Moon Cursed (16 page)

“Fifteen hundred years ago!”

“Perhaps being seen that one time was enough to make her more careful in the future.”

“And perhaps this is all hooey,” Kris muttered.

“Perhaps,” Mandenauer agreed.

“If she’s been drowning people for centuries without anyone the wiser, why is everything falling apart now?”

“Yes, why?”

Kris’s eye began to throb, and she lifted her hand to rub at the ache. “Just tell me what you think.”

“Either someone’s been protecting her—”

Kris dropped her arm. “While she murders people?”

“You would not believe what some will do because of a tradition, a vow, or for money.”

Actually, she would.

“Perhaps she has killed someone recently,” Mandenauer continued, “or done something else, that has made someone very angry. And while he, or she, cannot throw Nessie to the wolves—
us
—outright for reasons we do not know yet, this person plans to make sure she is blamed for whatever is rotten in Loch Ness.”

“She,” Kris repeated. “When we talk about Nessie, we automatically use the feminine pronoun. But when we’re talking about the killer, we slip into ‘he.’”

“And?”

“Are we looking for a woman or a man?”

“Traditionally serial killers are men.”

“Middle-aged white men who are the best damn neighbors in the whole world,” Kris muttered, and caught the twitch of Mandenauer’s mouth once more before he controlled it.

“In the realm of the supernatural most beings kill without compunction. Male. Female. Something in between.”

“In between?” Kris’s lip curled.

“We are talking monsters, beasts, things that go bump in the night and the day. Many are not bound by gender. Some have none; some have both.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Shape-shifters shift shape.” Mandenauer spread his hands. “They could be anything.”

“Fabulous,” Kris muttered. “How is it that you’ve been coming here for years and you still haven’t caught the culprit?”

“It is not a ‘culprit.’” Mandenauer’s voice had gone soft, but his gaze bored into hers. “The word hints at choice, and a monster has none. It kills. Period. If the beast we are searching for is not in the loch, it is wandering these hills or those streets. You will need to end it before it ends you.”

“This is crazy.” Kris’s voice wavered. “I can’t just shoot someone because I
think
they’re a supernatural serial killer.”

Mandenauer shrugged. “So prove they are,
then
shoot them.”

“And how do I do that?”

“If silver will kill them, it will also burn them.”

“I should prick anyone I suspect with a knife just to see if they fry?” Kris shoved her hair out of her face. “I am
so
gonna wind up behind bars.”

“Not if you touch them with the Celtic cross instead of a knife.”

“Celtic cross?” she repeated.

“Since it is basically a type of crucifix, the Celtic cross will work on vampires, too.”

Kris let her head fall between her shoulders. “Go away,” she murmured. “Just … go away.”

When she looked up, the computer screen was blue. Kris glanced at the clock. Nearly noon. Though it had felt like a few minutes, over an hour had passed while she talked to him. Not that she had anywhere to go, but she hadn’t done much work since she’d arrived and she really needed to.

While earlier she had decided to stay out of the forest and hills surrounding the loch while the constables searched for Carrie, maybe now
would
be the perfect time to go into them. At least she wouldn’t be alone.

Kris retrieved her video camera, but as she headed for the door she glanced at the coffee table. Should she really go anywhere without the gun? Although taking a gun around a lot of cops … probably a bad idea.

“Ya think?” she muttered. “The knife isn’t the best choice, either.”

However, she might be able to talk her way out of jail if she was found in the woods with a knife. She could be using it to take samples of …

“Trees. Leaves. Branches.” Wow. She was lying like a pro these days.

Kris crossed the short distance and opened the drawer. Then she just stared at the items that slid into view.

A gun. A knife.

And a silver Celtic cross on a chain.

*   *   *

Liam watched Kris leave the cottage and head down the road at a brisk pace. She carried a small backpack and appeared like a woman on a mission.

He slid out of sight and made his way to where Alan Mac awaited.

The eastern shore saw far fewer people than the western. The terrain was rougher, the trees thicker, and therefore the loch not as easily seen or reached. It discouraged all but the most competent outdoorsmen.

“We’ve got trouble, ye ken?”

Liam didn’t answer what hadn’t really been a question. He knew they had trouble. What he didn’t know was what they were going to do about it.

“There are women disappearing all over the damn loch,” Alan Mac muttered. “We might have been able to keep this quiet a bit longer. But then that writer woman found a body.”

Liam thought that if it hadn’t been her, it would only have been someone else.

“Ye should stay away from her.”

Alan Mac was beginning to repeat himself.

“She might be a
Jäger-Sucher.
” Liam snorted, and the constable’s gaze flicked to his. “She’s up to something. And she’s too nosy by half.”

Liam lifted his head; Alan Mac lifted his palm as if to halt any comment. “I know. She was attacked, has a big knot on the head, nearly wound up in the loch with—” Alan Mac’s gaze flicked to Liam’s, and he sighed. “If she were one of Mandenauer’s people, she’d be fine and whoever is doing this would be in pieces.”

Liam nodded thoughtfully. Alan Mac was right.

The man scrubbed at his fiery hair in frustration. “There’s just … something about her.”

Liam had to agree. He wished he knew what it was.

Suddenly Alan Mac cursed. Liam followed his gaze to where Kris Daniels had appeared, video camera in hand and trained on the water.

