Haunted, page 10
The little pewter sun brushed Ariel’s wrist as she twisted the shawl in her fingers. Somehow it all kept coming back to the charms. “What do you know…about them?”
The woman shivered even in the warm, stale air of the funeral home. “Your mother told terrible stories of witches and persecution. Some of it was from the past. Some from the future. That’s why she ran. She was always so afraid.”
Ariel remembered the fear. It lived in her own heart. She nodded. “I need to find this other aunt, Sadie.”
“Someone else asked,” the woman said.
“Who?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. He called here last night during the first visitation, and the receptionist called me to the phone since Sadie had already left. I figured he was a lawyer looking for next of kin.”
Urgency sent Ariel’s pulse racing. “Tell me where she lives.”
The woman nodded. “I’ll give you directions. But first…your mother was my friend. I haven’t seen her in a while, but I knew her well….”
Ariel bit her lip, waiting for whatever the woman felt she needed to say.
“If she gave you up,” she said softly, “I’m sure she did it to keep you safe.”
Ariel turned toward her mother’s ghost hovering in the smoke near her sister’s casket. Mama, we’re not safe anymore.
Ariel pressed on the accelerator, forcing the Jeep to speed over the rutted country road. She knew it was dangerous going alone. The killer might still be there, might even be waiting for her, but she had no time to call David, and from the way the sheriff’s deputy had treated her aunt’s hanging, she doubted they would believe she needed help.
So when she stopped the Jeep in front of a small frame bungalow on the outskirts of town, she reached inside her purse for her canister of pepper spray. Then she stepped out and noticed the van already parked in the gravel driveway, its once glossy black paint coated with dust.
Was David here? Had his computer searches brought him to this house? Or had he been the man who’d called the funeral home? Instead of relief at the thought of his being inside, fear fluttered through her stomach. She swallowed it down; she couldn’t suspect David had anything to do with the witch hunt. He didn’t even know about it because she hadn’t told him.
He was probably just questioning the woman about Ariel’s sisters, as she planned to do. But then the sudden wail of approaching sirens renewed her sense of urgency. Heart hammering, she rushed inside. “David!”
The small kitchen was empty but for the dishes piled in the rusted sink. Her boot heels caught on the worn linoleum as she ran toward the back of the house, where something crashed onto the floor, rattling the windows as it shook the house.
Ariel drew up short in the doorway of the room where David leaned over a bed, pushing rocks onto the floor. “What are you doing here—” Then she glimpsed the hand sticking out of the pile, the fingers wiggling. Someone was underneath the mound of heavy stones struggling to survive. “Oh, my God!”
“Ariel,” he said without looking up. His hands shook as he reached for another rock. “She’s still alive. Help me!”
Ariel rushed across the room and joined David, her hands burning as she struggled to lift off the rocks. “Are we hurting her?” she asked, first-aid lessons running through her mind. You weren’t supposed to move an accident victim.
But then, this was no accident. Someone had piled the rocks atop this poor woman, attempting to crush her to death, as they had witches centuries ago.
“She can’t breathe,” David said, grunting as he worked a particularly large rock off the pile. “We need to remove the pressure.”
His knuckles oozed blood as he worked, not stopping even when the rescue crew arrived. He was stronger, bigger and younger than the aging volunteers. So probably was Ariel, but David sent her away.
“Get out of here,” he ordered her as he reached for the rocks where the woman’s head might lay.
“David—”
“Get out!”
Something about his commanding tone had her stumbling back. But she wasn’t fast enough. Before she could turn away, she glimpsed the woman’s disfigured face. “Oh, dear God…”
And she knew…she’d be seeing her again. Soon.
“Damn her!” he raged, wincing at the volume of his curse. Pain hammered at his temples and the base of his skull, relentless. Like the redhead.
She’d gotten close. Too damned close.
Just as that first witch had to his long-dead ancestor. She’d gotten under his skin, into his heart. She’d known all his secrets. She could have destroyed him, the way the fire had destroyed his family. So he’d had to destroy her first.
Anger coursed through him, and he reached out with his hands, scraped raw from the rocks. Ignoring the blood oozing from his fingers and the pain radiating up his arms, he grabbed at something, anything, on his desk, flinging the journal across his office. The leather-bound book struck the wall with such force that its spine cracked and pages fluttered to the floor, the burned parchment shattering like glass.
“That bitch!”
The damned redheaded witch was destroying his plans and now his heritage. He hurried across the office and dropped to his knees on the hardwood floor. His swollen fingers fumbled the fragile papers. The burned edges had dissolved into ashes, the written words scrambled incoherently.
He dragged in a deep breath, trying to calm himself. It didn’t matter if the journal was gone, the memories were his now. They were a part of him. He wouldn’t lose them. He wouldn’t be like the rest of his family and dismiss the McGregor legacy. He wouldn’t lose his focus.
The witches would die.
He drew in another breath, reminding himself he was using the redhead to lead him to her sisters. All he had to do was wait.
