Page 27
Calum frowned. “What is?”
“The profile.”
He looked at the cup and then at her. “From that?”
She breathed in once more. “Honey. Grain. Apple. Smoke. Mineral water.” Olivia lowered the quaich carefully. “It’s the same family. This is what we’ve been chasing.”
Thunder cracked almost directly overhead, and the stone beneath Olivia’s boots trembled hard enough to send a thin stream of dust sifting from the ceiling through the beam of her headlamp. Calum’s expression changed immediately.
“We need to go. Now.”
Olivia nodded. “Give me the sample bag.”
“Get outside.”
“Calum.”
Another tremor passed through the wall against her shoulder.
He muttered something under his breath, pulled a clear evidence bag from the pouch clipped at his belt, and pushed it into her hand. “Bag it while we walk.”
She took it, but before she could slide the quaich inside, Calum looked past her toward the far end of the passage.
The color drained from his face. “Is that…” He shook his head. “Never mind. Must be the dark playing tricks.”
But when Olivia turned, it wasn’t a ghost she saw, but an old woman standing in the darkness, in a tunnel that had been sealed for more than two hundred years, in a place where no one could possibly have passed Olivia and Calum without touching them.
Olivia closed her fingers around the quaich.
“You.”
Calum turned toward her. “Me what?”
The woman’s gaze remained fixed on Olivia.
“I don’t see anything.” Calum followed the direction of Olivia’s stare, but his eyes moved over the darkness beyond the light without stopping.
Olivia looked at him. “You don’t see her?”
His brows pulled together. “See who?”
A coldness that had nothing to do with the air slid through Olivia.
The old woman looked at the quaich in her hand. “I unlocked the door.”
Her voice wasn’t loud, yet Olivia heard every word clearly beneath the rain and thunder.
“What door?”
“Ye chose to open it.”
Olivia stared at her. “I walked into a tunnel.”
“Aye.”
Calum caught Olivia’s sleeve. “We need to go. Right now.”
She turned instinctively toward the entrance, but it was gone. For several seconds her mind refused to make sense of what she was seeing.
