Free When Irish Eyes Are Haunting: A Krewe of Hunters Novella by Heather Graham

grimaced. “Another great tale written by an Irishman,” he added sheepishly.
    “I don’t think you’re daft at all,” Rocky said. Aidan apparently wasn’t aware that he belonged to—what even old friends in the agency referred to as—the ghost squad.
    “But,” he added, smiling. “I’ve yet to find a ghost or supernatural creature who could commit murder—or even attempted murder. I think that something is going on. And I do intend to find out what it is. Aidan, if you or Michael need me, I’ll be up in the old master’s chambers.”
    He left Michael and headed upstairs to the room he shared with Devin.
    The room in which Collum—and many a Karney before him—had died.
     

Chapter 8
    Devin spent a tense hour in the waiting room with Seamus and Kelly.
    The three of them knew that they were hanging on by a thread and every second now mattered for Brendan Karney.
    He teetered on the edge of death.
    Devin didn’t tell Kelly that she’d believed that Brendan was dead when she’d seen him on his back in the great hall. She wanted to think that they might have saved him now. She knew the odds were against him.
    For the hour, she sometimes paced. She sometimes hugged Kelly or Seamus. She sometimes watched them hug one another—wishing there was something that she could do.
    And then, miraculously, after they waited that tense hour, a doctor came out to talk to them.
    Brendan Karney wasn’t out of the woods.
    But he was stable.
    He was unconscious—yes, a coma. But, for now, that was best.
    Seamus and Kelly asked if they could just sit with him. The doctor said that they could.
    And so, after the waiting, Devin decided that she’d just give him a kiss on the forehead and then leave him to his brother and his niece and head back. When one of them wanted to come home, someone in the family would come for them.
    She called Rocky and reported the situation. He told her how pleased he was that it seemed Brendan had a chance. He was, he told her, exploring the master’s chambers—and then he’d go beyond. She was to take her time and return to the castle when she was ready.
    By the time she was nearly back—and in front of St. Patrick’s of the Village—she knew that she wanted to stop at the graveyard.
    She parked just on the side of the church. The sun was waning and it would soon be dark, but there was still enough crimson and purple light for her to make her way through the tombstones and crosses, Victorian funerary art, mausoleums and sarcophagi to the Karney vault.
    She was irritated that she’d forgotten to ask for a key and wondered what she’d accomplish by standing just outside the gate.
    But even as she approached it, she heard something on the air. Something that made her stand still, the hair at her nape rising.
    It was a cry, mournful and terrible. Soft—but something like that of a wolf that cried to the moon above.
    It was…eerie.
    And not like the sound she’d heard the night before.
    She was frightened, yet she continued to the vault.
    And she knew that the cry came from within.
    She stood at the gates to the vault and forced herself to try to peer within. She gripped the iron bars to steady herself, but the gates pushed inward and she stumbled into the vault.
    She felt it again.
    The darkness. The strange darkness that was like raven’s wings, a shadow, yet there, palpable…
    “Who is here?” she asked, hoping for her best special agent voice, praying that the fear that gripped her and the thunder of her heart couldn’t be sensed.
    Perhaps it was the ghost of a Karney—long gone, or perhaps, more recently so .
    She was startled to hear a soft, female voice, rich with an old country brogue, beautiful and lilting.
    “You see me?” came a whisper.
    No, she didn’t see anything.
    “Talk to me, please. You’re in distress. Tell me how I can help you,” Devin said.
    And then she saw.
    A woman emerged like a shadow from the far reaches of the vault. She walked toward Devin as if