But time was a luxury he didn’t have. The doctors claimed it wouldn’t be long now. If only he’d known about the power of the charms earlier, their protective and healing properties…
He shook his head, pain reverberating inside his skull at the simple gesture. It wasn’t too late. Not for him. But soon, it would be too late for them.
Then he’d be the one laughing. He’d be the one with all the power.
Chapter 7
She’d never seen David so furious. His body radiated tension, nearly crackling like lightning, as his feet pounded the stairs on his descent from the upper level of the penthouse. They’d driven separately to the Towers, him beating her from the hospital by several minutes. He’d had time to find an outlet for his anger—a wall to punch, a wastebasket to kick.
She’d figured he must have since he hadn’t had the guard stall her in the lobby this time. But his brow was as furrowed, his jaw as taut as it had been at her aunt’s house and at the hospital. Ariel followed in the wake of his stomp toward the living room. He already had a crystal decanter in his hand and was pouring a drink from the bar in the corner when she caught up with him.
“They think she’ll live, David,” she reminded him of the young doctor’s optimistic pronouncement, not certain she believed it even as she repeated it. “You found her in time. Now tell me how you found her and why you didn’t tell me you had.”
He took a deep swallow, then set the glass down with such force the crystal clinked against the glass-topped coffee table. “I pulled up a bunch of records on the Internet. Found birth certificates. Marriage licenses. This aunt of yours was married and divorced.”
“Her last name wasn’t Cooper?”
He shook his head as he picked up the glass again. “I didn’t tell you because I couldn’t reach you.”
Out of respect, Ariel had shut off her cell phone at the funeral home.
“So you know how I found her. How did you?”
“I went to the other woman’s funeral.” She couldn’t refer to them as her aunts; she didn’t know them. But then, she didn’t know her sisters either, not anymore. What were they to her? “I found out there was another Cooper left.” Besides her. Her sisters weren’t Coopers anymore. She only wished she knew what they were.
His fingers tightened around his glass until his knuckles turned white. “You put yourself in danger, Ariel, just like you did for Haylee.”
“That’s why you’re so mad.” She’d known it and guilt nagged at her. She would do nothing but disrupt his life, bring to it the media attention he abhorred. Undoubtedly someone from the hospital had already phoned a reporter—the story was too sensational not to repeat. When it was discovered that David Koster had been the first on the scene, it would be more newsworthy and the press would be camped out around the Towers again. With a fingertip she twirled his ring on her finger, thinking of slipping it off and giving it back.
“Of course it’s why I’m so mad!” he shouted, his deep voice vibrating.
Guilt flared again, over worrying him, not over what she’d done. “I am not going to apologize for trying to find my sisters.”
He turned toward her, his eyes full of anger. “How stupid do you think I am, Ariel?”
For the first time his anger alarmed her, had her heart beating fast with nerves. “David…”
“You’ve had years to look for your sisters. Why now?” He uttered a short, derisive chuckle. “I thought it might have to do with my proposal. That you wanted to find them before you could give me an answer.” He laughed again, the deep notes resonating with bitterness off the marble floor and high, plaster ceiling.
“David…”
He flung the glass, sending it hurling into the fireplace. “What the hell is going on, Ariel!”
Her heart thudded against her ribs. She knew the time had come to tell him everything. But she didn’t know where to begin.
“First your older aunt, hanging…” His dark eyes flickered with emotion. “That was no accident, Ariel.”
She drew in a quick breath. “How—how do you know?”
“There was no chair nearby that she could have kicked over. There wasn’t one anywhere near her.” He waved his hand around, gesturing toward the ceiling. “How do you hang yourself from a beam that high without climbing onto a chair first?”
Logical. He was always so logical. He would never understand what she had to tell him.
“Then your other aunt…” His chest rose and fell as he expelled a ragged breath. “Someone piled those rocks on top of her. Someone tried crushing her…alive.”
“But you saved her,” she said, although she didn’t know how long the woman could survive after the trauma—the torture—she’d suffered. If not for David…
She needed him to help her save her sisters. He couldn’t reject her now, not the way everyone else had. He’d said he loved her. But then so had many others….
He shook his head, then ran a shaking hand through his mussed blond hair. Blood from his scraped fingers streaked his forehead and stained his hair. “She’s in a coma, Ariel. The doctors don’t know for sure that she’ll ever come out of it.”
Her brain had been deprived of too much oxygen as her crushed ribs had punctured her lungs. Ariel rubbed her arms, thinking of the horror her aunt had endured. And she might never be able to tell them who had tried to kill her.
She swallowed hard, then began her story. “My two aunts, they weren’t the first….”
His forehead furrowed, the blood highlighting the lines of bewilderment. “What?”
She told him what had happened three hundred and fifty years ago when the vendetta had spurred the beginning of the witch hunt.
He shrugged, his shoulders rippling beneath the black cashmere sweater he wore, the expensive garment stained with blood and dirt. “That’s a legend, Ariel. You don’t know if it’s true or folklore passed down from generation to generation through your family.”
So logical. There was no way he would understand.
“The killing has started again,” she insisted. “In this generation, my mother was the first to die.”
“I thought you hadn’t seen her—”
“I haven’t seen her—” she paused before adding “—alive.”
