Moon Cursed Read Online Free Page B

her she couldn’t remember what it was. Such was the trouble with lies.
    “I … uh…”
    She needed practice. Lying had to get easier the more you did it. Which was probably why the best liars were always the biggest liars.
    Maybe by the time Kris came home from Scotland she, too, could stare a child in the face and say, I’ll never leave you, sweetheart. I promise.
    Kris winced as the last words her mother had ever said to her whispered through her mind.
    “Yer a Nessie hunter?”
    “No!” she said, much too loud. “I mean I don’t want to hunt. How could I hunt something that…” She paused before she blurted the truth.
    You can’t hunt what isn’t there.
    “I’m here to…” Why in God’s name was she here?
    “Oh, wait.” His confused—or had that been suspicious?—frown smoothed. “Yer the writer woman. I remember Effy talkin’ about ye now. Ye’ll be writing about Nessie?”
    Kris hadn’t said what she was going to write about, but that seemed as good a topic as any and would explain why she knew so damned much.
    “Sure.”
    “A children’s book?”
    Why did everyone think she was writing a children’s book?
    “Okay.”
    He nodded sagely. “I’ve heard how ye writer types don’t like to talk about yer work. Curses it, so to speak.”
    “Right.” Kris grasped at the excuse, even though she believed in curses as much as she believed in the fairy tales where they were found. “Wouldn’t want to do that.”
    They began to walk again. The lamp she’d left on inside the cottage seemed to flare like lightning against the night. Behind the house, hills that she knew to be sapphire in the sunlight loomed like the great black humps of a mythical beast.
    Kris sighed. One day in Drumnadrochit and she was being drawn into the group delusion.
    “Your last name’s Mac?” she asked, desperate for a normal conversation.
    “Mackenzie,” he said. “They call me Alan Mac because my father is Mac, ye see.”
    She didn’t but nodded anyway.
    “There are a lot of Mackenzies. ’Tis a Highland name.”
    “All the Mackenzies are related?”
    “Not by blood necessarily. Back in the auld days everyone had a leader. A clan chieftain. And all in that clan would take the chieftain’s name as a matter of loyalty. Started back in the eleventh century.”
    “Eleventh century,” Kris repeated. She couldn’t imagine. She had no idea when her ancestors had come to America or where they’d even come from. “You’ve always lived here?”
    “I have.” He lifted his big shoulders, then lowered them. “Where else would I go? Why would I want to?”
    The mind-set was so foreign to Kris, she wasn’t sure what to say. He could go anywhere. Do anything. The idea of staying in the same place as her parents and her parents’ parents and their parents for all of her days made her twitchy. Sure, she’d been in Chicago since she was twelve, but if she couldn’t travel, she’d go mad.
    “If you’ve always lived here, then you must know everyone.”
    “Everyone who lives in the area. But we get so many tourists or folks who stay awhile, then go.” He glanced at her. “Like you.”
    “What about a guy who’s my height, maybe one seventy-five? Long, black hair.” Kris indicated a length near shoulder level, then frowned.
    She couldn’t say if it had been curly or straight since it had been wet and slicked back from his stunning face. And why was that?
    She’d never asked. Her tongue had been occupied with better things.
    “Blue eyes,” she blurted. “Brogue. About twenty-five.”
    “That describes a good portion of the village.” Alan Mac laughed. “Ye’d best give up that ghost.”
    But Kris never gave up on anything once she set her mind to it. If she had, she wouldn’t be here.
    A heavy splash sounded from the loch.
    “What was that?” she asked.
    “Nessie.”
    “You said she was only seen in the daytime.”
    Alan Mac returned his gaze to the loch. “Just because ye cannae see her