Both Alan and Liam slipped out of sight.

*   *   *

Kris had tossed the chain that held the Celtic cross over her neck, concealing the icon beneath her sweater. She wasn’t sure how much good it would do. Didn’t amulets and the like need a wearer’s belief in them to actually work?

Kris blew a derisive breath between her lips. Right. An amulet would keep her safe.
Sure. Uh-huh.

She picked up the knife. She definitely knew
this
would work.

Kris headed south, past Urquhart Castle, following the path of A82, which skirted the loch on one side and brushed against trees on the other. She didn’t run into any of Alan Mac’s men. When she pulled out her binoculars and peered across the loch, she saw why.

They were all over there.

Well, if anyone had anything to hide, that’s where they’d hide it. In the wild, craggy, heavily wooded, mountainous expanse to the east.

However, Kris didn’t think they were going to find anything.

She turned her gaze to the murky, swirling waters of Loch Ness. Why leave a body over there when you could simply toss it in here? Some might wash up, but the majority did not.

Kris lifted her camera, filmed a bit of the far shore. It would make good background for the show. Much more foreboding than this side, which was full of tourists and restaurants and castles with cafés.

Something shimmied at the corner of her viewfinder, and Kris shifted the camera a bit. Then she lowered the thing just enough so she could see over the top.

Shadows capered at the edge of the forest and across the surface of the water, chasing one another to and fro. She glanced up. Clouds were moving in. She should probably head back before both she and her video camera got wet. Except—

Her gaze caught on an overlook. If she climbed up there, she could take better footage of the opposite shore.

Minutes later, Kris scrambled to the top of a pretty steep trail and onto a finger of land that jutted out farther and higher than any other in the area. As she had suspected, the view was spectacular.

Kris panned the shore, the water, the trees. At the bottom of the viewfinder, something big and dark slid leisurely from right to left in the water.

Bump-bum.

Had that been her heart? Or the theme from
Jaws
? Was her heart thumping the theme from
Jaws
?

“Stop that,” she ordered as she continued to film the large, whale-like shadow gliding just beneath the murky surface.

It disappeared of course. She got no more than ten seconds on film.

Kris again contemplated the sky. Those clouds that had been approaching were here, hovering above the loch, easily reflected in it. She was certain that when she examined the film more closely all she would see would be—

“Big clouds. Bump-bum. Bump-bum.” She started to laugh, then saw the flicker in the woods.

Her camera was up and filming again before she even realized what she was doing. Kris adjusted the focus, zoomed in.

Was that a person?

Excitement made Kris’s hands want to shake, but she refused to let them. This was it! She was going to have film of whoever had been hoaxing the hell out of people. If she was lucky she’d be able to enhance the water footage and reveal just what they’d done to make it look like there was a big black blob of a monster swimming down there.

Excited, Kris leaned forward, still filming, and suddenly—

She was airborne.

CHAPTER 12

Kris woke on the shore. Cold. Aching. Scared.

But alive.

She wasn’t on just any shore, either, but the expanse directly in front of Loch Side Cottage. There was no way she’d gotten here on her own.

The sun had set. The clouds blocked any prayer of a moon.

A car swished by but didn’t stop. No one could see her lying on the bank like a dead fish. She didn’t want them to.

A twig snapped to her right. Kris jerked in that direction, and every muscle in her shoulders shrieked. Her eyes strained against the night, but she could see nothing beyond the looming curve of the trees.

A sharp, heavy splash had Kris scrambling several feet up the bank before collapsing. She forced herself to glance over her shoulder. The loch gleamed like a sheet of black onyx—smooth and impenetrable—all the way to the distant shore. Kris was as alone as she’d thought she’d been on that overhang. Before someone had pushed her in.

Hadn’t they?

“Yes,” she whispered, scaring herself with how scared she sounded.

She had not leaned over that far. She had not been
that
close to the edge. She’d been off balance, distracted, then one little shove and down, down, down, until she plunged beneath the surface.

She’d come up once, and she could have sworn she’d seen someone watching her struggle and flail and eventually go under.

Or had that been a hallucination produced by her terrified, dying mind? Right now, she couldn’t remember if she’d seen the person on the eastern shore or the western. In the trees or up on the cliff.

And if she couldn’t remember
where
she’d seen him, or her, she certainly wasn’t going to remember what he, or she, looked like.

Kris needed to get inside. Not only because she was wet and cold and had begun to shake, but also because even though she couldn’t
see
anything sneaking up on her, she
knew
that it was.

She risked another glance behind her. A mist had begun to skate across the onyx surface of the loch, swallowing everything in its path.

Forcing herself to stand, Kris gritted her teeth and made her weaving way up the bank. Once she was on her feet, she felt better. Until she glimpsed the smoky fingers of mist curling around her ankles.

With a gasp, she twisted and met a wall of swirling white. From deep inside came another splash.

Then Kris was lurching across the road, into her yard, and up to the door. She had an irrational fear that if the mist caught her she’d drown in it like she hadn’t drowned in Loch Ness. She reached for the knob, moving forward eagerly as she did.

And bashed her nose into the wood when the knob refused to turn and the door refused to open.

Locked.

Kris spun about. The fog was cat-footing across the road.

She slapped her hand to the pocket of her jeans, then remembered. The key was sharing space with her video camera.

Out there. Where whatever had splashed was still splashing.