Font Size:  

Kris had tossed the chain that held the Celtic cross over her neck, concealing the icon beneath her sweater. She wasn’t sure how much good it would do. Didn’t amulets and the like need a wearer’s belief in them to actually work?

Kris blew a derisive breath between her lips. Right. An amulet would keep her safe. Sure. Uh-huh.

She picked up the knife. She definitely knew this would work.

Kris headed south, past Urquhart Castle, following the path of A82, which skirted the loch on one side and brushed against trees on the other. She didn’t run into any of Alan Mac’s men. When she pulled out her binoculars and peered across the loch, she saw why.

They were all over there.

Well, if anyone had anything to hide, that’s where they’d hide it. In the wild, craggy, heavily wooded, mountainous expanse to the east.

However, Kris didn’t think they were going to find anything.

She turned her gaze to the murky, swirling waters of Loch Ness. Why leave a body over there when you could simply toss it in here? Some might wash up, but the majority did not.

Kris lifted her camera, filmed a bit of the far shore. It would make good background for the show. Much more foreboding than this side, which was full of tourists and restaurants and castles with cafés.

Something shimmied at the corner of her viewfinder, and Kris shifted the camera a bit. Then she lowered the thing just enough so she could see over the top.

Shadows capered at the edge of the forest and across the surface of the water, chasing one another to and fro. She glanced up. Clouds were moving in. She should probably head back before both she and her video camera got wet. Except—

Her gaze caught on an overlook. If she climbed up there, she could take better footage of the opposite shore.

Minutes later, Kris scrambled to the top of a pretty steep trail and onto a finger of land that jutted out farther and higher than any other in the area. As she had suspected, the view was spectacular.

Kris panned the shore, the water, the trees. At the bottom of the viewfinder, something big and dark slid leisurely from right to left in the water.

Bump-bum.

Had that been her heart? Or the theme from Jaws? Was her heart thumping the theme from Jaws?

“Stop that,” she ordered as she continued to film the large, whale-like shadow gliding just beneath the murky surface.

It disappeared of course. She got no more than ten seconds on film.

Kris again contemplated the sky. Those clouds that had been approaching were here, hovering above the loch, easily reflected in it. She was certain that when she examined the film more closely all she would see would be—

“Big clouds. Bump-bum. Bump-bum.” She started to laugh, then saw the flicker in the woods.

Her camera was up and filming again before she even realized what she was doing. Kris adjusted the focus, zoomed in.

Was that a person?

Excitement made Kris’s hands want to shake, but she refused to let them. This was it! She was going to have film of whoever had been hoaxing the hell out of people. If she was lucky she’d be able to enhance the water footage and reveal just what they’d done to make it look like there was a big black blob of a monster swimming down there.

Excited, Kris leaned forward, still filming, and suddenly—

She was airborne.

CHAPTER 12

Kris woke on the shore. Cold. Aching. Scared.

But alive.

She wasn’t on just any shore, either, but the expanse directly in front of Loch Side Cottage. There was no way she’d gotten here on her own.

The sun had set. The clouds blocked any prayer of a moon.

Source: www.allfreenovel.com
Articles you may like