Dark Ones - Even Vampires Get The Blues Part 8

I looked around. There wasn't much to see in the darkness, the Lammermuir Hills being a remote and exposed area that was known for its wild beauty, sheep grazing, and grouse. I understood what it was she felt-this land was founded... No, more than founded. It was a lodestone, a holy place to faeries and elves. I didn't bother mentioning the fact to Clare, though. She had a soft, protective security blanket of denial wrapped around her that she clearly wasn't going to shed until she was ready.

"Interesting," I said, glancing at Finn. "Do you have anything to add to Clare's summary of events?"

"Only that I wish I'd been here to catch the b.a.s.t.a.r.d who shot her," Finn said. "A friend of mine wanted my opinion on some weaponry, so I left Clare watching the filming." He shot her a reproachful glance. "She was supposed to tell me when the fence came so I could be with her just in case of trouble, but I wasn't of much help on the other side of the field. I heard the shots, and found Clare lying b.l.o.o.d.y on the ground. I couldn't leave her to chase after the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, so I told Paen I needed his help."

"Finn told you he needed help?" I asked Paen. I'd been with him every minute since I had the phone call from Clare, and he hadn't used a phone once. Which meant... "Oh. That sort of message. You've got mind-mail."

"You asked me if my statue was of a hawk," Paen said slowly, an abstracted frown on his face as he turned toward me. "A bra.s.s hawk or a falcon. Am I correct in a.s.suming you know what this man was talking about?"

"Yeah, I think I do." I nibbled my lip for a moment while considering how much to tell the expectant faces watching me, and then decided that since it didn't have anything to do with one of our cases, there was no real reason not to explain how I came by it.

"It's at the office, downstairs, locked in Mila's safe."

Quickly I told them all how I had come by the statue, emphasizing that I had Jake check it over for any bad emanations. "I a.s.sume the guy who shot you must be the one the statue was intended for," I finished, glancing back at Clare's report. "He said he knew you had it, and would stop at nothing to get it?"

"Yes," Clare answered, mournfully examining a portion of the dress.

"That's odd. I wonder why he thought you had it? You weren't anywhere near the antique shop."

"He could have been using the collective you, referring to both you and your cousin," Paen pointed out, looking toward the battlefield, which now rang with cries and shouts accompanied by the sound of clanging metal as the extras gave their all to looking like a horde of wild Scots defending their land.

"True. Well, whatever he meant, I'm not at all inclined to give him the statue now that he tried to kill Clare. If he had asked nicely, I'd have had no problem giving it up, but not anymore. Now I want something."

"Revenge," Finn said, smiling his approval.

"Justice for my dress!" Clare snorted.

"Answers," Paen said succinctly.

I nodded. "I want answers. How long will they be filming?"

"At least another hour. They just got started when we arrived an hour ago. Why?" Finn asked.

Clare gave me an outraged look as I scooped her dress off the table and laid it over the back of a chair. "I'm going to try to contact the essentia of this area and see what it can tell me."

"The what?" Finn's face mirrored his confusion.

Clare explained briefly how I could communicate with locations while I made myself comfortable on the rickety portable table.

"I thought you could only do that with structures?" Paen asked, watching as I stuffed my purse under my head as a support. I folded my hands together and closed my eyes, trying to ignore the exposed feeling of lying on a table in front of three other people. Fortunately, the rest of the movie people were attending to the filming, so we were alone in our corner of their camp.

"This is a structure of sorts. It's a historic battlefield-didn't you see the marker when we came in?"

"I know it's a historic battlefield. My ancestors fought here. But there's no building for miles."

"There's a ring of standing stones on the other side of the trailers, and beyond that, some sort of rocky area that's the heart of the moor. It has enough history for me to look through its memories."

Clare held a whispered conversation with Finn, telling him more about how elves can feel the souls of places. I ignored them, pushed down my consciousness's awareness of Paen standing so close by, and cleared my mind.

Normally it takes me several minutes to calm my thoughts enough to be able to hear the voice of the house, but this location, being founded so strongly in the beyond, took no time before it started talking to me.

Or rather, the men did.

"Whoa," I said, my eyes opening a few seconds after I'd closed them. Surrounding us was a ring of men, their numbers growing as I stared at them.

