And then she faced another door, also a hand's-breadth ajar, and pushed through it. Her flashlight picked out a crucifix under stone vaulting, and she dropped to one knee out of habit, crossing herself before she entered. A chapel, hidden for centuries.
Brian's footprints led on, through the dust, circling the room as he scouted it and coming to rest at a pattern on the floor. Smears showed where he'd knelt and studied the thing, then shuffled along on hands and knees to brush the dust away and show the extent of it. Some kind of maze, set into the stone flooring. He'd followed it, she could see the traces in the thin film of dust his cleaning had left behind. And then his footsteps turned and headed back. No clue.
She squatted on her heels, eyes blurry. He left me. He came down here to get as far away from me as possible and finally worked up enough mad thinking about what kind of bitch I am and then he found a better choice and left me.
She felt the tons of stone overhead, the vaulted roof and the cubic yards of fill and the castle towers. The walls inched closer. Something rustled behind her, a rat or ghost or magic guardian, and she turned and Dougal stood just inside the door, livid scar across his throat from the blade of her kukri where she'd hacked his head from off his shoulders.
The blade flashed between them, spinning hilt for tip and whacking point-first into the wooden door. The thump echoed away through empty corridors before her hand and arm even thought about drawing the knife and whipping it across the room and the ghost vanishing the instant cold steel entered its space.
She stared at her hand. Yes, she could do that again -- you held the knife so and whipped your wrist so and the knife made exactly this many turns in that many feet and she could choose to strike with point or edge or pommel if she wanted. Her hand and the knife loved each other.
The walls inched closer. The ceiling sagged above her. She backed away from the altar, crossed herself again, wrenched the kukri from the door where it had buried itself two inches deep in solid oak, and whimpered. Small footprints led straight into the wall.
What kind of ghost leaves footprints?
Brian had told her of the Old One's powers to heal themselves. She hadn't actually seen Dougal's body burn. She had seen Brian chop Liam's body into pieces in that alley in Naskeag Falls, and seen a hand finger-walking across slush trying to find its wrist and rejoin it.
Cold terror ran down her spine. She pushed back through the door and the tunnel beside the firewood and the narrow, narrow spaces under low ceilings and the crushing weight of stone. Sweat greased her hands around the tube of the flashlight and the grip of the kukri. She heard her own screams and curses echoing from the cell.
And then she stood in the wine cellar, corkscrew at her feet, with the astringent ambrosia of fine burgundy in her throat. She took another swallow, long throat-pulsing chug-a-lug really, and let the fire spread through her body from her belly out to the rigid muscles of her shoulders and the tips of her cramped fingers.
She slid the kukri back into its sheath, picked up the corkscrew and another bottle, and climbed the cold stairway back to the kitchen. She found people there, strangers with white faces drawn with pain and memories, strangers with eyes that probably matched her own for madness. They moved like mannequins and showed about as much awareness of the world around them.
She handed her bottle to a woman and started to open another. Padric's face loomed across the room, the only familiar one, and the wine loosened her tongue and brain.
"Hey, Torquemada!" He turned, puzzled. "Yeah, you, fuckwad! Find out where Mairéad is hiding and drag her ass out of her bomb shelter. We need food and bandages and a bunch of beds and crap." He nodded and vanished.
Maureen took another gulp of Chateau DeFeat, giving the finger to wine-lovers everywhere because she wanted the alcohol, not the sublime blend of French sunshine and rain and soil. Who the fuck needed sobriety? She didn't have anyone to stay sober for. Not like Jo and David.
Chapter Eleven
David flexed his aching fingers and stared at them as if they'd betrayed him. Actually, he knew it was the other way around. He hadn't touched his guitar for a couple of weeks -- months, if you went by the calendar they used in Naskeag Falls -- and any little problems he had with chording and finger-picking were his own damn fault.
But his fingertips felt like they'd ballooned to twice their legal size, been sandpapered raw, and then spliced to red-hot wires for tendons. Playing a good riff depended on muscle memory, notes heard in the brain and expressed through the strings without an intervening thought. His hands refused to do that.
He set the worn Gibson on the sofa beside him, wincing as his shoulders joined the chorus of complaints. He'd been playing tense, hunched over the axe as if somebody stood behind him with a whip. That was the real problem. He had to get a gig somewhere, connect with a group and earn some eating money. Either that, or ask Jo to swipe some fairy gold from a Leprechaun's hoard.
The way things had been going, it would just vanish when it touched cold iron. His bank account had shrunk to the point where he'd need a microscope to find the balance, and Jo wasn't any better off. They'd been fine when there was money coming in each Friday. They'd neatly balanced income
