Haunt Me Still by Jennifer Lee Carrell Page A

from the left. Dunsinnan must go to Birnam Wood.
    The wind tossed in the trees, and I thought I saw shadows glide in toward the stones as all three voices spoke at once: She must die. …
    Gripping the knife close, I turned slowly about.
    “ Kate! ” This time, it was Ben’s voice. Flashlight beams criss-crossed the night, and footsteps pounded across the field toward the woods.
    Thirty seconds later, a flashlight beam strafed the clearing. Eircheard and Ben crashed through the trees in its wake.
    Ben took one glance at the knife and looked up at my face. “Are you all right?”
    “Someone was here.” I swallowed hard.
    “What happened?” asked Eircheard.
    I shook my head. “Nothing. Voices. I saw nothing but shadows.”
    Ben was scanning the ground around the stones.
    “Kids,” said Eircheard with contempt. “At a certain age, the village kids love to scare themselves silly telling ghost stories in the circle. Make a night of it, they do, by heading over to snoop about the forge. A few of them, you can see their eyes all starry with dreams of lame smiths forging magic rings and dragon chains. Most of them, though, are just idling, hoping to see me burn the place down, maybe the woods with it. Sodding little pyros.”
    “Not kids,” I said. Lily had been here, only moments before. Was I sure of that?
    I looked at Ben. “They were the same voices I heard on the hill this morning.” That time, there had also been a body.
    I told them what I’d heard, thinking through the words as I did. Why did you bring the dagger from that place? It must lie there…. Lady Macbeth’s cry to her husband after he’s killed the king, with the dagger made singular. “Put it back,” was the gist of it.
    Auld Callie’s words exactly.
    But the voices had stolen Sir Angus’s words, too. Dunsinnan must go to Birnam Wood.
    All in all, a fairly clear message: Drop the dagger, go after the manuscript—or whatever it was that Sir Angus had been after.
    Who would need to tell me that in the guise of ghosts in a stone circle? And tack on a death threat, besides.
    She must die.
    Who must die?
    “Jesus,” said Eircheard. “No, not kids.”
    Lady Nairn and Sybilla walked into the clearing. “A stone circle,” cried Sybilla, clasping her hands in delight. “I knew it. I knew there was a place of power hereabouts.”
    “Everything all right?” asked Lady Nairn. “I’d like to go to Birnam Wood,” I said.
    She looked from me to Ben and Eircheard and nodded. “I’ve organized a reading of the play on the hill at sunrise,” she said. “To begin the celebration of Samhuinn. We’ll head to Birnam directly after that.”
    It would do. It would have to.
    Sybilla was standing in the middle of the circle, swaying a little. “The knife belongs here,” she said. “I can feel it.”
    Irritation suddenly overwhelmed me. “The stone circles of Britain—and I am assuming this is one of them—are Neolithic,” I said crossly. “Stone Age. The druids were Iron Age Celts. And if Eircheard is right about the knife, it’s late Anglo-Saxon, which makes it medieval, at least five hundred years after the fall of rome. So where that knife belongs is anybody’s guess, but it isn’t here.”
    Sybilla wasn’t fazed. “It’s a sacred knife, and this is a sacred place. It belongs. ”
    I gave up. “I’m heading back to bed.”
    “High time we all followed suit,” said Lady Nairn.
    At the smithy, Eircheard gave me a leather scabbard for the knife, and then we made our way back to the house in silence. Orion the hunter, his star-studded knife at his belt, was just rising into the southeastern sky. To our left, the hill seemed to lean down over us, heavy with menace. Or maybe it was just mockery.
     
    We said good-night to each other at the upstairs landing. Sybilla’s hand lingered on Ben’s arm in unspoken invitation, but he discreetly disengaged himself and walked me down the hall. Just outside my door, he stopped.
    His clean,