"Sam?" Paen asked, a faint frown between his brows. "What is it?"I looked around at the men, a good twenty or so of them ranging in age from early teens to late sixties, all of them dressed in ragged tunics, grubby bits of plaid worn wrapped around their waists, each armed with a huge, ma.s.sive sword. "I think I just met the residents of Dunstan Moor. h.e.l.lo, gentlemen."

One of the men stepped forward and said something in a language I didn't understand.

"Ghosts?" Paen asked.

"That would be my guess. Unfortunately, we don't seem to speak the same language. Do either of you speak old Scottish?"

"It would be Gaelic, and I am reasonably proficient in it."

"Good," I said, taking his hand. It was warm and strong and sent little excited chills down me at the feel of it. "You can translate, then."

"Translate? Translate what?"

I opened my mind to him, willing him to see through my eyes. He jerked away at the touch of my mind. "What do you think you're doing?" His voice was low enough that only I could hear it, but it was rife with indignation.

I'm trying to let you see the ghosts. Mom used to do this with Dad whenever he wanted to see elf stuff. She said she just merged consciousness with him, and he could see things she saw.

"You are not a full elf, and I am not your father."

We can do the mind-speak thing. I think it's probably a given we can do other things, as well.

"I don't want to-"

Afraid? I interrupted.

"No, of course not."

Then merge up, handsome. The ghosts are waiting.

He gave me a long, unreadable look before I felt the tentative presence of him in my mind. I smiled to myself over his reluctance to admit what was pretty clear to me...

"Stop that," he growled.

... and turned my attention to the ghostly figures who stood around us.

Paen felt a moment of surprise that quickly melted into active curiosity.

"There are more than I expected." He pursed his lips a little as he looked at the ring of ghosts around us. "Do you normally see ghosts when you talk to houses?"

"Ooh, she found ghosts," Clare said, scooting closer to Finn. "Isn't this exciting?"

"It's something,, all right," Finn answered, a comical expression of disbelief and amus.e.m.e.nt on his face.

"Not normally, no," I told Paen. "It's especially rare at night, when I'm not at my best, power-wise. Sometimes you'll find one if it has an extremely strong tie to the location. But this place is kind of special. The ground is practically steeped in blood. I'm guessing that's given these ghosts the powers to make it through to me even late at night.""Yes, Dunstan Moor is one of the bloodiest battlefields in Scottish history. It makes Culloden look like a virtual playground.

Er... can you talk to them?"

"She's going to talk to the ghosts now," Clare said to Finn, sotto voce, but not nearly quiet enough.

"Clare!"

"Sorry."

"I'll try. No promises." I looked at the nearest ghost, a man with a long scraggly black beard, a filthy yellow tunic, and a yellow and brown bit of plaid material twisted around his waist as some sort of primitive kilt. "h.e.l.lo. I'm Sam."

The ghost squinted at me for a minute, then said something to the man nearest him. They both laughed.

"I don't suppose you got that?" I asked Paen without taking my eyes off the ghosts. Normally I wouldn't be worried about them, since ghosts can't interact with this reality without first being grounded, but with this area so strongly steeped in the beyond, I was willing to bet it served as a grounding force.

"Actually, I did. He seems to be speaking an ancient dialect of early Gaelic."

"Oh, good. What did he say?"

"That you're splayed out like a pig about to be roasted."

I glared at the ghost as I sat up, swinging my legs off the table, making sure to keep my mind firmly enmeshed with Paen's. I was a bit woozy with the drain on my power, but I figured I had enough to get us through a brief chat. "How do I say 'up yours' in ancient, ghostly Gaelic?"

He told me. It was highly satisfying to see the ghosts' eyes widen with surprise for a moment when I repeated it, and then the lot of them burst into laughter and clapped each other on the back.

"Why do I suspect you just had me telling a dirty joke?" I asked Paen as I carefully slid off the table and moved over to stand next to him.

He grinned in response. My stomach contracted at the sight of his grin, but it soon settled back to normal as we conducted a one-sided interview of the ghosts. Paen translated for me, while I tried my best to repeat phonetically everything he said.

