Pain shot through my palm, and I gasped and tried to drop the brooch, but my fingers had curled around it as though my hand had locked tight around the piece.
The pavilion blurred. Tables smeared into ribbons of brown and gold. Voices stretched and slowed and tangled together until the world sounded underwater, and the smell of mothballs vanished beneath salt and smoke and something bitter that caught at the back of my throat.
My training kicked in. Breathe. Assess. Identify hazards. Move to safety.
“Let go,” I whispered to it.
The old woman was still there, though farther away now, blurred behind a veil of white light.
Her mouth moved and I only caught two words.
“Find him.”
“Who?”
The floor disappeared. I had just enough time to think, with ridiculous clarity, that Brian would have laughed himself sick.
Done in by haunted jewelry after refusing to buy a silver toast rack.
Then the world snapped. Cold water slapped me across the face as I came up coughing, choking on salt and sand, clawing at a beach that was doing its level best to get into my mouth, my nose, my hair, and every seam of my clothing.
Waves dragged at my boots. My jeans were soaked through, my waxed jacket weighed a ton, and my teeth clicked together hard enough to make my jaw ache.
For a moment, I simply lay there on the wet sand beneath a low iron sky and concentrated on being alive.
Alive was good. Alive with sand in my bra was less good, but manageable.
I pushed myself up on shaking arms. My palms stung. The left one bore a round red mark where the brooch had rested, like a burn or a brand.
The brooch was gone. I stared at my empty hand then at the sand.
“No.”
I searched the wet ground around me, pushing aside pebbles and tangles of weed. I checked beneath my knees, inside the folds of my jacket, and finally every pocket I had, because apparently I’d reached the bargaining stage of whatever nervous breakdown this was.
Nothing.
“Oh, absolutely not.”
The thing had thrown me into the sea, branded my hand, and vanished. Even cursed jewelry ought to have the decency to stay around for the explanation.
I checked my pockets again. Still nothing.
“Fine,” I muttered.
The wind hit me full in the face, sharp with salt and smoke. Not city smoke, not petrol or plastic. Not the chemical stink of a warehouse fire.
This was woodsmoke. Thatch. Peat. Something cooking over an open flame. And underneath it, something else that made my stomach tighten.
Fear had a smell. Anyone who’d ever pulled people out of fires knew it.
I staggered to my feet. The beach stretched away in a long curve beneath cliffs patched with scrub and wind-bent grass. Above the shore, a scatter of buildings crouched against the weather.
Timber and thatch. A low stone chapel with no tidy tourist sign out front. No car park or railings, no orange safety cones bravely defending humanity from uneven ground.
My first thought was that I’d been drugged. My second was that I’d hit my head. My third, ridiculous and somehow more comforting, was that I’d wandered out of the antiques fair and onto a film set.
That had to be it.
