’s image for those who could see. He was a charming man, and she hoped she’d get to speak with him again.

She wondered if they
were
tomb-raiders. But she knew, perhaps more than most, that the saying
You can’t take it with you
was entirely true. Dust to dust and ashes to ashes and all that was organic in life would eventually disappear. The soul was the essence of a person, and no amount of finery could change that.

She realized she wasn’t frightened on the physical plane. She was a good shot, and she’d learned how to deal with criminals and psychotics in instances when she wasn’t armed and someone had to be “talked down.”

Kat didn’t like being alone now because she was accustomed to Will’s presence. She sat in his hotel room with the cat; it wasn’t really
his
place, and yet it reminded her of him. His aftershave was very subtle and pleasant and somehow spoke of breezy tropic nights and the sea. His shirts were neatly hung in the closet, his diving gear ready by the door. Always rinsed and always checked. He wasn’t obsessive, she’d learned. He was far more casual than she was, unless it had to do with survival—such as diving equipment—or something that wasn’t right, like McFarland’s desire to shelve Brady Laurie’s death as an accident.

She needed to sleep. She stroked Bastet but left her curled up on Will’s bed. It was as if the cat missed him, too.

She walked through to her own room, slowly got ready for bed and finally turned off all but the night-light streaming from the bathroom and lay down to sleep.

She started to think about the major players, at least the ones they knew. The film crew, who’d called them in. But she didn’t believe any member of
that
group could be involved. There were the two men from the Egyptian Sand Diggers, but Dirk Manning was nearing eighty and Austin Miller was dead. At the Preservation Center, Amanda—highly suspicious, but constantly with them or on video or witnessed by others. And there was Jon Hunt, a far more amenable scholar with whom to work. Then there were Landry Salvage and Simonton’s Sea Search. Landry was rich and definitely aware of what was going on. She didn’t want Andy Simonton to be involved; he had seemed too nice and down-to-earth.

That didn’t make him innocent, she reminded herself. Many a serial killer had turned out to be the boy-next-door type.

At last, physical exhaustion seemed to settle her mind, and she drifted into sleep. Even as she did, she tried to fight the fact that she was slipping into another plane where she saw things.

She couldn’t
really
see things, of course. There was no magic that let her see the past as it had been. People experienced haunting in two different ways. Residual haunting, in which events and the emotions they generated seemed to remain through the violence or energy of what had happened. It was why people saw Civil War soldiers in the misty fields of Gettysburg, or why some houses were haunted by murder victims.

Then there were “intelligent” or “active” hauntings, such as Austin Miller returning to the place he loved, the place he’d lived all his life. Returning to tell her that justice needed to be done, his killer needed to pay—and his killer had been a mummy.

What filled her dreams? Residual haunting or active ones?

They seemed so very real.

She could feel the night and, at first, everything that touched her senses was lovely. How could the moon ride the sky so beautifully before being obliterated by darkness? The breeze seemed soft, but she knew it would grow to be a bitter and icy cold. She could hear the music, the rustle of silk gowns. The sounds of laughter and pleasant conversation were all around her. But as she stood on the deck, she knew what was coming. The couple brushed by her, the woman fearful, the man quick to reassure her.

It all happened as before. The moon was consumed by darkness in the sky; the breeze turned quickly and viciously into a cold wind. The brutal kiss of ice seemed to touch her skin. She heard laughter change to screams.

And from the darkness, she could see it coming. Massive and dark—part of the darkness that covered the moon? There were cries all around her.

“Cursed!” someone screamed.

And there it was….

She saw the figure—the giant figure of the ancient Egyptian. It seemed to be fifty-feet high. It was coming closer and closer and seemed about to devour them all….

She couldn’t breathe.

The water was all around her. She was so cold she couldn’t feel her body anymore, but her lungs were burning.

“Kat!”

Distantly, she heard her name being called.

“Kat, breathe, breathe!”

She woke. There was something pressing down on her, something pressing air into her lungs. There was pressure on her mouth, but it was a good pressure, and she was no longer cold. She was warmed by the body heat of the man on top of her.

She inhaled deeply, coughed, inhaled again.

She looked into Will’s eyes. He was seated beside her by then, watching her breathe, dark eyes filled with concern and relief in one. She edged herself into a sitting position, still staring at him, afraid of what had happened, yet secure because he was with her again.

“In and out, breathe slowly…. I’ll get you some water,” he said.

He stood and hurried to the bathroom, returning with a glass of water. “Don’t talk. Just breathe and sip.”

She nodded and leaned against the headboard. She sipped the water until she felt that her lungs were whole again, that oxygen was filling her system. She wasn’t dizzy and she wasn’t confused.

“I—I guess I drown in the dream,” she said.

He nodded. “I don’t think you should keep going down to that ship,” he said worriedly.

