“I know.” Rhianna shrugged and smirked. “I must get it from my father. He’s a brollachan, ye know.”
“A what?”
“A demon. Hadn’t ye heard?”
“You don’t really believe that, do you?” Mena scoffed, though a little thrill of anxiety touched the base of her neck. “That your father is a demon?”
“I doona ken whether he is or no, but I do hear what everyone whispers about him. If he’s not a demon, then he is a very wicked man, indeed.”
“Indeed,” Mena murmured. Considering, not for the first time, if she believed in such things as demons.
CHAPTER FIVE
He’s a demon. He’ll destroy ye.
Mena dropped the edges of the library’s drapes and whirled around to face the enormous, vacant room.
Who had said that?
A pervasive stillness permeated the gloom as Mena frantically scanned the tapestries and ornate furniture of the library for the source of the unsettling voice.
“H-hello?” Her uncertain whisper echoed off the stones and the windows, though no answer followed. “Is anyone there?”
A chilling silence greeted her, and Mena could think of nothing worse at that moment than the feeling one was not alone in an empty room.
The marquess had taken his children to the village of Fearnloch for the afternoon, and Mena had intended to use her first day off to escape into a good book, and bask in the rare and lovely autumn sunlight in the conservatory. The library had the fewest windows in the castle, though it boasted an impressive fireplace and far too many candelabra. The marquess claimed to be an uneducated man, but he obviously understood that the sun would fade the tomes in his collection, and therefore kept out the light with drawn, heavy velvet drapes.
This part of the keep faced away from the sea and offered a view of Wester Ross and the Kinross Mountains. Mena had wandered to one of the covered windows and pushed aside the drapes. The glimmer of the afternoon rays off the golden waves of barley clinging to the verdant hillsides had diverted her immediately. Perhaps a touch of her distraction had been drawn by the strong backs of the clansmen toiling in said fields, some with nothing but a kilt wrapped around their hips while the light kissed their flesh with amber.
Unsettled, Mena scanned the gloom of the library again. A large, dark shadow caught her eye, but darted away as soon as she thought she’d found it.
“Please,” she called. “Show yourself. You’re frightening me.”
“If I showed myself ye’d be terrified.” The masculine voice could only be identified as serpentine. The ss drawn out in a bone-chilling hiss that seemed to come at her from everywhere and nowhere at once. “But I mean ye no harm, ’tis the laird ye should fear.”
“Why?” Mena asked the shade, inching along the wall toward the door that now seemed miles away rather than across the room. She wanted to call for help, but didn’t dare. What would she say once help arrived? That a disembodied voice had accosted her?
She’d be sent back to Belle Glen for certain.
Cold fingers caressed above the high collar of her gown, and Mena let out a strangled scream. Whirling around, she saw nothing but a dark blurred shadow, and the flash of white streaked with veins of startling red surrounding black, abysmal pupils.
Surging back with terror, she somehow forced her legs to move, and bolted from the library.
Mena didn’t stop in the hallway, nor did she seek refuge in the solarium, her room, or the conservatory. Running on pure, heart-pounding fear, she flew down the back stairs and burst from the keep into the embrace of the sun outside.
Racing through the back gardens, she didn’t stop until she’d plunged deep into the forest that grew wild on the south and west of Ravencroft lands. She quickly found a deer path that led through the foliage. Picking up her skirts, she allowed her fear to drive her deep into the trees. She’d always taken refuge in the forest back home in Hampshire, and while the sun broke through the dancing leaves, Mena could pretend she was at Birch Haven, and that demons didn’t chase her.
When her lungs felt as though they’d burst, Mena reached her arms out and braced them against the trunk of an ancient oak. Clinging to it, she focused on catching her breath, her thoughts racing as if chased by whatever malevolent presence she’d fled.
Had she truly just encountered a ghost? Or a demon?
She couldn’t believe it was so, and yet there was no denying the chill bumps that still lifted every fine hair on her body. If she closed her eyes, she could see nothing but those dreadful black pupils rimmed with white and streaked with alarming bolts of red. She’d never in her life encountered eyes like that before.
Because surely no living creature was bestowed of something so horrific.
As she began to catch her breath, another terrible fear pierced her like an icicle as a memory she fought to repress rose to the surface.
Are you hearing voices? Or perhaps seeing things that are not there?
Dr. Rosenblatt’s even timbre was as bloodcurdling as a banshee scream, and Mena fought the impulse to clap her hands over her ears.
Could it be? Was she going mad? Hallucinations were the hallmark of true insanity and Mena couldn’t decide which was worse. A demon in Ravencroft’s library, or one in her mind.
The things he’d said about the laird …
A sound permeated the roar of her own blood in her ears. A high-pitched yip and a howl followed by a succession of barks. Lifting her head and peering around the tree, Mena identified the unmistakable roll and crest of the sea.