He dodged his way past the shells of the old outbuildings, keeping to the shadows—the potting shed, the dovecote, the dairy. A piercing cry from one gave him a hell of a fright. “Easy,Fabio,” he murmured in the direction of the peacock’s call. The gunfire continued sporadically.
He circled behind the stables, catching a whiff of spilt petrol. A mechanical whine rose into the air above him. The sound was familiar, but he couldn’t immediately place it. He backed up and scanned the roofline of the abbey, then stole farther out to check the skies above. There, hovering over the treetops of the glade, a black shape against the glowing low cloud. It was headed to the road.
“Shit,” he muttered.
They were going to need a new plan.
Chapter 18
Amelia
Amelia’s visible world had shrunk to a small circle. The fog was thickening—the full moon was no longer drifting in and out of the clouds. If she looked around, she caught the sensation of ghostly forms reaching for her: the countess from the tapestry; a rock that morphed into a black bear; a spectral form of the real-life owl she could occasionally hear, its wavering whoop darting straight through her chest, every damn time. So she stopped looking around. Instead, she intently watched her pale sneakers carry her to safety, as if with a momentum entirely their own. Step by step by step.
Another gunshot popped. At the abbey? She walked faster. With each gunshot, she felt a dizzying mix of relief and dread—relief that the last shot evidently hadn’t hit its mark, assuming the mark was Tom, and dread that this one had.
She tried to recall what the moor had looked like in daylight—a billowing carpet of tufted blond grass and prickly shrubs, punctuated by skeletal trees and rocks. Streams had snaked through the grass and seeped into stagnant pools. Bleak, for sure, but not scary. She must be near a stream now—she could hear trickling water. There was a scratching in the shrubs to her left, and she fought the urge to freeze. Just some critter.Freeze was only slightly better than freak-out in the hierarchy of defense mechanisms. Freezing literally got you nowhere. Flight, in this case, was the only thing she could do to help any of them.
She rubbed the back of her neck, which felt even colder than her hand, even with her scarf bunched around it. She should be grateful for the dark. If she couldn’t see out of her fog cocoon, no one could see in. But she couldn’t shake the feeling that at any second a hand might clamp on her shoulder. She swiveled, suddenly, as if to catch it in the act, and walked backward for a while, but that just left her shoulders exposed in theotherdirection. She turned back. For Tom’s sake, she had to hold her nerve. He was on his home turf. He would be fine. If he was pinned by gunfire, he would find a place to hide, she would bring the police, and everything would work out. Amelia Bennett, saving the day. Who would have thought?
A sharp bang echoed through the skies, and then another: a different sound from the other shots. She started to run, then forced herself back to a fast walk. She had more than five miles left to travel, and the ‘road’ was no more than a country lane—narrow, uneven, and potholed.
She stretched her neck side to side. It felt like it was stiffening. Whiplash from the crash? The fleshy part beside her shoulder felt tender, too. A seat belt bruise.
Something shot past her, and she wheeled, trying to get a fix on it. Vertigo caught her in its current, twisting her into dizzying eddies and whirlpools. She couldn’t be sure if it was her body spinning or just her head.
Get a grip.
It was just an animal: a fox, a hare. Harmless. She took a moment to regain her balance, then upped her pace, forcing her focus back to her shoes. At least fear gave her momentum, and she might as well use it for fuel, seeing as her last proper meal had been some time ago.
A new sound rose. A buzzing, like a gigantic mosquito. It seemed to be in the sky ahead of her, like a flying remote-control car. Or maybe this was just what happened to your ears when you were walking through a moor at night, freaking yourself out.
Ahead, the fog was breaking up, revealing patches of actual clouds. The moon was still hidden, but Amelia could trace its position from the glow. As the shadows moved and wove across the lane, they took the shape of a person. She shook her head to clear the image, but it wouldn’t dissolve: a tall, dark figure striding toward her, coat flapping. It was coming from the direction of the village. Why would anyone be on foot on this road at night, unless…?
She scooted behind a large rock at the side of the road. The buzzing was louder now, as were the footfalls. Could this be the figure she saw on the road before she crashed? She wasnotseeing ghosts.
The figure passed by, and she breathed out silently. Then it stopped and turned. She could make out no more than a silhouette, but she’d swear it was looking straight at her. She flattened her palms on the cold rock.
“Amelia? Is that you?”
“Omigod, Tom?” Amelia stumbled to him. His features came into focus, pale and drawn in the moonlight, the gun clenched in his hands. “Where did you come from? I thought you were… God, I didn’t know what you were.”
“Sorry, I didn’t want to call out.”
“The gunshots. What happened?”
“Some of them were me, but not all. I thought they’d got you!”
“You firing, or you getting shot?”
“Firing. And missing. Hear that buzzing?”
“Yes! What is it?”
“A drone. It has thermal imaging—it can see in the dark.”
She looked up at the shifting sky. “How can you tell?”
“Because we sold the bloody Pritchards one of ours. For pre-dawn deerstalking. I tried to shoot it down, but it’s been a long time since this gun could shoot straight, if it ever did.”