"Did you see a man with a monkey shoot this woman here?" we asked the ghosts.

The leader, who identified himself as a man named Uilleam, answered in the negative.

"Has there been a disturbance of any sort in the area in the last hour or so?" I asked, via Paen's help.

"Nay," Uilleam answered. "Just the mortals dancing about and making fools of themselves on the plain."

"You think he means the actors?" Clare asked, clearly fascinated.

We asked. Uilleam answered in the affirmative.

"He says they don't know what they're doing," Paen said as Uilleam and two of his buddies stumbled over each other's words to speak. "He says if those swords weren't dulled, they'd have all killed themselves days ago."

"Well, they are just actors," I said, less concerned about the quality of acting and sword ch.o.r.eography than I was the man who shot Clare. "I wonder why they didn't see the guy with the monkey?"Paen listened a moment as Uilleam said something else. He smiled in response. "It sounds to me as if they've been spending their time watching the film people. You're right about one thing-they are tied to the land. They all gave their lives to defend it, and to it they are bound, acting as guardians of a sort."

"Fascinating, but not terribly helpful as far as finding out why someone wants the bird statue, or for that matter, who he was.

Well, I guess we're done here-"

One of the ghosts shouted something to Uilleam, who looked thoughtful for a moment, then turned to face his men and yelled something at them.

"What's going on now?" I asked Paen in a low voice, a little bit worried about the ghosts. So far they'd been perfectly well behaved, but I was still concerned about the possibility that they might have a physical presence in our world.

"Uh-oh."

"What? What are they saying?"

"Uh-oh? What uh-oh?" Clare asked at the same time as I spoke.

An odd look of chagrin pa.s.sed over Paen's face. "The suggestion has been made that they do something about the lack of sword skill being demonstrated by the actors."

"Oh no," I said, a dread feeling in the pit of my stomach. "You mean-"

Paen nodded. "Yes. They intend to show everyone how it's done."

Uilleam shouted something that sounded very much like a battle cry. The air around him seemed to s.h.i.+mmer and part, as if he was walking through a translucent curtain.

"G.o.ddess above, I see a ghost," Clare said, her eyes huge as she grabbed on to Finn. "He materialized! Do you see him?"

"Yes," Finn said, sounding just as curious as Paen. "Fascinating."

"No, no, no," I said, putting myself in Uilleam's path, my hands raised to stop him even though I knew it would serve no practical purpose. "I am not going to be responsible in any way, shape, or form for ghosts manifesting to teach a bunch of actors how to swordfight. I'll never live that down... Holy moly! I can feel him!"

Evidently Uilleam wasn't expecting to do more than materialize visually either, because he stopped and looked down in surprise at my hands on his chest.

"Oh no," I groaned, the dread feeling growing. "I was right. He's grounded!"

Before I could get the word out of my mouth, Uilleam decided to make up for what must have been at least six hundred years of nooky-less existence by grabbing me, pulling me into an all-too-real embrace, his lips cooler than body temperature as they mashed up against my mouth.

Paen was there in a flash, jerking me out of Uilleam's arms as he snarled something that sounded like it was probably obscene.

Uilleam laughed and made him a little bow, giving me a lascivious waggle of his eyebrows.

"He heard you? He understood you?"

"Yes," Paen said, releasing my shoulder. He looked p.i.s.sed, both at me and the ghost. I frowned at his frown.

"Good. Then you can tell him that now is not the time to show a bunch of actors how to wield a sword. Tell him if he doesn't back off and go back to his ephemeral form, we'll call in a Summoner and have them all sent to the Akasha."

Paen duly told the ghost what I said. Uilleam spat out a few words that I didn't need to have translated, then stalked back to his men, his form s.h.i.+mmering slightly as he released his grounding. The men grumbled when Uilleam gave them my ultimatum, a couple of them looking daggers at me.

"They're not very happy," Paen said quietly. "Perhaps it would be best if we were to leave."

"Poor ghosts," Clare said, her mouth turned down with sadness. She turned to me. "Would it be such a bad thing if they were to join the actors-"

I raised an eyebrow.

She sighed. "I suppose so. It seems so unfair, though. They just want to have a little fun, and they are offering to help..."