“Ariel.” His deep voice was amazingly calm and steady, his dark gaze watchful. “What are you trying to tell me?”
She drew a deep, steadying breath. “I hadn’t seen her in more than twenty years, not since that night we were taken from her. Until the night you proposed.”
“Ariel, you just said you haven’t seen her. You’re not making any sense….” And she was scaring him. She could see it in his eyes, an uneasy trace of fear churning in the dark depths.
“I’m not crazy,” she defended herself. “That’s what most people think, though, when they know the truth about me.”
David dragged in a deep breath. “So what is the truth, Ariel?”
Something in his tone caught her attention, had her studying his handsome face. Her pulse kicked up speed, racing, as a realization came over her. “You already know.”
Now she was scared…of what might happen to her heart. “Of course you would know. It wouldn’t take you long to hack into sealed records. Or maybe you broke into the social services office and looked in my file.” After all, Margaret had told her that someone had looked at her record, before David had gone to Armaya with her. Had it been as Margaret suggested—a rich man checking out the woman he hoped to marry?
His brows rose in confusion as his chin lifted with pride. “I didn’t break into any office. You asked me to find your sisters. I had to look up the files.”
That had been after finding Marie.
“But you haven’t found my sisters’ adoption records.” Or if he had, he hadn’t told her.
“I can’t get into them. Those files are better protected—”
“Than mine,” she finished for him. She knew what her records contained, what had been said about her. Tears of frustration burned her eyes, and although she tried, she couldn’t fight them. They slid down her face.
“So what is the truth, Ariel?” he asked again.
“That I love you.” Would he believe it? Or would he think she was like her mother, only after his money?
Although it was the first time she’d professed it, he ignored her declaration of love, waving it off with a bloody hand. “Why didn’t you trust me, Ariel? Why didn’t you tell me about your past before?”
She shrugged, her shoulders aching with the slight movement. Like his, her hands were scraped raw, oozing blood through the swollen flesh. They’d worked so hard to free her aunt. She prayed the woman lived. She prayed David understood. “You read my file—you know why. Every time I told someone what I could do, what I saw, they got rid of me.”
His dark eyes softened as his arms reached out for her. “Ariel…”
She jumped back, his pity hitting her like a slap. Her chin rose as anger whipped through her. “Don’t do that,” she warned him with quiet fury. “Don’t feel sorry for me, the poor, crazy, abandoned girl.”
“Ariel—”
“I don’t want your pity. And I’m not crazy.” She laughed now, with a hint of rising hysteria. “God, I wish I was. Then it wouldn’t be real. I wouldn’t really be able to see ghosts.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard. “Tell me about it.”
She blew out a ragged breath. “I should have told you already. I intended to, but I was scared.”
“That I would leave you?”
“That you wouldn’t understand. It sounds so unbelievable. I don’t expect you to—”
“That’s how you knew Haylee was dead.”
She nodded. “I saw her ghost. She came to school that day, like any other day. I still see her.” Although the last time had been at the little girl’s grave. “Maybe she knows I’m in danger. Maybe that’s why she’s stayed around. Otherwise they usually appear to me just after they’ve passed, when they’re caught between this world and the next. Not that I help them get to it. I really don’t do anything for them but see them. I can’t hear them.” She finally drew another breath as frustration burned a hole in her stomach like an ulcer.
A muscle ticked in David’s tightly clenched jaw. “You’re in danger?”
“I told you the legend,” she reminded him. “Don’t you get it? The hanging, the crushing. Someone’s started a witch hunt.”
“Ariel, that’s—”
“What, David? Crazy?” she asked, her voice rising again with that thin note she hated. “I told you I’ve seen my mother.” And she saw her again as the smoke filtered into the room, glowing with the orange light. “She’s dead. Someone murdered her, too, like her sister.”
“I didn’t find a death certificate, so you’re saying her body hasn’t been found?”
Anger drew her lips tight. “Right. But it doesn’t matter. I know she’s dead.” She drew in another breath before asking the most important question. “Do you believe me?”
He paced over to the fireplace, where shards of his broken liquor glass reflected the flames burning in the hearth. “God, Ariel, it’s the twenty-first century. What you’re talking about…”
“It’s real, David. It’s happening. My mother lived in fear of it. I think that’s why she signed off her parental rights, to keep us safe.” Or so she hoped. But she couldn’t hear the woman, whose mouth moved, speaking words Ariel fervently wished she could hear.
“So you’re saying someone from that family—what was their name?”
“McGregor.” Despite how long ago she’d been told it, the legend was still clear in her mind. Indelible. Was it that she had a good memory or was it as her mother had claimed, that the charm helped her remember? Ariel held it between her fingertips, only now aware that she’d been stroking it during their entire conversation.
“You’re saying a McGregor has resurrected this vendetta? That they want revenge on the Coopers?”
“Durikkens. We were Durikken women back then.”
“Three hundred and fifty years ago?”
The way he said it, his voice all vague and confused, made it sound ridiculous. Pride stinging, she lifted her chin. “Yes.”