She set the glass on her side table. “I’m not down at the ship, Will. I’m safe in bed with a bunch of other agents near me—and you
with
me,” she added at the end. “I
have
to keep going to the ship. My subconscious or someone from that ship keeps trying to tell me something, and I have to figure out what it is.”

“Not if it’s ‘Hey, you’re drowning!’”

She smiled. His muscles were still taut with tension, and his striking face was almost haggard.

“I’m afraid to leave you at all,” he told her.

For a moment, time seemed to freeze.

This was it; this was her chance. Should she be flippant? Honest? Was she seeing something that wasn’t really there, something she
wanted
to see? The light in his eyes said that he felt as she felt, not just the closeness because of what they were, but the attraction that happened between certain people.

She inhaled on a ragged breath. “Then don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me,” she whispered.

“I’ll stand guard, I swear,” he said, his voice husky.

She smiled. “I don’t want you standing guard ready to do more CPR,” she told him. “Stay with me.” One more breath and she could get it out. “Sleep with me.”

He looked back her. A smile tugged at his lips. “Kat, you don’t have to…”

She wasn’t sure if he really understood. It was time to risk all. She could live with humiliation; she couldn’t live with herself if she didn’t carry through with this right now.

She could still taste his lips on hers….

She leaned forward, slipping her arms around him and pulling him down with her. Finding his mouth, she pressed her lips to his in a way that had nothing to do with protection or security, and everything to do with need. With hunger.

He returned the kiss.

His touch was everything she’d dreamed. She felt the sweet fire of his tongue sliding over her mouth and delving deep within. The strength of his body seemed to seep into her, and she held him close, melding with him as his mouth made love to hers.

Then he drew away, breathless.

Again he said, “You don’t have to…”

“Oh, my God, does this feel like
have to?
”

“Lord, I’ve wanted—”

“I thought you were gorgeous,” she broke in, “but…stupid.”

“Stupid?”

“Arrogant, a jerk!” The taste of his mouth was like an aphrodisiac and his body so tightly against hers made her feel…combustible.

“Tinker Bell,” he whispered around a kiss.

“Tinker Bell!”

“She’s a beautiful little fairy,” he said, reaching for the hem of her nightshirt.

As she struggled out of it she looked at him and laughed. He smiled, too, and then his eyes were on her body and she molded herself against his chest. She had no idea what time it was; she didn’t care. He’d returned to the hotel a while before he’d awakened her because he was in his night garb as well, men’s long pajama pants. His chest was naked and solid against her own. His lips fell to her collarbone and then below. Entangled, they slid back into the bed. Under the soft cotton fabric of his pajama bottoms she could feel the rise of his erection, and that alone seemed to escalate an almost frantic desire in her. Yet she suddenly felt a sense of panic, and she stopped, tugging at the thick sleek darkness of his hair so that he looked up at her. “I’m so thoughtless,” she said. “Is this wrong? Is there someone in your life?”

“Not now. Not in a long time,” he told her. And the way his mouth curved, almost wistfully, made her wonder if his life had been like hers, if those who had loved him hadn’t been able to love him
enough.
Or if a greater tragedy had changed his life. She would ask later, because she had to know, but not now.

“I should ask the same, except I’m guessing that since you—”

“There’s no one,” she said.

He began to kiss her again, and she writhed beneath his touch, euphoric at the feel of his hair, the rippling muscles in his back. Then, just as he had made her nearly delirious with a series of very liquid kisses along her breasts, he pulled back. “Wait. I wasn’t planning… I’m not prepared—”

“I am,” she said and laughed softly. “Ever hopeful,” she murmured, meeting his eyes as she marveled at a lock of his hair.

He smiled and moved back against her. She felt the tip of his tongue graze her nipple and his mouth form around it and she seemed to melt into the softness of the bed.

Nightmares were dispelled in the excitement of being alive.

She remembered the first time she’d seen him, how instantly he had drawn her attention and curiosity. Now she could touch him, explore the length and contours of his body, and she did. She felt his every kiss, his every caress, so keenly. She moved against him in turn, fascinated by the way his body seemed to tremble beneath hers. Her kisses covered his abdomen, teased his sex, and then she rose again to meet his eyes. He held her there, studying her eyes as if in equal wonder. She knew that sex was instinct, and yet she knew equally that this was somehow different. Tonight was like breathing. She found herself laughing, feeling his fingertips on her skin, his kisses growing more demanding and intimate. It seemed as if the world would explode except that he rose, shimmying up her body again, the pressure of his flesh and heat so ecstatic it was nearly agony. Then he lifted himself above her, and she was so eager for him that he seemed part of her, a fit that was custom-made, exquisite. Slowly he sank into her, deeper and deeper, and she felt as though the world itself stood still. They both moved as if there’d never be enough time, as if they had to fulfill the yearning, desperate to reach a climax, desperate to prolong it. Every fantasy she’d ever had about lovemaking occurred. Heaven seemed real, above her and around her, in the touch and feel of him, the beating of his heart….